Sen. Mark Kelly on Trump’s ‘Worst 50 Days’

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Speaker 4 I'm joined by Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Senator, I want to share with you Donald Trump's top advisor, Peter Navarro, just said the following about the last 50 days.
Let's play it.

Speaker 5 President Trump has had the best 50 days of any president in American history, and there's no sign inside here or outside there that that's going to slow down because we got a lot of good stuff to go.

Speaker 5 And we're just...

Speaker 4 Senator Kelly, what's your response to that?

Speaker 2 I think it's probably the worst 50 days of any presidency I can think of in my life. It's been pretty much a shit show since day one, since his getting sworn in in the Capitol.
I was there.

Speaker 2 I didn't expect prisoners, criminals to be released after beating up police officers. My parents were both cops.

Speaker 2 So I take great offense to what Donald Trump did at the beginning of the administration. And since then, it has been one bad thing after the next.
The economy is now

Speaker 2 struggling, I would say, if you just look at the stock market. And

Speaker 2 I usually don't want to

Speaker 2 equate

Speaker 2 what a president does with how

Speaker 2 the markets react to this.

Speaker 2 I'd say it's generally not a good thing. But with his tariff policy, this has been very, very harmful.

Speaker 2 It creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And I think he's done a rather horrible job.
I can't think of what he could have done to make the first 50 days worse.

Speaker 4 You see what your colleagues are out there saying? Now you've got Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio. He's out there saying, well, I'll just show you what he said this morning moments ago.
Let's play it.

Speaker 6 What do you want to say about the tariff fight?

Speaker 8 Look, we have to remember, step back for just one second. We have to remember that if Kamala Harris had won on November 5th, the stock market would be down 50%.

Speaker 8 Business climate would be a total disaster, and this country would have been on a path to ruin.

Speaker 4 So that's where they're going with this. That the, you know, your 401ks may be in the tank.
Your pensions are done.

Speaker 2 It would have been worse. They're going with, yeah, it would be worse.
This is like upside down world, right? I mean, it's just pretty, pretty crazy.

Speaker 2 You would have had some of the policies with certainly some changes from President Biden, some of these programs that we put in place. By the way, bipartisan.

Speaker 2 you know, Democrats and Republicans working together on semiconductor manufacturing, the Chips and Science Act. I know Bernie Marino wasn't here then, but he's from Ohio.

Speaker 2 His state is benefiting from a program that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris put in place, which was the Chips and Science Act. And this president, Donald Trump, said he wants to get rid of this.

Speaker 2 He wants to cancel this. He wants to replace it with more tariffs.
And how is his tariffs working out for the American people? It's raising costs. It's creating tremendous uncertainty.

Speaker 2 And he can't even get his tariff plan right. I mean, it's one thing to have a shitty tariff plan.
It's another to not even be consistent with your crappy plan. And that's what we see going on here.

Speaker 2 And that's why I think the market is reacting to this.

Speaker 2 I think this is going to probably get worse before it gets better.

Speaker 2 The American people need to

Speaker 2 need to buckle up for a little bit of a wild ride. But let me tell you this.
We are a great country. We've got the best innovators in the world.
We've got the best military.

Speaker 2 We've got a strong workforce. We're going to get through this.

Speaker 4 What do we do when he's attacking our military, though? When he's attacking our veterans, let's talk about the attack on the veterans first.

Speaker 4 I mean, you have disproportionately these Doge terminations affecting veterans who work in the federal government, the VA cuts,

Speaker 4 you know, people not being able to work even at things like the crisis hotline. I mean, it seems that there's like an intentional, malicious nature here targeted at veterans.
What are you hearing?

Speaker 2 I'm hearing exactly that.

Speaker 2 That I had a dozen veterans here in my office about a week and a half ago or so. These are folks that served our country in uniform.
Many of them were combat veterans.

Speaker 2 Several of them were disabled. One was 100% disabled who had a government job after leaving the military because of his disability, recently received an excellent or very good performance report.

Speaker 2 Three weeks later, he's fired via email from the richest guy in the world. Elon Musk fired him for poor performance.
This guy was doing his job really well.

Speaker 2 I mean, at least they should be fair about it and just say, hey, I'm firing you because we don't want you anymore. They even have to, they have to lie about it and tell this guy he's a bad performer.

Speaker 2 Same story happened thousands of times. 6,000 veterans who serve this country honorably just kicked to the side of the road, their lives ruined.

Speaker 2 The next day, this guy was starting a minimum wage job in a kitchen. That's what Donald Trump and Elon Musk think about veterans.

Speaker 4 And spending was up last month, right? I mean, I saw a report from the Financial Times.

Speaker 4 Last month, $603 billion.

Speaker 4 spending was up more than any other previous month. So they're not even cutting things.
They're just cruelly harming harming some of our most vulnerable people. It's not even, it's not even working.

Speaker 4 What they claim to be doing isn't what they're doing. Anyway, let's talk about this, though.

Speaker 4 Trump White House today, according to NBC News, is actually asking the military for plans about potentially invading the Panama Canal. That's what the United States military is spending time to.

Speaker 4 There's a range of plans, but one of the plans involves U.S. troops seizing it by force.
That's being reported by NBC News.

Speaker 4 And also, when Trump uses this language, this Putin language of annexation, of taking over land of allies like Canada,

Speaker 4 that means young men and women

Speaker 4 dying and fighting in wars against their allies.

Speaker 4 Like, as a veteran, what do you make of that language from someone like him who took five deferments for bone spurs, and now he's out there speaking like Putin?

Speaker 2 It's insane. I mean, and it's dangerous.

Speaker 2 How do we tell Putin and other dictators around the world that you can't invade your neighbor when we start threatening to send troops to take the Panama Canal or to start talking about how we're going to take Greenland possibly by force or maybe

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 crazy stuff about Canada? Canada is our best ally on the planet. You can't be talking about your friends in this way.
So

Speaker 2 I think it's dangerous. It makes us weaker.
He thinks it makes us look tough. He thinks he's a tough guy.

Speaker 2 As you point out, here's a guy that avoided being drafted during Vietnam because he has bone spurs when he was in his, what, 20s?

Speaker 2 And now he's in his 70s and he's on the golf course a couple times a week. I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't get it.

Speaker 2 I don't even think he gets it, to be honest. And

Speaker 2 here's a guy who

Speaker 2 says something one day, the next day, he's, you know, he's flipped 180 degrees and then

Speaker 2 he's back. He's kind of like a, you know, with the flip-flops.
He's kind of like a house of pancakes here.

Speaker 4 You know, and I think that's one of the issues that lots of people have. They go, look, Republicans have decided they're not going to play by the rules.
I mean, look, you've got Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 I mean, you've answered this question before. I mean, he calls you a traitor because you go to, you know, because you're in Ukraine and you're doing your job.

Speaker 4 You've got Musk posting this morning, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn't murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did, you know, and your colleagues just, or, you know, what happened?

Speaker 4 You know, Republican colleagues are like, what, whatever, that's Elon being Elon.

Speaker 4 And I just think the American people across the board, I don't know if you're hearing this in Arizona, are just like, can we just fight back against this shit? Could we just fight?

Speaker 4 Could we just put, what can we do other than be told, oh, point a parliamentary inquiry?

Speaker 2 Like, like, what can we do?

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, it's not that. That doesn't help.
You know, people don't understand that.

Speaker 2 It's hard to understand that even when you're here in the Senate for four years. You know, what is all that stuff?

Speaker 2 What can we do? We can fight back and we can fight back stronger.

Speaker 2 I get the criticism here, and we have to, because they've taken a wrecking ball to the government, and now it's affecting the economy. So it's affecting people's lives.

Speaker 2 I think folks today, 50-something days into it, this are poorer. If they have a 401k, any kind of a retirement program,

Speaker 2 any kind of savings like that, they've got less money today than they did before. And then the cost of things are going up.

Speaker 2 This is the guy who said he was elected or running, all about bringing down costs. He has done exactly the opposite of this.
And these costs are going to continue to go up.

Speaker 2 And he lies to the American people about how tariffs work. All anybody has to do is look it up in the dictionary or in an encyclopedia to find out,

Speaker 2 how do these things work. And they're paid in the United States by the person who imports it, turned, that cost gets passed on to the consumer, prices go up.
It's pretty simple.

Speaker 2 So I think we keep fighting back.

Speaker 2 Elon is doing a lot of damage

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 the federal government, to the economy. Hey, and Ben, I think it's fair to say I'm all about

Speaker 2 change in the government and reducing any kind of

Speaker 2 redundancy, or if there's waste or there's fraud, we have to have a serious look at that, but this isn't the way you do it.

Speaker 2 You do this through a process of

Speaker 2 managing these agencies and looking for,

Speaker 2 doing some analysis, and then let the heads of the agencies, even the ones that I didn't vote for, let them take this on as a project. Let them do this and try to make smart decisions.

Speaker 2 This is just like random.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's not helpful.

Speaker 4 You know what I think most revealing, too, is when your Republican colleagues quash any attempts to subpoena Elon Musk so he could actually be transparent and testify before the Senate or even before the House about what he's doing.

Speaker 4 Finally,

Speaker 4 what are you hearing just from people in Arizona? Are you seeing a shift? I mean, Arizona, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, about one-third, one-third, one-third Used to be reddish, now purplish.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're a Democratic senator, you know, in that state, purplish state.

Speaker 4 What do you make of the vibe? I mean, I know from when I used to practice law there, a strong view.

Speaker 4 I practiced in California, but I had a few cases out there. Privacy was always a big issue.

Speaker 4 So not wanting people to go through their social security records, medical records, not have the federal government and Elon Musk and billionaires take it. I've heard that's a big issue.

Speaker 4 What are you just hearing generally? Is there a discernible shift that you've seen?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm not going to hear from people that are the die-hard Donald Trump supporters very often.

Speaker 2 I do occasionally.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there are some folks that just, whatever he does, they're going to be in favor of. But there are so many people.

Speaker 2 And I think there's more of these folks that are really concerned about breaking institutions, about actions that this president is taking that is going to have a direct effect on them, that are concerned about turning our backs on the Ukrainians who are allies, who we have supported their democracy against a country that has been an adversary and who wants to undermine Western civilization, who would like to see us fail, who interferes in our elections, who attacks us with cyber warfare routinely.

Speaker 2 And by the way, just as an aside, why did the Department of Defense,

Speaker 2 and we're still trying to verify exactly what happened, but decide to stop planning offensive operations against Russia, cyber operations, when they attack us all the time?

Speaker 2 It happens every single day.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 2 I think folks are,

Speaker 2 they're really concerned. And

Speaker 2 I get it. And I'm going to be here in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 2 you know, fighting to get us back on track. It's going going to take some time.

Speaker 2 We got an election in 2026,

Speaker 2 and then again, a presidential election in 2028. Elections matter.
People need to show up and vote.

Speaker 4 Senator Mark Kelly, thanks for joining us. We hope you come back.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

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