IHIP News - Putin's First State of the Union With Analysis from Rep. Boyle

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Congressman Brendan Boyle to discuss Trump's first State of the Union address. Pre-order our new book, join our Patreon Cult, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The State of the Union is tonight and of course convicted felon Donald Trump is promising something big and he's the biggest liar on the planet. Let's talk to one of our favorite congressmen, Brendan Boyle, to see what the Democratic response to this first State of the Union and Trump's second term is going to be. Congressman. Yeah, great to be back with you. Hi, how's work? Oh, everything's going just well in the Capitol. We have made America great again. The economy is doing phenomenally.

It's not like prices have spiked in the last six weeks. The market's doing just really well, I mean, except for being down five to 10%. And we've never been more popular with our allies. Although on the other hand, Vladimir Putin now likes us. But besides that, things are going great. So how is it when you see these Republican congresspeople that you work with, and knowing that they want to completely realign 80 years of blood, sweat, and tears in building democratic alliances. They want to throw it all away for a weakly positioned Vladimir Putin. His economy's in tatters. His military is completely depleted. Why on earth are we going to partner with him over the European Union, Canada, Australia and Japan and others?

Yeah, last week was unfortunately a humiliating couple moments as Americans. First at the UN, when we voted alongside Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and against every single Democratic ally. Followed a couple days later by Friday and that disgraceful performance by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who, as we know, now says 180 degrees different what he used to say just because he wanted to become vice president and Donald Trump's chief lackey. Truly humiliating moments, but ones that have actually real ramifications in the world. As you pointed out, 80 years from 1945 to 2025, this is the world that we've lived in. The reason why this has been the most peaceful time in the history of the continent of Europe is because of the United States. In the 20th century, we lost millions and millions of American soldiers on European soil. From 45 on, that didn't take place. All of those deaths were in the first half of the 20th century. Trump is now doing permanent damage

to the transatlantic alliance to the point where I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a member of the German Bundestag. And he said, you know, moving forward, we just have to assume the United States is either a neutral or aligned with Russia as they move forward and determine kind of their foreign policy and their decisions.

So this is not just humiliating, but incredibly dangerous moving forward. So what are you guys going to do? Because I feel like we're playing two different games here. I feel like the Republicans and MAGA, they've gone into the government. They're not going through Congress and legislating. It's executive order after executive order. They're losing in court, but are they going to honor these court rulings? And then is Pam Bondi's federal marshals, are they going to go out and enforce these orders? I feel like they're heading into a complete autocracy and the Democrats are

still playing like business as usual. And so I have this fantasy that like tonight none of y'all show up nobody shows up because you're like we are not going to be a part every single mega voter is a traitor and we're not going to waltz in here and act like this is normal what we're going to do is we're going to get a building across the street and we're going to get all the mega dick overs everybody who's been dicked over by Donald Trump in seven weeks that's lost their job, that has lost their benefits, has lost their health insurance, farmers, etc. Also, Elon Musk can't pay taxes because the thing is we can afford all this shit, Congressman. We can afford every single bit of it. If these billionaires would pay their goddamn taxes and quit being leeches off of working class Americans, it just sickens me. It sickens me. And I feel like we're playing two different games here. And I feel like sometimes you guys, not you personally,

but the Democrats as a party are going to the table like this is politics as usual. And out here in what MAGA calls real America, outside the beltway, everybody, even people I know that weren't like, didn't hate Trump, maybe voted for him one out of three, are like, where are the Democrats? What the fuck is happening? Like we're dying out here. Listen, I hear you. And I remember when I, the honor and pleasure of joining you the first time we kind of talked about my frustration, which I know you share that sometimes Democrats don't fight back as hard as we should. I shared with you my my theory and coming from Philly, it's probably not a surprise. I think that if you're hit, you get back up and you hit the other person 10 times harder and you do it immediately. You respond to everything. That's always been my philosophy when it comes to campaigning. One thing I'll say about the

State of the Union tonight, though, why I think it would be a mistake if all of us decided not to show up. What Speaker Johnson would simply do is fill the seats with sycophantic Republican staffers, which he has the ability to do. Any empty seat gets filled by staffers at the direction of the Speaker, including former Republican members. So then the State of the Union that would be covered and that 50 million people would watch would be Trump speaking to a chamber that's entirely cheering and whooping and supporting him. So I don't think that's the visual that we really want. Now, a lot of Democratic members are. We are bringing, actually, people who have been screwed over by the doge bags. So that actually is going to be happening, and we're going to be highlighting them.

I will say this, though. I believe we as Democrats have to use every point of leverage, and that begins literally next week. We are facing a government shutdown in approximately 10 days. Republicans want our votes. I don't know why, for me or any Democratic member, we could possibly vote for what they call a continuing resolution, while right now, Elon Musk is showing up just randomly at different agencies they want to shut down, even though by law, they can't do that. By law, we already have appropriated funding for those agencies like USAID or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, et cetera, et cetera.

How could I vote for something next Friday to fund it when then the very next day on Saturday, Elon Musk and the doge bag show up and shut down the agency? So that's our point of leverage. We will have other points of leverage. And then finally, on the litigation front, we're potentially facing a very scary moment. We've had J.D. Vance and some other Republicans talk about this administration becoming the first in American history to just ignore court rulings. So far, they haven't done that. They didn't do it in the first term, and they haven't done it so far, including in a recent

Supreme Court 7-2 decision that didn't go their way. That would be a very frightening moment for the country. I hope we don't reach it, but we need to be prepared in case we do. My question is about Elon Musk because he scares me more than Trump because he seems more craven and organized because I don't think Trump's really that interested in governing. But with the continuing resolution slash budget coming up, is there a way that you as Democrats can say okay we want to bring Elon Musk in we want to have absolute transparency about what he's doing we want to ask him about the investigations that are ongoing about the contracts that he has awarded himself and only what we help

vote regarding the budget if Elon Musk comes in and is held to account. Is that a bargaining chip that you could have? Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. It's actually pretty similar to where my thinking has been and what I was talking about earlier that, all right, if you want our votes, we need to reverse all of this illegal shit that has already happened over the last, what, only six weeks. So if we're talking about a continuing resolution, which is the parliamentary speak here for just keeping things on autopilot, well, they haven't been on autopilot the last six weeks. The White House and Musk, they have been violating the law. So if we're going to go back to actually following the law, then that's a situation that I could support. But I can't support continuing this reality, acting like it's normal when it

clearly isn't. So in my view, this is a great moment for us. And you know, if the last time I checked, Republicans can keep the budget, can keep the government funded if they want to. They control the House, the Senate and the White House. If you want our votes, it's got to be to end the illegal activity that has been going on over the last six weeks. OK, moving forward, Democratic messaging. There are reports and, you know, obviously after an election, everybody is, you know, Monday morning quarterbacking. And as you know, we live in a red state. We live in Oklahoma City. Not one county has gone blue in like the last five or six cycles. And you hear

this a lot of Democrats say, we have to turn away from identity politics and here's my perception from the middle of the bible belt like i mean it is maga dump truck where we are okay the only people that appear to be talking about identity politics ad nauseam is maga like where we live our governor our school superintendent they're so far up trump ass, they're never going to get their heads up. They talk about gender politics, trans, homosexuals, and porn more than any Democrat or even any gay person I've ever met in my entire life. They are the ones that talk about this. I feel like as Democrats moving forward, our position needs to be, look, we're not going to vindicate and say, oh, we're running away from identity politics. MAGA is the one that's obsessed with that. Kamala didn't run on that. She started running to the

center, running around with Liz Cheney, who's about as right wing as it gets. And I feel like for Democrats, if you saw Jeff Bezos, Amazon was all about DEI. He's at a human rights campaign accepting an award for being this big ally. Trump wins, and then he's like, no more DEI, no more gay-friendly shit for Amazon. And everybody's like, you know what? You're an inauthentic Jeff Bezos. And I feel like that's what we're going to look like. And I'll tell you what I think gets moderates or even some MAGA people to vote are people that are fucking tough,

that don't back down, that say, I'm not going to bully gay people. I'm not going to bully trans people. But let me tell you what they're doing to you. They're scapegoating these marginalized people so that you don't see that Muskk and bezos don't have to pay taxes and they get you mad at this very small minority because they're dicks i think that needs to be the democratic messaging because people in oklahoma in texas and around when you hear somebody fight for everybody and this inauthenticity like oh we're gonna run away from that it just seems like such a wimpy, wimpy thing. I'm not saying that you wanted to do this, but we know we all read what the Democratic messaging

is going to be. And I just think that this is a huge, huge mistake and it vindicates and validates what the right wing is saying about us. And I'm telling you, when you get to a deeply red state, the liberals aren't talking about this shit. the republicans that are consumed with this yeah i it is funny just how obsessed republicans are with trans issues um i mean whatever's going on there um you know i'll i'll leave that to uh to someone else to try to figure out that psychology and by the way the only time i've heard the word woke in the last two or three years is actually from someone who's on the maga right exactly talking about woke but look here's my message and this is actually why i'm incredibly optimistic about the next election in november do you think we're going to get to the next election i mean seriously listen we're going to win the next no uh november

2026. no no we're going to win no no no. All right. Here's what I'm asking. Autocrats don't cede power. Do you think we're going to have a very unfair election in 2026? I will say while we always have to work day in and day out to safeguard that, I am very confident we will. And here's why. How? We have 50 state elections run by over 3,000 counties. That's important.

It's also one of the many reasons why 2020 and the claims of MAGA that it was stolen was so fraudulent. We don't have federal elections, for better or worse, in this case for better. We don't have federal elections in the United States. We have over 3,000 different elections and election systems. So the idea that a president can even intervene, say, in Pennsylvania, where you have a Democratic governor, or Michigan, where you have a Democratic governor, Arizona, where you have a Democratic governor, et cetera, et cetera, I don't think they can, even if they attempt to.

And in terms of message you had asked earlier, I just want to come back to it. My message, I mean, if you've seen me on, if anyone watches TV anymore, if you've seen me on TV, whether in the Philly area or on MSNBC, CNN, et cetera, over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to remind everyone that right now, the crowd that pretends to be for the working class is pushing the largest tax cuts for billionaires in American history, over $4 trillion, paid for by the largest cut to Medicaid in American history. That is radical redistribution of wealth from the working class to the top 1%. That is also a deeply unpopular agenda. I saw one poll that showed 82% of the American people oppose cutting Medicaid in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

That's what they're pushing. The stuff that they're also pushing right now is actually hurting real people. Philadelphia Inquirer, my local paper, profiled someone this past week. I just had 400 layoffs at the IRS building in Philadelphia. They interviewed one guy who voted for Trump and was talking about how he voted for him because of he didn't like costs were too high. And he thought Trump being, in his view, this great businessman would come in and find waste, fraud and abuse. Well, now the guy realizes that he's been played, that Trump is the one good thing Trump is at.

He's very good at one thing. He's a con man. He's been a con man his entire life, and he's a very skilled con man. He is. However, enough people are now getting screwed over that they realize it. So we're already seeing this in early polls. I am incredibly optimistic about the next election. Yes, we will get to it. Democrats am incredibly optimistic about the next election. Yes, we will

get to it. Democrats are going to win back the House. And I think we're going to win by a margin pretty similar to 2018, where we actually have a pretty large majority. I want you to be right. And I can also admit when I'm wrong. And I agree with you that y'all have to be there because Moses Mike cannot fill those seats and give him the optics of all of that. And I really like your messaging moving forward about how MAGA is scapegoating people that we as Democrats and as Americans refuse to bully. We refuse to treat them like they're pieces of shit and further marginalize them so that they can take their eye off the ball. That the Elon Musk, the Jeff Bezos, the Peter Thiel's, these are the people that are robbing America. These are the enemy.

And I hope that as Democrats, we start messaging this because they are so good. They spend so much time on an issue. Like I think I read there's over 500, um ncaa athletes less than 10 are trans right and if you listen to maga if you listen to the um oklahoma school superintendent you would think that oklahoma city schools and oklahoma schools statewide are full of trans people where kids are going to school and wieners are getting whacked off left and right. It's just simply not happening. And so we have to go on the attack.

We have to pit bull this shit because the headlines are writing themselves right now for us. It is teed up perfectly. And I just don't want us to move away from, I think the identity politics is a myth that the right perpetrated onto us because Kamala didn't run that way. I've been around progressive people all the time. Nobody ever talks about it. Right. Yeah. But I will say on the bright side, I do appreciate the sudden Republican deep concern for high school and college girls and women's sports. I had no idea

that this was so important to them, where suddenly this is their most important thing. I will say, though, that, and I saw it in person in Pennsylvania last election, the biggest driver in this past, like, let's keep it simple. The biggest driver in the last election was inflation and high costs. I mean, I sat in on the other side of a one-way mirror and listened to focus groups. I listened to people who had voted Biden 2020 and unfortunately voted Trump 2024. And yeah, it was as simple as they didn't like the fact that we had the inflation spike the highest in 40 years, the same thing that has impacted every other government in a Western democracy the last year. And boy, those people going to the supermarket today

to see that prices are even higher, the tariffs that are coming in that are gonna jack car prices, an average of 6,500 bucks per car. If people were pissed about the inflation that was already coming down in 2024, how pissed are people going to be about the dramatic increase in inflation

that is just beginning, combined with the fact that the Atlanta Fed showed we are likely going to be in recession this quarter. Just watch those numbers. Let me ask you this. I see that, you know, the price of eggs, we kind of attribute it to racism more. Trump gives people a reason, allows them to be racist and vote that way. But let's say for the purposes of this argument, you're right. It was inflation. So inflation is going up, up, up. Eggs prices going through the roof, all of these tariffs coming in. And I see now they're spinning it on Fox News that, well, it's a national security issue. So if you have to pay more for eggs,

it's a national security issue. So at what point do these people, do they have to feel it in their pocketbooks? Or do you think the fact that they're not able to buy it, will that be the turning point? Or are they so dug in, like, say, for example, in Pennsylvania, that they would rather pay more for these eggs, thinking it's a national security issue, to stay with the Republican MAGA mantra? Yeah, so let's really analyze this. I would say for 35% of the public, they are mega diehards. They hated Russia one minute, and then dear leader tells them something different and they immediately flip. It's hard to figure out. It's depressing. But that 35%, just forget about it. They will swallow the party line. Guess what? We don't need to win 100% of the votes to win elections. For that middle 15, 20% of the country that could go Trump, could go our way, those people care about pocketbook issues.

The people who we had in 2020, but swung the other way in 2024. They are extremely price sensitive. The working class whites, but also working class Latinos and working class African-Americans, some of whom swung against us. African-American women. They showed up, so I want to push back on that. Latinos did not. Well, no, wait, wait. Let me just, hold on. To be clear, the vast majority of African-Americans voted Democratic in this election. What I'm talking about is our drop in vote. We had typically been around 90 percent.

We were in the low 80s this election. The people who peeled off from us, that's what I'm talking about. The Latino males, we actually did outright lose narrowly first time in American history. They also tend to be pretty price sensitive as well. So those folks will really, well, I'm not going to say one ethnicity is more sexist than another. I know you won't, but I'm not a politician and I'm going to say it. When you have women running on the other side of the ticket, sexism plays a role in that.

And we saw that with Hillary Clinton and we saw it with Kamala Harris. And I think as a party moving forward in the autopsy of this, I want a female president so desperately. But moving forward, I don't want a criminal as a president. And so we have to have honest conversations that do certain groups have more sexism like evangelicals for sure do for sure i think latinos as a culture there's a little bit more sexism i'm probably gonna people are just probably gonna rip me but i mean you know what we need to have these kind of conversations and so moving forward is it the smartest to put women up? I loved Kamala. I love Hillary.

I'd vote for him again in a heartbeat. I think they're qualified. I think they're brilliant. I think they took Trump on the debate stage and told him exactly what Vladimir Putin thought about him. Nobody listened or I mean, half of Americans did. But I just think that sometimes as we move move forward we're going to have to have these conversations about sexism about race um and what pumps was saying about uh trump talked about um egg prices but for some people it just gives them a permission structure to say oh i'm so worried

about inflation um because at the end of the day we have a problem where a lot of Americans, and you say these price-sensitive voters, they saw January 6th. They saw it. And then they saw him get convicted of 34 felonies. And there's a real, I don't know if it's a stupid problem. I don't know if it's a moral problem. I don't know what the problem is, but that you can say, I would rather have this criminal con man come in. And then we're going to sit here and say, oh, they're just price conscious voters. I think it's deeper than price because we all saw that. And I think it's something that we as a nation have to reconcile. How can American voters go vote for a man who tried to overthrow the federal government, who packed his toys up and left, didn't do a peaceful transfer of power because he's too

big of a titty baby to do it. And these people just go, oh, I was just really worried about the price of eggs. I think there's something fucking wrong with them. I do. Yeah. It, um, it's not the most inspiring set of facts, but I can tell you, you like how I put that? I go back to one of the focus groups I watched, and they asked this one guy who happened to be Hispanic, lived in North Philadelphia, pretty working class area. It was a focus group of non-college educated younger males, by the way, all of whom got their information from podcasts and social media, none of whom watched broadcast TV or cable TV. And the guy, he was asked about January 6th and he said something to the effect of, yeah, I don't disagree. I don't agree with January 6th. I think that was wrong.

But, you know, I just know when Trump trump was president i had more money in my pocket for a i'm not saying it's right or wrong i obviously strongly intensely disagree with it um and on a certain level it's pretty depressing but i'm telling you for a certain number of voters in fact the decisive number of voters, in fact, the decisive number of voters, it actually was as simple as that. Wow. Okay. One question. This is just kind of a gossipy because I'm petty. So when we had Eric Swalwell on, he said the difference in people on the floor and off the floor. So you see all this alignment with Russia from Trump and Vance and the attack on Zelensky. So are your colleagues that are rah-rah pro-Trump in front of the camera, surely, please tell me they have a little bit of pause about what's going on

behind the scenes. Yeah, although I don't know if that morally makes them any better or worse than the Marjorie Taylor Greene types who actually believe this stuff. Um, I spring, less than a year of billions of dollars of every democrat voted for of House republicans vote

100 of them voted for it. 100 House republicans out to oppose what Donald Trump did in the past week? They are a lot of people who privately disagree with him, who will mutter under their breath or say something on the House floor, but are so damn afraid of a MAGA-inspired primary that they just keep their mouth shut because they have seen other Republicans who have spoken out against Trump get voted out. So you have a bunch of Republicans who disagree with him on this, but are too afraid to say anything because they're scared. Cowards. Congressman, I think you're great. I think that you are a great messenger. I think you're fighting a good fight.

And I, um, I know that it's difficult to come on and because everybody's so pissed and, um, feels disjointed and lost. And, um, I think you bring a lot of, you brought some calmness to me that I needed because covering this day in, day out, it really takes a toll. I mean, what we're witnessing, this realignment and watching people lose their jobs. And in Oklahoma, we had the National Weather Service down in Norman, Oklahoma. Elon Musk shut it down. Last night, hail starts falling and we get tornadoes all the time.

And I'm just in bed with my French bulldog and my husband thinking, are we even going to get a tornado warning? I mean, does anybody even care anymore? And it's just it's really stressful being an American right now. It's really, really, really stressful. And I feel like I took for granted the security that I felt up until now. And I know that our listeners feel so much stress and we're all in kind of this agony watching this man just rape and pillage everything that we valued. So I can't thank you enough for coming on here and speaking honestly with us, explaining to me in particular that I needed to hear that some people just don't give a fuck about January 6th. I can't understand that,

but how great would it be to be in one of those mirrors behind the mirror like he was watching people just don't give a I can't understand that. would it be to be in one the mirror like he was wa I bet that was it was fac say this, I, I feel exact waking up every morning, in the pit of my stomach, Okay, I'm actually one of the few

people who's in a position to do something about it. So my way of, at the very least, as a coping mechanism is, all right, what am I going to do today? What's the plan? We know where we want to get to. We can get our way out of this. And working toward that every day is actually a way, a productive way of coping with all of the awfulness that we're seeing and is going on to get us out of this awful place that we're in thank you so much keep those elections pristine so that we can get to the midterms i have to hang on to one thing and i'm really really really worried about that and you're going to be in charge of that congressman you're going to be in charge of that, Congressman. You're in charge.

Thank you. Great being with you. We always love having you on. Good luck tonight. Yeah. Thank you. Have fun at work. Thank you. and it was love at first onboarding. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.