Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg: Trump’s Escalating Tariff Madness, Roy Cooper Breaks Fundraising Records, Senator Alex Padilla On ICE, The Budget, Rescissions And More
By Simon Rosenberg
Senator Alex Padilla Joins Hopium – Yesterday Senator Alex Padilla sat down with us for an extended conversation in this final week before the Senate summer recess. It was a ride-ranging conversation that touched on Trump’s immigration escalation, the coming budget debate, tariffs and the White House’s attempt to break or undermine the Congressional budgeting process. I encourage you to get to it when you have the time. The recording and transcript are above.
The moment that is still sticking with me this morning was when the Senator reminded us that those essential workers Trump celebrated during COVID are the very same ones being targeted now by ICE:
The tariff wars that Donald Trump is losing are driving costs up, and it’s going to be more expensive to deliver goods and services if there are fewer workers doing those jobs. And on that point, I just got to call out the ironic cruelty here. At the end of the Trump Administration, the first one, the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic was actually Donald Trump’s Dept. of Homeland Security that designated so many workers “essential,” people in agriculture, in the food supply chain, in transportation, in construction, in health care, et cetera. And they were essential then. Now they seem to be the primary target of these arrests, detentions, deportations. That’s cruel and it’s bad for the country.
It’s a great conversation with one of our most important emerging Democratic leaders on the front lines in the battle against Trump. Get to it when you can.
Read the full article here.