Trump Administration First 100 Days (Executive Session)
Mr. President, Donald Trump's first 100 days have been 100 days from hell. Over the past week, as I have thought about this 100-day mark, as I have met with people throughout my State--with business owners and nurses and seniors and veterans and many Republicans--I couldn't think of another way to describe the sentiment I felt back home. These 100 days have been 100 days from hell.
Donald Trump is not governing like a President of a democratic republic; he is acting like a King, a despot, a want-to-be dictator. Remember that during the campaign, he indicated that he would be a dictator just on day one, but everything we have seen so far shows he wants to be a dictator for much, much longer.
He is eating away at America's rule of law, America's norms, America's fundamental values, and people are scared, people are angry.
When seniors in Buffalo tell me they are legitimately worried about whether or not they will keep seeing their Social Security checks--and that is not just a political expression. They wonder how they are going to pay the rent, buy the food, buy the drugs next month if their Social Security check isn't there.
When doctors and health workers in Albany tell me they fear losing Medicaid funding for their hospitals and clinics, they are worried about caring for their patients, who desperately need help and may not get it, they are worried about their jobs.
When Republican businessowners on Long Island tell me they are losing sleep over Donald Trump's tariffs, it is because their businesses may go under. This is not just a political game. People are really worried, in ways that I haven't seen in a long time.
And when young people across New York tell me they are scared of being rounded up on the streets and sent to a prison in Louisiana because of the way they look or because of some blog post they may have shared a year ago or years ago, it is hard to fathom that this is all happening in America in 2025.
Mr. President, 100 days into this Presidency, there is a feeling of incompetence and indecision and chaos in the White House eating away at much of the country, emanating from the man who occupies the Oval Office.
Donald Trump promised a golden age on the first day he became President. What Americans got, instead, was fool's gold. We knew Donald Trump was lying by the time he pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists a few hours later, pardoned outright criminals who beat up cops--so much for ``Back the Blue''--pardoning lawbreakers who had an intent on disrupting the Congress as we counted electoral votes. What a disgrace. What kind of morals is he setting for this country? This will go down in history as one of the ways America has declined under Donald Trump.
So, this morning, let's talk about Donald Trump's so-called golden age. Democrats are going to hammer away at this topic all day long today, as we have done many days in the past. And tonight we will come to this Chamber and hold the floor until late tonight to mark these dismal 100 days by speaking the truth. Tonight, we will come to the floor and hold the Chamber to mark these dismal 100 days.
What is the truth? The truth is this: No President in modern history has promised more on day one and delivered less by day 100 than Donald Trump. In record time, the President has turned a golden promise into an economic ticking time bomb. It is getting worse every day, and he calls it progress.
Let's remember what Donald Trump said again and again on the campaign trail.
He said--
He said--
Well, the opposite is happening. The economic winds are pointing in the wrong direction and reaching hurricane speed. Americans are still paying more and more today for their groceries, their rent, their housing, their gas, their cars, auto parts, drugs, and household necessities. And Donald Trump's asinine trade war has made it all the worse.
And 44 percent of families now believe they will be worse off financially a year from now--a level of pessimism not even seen during the Great Depression or the 1970s' stagflation.
According to an AP-NORC poll, half of Americans are worried about a recession and expect inflation to keep going up. And these aren't just poll numbers. When I talk to New Yorkers, when I hear from Americans, that is exactly where they are at. Consumer sentiment is at a decades- long low. It has plunged by 30 percent. So the consumer is holding back. They are not spending. They are not planning that trip to see the grandkids. They are not thinking of buying the new car or new furniture because they are worried.
And then businesses--seeing that, hearing that--they hold back. I have heard from business after business, large and small. Everything is on freeze. Everything is hold. And you know what that does? That leads to a recession.
In fact, Amazon announced that they will begin displaying how much tariffs contribute to the total price of products to consumers. I urge more companies--particularly national retailers that compete with Amazon--to adopt this practice. If Amazon has the courage to display why prices are going up because of tariffs, so should all of our other national retailers who compete with them, and I am calling on them to do it now.
To the large businesses that sell to consumers, I say: Show your customers how much tariffs are hurting their pocketbooks. People deserve to know the impact tariffs have on their finances. And certainly, when people hear it, they will let their Congressmen and Senators know. And businesses, then you will have a chance to get rid of these tariffs, which are so stultifying your ability to move forward.
And it is also small businesses. They don't want to get blamed for hiking prices when Donald Trump's tariffs have put them in a terrible position--in a position that says: Raise your prices or close your doors. They hate doing either.
And, finally, let's not forget Donald Trump's favorite measuring stick, the stock market, which he has conspicuously been silent about over the last few months. The Dow Jones is on track for its worst April since 1932.
Did you hear that, Donald Trump? Your beloved stock market is on track for the worst April since 1932, the last year of Herbert Hoover.
I ask this Chamber, Mr. President: Is this what the golden age looks like? Are we supposed to feel good that Donald Trump has singlehandedly pushed us to the brink of a recession? This President, who governs chaotically and reverses himself like a weather vane in a windstorm, is driving the robust American economy into a ditch.
I think if you asked Americans to pick one word that describes Donald Trump's economy and how he is handling it, it would be one word, a five-letter word: chaos, C-H-A-O-S. Another five-letter word is Trump, T-R-U-M-P. Chaos equals Trump; Trump equals chaos.
Are Americans supposed to just take it when Donald Trump says families should be OK with prices going up, with experiencing some pain and disturbance? That is what he says: It is OK if prices go up. You will get some pain and disturbance.
Pretty rich coming from a billionaire.
American consumers are not supposed to take it. There is precious little, if anything, on the economic front to feel good about 100 days into Trump 2.0.
And don't take it from me. Today, Donald Trump has lower approval ratings than he did at this point in 2017;
Americans don't trust him on the economy, nor should they. They don't trust him on keeping America safe, nor should they. They don't trust him on his ability to fight for the interests of ordinary people because they know that the whole place is run by a small cadre of billionaires who don't really care about average folks at all. And we are only 100 days in.
And, finally, on a related subject, let me say this: As Donald Trump races to sabotage the American economy, he has likewise already inflicted lasting harm to the foundations of American democracy. When our Founders drafted the Constitution, they feared precisely a man like Donald Trump. They feared a man who sees rule of law as a nuisance, who considers the truth an inconvenience, who regards his fellow citizens as little more than subjects.
Either kiss the ring, bow before the throne, or watch your back: That is the ethos of Donald Trump. Kiss the ring, bow before the throne, or watch your back: the Trumpian ethos.
In 100 days, Donald Trump has moved with lightning speed to weaponize the Federal Government against anyone he thinks might oppose him. Plain and simple, Donald Trump does not believe in democracy or debate, nor do the people around him. He doesn't believe in honest disagreement. He simply wants to crush his opponents. And that is what dictators do.
He wiped the government clean of its independent watchdogs and rid the government of most measures of transparency. He has fired public workers by the tens of thousands and illegally paralyzed Agency after Agency that helps everyday Americans.
He has attacked the free press. He has attacked our education system. He has attacked our scientists. He is systematically attempting to weaken any political opposition, anyone who might hold him accountable.
In the name of security, which is a favorite justification for many of history's despots, Trump is arresting people with little due process and, in some cases, without even regard to immigration status. Last week--just look at last week--four American citizens, all of them children, two of them battling life-threatening cancers, were deported from the U.S., from their homeland--they are citizens like we are--and sent to places like Honduras.
Let me repeat: These are American citizens, Donald Trump.
If you thought something like this could never happen in America, then unfortunately you were wrong. It is happening right in front of us.
And what did Donald Trump have to say about the risk of deporting U.S. citizens? He said:
That is what he said. That is disgusting--just disgusting. If it was a member of his family trapped in such a calamity, would he say, ``Tough luck; nothing is perfect''?
Donald Trump's inability to feel empathy for people who do not look like him is shocking to the core.
So as America marks 100 days of the worst President of our lifetimes, I ask America to look at this administration for what it is: a full frontal attack on the core elements of what has made America truly great--the rule of people over kings and oligarchs, the rule of law and not the dictates of an authoritarian, respect for the rights of all people, and a commitment to ``promoting the general welfare'' for the whole of society--not cruel, cheap, and lying scapegoating.
So let us commit ourselves, America. Let us commit ourselves to continue to struggle against this administration and to uphold the core values and principles of this great Nation.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I just saw the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, the senior Senator from New York, on the floor talking about the 100 days of the Trump administration. He had his view. Let me give you the rest of the story--because President Trump took office 100 days ago today. That is when unified Republican government began.
The Republicans have been fighting every day for the American people. We have been fixing past failures. We are forging a bright future. We have a very bold agenda, and people are seeing historic results. Americans entrusted Republicans with the Senate, the House, and the White House, and we are addressing their priorities.
What do Americans want? Americans want secure borders. We are delivering them. Illegal crossings into the United States from Mexico-- at an all-time low last month.
Americans want affordable energy. What is happening? We are making it a lot easier to produce American energy.
Americans want jobs. We have created nearly 450,000 jobs in the first 100 days.
Americans want affordable prices. That is what you see and that is what I see at home. Prices fell in March for the first time in years-- in years.
Americans want peace through strength. Well, we are restoring it. Just ask the Houthi rebels about the resolve of the American people.
Americans want common sense, and we are fighting for that as well.
After 100 days, one thing is clear: Republicans are keeping our promises. We are getting America back on track. Here is our record:
The Senate confirmed President Trump's Cabinet at lightning speed, record rates. His team carries out the agenda to get America back on track. That is what that team that we confirmed is doing.
We promised safety and prosperity, and we are delivering it.
Well, first, we are making our communities safer, and you are seeing that in all 50 States. President Trump quickly restored strong border policies. He ended the chaos. He reinstated ``Remain in Mexico.'' He designated the cartels as ``terrorists.'' He stopped Joe Biden's widespread abuse of parole authorities. And he is doing what he promised in terms of deporting criminal illegal immigrants. I applaud President Trump.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, border czar Tom Homan-- they have made a significant difference to the safety and security of the American people. Illegal crossings have dropped 94 percent on their watch. I mean, think about it. Before, under Joe Biden's open border policies--let's take a look. In March of last year, they were having 7,000 illegal immigrants cross into this country each and every day. Now under President Trump, there were 7,000 for the entire month of March. Talk about a dramatic impact, a dramatic difference. That is it.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported there were over 100,000 deportations in the first 80 days of the administration. We have seen more ICE arrests of illegal immigrant criminals in the last 100 days under President Trump than we saw in all of 2024 under Joe Biden.
So the message is now clear: If you threaten our communities, you are out. No second chances. That is it.
This is progress, and it is promises kept.
Republicans in Congress--what do we do? We passed the Laken Riley Act. President Trump signed it into law. It was the first bill that he signed into law, the first serious immigration legislation in decades. It honors the memory of Laken Riley, a young nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia while she was out for a jog. It also honors the memory of Sarah Root. She was a young woman from Iowa. She was killed by an illegal alien who was driving while drunk. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa championed Sarah's cause for years. The Laken Riley Act mandates illegal immigrants who break the law be detained, not just released into the community.
Republicans in Congress, compared to what we saw with the Democrats in the last 4 years, are committed to protecting American families. That is the
Our agenda puts us on a path to finish the wall. It will boost Border Patrol. It will provide the staffing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs. It will build more detention space for the lawbreakers. And think about who those lawbreakers are. Those are people who felt invited into our country by Joe Biden and Democrats with medical care, free food, free housing, free plane tickets--an open invitation and an open border policy. Those days are over. This is how we keep our communities safe.
Mr. President, I am going to switch to energy because we have a bold energy agenda as well. For far too long, restrictive regulations locked up our God-given resources--the energy we have in the ground--certainly in my home State of Wyoming but all across the United States.
The cost of energy for American citizens rose 34 percent in the last 4 years. Who can afford that? Well, we are reversing that trend.
President Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin--to me, they are America's energy all-stars. They are showing it every day.
In 100 days, this administration, along with Congress, has taken over 50 actions to unleash America's energy potential, and we have a lot of it there.
I was at the White House recently when President Trump signed an Executive order for clean coal. Wyoming has--we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, and our energy workers are ready to lead the way because we are pursuing and need to continue to pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We need it all.
President Trump opened up areas for drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of America. It is American energy. It is affordable energy.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced his Department is working to increase oil production in the Gulf of America by 100,000 barrels each and every day. That is going to help lower costs.
President Trump has been so successful with streamlining burdensome requirements in terms of trying to build new energy infrastructure. He has lifted the Biden ban on liquefied natural gas exports. People around the world want what we have in America to sell, and they need it desperately.
We have abundant energy in this country. We want to use that energy to help our allies and to help drive down costs at home.
President Trump and Congress also cut costly Biden-era regulations on home appliances.
We are pioneering nuclear power that is safe and efficient.
These steps power America and will continue to power us as a nation into the future. They fuel our freedom. It is why energy is called the master resource. They are good for affordable prices and good for our national security.
We are an energy superpower in this country, and under President Trump, we are finally acting like it, not apologizing for it as we did in the last administration.
Within days of taking office, President Trump restored pressure on Iran. That is how we are protecting strength around the world and projecting it for the world to see. We are engaged in maximum pressure. It is a 180-degree turn from the weakness of the previous administration. It channels the strength and the resolve of President Ronald Reagan.
President Trump has committed time and time again and shown the world that he stands firmly with Israel.
Houthi terrorists attacked our servicemembers and our ships. President Trump struck back. America defends our military and our interests.
President Trump is also strengthening alliances around the world-- Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. They are partnering with us to counter China's global ambitions, and China is ambitious and active and aggressive.
New trade deals are going to bring supply chains back home to America, and this is going to end our dependence on communist China.
Under President Trump, America continues to stand tall. We are not going to be bullied. We are going to back our friends. We are going to confront our foes. This keeps America safe. Strength deters. Weakness invites, provokes.
Finally, Mr. President, we are returning to common sense. No more woke, leftwing policies that the American people strongly oppose. No more DEI mandates in Federal Agencies. A refocused military, focused on merit and readiness, not distractions; a military that is lethal, intimidating, and ready to fight.
In Congress, we are seeing Republicans cutting wasteful Washington spending--talk about common sense. Fiscal discipline is long overdue. This is bold, results-driven change.
So how can we build on it? What is next? Well, in the next 100 days, Republicans will continue to fulfill our promises. We are going to stop the Democrats' $4 trillion tax hike. This protects families and small businesses from the largest tax increase in American history. We are going to cut crippling regulations. Businesses will be allowed to grow and innovate and thrive. We are going to strengthen our border by providing law enforcement the resources they need.
The Republican agenda puts America and Americans first. Our mission, our mandate is America first. Republicans have delivered in 100 days. We have achieved so much. We are going to deliver even more because together we are going to get America back on track. America's future is bright.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Democratic whip.
Honoring Staff Sergeant Jose Duenez, Jr., Staff Sergeant Edvin F. Franco, Staff Sergeant Troy S. Knutson-Collins, and Private First Class
Mr. President, I have come to the Senate floor before to talk about my connections with the country of Lithuania, where my mother was born. She came to the United States as an immigrant at the age of 2. It has been my good fortune to visit and revisit her homeland and to get to know the wonderful people who live in that nation.
During my time in Congress, I have tried to make sure Lithuania's heroic path to freedom, the EU, and NATO are strongly supported by their American allies in the U.S. Congress.
Now more than ever, we need to support our Baltic allies. They are critical frontline NATO partners with clear memories of Russian tyranny and a key reason the United States has troops serving in former Soviet- occupied countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.
Sadly, last month, four American soldiers stationed in Lithuania died tragically while on a mission to recover a vehicle immobilized during a training exercise. I want to take a moment to tell you about these four brave men, one of whom was from my home State of Illinois, and the amazing efforts that were made to recover them.
SSG Jose Duenez, Jr., was from Joliet, IL. He, along with SSG Edvin F. Franco, PFC Dante Taitano, and SSG Troy Knutson-Collins, was part of the 1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division.
Stationed in Lithuania at a military base that I personally visited, they were called on March 25 to retrieve a tactical vehicle mired in dangerously deep mud. Sadly, these soldiers never returned. Then search efforts were initiated to locate them, and they couldn't find them.
They were in a tracked vehicle, a 70-ton tracked vehicle, and they disappeared. It took days before they finally found some tracks that led to an area, which was not very large, that looked like a puddle, but it was much more serious. The effort to find the soldiers eventually required hundreds of people from other nations. The effort was nothing short of miraculous.
The soldiers' vehicle was thought to have sunk into a muddy bog, but it was
It was soon clear that the mission would be one of recovery and not rescue.
Engineers were brought in to thin the concrete-like mud in an effort to drain the bog that swallowed this vehicle, but the water kept seeping in.
The recovery team grew by the hour, eventually reaching hundreds, comprised of 250 U.S. servicemembers, 160 Lithuanian soldiers and civilians, 50 Polish troops, and working canine teams from Estonia and Lithuania.
Soon, a team of U.S. Navy divers received urgent orders to fly from Spain to Lithuania to help connect cables to the sunken vehicle and pull it from the bog. It took hours of struggling through the thick sludge, but they secured the vehicle.
It was a mission fraught with extreme danger and challenges. It was met with ingenuity and a commitment to the underlying principle that every American servicemember must be brought home.
I spoke to the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States and others in Lithuania who described these days as painful days when they first tried to discover what happened to the vehicle and then an even longer period of time when they tried to retrieve the vehicle and the bodies of our soldiers.
They told me that in Lithuania, virtually every newscast focused on this tragedy. People in Lithuania felt a personal attachment to our troops, as certainly we do today. The death of these four American soldiers is a tragedy, but the joint efforts to secure them show the gravity of our commitment to our allies.
We have American troops stationed in nations like Lithuania because we have a commitment to join our NATO allies in stopping Russian aggression.
These four American soldiers lost their lives safeguarding democracy, but we owe gratitude to our Lithuanian and other allies who dropped everything and faced great odds to help us, a reminder of the common defense underlying our alliance.
On April 3, the schools were closed, the schoolchildren and their families came out and stood in the streets in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania--included in their ranks was the Lithuanian President--to pay their respects to our fallen American soldiers in their procession back to the United States.
It was a devastating episode, but it illustrated the power of international cooperation, friendship between allies, and solutions in the face of great challenges.
The loss of American servicemembers is always a tragedy. I particularly want to highlight my late constituent Sergeant Duenez. He jumped at the chance to volunteer for assignments, including the fateful mission to this bog, which he went to support even though he was not on that crew. He was a model Illinoisan and American, and he leaves behind a wife and a little boy. We should all strive to be more like Sergeant Duenez, and we owe him and his family a great debt of gratitude.
In honor of these four servicemembers, who were living examples of American values, I will be introducing a resolution recognizing their service and sacrifice to our Nation and our NATO allies. And I urge my colleagues to join me in honoring the memories of these four great soldiers and the remarkable effort that went into their recovery by passing this resolution without delay.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Massachusetts.
Trump Administration First 100 Days (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, almost 75 years ago, the junior Senator from Maine rose in this Chamber to deliver a speech from her heart about a crisis then facing our country, a crisis not arising from a foreign adversary but from within, a crisis that threatened the values and ideals at the base of the American experiment.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith's ``Declaration of Conscience'' turned out to be one of the most important speeches of the 20th century and defined her for the ages as a person of extraordinary courage and principle. And here she is with her famous red rose that she always wore on her lapel.
Now, I should admit upfront that I worked for Candidate Bill Hathaway, who defeated her in the election of 1972. But she and I made it up years later when I was producing a documentary on her life for Maine PBS. In fact, as we began the project, I was so worried that she might resent my having worked for her opponent, so I sent her a letter confessing my role in her last campaign.
Her response was pure Margaret Smith:
Simple as that.
In working together on the documentary, she shared some fascinating background on this famous speech, including that she drafted it by hand at her kitchen table in her hometown of Skowhegan, ME, on Memorial Day weekend of 1950.
After returning to Washington a couple of days later, she steeled her resolve and headed to the Senate floor. As luck would have it, when she got to the trolley from the Russell Building, there next to her sat Senator Joe McCarthy, who was the subject of the speech.
``Why are you looking so serious, Margaret,'' he asked her.
``Because I'm on the way to make a speech, Joe, and you're not going to like it.''
She told me that she was so nervous about the speech and the breach that it would make in her relationship to the then-powerful Senator McCarthy--this was the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, remember-- she told her chief aide, Bill Lewis, who was up in the Press Gallery, not to hand out the copies of the speech until she started speaking on the floor because she was afraid she might lose her nerve. But she went through with it, and the rest is quite literally history.
Here is how Margaret Chase Smith began that speech:
Remember, this is Margaret Chase Smith. These are her words, 75 years ago.
She continued:
Later in the speech, here is one of her conclusions:
I think that is very important, Mr. President.
She said:
Senator Smith's speech had plenty of criticism for the Democratic administration at the time, but the real focus of her urgent plea to her colleagues was the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom she never mentioned by name in the speech, by the way. But Joseph McCarthy had embarked upon an anticommunist crusade in a manner that threatened the principles of free speech and the rule of law embedded in our values as a nation and in our Constitution. In other words, it wasn't McCarthy's anticommunism she objected to; it was the manner in which he carried it out.
I fear that we are at a similar moment in history. While today's serious national condition is not involving the actions of one of our colleagues, it does involve those of the President of the United States.
Echoing Senator Smith, today's crisis should not be viewed as a partisan issue. This is not about Democrats or Republicans or immigration or tax policy or even the next set of elections. Today's crisis threatens the idea of America and the system of government that has sustained us for more than two centuries.
Again, this is not about the President's agenda, although, yes, I do disagree with most of it; it is about the manner in which he is pursuing it, which includes ignoring the Constitution and the rule of law. And it is this roughshod nonprocess that endangers all of us--all of us--his detractors and his supporters alike.
What is at stake is simple and, in fact, was the driving force behind the basic design of our Constitution: the grave danger to any society of a concentration of power in one set of hands--the concentration of power in one set of hands.
The paradox at the heart of the structure of any democratic government is that power is given to the government to protect and serve the people, but at the same time, the people must be protected from that same power being used against them.
Madison put it clearly in the 51st Federalist:
Madison said--
And, of course, it would now be men and women over men and women--
He was talking about elections--
Precautions that go beyond regular elections. The most important of these ``auxiliary precautions'' is the explicit separation of powers between the Executive and the legislature, which is at the heart--at the heart, at the very heart--of our Constitution, better known as checks and balances.
My fear is this phrase ``checks and balances'' has become such a cliche that we don't recognize it as the fundamental premise of our constitutional system.
There is nothing new, by the way, about the recognition of the danger of concentrated power. The ancient Romans summed it up with a simple question: ``Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes?'' or ``Who will guard the guardians?'' How do we control the government that we have created to keep it from abusing the people?
Another way to define this danger is a universal principle of human nature: All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It is important to emphasize that the danger I am describing here isn't based upon institutional jealousy of Senators worrying about the President taking some of their power or a loss of the prerogatives of the Senate or the politics of Democrats and Republicans. It is about the violation of the very deliberate division of power between the legislature and the Executive, which is, as I said, at the heart of our Constitution. It is there for a reason: to see that the power is not concentrated in one set of hands. And this is the most important bulwark between our citizens and--let's call it what it is--tyranny.
Again, Madison warned us in no uncertain terms, this time in the 47th Federalist:
Madison's word, ``tyranny.''
Later in the same essay:
``There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person,'' and yet this ``accumulation of all powers''--the term that Madison used--is exactly what is happening today before our very eyes. Although many in this body, unfortunately, seem determined to ignore it, deliberately ignore it, the evidence is everywhere: from the elimination of congressionally established Agencies to the withholding of appropriated funds--an appropriations bill, Mr. President, by the way, is a law; it is not a suggestion to the Executive about where he or she should spend money, it is a law to be observed--to issuing Executive orders purporting to be law in place of legislation, to sidestepping, if not ignoring, court orders.
This President is engaged in the most direct assault on the Constitution in our history, and we in this body, at least thus far, are inert and therefore complicit.
It is worth pausing for a moment to look at the terms of article II, which outlines the powers and responsibilities of the President-- article II of the Constitution. At the outset, we have to remember that the Declaration of Independence was directed specifically at the depredations of the British King, and later, the Framers had recently come through a brutal 8-year war against that same King. It is clear that a monarchy was exactly what the Framers were trying to avoid in the structure of the new government, and it explains the limited powers granted to the President in article II.
So let's look at article II. In light of this antimonarchical intent, article II only gives the President 1\1/2\ unilateral powers. The unilateral power is the power to issue pardons. That is something the President can do without any check or balance. The half unilateral power is the role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in wartime, but even that is constrained by the reservation to the Congress of the power to declare war.
With these two exceptions, all the other powers in article II granted to the President--appointment of judges, Federal officials; making treaties with other countries; vetoing legislation--are all bounded in some respect by the requirement of congressional assent.
I want to repeat, article II is not a broad grant of authority to the President. It is anything but. It is a restriction on the powers of the President.
And here, I think, is the most important phrase in article II. The principal responsibility of the President is spelled out in the last paragraph of article II: The Chief Executive ``shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed''--``shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'' It doesn't say only the laws he agrees with or that he has any power whatsoever to make laws. His job is to execute the laws passed by Congress without exception--a responsibility this President is spectacularly failing to meet,
While this is the most serious breach of our constitutional order, the administration has also taken a series of apparently unconnected actions which, taken together, spell out our rapid path toward one-man rule--or tyranny, as Madison would say.
In the style of the Declaration of Independence, here is a partial list--only, where the Declaration says ``he,'' it is referring to the King of England. ``He'' as used in my list refers to the President.
Here is the list:
He has enabled the random firing of personnel throughout the government without regard to the importance of the job or the qualifications of the individual, which has severely compromised the ability of the affected Agencies to carry out the purposes Congress intended--the very antithesis of faithfully executing the laws.
He has enabled the dismemberment of Agencies providing essential services to the American people, most particularly in the Social Security and Veterans' Administrations, by people who literally don't know what they are doing--again, in violation of his responsibility to faithfully execute the laws creating those Agencies and programs.
He has systematically--early in the administration--fired independent inspectors general throughout the government whose job it is to find fraud, corruption, and malfeasance in Agency programs, in clear violation of Federal law and apparent intent to govern without constraints.
He has used the power of the government to threaten, intimidate, and extort private law firms for the supposed offense of representing clients he doesn't like--an exercise of governmental power nowhere found in the Constitution and a clear violation of the very structure of our legal system.
He has used the power of the government to threaten and intimidate former government officials based upon actions and statements with which he disagrees, thereby sending the message throughout the government that pleasing the President is more important than telling the truth.
Again, he has no such power over the Constitution, and the result of this abuse of his office is the opposite--the opposite--of faithfully executing the laws.
He has openly threatened media platforms, particularly television networks, with license revocation or other punishment for airing content he doesn't like, in clear violation of the First Amendment, which is one of the fundamental bulwarks of our freedoms. For a President of the United States to threaten a media firm with revocation of their license or other kinds of punishment because they publish content he doesn't like--that is the antithesis of the First Amendment.
By the way, the compromise of the free press has been a sign of incipient despotism throughout history and right up to today.
He has used the power of the government, including the impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds and threatening tax-exempt status, to threaten and intimidate private universities in order to force them to adopt policies to his liking--again, a power found nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in article II.
He has enabled a national program of arrest and deportation of individuals in this country with no due process whatsoever. And even when it is admitted that at least one such individual was sent to a foreign prison by mistake, he has refused to make any effort to return that person to his home, despite court orders--including a unanimous order of the United States Supreme Court--of him to do so.
This entire process is a violation of the 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Amendments. It certainly is not consistent with his obligation to faithfully execute the laws.
He has openly suggested the possibility of sending U.S. citizens to a foreign prison for undefined crimes, thereby placing them outside the reach of our criminal justice system, including the constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel.
He has abused the limited powers delegated to him by Congress in connection with tariffs and trade by declaring emergencies where none exist and singlehandedly plunging our economy into chaos and risk of inflation, unemployment, and possible recession--a perfect example of the dangers of one-man rule.
The Constitution specifically delegates to the Congress, in article I, section 8 clause 3, the power over trade and commerce among nations. Congress delegated that power to the President under certain limited circumstances, that of an emergency, not that the President can define an emergency however he wants.
I live in Maine. We are on the border of Canada. There is no emergency that justifies the imposition of tariffs with Canada. If he wants to propose a tariff against Canada or Britain or any other country, he should come here, because that is our responsibility. We should debate it; and chances are, we can come up with a more rational solution than the one that was presented to the country several weeks ago.
He has also attempted to cut off funds to a single State, my own, because he took personal umbrage at our Governor's refusal to bend to his policy preference, which was inconsistent with the law of our State.
Our Governor's position was not on the issue of trans athletes. It was on the issue of State and local control, which is the basic bedrock of our representative form of government.
Tellingly, during that exchange, he said something really amazing and revealing. The President of the United States said:
That is more fitting to a king than to a President. ``We are the law.''
By the way, an Executive order is not law, despite what this President seems to think. An Executive order is not law. The Constitution does not give the power to the President to unilaterally decide what the law is. Again, his job is to faithfully execute the laws that are made here in this building.
This ``we are the law'' comment is a clear statement of an intent to govern as a sovereign without regard to the Constitution or the rule of law.
In a field that I have some specific knowledge of, he has compromised national security by dismantling those Agencies charged with defending our Nation against the clear and present danger of cyber attacks and firing many of the individuals--with no stated cause--who are best suited to mount that defense.
He has further compromised national security by alienating our allies with his unlawful and indiscriminate imposition of tariffs, which has severely undermined confidence in our country, again, acting far in excess of the limited power over trade delegated by Congress.
I have served for the past 12 years on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, and I have come to realize that our asymmetric advantage in the world is allies. China has customers. We have allies. To alienate our allies without good reason, with no emergency, with no consultation with Congress, with no consultation with the Foreign Affairs Committee, with no consultation with much of anybody, that I can tell, is a serious compromise of our national security, both in terms of our intelligence capability but also who will come to our aid in a time of trouble.
This is not a complete list. It does, though, present a disturbing and dangerous pattern. This President is attempting to govern as a monarch, unbound by constitutional restraint or by law, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution or the rule of law.
Again, this isn't about his policies, whether they be mass deportation or trans athletes, trade and tariffs, or the appropriate levels of staffing of the Federal Government. Reasonable people can discuss those, work out policies, and find what the law should be. It is not unilaterally in the hands of the President to make those decisions.
No. The issue before us we can no longer avoid is the manner in which he is pursuing those policies, which violates both the spirit and expressed terms of our founding document.
Again, this isn't about observing the boundaries prescribed by the Constitution just to check the appropriate boxes. This is about preserving boundaries to protect ourselves and our people from the abuse that inevitably--inevitably--flows from the unbridled concentration of power.
To those who like the policies of the President and are, therefore, willing to ignore the constitutional means of effectuating them, I and history can only say: Watch out. Today, the target may be the undocumented or Federal workers, but tomorrow, perhaps, under a different king President, could be you.
Once this power is concentrated into one set of hands, it is going to be very difficult to get it back, and it could turn that power against anybody who displeases the monarch.
So what can we do? What are the guardrails? How can we buttress? It is important. The first guardrail is the Congress itself, the part of our government actually empowered to define policy, appropriate funds, oversee the actions of the Executive. But, unfortunately, the majority in Congress has thus far wholly abdicated these fundamental responsibilities and thus far shown little inclination to even recognize the danger, let alone take action to confront it.
We could reclaim our power, however, by pulling back the trade authority--there is a bill to do that--instituting vigorous oversight of the activities of DOGE to determine to what extent their actions compromise the congressional intent, or holding the President's nominees and his prized tax bill until he seizes his attempts to make policy unilaterally, including compounding Congressionally authorized and appropriated funds.
You know, do our job. That is the simple solution. Do our job.
The second guardrail is the courts, which are generally holding up their end of the constitutional bargain. But they read the press just as we do, and they need to know we are ready to reassume our powers and responsibilities. As easy as it may be for us to rely entirely on the courts to save us, that is a copout. Reclaiming power must be a joint project.
The final guardrail is the people, who more and more are speaking up in rallies, in correspondence with us, in town meetings, and in conversations at the grocery store. But their only real power, the midterm elections, don't happen for 19 months. And in the meantime, the burden falls back on us.
I don't think we have 19 months, given what has happened in the first 100 days. We need to act now before the awesome power of the United States Government is consolidated into one set of hands. When that happens, there may be no going back.
No. We here in this body can't escape the responsibility of our oath. Each of us swore, mind you, to ``support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic'' and that we would ``bear true faith and allegiance to the same.'' The ``same'' being the Constitution.
Clearly, the Framers knew that someday, there might be domestic enemies of the Constitution and made it our literally sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from those domestic enemies.
I should mention that Joe McCarthy primaried Senator Margaret Chase Smith a few years after her speech as punishment to standing up to him, but to no avail. She crushed her opposition and won going away.
With thanks to Margaret Chase Smith for her example and inspiration, this is my ``Declaration of Conscience.''
I don't relish this moment, but I feel I have no choice but to call out the clear implications and dangers of what is happening--what is happening day by day--before our eyes.
To do otherwise, to keep silent, would be to compromise what I believed about our country since my first civics class in high school and at about the same time when I watched my dad risk his career to fight for justice and the rule of law.
So here I stand.
Abraham Lincoln came to the Congress in the midst of the Civil War at a time when our forebearers--like us--were reluctant to face the responsibilities that had been thrust upon them. At that critical moment, this is what Abraham Lincoln said:
``The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.''
Mr. President, I deeply hope that in the midst of our fiery trial, we will choose honor and the Constitution.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, my colleagues, you are going to hear a lot of stories about the first 100 days of President Trump's second Presidency, and, indeed, there are a lot of stories.
There is a story of incompetence. We are dealing with multiple measles outbreaks all across the country.
There is a story about abdicating our responsibility to lead around the world. Vladimir Putin is laughing at us as Trump goes about the business of handing Ukraine to a brutal Kremlin dictator.
There is a story of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle class, through massive cuts to Medicaid, to the very, very wealthy, who are asking for another massive tax cut.
But I would argue that the most important story to tell is a story of corruption--a story of mind-blowing, massive, scalable corruption. That story is important because we are watching the theft of taxpayer money by the decision of the Republican Party to look the other way as Donald Trump essentially monetizes, at scale, the White House and the powers given to him by the Constitution and the American people in order to enrich himself and his friends.
And if we don't tell this story and if we don't mount a national, bipartisan, apolitical resistance to this thievery, to this corruption, and it becomes normalized as just a part of doing business in America, a normal facet of residence in the White House, then shame on us because our democracy will not survive this level of corruption, grift, and graft.
So I am going to try to tell the story really quickly. I have got two charts, and this is hard to read. These words are really small because, you know, over the course of 100 days, there are 40, 50, 60 different individual acts of precedent-breaking corruption.
And that is intentional, because what President Trump is trying to do is engage in so much public corruption that you just become normalized to it, that you stop paying attention to the corruption because is it-- can it be--corruption if it is just playing out in public? He is trying to make you think that this stuff happens all the time behind the scenes, and, now, all that is different is that you are seeing it publicly.
But that is not true. This is not, actually, how government works, and I refuse to accept that, just because the corruption is happening in public, in front of the cameras for everybody to see, we should accept it.
OK, I am going to try to do this: I am going to try to do this as quickly as possible. I am just going to highlight for you maybe the 40 most egregious examples of corruption in the first 100 days, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, on January 6--this is before Trump is even sworn in--Amazon, which has a ton of business before the incoming Trump White House, pays $40 million to the Trump family to license a documentary, a series, about Melania Trump--just a cash payment from a company that has huge interests before the incoming White House to the Trump family.
On January 17, a few days before Trump is sworn in, maybe the most corrupt act in the history of the White House: This is the creation of the Trump meme coin. This is just a backdoor way for anybody with business before the Trump administration to send him millions of dollars in total secret.
Trump doesn't disclose who buys the coin. He launders his income from the coin through an unregulated Chinese exchange. He promotes the coin on his social media feeds.
In the first minute of trading, one buyer--and what we know is, this was likely a Chinese individual--purchases 6 million coins, sending the price through the roof and immediately making a ton of money for Trump, who makes money off of every transaction. Trump knows who this person is, no doubt, but American citizens do not.
All right, on January 20, he is now sworn in, and he fulfills a campaign promise to the oil and gas industry. There is a report from the campaign
This is not me alleging this. This is an open report.
The oil and gas industry says: We will give you a billion dollars in campaign contributions if you do what we want when you are sworn in.
And the day he is sworn in, Trump issues an Executive order gutting environmental rules so that the oil and gas industry can start making bigger amounts of money.
On January 25, Trump eliminates the inspectors general, the ethics officials in government, and whistleblower offices. It is a late-night purge; so you know it is fishy. On January 25, 17 inspectors general get fired, clearing the way for the President to engage in even more corruption--because that is what the inspectors general do: They sit in these Agencies, and they look for corruption.
Now, the inspectors general are gone. They are just gone. But that is not good enough because, on the same day, Trump fires the head of the Office of Special Counsel. Why would you do that? Well, that Office is an investigative and prosecutorial Office that works to end government and political corruption and protects government employees who become whistleblowers. That office is gone now, along with all of the whistleblowers.
Two days later, Trump illegally fires NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox. This effectively shuts down--illegally--the NLRB for a period of time. Why is that important? Because the guys who are standing behind Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are being investigated at the moment by the NLRB for massive workplace violations. Now the NLRB is shut down--a big gift to the people who financed Donald Trump's inauguration and stood behind him to give him political endorsement and cover on his Inauguration Day.
On January 31, a trend begins. Enforcement actions are paused against Trump loyalists.
This is Representative Andy Ogles from Tennessee. He was being investigated for illegal or potentially illegal loans made to his 2022 campaign. But right after Representative Ogles introduces a bill to amend the Constitution to allow Trump to serve for a third term, what happens? Trump makes the investigation go away. As you will see, Trump's justice system will often look the other way if you cheat or steal but you are a friend of Donald Trump's.
At the same time, another of Trump's friends, his IRS nominee, Billy Long, gets his donors--almost all of them have direct interest before the IRS--to pay off his six-figure campaign debt. It is a fabulously corrupt thing to do, but it is just all normal now. So when Trump is showing you the way, then the folks who work for him follow suit.
All right. We will jump to February now, February 4. We are into, what, week 2 of the Trump White House. Trump hauls the PGA and the Saudi Government into the White House to broker an agreement between the two rival golf leagues so that Trump can make more money hosting golf tournaments. He is in business with one of these entities, the Saudi-owned LIV league.
In a normal world, the President of the United States wouldn't be in business with any foreign government, but the President is. And not only is that OK, but it is also apparently OK for him to bring the golf league that he is in business with into the White House and pressure the other golf league, the rival golf league, to cut a deal. And guess what happens? The PGA, which had long said they were not going to host events at Trump's courses, after being hauled into the White House, looking the President of the United States in the eye--somebody they clearly have to do business with--they announce that they are going to start allowing their tournaments to be held at Trump courses--big benefit to Donald Trump's personal bottom line.
On February 6, 2 days later, Trump ends the criminal enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Do you know what this is? You should. It requires people who are being paid by foreign governments to register. It is no longer going to be enforced. So now members of the Trump administration can get backdoor payments from foreign governments, and nobody is going to enforce the law.
This isn't theoretical. There were people who got arrested for doing this exact same thing--getting paid by foreign governments while working for the Trump administration in term one. He wants to make sure it is not a problem in term two, so he pauses enforcement of the actual act.
Four days later, Trump eliminates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is just a magnificent present to all of his billionaire enablers because this is the Agency that stops big businesses--banks, other financial firms--from ripping off consumers, and now it is just shut down.
The same day, DOJ drops charges against Eric Adams in a mind- blowingly public and brazen quid pro quo. Adams says he will pledge loyalty to Trump. He is going to support Trump's political priorities in New York City. Trump drops the corruption charges against Adams.
Just like the Ogles case, the door is now wide open to engage in corruption or criminality as long as you support Donald Trump.
The thing that makes this one so egregious is that Adams and the White House go on TV to announce the corrupt deal, and they don't hide it. They just say that Adams is now supporting Donald Trump, and we are now going to drop the charges against him. And everybody gets the message: There is a lot of stuff I can get away with as a corrupt official as long as I am in bed politically with Donald Trump.
On the same day, February 10, DOJ pauses enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is the law that stops American companies from bribing foreign governments in order to get business. On February 10, Trump suspends enforcement of an antibribery statute, paving the way for his friends in corporate America to start bribing foreign governments again.
Two days later, the State Department forecasts that they are going to dramatically upscale the amount of money that they are going to send to Tesla. This is the first time that Elon Musk shows up in this story. By February 12, Elon Musk is pretty well embedded in the White House, and, guess what, the State Department is now going to spend $400 million for armored Teslas--its largest expected contract in the upcoming year.
On February 12, the same day, Musk infiltrates the Department of Labor and OSHA, giving him exclusive, secret access to labor law violation data against him and his competitors. It is unethical and corrupt, but this stuff is happening every single day.
A few days later, on February 15 and 16, Musk now starts really testing the limits of what his boss will let him get away with. He fires a specific set of regulators at the FDA that are reviewing one of his medical products, Neuralink. The message is clear: You got to do right by my applications or you risk getting the ax too.
Three days later, on February 19, Trump's new U.S. attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, starts to use his government power to harass Trump's critics. He launches something called Operation Whirlwind, and he is pretty unapologetic about the fact that this is going to be an enforcement operation against anybody who just seeks to get in the way of DOGE. He doesn't say it is going after people who are acting illegally; he says anybody who tries to stop or protest or harass DOGE's work is now going to be the subject of Operation Whirlwind. He starts trolling critics of DOGE online. The U.S. attorney for DC is now just trolling DOGE critics online, obviously threatening criminal enforcement.
See what is happening here? We are 30 days into the administration, and everybody in Trump's world, including the supposedly independent U.S. attorneys, are getting the message that it is now part of your job if you work for Trump to use your government powers to either enrich yourself or Trump or to help Trump politically.
On February 21, 2 days later, the FCC drops a major investigation into a company called Robinhood. Why does this matter? You guessed it-- this firm donated $2 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Thirty days later, the SEC drops an investigation into that firm. Put a pin in that because you are going to hear stories like it over and over again.
Throughout February, we watched the rich guys that are surrounding Trump come up with new ways to monetize their positions.
Kash Patel is a perfect example. He is the nominee to head the FBI-- maybe the most important independent Bureau of the Federal Government-- and while he is going through that process, he is selling merchandise online, ranging from T-shirts to playing cards, with the proceeds supposedly going to whistleblowers' education and defamation cases.
On February 26, news breaks that the FAA is considering giving a $2.4 billion contract to Elon Musk's Starlink. But it is not like a regular contract that is up for bid; it is a contract that was already awarded to one of Musk's competitors, Verizon, and word leaks that the White House is thinking of just ripping the contract away from Verizon because Verizon is not a political supporter of Donald Trump in the way that Elon Musk is, and just giving it to Elon Musk.
Now, that doesn't happen as reported. The contract has not been canceled yet. But there are regular reports of the administration still relentlessly attacking Verizon in a clear attempt to try to undermine their contract.
On February 27, the next day, Trump drops a lawsuit against Capital One. Why does this matter? Capitol One donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.
It is now just kind of automatic--you donate a big amount of money to Trump's inauguration, and you can ask him for something.
We are not done. That same day, the FCC drops a lawsuit against Coinbase. You have the story now. Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. They are now told that it is OK to keep cheating consumers.
We are not done. On February 28, a day later, the DOJ announces that it would drop a complaint against SpaceX, Elon Musk's SpaceX, for labor discrimination.
Elon is like: Wait a second. All of these other big donors to your inauguration are getting out of jail free. I want my get-out-of-jail- free card as well.
He gets it from DOJ.
We are now into March. On March 1, a report breaks--this is maybe second to Coinbase, the most stunning act of corruption--on March 1, word breaks that Trump is selling meetings at Mar-a-Lago. On at least one occasion, Trump has charged guests $1 million to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago.
According to the same report, business leaders can secure a one-on- one meeting with the President of the United States for a $5 million payment to Donald Trump. If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for like $200, you would be arrested. You would be run out of town. But not Donald Trump. He is selling meetings for $5 million, according to this report, and because the corruption in this White House is daily and normal, he gets away with it.
On March 2, Trump launches the crypto reserve fund. This is going to involve government-taxpayer dollars purchasing and holding a variety of digital assets in a strategic reserve fund--a move that definitely inflates and protects Trump's investment portfolio, by now, you understand, very heavily dependent on crypto assets.
Now, this normally wouldn't be a problem because normally when somebody takes a high position like President or Governor or mayor, they divest from their own personal assets or they put it all in a blind fund. Trump does none of that. He is controlling his own assets and his family is controlling their own assets while he makes policy that benefits himself and his family financially.
On March 3, a really curious thing: DOJ intervenes in an obscure but open-and-shut 2020 Colorado elections case. This is the case of Tina Peters, who tampered with voting machines on Trump's behalf in Mesa County, CO. She was convicted by a jury of her peers, open and shut, but because Peters is a MAGA loyalist, now DOJ, on March 3, says it is going to step in and review the case because there are concerns about how it was prosecuted. This is just President Trump again clearly shielding those that violated the law to help him from consequences.
Same thing, different day--no, not even a different day. This is actually still March 3. Yuga Labs, a blockchain company, donated $100,000 to Trump's inauguration fund. They now get in line. They get what everybody else is getting. The SEC closes an ongoing investigation into the company.
On March 4, DOGE lays off thousands of IRS employees. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but it certainly helps Trump's Mar-a-Lago friends because the IRS now cannot enforce the law against the big giant tax cheats in the ways that it could have when it had those personnel on the books. Mar-a-Lago is celebrating.
On March 4, the same day, word breaks that the Commerce Department is considering changes to a very specific rural broadband program and who is eligible. Why? Because Elon Musk wants to dominate that program. Under the program's original rules, Starlink was kind of capped at $4.1 billion. This curious change now will allow Elon Musk's company Starlink to receive between $10 billion and $20 billion from the rural broadband program.
This is like a broken record, but 6 days later, the CFPB, which is basically shut down but exists in name only, drops a lawsuit against Bank of America and J.P. Morgan. Bank of America donated $500,000 to the inauguration, and J.P. Morgan donated $1 million to the inauguration.
On March 11, a day later, Trump and Musk hold this now very well- known advertisement for Tesla on the White House lawn. This is just taxpayer dollars used to support the personnel at the White House and the White House being used to sell cars for Elon Musk. And the message, again, is pretty simple here: If you are loyal to me and you pay any kind of price for your loyalty to me, I will use government resources to help get you out of trouble, even including free advertising.
On March 19--we are 8 days later--the GEO Group donated $500,000 to Trump's inauguration fund. This is a private prison company. The NLRB drops its investigation into this company.
I mean, it is really getting disgusting at this point. I mean, I don't know that there is anybody left that made a major donation to the inauguration fund that has not gotten their favor from Donald Trump.
On March 24, the Treasury Department guts something called the Corporate Transparency Act. This is the regulation that requires businesses to reveal their true owners to the government. These new rules now make it easier for billionaires to hide money, to avoid taxes, to engage in corruption--less accountability for corporations.
On March 25, a day later, the SEC reduces from $125 million to $50 million an existing fine. So this has already been litigated. This company, Ripple, a blockchain-based digital payment company, has been fined. Trump comes in and reduces the fine from $125 million to $50 million.
You know the story by now. These guys made a big investment in the inauguration. Most of these companies that got a ``get out of jail free'' or had their investigations terminated were giving $500,000 or $1 million. Ripple made sure they got it right. They made a $5 million donation to Trump's inaugural fund, and they got their fine reduced by $75 million.
On March 28, Trump pardons the founder of Nikola autos, one of his campaign megadonors. Again, this is a pardon for one of his major campaign contributors. When asked about the pardon, Trump said: They say the thing they did was wrong, but he was one of the first people who supported me for President.
He just tells you what he did. He said: Yes, they said what he did was wrong. He did something that was probably pretty wrong, but he supported me for President. So I am giving him a pardon.
I am not saying there hasn't been a lot of really bad stuff that has happened in the pardon program under Democratic and Republican Presidents, but let's just name it what Donald Trump named it.
April 8--we are into April. Trump issues an Executive order to expand coal mining, part of his downpayment on the promise he made to those oil executives. Shares of the company owned by Joseph Craft, the billionaire coal
On April 9, this really curious timeline of events plays out, which Trump posts on his social media:
A lot of his followers comply. They make investments in the market. There are reports and speculation that many of his inner circle might have done the same thing. A couple of hours later, he announces he is pausing most of his tariffs. The market shoots up. People who followed his directions online make a lot of money, and, potentially, other people who had access to that insider information might have made a lot of money as well.
On April 17, Musk steers billions of taxpayer dollars to something called the Golden Dome. Reuters, on April 17, reports that Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, has emerged as the frontrunner to develop Trump's proposed Golden Dome. This is an ill-defined, technologically unproven defense system. It supposedly has a pricetag of hundreds of billions of dollars--money that now looks as if it will be funneled directly to Elon Musk. At this point, it is head-shaking.
On April 23--now he can do anything he wants. It is like he has just blown the lid off of any expectations about what a President can and cannot do to enrich himself. On April 23, a message appears on the homepage of the website for Trump's meme coin, declaring the top 220 meme coin holders would be invited for an exclusive dinner with Trump, and the top 25 coin holders--these are private investors in Donald Trump's financial empire--would get a ``Special VIP Tour'' of the White House.
After the message went up, the price of Trump's coin jumped by more than 50 percent. In the 2 days following the announcement of the ``Special VIP Tour'' in the ``People's House''--the White House--Trump and his allies made nearly $1 million in trading fees alone. They are just selling access to the White House out in the open.
On April 26, Trump's family--this is just last weekend--announces the launch of a private club called the Executive Branch, a new private club in Washington. The initiation fee is around a half-million dollars. It is advertised as a place where you can hold secret audiences with the Trump administration, as long as you pay Donald Trump's family and their financial backers over $500,000 in membership fees. It has apparently already sold out.
This is not normal. None of this is normal. This is outlandish. This is illegal. This is unconstitutional, brazen corruption, and this is only the first 100 days.
I just detailed 40 instances of mind-blowing corruption in just 40 days, capped off by an attempt to just sell access to the White House to people who put money in the pockets of Donald Trump's personal businesses.
Donald Trump wants to numb this country into believing that this is just how government works, that he is owed this, that every President is owed this--that the government has always been corrupt, and he is just doing it out in the open.
This is not how government works. This has been the story of his first 100 days, but it is our choice as a nation to allow it to be the story of the rest of his term. We need to expose what he is doing. We need to rally everybody, from the left to the right. Nobody in this country--whether you are a hardened conservative or a hardened progressive--should root for the President of the United States to be enriching himself off of this position. We need to rally this Nation against this corruption and bring it to an end because if Donald Trump gets what he wants and we just start allowing our government's leaders to openly steal from us during the first 100 days or for the rest of his term, then, I am telling you, American democracy is not going to survive.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Trump Administration First 100 Days (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, today, President Trump completes the first 100 days of his return to the White House, and it has been nothing short of transformational.
Under President Trump and Vice President Vance's leadership, we are witnessing the rapid implementation of campaign promises that are already reshaping America's policy landscape. When I go home to Wyoming each weekend, people approach me everywhere, from restaurants to the feed store, eager to discuss the positive changes happening in Washington. The overwhelming sentiment is enthusiasm for what President Trump is accomplishing for everyday Americans.
For example, on day one, President Trump restored the dignity of men and women as biologically distinct sexes. It is hard to believe he had to do that, but, indeed, he did. One of the administration's first major actions was signing an Executive order directing Federal Agencies to recognize biological sex in athletic competition.
The left spent the past 4 years gaslighting Americans and making the failed argument that biological males should now be competing in women's sports in the name of fairness. Within a few weeks of taking office, President Trump tackled this issue and made it clear that this administration won't support the left's attack on female athletes. I believe this is the women's rights issue of our time, and I am grateful for President Trump's leadership.
For some people my age, we spent so many years trying to exercise our rights under title IX and other rights to recognize women's rights, only to have them swept under the rug and disregarded by the left, requiring that women not only compete against men but have them in their locker rooms in what were uncomfortable and, in some times, unsafe circumstances. President Trump recognized this and, thankfully, has put that issue to rest for a while.
President Trump is also delivering on his promise to unleash American energy dominance. A few weeks ago, I joined President Trump and some of my colleagues at the White House for his signing of an Executive order that starts to reverse the Biden and Obama administrations' anti-coal agenda. For energy States like Wyoming, the official lifting of the unconstitutional coal moratorium represents a significant economic opportunity for western States.
By removing unnecessary restrictions on energy extraction, the administration has signaled its commitment to blue collar jobs, cheaper energy for American families, and a new era of energy dominance.
Joe Biden and his administration didn't care about the impact their regulations have on working-class people. The Trump administration does care, and they are continuing to take action that will help Americans and our amazing energy communities.
Wyoming exports 12 times more energy than it consumes; and much of that is in the form of hydrocarbons. And each and every year, for years after the Clean Air Act passed, we were producing more energy and producing cleaner air. These things can happen simultaneously. And it is because of Yankee ingenuity and it is because we know how to do things better all the time, we don't have to accept the status quo when it comes to energy dominance.
But there were certain people in the Biden administration that forced something called environmental justice, an absolutely trumped-up, dreamed-up idea that we can't have clean energy
There is such a thing as clean air that can be produced from coal and natural gas, in particular, and I am proud that my State is part of that. I am proud that President Trump recognizes it and that he has taken steps to restore our statutory ability to produce both clean air and abundant hydrocarbon energy simultaneously.
Perhaps the most dramatic turnaround has been at the southern border. Where the Biden administration created chaos, President Trump has restored order--through multiple Executive actions, signing the Laken Riley Act, ending catch-and-release, re-implementing ``Remain in Mexico,'' and more. We have seen border encounters plummet from nearly 380,000 in February and March last year to just 22,000, plus a few, during the same period this year.
The people of Wyoming are grateful to have a President who cares about securing our border and deporting those who are not here legally, especially those from gangs that are causing unsafe communities, horrible crimes perpetuated on the American people--all unnecessarily, if we only followed the laws that were in existence and the statutes that were in existence all along, those laws that President Biden ignored and that President Trump is following and implementing.
For decades, America's leaders have failed our country when it comes to fiscal responsibility, and we in this very Chamber are partly responsible for that. Our $36 trillion national debt represents a real and present threat to America's future.
We all know it is unsustainable. And yet, after COVID, we never went back to pre-COVID spending levels. We have kept spending at post-COVID highs, even though the moneys spent during the COVID years is no longer necessary in our now more growing and robust post-COVID economy.
Most taxpayers don't realize their hard-earned dollars primarily service this massive debt through interest payments rather than funding national defense and essential services. That is why I strongly support President Trump's creation of the Department of Government Efficiency-- DOGE. It was done through a provision in ObamaCare and its subsequent ability to gain efficiencies through efforts that computers can assist us with.
And nobody knows better how to do it than the people who have voluntarily participated through their expertise and ability to identify waste, fraud, and abuse, using the Department of Government Efficiency and their remarkable skills with computers to ferret out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Elon Musk and the DOGE team have already identified a huge number of wasteful programs and abusive expenditures that don't benefit American families. All of us should be proud, in both parties, that the rhetoric that we have used over the years that we are going to pay for things by ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse and then after elected, don't even try to find waste, fraud, and abuse, has finally come to an end.
Elon Musk and his team have found true waste, fraud, and abuse in government and is identifying it so Cabinet Secretaries can deal with it in their respective Agencies. That is exactly the kind of fiscal discipline that we value in Wyoming--that we all should value as Americans.
After years of the Biden administration's unbridled hostility toward digital assets and cryptocurrency, President Trump is fulfilling his promise to lead the most pro-digital asset administration in history. I could not be more proud. We know that we are moving into a digital future, a digital economy. It is something we should embrace. It is something we can include in a new, modern 21st century economy.
It is not something to fear. But it is something that cries for consumer protections, and our incredible ability that we have as Agencies to disclose matters that should be disclosed to investors and to allow innovation where it makes our ability to do business internationally, faster, cheaper, and more responsible. Through the ledgers, the blockchain's incredible ability to send money all over the world fast and inexpensively helps regular, everyday Americans avoid the tremendous friction that is in the banking system that costs taxpayers money and costs taxpayers time and allows us to do business all over the world in a much less expensive and a robust way.
What a blessing to have an administration that sees the future in this way, that understands the innovation that is at our fingertips and that we can use to go forward in a true 21st-century digital economy.
I am particularly pleased with President Trump's support of my strategic Bitcoin reserve initiative, which will address our national debt while securing America's position as the global leader in financial innovation.
As Bitcoin comes into more usage, its use makes the whole system more secure, more robust, and more capable of serving our needs all over the world. We should be the global leader with this fantastic, new, ledger- based asset that is in a digital format that is going to be transformative of the everyday economy and puts the everyday American-- in fact, the everyday worker all over the world--in control of their own money. What a wonderful blessing for hard-working people all over the world to have this great, new technology and to have America lead the way in implementing this wonderful, wonderful innovation.
Here in the Senate, we have confirmed 54 of President Trump's Cabinet and sub-Cabinet nominees. It has required some long hours--many in the middle of the night, much to our consternation. But our work is far from complete.
The Democrats' agenda threatens to impose crushing tax increases on hard-working Wyoming families and our local small businesses. If the tax cuts that were implemented under President Trump's first administration are allowed to expire, it will create the largest tax increase in history at a time when businesses need the innovation that allows our economy to grow. That can come through a robust, fair tax system. This is something that I look forward to assisting my colleagues in this body to implement in a permanent form and using our current standard practices.
Following years of punishing inflation under the Biden administration, our communities and working families cannot shoulder any additional financial strain, and keeping our Tax Code as is and making it permanent is yet another way of implementing advantages for local working economies.
It also just delights me that President Trump identified just real working Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, who are living paycheck to paycheck, and tried to identify ways to tax-advantage their lives--for example, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime hours. These are things for regular, everyday, working people.
Some people allege that President Trump is trying to help his billionaire buddies. I am not seeing that at all. I am seeing a President who really gets the everyday working American and wants to make sure that as they live paycheck to paycheck and try to plan for their families, there is some relief in store for them with regard to his proposals for taxes.
These first 100 days of President Trump's return to office represent just the opening chapter of America's golden era. Already, his administration has made remarkable progress in securing our southern border, revitalizing American energy independence, cutting wasteful government spending, supporting innovative digital asset policies, and restoring America's rightful leadership position globally.
We know even today that as countries are renegotiating their trade policies and tariff policies with us, there is a newfound desire to find a level playing field, parity, and reciprocal trade agreements that allow for some of our products to go into their economies in ways that acknowledge that the United States has been globally at a trade disadvantage and to try to repair some of those long practices where the United States was participating in free trade and other countries were not. It is time to make it all fair trade. I applaud President Trump's desires to do that hopefully soon so we can get some of the turmoil associated with these important changes to our economy behind
I anticipate the next 100 days will bring equally significant achievements, and I feel deeply privileged to work alongside this administration and this President.
I served 14 years in the Wyoming Legislature, all with Democrat Governors. I have served 12 years in the Congress, all with Democrat Presidents. This is the first time in my entire life that I have legislatively served with a President of my own party. It is refreshing, it is delightful, and it is even, on occasion, fun.
I feel so privileged to be here with a Republican President who is delivering meaningful results to the people of Wyoming and our great Nation.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic whip.
Mr. President, the jury is in. At the end of 100 days, the major polling firms across the United States went out and asked the American people: So what do you think? What is your impression of this new President? What is your impression of the MAGA agenda?
The results that came back don't surprise me, but they might surprise some. Overwhelmingly, on every major issue that this administration has taken a position, the American people have said: We don't like it. We are not happy with what is happening in this country today.
After all the promises in the last political campaign about dealing with the cost of living for ordinary Americans, there is little or no progress to be shown for the 100 days of President Trump.
For 100 days, President Trump and his administration--mainly billionaire buddies like Elon Musk--have brought us chaos, wreaked havoc, and sowed division. President Trump has undermined the Constitution and our system of checks and balances and the rule of law. Through it all, I am sad to report that my Republican colleagues have remained silent.
I got a call several weeks ago, before the Easter break, from CEOs of major corporations, some in my State and some not. I had not heard from them before. Why they called me puzzled me a little bit. What it boiled down to was they were desperate for information about the policy decisions here in Washington. What did it mean that this President, Donald Trump, started a trade war and then announced he was going to put it on pause for 90 days? What were they supposed to do in terms of the future of their businesses? Were they to assume that the tariff tax war had begun, that in order to import key elements and parts to their production, they would have to pay tariffs of 10, 20, 30 percent? 100 percent? What did I know about it?
I couldn't answer because I didn't know the answer. I am not sure anyone knew the answer.
Somewhere in President Trump's mind is a theory of tariffs that he believes is going to make America stronger. These business leaders said just the opposite. Because of the uncertainty of these tariffs and the uncertainty of our trade relationships, they were going to hold back. They couldn't risk it. And that is the reality of what we face today.
When it comes to specific cases in this administration, it is hard to explain how we have reached this point.
When Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father who was living legally in the State of Maryland with his family, was sent to a terrorist prison in El Salvador because of what was said in court to be an ``administrative error,'' where was the outrage that this man was treated so unfairly, with no evidence except, perhaps, a tattoo that might be connected with a gang? There was no evidence that took this man out of the United States and put him in a prison in El Salvador.
Our colleague Senator Chris Van Hollen went down to see him and the conditions he is being held in and never came back with a satisfactory answer of why this man was being charged with a crime.
Now, you remember how many times Donald Trump gave speeches at rallies, and he said that we are being overrun by murderers and rapists and terrorists and mentally ill people who came to this country and shouldn't be here, and as a consequence, they were going to change things when he was elected President.
What they changed was to take this Mr. Garcia, living legally in Maryland with his family, and, through an administrative error, threw him into a hopeless prison in El Salvador. Is that what America is all about now? Because he had a surname like ``Garcia,'' we can ignore any reference to due process?
The President went so far as to suggest he would do the same thing to an American citizen. Now, of course, he says things which he later disavows, but it is outrageous to think a President of the United States would suggest that an American citizen, without due process, would be relegated to a terrorist prison in a foreign country. The American people don't care for that much, and neither do I, because it happens to offend this document: the Constitution of the United States.
Can you imagine an immigrant living here under a protected status torn from his home and family for no legally justifiable reason, and then the administration says it was an ``administrative error''?
While the Trump administration continues to avoid facilitating the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia as the Supreme Court has ordered him to do, Republicans have remained silent.
It was about 6 weeks ago. There were several key appointees by the Trump administration to positions in the Department of Justice. They included a Solicitor General and two other Deputy Attorneys General.
During the course of questioning, I asked these individuals a basic question: Do you believe that an executive official can defy a legally held court order? I thought the answer was clear: It is no, and it should be, whatever the President's party may be. Yet they struggled to come up with an answer that suggested maybe, in some cases, it was all right to defy a court order.
We have been through this in America. The case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was an effort to integrate schools across America for the first time--an extremely controversial decision, and several other decisions followed from it. But there was a legal court order for that to happen. In order to move forward, you have to start by obedience to the court order. You can criticize it within the realm of ethics, and you can even appeal it, but you can't ignore it. Yet these officials headed for the Trump Department of Justice wanted to equivocate on the answer.
Who came to my rescue on my argument? A Republican Senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, who came in and addressed the three nominees and said: Let me make it clear to you--I paraphrase him I think accurately--your options with a legal court order are to be critical within the bounds of ethics and to appeal the decision if you disagree with it, but you have to obey that order or resign your official position.
That was as clear an explanation as I have ever heard. But under the Trump administration, they believe they are above the law. Some do.
Or take Donald Trump's ill-conceived, mindless tariff tax war, which I mentioned earlier. Global markets plunged when he came out with his proposals in the beginning of April. It wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth from the stock market and will cause Americans to suffer from higher prices and smaller export markets.
The advice which many people are giving to those who are worried about their IRAs and 401(k)s is: Don't look at it. Don't look at the balance. You are going to be too depressed when you see it.
And it is because of the chaos in the Trump White House when it comes to our trade policy and economics. While their constituents saw their retirement funds drain and grocery bills skyrocket, sadly, my Republican colleagues remained silent.
Rinse and repeat the cycle. Donald Trump threatens to withhold Federal funds from higher education institutions to coerce them to give up their constitutional rights. It is hard to imagine--we are talking about modern America--that a President of the United States who is unhappy with what is being taught at a college or a university threatens to remove all of their Federal funding.
For God's sake, this is a democracy. Freedom of speech is part of what we
The Secretary of Defense violates national security protocol and shares classified war plans in a Signal chat that mistakenly includes a journalist listening to the conversation. You would think that at least one hard-line Republican conservative, some hawk in their ranks, would stand up and say: That is wrong, regardless of who the President may be. But they didn't. The Republicans remain silent.
Unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE brothers gut the Federal Government, leading to cuts to lifesaving medical research, Americans unable to get their Social Security benefits, and threats to Medicaid. What was the response from the Republican side to these outrageous developments under the Trump administration? Silence.
When our Nation's Founders began the lofty task of building our democracy, they created a system of checks and balances to ensure a stable government and prevent the abuse of power.
In 1788, James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51:
But it seems the ambition of the Republican-controlled legislative branch is all but absent as Donald Trump's government goes out of control. Never in our Nation's history has a coequal branch of government so willfully rolled over and ceded their power. It is, in fact, the silence of the lambs.
The President is testing--and violating--the bounds of our Constitution, amassing power for himself as the economy tanks, violating the rights of Americans, and destroying our image abroad. My congressional Republican colleagues have the power to join us in a bipartisan effort to stop it.
Has it ever happened in history? It did, very graphically, in history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was upset with the Supreme Court and its rulings on New Deal programs. He went through a reelection cycle and was reelected by a large margin. He then came here to Washington and said: My first order of business is to increase the number of men-- all men then--serving on the Supreme Court so that I can finally get the rulings that I am looking for on my key elements of the New Deal.
What was the reaction of the Democratic Congress to the Democratic President, Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted to pack the Court? The reaction was fierce and it was bipartisan in opposition to FDR and he had to drop the plan. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress realized that if a President can control the composition of the Supreme Court and its rulings, that we have lost a valuable part of the protection of our Constitution.
My congressional Republicans have the power to join us in a historic stand on so many areas that this President has violated. They have majorities in both Chambers of Congress, and in private moments many of them express outrage and horror at Trump's dangerous abandonment of law, norms, and the will of the American people. But as their constituents suffer, out of fear of retaliation, Republicans remain silent.
When we are elected Members of Congress, we swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any politician or any President. It is time both parties remembered that and lived accordingly. So I am coming to the floor regularly to highlight the President's latest outrage and the GOP's inevitable silence in the face of it. Until they start using the voices they were elected to raise, we are going to continue to have a pending constitutional crisis in this country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, I totally support the comments of the minority whip.
It is 100 days, and it is time to assess. Whatever you may say about President Trump and the stated goals, there is an obligation to act functionally to achieve those goals. Stating you want an outcome is a long way from implementing a plan and executing a plan to achieve it. And there is no plan. There is absolutely no plan.
Let's talk first about DOGE. DOGE is about, supposedly, getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, there is not a single Member of this Congress who is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you are going to do that, you look at a Department: What is its goal? How is it achieving it? Where is it coming up short? You do an assessment, and you do a plan.
What DOGE did was essentially get the personnel list and then send out emails to every fifth or sixth person saying: You are fired because you did a lousy job.
So it is not at all on the level. It is not at all on the level. And as a result, the real goal becomes revealed. It is not to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. It is, say, to eliminate USAID. It is to eliminate the Department of Education. It is to eliminate the Social Security response team. That is what is going on.
And the challenge for us--and this is bipartisan--is whether we, as an independent branch of government, want to look at what is before our very eyes and address it or simply ignore it.
Let's take the other so-called plan that is going to make us rich, more revenue than we can ever deal with. And that, of course, is the tariffs. The tariffs are going to be seen by historians as the absolute worst economic blunder in the last 100 years.
Whether you are a farmer in Vermont or in Utah or in the Dakotas, these tariffs are hammering you. Most of our farmers in the northern part of the country, we import our fertilizer and we import, in many cases, grain to feed our animals from Canada. This tariff is going to hammer farmers who are already contending with what farmers every year have to contend with: very tight margins, the will of the weather. This is having a real impact on them.
In Vermont, we had roundtables with people from various industries and asked: How are these tariffs going to affect you?
No. 1, what tariffs? What are they today? Supposedly they were 25 percent yesterday. Then they are suspended. Then they are back on. They apply to this part but not that part. No possibility of anybody making a plan in order to run their business.
But across the board--and, by the way, these are folks who came in and are affected by the tariffs. They are not Republicans or Democrats or Independents; they are really folks just trying to make a living. And they may have their political preferences, but what they are talking about is the real-world impact of these crackpot tariffs that are on again and off again with the President.
But some of the folks who spoke: Small business owner Jason Levinthal, founder of J Skis, said:
Something the administration won't acknowledge itself.
Mimi Buttenheim, President of Mad River Distillers:
Jen Kimmich, cofounder of The Alchemist Brewery:
John Lacy, CEO of Burton Snowboards, one of the global enterprises founded in Vermont by Jake Burton and Donna Carpenter:
It is a fair question, and it is a question that the administration, President Trump, feels he has no obligation to answer.
So this goes on and on. You have got the economic issues, the tariffs. You have the attack on the institutions. USAID is a good example, and it is a vulnerable target because there is a lot of misinformation about USAID. A lot of folks think it is about 25 percent of our budget. And I see we have the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee here who knows this better than anyone else. It is like 1 percent of our budget.
It creates, first of all, the alleviation of enormous suffering among many people who are absolutely starving,
That was just shut down, literally. Notices went out: You are fired. Notices went out: Your program is terminated. Notices went out: Turn the ship around and bring the food back.
And the impact of this on these USAID workers who have dedicated their lives to being a representative of our country, doing something beneficial in other countries? They just got the termination notice that they haven't been doing a good job. Obviously, not on the level.
But when I think about the cruelty of the way in which this was done; that in those warehouses where food is stored, the local population who is hired and paid to take the food from the warehouse and deliver it to where those starving children needed the food were fired. And we literally have food rotting in warehouses rather than nourishing families' children.
The same is true with medicine. We won't deliver it. It is over there. It is where it is needed. It can be delivered. But the way in which the Trump administration, with Mr. Musk, is proceeding is to literally take that food away and take that medicine away rather than deliver it. So that is not at all on the level.
There is not, here, an effort to deal with waste, fraud, and abuse. There is an effort here, essentially, to destroy these institutions that have served this country. And I just want to state very clearly that those of us who are appalled by this conduct are all in favor of looking at every program, from SNAP to the Pentagon: How can we do it better? How can we get more for less? How can we get the most out of the folks who are serving in those organizations? But that is not what is going on.
Then there is the next step: the overreach of power; a lawless, in my view--absolutely lawless--abuse of Executive authority. You know, what business is it of Donald Trump what the hiring practices are of an individual private corporation or firm? It is the business to enforce the law, but it is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: We will take contracts away. It is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: Since you had somebody who represented the government in a case against Trump or some Trump person or ally, we are going to punish you and not allow you, in fact, into a court building or to get access to the secure information that is necessary to defend somebody who is in court.
This is a complete overreach and extension by the President, essentially to impose his own will--not enforce the law--but to enforce his will as he arbitrarily wishes.
What sense does it make that because of his vendetta about higher education, that instead of addressing those concerns and having discussions, he literally takes away billions of dollars of research that has gone not just to Harvard, our oldest institution, but the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina where you have people who, to our benefit, have dedicated their lives to scientific research; that because the United States Government has provided support for research and development--we have had cures for terrible diseases--but if they don't do what Donald Trump says, he will take away grants that actually have legally been transferred to these academic institutions--destroying research--destroying research and development.
It is this arbitrary use of power beyond enforcing the law but having the Trump vision of what he wants be the law. And this brings me to the point that the Minority Whip was making: You know, this is not just a question for each of us as a Member of the U.S. Senate to decide, When has the Executive overreached? It is about the obligation we have in both parties to uphold the constitutional system of checks and balances.
As many people have said, James Madison made the clear point that absolute power is the biggest threat. And if it is in any single branch, it has the capacity to bring down the entire structure of democracy.
Now why is that important? It is important not just because democracy is a form of government we are taught as young people to revere and to be proud of, that we have this oldest democracy in the world; it is because democracy is the tool by which the citizens in Utah and the citizens in Vermont who may have very different points of view on a whole number of important issues have that right to have a seat at the table to have a discussion about, How do you resolve these differences?
And if we don't stand up for that, it means there is going to be a small circle of well-connected people around President Trump who make all those decisions and make it from the framework of what is best for them as opposed to what is best for all of us. That is the real threat here. That is happening.
You know, the fact that the President won't acknowledge so many failures of just--for beginning the tariff policy, and what we are seeing in this economy that is now revolving around this question of tariffs and on whom will they be imposed--what you are seeing is that if you are Apple computer and you are at the inauguration, you can call up the Treasury Secretary, you can call up the President, and you can point out that these tariffs are going to have an enormously negative impact on Apple.
But if you are a farmer in Vermont, if you are a snowboard manufacturer in Vermont and you don't have Secretary Bessent's telephone number on speed dial or the President's, you don't get to make that call, and you will have to live with that enormous impact on your cost structure and on what you have to charge customers and see your market evaporate.
It is as though the President is transforming the economy we have had that has been based on competition--you succeed if you have the best product and the best service--into an economy that is based on access.
Do you have the Treasury Secretary's telephone number so you can make your case? Do you have the President's number so you can make your case? And who knows what conditions the President imposes on whoever it is he is going to give the benefit of his capacity to make an exception for you or for your business.
That is called corruption. And the worst thing that we can do is to inject, as a material factor in the way the economy works, a corruption that is based on your ability to get special treatment because you have made campaign contributions, because you have made certain other concessions, because you looked the other way. That is what is happening right now.
You have got an administration that, in the name of waste, fraud, and abuse, is destroying institutions. You have got an administration that, based on an assertion that tariffs will make us rich, is causing inflation, causing enormous business uncertainty, and is, ultimately, going to lead us into a recession.
You have got an administration that has now weaponized the Justice Department, the FCC, governmental entities where, yes, they have a very important responsibility to enforce the rules and regulations but where their targets are cherry-picked for political reasons. And that is very damaging to the long-term well-being of our country and our democracy.
It is time for this Congress to make an assessment of our obligation to the citizens we represent. When is enough enough? When has the Executive gone too far? When is it that all of us should heed the pleas of the businesses, the enterprises in each of our States about this chaotic, very destructive tariff policy?
When is it we will say ``no more'' to an Executive pushing his weight around with private law firms, private employers, with our universities, and telling them unless they do it his way, they will pay an enormous price in lost governmental funding or access to things that they need?
Mr. President, in my view, 100 days of giving a lot of rope and a lot of license to the Executive is 100 days too many, but it is not too late for us, as Congress, to stand up for the separation of powers, the balance of powers, and the prerogatives of the United States Senate and the United States Congress.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mr. President, 100 days ago, our Nation was safe and our economy was considered the envy of the world. We had disease surveillance programs that were in place to stop the spread of deadly viruses like Ebola, no matter where they broke out in the world, and the security contracts at detention camps that have been filled with ISIS fighters were still being paid.
And if our Nation was attacked by a foreign enemy or if we were thrown into a global pandemic or even a global economic crisis, our allies had our backs. They had our backs because they knew that in their darkest hour, the United States would stand with them.
Then, unfortunately, the Trump administration took over, and in 100 days, this administration has undone six decades of investments that have made the United States more respected and influential than any other nation.
The administration and the President have raised and lowered and raised and lowered tariffs against some of our closest allies and neighbors, spiking costs for Americans and hurting our manufacturers and the defense industry.
Instead of the promised golden age of America or golden age of prosperity and lower prices, of safety and security, of our enemies bowing to our demands, the resulting chaos has left us weaker and more vulnerable. From global financial markets to New Hampshire supermarkets, consumers and businesses aren't sure what to expect.
They are looking at higher prices, at layoffs, at longer wait times, and at uncertainty, which many businessowners I have talked to tell me it is just as bad as higher tariffs because they don't know what to expect, and they can't plan.
I recently met with a New Hampshire company called New Hampshire Ball Bearings. It is a company that makes bearings for the aerospace industry, and they do a lot of business with our Department of Defense.
They are concerned because once the tariffs were announced, their only domestic steel manufacturer has increased its cost to be equivalent to what out-of-state companies--out-of-country companies are charging.
But worse than that, they said that their lead time for steel that they use for the aerospace industry and for our Department of Defense has gone from 20 weeks to 2\1/2\ years. I mean, think about that. The lead time to get the steel they need to make the ball bearings has gone from 20 weeks--which is a long time in and of itself--but now it is 2\1/2\ years because of the tariffs.
And the administration's attacks against U.S. research and academic institutions, against our international students, have also caused serious damage to our reputation as a global hub for STEM talent, not to mention those students who are graduating from our colleges and universities who we want to attract to stay in the United States because they are the next generation of talent.
The policies of this administration have left us more vulnerable to the spread of deadly diseases like Marburg and Ebola. They have crippled our response to disasters like hurricanes in the Caribbean, as we enter what is expected to be an active hurricane season.
And just today, the Secretary of Defense said he would end the Women, Peace, and Security program at the Department of Defense. Now, he mistakenly said this was a program that was put in place by the Biden administration. That is not true. He didn't even--he wasn't even concerned enough to go back and look at the history.
This is legislation, and it is a law--it is not a rule--it is a law that we passed in 2017 during the first Trump administration. I know because I sponsored it. The House sponsor was our current Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. It had support from our current National Security Adviser, former Congressman Waltz, and it was bipartisan legislation.
It is not some DEI program--some program that is designed to provide women an advantage in the Department of Defense. What it is is a program that gives us a security advantage.
Every combatant commander who has come through my office has highlighted the strategic advantage that this program gives to our U.S. forward deployed forces, and it gives us that advantage because our adversaries don't have this kind of program.
One of the reasons we passed it in the first place is because what we know from the data is that when women are at the table in a negotiation to end conflict, that the negotiations that are agreed to have a better than 30-percent chance of lasting 15 years or longer because women are at the table.
It is an advantage that it gives us because China and Iran and North Korea and Russia don't have that role for women in their military. What Secretary Hegseth's action has done is not only showed his ignorance, but is now putting our military at a disadvantage because of that ignorance.
Now what these kind of actions do is to create opportunities for our adversaries to gain influence. It is not just giving Vladimir Putin the chance to keep stringing along American negotiators, to continue to play President Trump as he is trying to secure a Ukraine peace deal, but across the globe, China is stepping in everywhere the United States is retreating.
After the earthquake in Myanmar, the Chinese Embassy flooded social media with images of Chinese rescue workers responding to crises, instead of the United States because we weren't there at all because the three people we sent to assess the damage to see what we needed to do to help were fired while they were in Myanmar trying to figure out what we can do to help that situation.
So China's image is being bolstered at our expense.
Across Africa and Latin America, Chinese Ambassadors are giving interviews focused on the unreliability of the United States as a partner. They are inviting local officials to all-expense-paid trips to Beijing to discuss further cooperation.
China is now replacing a canceled American program for child nutrition in Cambodia, and Beijing just announced an early childhood project in Rwanda, where the United States recently cut our program.
They are even moving in, picking up the PEPFAR Program that we have walked away from in Africa, after saving millions of lives. These cuts represent a serious strategic error on behalf of the United States because for less than 1 percent, about 1 percent of our annual budget, America has been able to build partnerships around the globe that have reduced the threat of illness and the spread of disease, including here at home, because thanks to these programs around the world, we have nearly eradicated polio, we have cut malaria deaths by half, and we have saved 25 million lives from HIV/AIDS. And these successes strengthen America's reputation on the global stage, they help counter our adversary's influence, and they help us here at home, because it means that diseases like bird flu don't reach America's shores, where they are now. It means that we can track those diseases.
So whether it is through its mismanaged trade war or deliberate weakening of U.S. standing overseas, the administration is facilitating China's global rise. That is why, as the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I am committed to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to preserve the vital programs that we need to keep our country safe.
I am committed to speaking up for American families and small businesses that have been shouldering the burden of higher costs because of President Trump's trade wars.
So I know he is not listening, but I call on President Trump to reverse course, to spend the next 100 days fulfilling the promises that he made during his campaign--promises to make our Nation safer, to make it more secure, to make it more prosperous.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I am honored to follow the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee and to be followed by another distinguished member of that same committee and to focus on these first 100 days.
The focus on the first 100 days of an administration, I think, comes from
And there are dramatic differences between those 100 days and the 100 days we have seen from President Trump. First and foremost, our economy was at near full employment, at a time of solid prosperity, 100 days ago, and we are now sliding toward exactly the kind of economic downturn that F.D.R. helped to address.
Second, in those first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, there was a whirlwind of congressional activity, inspired by the President, with his proposals for new Agencies and programs and investments. Congress was a partner. In this administration, President Trump has acted unilaterally by Executive order--illegally, unconstitutionally, and unchecked, except by courts that have been a bulwark.
In those first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration, F.D.R. appealed to our ``better angels,'' our willingness to give back, to be generous to our fellow Americans. He later inspired us with the call to ``a rendezvous with destiny.'' In this administration, which is plagued with corruption, crypto theft, and Musk exploitation of Agencies, it is a downward spiral, a race to the bottom in an appeal to self-indulgence and self-enrichment.
There are many, many other differences, but the whirlwind of activity here has produced chaos. That is the operative word: chaos. The turmoil and turbulence have produced confusion and, yes, anxiety, deep fear, and apprehension about the future of this country. And the poll numbers only reflect not only the downward spiral of our economy but of our confidence in the future.
This administration has been cruel, and it has been dumb. It is unmatched for its meanness and stupidity--the harm and hurt done to everyday Americans in real life and realtime; the harm in tariffs already having effect on the uncertainty of businesses about the future, their inability to plan, to invest in new manufacturing, and the fear of people that they will be jobless and lose the dignity of work and be hit with higher prices for everything from groceries to gasoline, to housing; the harm done in healthcare already, our federally qualified health centers deprived of funding, NIH research grants for curing cancer, for diabetes or hypertension canceled or frozen; in education, the uncertainty and loss of funding for special education and other programs that benefit children and the neediest and most vulnerable of our districts, in rural areas as well as urban; and, of course, the damage to our fundamental freedoms, women's reproductive freedoms, the suspension of title X grants, and the assault on women's healthcare--other freedoms: the basic due process of people who should have a right to receive notice and the opportunity to be heard before they are deported, before they are detained, before they are imprisoned or put on a plane to be imprisoned out of the country.
Basic fairness and due process rights that involve also the President intimidating law firms with threats that they will be denied access to security clearances or even to go on to governmental property, and intimidation and threatening our universities, supposedly in the name of anti-Semitism--nobody hates anti-Semitism more than I do, but I despise using anti-Semitism as a pretext or a guise simply to attack people or institutions because they disagree with a public official.
We live in a time when the rule of law is under threat, perhaps as never before in my lifetime, and the cause of freedom, all around the world, is in jeopardy. Ukraine has been betrayed. This Nation has switched sides to the enduring and deep detriment of our standing in the world, our reliability as a partner and ally. The harm may be irreparable.
We must stand with Ukraine. We now have more than 60 cosponsors of a Russia sanctions bill that I have been proud to lead with Senator Graham--it is bipartisan, evenly divided in cosponsorship--to send a message to Vladimir Putin: We are going to hit you, and we are going to hit you hard economically if you continue to stall and string along America, if you continue to play the President.
But Donald Trump has been a seemingly willing partner in being played by Vladimir Putin, his bro, his role model, perhaps.
Nobody has a stronger right to claim credit for preserving our freedoms in the past and now than our veterans, and they have been betrayed by this administration. For our veterans, it has been 100 days of chaos, of cruelty, stupidity, anxiety on their part, and apprehension, and 100 days of decisions made about their healthcare and their benefits. They were promised healthcare, and they were promised benefits. And now this administration is breaking those promises, not by coming to Congress and asking for a rescission or changing the PACT Act, which we passed in a bipartisan way, but simply by firing the people who were supposed to approve those claims for PACT Act benefits for veterans who have been exposed to toxic chemicals or burn pits.
And this is an administration that has fired already 2,500 of those dedicated VA employees, close to one-third of them veterans themselves, thousands from the Federal workforce, generally, close to 30 percent of them are veterans as well. And make no mistake, every one of these days has been a time of crisis for those veterans. Since day one, the administration has systematically shortchanged and betrayed veterans with its policies.
They have not only fired that 2,500 in reckless mass terminations of probationary employees--our young workforce, starting out on jobs, our VA future, and some of them dedicated multiyear employees who have just been promoted and, therefore, are in those new positions on a probationary basis. They have been promoted because they were good at their jobs and dedicated and hard-working, and they have been fired.
That is why I have proposed the Putting Veterans First Act, which would put those veterans back on the job--all of them from the VA--and put those veterans back on the job from the Federal workforce, and make sure that anybody who is terminated in the future gets a right to a personal, individual evaluation, and not just fired because Elon Musk wants to meet certain numbers or apply an algorithm or have his tech bros pick out randomly, arbitrarily names from the list.
There are 83,000 of those VA jobs on the chopping block. The approach of this Secretary of the VA, of Elon Musk, and Donald Trump is ``Fire first, plan later''; ``Fire first, evaluate later.''
I am disappointed that so many of my Republican colleagues are seeking to minimize or diminish the human impacts of these cuts, because I am hearing from veterans, just as I am from people in Connecticut and all around the country.
I went to Michigan just last week to talk to folks there. Those human impacts are heartbreaking because these actions are heartless, and they are impactful not only on the incomes of these people but on their self-worth, their sense of dignity. They have devoted their lives to caring for veterans, and now, with the sweep of a hand, they get the back of a hand from Elon Musk, who has never ever even thought about wearing the uniform of the U.S. military.
These human impacts include world-class researchers who are looking into how to predict stroke risk among veterans; enrollment of veterans into clinical trials for advanced cancer delayed because of the VA's hiring freeze; openings for new clinics that have been delayed because the VA can't hire the necessary staff to open their doors; the VA mental health staff forced to conduct counseling sessions in open cubicles without privacy, basic privacy, for the veterans who are talking about their innermost doubts and fears; service lines at VA hospitals and clinics that have been halted; beds in operating rooms at VA facilities that have been suspended. We are hearing about VA supply teams now understaffed and behind on placing critical supply requests for medication and equipment; support lines for caregivers that have been reduced; Veterans Crisis Line employees fired and, after a public backlash, maybe some rehired, as we heard today in a hearing of the Veterans Affairs' Committee. But the impact is enduring because suicide prevention has to be done in the moment, and suicide
Earlier this month, the Secretary announced he will be abruptly canceling the VA Servicing Purchase Program, known as VASP, on May 1. Now, I know very few of my colleagues have heard about VASP, but it is a program that enables veterans to get some very temporary, short-term help so they can avoid eviction from their homes and the homelessness that we are all ashamed to acknowledge continues to exist in the greatest country in the history of the world.
Our veterans are on the streets without shelter because they lack homes, and here is a program designed to keep them in their homes, and the Secretary is canceling it.
With housing more unaffordable than ever and veterans losing their jobs, I am at a loss--total, absolute loss--to understand how he can cancel a critical program that helps veterans undergoing financial hardship to stay in their homes.
I challenge the Secretary of the VA; I challenge the President of the United States; I challenge my colleagues across the aisle: Instead of saying yes blindly to Elon Musk, when he says ``Slash and trash the VA, fire those thousands of people, and end those programs,'' look at them not as waste but as an investment.
Yes, if there is waste, let's eliminate it. But as the national commander of the VFW--Veterans of Foreign Wars--said to us in one of our hearings, when he was wounded in combat, the surgeon who took the shrapnel out of his arm did it with a scalpel; he did not cut the arm off with a chain saw. Let's give up Elon Musk's chain saw, and if there is waste, do it with a scalpel.
These first 100 days have been disgraceful and shameful, cruel and dumb, deeply un-American. These VA employees are the ones delivering healthcare to the people we love and revere.
To my colleagues across the aisle, I just want to remind you in closing that this is a moment that will define you, your career, your reputation. It is a moment of profound historic challenges that has been recognized with massive marches here in the Nation's Capital, in Connecticut, around our State--New London, New Haven, Westport, New Britain. I have been to many of them.
Veterans are one of most powerful voices in our country, and I urge them to use those voices and their faces to say: We need the PACT Act. We need veterans' healthcare. We need to fulfill our promises.
As VFW commander Al Lipphardt said at that hearing, apply pressure and stop the bleeding.
These heartless and heartbreaking cuts, firings, freezes are un- American. My Republican colleagues, who have been almost entirely silent, please do the right thing. Our country has made a sacred promise. Our duties as Members of Congress is to keep our promises.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Madam President, in 100 days, in 100 days, what can a President accomplish? In the last 100 days, President Trump has made Americans less safe, less prosperous, and less free. He has chosen to move us in a direction at home and abroad that is the opposite of what those who voted for him expected and that is aligned with what those of us who worked against him feared.
What I have heard my whole life, whether in business or in foreign policy, as a lawyer or in my community as a local elected official: Folks need trust, and they need predictability. Businesses say they need predictability in order to decide what to invest in, who to hire, where to grow. Other countries around the world say that they need to know they can trust us, that they can rely on us. And in the last 100 days, President Trump has shattered both of them.
I am going to speak for a few minutes about foreign policy because so many of my colleagues in my caucus have stood to talk about the disastrous cuts led by Elon Musk and DOGE and the ways they have impacted Americans all over the country. But if you think about our reputation globally, statement after statement and tweet after tweet by President Trump has puzzled, concerned, even alarmed our allies. He is going to invade Greenland, a NATO ally. He is going to take back the Panama Canal. He is going to take over the Gaza Strip and make it ``Mara-Gaza.'' He is going to turn Canada into the 51st State.
One of my Republican colleagues has said: Don't pay so much attention to what he says; look at what he does.
Well, lots of our partners and allies have looked at what he has done by imposing tariffs on trusted allies and partners and recoiled.
An election in Canada last night where Trump was the issue elected a new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, who ran on a platform of standing up to America, of standing up to Donald Trump.
Look, folks, the actions he has taken in slashing foreign aid, in abandoning decades-old, bipartisan programs around the world that save lives and that help other countries to trust us and rely on us, have weakened us abroad and created openings for our pacing threat, the People's Republic of China.
I was recently in the Philippines, a nation that faces more natural disasters every year than any other country on Earth--more typhoons, more earthquakes, more volcanos. For decades, they have relied on the United States and the help of USAID, volunteers, nonprofits coordinated through our government to respond to these disasters. It has built a long and close partnership of trust. Gone.
I was recently in Taiwan, a country looking to decide whether they can rely on us should China make real their threats to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force. Can they trust us?
Well, what I am going to say is that in 100 days, President Trump has shown weakness in Europe and created openings for China.
We have long relied on a global network of allies and partners to keep us safe and strong, to make us prosperous, and to build our role in the world. China doesn't have that. They have nervous neighbors, client states, countries that can't count on them and view them as predatory. Yet now, through the actions of President Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, and the silence and the collaboration of Republicans in this Chamber, even our closest, most trusted allies, like Canada, question whether they can count on us.
Back to the Reagan days, Republicans have talked about ``peace through strength.'' What we have seen from Donald Trump in 100 days is weakness through chaos.
One hundred days in, he is not stopping Putin; he is preparing to sell out Ukraine and Europe to Putin. One hundred days in, he is not deterring Xi Jinping; he is backing down every time he says he is going to stand up to him. At the end the day, these first 100 days have shown that we are weaker, the world is less stable, and Americans are less safe.
I have to say that 100 days is more than enough time for my Republican colleagues to have seen enough, to stand up to this President, and to restore the role of this Senate and return our position of strength to the world.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
Madam President, first, I thank my colleagues, the ones I have heard so far--Senator Blumenthal, Senator Coons. I know Senator Klobuchar will be great as always, as will Senator Baldwin. But I thank them all for coming.
Democrats are holding the floor late tonight to expose the disaster of Donald Trump's first 100 days in office. We will be speaking for several more hours.
This week marks the 100th day of Donald Trump's second term as President of the United States. It has been 100 days from hell, and people are fed up.
One hundred days in, the legacy of Donald Trump's second term is already set: chaos, corruption, costs. It is chaos, one fiasco after another. One minute, Donald Trump and his people say one thing, and then they say it is the opposite, and then they say something else entirely. Nobody ever seems to know which way is up, and many of them just lie outright to the American people.
It is corruption. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans are highjacking the government, raiding the public's piggy bank, and picking the pockets of the American people to enrich themselves. These billionaires are using the
MAGA grifters are getting rich off meme coins, and the White House lawn has been turned into a Tesla dealership. It makes Americans cringe. This is not the American way. This has not been a hallmark of our history.
Maybe most of all, it has been 100 days of costs--costs going up and up and up because of tariffs; costs to working people because programs vital to them--Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits, housing, SNAP--are being threatened or even already taken away to some extent, and it will be a greater extent once we see their reconciliation bill.
So Donald Trump promised a golden age on the day he took the oath of office. What Americans are learning instead is it is fool's gold. Americans got corrosion, erosion, and rot--corrosion across this administration, erosion across this economy, and rot within the foundations of our democracy.
So tonight, Senate Democrats come to the floor to expose this administration for what it is: a full-frontal attack against the fabric of America, a full-frontal attack on our economy and on people's pocketbooks, and a full-frontal attack, finally, on working people in the middle class to take away people's Medicaid, their Social Security, veterans' care, healthcare, and more--all to give tax cuts to the very wealthy.
Another way to describe this administration: Billionaires win, American families lose.
There is a cabal of very greedy people who run the White House. They are rich. They have no understanding of what average Americans go through. And they plunder the government, then slash programs we so desperately need for average families--all for tax cuts for the rich.
And there is a second thing they are doing. They are destroying the guardrails of government. They are destroying every part of anything that opposes them, all so they can take more money away from working people and give it to themselves.
Let's talk about it. First and most urgently, maybe--they are all very urgent; that is the only reason I say ``maybe.'' But the first 100 days of Donald Trump have meant 100 days of rising costs. For months before he became President, Trump promised that if elected, costs would go down, that America would be affordable again. Well, prices haven't gone down. Quite the opposite. Groceries up; gas and energy prices up; clothing, cars, homes up.
What about retirement savings? Down.
What about consumer confidence? Down. In fact, consumer expectations are at their lowest level in over a decade. The stock market is on pace for its worst 100 days of any Presidential term since Nixon.
What happened to Donald Trump bragging about the stock market like he always liked to do? There is not much to brag about these days.
No President in history has promised more on day one and delivered less by day 100 than Donald Trump. In record time, the President has turned his golden promise into an economic ticking time bomb. It gets worse every day. He is trying to call it progress. He says to people: Americans won't mind paying more. That is the arrogance of a billionaire--the arrogance of a billionaire.
Thanks to Donald Trump's stupid trade wars--which have failed to rein in countries like China--CEOs and small business owners are warning about rising prices, empty shelves, disrupted supply chains. We urge national retailers to be honest with their constituents, with their customers. I urge national retailers, when you post prices online for your products, show the consumer exactly how much tariffs are added to the total price. Cars would have been X dollars, but now they are X plus Y dollars.
Show it to the American people because it is hurting you, retailers. Don't let them blame you. They should be blaming Trump. Be honest with your customers. Show them exactly how Donald Trump's tariffs are making prices go up. Americans deserve to know who is picking their pockets.
And smaller businesses shouldn't take a downfall of Donald Trump either. His policies are forcing them to an impossible choice: hike your prices or risk shutting down your doors.
On Long Island, a small business owner told me she is losing sleep over tariffs. She proudly voted for Donald Trump but told me she is seeing her costs rise 30 percent. She is frustrated--frustrated that the President she supported put her whole business, which she put everything into, at risk.
Donald Trump's tariffs are a MAGA double whammy. Not only are they eating the people's bottom lines, his chaotic approach makes it harder for people in businesses to plan ahead at all. If you are a business, you don't know what he is going to do 2 weeks from now or 5 weeks from now, so you don't spend. You don't build a new plant. You don't hire the new worker. Small businesses have to cut back because they don't have a cushion. Every business is getting clobbered by Donald Trump's chaotic tariff policies.
And even if Donald Trump ended Trump's tariffs tomorrow, the damage is already done because leaders don't know what he is going to do next.
It is not just the tariffs, the prices, and recession. Americans are worried about the costs of cutting to their healthcare, cutting their Social Security, cutting Medicaid. They are going to slash Medicaid.
I was in six of the Republican districts in New York State last week. All six had Democrats, Republicans, Independents frightened to death about what will happen if Medicaid is cut. They could lose their jobs. Elderly people could be kicked out of nursing homes. Healthcare would diminish for everybody.
And when they are cutting the healthcare of veterans, these people who served us are told: ``Go away.''
And the cruelty with which they are firing people in the VA and other Agencies--I know one woman who was a former veteran. She served our country, risked her life, got injured. She was helped by the VA, then decided to work there. She saw the good work they were doing. She loved her job. She didn't get paid that much, but she loved helping her fellow veterans.
One night, Friday night, she comes home and on her computer is: You are fired. Don't show up to the office until further notice.
This woman was distraught. Why was she fired? What did she do wrong? What of her services serving the veterans at the Buffalo VA home--what services were not needed, were superfluous, were waste? There were none. She was just cruelly fired.
Only an administration that exhibits a meanness--almost a viciousness--would do it. But that is what Trump, DOGE, and Musk and all their henchmen who work there are doing.
This is just a terrible, terrible 100 days for anyone who depends on Medicaid. And that is a huge number--tens of millions of people in America.
And there is also chaos in so many other places. Every single day, Donald Trump's administration lurches from one crisis to the next. For all their talk of bringing back meritocracy, their administration seems addicted to chaos and incompetence--hardly meritocratic. Every day, there is a new decision, new reversal, new course correction, only to give way the next day to whatever impulsive decision comes next.
Tariffs are a great example. One day he says yes to tariffs. The next day he says: No, I am negotiating with countries. Oh, no, maybe I am not. This tariff is going to stay in place. This one will be reduced. Then he flips it.
Again, no sound businessperson is going to plan ahead. That is why, not Democrats, but places like the big banks and big analysts say chances of a recession could be as high as 60 percent.
What does a recession mean to the average family? You could get laid off. If you need to find a job, it is harder. Costs go up. Stagflation is likely to occur. It is nasty, brutal to people.
So chaos is there; and chaos, of course, is in foreign policy. I was amazed last week on one day when Donald Trump was over at the Vatican, he says he had a great talk with Putin and acted like there was going to be a deal. Next day, he says: I had a terrible talk with Putin, and he didn't even talk to Putin in between. He makes it up. Whatever he thinks will appeal to people that moment, he says. And he
The chaos makes Americans' heads spin--firing people who manage our nuclear arsenal, then saying: Never mind, oops. But, you know, when you fire people, they don't all come back. Of course, their morale is shaken. These are good people who worked so hard for so long.
The long and short of it is this: Donald Trump's 100 days is 100 days of corruption, cronyism, of higher costs--much higher costs to the American people. It really is awful. The poll numbers show it. But we don't need the poll numbers to tell us. We have all been back in our districts. We are hearing it. We are not just hearing it from Democrats. We are not just hearing it from people who are out on the streets protesting. We are hearing it from average folks who don't really care about politics but are getting hurt, and it is making them look at Donald Trump and say: Whoa, this is not what I bargained for.
And, of course, last but not least is the threat to our democratic republic. He is acting like a King, a mob boss, a wannabe dictator. He said he wanted to be a dictator on day one; it looks like he is extending it. Any quarter of opposition that might say something in our tradition of free speech and debate, he tries to crush--crush the law firms, crush the universities, go after the judges which have been a foundation of our Republic. The judges are independent and are able to stop an executive that is going too far.
When the Founders drafted our Constitution, they feared a man like Donald Trump who sees the rule of law as a nuisance, considers the truth an inconvenience, regards his fellow citizens as little more than subjects: Kiss the ring, bow before the throne, or watch your back. That is the ethos of Donald Trump.
He has moved with lightning speed to weaponize the Federal Government against anyone he thinks might oppose him. He doesn't believe in democracy, debate, or honest disagreement. He simply wants to crush his opponents. That is what dictators do.
What is so interesting, Madam President, Americans are as angry about that as they are about their higher costs because the roots, Donald Trump, of democracy go deep in the American people. And the American people will not tolerate--will not tolerate--your disruption, your threat, your trying to end, in a sense, our democracy.
Good news is this: Donald Trump's destructive agenda has one great weakness--the American people themselves. Most Americans vehemently reject the path which he is trying to take our country on costs, on chaos, on corruption, on democracy. The American people are not giving up. They are standing up. They are organizing. They are resisting, and Democrats are standing with them shoulder to shoulder and with our country.
As America marks the first 100 days of the worst President of our lifetimes, I ask Americans to look at this administration for what it is--a full frontal attack on the core elements of what makes America truly great: The rule of people over kings and oligarchs; the rule of law, not the dictates of an authoritarian; respect for the rights of all people, respect for all people; and a commitment to promoting the general welfare for the whole, not cruel and cheapskate voting.
Let us commit ourselves, all of us--Democrats here in the Senate-- against this administration and to uphold the core values and principles of this beautiful Nation which we must fight to preserve and protect.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Madam President, it is 100 days since Donald Trump took office. I think back to the promises that were made, not just during the campaign but the first day. I think of my constituents who voted for me and voted for him--who actually believed he was going to bring costs down and put them first and do something about housing and do something about healthcare and do something about childcare.
Those were some of the main things they brought up to me. They were hoping that would happen. But, instead, we have seen the most divisive, chaotic Presidency.
Yes, chaos is up, corruption is up, costs are up, and, sadly, people's retirements are down. Americans are paying the price.
Trump's tariff taxes, which is especially concerning to those in the rural areas of my State who sometimes just get by on a margin--those tariff taxes, $4,000 a family, $200 in grocery costs--that is what is going to happen. That is what is happening now, and they know it. That is why you see these numbers. It is not like the American people haven't noticed.
In his 100 days, President Trump, sadly, has the worst approval rating of any President since polling began. Two-thirds of them don't like how he is handling the economy. Two-thirds of them, by multiple polls, don't like these tariff taxes.
I was just on a 19-county rural tour in my State. I visited farms and small businesses. Everywhere I went, I heard people--some of them quieter than others--and I think that is important to know. On TV and on social media, you see these big people yelling into a microphone. I don't blame them. They are mad; they are sad. That is all. They are showing how they feel.
But there is another group of people maybe are a little quieter. Maybe they just tell us--maybe they tell people behind closed doors, maybe they show up. They don't know why the person next to them has a sign that says ``This is not normal.''
I heard a farmer ask this woman: Why do you have that sign? She said: Because it is not normal. He said: I am normal. And she said: This is not normal.
They are showing up because they cannot believe what is happening.
Here is the problem. Some of the biggest entities, the big companies--Tim Cook, it is good for phones, good for Apple--he is able to call the President, go over there. My soybean farmer who relies on a market that is quickly dwindling--that already dwindled under the last Trump administration--he doesn't have that phone number. He can't get over there in the Oval Office. He can't get an exception. Or I doubt that the Treasury Secretary has heard about Beth Benike, who runs our ``Minnesota Small Business Person of the Year'' company, called Busy Baby, an online company that gets stuff that she makes into things for high chairs for babies--a successful small business. She is not going to make it. She wasn't invited by the Treasury Secretary to that secret JPMorgan investor meeting. She didn't get in the door. She doesn't know what the scoop is. She is just trying to get by.
Among other things that all my colleagues are hearing right now from individuals and people living on fixed incomes and seniors who are depending on Social Security and can't get through--one of my constituents, when their wife died, he couldn't even get through. He tries on email for days, tries to get through, just trying to figure out what he does when his wife has died, and he can't find one person to talk to in the government and has to call our office. Besides all of that horror show, what really people have to understand--people ask me: What is the worst thing no one is talking about? It is the small businesses, the small ranchers, the small farmers that are the roadkill here. They are the ones who do not have the margins.
In the case of farmers and ranchers, it may be because input costs are already difficult, or maybe because of the weather. Or in the case of our poultry producers, it may be because of the avian flu and the like. But this is just like the last straw that they can't handle. That is what is going on right now.
So if you wonder why these opinion polls are saying what our colleagues on the Democratic side here have been saying forever and asking our Republican colleagues to stop rubberstamping everything he does and to stand up, which did happen on the tariff vote that Senator Kaine and I and Senator Warner pushed forward when it comes to Canada-- we are going to have another vote like that, which covers more countries when it comes to tariffs--they want people to stand up. They don't want any more rubberstamps.
And the thing that is really galling to them is, when you look at what
So I know that my businesses, big and small, are seeing this coming. They are stopping investing. You know what that means. When America was on this cusp of greatness and we had come from the pandemic--we were dealing with inflation; that is true. To me, we were going to the next level of problems, which is making sure we had a workforce for the jobs we had and that they had housing and that they had childcare. Instead, we are going backward.
We were on the cusp at NIH, with the research and with the combination of mapping the human genome and AI and all of these incredible innovations that are going on. And as long as we put some rules of the road in place, we were in the place to lead in the world on some incredible new things. But now we are going backward if we don't even have FDA people who can improve the new gadgets and the new medical devices. Or if we don't have any rules in place when it comes to AI, we are going to go backward, not forward.
So when I look at these 100 days, I wish for my constituents it wasn't so.
My State is fourth in the country for ag exports. We have 15 Fortune 500 companies. I know the differences in this economy and how hard it is anyway. But when I look at those people showing up at the rural smalltown townhalls or showing up at farmers' events and telling me what is going on, that is where I realize: This 100 days isn't just some campaign brochure. This 100 days isn't just sound bites on social media or a post. This is their lives, and we need to stand up for them.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Madam President, listening to my colleagues, I am reflecting on last year, when President Trump was campaigning in--I want to say it was Bozeman, MT--and I remember he said: ``Starting on day one,'' in his administration, he said, ``we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.'' That is what he said.
Well, it has been 100 days since he entered the White House, and here is what he has given us so far. His tariffs are increasing costs for the average family by more than $4,000 a year. He has slashed billions from programs that everyday Americans rely on, including $1 billion for mental health care services. He has directed Elon Musk and his unqualified, loyalist DOGE team to fire more than 121,000 Federal employees who deliver essential services, including everyone from firefighters who should be fighting the fires that happened in the West to scientists researching cures to deadly diseases.
Donald Trump is pushing House and Senate Republicans to rubberstamp a plan to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid in order to give tax cuts to billionaires, and, on top of all of that, he has created endless chaos and uncertainty.
I can go on and on. That is just how much damage President Trump has caused to our country in his first 100 days in office. But I want to take some time to focus on the impact that his economic agenda is having on our small businesses.
I am from Nevada, where there are almost 300,000 small businesses. These are our mom-and-pop shops. They are entrepreneurs. They are the lifeblood of our economy and are part of the fabric of every community across this country. And it is these small businesses that are bearing the brunt of President Trump's destructive tariffs.
Now, don't get me wrong. I believe that targeted tariffs on our adversaries can be a useful tool to protect American jobs and our national security. But these blanket tariffs are just the opposite.
These last 2 weeks, while back home in Nevada, I got a firsthand account of what small businesses are dealing with because of these tariffs. I have heard concerns and visited with three small business owners in Las Vegas: Juanny, Santy, and Kristen--separate business owners. All three of these are women-owned shops that serve specialty drinks and incredible foods to Nevadans, from coffee and boba to tacos.
In Vegas, as you may know, travel and tourism are the backbone of our economy. When people come to Las Vegas, they don't just visit the Strip. They go to Chinatown. They go to the Arts District and all over the valley to patronize our small businesses. For many businessowners like Juanny, like Santy, and like Kristen, their margins are already razor-thin, and tourism is key to meeting their bottom line. But because of President Trump's blanket tariffs, we are already seeing a decline in visitors coming to Las Vegas.
Whether people are staying home because they don't have the room in their budgets for a vacation or international tourists are choosing other destinations, Trump's economic agenda is threatening to crater our $2 trillion tourism economy. That hurts small businesses.
And when they can't keep up because costs are rising because they have fewer patrons or because of the higher cost of importing their supplies, these small businesses are forced to raise their prices. They don't want to have to, but they are forced to raise prices and pass the burden on to customers, everyday Americans. It is just unsustainable.
The same sentiment is echoed in the northern part of our State. In Reno, I spoke to Mark. He is a small coffee shop owner who is already asking himself how he can continue to navigate everyday operations amid this uncertainty. He doesn't want to have to pass higher costs onto his customers. But if Trump's erratic tariff agenda continues, he may have no choice.
Trump says Americans must accept short-term pain for long-term gain. But what is there to be gained if hard-working Nevadans have to close the doors of their businesses?
I think to myself: If it has only been 100 days, how much damage is he going to potentially cause in the next 100 days, in the 1,361 days left in his term?
It has been 100 days, and small businesses across the country may soon be faced with having to close up shop. I think about what is going to happen to my small business owners, the ones I just talked about: Juanny, Mark, Santy, Kristen, and the others. Will they make it through the rest of Trump's term? I don't have the answer.
But I hope, and I ask my Republican colleagues to join me in protecting these small businesses and families from these harmful tariffs.
If I am hearing it in my State, I know, my colleagues, you are all hearing it in your States as well. So if there is an opportunity to work together, please don't rubberstamp Donald Trump's harmful agenda. Let's work together so we are actually working on behalf of American families and ensuring that these small businesses can keep their doors open.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Madam President, I rise today to reflect on the last 100 days and the unimaginable amount of havoc and harm President Donald Trump has caused for Wisconsinites.
Now, while on the campaign trail and even once in office, the President made a staggering number of promises: promises to end wars on day one, promises to lower costs at the grocery store on day one, promises to make healthcare more affordable. And the list goes on and on and on.
Look, I was on the campaign trail and listening to Wisconsinites at the same time as Donald Trump was. And, truly, I get why he was making some of these promises. Wisconsin families were facing high prices. Workers felt like they were being ripped off by their big-corporation employers. Democracy felt broken, as voters' voices were drowned out by special-interest money, and people were sick and tired of endless wars. Mr. Trump claimed he had the solution.
Well, so far, he has broken these promises and literally betrayed the American people.
Here is the kicker: Donald Trump not only broke these promises, but many of the things he promised to fix he has actually made worse. Grocery bills are up, and I have yet to see even a concept of a healthcare plan, while Medicaid coverage for 1 million-plus Wisconsinites is on the chopping block to pay for tax breaks for billionaires. Wars are raging in Ukraine and Gaza. Billionaires and big corporations have a friend in the White House who has their backs. It is one of the greatest bait and switches of our time. And, at the end of the day, it is Wisconsin families who are paying the price.
For the last 100 days, I have heard from constituents in all 72 Wisconsin counties who fear what this administration's actions will mean for them and their families.
I have heard from farmers like Linda in Vernon County, who barely survived Donald Trump's first trade war. Family farmers like her are scared that they will be put out of business entirely as punishing tariffs and new trade wars jack up costs of fertilizer and farming equipment, while cutting off access to markets.
I have heard from folks like Renee in Milwaukee. Renee has stage IV breast cancer. Renee is scared that cuts to Medicaid will force her and her husband to choose between protecting their life savings--their retirement savings--or getting the lifesaving cancer care that she needs to stay alive.
I have heard from veterans like James in southeastern Wisconsin who are out of a job because Donald Trump fired them from the only place that they have ever felt like they belonged in civilian life: helping their fellow veterans at the VA.
I have heard from so many small businesses, like Lakefront Brewery. There was a local roofing contractor in Milwaukee, small retailers, and an auto parts seller in Milwaukee who are all considering: Do we have to raise our prices? Will our customers be able to afford our prices? Or do we have to lay off workers because President Trump's trade war is tightening their margins and making it harder to plan for the future?
I have heard from families from Ozaukee County on Wisconsin's east coast to the St. Croix Valley on our western side who have had their childcare or food assistance threatened because this President is choosing to prioritize tax breaks for his wealthy friends over working families.
Dairy farmers saw millions in funding that they were promised to grow their businesses frozen, and Alzheimer's researchers at Wisconsin's universities are making do with less because of arbitrary cuts that threaten the next breakthrough that would serve our loved ones. Seniors accessing their hard-earned Social Security benefits have fewer places to turn as field offices shutter and staff is let go.
Public schools in Milwaukee with children in them who have been exposed to lead paint in the schools have fewer resources because President Trump fired the very lead hazard experts they relied on at the CDC. Imagine that.
I hear it from constituents every day calling my office. Now, in ordinary times, my office would maybe get around 50 to 100 calls a day, but regularly, since January, we have passed 1,000 calls a day from Wisconsinites. There isn't a corner of our State that hasn't been impacted by this President's often illegal, sometimes unconstitutional overreach of his Presidential powers.
These Wisconsinites are not alone. Poll after poll is showing the same thing: This President is reaching historically low approval ratings. More Americans are giving him an F grade than any other grade.
It is hard to state all the ways that President Trump's second term is already impacting folks in Wisconsin. His actions have made things more expensive and the future far less certain, whether you are a Wisconsin farmer or small business owner, veteran, senior, or just a family looking to make ends meet.
In January, I said I would work with anyone to deliver for Wisconsin. I also promised that I would stand up to anyone who hurts Wisconsinites. Those things remain true, and right now our country is not on the right course. And Americans agree.
Wisconsinites want lower costs. Our veterans and farmers want to be respected and working families to have a fair shot. Donald Trump's chaos isn't delivering any of that, and it is about time Congress steps up and acts as a true check and balance on this President before it is too late for our economy, working families, and the future of our Nation.
I yield the floor.
Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title 5, United States Code, of the Rule Submitted by the Department of Energy Relating to "Energy Conservation Program for Appliance...
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. President, we are 100 days into Donald Trump's term, and it is time that we ask the most important question, the most obvious question, but it is a question, actually, that has not been asked enough--not ``How is he doing?'' not even ``What is he doing?'' That is important too. The most important question is ``How are we doing under Donald Trump?'' The answer is ``Terrible.'' It is going very badly. In 3 months, we have become less safe, less secure, and less prosperous, and it comes down to Donald Trump.
People voted for him for all kinds of reasons, but as my friend Senator Chris Murphy said, people took him seriously when he said he would lower costs and didn't take him seriously when he said he would act like a dictator. It turns out that the opposite is true. We are paying more for everything. We are paying more for everything. People's life savings and college plans for their kids are being gutted. Tens of thousands of jobs are getting cut.
Investors are looking for more stable places to invest their money. The hallmark of the U.S. financial system and economy is that we are the most stable place, the most predictable place, the best place for rule of law, to park your money, for infrastructure, for higher education, and all of that has been lit on fire in 100 days.
Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come. Trump's approach to tariffs--one day they are on, and the next day they are gone--is starting to make everything from groceries, to clothes, to cars and homes more expensive. And people are understandably worried about a recession. Consumer confidence is at its lowest point in 5 years.
You will recall that there was a global pandemic that caused people to have a low level of consumer confidence. But this is not a global pandemic; this is a self-imposed recession by one person who has a very weird idea about economic policy and nobody willing to stand up to the mad King.
This is not what people voted for. And if you voted for Donald Trump--look, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump. Most people voted for Donald Trump. I am not here to scold anybody. But people thought that whatever his other faults, Trump was going to be good for the money side of things--he was going to be good for your money; he was going to be good for entrepreneurship; he was going to be good for your 401(k); he was going to be good for the stock market; he was going to be good for investments. Here we are, and the American economy is in a free fall, threatening to drag the entire world down with it.
But it is not just the economy that is hurting. Trump, aided by his band of rogue advisers, including Elon Musk and Russ Vought, has broken basically everything, forcing seniors and disabled people to wait for hours just to get help with the benefits they have already earned. Veterans are being laid off by the thousands and facing even longer delays in getting the care they need. Trash is piling up at national parks with fewer park rangers to look after them. Drastic cuts to medical research and staff mean fewer discoveries and potentially lifesaving treatments for conditions like cancer and Alzheimer's. The national parks, the VA, the NIH, the CDC--these are the kinds of American institutions that have made us strong for generations, and they are being trashed on purpose. A proposed downsizing at the Postal Service will keep people waiting longer to get their packages and their mail and their prescriptions and their bills, especially in rural and remote areas. And none of this is saving any money. It is absolutely making people's everyday lives harder.
OK, so the economy is not doing great, support services are being cut left and right, but are we at least safer and stronger and more respected globally? The answer is no. Since his first hours in office when he froze all foreign assistance, Trump has undermined our safety and national security at every single turn. He has picked fights with neighbors and allies, weakening longstanding partnerships and forcing the rest of the world to work against us rather than with us.
I was in Europe a couple of months ago, and it was kind of jarring when our allies--and I mean our allies, our closest allies, who have always been there with us, who have defense treaties with us, who have economic partnerships with us, who have people-to-people ties--came to us and said that the biggest destabilizing force on the planet is the President of the United States.
We used to be the good guys that would respond to disasters and treat diseases around the world, but Trump has decimated one of the most successful global health programs in history--PEPFAR--leaving an estimated 1 million newborns to contract HIV from their mothers--1 million newborns contracting HIV from their mothers. What possible purpose could there be behind that?
One note to my former colleague Secretary Rubio: There is not a waiver program in place that allows lifesaving aid to flow. These organizations that provide aid are absolutely shutting down.
I was just talking to a colleague who was in Africa over the recess period, and he said kids are on half rations. Kids are half the size they are supposed to be because of what America is doing--because of what America is doing.
An earthquake hit Myanmar, and the United States sent three aid workers to assist with the disaster response, who were then fired while they were on the ground. We have three people there to help people in Myanmar, where there was a catastrophic earthquake. The ``United States'' logo is on their armbands, and they are fired and told to come home.
Guess what happened next. China sent 600 workers and has committed to delivering close to $14 million in supplies. I think that is catastrophic for humanitarian reasons. I think that is catastrophic for moral reasons. I think it is bad that the United States is causing death on purpose. But even if you don't care about that, we can at least see the geopolitical downside to vacating the scene when another country is in trouble and letting China go into the breach.
I have a friend of a friend who just texted me. They were doing good work in Fiji, and they were sent home. China came in within 2 weeks and is performing the same work. I cannot imagine anybody making the argument that that is good for the United States.
You do not counter China's growing regional influence or outcompete its economy by walking away from the world and insulting all of your friends. You don't bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine by making false promises and empty threats, nor do you win the future on issues like AI and clean energy by pretending that America, as strong and powerful as we are--and we are strong and powerful--that we can solve any of these global challenges alone.
A lot of Trump's failures, whether in domestic or foreign policy, boil down to the simple fact that he and his people honestly don't know what they are doing. There is no grand strategy that we are all somehow missing. There is no brilliant, new way of looking at things. They are just kind of messing around in the most powerful positions on the planet--the Signal group chat, the forged DOGE savings receipts, the frantic firing and rehiring of nuclear weapons workers and disease detectives.
The people currently in charge of the most powerful Nation in human history, moving trillions of dollars around, are just winging it, and their response to the frequent mistakes, no matter how serious or costly, is ``oops'' or sometimes they pretend it was their plan all along.
Trump's ineptitude is matched only by his corruption. Just days before his inauguration, he launched his own meme coin, which he encouraged supporters to buy. For those of you who are not super up on all the crypto stuff, this is the equivalent of basically saying: I have a Swiss bank account in case anybody wants to deposit money into the President of the United States' pocket. That is what this meme coin does.
After he made close to $100 million from it, the coin quickly lost most of its value. And then just last week, after Trump announced a dinner with the coin's top holders, complete with a ``VIP White House tour''--let's be very clear. There are some things you absolutely can't do. One of them is to monetize the Presidency. The other thing is to use a government building, to use the White House as an inducement to pay the U.S. President is out-of-this-world corrupt. It is the kind of thing that if you are on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Defense Committee or whatever it is and you are traveling abroad, you will have in your talking points to scold some counterpart of yours about corruption. This is the kind of thing that, up until about 100 days ago, we went around the world trying to prevent, but now our leader is doing it.
While regular people are losing money every day because of Trump, he and his family continue to get richer--and worse, if Trump has his way with the tax bill, billionaires will get the biggest tax break in history while children, seniors, and families find it even harder to make ends meet because they can no longer get healthy meals or because they have been kicked off of Medicaid.
One final point: Whether it is withholding funds that were enacted by Congress and made into law or deporting people without due process, including a 2-year-old--a 2-year-old--American citizen with cancer last week, Trump is breaking the law on a daily basis. Everyone is afforded due process in our system, and with good reason--because the moment some people are not provided due process, there is no telling who is entitled to it and who is not and, crucially, who decides who gets due process. It sure shouldn't be any individual elected official to determine whether you get due process.
This has been the worst start to a Presidency in the history of the United States. People had their own reasons for voting for Trump last fall. I have got friends who voted for Trump. I understand, for some, it was COVID. For some, it was Gaza. For some, it was the price of everything. For some, it was Biden's being too old. A lot of people had a lot of reasons, and I am not here to judge.
A good buddy of mine, a former Governor of Hawaii, used to say: You know, people vote for you for their reasons, not yours.
So I am not here to try to be vindicated. I am saying, for even those people who voted for him, all of the reasons that you voted for him, unless you were enthused about corruption, unless you were enthused about lawbreaking, unless you really hated Medicaid, unless you really wanted veterans to be laid off, unless you really wanted our standing in the world to be diminished by massive proportions in a super short period of time--unless you love that stuff, it is OK to say: This guy is not working out. He doesn't own your vote. He doesn't own your support. You cast a ballot, and he becomes the President of the United States. It went very badly. This is the worst 100 days of a Presidency in American history.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. President, I would like to use my time tonight to talk, as well, about the first 100 days under this administration's leadership.
You have heard my colleague already speak, and I concur with his remarks. Simply put, it has been chaotic; it has been disorganized; it has been an unmitigated disaster. Quite frankly--and I know that I am not alone in this--we are absolutely sick of it.
This President and this administration rode in with promises of reducing costs for American families--families like the family I grew up in, with a father who worked through the night and into the morning as a newspaper delivery person and with a mother who worked as a receptionist. This President promised. He said, on day one, that he was going to reduce the cost to American families and improve their quality of life. Only, 100 days later, Americans have only seen reductions in the stock market, in their 401(k)s, and a lowered respect for the Constitution. What we have seen continue to rise, instead, are grocery prices. We are seeing the cost of living grow out of control as families experience freezes in critical funding that supports their households. We are seeing housing costs continue to skyrocket as well.
Again, we were promised the exact opposite, which is that this President knew and understood what it was for the average American family to struggle to afford the cost of housing. He
And do you know what? What is worse is they don't seem to care. But do you know who does care? The American people care.
If you are a working-class American who had hopes that this administration would lower costs as they promised, I will bet you are feeling betrayed by now by the impact of the Trump tariffs.
If you spent your working life paying into Social Security, like so many of our seniors, in the hopes of having a reliable safety net in your later years, you are feeling helpless in listening to this administration's plans to raid Social Security.
If you get your healthcare through Medicaid and Medicare, you are feeling alarmed at this administration's intent to gut these essential programs.
If initiatives like SNAP and Head Start help keep your family's head above water during tough times, you are feeling frustrated that this administration is so out of touch that they would even consider eliminating this critical funding.
These emotions run deep nationally, and I have seen them felt locally. Somerset County, for example, is one of the poorest counties in my State, the State of Maryland. If that is not enough, its geography has contributed to awful flooding problems for decades. The city of Crisfield was depending on a Federal grant to finally help fix the problem. It was a funding plan that people had worked on for years and for such a long time, but this administration's rash decisions have now eliminated that plan.
These are the kinds of decisions that can leave you feeling hopeless, and when you see that your emotions and your struggles are being ignored by this President so that he can hand tax cuts to the billionaires around him who choose to grab for more money instead of holding on to some sense of morality, you feel angry. Resources may be in short supply for American families right now, but there is more than enough hurt and anger to go around. This administration is hurting Americans--the ones who voted for this President and Americans who didn't. They are hurting Americans who didn't vote and Americans who were too young to vote. They are hurting the business community, and they are hurting farmers. They are hurting cities, and they are hurting our rural areas. They are hurting law enforcement officers and factory workers. They are hurting teachers and students. They are hurting factory workers and union members. They are hurting doctors and medical professionals and researchers.
Across the political spectrum and across all demographics, the only thing we have to show for the first 100 days is losing, the kind of losing that will be felt in this Nation for years to come.
One hundred days in, look at how they have treated the very best of us--this Nation's civil servants, the Federal workers who serve with absolutely no political motivation. I have met them. I know them. Close to 160,000 of them live in the State of Maryland, and many of them have served for years under both Democratic administrations and Republican administrations, and they have one dedication, and that is to their fellow Americans. Our Federal workers keep our food safe. They explore the bounds of science to find cures to our most challenging diseases. They make sure that our veterans receive the benefits that they so richly deserve and that our seniors have access to resources that they set aside for the future.
Our civil servants do so much to boost our quality of life, and do you know what? This administration doesn't care. For the first 100 days, they have been subjected to spiteful, petty attacks. They have been caught in the crossfire of a political witch hunt. They have had their lives disrupted by these abrupt and improper firings.
My State has felt a significant impact from these firings. It is home to so many Federal workers--as I have mentioned, 160,000 of them-- people who I am incredibly proud to represent. I have heard the calls from panicked workers who don't know what the future holds. I have met with distraught workers who fear that they won't be able to provide for their families.
All of this is the result of an administration claiming to prioritize efficiency. The majority of Americans is OK with finding efficiency. What they are not OK with is the cruelty that we are seeing. How you treat people matters, and this administration is more interested in celebrating cruelty than being cost-effective.
There is no better example of this administration's chaos and cruelty than HHS Secretary Kennedy. His Department and its Agencies are indispensable in the fight of keeping Americans safe and healthy. From keeping our food safe today to finding cures for disease, the mission of these Agencies and their workers is critical to our well-being. Yet Secretary Kennedy doesn't care. He has pledged to make America healthy again, but in reality, he has fired safety inspectors, eliminated food safety labels and labs, and revealed plans to take the Federal Government out of the role of keeping our food safe.
Our Nation has enjoyed progress due in no small part to our commitment to sustained research. The groundbreaking discoveries that our Nation's researchers have made have done so much for our society. At Health and Human Services, that has meant eliminating diseases that used to ravage our communities and currently means working on solving health challenges that continue to puzzle us today.
The NIH is headquartered in my State, and I know firsthand the good work that they do. We know all too well the significant role that the NIH and other health and research Agencies play in developing and deploying vaccine treatments. Only recently emerging from a devastating public health crisis, we know firsthand how important their work is.
Secretary Kennedy either doesn't know or doesn't care what his Department's mission is. He is doing the administration's bidding to eliminate funding that goes toward finding cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, and rare diseases; and in the midst of outbreaks of measles--a disease that researchers had virtually eliminated--he has pressed forward with firing thousands of vital workers in our health Agencies. This is not efficient, and it is not a profile in competent leadership. What it is, instead, is absolutely dangerous, and it is putting sensitive information and decisions between life and death in the hands of grossly unqualified people.
Secretary Kennedy's pledge to make America healthy again is another promise that this administration is either unwilling or incapable of keeping. His idea to create a national registry for people with autism is an example of what happens when incompetent and incapable leadership is in place.
This administration is full of examples like this. The callous, heartless disregard for others comes right from the top, and it is mirrored in the people who have been nominated to run the government. So we can't join them in celebrating this milestone, because there is nothing that they can hold up as an accomplishment that they have achieved on behalf of everyday Americans.
One hundred days in, we have seen what this administration is. They are disinterested in the lives of working-class and middle-class Americans, uncaring about the futures of our veterans and our seniors, unmoved by the plight of the underprivileged, obsessed with attacking our civil servants and settling scores, unable to make good on the promises that they laid out when they took control, and they don't seem to care.
But Marylanders care; the American people care, and we are tired of seeing this administration tank our economy. We are tired of seeing out-of-touch leaders dismiss the sacrifices that families across the Nation make every single day, and we are already sick and tired of seeing billionaires win while the rest of us lose. We are sick of it, and we are fighting back.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, I want to say how much I appreciate the remarks of Senator Alsobrooks.
It is an honor to fight alongside you.
So here we are--100 days, 100 acts of corruption.
Today, I am reading into the Congressional Record 100 reports of corruption from Donald Trump's first 100 days in office.
Now, when he ran for office, Trump promised repeatedly--repeatedly-- that he would lower costs ``on day one.'' But instead of following through on his promise, Trump and his Trump administration have paved the way for the President, his top officials, and his billionaire buddies to personally feed at the trough of government corruption.
So count with me. In just 100 days, Donald Trump, his family, and his administration have:
No. 1, turned the White House into a Tesla dealership.
No. 2, fired independent Commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission.
No. 3, punished former officials who opposed his 2020 election lies.
No. 4, paid for the White House Easter Egg Roll by soliciting corporate sponsors who have business pending before the government.
No. 5, helped Trump's son set up a club--pay $500,000 for access to Trump's Cabinet.
No. 6, declared that there would be no tariff exceptions, then permitted Apple's CEO behind-the-scenes access, and, poof, iPhone tariffs were cut.
No. 7, created an opening for insider trading by reportedly giving Wall Street exclusive information about how trade talks were going.
No. 8, hosted million-dollar dinners between Big Pharma CEOs and their regulator, R.F.K., Jr.
No. 9, launched crypto meme coin right before the inauguration to make millions of dollars, then increased the value of those coins by signing Executive orders, making crypto a priority.
No. 10, launched a meme coin for Melania too.
No. 11, promised his ``rich-as-hell'' donors a giant tax handout and is working hard to deliver.
No. 12, weakened rules insulating government workers from politics.
No. 13, limited corporate foreign bribery investigations.
No. 14, halted enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act-- wouldn't want people to know what is going on.
No. 15, offered a private dinner with Trump himself and a special tour of the White House for the top 220 holders of his meme coin, permitting Trump and his family to profit both from the runup in the value of the coin and the increase in trading on the Trump platform.
No. 16, accepted $40 million for First Lady Melania's documentary from Jeff Bezos--way above the market rate.
No. 17, pointed to Bezos's multimillion-dollar documentary payment as a model when Warner Bros. asked Trump's team how to improve its own relationship with the White House.
No. 18, struck a deal with Amazon to stream Trump's old show, ``The Apprentice,'' which will mean more money for Trump, as Amazon is seeking tax breaks and other Federal benefits.
No. 19, coercing law firms to offer almost $1 billion in free legal work in an arrangement that experts say could run afoul of anti-bribery laws.
No. 20, started undermining Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices after Big Pharma gave millions to Trump's inauguration.
No. 21, filed a meritless lawsuit against ``60 Minutes'' and launched a baseless FCC investigation.
No. 22, tried to get the AP to bend the knee and kicked them out of the White House briefing room when they refused to bend the knee.
No. 23, hired Defense Secretary Hegseth's younger brother to serve in a key role.
No. 24, hired a longtime former partner of Don, Jr., to serve as Ambassador to Greece.
No. 25, nominated Jared Kushner's father to serve as Ambassador to France.
No. 26, selected Tiffany Trump's father-in-law to serve as an adviser.
No. 27, appointed an oil and gas executive to lead the Department of Energy.
No. 28, selected a Chief of Staff who was a big-time lobbyist for clients like tobacco and mining companies.
No. 29, named officials who had recently lobbied for oil and chemical giants to help write EPA rules. What could possibly go wrong?
No. 30, appointed Mehmet Oz, who had close ties to Medicare Advantage insurers--in fact, sold it on TV--to lead CMS to set payment rates and otherwise help out whom? Medicare Advantage insurers.
No. 31, appointed John Phelan, a major donor with no military or government experience, to lead the Navy and hand out Navy construction contracts.
No. 32, appointed Pam Bondi, a former lobbyist for a Federal detention contractor, to lead the DOJ.
No. 33, announced that the DOJ would stop prioritizing enforcement of restrictions on foreign lobbyists under the leadership of Bondi, who herself is a former foreign lobbyist for Qatar.
No. 34, appointed Howard Lutnick, who has billions invested in companies accused of illegally facilitating crypto money laundering, as the guy to lead the Commerce Department.
No. 35, appointed Marty Makary, the former executive of a company selling weight-loss drugs, to lead the FDA, which would be the Agency that would regulate his company.
No. 36, appointed Sean Duffy, who lobbied for the airline industry, to be the Transportation Secretary to regulate the airline industry.
No. 37, tapped Pete Hegseth, whose wife owns stock in large defense contractors, to lead the Defense Department and help hand out those defense contracts.
No. 38, tapped Doug Burgum, who made money from leasing land to Big Oil, to lead the Interior Department and manage the leasing to oil companies.
No. 39, nominated a Big Oil lobbyist to run the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
No. 40, nominated as IRS head Billy Long, an aggressive salesman for a fraud-riddled tax credit who received donations after being nominated so he could clear out old campaign debts.
No. 41, tapped Paul Atkins, a former crypto lobbyist, to lead the SEC that will regulate crypto.
No. 42, appointed a former tax lobbyist to lead tax policy.
No. 43, appointed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who planned to get paid for anti-vax lawsuits while he was heading up HHS and could affect the outcome of exactly those same lawsuits.
No. 44, appointed a top Pentagon official who led a firm investing in defense contractors and has directed DOD to outsource as much as possible to defense contractors.
No. 45, appointed someone who lobbied to privatize Medicare to lead OMB's healthcare budget.
No. 46, installed Steve Davis to effectively lead DOGE, while also leading another Musk company.
No. 47, installed another DOGE leader to control Treasury's payment system, while still holding down his day job, oh, as a software CEO.
No. 48, handed the power over crypto policy to a White House crypto czar, who leads a venture capital firm that heavily invests in crypto.
No. 49, selected a border czar, who led a firm that got tens of millions of dollars of Federal contracts for Homeland Security companies.
No. 50, appointed Treasury Secretary Bessent, who is gutting the IRS so that it can't audit rich tax cheats because he himself is a tax- dodging megamillionaire.
No. 51, pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois Governor convicted for corruption after his vocal support for Trump.
No. 52, pardoned January 6 insurrectionists who tried to overturn an election that Trump lost.
No. 53, pardoned a Trump loyalist found guilty of wire fraud.
No. 54, pardoned the son of a longtime Republican donor.
No. 55, pardoned a corporation that had been fined $100 million for money laundering.
No. 56, watched his own stablecoin while preparing to sign legislation that will help stablecoin and let Donald Trump oversee it.
No. 57, sold merch with Presidential branding.
No. 58, disbanded DOJ's crypto unit after business talks between Binance and a Trump-backed crypto company ramped up.
No. 59, halted SEC enforcement actions against crypto companies that enriched Trump personally.
No. 60, met with crypto executives who are asking Treasury to back off of oversight of their companies, all while simultaneously exploring a deal to list a Trump-linked crypto company's new stablecoin.
No. 61, maintain financial ties between Trump officials and Trump's media company that includes FBI Director Kash Patel, who was given a huge award of Trump media company stock.
No. 62, nominated Attorney General Bondi, who owned $2 million in DJT shares.
No. 63, paid the Education Secretary almost $1 million in Trump media company shares.
No. 64, nominated Intelligence Board nominees who have millions in Trump media company shares.
No. 65, selected a special envoy to the Middle East who wants to develop real estate in Gaza while running his own real estate firm while he is Special Envoy to the Middle East.
No. 66, appointed an FBI Director who consulted for the Qatari Government.
No. 67, picked that FBI Director, even though he also received millions of dollars from a Cayman Island holding company with ties to China.
No. 68, decided to cancel the Direct File Program. The cancellation of this program that lets taxpayers file their taxes online for free will help the bottom line of Intuit, which charges people for filing their taxes and that gave $1 million to Trump's inauguration.
No. 69, took its largest inauguration donation from a poultry company that was under DOJ's scrutiny. After the donation, the SEC approved its parent company for the New York Stock Exchange.
No. 70, dropped a probe into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump's Education Secretary's husband.
No. 71, hosted dozens of foreign Federal and State officials at Mar- a-Lago, helping enrich Trump.
No. 72, hosted a GOP retreat at another one of Trump's resorts, for which Trump's resorts get paid.
No. 73, circumvented the normal contracting process to pick a company with close ties to Trump's former campaign manager.
No. 74, awarded a $30 million ICE contract to Trump insider Peter Thiel.
No. 75, continued developing new Trump properties overseas, including in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
No. 76, hatched a plan for the State Department to pay Tesla $400 million.
No. 77, accepted a $4 million inauguration donation from a GOP megadonor and then nominated him as UK Ambassador on the same day.
Did anyone miss the message here?
And Donald Trump took actions so that he could advance the personal interests of his ``co-President,'' Elon Musk. How? Well, he fired EEOC leaders that were investigating and suing Tesla. He illegally fired the NLRB Chair, which had filed a complaint against SpaceX, one of Musk's companies. He gutted the CFPB staff and fired the Director after they investigated complaints against Musk's companies. He gutted the Department of Labor office investigating Tesla and SpaceX and fired the USAID inspector general who launched a probe into satellite terminals made by Musk's Starlink.
No. 83, targeted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration staff who were reportedly ``a thorn in Tesla's side.'' That is enough to fire them.
No. 84, said Musk would self-police his conflicts of interest--yeah, right.
No. 85, pressured the Administrator of the FAA, which fined Musk's SpaceX, to resign.
And No. 86, permitted Musk to keep his financial disclosure hidden. And, by the way, I have a new bill to fix that one in particular.
No. 87, allowed Musk's Starlink to start working with the FAA after Musk criticized the FAA's air traffic telecom system.
No. 88, made Musk's SpaceX the frontrunner for a new, lucrative Golden Dome contract.
No. 89, stood by Musk when his X executives told an advertising firm to increase ad revenue, threatening that Musk could interfere with their pending merger if they didn't play along.
No. 90, permitted Musk to join Trump's interview with the Air Force Secretary nominee while SpaceX held billions of dollars in contracts with the Air Force.
No. 91, permitted the National Transportation Safety Board to share news related to the airplane crashes in Washington and Philadelphia only on Musk-owned X.
No. 92, permitted the Social Security Administration to share important public communication only on X.
No. 93, dropped the Department of Justice's anti-discrimination complaint against Musk's SpaceX.
No. 94, fired FDA staffers reviewing Elon Musk's Neuralink clinical trial applications--a lot of benefits for Elon Musk there.
And for our closing six moves that make every bit of this corruption even harder to root out, Trump got rid of the cops on the beat.
No. 95, fired 18 inspectors general who make sure that Federal Agencies follow the law.
No. 96, fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, who protects whistleblowers and makes sure that civil service laws are followed.
No. 97, fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, who watches to see that the President and his administration follow the laws on conflicts of interest, bribery, and other ethical issues. The guy is gone.
No. 98, fired DOJ prosecutors who worked on the January 6 investigations.
No. 99, sidelined DOJ's office that reviews the legality of Executive orders.
And No. 100, gutted DOJ's office that prosecutes misconduct by public officials.
That is 100 corrupt acts in 100 days. Americans deserve accountability. We need to fight back--all of us.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, I have a question for my colleague from Massachusetts, if she would yield for a question.
In your knowledge of American history, has there ever been a Presidential first 100 days that showed this level of corruption that we are witnessing with this administration?
I appreciate the question. I want to say here that I have never seen, anytime in American history, this level of corruption over 8 years in the White House, much less in just 100 days.
This level of corruption is everywhere, all the time, and it truly undermines the ability of our country to function. It undermines our economy. It undermines our position in the world. It undermines the economic stability of our families. And it undermines our entire democracy.
I thank the Senator for the question.
Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator's speech in laying this out.
I am going to address another aspect of the first 100 days, which is about the phenomenal strategy of President Trump to undermine our Constitution; to undermine the separation of powers, the checks and balances, for the purpose of creating a strong-man state, which is also just an extraordinary, extraordinary experience to be living through.
The first 100 days of the Trump administration have plunged our Nation into a constitutional crisis unparalleled since the Civil War. How bad is it, and how will we respond? How will this Chamber respond? How will the House respond?
Our democratic Republic, with its separation of powers and checks and balances, is sliding into an unaccountable strong-man state.
To the first question--how bad is the constitutional crisis?--I summarize: worse than we could possibly have imagined. It is an authoritarian takeover, emboldened by a subservient majority in Congress, a deferential Supreme Court, and an aggressive, authoritarian President.
We all know that strong republics can slide into corrupt strong-man states. Witness Venezuela. Witness Turkiye. Witness Hungary. It can happen gradually. It can happen suddenly that Congress becomes a rubberstamp, that the courts defer to an aggressive Executive, the press softens its criticisms, and other institutions tread ever so carefully.
However often we have witnessed this happening elsewhere, however, we always thought that it could never happen here, not in the United States of America. It could never happen here because our commitment to the separation of powers is too secure, our 250 years of dedication to a democratic republic too established for it to ever happen here.
But the last 100 days have shown us that we were robbed. So tonight, I am ringing the alarm bells. The danger is clear. The danger is present. This crisis calls upon every patriot, every individual who cherishes a deliberative republic, every institution--whether it is Congress or the court or the people or the press or the university or the law firm--to use their heart and mind and sinew, their clout and their connections, to resist this authoritarian takeover and save our Republic.
In only 100 days, Trump has aggressively pursued five strategies to advance his authoritarian powers. The first strategy has been to willfully violate a host of Federal laws.
One hundred days ago, on January 20, I sat in the Rotunda of the Capitol, just down this hallway, halfway between here and the House of Representatives, for Donald Trump's inaugural address. It was not a traditional address. A traditional address is when the President lays out a vision and says: Here in our democracy, I will be working with Congress to pass laws to provide a foundation to implement that vision.
That is the way it works when power is divided between a court and an Executive and Congress. But instead, the speech that President Trump gave just down this hallway in the Rotunda didn't talk about working with Congress. It didn't talk about passing laws. He spoke only of governing by Executive order, as if he was already a King.
Well, governing by Executive order is exactly what he has done, with 26 Executive orders on that first day and over 130 Executive orders and counting as of now. And many of those Executive orders directly violate laws on the books.
He fired 17 inspectors general, violating a law that allows a President to fire an inspector general only for cause and with 30 days' notice to Congress.
He fired members of the Boards that lead independent Agencies, violating the law that provides these members with established terms and says that they can only be fired for cause.
Trump's targets have included Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, Rebecca Slaughter of the Federal Trade Commission, and quite a few others.
Trump violated the Antideficiency Act when Elon Musk and DOGE sent the ``fork in the road'' email to 2 million Federal employees, offering a buyout with pay through September 30, committing funds beyond the March 15 deadline that the law allowed.
Trump violated the Privacy Act of 1974 when Trump, Musk, and DOGE accessed sensitive personal information from the computers of the Social Security Administration.
Trump violated a 2018 law banning reductions in indirect costs covered by the National Institutes of Health research grants when he capped those rates at 15 percent.
The mastermind behind this strategy of deliberately, willfully breaking the law, time and time and time again, is one man. His name is Russ Vought.
Who is this man? He directed the Office of Management and Budget in the last year of Trump's first term. He is an architect of Project 2025, and he is leading the Office of Management and Budget for Trump's second term.
As the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, I interviewed him in my office before his nomination hearing, and he was very clear, very direct about his viewpoint. He is a proponent of the fringe unitary executive theory that says the President has complete authority over every element of the executive branch. The President, he believes, can ignore any detail in law passed by Congress and perhaps ignore any order by the courts that constrains how the President manages the executive branch.
Vought anticipates that when Trump's lawbreaking reaches the Supreme Court, a deferential Court will legitimize his unitary executive theory and hand vast power to President Trump.
Mr. Vought's deliberate desire to break the law and violate the separation of powers caused me to label him the most dangerous man in America. He is a direct threat to the entire vision of our Constitution.
I led a 30-hour debate here in this Chamber on his nomination to put a spotlight on him and on his ideas, but it was a party-line vote. Every one of my colleagues across the aisle looked to their loyalty to President Trump over their loyalty to the U.S. Constitution.
The second Trump strategy to expand the power of the President--the authoritarian power of the President--is to usurp Congress's article I power of the purse by impounding the funds that Congress has dedicated in law and long passed in the Senate and passed the House and signed by the President, impounding funds in those laws for specific programs. This is illegal. It violates the law, and it is unconstitutional, and it violates the separation of powers.
You know, Nixon tried this. He impounded funds for the EPA for fiscal year 1973. The Supreme Court ruled, when this case finally reached it in Train v. City of New York, that impoundments violate article I of the Constitution, which so clearly--this Constitution so clearly gives the power of the purse to Congress.
And when Congress passed the law in 1996 that gave the President a line-item veto on program funding, the Supreme Court ruled again, in Clinton v. City of New York, that Congress could not give to the President the power the Constitution reserves to this Chamber, to Congress.
It is worth noting that Trump had a choice. Instead of illegally impounding funds, he could have sent a legal rescission request to Congress. And there is a good possibility, perhaps a probability, that the Republican-led House and Senate would have passed that rescission. A rescission formally undoes a law by Congress reconsidering it. But he deliberately--he, being Trump--deliberately chose the illegal path of impoundments, the unconstitutional path of impoundments in order to put a case before the Supreme Court so the Supreme Court could rule--Trump and Russ Vought hope--for the unitary executive theory of power, the vision of a strong-man rule in our Nation rather than government by the people.
Note the parallel. Trump fired thousands and thousands of employees across this country. He could have done it legally through reductions in force, RIFs, but he chose to do it illegally. Why? To put a case before the Supreme Court so the Court could enhance the power of the President of the United States of America. It is that hope that they have for that deferential Court.
Trump and his team have impounded funds for so much now. There are so many cases in the courts. Court ruling after court ruling are saying: This is illegal. You cannot do this. This is unconstitutional.
But he just keeps doing it.
Electric vehicle charging stations, impounded. Security systems to Ukraine, impounded. Program funds for sanctuary cities, impounded. Immigration lawyers for 26,000 unaccompanied children, impounded.
But the most tragic example of impoundment is Trump's attack on the U.S. Agency for International Development.
On February 3, Elon Musk posted that he and DOGE had ``spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.'' Musk was bragging that he and Trump had destroyed an Agency in a single weekend, in violation of the law. They fired almost all of USAID's employees and canceled more than 5,000 contracts, crippling America's delivery of lifesaving aid around the world and, I might add, crippling relationships that create soft power for the United States of America to accompany the hard power of our military.
In February, a senior USAID official Nicholas Enrich estimated that a yearlong pause in AID's programs could cause between 71,000 to 166,000 additional deaths just from malaria, with huge increases in deaths from tuberculosis and infectious diseases like Ebola. Shortly after making these estimates, Enrich was fired.
Speaking the truth in this administration is a cause to be fired because the truth scares Donald Trump. He doesn't want the truth. He just wants
Another study estimates that shutting down USAID over 15 years could result in 25 million additional deaths worldwide. That is a hard number to digest--2 million more deaths from tuberculosis, 8 million more deaths from malaria, from malnutrition and other causes, and 15 million more deaths from AIDS, with PEPFAR shut down. And those 15 million deaths from AIDS generate 14 million additional orphans.
Just let that sink in. One illegal decision in one weekend by Musk and Trump putting AID in the wood chipper could result in millions of deaths. Illegal defunding and dismantlement, done in one weekend, to an Agency that constituted only one-third of 1 percent of our national spending in 2024 could result in more deaths than World War I.
Now you may say: Is this some crazy theory on the internet?
It was a study put together by prestigious medical organizations, groups like the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the New York University Grossman School of Medicine--serious people, serious modeling, serious understanding of what USAID does around the world.
And do you know what else his decision did? It created an enormous opportunity for China to move in and say, ``You can't count on the United States of America, but you can count on China,'' hugely undermining our standing and influence in the world.
That is what was done illegally in one weekend.
A third Trump strategy for amassing Executive power is to attack the constitutional power of the courts. The Founders gave the courts the power to address ``all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution,'' and that power includes the ability to strike down laws that violate the Constitution. It includes the ability to invalidate Executive actions that violate the laws or violate the Constitution. But for the court's check--this crucial check on Executive misuse of power--to be effective, the President must follow the decisions of the court, and that is why the oath of office is so important. You are taking an oath to the Constitution that lays out this structure of accountability.
But President Trump is stiff-arming the court. He is not honoring the Constitution. He is not honoring his oath to the Constitution.
He ignored Federal Judge James Boasberg's order not to deport Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, refusing to keep the planes on the ground or turn them around. He ignored the judge's order to provide details regarding the flights to El Salvador. And in a stunning stiff- arm to the Supreme Court, he refused to facilitate, after a 9-to-0 Supreme Court decision saying he must do so, the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador despite the Court's order.
In yet another confrontation with the Supreme Court, Vice President Vance claimed in February that ``judges aren't allowed'' to check Executive power.
Then, in March, Trump called for the impeachment of Judge Boasberg, calling him a ``crooked'' judge, a ``troublemaker and agitator.''
What in Trump's mind is a ``crooked'' judge? One who is actually ruling on the law because the last thing Trump wants is a judge who honestly rules on the law. He wants subservience.
This call for impeachment of a judge provoked a rebuke--a rare rebuke--from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said:
Calm language to address a massive constitutional violation.
Over the last 100 days, Trump has brazenly signaled to the courts that they should not interfere with his management of the executive branch.
A fourth authoritarian strategy by Trump is to attack the free press and free speech. Benjamin Franklin wrote that ``whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.'' Apparently, President Trump was paying attention because he is seeking to overthrow the liberty of our Nation, and he is trying to subdue the freeness of speech.
One of his tactics is to intimidate the free press by suing them. He sued the Des Moines Register for an inaccurate poll predicting he would lose Iowa. He sued CBS News for $10 million because he disliked its editing of an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris on ``60 Minutes.'' And he sued ABC News because George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found liable for ``rape'' when, in fact, he had been found liable not for ``rape'' but for ``sexual assault,'' under the detail of the law, in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit.
Trump hasn't just launched suits; he is succeeding in compromising our free press. ABC bent the knee, agreeing after Trump won and fearing for how Trump might misuse Presidential power, to pay Trump that $16 million to settle the case involving Stephanopoulos, even though Trump had, in the view of experts, little chance of prevailing in court.
And last week, Bill Owens, the executive director of ``60 Minutes,'' resigned, citing encroachment of his journalistic independence in the face of mounting pressure from Paramount, CBS's parent company, again potentially for fear of the misuse of Executive power that would compromise the success of Paramount.
A reported possible source of that pressure is from Shari Redstone, Paramount's controlling shareholder, who is reportedly eager to settle this issue to secure the Trump administration's approval for the multibillion-dollar sale of Paramount to Skydance.
Trump further pressured the press by playing favorites with access to White House events, barring the Associated Press from the White House press pool for continuing to use the name Gulf of Mexico instead of Gulf of America. It is a style manual question, and Trump doesn't like that a free press can choose its own style.
A judge ruled on April 8 that, under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalist, it cannot shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution, the court said, requires no less. But a week later, the White House was still excluding AP from the press pool.
In yet another action against the press, Trump has silenced the Voice of America. The Voice of America was created to counter propaganda from authoritarian governments in the Second World War. The Voice of America has grown to be a powerful check on disinformation from authoritarian governments. It broadcasted in 40 languages, bringing facts to bear against that propaganda from those strong-man states.
But now Trump has canceled that powerful counter to authoritarian governments around the world.
He is attacking free speech as well as the free press. Like many of us here, I was in the House Chamber last month for Trump's State of the Union Address when he claimed to have ``brought free speech back to America.'' That is completely wrong. The opposite is true. He has sought to end free speech in America, taking control of content at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian museums, canceling programs, firing employees, even scrubbing Federal websites simply because of words he doesn't like.
But most egregiously, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is using a 1952 Red Scare law--a McCarthyist law--to strip students and others of their visas and deport them, students like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University or Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University. Neither was accused of a crime. Both had simply exercised free speech. I think every Member here would have assumed that a student has the right to express their opinion on an issue because we are here in the United States of America.
You know, many of us grew up hearing the phrase: I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. That is the conviction behind free speech. I don't like what you say. What you say even makes me angry. But I defend your right to say it. I defend your right to have that opinion because we live here in the United States of America, where we honor free speech.
It is the freedom of the individual, and it is an important check on power that people can express it, can express it without having their documents canceled, without being arrested as they
This particular 1952 Red Scare McCarthyist law being used by the Secretary of State says an alien can be excluded if ``the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling [U.S.] foreign policy interest.''
``[A] compelling [U.S.] foreign policy interest.''
How does a student expressing an opinion on a campus somewhere compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest? Does it compromise our foreign policy interests when I say I disagree with some foreign policy venture? I have said it about Democratic Presidents, that I disagree with them. I have said it about Republican Presidents, that I disagree with them. So has virtually every single Member of this Chamber. That is freedom of speech. And we don't expect or believe that compromises the United States; we think it makes it stronger to have an actual debate of ideas, opinions expressed and hopefully considered.
It is an extraordinary law that came from another era where free speech was under attack. It is an extraordinary power to have vested in one person--the Secretary of State--that power to punish free speech. It is a chilling attempt to silence free speech that presents viewpoints out of favor with this administration, and it is wrong. It is wrong under our Constitution.
I would hope that every single Member of this Chamber would share the view that when they hear someone speaking with whom they disagree, they would still stand and defend that person's right to say it.
Note that there was no due process for students Rubio disfavored, just as there was no due process for the Venezuelan immigrants Trump sent to El Salvador.
``Due process''--those two words. What does it mean? And maybe it sounds like legal mumbo-jumbo. Due process is the guardian of our freedom. It means you cannot be grabbed by the government at their will, tossed into a van, and thrown into a prison because they cannot do so, they cannot take away our liberty or our rights without a fair, public process. That defends our freedom.
It is about freedom, but this administration isn't about freedom. They are about power, authoritarian power, about creating a strongman state. If we want to preserve freedom, we damn well better defend due process vigorously.
The fifth authoritarian strategy by Trump is to target other power centers in our communities, including law firms and universities.
Trump has attacked a host of major law firms, in some cases hamstringing the firms by suspending their national security clearances and therefore making them unable to represent their clients in key cases. He has done this to punish their past association with individuals or cases that threatened his power or to sway them from using their skills, their legal skills, in new efforts that might threaten that power.
The attacks that Trump has launched on law firms have generated some results. Skadden, Arps and Paul, Weiss have capitulated, agreeing, among other concessions, to end diversity policies and contribute millions of dollars of pro bono work to conservative clients. It is extortion. That is what this administration is involved in. They are using the power of the Presidency to take away the ability of law firms to operate in order to extort them to contribute free services to causes the President favors.
Well, these law firms--Skadden, Arps and Paul, Weiss--are not alone. As of a month ago, nine firms had surrendered, nine firms had bent the knee, agreeing to provide $1 billion in pro bono legal work for causes preferred by this administration. Again, it is extortion, and it is misuse of the President's power.
But some of the law firms actually believe in an America where a President cannot exercise this sort of extortion. Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale have fought back. They are challenging Trump's authority to do this. Impressively, more than 500 other firms have stood with them, signing briefs denouncing Trump's extortion.
Trump and his team have also pressed to reshape policies at universities by launching investigations of their practices and freezing millions or billions in their Federal grants--$510 million in Federal grants frozen at Brown University; $175 million in grants frozen at the University of Pennsylvania; $210 million frozen at Princeton; $2.2 billion in Federal grants frozen at Harvard University.
Some universities, like Columbia University, have capitulated. Others, like Harvard and Princeton, are fighting back.
A sincere compliment to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, who published an op-ed in The Atlantic when the first attack occurred on Columbia University. He called on presidents to ``speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.'' He said: This won't be the last university that is attacked. Not soon after, his own university was attacked. He noted that this attack on universities is ``the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.''
Looking back on these 100 days and these five strategies to convert a robust Republic, our robust Republic, with its checks and balances, into a strongman state, it raises a number of questions--questions that I hope folks will ponder.
First, Trump nominated a man, Pete Hegseth, to be Secretary of Defense who is fabulously unqualified for the position. He fired several highly capable, top-tier military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CQ Brown, and the Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Lisa Franchetti. These firings make plain that Trump doesn't value these professionals' management--nonpartisan management of our Armed Forces.
Is Trump seeking to fill these top tiers of our military with loyalists? If that is what he is up to--replacing these highly professional, impartial managers of our military enterprise with loyalists--what additional authoritarian risks does this pose for our Republic?
Second, what has the Supreme Court unleashed through its Trump v. United States decision? Last summer, less than a year ago, at the beginning of July 2024, the Supreme Court found some invisible ink in the Constitution. Grab your Constitution. Take a read of it. Where does it say in here that the President is above the law?
Our Founders were terrified that a President would try to become a King. They had just escaped one King; they didn't want another. Instead, they had a theory of the world: Equal justice under law-- equal. For the powerful and the nonpowerful, for the rich and the nonrich, equal justice under law.
It is carved into the stone above the pillars of the Supreme Court, which, if you go out the doors I am pointing out to my right and you continue down the hallway, there is another set of doors, another set of stairs, and you can see the Supreme Court straight across from here, and you can read ``equal justice under law.'' That is the principle. But I will tell you what--that Supreme Court last year decided no equal justice under the law. In fact, the President has complete immunity from committing a crime as long as he calls it a government act.
It is invisible ink in here somewhere, but I will tell you, the Founders are rolling over in their graves at this betrayal of the Constitution by this majority in the Supreme Court. Think about what they have done. You take this immunity from being accountable under the law and you pair it with pardon power, and you now have an entire executive branch that considers itself immune from the law, which helps explain some of the items I went over before--how there are deliberate and willful violations of law by this administration.
Quite a challenge for the future of our democracy has been created by the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court will have a chance to redeem itself. It never really considered how the combination of the new power they found in invisible ink that a President is above the law combined with pardon
A third issue is the stretching of laws that really don't even begin to convey the power that Trump has claimed.
We are all aware of the tariffs that he is setting and tearing down day after day. Tariffs are up. Tariffs are down. Tariffs over here. Exceptions over there. Oh, iPhones? Too important. Let's create an exception. Oh, cars are too expensive. Let's create an exception. Who knows? It is certainly not a foundation for companies to invest in America because it is chaos.
He is using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act as a legal basis to set tariffs. But read the act. It says nothing about powers of tariffs, nothing that gives the President the ability to raise and lower tariffs on one fiat after another. It provides power for sanctions and seizures, not tariffs. It has never been used by any other President to set tariffs.
There is no precedent for it, and there is no language in the law that serves it.
Or let's see him reaching further back into history, using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. That act was passed when our early Members of Congress were afraid that France would invade the United States, and they wanted to be able to deport French citizens who might help the French invasion, should it occur.
But Trump is using that as the legal basis for deporting Venezuelans, saying: There is an invasion of Venezuelans.
Well, clearly there is no invasion by the Venezuelan Government. This act was used, shamefully, in World War II, in particular, to lock up Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, and it is being used shamefully and inappropriately now.
It raises the question: What other ancient law is the President and Russell Vought going to dust off and use in a way that was never intended?
Whatever emergency power law--and there are 25, several dozen laws that provide emergency power--is the President going to dust off and say this gives me some additional ability? How might those laws be used in ways to reinforce the strongman state and erode our Nation?
And might the President invoke the power in article II, section 3, a power that is in the Constitution that says that the President can adjourn Congress? Of course, it was never intended to undermine the ability of laws to be crafted here or Congress to serve as a check on Executive power. It has never been used, in fact, by a President ever, but what is this President going to do with that power? Might he--given how he is stretching other laws, misapplying them in situations for which they were never intended--deliberately adjourn Congress to advance his goal of the strongman state?
And let's ponder a few questions that are specific to our Congress. Will Trump's impoundments and rescissions destroy the congressional process for drafting bipartisan spending bills? For fiscal year 2025, the year that started last October 1, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 11 of the 12 spending bills out of committee in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion. In fact, most of them were passed unanimously out of committee.
That was possible because compromises were struck. Compromises were the priorities of both parties, compromises for priorities of different regions of the Nation with different concerns.
Just think about the difference in types of natural disasters that strike different parts of our country. Some States endure hurricanes, others grapple with earthquakes. The Pacific Northwest, where I come from, battles wildfires. Different parts of the country have different needs. Different parts of the country have desires to have those needs met, resulting in compromises in these spending bills.
But if Trump is allowed to impound the funds for programs for the priorities of his political opponents of either party, then that destroys the foundation for these compromises since no Senator can be assured that the deal they are striking--you get what you need, but you agree to help me get what I need for my part of the country--no one can be assured that that compromise will be honored.
Second, what is the most effective way for Congress to confront Trump's authoritarian exercise of power? In the second week of March, just a month ago, with the authority for government spending set to run out on March 15, the Senate Democrats had the ability to reject the spending bill written by the House Republicans that created a massive slush fund for Trump to use as he pleases to reward or punish specific States or specific congressional districts.
Some on the Democratic side of the aisle here in the Senate argued Democrats should not block this bill because it posed a potential shutdown, and that shutdown had political and policy risks, given that Trump might love the opportunity to operate a shoestring government with the President deciding what constitutes essential services.
Others on the Democratic side of the aisle here in the Senate argued differently, believing that the risk to our Nation was much greater if we let Trump's authoritarian ambitions go unopposed and that history teaches us that the best time to confront an authoritarian is right away, before he amasses even more power.
Both of these arguments had some merit. We will face this decision again soon when the existing continuing resolution runs out on September 30. That will be a critical moment for Congress to confront the President and not hand him more power. We should be preparing for that moment now.
A third question specific to the operation of Congress: Over the next several months, the national policy debates are likely to be dominated by Republican pursuit of a reconciliation bill, a fancy term for a bill that has a special fast-track, simple majority, no filibuster path through the Senate. This bill is designed to cut $2 trillion from programs families use to thrive--healthcare, housing, education, good- paying jobs--gifts $2 trillion in tax breaks to the richest Americans. So families lose and billionaires, they win. That is the philosophy of this bill.
It also abandons the use of nonpartisan calculations of how much a specific policy will cost and instead decides to engage in smoke and mirrors so the American public won't realize what is being done. And it will explode the national debt, adding 7 trillion of additional debt over 10 years and 52 trillion of additional debt over 30 years. Families lose; millionaires win. And America's future is deeply damaged, perhaps drowned in an ocean of red ink created by this bill.
You know, it was stunning at the inauguration, the one that happened just down this hallway in the Rotunda, to see President Trump with a lineup of billionaires standing behind him. Some countries would call this oligarchs--oligarchs standing behind him.
Will Congress really pass a bill that takes away 2 trillion from families to give 2 trillion in tax breaks to the very richest Americans to buy the support of oligarchs? Is that what we are headed to--a strongman state in which Congress acquiesces in buying the support of the oligarchs?
We saw this happen just yesterday and today. Amazon was going to put up honest impacts on its website saying how much Trump's tariffs would add to the cost of products so people could see why they were being charged so much for things that were much cheaper a little while ago, but Trump in this relationship with the oligarchs called up Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, and said: That is bad for me. Don't do it.
Here is what is going on. Trump is doing what is good for the oligarchs, 2 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans, and then he is asking them to do his bidding, and that includes not being honest with the American people about the impact of his tariffs.
The first hundred days of Trump's administration has made clear that his quest for authoritarian power is a threat to the framework of our Constitution, to the separation of powers, to the checks and balances that must be fiercely resisted, fiercely resisted by Congress.
And I call my colleagues across the aisle: Remember your oath is to the Constitution. You did not take an oath to the President of the United States, not to one individual. That is what people do when they kneel to a King, and we are not a kingdom. We are a Republic, fiercely resisted by the courts, fiercely resisted by the people through
And to the American people across the country who are angry and disturbed by what is happening, who want to stop this authoritarian takeover, I have three suggestions:
Get off the couch. You can't help change the world curled up in a fetal position on your couch.
Second, fiercely hold your elected representatives accountable with your phone calls, with your mail, with your demonstrations outside their office. Hold your representatives accountable. That is what you get to do in a free nation.
And, third, join affinity groups. Being angry and frustrated alone is depressing. Being angry and organized with others is energizing and effective.
Next year, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. Let it be a celebration of our determination and our effectiveness in confronting and turning back Trump's authoritarian assault, a celebration of the reenergization of our constitutional framework and the vision of government by the people, not by the powerful.
We are participants in a 250-year relay of democracy, where the responsibility to govern ourselves has been handed from one generation to the next. We inherited it from our parents and our grandparents. Let's pass it on to your children and our grandchildren.
When Ben Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked: What type of government do we have?
He responded:
Let's keep it.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, we are closing things out here till midnight, but I do want to thank my colleague from Oregon for his passion for this country.
We all do dream of that world where, in fact, the people in this country can once more have a say in what is happening; that we do not have this chaos that is actually not what they bought into.
I just came back from a 19-county trip across my State, and people came up to me all the time and said: You know, I voted for you, and I voted for Donald Trump. But I voted for him because I thought he was going to bring costs down. That is not what is happening right now. Or I thought he was going to do something about housing because we don't have enough housing in rural Minnesota. Or I thought he was going to do something about childcare.
They actually, understandably, thought it because it was the stuff that he talked about in the campaign. But that is not what has happened in these first 100 days. In fact, what do we have? We have got costs are up; ask anyone in the grocery aisles. Corruption is up; look at the budget being proposed, $50 million in tax cuts for millionaires. And, yes, chaos is up.
Sadly, retirement savings are down. When you look at what has been happening with the market, we haven't seen this kind of decline in the first 100 days--I don't think it has been since Richard Nixon that we have seen this kind of a drop.
So in his campaign, the President promised ``to lower prices on day one.'' Instead, Americans are paying more today than we did on January 20. And then you look at the tariff taxes: $4,000, $4,000 per family, $200 of that an increase in groceries. That is what it is; it is a tariff tax.
At the pharmacy, prescription drugs will cost Americans an extra $70 a year, and clothing prices will soar more than $900 a year.
Look, Elon Musk is going to be able to afford that. Millionaires, billionaires, OK, they can afford this doubling of certain prescriptions. They can afford things going up at the grocery store. Agriculture prices going up like they were--they can afford that. But regular people, people who aren't in the Trump Cabinet, can't afford that.
When you talk to people out there--I am not talking about activists, as much as I am excited that they are showing up at things. I am just talking about people that maybe have never even gone to a townhall meeting before.
I had one case where a farmer was sitting next to a woman who had one of the signs that said ``This is not normal.'' She is right, it is not normal, but he didn't know what that meant.
He said to her: I am normal. What do you mean?
She said: No, it is not normal.
Well, he wasn't an activist. He was just someone that is worried that his whole life's work is going to go to waste because he is a soybean farmer, and that market is going to dry up where he sells his soybeans in China because, guess what, they are going to look to buy from Brazil.
People are worried about costs and their own families. They are worried about healthcare access and the impact of Trump's tariff taxes on the economy; people who live on fixed incomes, and suddenly those costs are ballooning or they saved in a 401(k) or some other retirement savings, and that has gone down to where they didn't expect it. Then they try to call Social Security to figure out what they are going to get or they are getting or they have a spouse who died.
One man who I met with--I could not believe his story. He has worked with Social Security before. His wife died in January after a long illness, and he emailed, and they asked for his fingerprint. He couldn't do that online, but he kept emailing. Then he called. Then he finally had to drive into Brainerd, MN, to get to the office. Then he finally ended up having to call our office, and we figured it out for him. That is happening now.
I think about the businesswoman Beth Benike from southern Minnesota. She is an Army veteran and the owner of a little company called Busy Baby and this year's Minnesota Small Business Person of the Year. She is feeling really good about that. She has a business where she gets mats for highchairs so these little babies can't throw things over. Many of us who are moms remember that. All of a sudden, in come those tariffs.
So some big businesses and their CEOs have a red carpet to the White House. You know, Tim Cook--I am glad he saved his phones. But he is able to make a call to the President at any time, and he can go in there. Beth Benike at Busy Baby doesn't know the President's number. She can't just waltz in there. She can't just go and make a call and make sure that they are going to take care and make an exemption for her Busy Baby gear.
Maybe the other ones got to go to that special, secret investment meeting at J.P. Morgan with the Treasury Secretary. That soybean farmer at the townhall meeting was not invited to that meeting. The owner of Busy Baby was not invited to that meeting. So they don't actually know. Maybe they revealed what countries are close to trade agreements.
Today, the Commerce Secretary claimed he has an agreement with a secret country--his words--secret agreement. But my constituents who are living on the margin, who, maybe because of input costs for their business or their farms or their ranches or because of a weather event for farmers or because of avian flu for some of our poultry producers-- they are just on the edge. They are on the edge, and they just barely make it every year or maybe one year, they have a really good year.
But these tariffs for them came out of nowhere. They actually never would have believed that this would have been going on as long as it has.
You know, one of the problems is that even if it gets fixed, a lot of those markets may not come back because we have become undependable to other countries.
If we continue along this path, as we have already seen--the farmers told me: Sometimes, because we need consistency, we figure out what crop we are going to plant, what seeds we are going to plant. But we are really not sure. It is a guess for us now because we don't know about soybeans with China or ethanol--40 percent goes to Canada. But we don't know which ones we are going to get the trade agreement with.
They need consistency.
So what happens when they don't have that consistency? Well, they
The supply chains get messed up. They don't know--one of my major manufacturers, about 20 percent of their parts come from China, but they employ nearly 10,000 people in America, and they put stuff together. They don't know which parts are going to be available or not because they probably don't get them directly from one company. They don't get them directly from China; they get them from someone in the middle who doesn't know if they are going to get them. There is an incredibly complex supply chain in this country.
We learned during the pandemic the hard way, the sad way, what happens when that supply chain gets messed up. If just one thing is missing, a piece of a part that goes on some furniture manufactured in North Carolina, but they need some parts from somewhere else, then you can't have it at the room and board in Minneapolis. That is what got messed up during that time with the supply chains.
Those were the simplest examples.
When you have this intricate supply chain, as leaders of this country, when we take out things like tariffs, we do it in a targeted fashion, but we also do it in a smart way, and the best way to do it is with trade agreements.
One of the things that always confused me about the President going after Canada the way he has--we congratulate Prime Minister Carney, who just won his election. One of the things that really confused me about these attacks on one of our biggest allies, the incredible country of Canada--the attack of calling it our 51st State--it was this country, Canada, that fought alongside our soldiers in two world wars; it was this country, Canada, that was there as the first ones on the ground outside of America after 9/11; it was this country, Canada, that, on their Embassy, had draped for years, when others sometimes didn't even want to admit they were America's friend, ``friend, ally, partner.'' That is the country you are going to mess around with?
In my State, it is the top trading partner, and it actually eclipses the next three added together. This is the State--my State--that is the fourth biggest ag-exporting State in the country, that has multiple Fortune 500 companies but also has very successful small- and medium- size businesses.
So that is the messing around and the chaos we are talking about. That creates a situation where some of our best friends who love coming to America for vacations--they will go to Minnesota to go fishing even though they have a lot of lakes in Canada. They will go to Vegas. They will go to our national parks. They will go to New York City. They will go to see one of their Canadian hockey teams play an American hockey team. But do you know what is happening now? They are not just booing at those hockey games. What is happening now is they are canceling their trips, so they are not coming at all. It is viewed as a sign of patriotism because of what President Trump has been saying about the people in their country. They are predicting a 70-percent reduction in Canadians coming to America.
I was just up in a small town on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. They have already seen like 15 percent down in just 1 month in border crossings. Average tourists, when they visit from another country, spend $4,000 in our country. That is going to restaurants-- waitresses, waiters, jobs, chefs. That is money spent on going to small community theaters or going to the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN. That has a huge number, in normal--normal--conditions, of Canadian visitors.
That is the mess just with one country. I could use similar examples with Mexico--40 percent of corn to Mexico. I could use examples from some of our best allies--Japan, South Korea, Europe--countries that have stood with us through thick and thin. But just slap a tariff on it, and say it is paused but keep it in place. What is this going to do to, yes, our national security but also to our relations with the rest of the world?
That is why, when you see these public opinion polls, two-thirds of Americans say they don't like these tariffs or tariff taxes across the board--so many polls in the last week assessing these 100 days. Americans say they don't like the way Donald Trump has handled this economy--nearly two-thirds of them say that. His approval rating is down to lower than any President in the last 80 years since they started to do polling. People have noticed. It is their livelihoods.
Unfortunately--I would love to tell them: Hey, that is going to turn around tomorrow. They have these secret deals. They are going to negotiate.
I don't actually believe that anymore. I never really did.
But then to compound everything, you have this billionaire budget going on. To pay for these tax cuts--I think it is $37 trillion total in 30 years, but when you take out the tax cuts for people making under $400,000--some of the ones that I strongly support--when you take those out, you are left with about $25 trillion. You have $25 trillion added debt in those 30 years.
What is it all about? How are we going to find ways they think will pay for these tax cuts for these millionaires and billionaires? Well, why not do it on the backs of working Americans? Because that is the proposal from over in the House, where they have suggested hundreds of millions of dollars--something like $800 billion--$800 billion. And the way they have done it, the Congressional Budget Office has looked at it, and they say the only way this will work is if you make reductions to Medicaid. Eighty million Americans are on Medicaid. In my State, one out of two people in nursing homes is on Medicaid. One out of five people overall in our State is on Medicaid for their healthcare.
One constituent from Mora, MN, told me that Medicaid helps her afford a direct-support professional for one of her daughters who has a complex developmental disability. You have people who are in nursing homes.
This is what is interesting about this. It is not just our seniors who are on Medicaid; it is our family members. When my dad got sick late in his life--he lived into his nineties--he was in a nursing home. I knew exactly the day his savings were going to run out. We calculated it because we knew that the place he was staying didn't take Medicaid. I knew the exact day, the exact week, the exact month we were going to move him. We were going to move him to Catholic Charities. They said they would take him. It was about a year after he died that that date hit, but I knew that date. So many families know exactly what I am talking about. That is real--if we start messing around with Medicaid-- the effect that is going to have on families.
Then there is food assistance, which is big-time on the chopping block. I think the farm bill estimates for the Senate bill would be about $1 billion down, but in the House, it is $230 billion. Food assistance for 42 million Americans, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 1 million veterans is on the chopping block.
If you cut that in this reconciliation bill, if that gets cut under the Trump budget and it gets transferred to the States--Texas alone-- let's say you have 20 percent. That is a number that was thrown out in the House. Texas would have to take out of the State budget over $1 billion. This is in part because of the escalating costs of groceries-- $18 billion overall for the Nation.
When we talk about costs being up, we talk about real people, not just what is happening with Wall Street and the shock it meant to the market and the stocks going down. It is real people and their livelihoods.
What else is up? Chaos is up. Yes, the billionaires' budget is cruel, but so is the chaos that people are experiencing every day.
Social Security--I used that one example already. They proposed stopping phone service on a number of Social Security claims. There was so much pushback from AARP and seniors, I heard that they rolled it back some, but it still does not allow the phone answerers for certain things.
I mentioned the widower, the 79-year-old from Crosslake who couldn't get the Social Security benefits after his wife died. That is unacceptable.
They have also attacked food safety inspections, cutting medical research out there, of course, when all those probationary employees were fired and then, of course, brought back because of court orders because this wasn't legal, because we in Congress, Democrats and Republicans--a Republican-run House and a Democratic-run Senate--had actually authorized that money and put a budget together that passed the Congress and was signed into law.
Servicemembers, classified battle plans on unclassified Signal chats, releasing the address of a secret CIA facility, sharing the names of 200 CIA officers in an unclassified email, planning to lay off 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs--that will, of course, increase wait times. You can't decimate this. You could--as a CEO would do, you could go in there and say: OK. How can I do more with less? Where do I want to move employees? What are my important priorities?
That is not what happened. DOGE came in there and did this before most of those Cabinet members were even in.
When our soldiers sign up to serve, when people in this country want to serve our country, there is not a waiting line; and when they come home to the United States of America and they need their benefits, they need a job, they need healthcare, they need a place to live, there should never be a waiting line in the United States of America.
But no amount of chaos has blinded Americans to this issue of corruption. There have been attacks on the rule of law, attacks on our Constitution, attacks on our system of checks and balances. Of course, as I have discussed before, one of the President's first acts was to pardon those who attacked law enforcement heroes, who defended our democracy and the Capitol on January 6. He has used our justice system to reward friends and punish who he considers his enemies. I have multiple examples of this.
I think of one guy Chris Krebs, who was running the Agency that made sure that our cyber was safe, that our elections were safe. He did this during the last Trump administration, and he did a good job. He worked with the military, and he came out of this and said after that election that, in fact, it was a safe election. It was exactly what Bill Barr, President Trump's Attorney General at the time, said--that it was safe. This made the President mad. He fired Chris Krebs. All of a sudden, just in the last month, he mentions Chris Krebs again--the guy who had the audacity to make sure that our elections were not broken into by a foreign country, that we didn't have data stolen--and he says he should be investigated.
Or how about the taking away of security clearances on people whom he doesn't like? Or how about just deciding ``this university I am going to go after, not this one. I will go after that one. I will go after that one.'' One of the things I have seen that I believe we didn't see at the beginning of all of this that is worth noting is more and more other universities that aren't being targeted have come together, all signing a letter saying: No. This isn't right. Or law firms, the ones who aren't being targeted, saying: Wait a minute. This isn't the rule of law. You should be able to represent clients even if they are people you don't agree with.
I have been at law firms. I know what this is like. I may not agree with every client that our law firm represented. And I have also been in politics. I might not like a story that was written about me. I might not like what has happened in a certain race, but I don't go after the media and say that they are enemies of the state, which is what the President's FBI Director did.
The President has also--as you know, while the administration has agreed with some court orders--OK. Great. It is important for probably most of them--they just pick out ones they are not going to agree with here and there. That is not how the law works.
Access to personal financial data that was given to Elon Musk and illegally firing independent watchdogs from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to inspectors general, to the FTC. Why would you fire the very people who are rooting out the waste and fraud that you claim you want to root out? In 2023 alone--I will use the example of the FTC--the FTC returned more than $330 million to consumers who lost money from scams and deceptive business practices.
We always had a Commission and Commissioners from both parties. They didn't always agree on everything, but it was actually a functioning Agency. They are actually the ones who are bringing that case against Meta right now, which was supported by both Republican and Democratic Commissioners. Unfortunately, the President fired the two Democratic Commissioners illegally. They are contesting it, but that happened.
Another example: Since it was established just 14 years ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has returned more than $21 billion to Americans. Why would you want to get rid of that? President Trump is attacking these consumer watchdogs while giving Musk deals and while giving tax breaks and tariff exemptions to those who just happen to have a connection to be able to get them.
This is not what the American people voted for. The American people might disagree greatly on issues, but they did not vote for costs going up. That is for certain. They wanted costs to go down. They did not vote for someone who is engaging in: Hey, I am going to get rid of this person because I don't like him. I am going to cut off this grant because I don't like it. I don't like this program, even though Congress authorized it. Even though it is illegal to stop it, I am going to try.
They didn't vote for that, and they certainly didn't vote for this chaos. Life is hard enough right now without having this chaos.
So what is happening? The courts and the Congress are constituents. That is what is happening. So when you look at these court cases across the country, there have been over 200 so far. There have been over 100 instances where judges--and this is really important to know that there are major cases handled by judges appointed by President Trump himself where those judges said: No. This is wrong. Under our laws, this is wrong and under our Constitution.
There have been cases by Bush judges and, yes, Reagan judges, including a very recent one by Judge Wilkinson, who is a revered conservative judge on the circuit court, who upheld the district court's decision and said the district court judge had done the right thing under the law when it came to the wrongful deportation of a man who they have now admitted was a mistake. They have made very clear that he shouldn't have been deported, that it was a mistake. Then when they tell him that they should, in fact, remedy their mistake by bringing him back and U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen actually went to the country to get his constituent and was able to meet with him, it became very clear they could get that guy who was mistakenly deported back. That is called when you follow the law and you do the right thing, because, in America, the President is not King. The law is King.
How else do we hold them accountable? Congress. We are holding people accountable when we do oversight hearings, but now we just avoid it. We hold them accountable when we have votes, just like had happened on the Canada tariff bill that Senators Kaine and Warner and I put forward. It basically said the President didn't have the authority to say there was an emergency at the Canadian border, because there wasn't. Four of our Republican colleagues stood up--Senators Collins and Murkowski, whose States border with Canada, and then Senator Rand Paul and Senator Mitch McConnell, in Kentucky, which does a lot of ag. I know they have a lot of soybeans; they have a lot of exports; they also have bourbon that was being taken off the shelves, Kentucky bourbon, in the country of Canada. They understand that that is really hitting their constituents in a big way, and they stood up when it came to tariffs. It passed. Now it is sitting over there in the House of Representatives in the Speaker's freezer somewhere next to the frozen peas. I don't know, but nothing is happening right now on that, and it should, because we should actually have votes on this. Then if the President wants to veto it, go ahead. Then we could override his veto if people stood up, and this madness would stop about the Canadian tariffs. We could go
We are also doing this with our constituents by our side, and this means, to me, yes, some of the loudest voices in the room with the big townhalls and people at the microphone. Someone I ran into the other day who was not used to politics called them open mic events. Yeah, those are happening, but what is more important to me is some of the smaller ones in small towns of 1,000 people, in rural towns, with people showing up from local businesses, with people showing up from the Farmers Union, from the Farm Bureau, with people explaining what is going on in their lives in a real way, people telling the stories of trying to call Social Security. Or the two women I met who are in the middle of cancer trials that have been incredibly successful, and no one gave them a chance to live at the University of Minnesota, and they went through this cancer trial, and now they don't know what is going to happen because, while some of those cuts were put off, when you start threatening the universities, when you start threatening the funding that makes those cancer trials possible, when you have so much chaos and you want people to leave and you gave them all these buyouts and you say: Please go away, they are going to find other jobs, especially people in the medical profession where we know it is hard to keep people because they have other opportunities.
That word ``opportunity'' is really what people ask me about. What do you think we are not talking about enough when it comes to this chaos? You know, maybe we are not talking enough about what is going on in the world. I think people are starting to do that. But I think what people are not talking enough about is this opportunity that we are squandering away because of the mapping of the human genome.
Because of the investments Democrats and Republicans made together the last 11 years, every year we have increased funding to NIH--this incredible development of personalized medicine. So when you find out you have cancer, they can better figure out what your treatment should be and try to use the least invasive procedure possible, as happened to me, so that you can get through this with the breast cancer, with a lumpectomy, and you can get through it with just 5 days of radiation. You can be back at work that night. You may be a little tired, but you can.
That never would have happened 20 years ago. I don't know if I would even have been standing here. But because we invested as a country in the technology and in the work that had to be done, we are where we are, and now we are on the cusp, thanks to that mapping of the human genome, the personalized medicine, all the information we are gathering, and, yes, AI, if done and used professionally and ethically. We are on the cusp of leading the world again when it comes to curing rare diseases and when it comes to the next great big thing.
But that is not going to happen if we suddenly pull back, and people start quitting all of our research facilities and go do their clinical trials in other countries because it is more dependable, which is what is happening right now. That is not going to happen if FDA inspectors-- which it is very hard to get these doctors and medical professionals who can look at medical devices and make a decision. That is not all going to happen if they start leaving because of the negativity coming from the White House about their work, because of the forced departures, because the incentives put in place cannot keep them there, which is what we should be doing rather than incentivizing them to leave.
On the day of the inauguration, I had the opportunity to speak for, like, 4 minutes, and I picked every word really carefully. I knew it was an important event. I knew what my role was--I would have done it no matter who won--but on that day, I made three points, and I think they are still more relevant than ever. I wanted to pick three things that I thought would stand the test of time.
The first was that, before this and certainly now, our democracy has been a hot mess. There is a mess of division, and I think it has gotten much worse. But it is our job as citizens, especially as elected Representatives, to be the ``shelter from the storm,'' to quote Bob Dylan, a great Minnesotan. A shelter from the storm--that is what our democracy should be: a place where people civilly debate things and come up with a compromise and get through all this, and it is still on all of us, especially in the U.S. Senate--what has been called the world's great deliberative body--to do that.
The second thing: In America, the inauguration is not held in a gilded palace. It is not held in an executive office building. It is held in the ``People's House.'' It is held in the Congress for a reason because we have three equal branches of government. That means we have a court that decides the law. That means we have a Congress that should be able to show its weight. And all of these Representatives, duly elected in each State and each congressional district over in the House--and show its authority on behalf of the people whom we represent. That means taking on these tariffs and votes. That means making sure this is a fair budget for the people of this country.
And the third and final thing that I believe will stand the test of time is, remember that day in the Rotunda and there were all those powerful billionaires in that room and there were also the people's representatives in that room, but the thing that we had in common, from a freshman Member of the House of Representatives to the President of the United States that day, is the power did not come from within that room; the power came from outside of that room, from the people.
So what you are seeing right now in the form of, yes, townhalls, also in the form of rallies, yes, but also in the form of regular people writing our offices, burning up the phone lines, showing up at events, talking to you at a grocery store, talking to you on Main Street, and they are saying: This is not OK, Senator; this is not OK, Representative; I need you to do something about it. That is the power of the people from outside this building. That is the power of the people who gave us the honor of serving in this building.
So as we look at these first 100 days of this chaos, of these costs going up, of the retirement funds going down, we still have to remember why we are here. So instead of throwing our hands up in the air, either side, and saying: Oh, what can I do? This is our moment in the U.S. Senate to stand up, our moment to stand up on tariffs, our moment to stand up on this budget. All we need is, like, four Republicans in the House of Representatives to stand up and say ``enough is enough'' and listen to their constituents instead of rubberstamping what this President wants. This is truly our moment to do that.
With that, I yield the floor.
