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Hopefully folks will look at the good things that I've done over the years, you know, my 10 years in Congress, my 12 years in state legislature, my many years of community organizing for the environment, for police accountability, for criminal justice reform, economic empowerment, trying to fight for small-business people, all these things.
Worked hard on [our message of strengthening the middle class, working people], but it didn't come through in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.It really should have, because people are struggling. And the Democratic message and the Democratic platform would help them, but somehow it didn't come up the way it should have. But it will.
You approach faith with humility. You can have some idea, but it boils down to do you see religion as a club, or do you see religion as a path? Do you see it as a wall that separates you or do you see it as a bridge that connects you to God and other people? When you see it as a bridge, you aren't so worried about bringing others over to your side.
I think that people have been looking at 40 years of flat wages. You know, the reality is you've got folks in diners and hair shops and barber shops all over this country who look at their own lives and think, you know, "My parents did better than I'm doing and my kids might not do as well as I'm doing." And that's because wages have been slashed for so long.
What I hear people talking about are things that anybody of any color or any religion or any sexual orientation can get with. They cannot earn a decent living if they`re working class folks. They`re worried about retirement if they`re in their 40s and 50s. They`re worried about sending their kids to college. If we focus on what really matters, we can get there.
If you ignore somebody's record and only focus on something that happened 25 years ago when all they were doing even then was trying to stand up for a minority group that felt excluded and discriminated against, then I don't - I think that is a distortion of a person's record. I mean, a person's record is full, not just the parts that you want to use against them.
The conversation should've been about middle class people. The conversation should've been about how to raise the minimum wage and strengthen Social Security. But then we started talking about this whole email stuff again. And now the outcome is that, you know, Donald Trump has somebody who he's looking at to put on his Cabinet who's a lobbyist to privatize Social Security.
You know, the elites always want to shame the poor - right? - and everyone else. I mean, the fact is, this economy is based on 70 percent of the people driving consumer demand. If people do not purchase goods and services, this economy will grind to recession. And that is why, if you are going to do a tax cut, it ought to really be aimed at low-income and middle-income people.
Look, rich people already have a lot of money. There's literally trillions of dollars in cash held by corporations, their stock valuations at an all-time high. They do not need a tax cut to do anything. They can invest now, if they wanted to. They don't want to, because they can make more money just by mergers and stock buybacks and stuff like that. So, this is really just sort of a travesty.
Obstruction, basically, is whether you corruptly influence, obstruct or impede the administration of justice. You tell a chief law enforcement officer get, you know, back off my friend - or I hope you back off my friend and then when he doesn't, you fire him, clearly, that isn't - that is - fits the behavior of obstruction. The question of whether or not you can prosecute the president is open.
I love the donors and we thank them, but it has to be that the guys in the barber shop, the lady at the diner, the folks who are worried about whether that plant is going to close, they've got to be our focus. They've got to be a laser-beam focus on everything we do, and everything we do should animate and empower them at the grassroots level for working people across this country. That's how we come back.
You take for example the environmental movement is a big deal in my district. You know, you might say, yeah, more African Americans are suffering from asthma and air pollution-related illnesses, but there`s a lot of white folks, a lot of white kids with inhalers. So, you just got to talk to the reality of everyone, not exclude anyone. And make sure that people know that you care about them too. I think if you do that, we can get there.
The fact is, is that Americans don't hate their Muslim neighbors. They don't hate their Latino neighbors. We have got to build human solidarity in this country, because human solidarity is what's going to allow us to come together to protect our democracy and to protect our economy. So reject the hate. Turn it away. Don't buy it. And reach out to a neighbor. Trump is trying to sow division so that he can distract us from what he's doing to us.
I'm an optimistic guy.It's just as much the case that people will come to me and ask my opinion about how to properly include the Muslim community, as it is that people will come with some hateful stuff too. When people come to me about my religion, it's not always a thing of "we don't want people like you here," which happens sometimes. But mostly it's people who would like to know more. I get a chance to help people understand the religion better.
We have to have a shared prosperity. We have to make that our job number one. People want a better economic playing field for working Americans. And they're voting for it. Our job is to make sure that people know that the Democratic party is the party that is going to deliver that for them. And that means strengthening the grassroots. That means strengthening the local precinct county level and making sure that we're all channeled on massive turnout for that program.
I'd say the most important criteria is vision. What is your vision for the party? Do you have a vision to strengthen the grassroots and help them turn out people in their local communities? That's the real thing. The real question is not about one person. It's not about an individual. It's about millions of people working all over this country to reach out in their local communities. And the DNC chair has to help them do that and have a vision for that and have the energy for that.
One time, the Library of Congress was giving books to local libraries around the country on Islam. The library of a guy named Walter Jones, who's a member of Congress from North Carolina, got some books and resource materials, and he got up in the press and said he didn't want any Muslim books in the library. And the people said, "Wait a minute, that's kind of anti-Muslim." He said, "Oh no, Keith Ellison is a friend of mine." And I said, "You know what? We are friends, but you're wrong about this.
The fact is, is that Donald Trump knows that as he rifles money from the working and middle classes up to the super rich, he has to sow division among working people, because if working people and middle-class people really take a look at his economic policy, they will come together, and they will stop it. So, what he has to do is to promote racism - hate the Muslims, hate the Latinos, hate the blacks, you know, have male - men and women at each other's throats, you know, make sure we repress the trans people.
I like Paul Ryan, and to a certain extent, I feel bad for him. But this is a moment of moral choice. And if he says that Hillary Clinton is worse than a openly racist, Muslim-hating misogynist who wants to build a wall to exclude Mexicans, who thinks that a judge, an American judge because of his Mexican lineage cannot be fair to him, if you`re saying that Hillary Clinton is worse than all that, then I just think that that just is ridiculous, it`s absurd, and it really starts to damage the speaker`s credibility.
Trump himself stands to benefit dramatically from the tax cuts. One of the things they're cutting is the alternative minimum tax. Last time we have tax returns for him was in 2005, where he paid about $31 million because of the alternative minimum tax. He won't have to pay that, if this tax bill goes through. So, not only is he reordering our constitutional democracy, he is personally enriching himself - which is not new, because, of course, he's done it ever since he swore an oath to become president of the United States.
One thing that I'd just remind young people of is that when John Lewis, who's a member of Congress today, defied George Wallace and led the march from Selma to Montgomery, he was 23 years old. Martin Luther King was the old man in the bunch, and he was 35, so young people need to know that they've always been an important part of our society, have always been at the forefront of pushing for a more just America, and we can't be successful without the impatience, the vigor that young people bring to the fight for social justice.
Donald Trump was tainted every kind of way you could imagine. I mean, no way in the world that Donald Trump is a champion of working people. He has hurt workers in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida, multiple bankruptcies, never showed his taxes. I don't know any good thing this guy's ever done. And yet, because he was able to throw hate and poison on Hillary Clinton, he was able to somehow prevail at least until the Electoral College. I think he was skilled at just sort of, like, keeping the attention on anyone but himself. He is the most outrageous person ever to win a presidential election.