The MeidasTouch Podcast - Congressman Krishnamoorthi on Trump Disasters

Episode Date: March 15, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump crashing in the polls on every issue and Meiselas speaks with Democratic Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi on how he’s fighting back against Trump. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It seems everything is plummeting right now in this Trump regime. Let's just take a look at the latest Ipsos poll. Trump's approval on the economy, which for reasons that were unclear to me, were previously high. I don't know why, but now 51% of Americans disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the economy. On this question, the U.S. should make Canada the 51st state because the two countries are already so intertwined. 80% disagree, 17% agree.

It's a good idea for the U.S. to charge higher tariffs on imported goods, even if prices increase. 53% disagree, 32% agree. Trump's moves to shake up the economy are too erratic. 57% agree. 32% disagree. The U.S. should take over the Gaza Strip and develop the area for tourism. 84% disagree. 12% agree. Expanding U.S. territory will help the nation prosper. 68% disagree. 29% agree. I support Ukraine's use of U.S. supplied arms to strike inside of Russia. 54% agree. 42% disagree. The problems of Ukraine are none of our business and we should not interfere. 57% disagree. 47% agree. Net favorables. Trump,

negative 9%. Vance, negative 20%. Elon Musk, negative 21%. Trump's approval on handling the cost of living, 57% disapprove, 32% approve. Trump's approval on foreign policy, 48% disapproved, 37% approved. Do you consider Canada an ally, a neutral country, or an enemy? 59% of Americans say an ally, only 2% say an enemy, which is interesting because now if you ran that poll in Canada, I think only 25 to 30% of Canadians still view the United States as an ally, even though the American people stand with Canada because of the Trump regime's policies and Trump's unfavorability continues to soar. His favorability plummets. And I mean, look, he brought the NATO secretary general into the Oval Office on Thursday. And what Donald Trump was talking about was invading Los Angeles to take the water and turn on a faucet.

Here's what Trump talked about in front of the NATO secretary general in the world press. I broke into Los Angeles. Can you believe it? I had a break in. I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water and the water is now flowing down. They have so much water. They don't know what to do. They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons.

OK, can you believe it? And in the meantime, they lost twenty five thousand houses. They lost and nobody's ever seen anything like it. But. Like I see, the psych is a psychotic individual. I live in Los Angeles. What he's saying is not true. What he did do is send the Army Corps of Engineers to invade and break into reservoirs in northern California, nowhere near Southern California, after the fires were already out. And then he dumped over 2 billion gallons of water onto farmland in Central and Northern California, nowhere near where the fires were previously, which were put out. And he destroyed the farmers' livelihoods going into the summers. And those were some of the areas that were reddish in California. Those were the Republican voter farmers and he destroyed

their summer. So it's a bunch of insanity. If you heard some of those laughs as I was going through this segment, I'll bring in Democratic Congress member Raja Krishnamoorthy. I mean, you hear these questions and I'm with you. I mean, the fact that we have to even ask these questions is outrageous. But here it is. And your colleagues, these spineless MAGA Republicans are like, oh, things are going really good. What do you make of all this mess? I got to tell you, our constituents are livid at this point. We're getting tremendous outreach. The main reason being that I'm talking about even people in the middle, people who might have voted for Trump. We're hearing from, for instance, small businesses.

We're one of the biggest kind of concentrations of light manufacturing anywhere in the Midwest. And Illinois, Illinois' biggest trading partner is Canada. And so we have tremendous number of exports and imports coming across the border. And these businesses are just seeing their prices skyrocket for their inputs. And now that they're having to pay a lot more to build whatever they're building. They can't sell what they're trying to sell either at the prices that they were expecting. And meanwhile, our farmers met with me on Thursday, farmers from central and southern Illinois, and complained about retaliation in the form of tariffs, counter tariffs on their goods. And so they are very upset. And then you have just residents, everyday people who are paying 27% more for eggs at the

grocery store, a lot more for groceries in general. I had the president of the local 881 of United Food and Commercial Workers as my guest for the State of the Union. He reported that for his 35,000 workers, many of them cannot afford the groceries that they are stocking on the shelves of their grocery stores. And so this is just a complete mess. And it's why, as you saw, Trump's unfavorability is skyrocketing. You know, there's also now a show, the one stat where Americans rightfully view Canada as an ally. Trump is treating Canada like an enemy. And so the people of Canada are boycotting tourism. They're not showing up in the vacations. They're canceling their conferences here. They're taking American booze off their shelf. They're buying Canada. The world is now boycotting America. I don't even know who America under Trump regime is allied with.

I can't make, I'm sure one of the things you're hearing too is like people can't even make sense of what he's doing. That's why I'm saying like I'm not trying to be hyperbolic when I say it's psychotic. It's psychotic. Well, I should tell you that my district is also home to one of the biggest concentrations of Ukrainian Americans, and for that matter, Eastern European Americans of any congressional district. These people are beside themselves because they see that we are basically taking the side of a dictator, a communist dictator, basically in the form of Vladimir Putin. They're not technically a communist country, but they just act like it. And we are disfavoring a freedom-loving democracy in the form of Ukraine. And they are beside themselves about that. And then they see that what we're doing with Canada, what we're doing with our friends and partners and allies elsewhere means that whether it's Poland or whether it's any other NATO country or for that matter, whether it's South Korea or Japan or anyone else with whom we have treaty alliances can't rely on us.

And that drives them insane. And so we are kind of in this situation where they feel less safe and they're paying higher prices and they're having a harder time doing business and they're worried about their children because we just heard two nights ago that Trump is going to lay And this is the kind of nonsense that they're very, very upset about. And did I mention Doge and Elon Musk that when when people found out about Doge and Elon Musk having access to their private identifiable information at first at the Treasury Department, department, we got like a thousand phone calls in 24 hours. And that's just the level of alarm on the part of people at this point. Right. And federal spending went up last month. It didn't go down. With all of this happening, it was the highest month of federal spending ever in history, $603 billion, like 15 or 30 billion more than the prior month with all of this going on. So it just seems that cruelty is the point. Lay off 70,000 people from Veterans Affairs, 10,000 people from the Social Security Administration, half the staff at the Department of Education get rid of the national parks, while Elon helps himself with his contracts, while Donald goes around the NASCAR racetrack while half the country was

suffering from severe weather events. They they're not doing the things. And then your Republican colleagues are just like, trust me, bro. Trust me. You need pain. That's their line. Their line is you need to experience this pain and suffering for the greater good. Do your constituents want pain and suffering and infliction of harm? Absolutely not. And, you know, one of the worst things that I heard the other day,

apparently there's a report that maybe it was Howard Lutnick or it was Scott Besson, one of those billionaire cabinet secretaries actually said that we should go into a recession. Can you believe that? That somehow going into a recession would be a good thing for America. And I was saying to my friends, like, we need to get back to basics here. You know, we need to like do whatever we can. We need to have like a coalition to prevent recession. I call it CPR. We need CPR for this economy to prevent us from going into recession and preventing all the collateral damage that's about to happen in the form of unemployment and everything else. Finally, tell us some of the things that you're doing. I mean, reaching out to your constituents,

what do you recommend other Democrats to be doing? I mean, your constituents aren't just Democrats. I mean, they were Republicans, independents, people who were not political until politics just whacked them. What are you doing now to kind of reach out? I'm sure you're hearing, Congressman, we want you to fight. And what does that mean to you? What are you doing to fight? Yeah. So I think it means a few things. First of all, I'm doing a lot of town hall meetings. A lot of them are even pop-up town hall meetings where we find out about an executive order in the morning and then we say, look, we got to talk about this with our constituents either today or the next day. And believe it or not, we had like 1,600 people just show up for one of these pop-up town hall meetings

because of the level of concern and fear and anger and all of the above. In terms of how do we fight, I think there are a few ways that we have to fight. One, we absolutely have to lift up our voices at this point. I've mentioned this before, but that means the average person lifting up their voices and connecting with their member of Congress on both sides of the aisle. It means us

in Congress using our tools on committees to bring about accountability and transparency. We came within one vote of successfully subpoenaing Elon Musk, And we have to keep doing that. We have to get him to testify under oath about what the hell he's doing at Doge. Secondly, we have to continue with the litigation, both inside and outside Congress. Third, we have to use our votes. And that's very important. As you know, we do have some leverage. We need to use it accordingly. And then last, we have to go to our Republican colleagues and we have to say, look, you have choices. You can either harm your constituents by gutting Medicaid, for instance, or you can do the right thing and oppose those moves. If you

decide to do the wrong thing, we're going to hold you accountable. And that's going to be at the next elections. It could be in your primaries, whatever. But the point is that we need to do everything. We need to fight in the court of public opinion. We need to fight in the legal system. And of course, we need to fight in the halls of Congress. We will never surrender. We cannot surrender. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthy, thanks for joining. Thank you so much, my friend. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas?

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