From the Speech by Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Thank you all for inviting me here today. I’m delighted to be with you. This is a dangerous moment for America and for the world. A global contest is escalating between democratic institutions governed by the rule of law and lawless dictators who seek to enrich themselves and their cronies. Here at home, President Trump’s terrorists are driving up costs for families. Millions of Americans have lost their health insurance so that Republicans could fund tax breaks for rich people. Ice is sowing chaos and terror in our communities, resulting in the tragic killing of Renee Good in Minnesota. And Donald Trump’s view of the First Amendment is that he gets to say whatever he wants and he gets to use power of government to silence, export, bankrupt, or even prosecute anyone who criticizes him. Acting like a want to be dictator that he is, Trump is trying to push out the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and complete his corrupt takeover of America’s central bank so that it serves his interests along with his billionaire friends. And he has invaded Venezuela to boost the profits of oil companies and has announced that he will run the country.
Now, none of this would be happening if Democrats hadn’t been wiped out in 2024. And according to some self-described experts, Democrats lost power because we were too progressive. For a lot of powerful people, wealthy people from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington, too progressive is code used to undermine any economic agenda that favors working people. Look, they put it more politely, but these movers and checkers want the Democratic Party to respond to between 2024 losses by watering down our economic agenda and sucking up to the rich and powerful, claiming that a less progressive Democratic Party will win more elections. They are wrong. Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a written system in order to fix it. Revising our economic agenda to tiptoe around that conclusion might appeal to the wealthy, but it will not help Democrats build a bigger tent, and it definitely will not help Democrats win elections. A Democratic Party that worries more about offending big donors than delivering for working people is a party doomed to fail. In 2026, in 2028 and beyond.
So let’s start with some basic math. By definition, the top 110. 1% of the economic ladder doesn’t have a lot of votes. So when the question is raised whether Democrats should build our tent by sucking up to the rich, is sure not about attracting your votes. It’s about attracting their money. There are, of course, extremely wealthy people who are also deeply publicly minded. For some, it’s about living their values. For others, it’s the recognition that massive economic instability is ultimately bad for business. Either way, these very wealthy people advocate for better health care and universal childcare. They embrace sensible regulations to stop corporate scalops. They press the government to raise taxes, including on themselves and their businesses. Over and over, they push for an economy that works for everyone. But there is a different and frankly much larger group of extremely wealthy people trying to influence policy. This group might align with Democrats on some social issues. They certainly are not a Republican. But they’re also not interested in changing an economic game that is already rigged in their favor. In any change for their financial support, they insist that the Democratic Party turn its economic agenda in a direction that mostly benefits the wealthy and further undermines the economic stability of tens of millions of families all across this country.
These people push Democrats to embrace candidates who will slow off popular economic policies. They lobby for deregulation and special tax rates that will pad their own bottom lines. They promote making big-time corporate lawyers federal judges. They pressure presidents to appoint tepid leaders at regulatory agencies, people who, once in a half, seem positively allergic to enforcing the law when that might make life uncomfortable for big business interests. In their effort to shape the democratic agenda, the ultra wealthy, wheeled, outsized power. And we all know why. Rich people can fund superpacks to prop up political campaigns for their chosen candidates. They can fund their own lobbying efforts. They can build or simply buy whole media empires in order to bend the news to their liking. And as we’re seeing right now with AI and crypto, they can try to crush anyone who gets in the way of their business interests. Over the past generation, the wealthy have avoided accountability time and give. Regular Americans must play by every rule face real consequences. You don’t need to read every news article about Jeffrey Epstein and his good buddies like Larry Somers and Donald Trump to understand how consistently rich and powerful insiders protect each other, regardless of politics and regardless of how obscene the situation has become.
The Epstein scandal is real and enormous, but the slew of white-colored pardons issued in recent months by President Sloan reflects the same, the rules only apply to someone else mentality that pervades Washington. So how does this affect winning elections? After the 2024 election, pundits, slice and dice demographic groups across race, age, religion, and geography to show how Democrats need to grow our coalition in order to win again. And yes, we need support from rural voters, men and voters without a college degree. And yes, in 2025, we went back to some of these folks, partly because Democratic candidates from every wing of the party ran against Trump’s betrayal of working people on affordability issues. But in the long run, to build a strong Democratic Party with a sturdy big tent. It is not enough simply to attack Trump. Democrats need to earn trust, long term durable trust across the electorate. Trust that we actually understand what’s broken and trust that we have the courage to fix it, even when that means taking on the wealthy and the well connected. Democrats weren’t always It’s just the default option when the other guys were worse. Once, we were trusted by working people to fight for their interests.
And we delivered, even against tough Republican opposition. Social Security, strong unions, the 40-hour work week, over time, Medicare, Medicaid, homeownership for veterans, the first-time homebuyers, the Affordable Care Act, over and over and over. We showed that we fight and we could deliver. I understand the temptation in this moment of national crisis to sand down our edges, to avoid offending anyone, especially the rich and powerful who might finance our candidates. But we can’t win unless we rebuild trust. And we can’t rebuild trust by excommunicating Biden administration law enforcers who, for the first time in decades, actually thought to hold corporations accountable for driving up prices. We can’t rebuild trust by calling up Elon Musk when he tussles with Trump and offering him whatever he wants if he’ll come back to our side and kick in a few nickels for our candidates. We can’t rebuild trust by staying silent about the abuses of corporate power and tax fairness, simply to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the already rich and powerful. I understand that because of our broken campaign finance laws, Democrats need to raise a lot of money, and I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament against the Republicans.
But money is not the only ingredient for a successful election. When Democrats water down their economic platform to appeal to wealthy donors, whether the transaction is explicit or subtle, we squander trust with working people, and the money just isn’t worth it. Yes, Democrats need a big tent. But there are two versions of what a big tent means. One vision says that we should shape our agenda and temper our rhetoric to flatter any fabulously rich person looking for a political party that will entrench their own economic interests. The other vision says we must acknowledge the economic failures of the current rig system, aggressively challenge the status quo, and chart a clear path for big structural change. If we are going to pick up the broken pieces from the 2024 election and build a durable terrible big tent, we must acknowledge a hard truth. The Democratic Party had not pursued both visions at the same time. Either we politely nibble around the edges of change or we throw ourselves into the fight. Either we carefully craft our policies to ensure that the rich people write on getting richer, or we build a party that ferociously and unapologized energetically serves the needs of working people.
Democrats have a choice to make, and the first step in rebuilding trust is to admit that we have to choose. Over the past year, I’ve often been asked about the abundance agenda and how it fits into the conversation about the future of success of our party. When this agenda is about making government more effective, count me in. The consumer financial protection bureau was built in the spirit of abundance before abundance was hit. The agency consolidated scattered authorities and streamlined bureaucratic processes. And best of all, it worked. Every year, the agency rooted out the fraudsters and returned more than a billion dollars to people who had been cheated. The CFPB should be a poster child for government efficiency. And sure, there are plenty of other places where we can cut red tape. But we should make a clear diagnosis of the problem. Where well-intentioned regulations have simply gone off the rails, we should fix them. But ongoing inefficiencies that we cannot seem to fix often exist because powerful people have captured the regulatory process and they use regulations to block improvements that would bite into their own profits. Look around. For years, I fought for a simple, free government tax filing system so nobody has to pay a couple of hundred bucks just to file their taxes.
Every step of the way, the giant tax prep companies have thrown up roadblocks to stop it. When the IRS finally built a free and wildly popular filing option for American taxpayers, the tax prep companies swooped in to kill it the minute that Donald Trump took office. One of my favorite legislative achievements in the Senate is a bipartisan law I got enacted to cut the price of hearing aids by thousands of dollars by overriding a bunch of state-level regulatory hurdles. But even Even after we got it signed into law, it faced years of delay and nearly died because hearing aid manufacturers mobilized to protect inefficient regulations that kept consumer prices and corporate profits high. Don’t even get me started on the defense industry blocking legislation that would have guaranteed our military the right to repair their own equipment. So yes, we need more government inefficiency a lot more. But many in the abundance movement are doing little to call out corporate culpability and billionaire influence in creating and defending those very inefficiencies. Instead, abundance has become a rallying pride, not just for a few policy nerds worried about zoning, but for wealthy donors and other corporate-aligned Democrats who are putting big time muscle behind making Democrats more favorable to big businesses.
It looks like the corporate tycoons have found one more way to stop the Democratic Party from tackling the rig system with too much energy. Consider the case of Reid Hoffmann, one of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party, according to the New York Times. Now, he’s the same billionaire who donated $7 million to supporting Kamala Harris, and then spent much of the campaign publicly pressuring her to fire Lena Khan as FTC chair. Now, remember, the central challenge confronting the Harris campaign was affordability, and Chair Khan was doing more in that fight than pretty much anybody else in government. Pauline show that strong majorities supported taking on powerful corporations, and the FTC was leading the in charge. Democratic leaders, including labor unions and civil rights groups, and progressives like Bernie and me, and moderates like Jim Kleiberman, John Hickenlooper, all spoke up for Khan. There was Reid Hoffmann, a man with close ties to two of the biggest corporations under fire from the FTC, Microsoft and Facebook. Hector and Harris to promise that she would fire the FTC chair. Now, to her credit, the vice President didn’t promise to fire Neva Khan, but she didn’t promise not to fire her either.
Now, it wasn’t just corporate influence at the FTC. In August, Harris complained that she would address high costs facing families by putting in place tough corporate price gouging laws. Later, according to the New York Times, she narrowed those proposals after a, corporate ally, after the campaign badgered her into doing so. Now, keep in mind, that story of retreat ran just weeks before the Democrats lost an election to Donald Trump, who loudly, day after day after day, promised he would lower costs for families on day one. Now, we are in a new election cycle. And according to Axios, Reid Hoffman is sending everyone he knows a copy of Esra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book on Abundance and backing grow among these families. And on his podcast, Hoffmann has used the framework to argue against regulations that slow down data center construction. That’s right. When families are already getting crushed by rising costs and a data-centered boom means even higher utility costs. When affordability is front and center in voters’ minds, Hoffmann wants Democratic candidates to stand with the billionaires for higher costs. Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families, instead of on full-throated economic populist ideas is a terrible plan for winning elections.
And that might not be the opinion of all of the tech Titans with histories of funding organizations that are now tripping over each other to promote abundance. People like Dustin Moskowitz, Mark Andreessen, and Pat Collison. But it is the conclusion of every serious person who’s looked at the data on what voters actually think. A recent poll by Jeff Beren, the poster for both Kamala Harris and Chuck Schumer, showed how much stronger a populist message performs among voters than an abundance one. James Carville and I don’t agree on everything, but I’m with it when he says, It’s clear, even to me, that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression. And if you still have any doubts, look no further than Mitt Romney, the corporations or people candidate. In a recent New York Times op-ed, even he embraced raising taxes on the rich. If Democrats want to win elections, they need to read the room, or I should say, need to read literally any room anywhere in America that is not filled with big donors. So what does it mean to focus our agenda on an aggressive economic vision?
At its core, the goal is simple and easy to measure. It means boosting pay and making life more affordable for working people, building more affordable homes and cracking down on corporate landlords, increasing the size of social security checks, providing universal childcare, passing price gouging laws with real teeth, guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines, and business equipment, strengthening unions, building universal health care, taxing the wealth and giant corporations, increasing the minimum wage. But I could go on and on, and in fact, I have, with detailed plans and legislative proposals. We are not short on good ideas. And to When every Democrat should be proposing concrete plans for lowering costs. Sauramam Dhani came from nowhere and took down a political dynasty. How? He ran a campaign tightly focused on the cost of living with easy to understand platform. Free busses, freeze the rent, and deliver no-cost childcare. Mikey Sheryl also focused on cost of living with an easy to understand platform, including affordable childcare and a bold promise to freeze utility rates on day one. And she won by 14 points. Ideas are great, but voters also need to believe that we will fight and that we have the guts to enact an affordability agenda, even over the objections of other Democrats.
Many voters are rightly skeptical that we’ll really make something happen. After all, we didn’t even take the extraordinarily obvious and simple step of increasing the minimum wage the last time we had power. Why not? Well, ask Kirsten Sinema, the former Democratic senator from Arizona, who curtsied on the Senate floor while rejecting a minimum wage increase in to raise wages for up to 27 million Americans, and then spent the rest of her time in office protecting hedge fund managers from paying taxes and blocking filibuster before. Sinema faced no consequences from her President or her leaders in Washington. Eventually, it was her own constituents back home who chased her out of the Senate. But today, she is cashing in from the industry she protected. The Wall Street Journal recently marveled at the sheer number of projects cinema has taken on from crypto, AI, and other wealthy corporate clients. And meanwhile, millions of working Americans who have not seen a minimum wage increase in almost two decades are still waiting for Democrats to deliver on one of our most basic promises. Democrats win when we show we are willing to fight. And that means even when we fail, we leave everything on the field.
One moment in 2025, when voters actually saw Democrats fighting for them, was the government shutdown. We refused to rubber stamp Trump’s budget unless he rolled back his health care cuts. And we said so loudly and unapologetically every single day. And you know, a small group of moderate Democrats ended up blinking. So we didn’t get the health care wins we could have. But public polling shows that voters supported us, putting up a real fight to actually lower their costs. We win when we run on big changes that it will take to build an economy for everyone. We win when we call out corruption and bad actors. We win when we stand against the avalanche of corporate money trying to bury our democracy. We win when we stop members of Congress from buying and selling individual stocks and cryptocurrencies while they’re writing the laws that affect those various assets. Sure, a tepid, nibble-around-the-edges approach, earned praise from Jamie Dimon and other Wall Street and big tech CEOs, and If we’re being honest, that approach also has been a good way to appeal to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as they decide which primary candidates they will support.
But it doesn’t take a political genius to conclude that in a democracy, when the choice is between make the rich richer and help everybody else, winning elections is about choosing everybody else. I believe in markets and a market economy. I spent my entire career trying to make them work better so that our economy works for everyone. I celebrate success. I don’t think billionaires are bad people just because they’re billionaires, or the corporations are evil because they pursue profit. And let me say it again, there is a big difference between a billionaire who spends his fortune to advance the interests of working people and a billionaire who uses his money to entrench a rigged economy. Ideas are not better because they come from a rich person offering to open his wallet and advance his own financial interests, and our leaders should stop acting like they are. I’m deeply worried about the survival of our democracy. Democrats need to win elections across this country, and I will do everything I can to help. Just last week, I donated over $400,000 to 23 state parties that will be fighting some of the most competitive Senate House and governor’s seats in November.
We must, must, must win up and down the ballot in these critical midterm elections. And I will keep doing my part. And every chance I get, I will also stand up and say that Democrats cannot build a durable governing majority that actually makes life better for people and rebuilds trust in the Democratic Party by watering down our economic vision. Democrats must build a big tent based on big ideas that help working people. And now is our time to do exactly that. Thank you all.
Q&A with members of the press, moderated by Mark Schoeff Jr., the incoming president of the National Press Club
Question: Let’s start with your analysis of where the Democratic Party is. What you just gave us sounded certainly like perhaps a An examination, medical examination, if not an autopsy, and there actually was an autopsy conducted. Last month, the D&C announced that it would not be releasing the autopsy despite Chair Ken Martin’s public pledge to do so. This is a question from the audience. How do you expect the DNC to implement the findings of the autopsy and maintain trust with voters without sharing the autopsy with the public?
Sen. Warren: Look, I’m a big fan of transparency. I like seeing everything out there where everyone can take a look at it. But for me, right now, at this moment in January of 2026, we’re putting together the foundations of how Democrats are going to run in the 2026 election. And so the point I want to keep driving toward is our economic agenda and how important it is that our economic agenda is about working people and not about pulling back on the agenda in order to attract more wealthy donors.
Question: In 2024, President Trump received a lot of support from the working class. He convinced them that he was the person, rather than Kamala Harris, who would be the answer for their economic concerns. I know you are not a Trump fan, but is there something Democrats can learn from Donald Trump when it comes to communicating to the very people you’re trying to communicate with?
Sen. Warren: You bet. I mean, look, Donald Trump stood up pretty much every single day for a solid year. And promised that on day one, he would lower costs for American families. That was his break. He used it over and over and over. When he got elected, and the very first interview he gave, he was asked, Why do you think you won? He said, Because I promised on day one to lower costs for American families.
So here we are, nearly a year into the Trump administration. And the cost of groceries is up, the cost of housing is up, the cost of utilities is up, the cost of health care is up, and all of those are up because of policies driven by Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress. They have actually pushed up costs for American families. So this is the moment for Democrats to stand up and first call Trump to account for his betrayal of the American people. But secondly, to lay out our own agenda and say, This is it. This is what we will do, what we can do to lower costs for American families. And what’s so important about that is our agenda needs to be strong.
It needs to be bold. We need to be unapologetic about it. We need not to shade it at the edges because we’re worried about talking about raising taxes on billionaires may cause some of our richest donors to fade away.
Question: You’ve heard this from many witnesses at banking hearings. Regulations and big government add to cost. They make it more costly to serve their and investors. How do you respond to that?
Sen. Warren: Well, that’s just plain wrong. It’s not to say that there aren’t regulations that have gone off the rails, that there aren’t regulations that are a problem. But look at both half of it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau delivered, until Russ Bugg got a hold of it, over a billion dollars a year to people who got in need it. And now that’s about regulations. Regulations that say you don’t get to build your profit model around lying to people. You don’t get to build your profit model around tricking them about what they sign on to. You don’t get to build your profit model around adding a bunch of hidden costs at the end. It says instead, let the playing field, people have an opportunity to take out a mortgage or a credit card or student loan. That’s regulation that makes markets work better. And the efficient enforcement of that regulation, wow, it works for American families, it works for our economy. The only people it doesn’t work for are the CEOs of the giant financial institutions who don’t get to scoop up every bit of profit they would like to make, including profits from GE.
And that’s true across the board. The CFPB is the perfect example, but there are multiple examples that we have to take another look. What are you calling an inefficiency? An inefficiency because people don’t get to cheat other people? Gee, I think that’s an efficiency because it means the market works. It means people are competing straight up on the quality of their goods, on the price of their goods, on their good consumer service. But this is the fight we’ve got to be willing to wade into. It’s a fight about monopolies. It’s a fight about who has corporate power. It’s a fight about who lobbies in Washington to hang on to those inefficiencies that help drive up costs for families and drive up profits for the corporations that figure out how to exploit them.
Question: Your talk today It was all about economics, essentially. I didn’t hear much, if anything, at all about social issues. There’s a question from the Huffington Post. Should the Democratic Party be willing to compromise on social issues like guns, abortion rights, and immigration?
Sen. Warren: I want to be where the American people are right now. What they’re telling us across the spectrum is that they are under enormous financial pressure. The data bear them out. I don’t know if anybody’s seen this. Home mortgage foreclosures, around 21% since Donald Trump took office. A survey after survey talks about the majority of Americans saying, I worry every day about money. I worry about making it to the end of the week. I worry about making it to the end of the month. I worry about how I’m going to pay off my debts. I worry about how I’m going to educate my children. I worry if I’m ever going to be able to retire. It is our economic message that has to be the tip of the spear for Democrats. It is the thing that American people are telling us they want us to talk about. And this is the history of the Democratic Party. This is who we are. This is our fight from the Great Depression on through the ’50s and ’60s. This is our fight. And we have to be willing to lay out, here are the things we will fight for and we will deliver.
I’m trying to lay the foundation for how Democrats run in 2026. I think we do that on a solid foundation that is based on our economics. And this is the place where we are most at risk for the billionaires swooping and saying, dial that down. Move back just a little. Not that one. Not universal childcare because damn, that could drive up taxes on billionaires. Oh, not that other thing because it doesn’t fit with our business model. Don’t talk about putting somebody tough back in the FTC again. Somebody who will go after non-competent clauses and click to cancel. Somebody who actually will be there to make this whole system work better for working families. That’s where we are most at risk, and that’s why I’m in this fight, and that’s why I’m here today.
Question: President Trump says he is very much focused on populism. What are your thoughts on the current administration’s latest attempts at populism? For instance, limiting credit card interest. And wait, there was another question about that. What do you think about Trump’s idea, which he got from you, I think, this was a member of the audience, to cap credit card rates at 10 %.
Sen. Warren: So where’s he been since then? He said that during the election, right? Said to people, that’s going to be one of the things he’s going to do. He’s going to put a cap on credit card interest rates. And I said, let’s go. I’m ready. I have that one written out. We are ready to move that one in Congress on the democratic side. And where’s President Trump been? Missing in action. He’s just not there anymore. He has no interest in that anymore. Instead, he is worried about profitability for the people who are making the big contributions to his ballroom, the people who make the big contributions to his campaign. Donald Trump is doing his best to run America to work even better for a handful of billionaires, a handful of oil executives, a handful of people who’ve already made it big. And we can’t be fooled by the fact that he promised to do otherwise. He has not delivered. And I want to pick up on your point, Mark, because I think you’re right. All of a sudden, Trump is starting to wake up to the fact that people across this country are more alarmed about their economic circumstances than they were a year ago when Donald Trump was sworn in.
And he realizes that there are going to be a lot of Americans across the country come November, 2026, who are saying, the buck stops with you. But what did you do to lower our costs? And that’s why he’s scrambling around. But notice, at least so far, he hasn’t delivered anything that would take a dollar out of the pocket of a billionaire in America.
Question: We have a question about putting caps on credit cards interest.
Sen. Warren: One Republican and all of the Democrats will not get the job done. Just do the math. The only way we’re actually going to deliver for working people is to put Democrats back in the majority of the house. That’s what it’s going to take.
Question: What are you thoughts on the various proposals that the President has floated in the last few days about housing affordability?
Sen. Warren: Let’s start with whether or not anybody in this room thinks that Donald Trump is serious about lowering the cost of housing. Keep in mind, we worked hard, and I know you covered this, to get a housing bill that really addresses the core of the problem, and that is supply. We’re not going to bring down the cost of housing until we build more housing. Most estimates are that we’re about 3 million housing units short of what we need in America. And that’s housing for first-time home buyers, housing for seniors, apartments for renters, housing for people with disabilities, housing in urban areas, housing in suburban areas, housing in rural areas.
What do we need more of? Housing, housing, housing. I worked with Chairman Scott, the head of the Banking Committee, and we put together a housing bill, Road to Housing, that has 40 proposals in it. You want to know the main thing about those proposals? Every one of them is basically screened for, we get more housing out of it. We get more homes built, more apartments built, more people, more manufactured housing. Every one, they come from different places. Can you drive down the cost of building so that we get more housing supply.
And that bill passed the United States Senate unanimously. Just everyone pause for a minute to absorb what that means in the United States Senate today. Passed it unanimously. And now the House is just hung up. The Republicans are saying in the House, No, they can’t do that. They don’t want to do that. And where is Donald Trump? Has he lifted a finger to move that bill forward in the House of Representatives? He sure knows how to get on the phone when he doesn’t like what they’re doing over the Epstein files. He knows how to get on the phone when he doesn’t like what somebody is trying to do over Venezuela. But is he on the phone to say, move that housing bill so that we can start right now, today, on expanding more housing in America? No. Donald Trump has just sat back and They’re throwing out one idea and thrown out another. Then what’s the other thing Donald Trump did last week? The Trump administration just signed off on the biggest merger in the real estate industry in history, the two biggest outfits. And real estate just merged with each other. You know what the consequence of that will be?
Just like it is with any of these giant mergers. It will drive up costs. It will drive up costs for sellers. It will drive up costs for buyers. And the consequence is it just makes housing more expensive and more out of reach. Look, Donald Trump identifies this piece or that piece he’d like to do. He claims that he would get corporations out of homeownership. Sign me up because I’ve been working on that since 2018. I have proposals on that. I am ready to go. But I have to say, he has a real credibility problem here. He’s just shooting out one idea after another and doing not one damn thing to actually lower the cost of housing for the American people. And he needs to be called out for it. And that’s what we’re going to do come November of 2026.
Question: As of last night, Trump is trying to do something at the Federal Reserve. I want to ask you about the subpoena of Fed officials regarding Chair Powell’s testimony on the renovation at the Fed. Chair Powell said out loud, what I’m sure all of us believe he was thinking in his mind over the last few months, and that is that the administration is trying to pressure the Fed into interest rate decisions that the administration favors. And we have a related question from Xi Jinping Media from China, do you recall anything from the Powell hearing last June that sounded like perjury to you?
Sen. Warren: Let me start there. No. But let’s do just a little backup on what’s going on right now with the Fed. Decades and decades and decades ago, policymakers made a decision, and this was not Republicans or Democrats, it’s everybody. They said, We need a Fed that is largely independent of the political process. And we need that because there’s an underlying tension on monetary policy. Every President who’s facing an election or his party is facing an election, which is every President, every two years, is going to want to juice the economy. The way they’re going to want to juice the economy is they’re going to want to dial down those interest rates and throw a little sugar into the economy. It’s a lot cheaper now to make investments because borrowing money is a lot cheaper, and a lot of loans will get made, and it’ll boost up the economy short term. Long term, the consequences can be disastrous for the economy if you do too much of that because it just inflates the economy in ways that are damaging for American families, for employment, for investment overall. The whole idea behind it was to build an an independent Fed and to insulate.
That’s why it’s budget, along with the other banking regulations, why it’s budget is insulated from Congress, insulated from the President. Donald Trump has made it clear since right at the beginning of his presidency that he wants to be the decision maker on where interest rates should be set. And he’s made that clear repeatedly. He’s made it clear by threatening to fire Jerome Powell. He’s made it clear by threatening to fire Liz Cook, another Federal Reserve governor. He’s made it clear by picking a fight over the renovation of the historic Fed building. He’s made it clear by issuing a statement that says he’s not going to nominate anybody in the Fed as chair who doesn’t agree with him all the time. That’s what Donald wants. He’s saying, I want to put my hand on the dials on monetary policy. And Jerome Powell and some of the Fed have resisted him and said, very calmly, that they are going to continue to look at the economic data and that they are going to make decisions based on what the economic data say. And that’s just not only not good enough for Donald Trump, it’s a challenge to who Donald Trump is.
It’s a challenge to somebody who thinks he’s supposed to run everything. And so Donald Trump just stays after him. And now, this is a question about weaponizing the Department of Justice right out in plain view in order for Donald Trump to try to have a chance to take over the Fed as quickly as possible so that he can make political decisions that he thinks will help him rolling into the 2026 election, even if it has disastrous long term consequences for our economy and also for our economic structure. And I just want to add one more point to this. What Trump is trying to do is terrible for our economy, but it undermines America all around the world. People rely on the American economic system, and I’m saying this at a writ large, that it’s a Fed that’s independent. It’s making decisions based on data. You may like them, you may not like them. I’ve often not liked them and disagreed on the data. But then it’s making its decisions based on its best understanding of the data. The Fed has been the gold standard for that monetary policy decision-making, and Donald Trump is just burning to the ground.
That’s going to be costly for the United States in all of our global markets. It’s going to be costly for the United States over a very long arc if Trump gets away with this.
Question: As we come to the end of our Q&A time, we have a couple of questions about immigration and some incidents, tragic incidents of the last couple of weeks. What ICE backlash do you anticipate for midterms when compared to economic angst? Should another government shutdown be on the table right now to force substantive changes at ICE? If not, what can Democrats be doing now to channel voter anger about ICE overreach?
Sen. Warren: Let me describe what I hear as a senator, and that is how deeply disturbed people are across this country about an out-of-control ICE. But I get it. We need to enforce our immigration laws. I believe that we need a lot of revision to those laws and restructuring of how we do it. But what’s happening right now feels like an ICE that is just out of control. I hear from people who are alarmed for themselves, for their neighbors, from an elementary school principal who talks about what it means that they don’t know whether to advise parents to bring the children to school or not, and trying to set up contingency plans. If parents, who aren’t here legally, get scoped up by ICE and can’t be there in time to pick up a child at three o’clock when school lets out. Families that are torn apart, people who are in school, and all of a sudden, other students are missing. It’s true in Massachusetts. I’m hearing from people all around the country about this. So this is a moment when this horrific shooting in Minnesota It has taken a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, a lot of concern about what does it mean that people wearing masks are coming out on our streets and scooping people up, and then nobody can find them.
I think it’s bringing it forward in a way that a lot of people who may not have focused on this issue are getting more and more engaged in. I worry about Donald Trump sending even more agents, federal agents, into Minnesota. I worry about the idea of just trying to provoke more violence, because this is the part I know for sure. Donald Trump, Christie Noem, and ICE are not making America safer. The two things that I think America is care a whole lot about is that Donald Trump promised that he was going to make Americans safer economically and safer physically. And he not only has failed in both of those, he has actually made life worse. And I think he’ll be held to account for that.
Question: Going back to your speech to wrap up here, this is a question from CNN. You’ve already made key endorsements in 2026 Races, and as you noted, donated over 20 state parties. What else should we expect to see from you in 2026 on the trail? And where are you going? Where are you going to be boots on the ground?
Sen. Warren: I appreciate the question. I’m not doing anything I can to help. I am all in in this fight. I’ve endorsed Peggy Flanigan in Democratic primary out in Minnesota for two reasons. Because Peggy Flanigan is a ferocious fighter on behalf of working people And because she doesn’t take any corporate PAC money, and both of those matter a lot to me. I’m hoping there will be other places where I’ll be able to get involved on exactly those same ideas. I just I never thought we’d be here, but I understand how important this election is in 2026. And whether it’s ICE or economic issues or other issues that drive you Donald Trump is being clear he just wants to be a guy with no constraints, no constraints for law. And a Republican Congress has just bowed down him and said, Yes, Mr. President, you can do whatever you want. And that is a threat to families across this country and a threat to our democracy. I’m in this fight all the time.
Final question: Last year, your gold retriever, Bayly, dressed as Stephen Colbert for Halloween to support him after CVS announced in July that it would hit in the late show in May of this year. Are there any early front runners for who Bayly will be dressing as for Halloween in 2026?
Sen. Warren: Not yet, but keep those cards and letters coming in. I love hearing the good ideas, and so does Bayly. He likes to rest in office. We all need a little golden retriever in our lives.