Transcript of We The People 2026: Post-election special coverage Part 2

But first, we're going to do a quick little check-in on the President of the United States, because, well, he woke up today after the generational shellacking his party and his presidency received last night and reached right for his security blanket. Yes, everyone, in case you haven't seen this, Donald Trump decided that after the country told him quite clearly, "We hate all the corruption, you know, the corruption under your administration," the best move today was for him to gather reporters for a tour of a symbol of that corruption: his ballroom.

His ballroom, of course. His favorite vanity project. And he was super, super into it. I mean, he spoke about its magnificent columns. He encouraged everyone to envision chandeliers all over, to envision marble flooring, claiming, "This is the greatest," right? Right? I mean, hard to make up sometimes the script here. The ballroom is, of course, just one of many pet construction projects that Trump has sunk or is planning to sink hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into.

And yes, it's completely maddening. It's probably why many of you went to the polls—some of you, at least—yesterday. But your taxpayer dollars have been benefiting Donald Trump and his friends and family in all kinds of ways since he returned to the presidency. And it's almost hard to keep up. So we're not going to give you every single way, but just to give you a sense or a flavor if you were tuning into this: I mean, billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts have gone to companies in which Trump's sons, Eric and Don Jr., are investors. Also, the Trump administration approved over $1.5 billion in government financing for a Kazakhstan mining deal his sons have ties to.

Again, can't make it up sometimes. Also, a $10 billion Pentagon contract went to computer maker Dell after Donald Trump acquired millions of dollars in Dell stock. Also, hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds went to retrofitting the jet that Cutter gifted to Trump, and which Trump says he is going to keep after he leaves office, as one does not do as president. Also, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is reportedly trying to negotiate a multibillion-dollar Russian oil deal involving the U.S.

government, a major Trump donor, and two of Jared's Middle Eastern business partners. Nothing to see there, obviously. Also, a $350 million Pentagon contract went to a company closely tied to one of Trump's appointees at the Defense Department. Also, Trump's former DHS secretary spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars buying planes from one of her donors. Planes DHS has barely used. Also, Trump's DHS recently bought a private prison from a company that has donated to Trump.

The company had previously offered to sell the prison for $75 million. Trump's DHS bought it for nearly a half a billion dollars. Also, Trump tried to create a slush fund to pay out nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to allies and supporters, including pardon January 6 rioters. Also, Trump gave out no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars to renovate—badly, I would note—the Reflecting Pool in D.C. One contract—and this detail just never gets old—to his own personal pool guy.

Remember that story? And another contract to a company owned by this memorable gentleman you can see on your screen, one of Trump's donors. Remember him? Quite a looker. Those are just a handful of the ways your taxpayer money—your taxpayer money—has reportedly been directed into the pockets of Donald Trump, his family, his sons, his associates. And it doesn't even scratch the surface of all the other ways Donald Trump has found to monetize the presidency. I mean, take the fact that an actual pardon industry has exploded, has been created, and really exploded around Trump and his administration.

The pardon industry is not a phrase that even existed, I don't think, before the Trump presidency. But now, convicted felons who have $100,000 or a million or tens of millions of dollars to give to Trump entities or Trump lobbyists or Trump cronies, all of a sudden, they happen to get pardons. They get them because there's now an industry. Now, I should note the White House, of course, has denied repeatedly that there are any conflicts of interest when it comes to Trump, his family, and any government business. That includes allegations about those pardons.

Okay, we can all read the information ourselves, I think. Trump's sons say they're just private businessmen whose deals have nothing to do with their dad. And Trump's business says he doesn't control his stocks. It's all just all of it a lucky coincidence, I guess. I guess. And with the Justice Department and all of Congress under Trump's control, there has never been a real investigation into any of the corruption allegations against Donald Trump. But after last night's blowout Democratic victories, that's about to change.

And it was exactly what we needed to bring ourselves back from the brink of authoritarianism. And corruption is a permanent way of doing business. And so our committee is going to have to both shine a light on all of these different domains of government that have been absolutely poisoned and contaminated by quid pro quo corruption and pay-to-play government and coin-operated public policy. We have to move away from that. But what that means is we are not only going to just give everybody that exercise and exposure, but we're going to have to put forward the laws that we need to establish strong guardrails around the executive branch of government.

James Madison said that Congress is the predominant branch of government. It is in Article One for a reason. We've got the power to declare war. We've got the power to appropriate money. We've got the power to control federal buildings and installations. Not Donald Trump, if he can rightfully bulldoze the east wing of the White House without anybody's permission. He can bulldoze the west wing. He could just burn the whole thing down. He can't do it. It's not his house. It belongs to the people. And it is Congress that controls it. So we're going to be advancing a whole series of investigations and hearings to shine a light on the corruption and then advance the laws that we need to shut this down for good.

So how do you enforce it? When you send the subpoena, when you send the summons to come to have a secretary or a department head or maybe even the president himself come and explain his dealings and his behavior, how do you enforce that? How do you make sure that you get the answers that the American people have wanted? I give you the Epstein files. The law is very clear on what this administration was required to do under letter of law.

And this administration has basically said, "Eh, okay, whatever."

We will exercise the power of oversight through subpoenas, through Congress's own inherent powers of contempt, through judicial action if need be, but also through the flood of whistleblowers who are running away from the wreckage of the Trump administration and also from subpoenas that we issue towards private parties, corporations, businesses that might be involved in a lot of the corruption that we're talking about. And finally, we have other kinds of powers, including impeachment, trial, conviction, removal from office, and so on.

But we don't even need to get there right now because we control both houses of Congress. We control the power of the purse. And we're going to use it every single day. We're bringing in maybe 50, 60, 70 new colleagues. Who knows at the end of it? These are brilliant, public policy-oriented, public-interested people who are raring to go. And every committee in Congress is going to be on fire to get the job done, both to deliver results to the American people, to bring health care to the American people, to save our environment from the plunder and rapaciousness of the corporations that Donald Trump's been giving everything away to, and also to get to the bottom of this corruption so we can shut the swamp down for good.

And what do you want to know from them?

So that's a victory that we've had in the minority simply by using the sternly worded letter that everybody makes fun of. But we will not hesitate to go after the private corporations that are collaborating in all of the lawlessness with Donald Trump. And we've done it before and we will absolutely do it again. The law firms you mentioned, we know that there were many heroic law firms that have stood up against all of the lawbreaking and then the attempt to shake them down for the time of their partners and their young associates.

And yet there are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss, that have capitulated to these coercive tactics by Donald Trump and have basically surrendered and made all kinds of outrageous concessions. We've sent a number of letters to those law firms and they have been not forthcoming up until now. But when we have the power of subpoena and we have the power to conduct oversight, we believe a lot of these law firms are going to be coming forward and telling the truth.

Otherwise, they are law firms that have no respect for the rule of law. And we're going to make sure that they comply with a congressional subpoena. It is the exact same legal force as a judicial subpoena does. Subpoena means under the power or under the penalty of law.

I would tell them that there's a great 501(c)(3) not-for-profit law community mobilized on that, that the Democrats under Mark Elias and different state party lawyers were mobilized for that. But I would always say in the final analysis, our best insurance policy against a stolen election is a landslide election. And the voters, the American people delivered a landslide repudiation of all the lawlessness and corruption. But guess what? We shouldn't need a landslide in order to have a real election in America where the votes are counted.

We should be able to win even by 5 million votes instead of 30 million votes or whatever it turns out to be. We should have a real election. And imagine what they would be doing right now if it were a narrow election and not a broad one. So I would say, yes, add that to the list of things that this attorney general has done that are constitutionally repulsive, starting with all of the cover-up and suppression of the truth in the Epstein case where they got in Donald Trump's former personal attorney, Todd Blanch, who would later become his personal attorney general, zeroed in on the Epstein files, had them moved from the Southern District to DC where they sat on them, nothing happening for six months.

And then right after the 4th of July, I believe it was July the 7th, they sent a letter saying that there is no evidence in the entire Epstein file, no evidence at all that would justify even an investigation of people who might be accomplices or co-conspirators. I mean, just a patently outrageous and false assertion, which we debunked a couple of weeks ago in a report that we put out demonstrating not only that there's lots of evidence that would certainly support investigation, but evidence that would support investigation of Donald Trump himself because of all of his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and all of his involvement in their network.

So yeah, I would say that this attorney general has been doing nothing other than acting in his old capacity as a personal criminal defense attorney to Donald Trump. Look at all of the fraudulent prosecutions that they've engaged in against people like James Comey, like Letitia James, like Adam Schiff, like Mark Kelly, like Maggie Goodlander, and Jason Crowe, and on and on against my constituent, Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympic canoeist who dipped his hand in the reflecting pool, is pounced on by federal agents and they charge him with felony destruction of federal property and want to send him to jail for 10 years.

Now, the judge basically excoriated the Trump administration for bringing this case and said he would dismiss the charges with prejudice. But meantime, the Department of Interior already knew that it was Trump's pool guy who was behind it, along with the insider no-bid contractor who's gotten more than $25 million of our money. I know that's small change as their corruption goes, but nonetheless, it's exemplary of what's happened. And Todd Blanch has been there overseeing all of it.

The Department of Justice has clearly become a department of injustice, an instrument of revenge, political revenge for the president, and an instrument for the suppression of criminal cases that may affect the president or his family and friends.

Damn whatever the people of South Carolina thought. Trump himself visited the state three times to shore up Graham in her special election primary, twice to stump for her in the general election. It didn't work. Dr. Annie Andrews won decisively. Not close, not a squeaker, not 11,000 votes by four and a half points, a margin of nearly 100,000 votes. In her victory speech, Andrews insisted that unlike Graham, she will be beholden to no one but her constituents in Congress.

Of course, the political environment was very different. And I'm really proud of the race that we ran and just really excited to get to work on behalf of South Carolina.

So we need to do something about the cost of prescription drugs. We need to hold our insurance companies accountable. Number one, we need to stop the Medicaid budget cuts. That will be my priority when I get to DC. There's so much work to be done to fix our broken healthcare system. And I look forward to using my lived experience working within that broken system to make a system that actually meets the needs of everyone in America.

Pretty simple.

This has just happened within the last minute or so. I've been watching this one. This is Nevada 2. Nevada's second congressional district drawn explicitly to be a bulletproof conservative district in Nevada. David Flippos, the Republican candidate there, he A, does not live in the district, B, did not win a Bronze Star with Valor despite his claims to the contrary, and C, did not spend Operation Desert Storm in the desert. He spent it in college despite his claims to the contrary.

But Teresa Benitez Thompson in a very, very, very Republican-heavy district has defeated David Flippo, one of the most embarrassing and scandal-ridden Republican candidates. The Republican Party scared up for this race in Nevada. She has defeated him handily tonight. That has just been called by the Associated Press. All right, we're going live to Austin next. Stay with us.

And you have probably been hearing, I'm so glad that whistle worked. That was like a really high-stakes gambit at that point. I could have very easily just gone. Anyway.

That is hugely important, not just in terms of statewide office, but because of the oil and gas industry in Texas, which is a thing. It is hard to understand the seismic nature of what happened in Texas last night, but we can at least start to understand what caused it. Look at this. When Trump ran for president in 2024, he won Latino voters in Texas by 10 points. Last night, Gina Inohosa and James Talarico each won the Latino vote in Texas by more than 30 points.

That is a swing of more than 40 points in the Democrats' favor among Latino voters specifically. Absolutely seismic. Joining us now is MS Now national reporter Rosa Flores, who is in Austin tonight. Rosa, you and I had a moment last night during election coverage where you were in the middle of an absolute cacophony. Both knowing the results, knowing the people behind you were only just about to figure them out, bringing us original reporting on a concession that hadn't previously been nationally reported.

And I was like, say what, Rosa? Can you explain more? I knew that I wanted to talk to you again, both about what it was like to do that reporting last night, but also about being a native Texan and being in the middle of this story. Please just tell me how this has been for you.

And that was the strength of the American dream. And that was the root of the American dream. And that was in the '80s and '90s. And so fast forward time, in the past two years, a lot of young girls, little girls like myself in the Rio Grande Valley, what they saw were masked agents ripping families apart, their parents, their grandparents. And so the American dream was shattered in a lot of these communities.

I reported from there, like you mentioned. The construction industry was destroyed. A big part of the American dream is you work hard, Rachel. You work really hard. Like that's the whole point. And if you can't go out and work because you're afraid of being racially profiled and you see individuals like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, who a lot of the people that I interviewed, and I can tell you personally, we all see that man and what we saw were our fathers possibly being racially profiled, whether they were U.S.

citizens or not. And so all of those emotions, you bring all of those emotions. And what you have is, for me, when I was a little girl growing up in the '80s and '90s, my role models were my mother, my teachers, and a fancy lady in Austin with big Texas hair, and her name was Ann Richards. And so yesterday, what you saw in that room were a lot of women who have daughters, a lot of men who have daughters and young boys.

And what they're going to be able to say is that their role models are their mom, their dad, their teachers, and the governor of Texas, Gina Inohosa. So there's so much emotion there. So when you look at the turnout of the Latino vote, just think about that. It's the idea of the return of the American dream for so many little girls like myself, who for I don't know how many years thought that that American dream was dimming or had died.

And now we see it again.

It also takes faith that the Democratic system can deliver it, that it is worth the risk, that it is worth defying the cynicism, that it is worth defying how hard it is to vote in Texas. And that in a state where in my lifetime, it's never been possible for a Democrat to break through at any level in Texas. It's never been possible even for all of these very inspirational, very capable candidates to break through. It took believing that this was worth doing and worth getting out for.

And that's a feat of organizing, right? That's a feat of, that takes political skill to get people to, yes, I can and yes, I'm going to. And I guess I wanted to ask what you can help us understand about that feat of political organizing, about the political skill, about just the work, the shoe leather it took to get people to actually get out in those huge numbers.

And hope is a really powerful thing when we're talking about the American dream, when we're talking about your children having a chance, your grandchildren having a chance. And Rachel, I got to tell you, I talk to so many people in this state. And I always like to understand the human emotion. And so I would ask them about that emotion, what emotions took them to the polls. And a lot of people were in tears, Rachel, telling me about ice ripping families apart, affordability.

And I don't even like using the word affordability, because it's so much more than that. The way that it was explained to me by Texans is like, Rosa, how am I going to put food on the table? How am I going to buy medicine? How am I going to pay rent if I'm in a fixed income? And Republicans win. Voter suppression, Rachel, when you think about Tarrant County and how Republicans there cut polling places in areas in black and brown communities where nearly 11% of the people don't have access to a car.

And those communities coming together and saying, you're trying to take our right away to vote and to change our government. Well, then that's going to motivate me even more to vote. So it's those very emotional things. And the last one that I'll mention, because this one was so powerful for so many Texans. And I feel like they felt the weight of this election. And that is the future of our democracy. I don't even know. I can't even find the words, Rachel, to explain, because so many Texans feared that if this didn't happen, what we're witnessing right now, this blue tsunami across this country, and of course this state, they didn't know what tomorrow would bring.

They were worried about their children. They were worried about their grandchildren. And they wanted to do what they needed to do, which was vote and exercise their right to vote to make sure that the next generation has the America that you and I know.