How a Red-District Democrat Is Navigating Trump

Support for this podcast comes from Amazon Ads.

I'm Alan Moss, global vice president at Amazon Ads.

Nearly three in four consumers say their interests, their hobbies, and their passions define them more than their age.

This is an opportunity for brands to create much more meaningful connections by engaging audiences through their shared passions and cultural moments rather than demographic assumptions.

Ready to connect with more relevant audiences?

Go to advertising.amazon.com/slash generations.

You go back a couple of decades in American politics, and it is extremely common to have members of the House who represent a district that was won at the presidential level by the other party.

But year by year, election by election, it's becoming a lot less common.

At this point, only a handful of Democrats represent districts that Donald Trump won.

But one of them is Marie Glusenkap-Peres from Washington's 3rd district.

And Glusenkap-Peres doesn't sound like other Democrats.

She's a pretty different economic philosophy they do, one built around the right to repair, built around, I would say, a moral critique of what our economics has come to look like, who we value, what we value, the way we have lost respect for those who work with our hands, and the economy has become profoundly imbalanced towards a consumerism, away from a producerism, which makes her particularly interesting in this moment.

Because all of a sudden, people in the Trump administration began saying kind of similar things, that we we should be making so much more at home, that we're addicted to cheap stuff from abroad, that we're on a sugar-high economy, that we need to detox.

So let's talk a little bit about what we believe in the Republican Party.

We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.

If they had a choice between a doll from China that is not as well constructed as a doll made in America, and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you would probably would be willing to to pay more for a better-made American product.

The market and the economy have just become hooked.

We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.

Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it's happening, and it will happen rather quickly.

There'll be a little disturbance,

but we're okay with that.

For a lot of Democrats, this is a pretty easy moment in economic policy for them.

The tariffs are causing all this upheaval.

Donald Trump is less popular than he was when he was elected by a lot.

Simply opposing him is enough.

But if you're someone like Lucy Caperes and your marginal voter is a Trump voter, well, how does this look to you?

How has it changed your politics?

I was curious to see how she was absorbing it.

Things have gotten a little bit weirder in her district.

There have been some very raucous town halls.

So, how is she thinking about what Donald Trump represents and the broader economic arguments she's been making as the politics of this begin to come into direct conflict with reality.

It's always my email, ezzorclanshow at nytimes.com.

Congresswoman Marie Gluzenkamp Perez, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

So I wanted to start with a clip of President Donald Trump from Wednesday talking about China and his tariffs.

What if you speech to President Xi of China?

What happens?

I mean, look, right now, and I told you before, they're having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business.

They made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion one

with Biden selling us stuff.

Much of it we don't need.

You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open.

Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dollars, you know.

And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

But what did you think of that?

Well, you're talking to a lady that like doesn't give my child toys.

Like I'm a big believer in dirt and string and sticks, you know.

But at a broader level, you know, tariffs are a tool.

A tool can be used destructively or it can be used productively.

And it depends on how it's wielded.

You know, talking to folks back home who really don't care at all about most politics,

you know, they have very sophisticated views on Canadian lumber dumping practice.

We've lost seven mills in my area last year.

I think it's about seven.

We want domestic manufacturing.

We want self-sufficiency.

We want like the ability to make things ourselves.

I think it's a mistake to sort of defend our identity around like being just consumers and not producers

as well.

But

you know, these reciprocal trade deals, like it's a backroom deal for multinationals.

Like

how it's used is what matters.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about the tariffs because in a way, members of the Trump administration have moved to making a critique that I think of as something that you've argued at times and that many people argue, which is that over decades, we became somewhat addicted to cheap stuff from China, that we lost values that we should have had in terms of what we want in the economy, in terms of what we value in the people who participate in the economy.

And on the other hand, it's yoked to this sometimes almost random seeming set of economic policies.

And so I've just been curious how you're processing this.

Like, do these feel like people sort of allied in thinking about where we've gone wrong?

Do they feel like people who have like hijacked arguments you make for something completely different?

Like when you think about that economic philosophy that you've been trying to push in Washington, how have you processed both the sort of overlaps and the contradictions?

Well, I'm pretty focused on my community and what we want and what we believe.

And yeah, I think people have pretty nuanced views.

I mean, the specifics really matter.

One thing that's weird is like watching the Democratic Party suddenly become the defenders of the stock market and like NASDAQ.

Like that's a weird thing to me.

And I think the question is not like,

what the nominal picture of wealth in these terms are, but how much economic agency agency and self-determination we have.

Do you have the power to stay home and spend time with your family?

Or are you working three jobs?

Are you able to own a home, to own land, owned farmland?

Or are you stuck in a cycle of perpetual renting that you don't want to be in?

Do you have the right to make your own stuff?

Do you have a level playing field to start your own business?

Those are the questions.

And so that's kind of the lens that I think about these bigger international arguments on trade through.

It's like, what is worth having at the end of the day?

What do people really want?

Well, maybe we want contradictory things.

I think on the economy specifically, I think we want plentiful, cheap goods.

And I think we want the self-determination, the resilience,

an economy that values and rewards production in exactly the way you say.

And I always think of one of the real problems for politics is being the collision of those two things.

People want policies that will get us to that self-determination and sovereignty.

But then, I mean, we saw this a bit during the Biden administration.

If you begin to seeing the price of things at the grocery store go up, people get pissed real quick.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that,

you know, under NAFTA, there's this argument presented to the American public of like, well, look, you're not going to have jobs anymore, but you have a bunch of cheap crap.

And then when people don't have the cheap stuff and they don't have the jobs, it accelerates into a really profound anger.

And I think kind of a righteous anger.

And so, you know, one point is like, we don't just want cheap stuff.

We want stuff that will last.

I mean, I think that was one of the issues with the CHIPS Act is it's like, well, what's driving the chip shortage?

Like, do I want a washing machine that can play Tchaikovsky or do I want a washing machine that will last more than three years?

My washing machine is from 1997.

My stove is from 1954.

And I think about how many times that has been bought and sold on Craigslist, like how much durable wealth that's created in the middle class.

Not just because people were paid a living wage in America to make those things, but because then they held value and created value for the household who owned them.

And then they were sold and bought and sold and bought and sold.

And so like the durable wealth,

people kind of belittle this argument about like washing machines and dishwashers, but it's real.

And I think particularly for people who are in the trades, like,

you know, it's like, shit, it's got 0.5% lower energy consumption or whatever, but they put the control panel right underneath the drip line.

So of course it's going to blitz, you know, the marriage not just of the technical, but of the applied.

Like I used to kind of run this bike shop and I will, I'll never forget teaching a physics major how to hold a wrench.

Be like, move your hand back.

You know, this is a fulcrum.

You know, it is this over specialization that has sort of deprived the underlying value itself.

One thing that I think always is challenging this discussion is, is what people buy the signal for what they want?

Or is what they will say in a deeper conversation the signal for what they want?

You know, that's one of the things is that like we've replaced, you know, the idea of like freedom as the freedom to consume.

You know, and I would argue that like

we're not just consumers, we're stewards, we are producers.

and so it's not just what you can buy but it's what you can make and how you can make things last and and

your values your inner values like manifest in the world around you so like i have a bill that would require manufacturers of household appliances to put on the sticker the average life expectancy of that washing machine along with the annual maintenance cost.

So I think like, you know,

the persistence of Speed Queen or something like that does show that people will pay more.

But having a class of buyers who has that information available, I think changes consumption habits.

Do you think of these as economic policy arguments or arguments that are almost more moral and spiritual in nature?

They're both.

You know, my dad used to say you can talk about your values all day long, but you see somebody's tax returns and you know what they really think.

One of the depowering of the environmental movement has been supplanting real environmentalism with a consumption habit.

Like true environmentalism is not just buying like a mat package at Target.

You know, it's not a consumer good.

It is a way of being in the world.

It's a relationship to the natural world around you.

It is the way that you spend your life developing skills.

and allocating your time

to

live in relationship to the world around you.

Like one of the things I really love about where I live in rural Schemania is that we don't have trash service.

So I have to look at all the trash and,

you know, of course I'm not going to buy a single serving yogurt cup because I'm going to have to smell that for two or three months before we go to the dump and load up the truck and take everything.

Like you have to see it.

And I think it enforces the reality that there is nowhere else.

You can't export emissions.

The climate is global and like your relationship to the world around you, not just as a terrarium, but as a dependence and as like something that informs your, your life daily.

Like, I think that really matters to informing what trade-offs people will make.

So I take that point, but I mean, most people want trash pickup, right?

I want trash pickup.

And when you think of the cities, and you represent partially a city, like they're not going to work without trash pickup.

You know, I'm not necessarily here to defend single cup yogurt servings, but some of this is a kind of marvel of modernity that does have remarkable benefits and has allowed us to live in different ways and ways that are, look, like I have this sort of distinction I sometimes make between green and gray environmentalism.

And there's ways of living deeply in harmony with the world around you.

And then there's ways of living that are very unharmonious with the world around you aesthetically, but they're actually quite light footprint.

Living in a pretty tall high-rise is in many ways quite good for the environment because you just have a lot more economies of scale in the heating and a bunch of other things.

Yes, there are economies of scale, but often they can exclude the fuller reality.

Like, yes, like there is a modern convenience, but like, is the climate better?

Are we happier?

Are we healthier?

Do we have what we actually want?

Or has it been supplanted?

And yes, like I would like to have trash service, but would I like to have trash service enough to move to a city?

No.

I very much take the point that you don't want trash service and to move to a city.

And I think that that's totally fair.

But what do you think?

And how do you talk to your constituents who do?

Oh, that's great.

Like, if you want to live in a city, like, you should live, you should, yeah.

It's also true, like, you could put an apartment building in a rural town and a lot of people would get a lot of utility out of that.

But I think one of the things that is missed frequently in this discussion is that like

the shift to a service economy or a knowledge economy means that now your barber has to move to a city where they are not able to afford housing.

When you have domestic manufacturing, if you're, you know, a mill in a rural community, you're able to own land, you're able to spend time with your family.

I'm not trying to like slight the urban issue, but I think it's that divorce from

the farms you rely on, from the water that you drink, from being able to ship your garbage somewhere else and not have to smell it yourself.

It changes your relationship to the natural world around you.

And if you're not clear about that and those relationships, you're losing something necessary.

I think you're losing something profound.

Something that you've been involved in recently is the revival of the blue dog Democrats.

And I think for my younger audience who sort of doesn't remember the blue dogs of the 90s, that was sort of traditionally the more moderate Democratic coalition.

And it may still be that now.

But the argument you all made, and I thought this was interesting, is that what you really want to bring back is localism,

that politics has become too nationalized.

Tell me a bit about that.

I feel like this is actually pretty important to your politics, a sense that nationalization is maybe broken.

The way politics is supposed to work in one answer is going to be bringing back a localism that we've lost.

Yeah.

My American, like my, you know, my mom's side of the family, my dad's from Mexico.

My mom's family has been in Washington state for five generations pre-statehood.

And the last time that people in my gene pool were Democrats was when they were blue dog Democrats.

That still means something to people.

when blue dogs were a large caucus because we were holding seats that we have not that we have lost and not regained.

And so it is a clear urgency of like having a gavel and having the ability to govern, but it's also the question of on whose behalf and towards what end.

I think having loyalty to your soil and to your community and

not something that's been focus grouped in DC or that came from a think tank, but like what matters to people at home.

That is what is fun.

It's like, I don't want to be a mouthpiece for any agenda besides besides my communities, like, because it matters to me.

Like, this is where I'm trying to die.

You know, it's where I got married.

It's where I really try to give birth.

And like it, that loyalty and the lens that

if you can get, build a political body that is bringing that local lens together, fierce loyalty to the specifics of our community.

That is how you build the Venn diagram of what is a useful federal policy.

That's, I think, how we break the stranglehold that

this duopoly on, you know, it's being useful and relevant and building good policy out of the urgent, specific realities of our community.

I think something that you have correctly criticized the Democratic Party for

is a sort of politics of dignity and indignity, where things that you value are not well valued by the party, but I think by cultural elites more broadly.

When you talk about the physics major, you have to show how to hold a wrench.

There is a valuing of office work and a devaluing of shop work.

One thing I hear you saying is that in some ways we should reverse the moral hierarchy, that it's actually bad to have this sort of trash service that alienates you from your trash, right?

It's kind of, it's okay for people to live in cities, but you got to understand that we've probably gotten off track in a pretty profound way in modernity.

There are a lot of people in politics who I hear hear like their critique is very surface level.

We should like change the dials on the tax code a little bit.

When I listen to you, I hear something much more fundamental, a sense that we've gone off course in terms of what and who we value.

And the correction, I mean, stickers on home appliances is a good start to sort of tell people how long they last and what they cost.

But that there's something that has gone wrong to you, it seems to me, morally here.

Is that fair?

Or would you say I'm overreading you?

Aaron Powell, I think that,

you know, like telling a child that

what they're interested in isn't interesting or what they're good at isn't good enough is like deeply toxic.

I think that there are a lot of forms of intelligence.

I mean, there's millions, you know, and exactly one of them is academic intelligence.

And to your point, it's like, well, you know, we're going to.

We're going to shut your mill down.

We're going to stop harvesting timber.

But hey, here's a grant that you could apply for if you're nice to me.

Maybe I'll give you money.

That's not what people want.

Like, people want self-determination and agency.

And I think it presupposes a hierarchy that's pretty offensive to a lot of people I know that you're going to tell me I have a problem and that you're the one that knows how to fix it.

You know, it's this masturbatory interest in like

policy without a reality of like implementation or local localism.

You know, you can't be all brain and no muscle.

They're equally necessary to have a healthy body.

And

there is also a false dichotomy.

Like, you know, not everything worth knowing you can learn in a book.

Like, we don't all want to go to college.

Like, don't tell me we need to go to college to be useful and to be self-realized, self-actualization, or whatever.

Like,

we can know things and be in the world in a way that is not strictly capturable by a,

or capturable at all by like a spreadsheet.

Right.

So this is why I started in this Trump quote, because something to me really

interesting and strange is happening in politics and economic politics right now.

Look, Donald Trump has been for decades the living, breathing embodiment.

of materialist excess.

And Republicans, probably, have been quite free trade and, very excited about cheap stuff from all over the world.

Democrats have been a little bit more, generally speaking, pro-tariff and a little bit more skeptical.

And even during the campaign, Trump is running aggressively on the cost of living, how much everything costs, how much things would be at the Walmart.

And as he's sort of layered on these tariffs, you've begun seeing this other argument that was sort of burbling around the edges of, I would call it the new right for a while.

get more central.

And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about how we have too much cheap stuff in this country and kids kids shouldn't have all these dolls and we're too materialistic and we're not valuing the right things.

And the Democratic Party and liberals in the Democratic Party becoming very pro-free trade, which is not their traditional stance.

And you're watching this thing reorient really fast.

And I mean, Trump is good at that.

He sort of reorients politics around him.

But when you watch this and you talk about the Democratic Party becoming, you know, the party that is defensive of the line on the stock market, How have you just experienced this?

Do you feel like your allies are changing?

Do you feel, you know, I guess I asked this in a way before, but do you feel like your critique is being hijacked for something that it, you know, doesn't really serve it?

Like, there's something changing around you.

I don't think you're changing that much, but something is changing around you.

And people are talking in a way they didn't speak before.

How do you take it?

Things have moved and shrunk.

And you've got like 8% hyper-focused on the left and eight percent hyper on the on the right and it's like they're talking and they they have the mic and like it's leading this but i think to your point like yeah my community people in my community their experience of the economy hasn't changed that much like still can't afford rent or can't get a loan from the bank to get a house still work in three jobs still worried about their truck getting repossessed.

Like people's experience hasn't changed that much.

And it's like, it is kind of wild to me to see the same playbook getting picked up again from Trump's first term to today, where it's like, like reflexive resistance.

And I would argue that the urgency here is

to have a positive policy agenda that is relevant to more people.

If you're somebody that has the ability to go to a protest every day,

like

it is not reflective of the average American experience, you know, and thinking about how do you, how do you build an agenda that is more useful to your neighbors, that is relevant.

If you want to bring more people, like you have to present a policy position that is more popular than the policy positions Trump's proposing.

And it's like, I think he has done a good job of amplifying and echoing broad dissatisfaction with the way things are going.

And we can't put ourselves in a position of just negating and of refuting everything he said.

It's about presenting an actual policy agenda that will address those concerns and that rage that people are feeling about their loss of agency in the world.

Sometimes there are critiques about, like, you know, the world's on fire and she's talking about bananas and washing machines and right to repair.

But like talking to people about the things they care about and fighting for the agenda and priorities of my community, like that is the job of a representative.

And, you know, it's like

I

held a lot of round tables with farmers in my community when we were working on the farm bill.

And not a damn one of them said antitrust.

But

farmer after farmer was telling me that, yeah, I used to be able to sell my chickens 12 different buyers and now I can sell them to two.

That matters to people.

Having a level playing field for their business, having economic self-determination matters to people.

I guess what I'm asking you on this, though, because I don't buy, I'm not sure if this is what you're saying, but the tariffs are going to matter to people.

This is not some elite Washington fixation.

I mean, your community is going to feel them.

Like, you know, this much better than that.

We don't know that they're staying is the other thing.

And so just being the anti-Trump.

But you have to treat policy that he is proposing like it will.

I mean, it might not stay if it is opposed in a certain way.

But I think I'm asking, like, he is making an argument for these things that sounds in some way similar.

Like,

I take the stylized policy here as we should dramatically raise the price of every single good that comes into this country and really dramatically raise the price of goods from China.

So we wean ourselves off a lot of cheap crap and we make it here.

And if that means things cost more, and if that means you can have things good, like it's time for you to like pick up, start making things here again, and like get over this neoliberal delusion that we can have, you know,

everything shipped in from another continent at half price.

I mean, the terrorist will go up and they'll go down, but like, is that right?

Is he right about it?

Is he going about it wrong?

Is he right on half of it?

I mean, this is a big policy, right?

This is not weirdo Washington stuff.

Like we're all going to feel this.

Like it's going to affect every store in the country.

I think most of us in my community share a lot of those sentiments.

You know, like when they shut down the paper mills, congratulations, now we're packaging everything in plastic, disposable plastic from Saudi Arabia.

And we got wildfires at home because there's no value in the residual, you know, in the slash piles.

And

so I would say like the policy position can't just be anti, anti, anti, anti, but saying, all right, like what is it going to take to build manufacturing?

It's going to take permitting reform.

It's going to take some antitrust work.

Like it's going to take shop class and junior eye.

It's going to take a, you know, the elite reevaluating and like acknowledging the nobility

of

people in the trades and the reality of like dirty hands, clean money.

So I think it would be a mistake to just be like anti-anti anti, but instead saying, all right, like if this is the thing they're going to do, like how do we harness it in a way that is productive in the long term for having the things that we actually want?

Tell me a bit more about what that looks like.

I hear you on permitting reform.

I mean, the argument the Biden administration used to make was we are trying to compete with China by building our capacity here.

We'll put tariffs on a limited number of things from China, electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, things like that.

And we will invest a bunch in domestic manufacturing capacity and infrastructure.

And that's going to get us where we need to go.

Then you have Trump who says, no, what we need to do is actually just make the things unaffordable.

And that's what's going to get us where we need to go.

What would you keep from the two approaches?

Or would you keep nothing from them?

When you say it should be a positive agenda, what should that agenda look like?

Well, I mean, a reevaluation that like there's been this like obsession with technology and the next like whatever lobbyist is in your office like shilling, you know, triple glazed argon filled windows and a blindness to the actual skilled trades of of like, yeah, you know what?

You get a shit ton if you put the long side of your house facing south.

You put an eave on it.

You know, if you put a skirt around a mobile home, like it's a metal sheet that connects the bottom of the mobile home to the ground, creates an air gap, saves a shit ton of energy.

And now those folks, a lot of them on fixed income living in a mobile home, like their energy bill just went way down.

You don't put a hip and valleys in your roof line.

You're going to get a roof that lasts for 50 years.

We ignored all of the things that we know in the trades are the kind of low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and utility and a progressive tax system.

Like, that's one of the things that bothers me is that it's like, you know, the electric vehicle tax credits, the heat pump tax credits, like those were profoundly regressive tax strategies.

Let me ask you about the electric vehicle tax credits for a second, because let me try to give the best version of that argument as I understand it.

People will buy many, many, many new cars over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

Like, that's just baseline.

We want there to be a big electric vehicle transition.

We also want a lot of those electric vehicles to be made here.

So when the Biden administration does this, they put pretty heavy tariffs, I mean, the, you know, 100%, as I remember it, on Chinese electric vehicles, which are a major competitor.

And they do a lot of investment in domestic supply chain on that.

This sort of sounds to me in broad strokes like a policy you would like.

It's not the only policy.

It doesn't take away from the question, you know, of a million things we could do to weatherize homes and make homes more efficient.

But if we want to make it here,

if we sort of want these cars that people buy and we expect on the margin, there's going to be a decision people make between combustion engines and electric wheels.

We want them to be electric.

And we want to accelerate this technology so it gets cheaper more quickly.

So it's not a decision only richer people can make.

That's sort of how I map that policy out in my mind.

What's sort of wrong with that logic to you?

I mean,

I've never bought a new car in my life.

But most people do eventually.

I mean, it's not a rare thing in this country for people to buy new cars.

Yeah.

I mean, I think first there's a priority on being a steward, a good steward of what you already have.

Like that manifest environmentalism is getting your rig to make it to 500,000 miles.

It is making what you have last longer and wanting less.

You know, I think that

there's been a lack of

pragmatism a bit, like a Tesla plaid with like a 300-mile radius, like uses 10 times as much battery minerals as it would take to have a hybrid on the road.

That's one side of it.

I think the other side of it is

a selection bias.

My colleagues and I, like, we fly a shit ton.

Like, we're always on the road.

We're always seeing consumer transportation.

And so that's what gets echoed.

But in reality, like if you prioritize stationary electrification first, then you're not moving that heavy battery everywhere with you.

You're not wearing roads out.

So like port infrastructure being electrified, things like that.

Like that is, I think, a much better bargain.

That is where things should look first if you're trying to decrease the carbon footprint of the American basket of goods.

It's not just like what feels good or what's like a virtue signaling, but like what is the actual absolute value you can get.

Support for this podcast comes from Amazon Ads.

I'm Alan Moss, Global Vice President at Amazon Ads.

Nearly three in four consumers say their interests, their hobbies, and their passions define them more than their age.

This is an opportunity for brands to create much more meaningful connections by engaging audiences through their shared passions and cultural moments rather than demographic assumptions.

Ready to connect with more relevant audiences?

Go to advertising.amazon.com slash generations.

This episode is supported by Wealthfront.

Markets can be unpredictable, but your your cash doesn't have to be.

With Wealthfront's cash account, earn 4% annual percentage yield on your cash from program banks with free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts.

Get a $50 bonus when you open your first cash account and deposit $500 at wealthfront.com slash Ezra.

Bonus terms and conditions apply.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member Finras IPC, not a bank.

APY and deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

This podcast is supported by PMI U.S., U.S.

Businesses of Philip Morris International.

What does it mean to be invested in America?

For the U.S.

businesses of Philip Morris International, it means we're invested in advancing science, giving adults who smoke better options.

We're invested in American manufacturing, helping local economies thrive.

We're invested in community, supporting military veterans and their families, disaster relief, and economic empowerment.

Because we're proud to be invested in America.

See how at uspmi.com.

Tell me about some of the divisions over sort of these ideas that are trumping your district right now.

You've had some very raucous town halls recently, and you've got these voters who are both the voters that Democrats win reliably

and the voters that Republicans win.

reliably.

Like you have a like a very, you have a bigger coalition and a more complicated coalition behind you than most Democrats have.

And you have urban and rural voters in your district.

So, how are the different constituents you come into contact with experiencing this moment differently?

Yeah.

So, six out of seven counties are highly rural.

You have Vancouver is kind of the big city.

Vancouver, Washington is the big city in my district.

And it's voted for Trump three times in a row.

I

outperformed Trump and Harris in the last election.

And so, yeah,

I have a unique coalition.

I have a very independent community.

So

I think,

like I was saying before, where it's like 8% here and 8% on the other side.

But like, most of us feel like it's all sound and fury and nobody actually gives a shit about our lives.

The kind of unglamorous,

like deep, bitter erosion of fentanyl addiction and farm consolidation and job loss.

Like, I really believe in showing up.

Like, I do town halls in all my counties.

I've done 15 now.

And I think it's really important that people, you know, that you're like available and accountable and present and meeting them where they are.

And when I'm talking to people, I kind of in my head, I have these two buckets of like, was this person paid to talk to me?

Or do they have to get a babysitter to come here?

And I wait the input proportional to reflect like how many people in my community are paid to engage in politics.

What do you mean by paid to engage in politics?

Oh, like a lobbyist or somebody that's a director.

You know, they're paid to be in government relations.

They're paid, they're on the clock when they show up in my office.

And if somebody had to like take time off work to come talk to me, I take that really seriously.

And I try to spend my time going out and talking to them, like going to where they're at to be available.

That's one of the reasons like I believe in town halls.

And like at its best, it's a really powerful forum for civic dialogue.

And I think at its worst, it turns into a mob where you have folks who are

spending a lot of time reading news articles and they have the income to come out.

And it's not reflective of most people's experience.

And it's also a valid experience.

And it's also a valid opinion that I should, that I do take into consideration.

But you still have to account for the fullness of your community and what, you know, whether or not people have time to respond to a, you know, a survey or make a public comment on some agency's website.

Their opinion still matters.

I mean, your position now is tricky.

It's like there are a lot of Democrats who their marginal voter right now is absolutely furious.

Their marginal voter is a Democrat, is somebody who might read the New York Times or listen to my podcast, and they just hate Trump.

They hate what's going on.

They don't see any good in it.

And all that person has to do is show up and tell them how bad everything is, and they're good.

And your marginal voter is somebody who is at least open to this.

Your marginal voter is somebody who maybe voted for Donald Trump.

And

who definitely voted for Donald Trump?

So put aside the people paid to talk to you, right?

I agree that the lobbyist and the government affairs class are different.

How are the two sides of the people who just vote for you, where do they diverge and where in your experience of your own constituency do they converge?

So

for a while, I was getting a shit ton of letters about Hunter Biden's laptop.

And

I think it's easy from people who are mad, he wasn't being investigated.

And I think it's easy to kind of like dismiss that

as like

silly.

But I think if you lift the hood up on that, what a lot of those folks are saying is that they feel like there's a legal system that works better for you if you have a different last name or you have the right lawyer.

And so if we offhandedly dismiss these concerns as silly or biased, like we miss an opportunity to build a coalition of people who are actually all quite unified and wanting reform of our judicial system.

I think that's the intersection of trying to like delete the proper nouns out of the argument, figure out how terms are being used differently, what things mean to people,

and what's the path to building an agenda that is more popular than what Trump is offering.

Is that true, though, about the Hunter-Biden laptop issue?

I mean, I take your point that there are people all over the spectrum, because they're right, this is true,

who see a judicial system that works for some people very differently than it works for others.

But you've got Donald Trump offering out pardons left and right.

He is making God knows how much money off of what certainly seemed to me to be incredibly corrupt crypto schemes.

I wrote a book about political polarization.

To me, some of this just reflects very different news sources and the tendency we all have

to believe that the people on the other team are fundamentally corrupt, even evil.

And the people on our team, it's understandable.

These are old relationships.

Maybe it's not as bad as you think.

I guess I wonder if deleting the proper nouns from that can actually mislead.

I think if you had gone from

the Clinton email security fights in 2015, I guess it was,

to where we are now with digital security under the Trump administration and the accessing of all these internal government databases and doing war plans on messaging apps.

I don't think that's going to be a consistent line.

I think that's just partisanship reshaping people's brains.

I guess what's the consequence of me being wrong about that and finding common ground and common cause for things that we all believe are worth having at the end of the day?

I think it's, you're probably right for a certain segment, but like it's very easy to over

account and say that that's all those people who are pissed about the laptop.

And the truth is, like, yeah, like most people, they don't, they're not thinking about it at all.

They're, they're handling their lives day to day.

But those same people still,

you know, they know that some kids at their high school can get out of a Dewey and others can't because their parents could pay for a lawyer, you know, and that's going to set them off on a different track.

I agree with you on that.

The Hunter Biden story, I have such, I think I'm scarred by past email security debates, but

But I think that's why I was asking about this moment with the economy, because,

look, so much in politics has no

visible ground truth to people.

We're arguing about these bizarre, complex systems that are far away or stories we don't really know.

What's ground truth?

That you can't go and you can't feel it around you.

Okay.

And

that's why I'm sort of interested in some of the debates about the economy, because I do think people have common ground in the economy.

They might want a lot of things all at once, but they, you know, they want, I think, a lot of what you're describing.

They want to be able to have a good job.

They want to have autonomy in that job.

They want their children to be able to do well.

They want things to be affordable in the store and also for them to have good wages and for the factories to be open and the goods, but also to be plentiful.

And so I guess one question I've had is that,

do you feel people shifting in one direction or another?

Like, are things splitting apart for you in your district?

Or are they actually, as this becomes something real,

you know, and people either worry about the tariffs or get excited about the tariffs?

Does it become more of one thing that you can work with and that you know it's contours?

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right about

this sort of fracture.

Like, I think

I've talked to folks from home who like used to be a part of the Democratic Party and left.

They're like, yeah, we can never be

correct enough for you.

And like the Republicans are having a Kager.

So like, you know,

I think

that it's become quite loud, folks not seeing the reform they want and like this like frustration of just like saying it louder, you know.

And

also kind of a decay of social institutions.

Like I was talking to a friend that runs a veterans assistance nonprofit and they

they told me that like volunteer rates have fallen through the floor since January.

Why?

Well, for one, I mean, some folks are like more in politics, you know, some people, well,

you know, the cuts to food assistance programs mean that more veterans are coming in for food.

And so the volume has gone up, but the availability of people to

do that work is declining.

I think it's, I mean, political activism can feel really like glamorous and correct.

And it's like, how could you worry about these small things when the world's on fire?

But I like, I would argue like the way you put the fire out is by like actually going and building community.

Like I don't think that democracy is something that you

buy with a binary vote in one election.

It is the muscle of community.

It is your relationships with your neighbor and like knowing the name of your mail carrier and like talking to folks at daycare drop off and having the time to do that.

And

so there's that acceleration.

But

I was talking to somebody that's like,

you know, they're going to protest Tesla every day.

A lot of their family are Trump voters, but they don't want to talk to their family.

They're like, that's not the forum for that.

But man, it feels good to get flicked off by guys driving F-350s.

You know,

it's that muscle of community and like relationships, I think is the, the kind of the path out of here.

What do you tell people works within community, within that kind of local democracy?

I heard something said at a town hall was that, quote, being angry, being loud feels good, but is it productive?

My assumption is you feel it's not productive.

So what to you is productive?

Yeah, I mean, the part of your brain that is angry is not the part of your brain that you think strategically about with.

Those are different muscles.

And I think it can feel condescending to a lot of people when somebody's like,

the world's on fire, everything's going to hell and I'm the only one who sees it.

And like, you guys all need to wake up, you know?

And it's like,

I don't think people can hear that.

You know, I think that curiosity and humility and relationships like are very powerful tools, profoundly powerful tools.

I kind of think that like when you have all of your wants and needs met, it's easier to empathize with

someone somewhere else

or

a fuzzy animal than it is to have compassion

for your neighbor who's got a fentanyl addiction or your neighbor that's got like rolling coal or that has the wrong lawn sign up.

You know, there's a reason that's like the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor.

Support for this podcast comes from Amazon Ads.

I'm Alan Moss, Global Vice President at Amazon Ads.

Nearly three in four consumers say their interests, their hobbies, and their passions define them more than their age.

This is an opportunity for brands to create much more meaningful connections by engaging audiences through their shared passions and cultural moments rather than demographic assumptions.

Ready to connect with more relevant audiences?

Go to advertising.amazon.com slash generations.

This episode is supported by Wealthfront.

Markets can be unpredictable, but your cash doesn't have to be.

With Wealthfront's cash account, earn 4% annual percentage yield on your cash from program banks with free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts.

Get a $50 bonus when you open your first cash account and deposit $500 at wealthfront.com Ezra.

Bonus terms and conditions apply.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member of FinRass IPC, not a bank.

APY and deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

FirstNet is the only nationwide communications platform purpose-built with and for first responders.

FirstNet is built with AT ⁇ T in a public-private partnership with the First Responder Network Authority, an independent agency responsible for ensuring firefighters, paramedics, law enforcement officers, emergency dispatchers, and others who are called on during emergencies have the communication tools they need to help keep America safe.

FirstNet built with ATT.

Learn more at firstnet.com/slash public safety first.

Let me ask you something.

Sometimes I hear you say things, and you seem really frustrated with, I think it's Democrats specifically.

I mean, I take the point that sometimes it can be easier to empathize with, you know, I think you're saying sort of like a panda rolled away than the person right next to you.

I don't know.

We're disappearing people to El Salvador and terrorist prisons with no due process.

Like the tariffs will hurt a lot of these people, the same people you're talking about.

I would not say the Trump administration has been like amazing on fentanyl or even strategic about it, more to the point.

And there's a lot of, I think that there is a lot of fear.

I mean,

the way I often put it to people when I've heard the argument, look,

we should be worrying about, you know, the people next door, not, you know, people being shipped off to El Salvador in prisons.

Is that, I don't know, when, like, I'm Jewish and I think I bring my own kind of assumptions to this conversation, but

I look at history and I look at other countries and I feel like when the disappearance machine begins running, if people don't stop it, it can start going really far.

Like if regimes begin to realize they can use disappearance as a tool, who that eventually comes for is not clear.

So, I mean, I was asking you sort of about common ground among your constituents.

And what you sort of said is like, look, a lot of these people are sort of maybe sympathizing or empathizing with the wrong folks.

But I mean.

Is there a part of you that takes the other side of that argument that feels that Trump is trying to really fundamentally change the character of this country and its institutions and how it works, and the people who are scared as shit and like don't know what to do because they don't really have any power over it

and you know, they don't know how to get listened to, that there's a righteousness to the way they feel too.

Like, yeah, like

people are valid in their anger,

and it's it is a fool's errand to try to talk somebody out of their feelings.

That is not

a good idea,

but

you can affirm the validity of their feelings

and also

present a productive strategy for resolving some of those drivers of that anger or that fear.

You know, on your point about El Salvador, my dad was the pastor of a Spanish-language church growing up.

And

you want to meet somebody that really fucking hates gangs.

You talk to an immigrant who gave up a profound amount to leave a country that was corrupt and run by gangs.

That same person cares passionately about due process.

They understand that the only inoculant against a corrupt regime is fidelity to due process.

And if we had had due process in these cases, we would be in a position to evaluate

a judge's decision about whether or not that person was involved in human trafficking or whatever the claim is.

But the point is that we don't have it.

And it's a deep strategic mistake

to accept

that we have to choose between really hating gangs and really loving due process.

When you have experienced truly being afraid of being kidnapped or having your business exploited or human trafficking.

Like you take quite seriously, that feeling is real and valid.

And the productive strategy is due process, fidelity to due process.

And I think it's kind of a yes and like, yes, it makes sense to be scared.

And if you're really believing that we are entering a totalitarian state,

is the point here?

If you're really worried that we're never going to have elections again, why is the second bullet point on your agenda primaring Democrats?

Like, that's not what people do in real scenarios like that.

This has been, to me, one of the very frustrating things about the Trump administration.

I also hate gangs.

I don't want MS-13 operating in America.

I don't want them operating anywhere.

But we have due process.

That's a good way to find out if people are part of MS-13.

I find sometimes there's like a political blackmail that's applied.

It's like, and I'm not saying you are, but but I've seen, I've heard this from other people, where it's like, is your politics really to be on the side of people who might be in a gang?

It's like, no.

My politics is to be on the side of processes that protect everyone and also are perfectly good at figuring out if people are in a gang.

We can cross-examine some witnesses, right?

This is not like a thing that's going to endanger anybody.

So when you're dealing with some of those issues, it've become the cleavages.

I mean, for you, is it reminding people that due process is a question that goes across the immigration divide?

What do you find works for navigating that?

Yeah.

You know, where I live, like, we believe that countries have a right and an obligation to know who and what is coming across a border.

I don't think that's crazy.

And

one of the,

I guess, failures or...

weaknesses is that words mean different things all over the place.

Some people talking about immigration, immigration, they're talking about drug trafficking.

And whether or not you're mad about that conflation, you do have to hear and try to get at what is the strategy, the productive strategy to address it.

And not just like policing the conflation, but saying like, yeah, it fucking sucks to have a family member addicted to fentanyl.

It's been frustrating for me at times.

You know, in this new world I'm in, it's like, it's not hitting.

They're insulated.

They're not hearing these horrifying stories about industrial accidents.

It's not their plate eight that's getting in a car wreck because daddy's on fentanyl.

It's not their cousins who are robbing grandma because they've got a fentanyl, you know, and treating that with an urgency of like, how do we stop the flow of fentanyl?

How do we build resilience against foreign actors that would like to see,

you know, the entire middle class being addicted and unproductive?

Do do you feel that there are

fentanyl policies that we know how to do that really work

every time i've really tried to write or report this out the level of frustration i hear from the people really working on it is it's almost unimaginable because it is so hard it is so concentrated has become so much easier than heroin was before it to transport

is there something you feel that if we did it would make a big difference that we're not doing right now that neither biden nor nor Trump has put their weight behind?

A few things.

I mean, cartels don't operate under political boundaries.

And so, I think multi-jurisdictional interdiction, like that works, ensuring law enforcement has the tools to be able to, you know, communicate and cooperate.

Like, I have issues where, like, some of my departments, they transition to digital radios, and some of them are still on radio towers.

and they can't talk to each other.

They have to relay through a 911 responder.

You know, like there there are issues like that.

There's the geopolitical question of these Chinese-produced precursor chemicals.

I was talking to my dad, and one of his buddies from high school was running a factory in Mexico and figured out they were bringing in fentanyl precursors on the weekends.

He went to the cops in Mexico and they were like, Yeah, we fucking know.

You can shut up or you can move to Canada.

And so he moved to Canada, you know.

It's all of the supply chain going into it.

And there are also some, I think the GLP3s, the,

is that right?

The GLP1s.

GLP-1s.

Unless there's more of that I don't know about, but there might be.

It's yeah, they seem to have a real effect there.

They have promising studies on reducing fentanyl addiction and helping people break that chain.

But it's long work, you know.

Then there's other drugs that are promising where it's like.

Rather than having to go in and getting a dose, like if you're living where I live, like you can't have a job and be in recovery.

You have to go drive into Vancouver, you know, an hour and a half, whatever, every day to get a treatment, to get the drugs to help you get off.

There's another drug that's emergent that's like a 30-day

release, things like that.

There's

the long work of addressing the appetite and

why people are vulnerable to these drugs.

It's like interdiction of fentanyl and treatment and better options for people.

If you know that you can run your own business, you can buy a log truck, you can, you know, you can do whatever you want with your life, you really do have latitude to make things in life, you're a lot less vulnerable to a cheap high.

Then I'll ask our final question.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

So

there's a book my grandpa gave me, The Wheelwright Shop.

It was written in the 1920s by George Strut.

whose family had been building wooden wheels in England for 200 years.

And like the specifics of it are just beautiful.

Like he's like, you know, you had to know that that grove, the elm grows too rich.

It's not good for specific uses to build a wheel that will last and that your name is attached to and that's useful to your community.

You have to know how the sap is running that year.

You have to know when to quarter and when split.

It's a really beautiful book.

There's another one, experiences and visual thinking.

It's like kind of a hippie, like, you know, 70s, but it is really brilliant at helping exercise the other parts of your brain that analyze problems, like drawing and using your finger.

Like it's, I think, does it a necessary part of rebuilding parts of your brain that are not just the rote correct answer, but like how to create a caricature out of your idea and then like.

enlarge certain parts, reduce.

It's a really useful, tangible tool.

And then

the other thing, you know, I've got a three and a half year old son at home, and he's like, we cloned his father.

He's like a really smart,

gifted little mechanic and

fun.

But he also really loves poetry.

So any of the children's poetry anthologies from Jack Proletsky, just that reading and language is fun.

It's not.

academic.

It is not for getting a good grade.

It is joy and like the rhythm and the cadence and like moving it from a strictly like

absolute like rote ABCs to like the pleasure of rhyming things and just like having fun.

And it is so fun to have a toddler running around your house like making up silly rhymes.

I can't recommend it enough.

Congresswoman Marie Gluzenkap Perez, thank you very much.

This was fun.

Thank you, Ezra.

This episode of The Ezra Clan Show is produced by Jack McCordick.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair.

Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.

The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Koble, and Kristen Lin.

Weave Original Music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta.

The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

And special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

A 150-foot-tall Branosaurus?

That's something you have to see to believe.

Make sure to fill up with Chevron with Techron along the way, giving cars unbeatable mileage and helping to keep critical engine parts clean so you can fuel up on memories.

Chevron with Techron, fueled by possibility.