Transcript of Rep. Moskowitz Discusses Trump Destroying Entire GOP

Republicans are absolutely losing it right now as the American people are livid. Can you extend these Affordable Care Act subsidies? And MAGA Republican is, you know what? That's what they're saying. You know what everyone's complaining about? It's not the extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. They're wondering why we don't have talking lizards selling you health care on TV. Am I right? Isn't that what the American people are asking for? I kid you not. That is what the MAGA Republicans are saying is part of their plan. Here, watch what Steve Scalese, MAGA Republican, said in the morning. Let's play it.

To lower cost.

The Choice Act, which everybody complains.

They say, Why when I watch TV commercials, I see this gecko lizard, and I see the emu, and I see all these other animals out there selling health.

They're selling car insurance.

They're selling homeowners insurance.

Why aren't they selling health insurance?

That's exactly the question on everybody's mind right now. Why aren't they selling health insurance? Then let me show you what Mike Lawler, a Republican, had to say that it was political malprivacy practice to not allow a vote on the Affordable Care Act subsidy. Let's play it.

Mike Lawler is a very dear friend and close colleague of mine. Ironically, the weekend before last, I was in New York in his district on Long Island, and we were campaigning together ensuring that he gets reelected. Mike Lawler fights hard for New York, as every Republican in this conference does for their districts. The districts are different. They have different priorities and ideas. But we do have, there's about a dozen members in the conference that are in these swing districts who are fighting hard to make sure that they reduce costs for all of their constituents. Many of them did want to vote on this Obamacare, COVID era, subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be. We worked on it all the way through the weekend, in fact. In the end, an agreement wasn't made. Now, everybody was at the table in good faith.

Now, pressure release valve. It was not meant to be. What about that pressure release valve? That's how the American people are thinking about, I really want to release that pressure valve. Then finally, you have Maga Mike being asked, so Donald Trump said that his legislative agenda is done. If This is it. If it's done, why should people be voting for Republicans? If this is it. Here, play this clip.

I don't know which comment you're referring to and in what context, but I'll tell you, I talk to the President sometimes multiple times each day. He and I and his team and our teams work around the clock. Literally, the President and I will talk sometimes at midnight and then again at 6: 00 AM. This President doesn't sleep. He's working all the time. The agenda is aggressive. There is much more to do. Sometimes I think what he's sometimes when he's taken out of context.

That's always taken out of context. He never sleeps. They talk in the middle of the night. Let's bring in Democratic Congress member, Jared Moskowitz. Congressman Moskowitz. I just give you these layups sometimes at the beginning. Sometimes we're like, What should we talk about? I'll let you respond to those clips, although it's some deeply serious stuff that they're making light of.

It was a lot there, Ben. I don't even know where to begin. Can we go back to the characters from the insurance companies like the gecko and the duck? I like Skalees talking about all the zoo animals. I sometimes think that's reminiscence of what the house is like. It's probably why he felt comfortable. He's actually I'm not making a terrible point, by the way. It's something that we've discussed in Florida in the legislature for a long period of time, which is allowing insurance companies to sell specific lines of insurance that they make money on and allowing insurance companies to not sell certain lines of insurance that they don't make money on. In Florida, it's a home insurance issue where we let them sell auto insurance, but not home insurance. They always threaten to pull out of the market if we make them sell home insurance. Here's a similar thing, right? I mean, everyone should be selling all lines of insurance. Some of them will make a lot of money, some will be lost leaders. So he's not making a terrible point there, but I do like that he's using all of the lovely characters that we often think about, which sometimes reminds us of Mike Johnson, who gets to cosplay a speaker.

I love every time he's asked about the President. I mean, obviously, we know Speaker Johnson doesn't have any health issues that have been reported, but he's got memory problems. I haven't seen that. I haven't heard about it. Telling me about it for the first time. The President, he likes words and all caps and commas, and he says things that are sometimes funny. But I mean, man, Speaker Johnson just can't get away from having to figure out how to defend the President without making it look like he has completely no idea what's going on at any point in time in the Capitol. As far as Lawler and the group of Republicans, look, they're trying to win their re-election. They know there's a tsunami coming, and the Republicans say they want to keep the House, but they're exposing their center members or supposed center moderate members who want to take a healthcare vote. Lawler is literally trying to save them from themselves, and they're not willing to listen. And so look, that is what it is. I believe where we're at now is they're not going to extend the health care subsidies. I have 160,000 people in my district who receive those subsidies.

People are going to immediately lose their health insurance. Others health insurance is going to double or triple every month, and they won't be able to renew it because they won't be able to afford it. And Republicans are going to own this health care crisis. Ben, remember, 15 years they've had to develop a health care plan. That's how old Obamacare is right now. Fifteen years they have had to try to develop a health care plan. Repeal and replace. Remember that? They never did repeal, and they never came up with replace. We have a concept of a plan. In the first Trump administration, he said he was releasing it every two weeks. That two weeks went on for three years. Then we're back in a Trump administration, and they still have a concept of a plan. It's clearly in their Twitter drafts folder. It's still in the drafts. They've not released it. I mean, 15 years seems like a long time. Not only that, they had 45 days when Mike Johnson furloughed us for the first time in American history. It didn't let us come and do our Congressional job. They had 45 days to come up with ideas, didn't do it.

So we're going to go off this cliff. They own it. It's really unfortunate. They're going to hurt a lot of Americans in the process.

And we're going off this healthcare cliff where especially a lot of unemployed people or people transitioning to new jobs are on Affordable Care Act plans. A lot of individual business people on these Affordable Care Act plans at a time where we just got the job numbers, and the job numbers aren't good. Up to 4. 6% unemployment. If you look at job losses over the past year, up 54%, over 1. 2 million jobs lost in the past year with Donald Trump. So there should never be a time where you're ripping away people's health care. But when you also have people becoming unemployed, this is a recipe for disaster, and it's a disaster.

I don't know if you know this, but the affordability thing is a hoax.

That's what Donald Trump says, And he says, But let's go to your district because you have an interesting district in Florida. It was Trump almost won that district in the last election. Desantis won that district by a point. So I'm curious, though, if you've seen changes in your district on their outlook right now of the political dynamic with these very close races in 2024. And we're seeing plus 12, plus 14 Democratic over performances. We saw what happened in Miami recently with the Democratic mayor winning there. What are you seeing in your district in Florida?

Well, let's go backwards for a second. Florida had more Democrats, more registered Democrats. Even when we were electing Republican governors, we still had more registered Democrats in the state of Florida. But since COVID, that's dramatically changed. We've seen re-registrations in Florida, and we've seen, obviously, a lot of people moving to Florida from California, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut since COVID. Now, Republicans outnumber Democrats that's in the state of Florida by 1. 4 million registered voters when we outnumbered them by about 300,000 registered voters pre-COVID. So there's been a dramatic change in registrations to Florida, clearly being a red state. My district is a moderate district. They redistricted it just four years ago, tried to make it as Republican as possible. This was a district that Ted Deutz won by 13 points. Then they redistricted when I first came in, and I won it by five in a year Ron DeSantis won his re-election by two. So I overperformed with Ron DeSantis winning the state by 19 points, winning my district by two, and me winning by five. The district has become even more Republican since then, almost four years ago now, since I three years ago since I first got three years ago, since I first got re-elected.

And they're talking about even more redistricting. But you're hearing a lot of things. Some of my Republican colleagues are very worried that they don't want their districts to be touched because if their districts become less Republican with the wave that is coming, they could lose their election. We also have a constitutional amendment in Florida that the voters put in the Constitution that bars political gerrymandering. So all of the folks out there are talking about how they're going to politically gerrymander. That will be used, obviously, in the coming depositions and the lawsuits. So we'll have to see. I mean, this is not working out as they intended because they were using Trump numbers when Trump was on the ballot, when they were drawing these districts, and we're We're seeing now with Trump not on the ballot, they're having a turnout issue. We're clearly seeing a democratic wave coming. There's 150 years of history that shows when one party has all three branches of government, they lose either the House or the Senate coming up. Look, you could have a circumstance where Democrats are going to dramatically overperform in '26, mainly because we're the alternative and mainly because a lot of their voters won't turn out.

In Dade County, specifically, obviously, they told the Venezuelans they wouldn't touch TPS. They told the Haitians they wouldn't touch TPS. That turned out not to be true. The temporary protective status, the Trump administration did come after those two communities. The Cubans are obviously watching what's happening unfolding on television, seeing some of the cruelty that's going on, seeing some of the insensitivity with families and wondering what could happen in their neck of the woods. Florida, still a Republican state, still dramatic Republican registration, but the trends are clearly not in Republican favor in 2026.

Let's talk FEMA. You led emergency management in Florida, notably under the DeSantis administration, and you were widely credited for running that very successfully. You're seeing right now the way FEMA is being run into the ground or has been run into the ground. I know there was supposed to be now infamously, because Christine Ohm said that's where she had to go to when she left that hearing early last week. But they were supposed to do this FEMA Review Council, where they were going to be, I guess, recommending basically, in theory, this is what the purpose of this council when it was set up by executive order, to destroy FEMA in Donald Trump's words and transfer it to the states, whatever the hell What's that supposed to mean? And that executive order happened in January. I think it was supposed to be 120 days where that council was going to meet to make these recommendations about basically destroying FEMA. And then it never met then, and then it keeps getting canceled. And then Christine Holmes said that's why she had to leave the hearing last week when she was being asked about deporting veterans and rounding them up.

What's the latest that you're hearing there? And in general, what's the latest you can tell us on FEMA? Because I don't even know who's running it. They brought in another conspiracy theories guy to be the number two. What's happening there?

Yeah, you did a pretty good run down there. By the way, that hearing with Christie Noem was interesting. I loved when my colleague Seth was like, Have you deported any veterans? She was like, Absolutely not. He was like, Here's the veteran you deported. It reminded me of a Maury Povit show when you're like, Do you have any children? They're like, No. They're like, Here, come meet your boys. It was very funny. Everyone knew she was going to walk right into that because she has no idea what's going on in her department. But here's what I would say about FEMA. It's actually not a laughing matter anymore. But the FEMA Council, believe it or not, then, actually, FEMA Council was created to reform FEMA and save it. That was created as an effort, as an off-ramp from this, Let's get rid of FEMA completely, which there are some in the administration that want to do. Christie Noem, Cory Lewandowski want to get rid of it completely. That's clear. I think there are others, especially the Republican governors, who understand that that's just not possible. You get rid of FEMA, states like Louisiana and Mississippi go bankrupt if they have a hurricane.

You have places that are in Tornado Alley go bankrupt. These are red states. In fact, FEMA helps red states more than they help blue states. Florida and Texas obviously have bigger budgets, but if they got... If we had another season of Irma, Harvey, Maria, same time, if we had a Cat 5 coming to South Florida without FEMA, you'd blow up the Florida budget. You'd have to blow up DOT, blow up the healthcare budget in order to pay for the cleanup. Without spreading out the risk, which is what FEMA does statewide when they come in using federal dollars, state's budgets are going to be disastrous. You'd have to raise taxes. I actually think they're trying to reform FEMA. Look, FEMA needs reform. I think there's nothing wrong with that. That's a fair criticism. But that reform is getting FEMA out of Homeland Security. Believe it or not, that was actually in the original report. In the original report done by this, it was like 100 and something pages long. They were going to move FEMA out of homeland. Christie Noem actually stopped that. She pulled that out of the report and sent a shorter report to the White House, not the full report that the entire Council did.

She then created her own summary of the report sent to the White House. I don't know where this is, obviously, because obviously I don't get information, but something tells me there's a disconnect between what Christie Noem is trying to accomplish and what the White House wants to try to accomplish. I think they're the ones who canceled that meeting, and I think they're the ones who have paused this whole thing because they're hearing from Republican governors who can't get their reimbursement money out of FEMA, can't get it out of Christie Noem. You're talking billions of dollars for previous storms, things that were already declared under federal declaration, under presidential declaration, money that was spent at the local level, blowing up city-county budgets that they can't get their federally declared statutory money out of Christie Noem. Right now, FEMA is in a very perilous situation. Thank goodness for the American people and for the administration, quite frankly, we didn't have a hurricane this summer that would have just destroyed the agency. We got a little taste of it at that horrific flooding in Texas where FEMA couldn't even get its Swiftwater rescue crews going because Christie Noem wouldn't put them out there.

You then had the director of that department resign in protest over that. And so FEMA is not in a good place. I would say of all the agencies that have been destroyed, USAID and FEMA, USAID being gone, FEMA still being there. Fema has been just completely obliterated, doesn't have a core mission, probably couldn't respond. We need to focus on response. We can do block grants. We can block grant some of this money down to the states. I think States can handle that. Not all the money has to be done up here. I agree with that. That's something the Republicans have put I can support that. But I think we got to get FEMA out of homeland. Homeland is slowing it down. It's a giant bureaucratic mess, and we just got to get it out of there. If we want FEMA to really serve the American people in their greatest time of need. And these disasters are not partisan. They hit Americans, left, right, center, doesn't matter. We got to go back to treating disaster management that way.

Finally, before we go, just wanted to ask your thoughts about Susie Wiles' Vanity Fair interview, White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. She comes out of Florida politics. And so what Vanity Fair says, Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of Trump and his team. Mr. Trump has an alcoholic's personality. J. D. Vance has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade, and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle, but political because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is an avowed ketamine user and an odd, odd duck whose actions were not always rational and left a gasp. Russ vote the budget director, is a right-wing absolute zealot. And attorney general Pam Bondi completely whift in handling the Epstein files. Seems about spot on.

Well, she's definitely right on the last two. Pam Bondi with the binders, and the list It was on my desk. Then there is no list. I mean, everyone knows that was a whiff. Let's not pretend that that's not the case. Everyone knows Russ Vot wrote Project 2025 and is a right-wing zealot. None of those are breaking news. Listen, I know Susie, obviously from Florida. I consider Susie to be one of the most capable people I've ever met. That doesn't mean we agree politically, but from a capability standpoint and running a logistical operation, Susie knows what she's doing. I don't know what to make of the article. There's a lot of stuff going back and forth with what was said, what was not said, what was published, what was not published. But obviously, this is something that people are going to discuss. I did send a little note to James Comer this morning who wants to schedule these depositions for Hillary and Bill in that article, specifically said there is no evidence in any of the files dealing with Bill Clinton, that they were just wrong about that. Sorry, James, another thing that you touch dies.

But as your friend, I'm always praying for you.

Congressman Jaron Moskowitz, thanks for joining us. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at mitisplus. Com. You'll get daily recap from Ron Filipkowski, ad free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content, only available at mitisplus. Com.