Joshua Scheer

Defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box will mean little if Democrats preserve the corporate rule that helped bring him to power. The ballots have been counted. The danger now is that Democrats will mistake a repudiation of Donald Trump for permission to keep serving the billionaires who own American politics. On The Chris Hedges Report, Ralph Nader warns that an electoral landslide can become another exercise in betrayal if voters allow the party’s corporate leadership to turn public anger into empty promises, toothless investigations and business as usual.

For Nader and Hedges, the battle now runs directly through the Democratic Party—and through leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, whose allegiance to wealthy donors, military contractors and the Israel lobby they argue has repeatedly smothered demands for change. A party that celebrates defeating MAGA while leaving Americans trapped in medical debt, poverty wages and corporate exploitation is preserving the conditions for the next authoritarian to exploit.

Nader calls for replacing the party’s leadership and building organized pressure for universal health care, a living wage, prosecution of corporate criminals and Trump’s impeachment. Voters delivered the victory; now they must make those they elected fear the consequences of betraying it. Otherwise, he and Hedges warn, the celebration could become the prelude to a more dangerous backlash.

Nader lays out an agenda of universal health care, a living wage, corporate criminal accountability and impeachment, backed by relentless pressure from constituents. Without that mobilization, he and Hedges warn, Democrats risk repeating the broken promises and economic abandonment that fueled the authoritarian backlash in the first place.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report on YouTube for uncompromising conversations that challenge corporate power, expose the machinery of empire and amplify voices the establishment would rather you never hear. Subscribe and support independent journalism.

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Will the Democrats Betray Us Again? Chris Hedges With Ralph Nader

Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Timestamps, filler words and repeated false starts have been removed, and clear transcription errors have been corrected. The speakers’ arguments and substantive claims have been preserved.

Chris Hedges: The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate. They may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt and fascistic regime of Donald Trump to account—something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing to overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president—but a battle to sweep away the corporate indentured hierarchy of the party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The Democratic Party, since the presidency of Bill Clinton who gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and who gutted programs such as welfare, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby, and their funders in the billionaire class.

The country is broken. Corruption in both parties is endemic. Federal agencies have been gutted and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates sustains a system of legalized bribery. The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arm shipments to Israel, and campaign finance reform.

But no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters. Will cutthroat capitalism sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1%? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire Elon Musk gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized?

No one has fought corporate power longer or with more integrity than Ralph Nader. He battled and successfully regulated corporations such as General Motors and the airline industry as a consumer advocate. He later mounted presidential campaigns to push back against the corporate coup d’état. Ralph was once able to find allies in Congress. Those allies were systematically driven out and replaced with politicians beholden to corporations and the rich. Big business, the war industry, and Israel have highly organized lobbying groups. Lobbyists spent $5.13 billion in 2025 to elect and influence politicians to ensure they get what they want at our expense.

The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption visited on the American working class such as Bernie Sanders see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership including Barack Obama. Ralph hasn’t given up. He held an impeachment seminar in July. He has contacted progressive candidates including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, calling on them to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime, and impeach Trump. He is terrified that with a win of this magnitude, the Democratic Party leadership will see the vote not as a repudiation of Trump, but as an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less.

This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, perhaps one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years. Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the megadonors, lobbyists, and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party. This effort to wrest the party back from their hands will be vicious and difficult. As Ralph is intimately aware, it will require us to organize, to put pressure on the Democrats.

If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections, but doomed. Joining me to discuss the elections and what comes next is Ralph Nader. You have a long history with the Democrats. Ralph, I watched as they sabotaged or attempted to sabotage your own presidential runs. What does come next?

Ralph Nader: Well, Chris, you’ve laid out the challenge and let me fill in the blanks. We’ve seen this rodeo before in January 2009 after Obama won the election against John McCain and took a huge majority of Democrats in Congress, even larger than the one that’s coming up after November 3. And what did he do with it? He squandered it. He just passed an anemic Obamacare, giving up before even negotiating a public option. And in the rest of the two years, nothing. Just continuing basically under Obama label. The attacks in empires all over the world, Afghanistan, stayed in Iraq, blew up a lot of other parts of countries.

He was a consolidator of the empire. He refused to prosecute the Wall Street crooks after the collapse of the economy that they were responsible for in 2008–2009 saying he wasn’t going to look back. Well, every criminal prosecution looks back obviously, but he gave them a green light and then he just sat on his haunches. He broke his promise to raise the minimum wage. He didn’t do anything on health care other than this anemic Obamacare. And so here we go again. You got a big majority in Congress.

The people came out to vote in sufficient numbers to make that happen. So the people have credibility here. They’re no longer looked at as patsies and supplicants because they made something happen on November 3. And the politicians know that. So there’s an element of respect and fear that the voters have got to build on that is coming out of Washington. They don’t think they’re in a self-defining bubble in Washington anymore, the Democrats. And so the first thing is the voters have got to send a message to their representatives and senators in the following way.

We voted you in but we’re going to watchdog you all the way. We’re going to summon you to town meetings of our organization and priorities back home where you sit in the audience and we’re on the stage and you listen to our demands. We’re also going to start volunteer Congress watchdog groups so we can monitor you regularly and we can make sure you don’t betray us. That’s number one. Number two, the Democrats who are now dominating Congress, they’re corrupt, as you say, Jeffries and Schumer, we’ll get to them later.

They have to clean their own house. They got to stop stock trading. They got to stipulate they’ll take no money from AIPAC, no money from military contractors. That’s a conflict of interest in terms of the money they give them in the congressional appropriations process. They’ve got to put a taboo list of we’re not taking this kind of money. Bernie Sanders years ago showed they could raise considerable money in small amounts over the internet. They don’t have to take corporate PAC money or people who dump $5 million here and there for quid pro quo with strings attached Then, once they clean their house, here is what the media has been missing.

This was a big victory for the Democrats but no mandates. The National Democratic Party does not like mandates. They refused former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s list of how to make life affordable for the American people. He sent it to them. He has a big internet following as you know. He sent it to them in December. None of them responded. None of the leadership of the Democrats, Jeffries, Schumer, the Democratic National Committee. He sent it again in July. Updated it. No response. Now, why is it they don’t want mandates?

Because mandates mean that they have to actually pay attention to specifics. A minimum wage mandate of 20 bucks an hour, for example. That’s the specific. What they prefer instead is a throwaway line. They just say, we’re going to raise the minimum wage and they never give any specific. A mandate means they have a program to crack down on corporate crime. Which makes life unaffordable because it steals trillions of dollars from consumer dollars and savings. And people know it and they feel it. The insurance companies, the credit card companies, the banks, the oil companies, the health insurance companies, they know it.

And they’ve got to have a priority law and order for corporate crooks. That comes in at 90%. You want to have a left-right support on an issue, just say we want to crack down on corporate crooks. Because whether it’s in red state or blue state, people are bleeding the same color. They’re getting ripped off the same way. The corporations don’t give a pass to a conservative family and just rip off a liberal family. It’s equal opportunity theft from these corporations. Next, what they have to do—specifics.

They didn’t want a mandate on universal health care. Heaven forbid we have the same system that they have in Canada. Everybody in, nobody out. Much less expensive. And according to a recent Yale study, which you should have the authors on, it came out in July, Yale School of Public Health study, single-payer will save over a trillion dollars a year and 113,000 lives a year. That is the rebuttal. They didn’t even use that. We gave all this that I’m talking about. We gave it to Jeffries in a special package.

I know he received it. We sent it to Schumer. We sent it to the Democratic National Committee. They don’t want mandates. They don’t want mandates on the military-industrial complex bloated budget and war in all directions. Empire. They don’t want mandates because they like to vote for a big military budget and they get paid for it by the Lockheed Martins and the Boeings and the Raytheons and the General Dynamics who have insatiable demands for massive weapons that are never needed to begin with. So just look at the issues.

No reform of the oil and gas companies. No, no front-burner impeachment. As you noted, Chris, 90% of the Democrats and two-thirds of the independents, according to Celinda Lake’s polls last April, want impeachment. So, they didn’t put that in because Jeffries and Schumer are against impeachment. They want to use it as a bargaining chip with this crook in the White House, assuming that he’s going to do what he promises them. You know, were they born yesterday? They’re cowards and they remain cowards. Now, the next change has got to be with preparedness.

We have to be prepared for pandemics. It’s not if, it’s just when. According to the experts, we have to be ready for climate violence. That happens all the time. Wait until you see the way El Niño hits the West Coast in a few weeks. And we’re not prepared. And that wasn’t even an issue among the National Democratic Party. They downplayed it as was reported in the press. All they do is this. They won this election by saying they’re not Trump and they characterize Trump as corrupt etc.

And by using the word affordability but they only used one leg which was prices of groceries and fuel and health care, etc. There’s three legs to affordability. The second leg is increase income. Increase the minimum wage to a living wage. And the second way to increase income is to increase Social Security benefits have been frozen since 1971. Frozen since 1971. They won’t even come out for that. And end the income cap on the rich for Social Security and [unclear—check audio] all of Elon Musk’s income, not just the first $184,500, which is the present cap.

And then the third leg of affordability is cracking down on corporate crime, fraud, theft, abuse, manipulation, denials, and so forth, which bleed existing income levels of the vast majority of the American people. And so the first order of business for the insurgents, and there are exceptions to my characterization, Chris, obviously Talarico and El-Sayed, Jackson and others are coming in with our sense of urgency. And what they’ve got to do is mount a challenge to Schumer and to Jeffries and get the allies that are already in the Congress on that score.

For example, Greg Casar, the young chairperson of the progressive caucus in the House from Texas wants nothing better than to replace Hakeem Jeffries. He should be the speaker or Jayapal, Congresswoman Jayapal or Jamie Raskin even if he can unload his fealty to the leadership, Hakeem Jeffries There are several prospects here, and unfortunately there’s not much time here. The decision on retaining Jeffries and Schumer will be in early January when the members of the Democratic Party in the Congress vote. But here’s what’s going to happen. If Schumer and Jeffries remain, there’ll be no impeachment drive.

Number one, they will put in place corporate chairpeople, corporate Democrats of the worst kind. Jeffries has already put three members of the House who are Netanyahu toadies in charge of the House Foreign Relations Committee and subcommittee already. He’s done that. He’s announced it. He is the most indentured member of Congress, even more than Schumer, to the Israeli government can do no wrong lobby led by AIPAC. He once said Israel could be the sixth borough of New York. He takes huge money from AIPAC, huge money from Wall Street, huge money from the military weapons companies along with a lot of leading Democrats.

So, he’s going to lock in his power through right-wing corporate chairpeople of House Ways and Means, foreign relations, appropriation committees, and so forth. And he’ll start with the one of the worst corporate Democrats of all. Richard Neal from Western Massachusetts, Congressman Richard Neal has been in for 38 years when he took the helm of House Ways and Means in January 2019 after the Democrats won the congressional race majority in 2018 November. What was the first thing he said? First thing he said was he was not going to revisit Trump’s massive tax cuts for the superrich and the big corporations that were enacted in 2017.

Imagine that. The second thing he did was he suppressed Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s subcommittee from investigating corporate tax escapes, evasions, and other shenanigans and tax havens overseas. Suppressed his own subcommittee. The third thing he did was side with Nancy Pelosi and block John Larson’s very popular bill to increase the benefits of Social Security. He even voted for it in the Ways and Means. But when Pelosi didn’t want to bring it to the floor for a vote, it already had 200 Democrats signed on. It was hugely popular around the country, benefiting 60 million elderly.

And he went along with Pelosi. He surrendered the prerogatives of his chair and his own committee members and agreed not to bring it to the floor. That is one of the things that cost him the 2022 congressional election. So we have to be very alert to who is placed in charge of these committees and that alert’s got to start now by calling up your members and ask them who are you going to support and you may suggest someone that they can support. All the things I’m asking people to do, Chris, back home, all that needs to be done is 1% of the people.

If two and a half million voters in 435 congressional districts become real active, that’s 1%. Big deal. That’s less than [unclear—check audio]. 1%. And why would they be influential? Number one, they’re on the right side of history. Number two, they represent the blue wave which now has to be taken into account. It can’t be given the cynical backhand by the members of the Democratic corporate party. And number three, they represent vast public opinion, including conservatives who want the same things in life where they live, work, and raise their families.

And finally, they know what they’re doing. They got the facts. When they talk about Trump’s corruption, it’s not enough just to say, you know, he’s manipulating, extorting, bribing cryptocurrency speculators for his personal wealth. You got to break it down. According to his own financial disclosures, in 2025, listen to this. He made $6 million a day. $6 million a day, or roughly a million dollars an hour on a 40-hour week. I just imagine that really hits home to people. $2.1 billion, which is what he reported. That’s just too big to contemplate. 2.1 billion.

But did the Democrats break it down that way? No, they didn’t break it down that way. They’re too busy now self-congratulating. Not looking in the mirror and saying, “How’d we get into this mess in the first place?” Answer: They’re the ones who elected Trump by their renegade cowardliness, corporatism, race, you know, Israel über alles, etc. And going along with huge inequality of wealth. I don’t think maybe your audience is aware of a RAND Corporation study that just came out. Chris, it’s Carter Price’s RAND Corporation study.

He said over $79 trillion of wealth has been pumped to the top 10% of the richest people in America since 1975 through 2023. Over $79 trillion of wealth would now be in the hands of 90% of the American people if it wasn’t for a corrupt Congress allowing the corporate supremacist to control our economy, our government, our media, and strategically plan every aspect of our lives, including raising our kids, which is what corporate operations are doing now five to seven hours a week and the subject of a very good book recently called Who’s Raising Our Kids? by Susan Linn a psychologist at Harvard.

So what can I say to people? I can say that we have prepared for you very readable practical materials that take a huge surge of power back home and carrying it to Capitol Hill which I’ve often called Withering Heights. So if you go to nader.org you can order two of our books. Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country That Works for the People. That’s my first book. And my second book may be the most important one I’ve ever written.

And it’s also the shortest. It’s called Civic Self-Respect. It basically shows how you can build in your daily lives a civic dimension to what roles you’re playing in your daily lives as workers, consumers, taxpayers, voters, patients needing reasonable and safe health care, parents and grandparents, retirees and veterans as some examples. Now, people do these things, these roles, every day, and you can add a civic dimension to them and connect it to your neighbors and co-workers and relatives and friends, and you’re establishing the fundamental basis for a new society, a new Congress, a new government, a new economy, a new culture, a new set of norms and ethical rules, and the subordination of lawlessness and the serial law violators that permeate our big corporations and the government that they own and have turned into a corporate state.

So go to nader.org, you’ll get these two books right away. And if you want them autographed, just indicate that you want them autographed. That helps readership and it includes shipping. And we want to hear from you because that’s when we know you’re serious. We work hard to provide these materials for you. We work way beyond 40 hours a week. We’re working on impeachment now. We have a great network for impeachment. We’ve had two symposiums on Capitol Hill for impeachment. And there are a lot of new members of Congress loaded for bear that tell Donald J.

Trump two words he’s very familiar with: ‘You’re fired.’

Chris Hedges: Ralph, let me ask about impeachment. I remember you and the attorney Bruce Fein drew up a list of impeachable offenses. If I remember, it was about a dozen. I mean, just on the emoluments clause alone. But he has committed so many impeachable offenses. I’m mystified by why the Democratic leadership—even Sherrod Brown and others—have just ruled it out. Jeffries, of course, but Sherrod Brown was a little more surprising. How do they expect to hold him accountable, number one, and how do they expect to roll back these constitutional violations?

Ralph Nader: It really comes down to cowardliness because they’re saying that their priorities are the immediate needs of the American people and impeachment is a distraction. That’s the routine response. And my response is the following, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, but it’s even better than that. If you want to get Trump to agree to restore some of the cuts in Medicaid, some of the tax cuts for the wealthy, some of the cuts for food stamps and other social safety nets, some of the cuts for scientific health research and applications and so on.

If you want to do that, you can only do it by building pressure for impeachment heading his way. Like a bully, when he sees power growing at his expense that he cannot control, he’ll start compromising and conceding if he doesn’t retire and resign entirely and hand it over to Vance who can protect him when he’s in Mar-a-Lago. There’s a case that can be made for that. His health is not very good. So my answer to the Democrats is stop the cowardliness. Start impeachment. You have highly publicized hearings, committee after committee, telling the people what Trump has done in detail, to wreck America, weaken America, indenture America to corporate power.

And that’ll only help you with your other issues. Only help you. And then if you get it through the House, you got the votes to do it. You can do it on day one. You have the votes. All it takes is a majority, you send it over to the Senate, and the Senate is Democrat. They don’t have 65, 66 votes yet for impeachment, but they have hearings. So you have a whole round of hearings with witnesses and exhibits further educating the American people red state, blue state what the Trump regime and the DOGE criminality led by Felon Elon Musk has done to them in great explicit detail.

They can have people testifying, not just professional witnesses, families, women, children, what’s going on with children, Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and all the rest, the health insurance, and all the rest of the social protection programs that have been shattered by Trump and the education programs and the student loan restrictions and just on and on. So it’s all a matter of cowardliness. You know it was Aristotle who said courage is the prime virtue because without that all other virtues are impossible. And Samuel Johnson in the 18th century in England said a similar truism.

In other words impeachment is a deterrence. It’s a tool that they can build power against Trump in order to get Trump to agree to a lot of other things that they say are kitchen table issues. Now, why are they cowardly? After all, 90% of the Democrats want impeachment. Two-thirds of the independents want impeachment. And probably by now 15 or 20% of the Republicans. We got a big majority in the country. Why are they cowards? They’re cowards because Trump and his network has perfected anonymous intimidation and physical threats.

And they’ve been getting physical threats. Even dissenting Republicans like Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina went public with the threats he and his family’s been getting. In other words, it’s messy. It’s nasty. And they don’t want to get involved. That’s what it really comes down to. The other thing it comes down to is that when they do these investigations risk of corruption, they obviously have to bring in corporate crime, corporate criminals, all the people who have these giant corporate PACs. Well, some of them are very implicated in Trump’s network of crime, fraud, abuse, self-dealing, theft, and those are the people who fund the Democratic leadership, the Democratic National Committee, Schumer’s treasury, Hakeem Jeffries’ treasury, taking money from Wall Street, from the oil and gas companies, from the health insurance companies, from you know, one special interest after another.

They can’t turn down a contribution, whether it’s from a military PAC, a pro-Israeli government PAC. So that’s part of it, too. And when that happens, it embarrasses the Democrats, and people start seeing, gee, they’re part of the same corrupt crowd there. You know, they’re doing the same thing. Why don’t they look at themselves in the mirror? So it upsets their routine of preparation for 2028 which they’re going to start immediately dialing for corporate dollars. So that’s my explanation.

Chris Hedges: You did see an infusion of corporate [money]—Elon Musk, some $400 million he poured in, the money they poured into the Michigan Senate race. I think it ended up 70 million in the primary. I think it was 300 million total to defeat El-Sayed. It didn’t work. I mean, that’s an interesting development. I’m just wondering if you could comment on that.

Ralph Nader: That’s a very important point you made. One of the lessons out of this campaign is that massive money faces diminishing returns. And Musk proved that in spades by pumping $150 million in the month before the election in one state of Texas, one state. And it didn’t work. So what’s happened is that when you flood the television, radio and social media with repetitive ads again and again, they hit the law of diminishing returns. They turn voters off. They irritate voters. Sometimes they even boomerang against the candidates because of their emptiness and their nastiness and their repetitiveness and the way they demean the voters’ intelligence instead of informing the voter about real issue differences between candidates and parties.

So that’s something needs exploration. Has big money hit a stonewall because all over the country they’ve pumped huge money against Troy Jackson. AIPAC pumped $50 million—AIPAC-related campaign donors—$50 million in Michigan alone against Abdul El-Sayed and it didn’t work. In fact it helped to backfire. How? Because AIPAC rates so low now in the minds of most people in our country that if they give a lot of money to an opponent, the candidate they oppose can use it as a campaign plus they can say, ‘Look, my opponent takes this dirty genocidal money from AIPAC circle.

I don’t take a cent. Who do you want to support?’ Your tax dollars are funding the weapons of mass destruction sent to Netanyahu’s genocidal regime to slaughter by now about 600,000 Palestinian civilians. It’s not 74,000. That’s a very restricted number by the Hamas Ministry of Health just for identifiable deceased reported by hospitals and morgues which now are almost all entirely destroyed. So that’s that’s what’s happening. And if other corporate PAC money can be similarly stigmatized like these corporate PACs want immunity from their corporate crimes. They don’t want to be prosecuted, people for stealing your dollars, for toxifying your air and water, for endangering the health of your children, for wrecking the environment, for not preparing for a renewable energy replacement of the big oil, gas, and coal barons in their political action committee.

See, once these PACs get stigmatized, they not only have diminishing returns, they actually boomerang against the candidates that are taking this corporate PAC money. So, I think that’s something needs to be studied out of this campaign. One of the interesting trends in this campaign that you just pointed out.

Chris Hedges: I want to ask about the tactic the Democrats have embraced. They said that they will carry out investigations especially of Trump’s family. They will go after Pete Hegseth. So while they have essentially washed their hands of impeachment, the officials and of course Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s destroying our health care system, that they will go after these officials. Can you address that decision?

Ralph Nader: Well, you’re right. They’re going to focus on them personally. They don’t want to cast a wide net because a wide net may start catching Democrats being part of the same shenanigans. So they will be voting on impeachment of Pete Hegseth in a few days when they come back on November 9th to the Congress. That’s a certainty because under Rule IX of the House an impeachment resolution cannot be blocked. It has to be voted on in two days after it is introduced and we have both Republicans and Democrats behind the impeachment of Pete Hegseth.

So he may be impeached in the interregnum. It’s not going to probably get through to the Senate two-thirds because right now the Senate is still controlled by the Republicans. But I think they are going to focus on the persona of the culprits of the impeachable officials. But you know that’s a start. I’m worried about their ballyhooing investigations because in the first two years of the Biden administration, they had all kinds of investigations. The only one that went all the way was the oversight, excuse me, was the special committee on the January 6th insurrection.

And that went as far as it could go. Subpoenaing Trump, etc. The other committees, they had their investigations, but then they rested on their laurels. They didn’t come out with any specific legislation or any demands for impeachment. And so I’m very wary of they’re using investigations as a PR tool if they don’t connect it with impeachment and removal from office as well as impeaching some Supreme Court justices who have shredded the Constitution and disabled their own branch of government from constitutional requirements in the balance of power that we call the separation of powers.

Chris Hedges: Silicon Valley lined up behind Trump gave him all that money not only for his campaign but his pet projects. You had the $40 million documentary or whatever. It wasn’t a documentary but kind of public relations stunt provided for Melania Trump. What happens now? Silicon Valley became so partisan. Is this going to curb their power? Well, what do you expect them to do?

Ralph Nader: Well, Silicon Valley is in a quandary. You know, they go with the power. So, they were more allied with the corporate Democrats before Trump and Trump won the second term. They shifted. They appeared at the inauguration that famous picture with Trump and Melania. Jeff Bezos and you know the heads of Meta Zuckerberg and others. Now they’re in a quandary. So I suspect they’re going to try to moderate their pro-Trumpism. Recognizing that Trump, you know, is on the way out toward, you know, at the end of his term and certainly reduced power and start catering to the Democrats.

And the first sign will be the campaign donations. And the second sign will be how Musk changes his behavior. He’s like a weathervane. He just wants to maximize his own wealth. The irony with Musk is he moved from California to Texas and established a compound for his harem. He has at least four de facto wives and about 14 children with more on the way. And he moved to Texas because it was a red state. Well, now Texas can roll out not the red carpet but the blue carpet because the governor of Texas coming up and the senators are Democrats and they took control of the house in Austin and they’re going to have substantial control over the Senate through their Democrat Lieutenant Governor who under Texas law has enormous power, believe it or not, over the state senate.

And they took a lot of local seats and of course they recovered the governorship. Governor Greg Abbott, who I’ve called the [unclear—check audio] governor in the United States, was going for a fourth term and he got swamped by an insurgent Hispanic challenger, very capable person. She’s going to be the new governor. So roll out the blue mat for Elon Musk. So that’s the second signal. The third signal is one they can’t control. It’s the data centers. Huge left-right opposition and that is collapsing the stock market because the tech companies are losing value by the hour.

Because they see that the politics are moving against them. Foolishly the tech AI corporations made data centers the be-all and end-all of expansion of AI in our economy and competition with China as they say and that is pulling them down and it’s pulling down the stock market. So, the Silicon Valley Goliaths are going to have to get together and figure out, what they’re going to do, but their options are a lot more limited than they were before November 3rd.

Chris Hedges: Trump still has two years in office. What can we expect to see from Trump?

Ralph Nader: It could be very dangerous for the world and the American people. He’s like a cornered rodent. And he could start wars. He could unleash ICE on our cities like never before. He could invoke the Insurrection Act. But if he thinks he can be impeached and removed from office, he won’t do these things. That’s why the Democrats are making a big mistake making impeachment a subordinate do not touch issue. Just because they may be implicated in some of the impeachment hearings where the Republicans say, “Well, you did the same thing.

Look at that.” they are betraying their duty to the American people. So, he could be very dangerous if he thinks that he is continually going to be immunized by the Supreme Court decision Trump v. United States a couple years ago. And if he thinks he’s out of the impeachment threat. So that’s another reason why the Democrats have to mobilize and reflect 90% of their voters who want impeachment yesterday, last week, last month. That would keep him from being dangerous. And he knows one thing that most people don’t know that let’s say he starts a war and the energy prices go through the roof and inflation and everything and soldiers are getting killed in the Middle East and Israel is pushing him like a toad into more and more quagmire in one area after another there.

Well, he knows one thing that most people don’t know. He can be impeached and convicted in a week and removed from office. He can be impeached in the House, sent to the Senate, and in a week or two, they can remove him from office, and they will get some Republicans defecting just the way they defected from Nixon and told him, “Your time is up,” in 1974. The Republicans now are blaming Trump for the disastrous results on November 3. There’s no question about that. He made himself blameworthy because he said as he went around the country, “Pretend I’m on the ballot.” Okay, so you’re on the ballot and we lost both houses of Congress.

So politicians put their own political future ahead of any loyalty to a president like Trump who’s no longer going to be up for election. So getting two-thirds is not off the wall here to convict them. The Democrats are likely to end up with 56 or 57 votes. So they need, you know, eight or nine more votes. And there are a lot of Republicans smarting and realizing that their colleagues lost because of Trump and they’re up next in 2028. And they basically go to Trump and they say, “Look, we don’t have the votes to save you.

You’re going to be convicted in the Senate. You’ve already been impeached in the House. Make a speech declaring victory and retire back to Mar-a-Lago. You will put Vance in the president’s office and he will protect you from prosecutions because he will control the injustice department and the federal prosecutors. So that’s your best option, Mr. President. Retire after you make a grand speech of all the great things you’ve done to make America great again.” That’s the scenario.

Chris Hedges: What are the consequences if the Democratic Party does what they in essence did under the Obama administration or the Biden administration where they ignored their own campaign promises. Of course, the most egregious being Obama, who promised to curb the banks after the financial meltdown and then call the big bankers in, Rubin and Larry Summers, and told them he was ready to do their bidding, which is why I think he has three mansions and two presidential libraries, one in Chicago, one in Hawaii. But what happens if the Democrats do that?

How’s that going to play out?

Ralph Nader: That’s their Achilles [heel] for the 2028 presidential campaign. They could experience a tremendous backlash where tens of millions of voters shout betrayal and they can blow the whole thing. Whereas if they follow the agendas of the Talaricos and the Troy Jacksons and the El-Sayeds and others in the House that are coming to the Congress, they could have a very good possibility of a big win for the presidency in 2028. So that’s why Jeffries and Schumer have to be replaced because they have displayed ample amounts of political masochism in prior years.

That is they do things that are harmful to the Democratic Party electing a majority in Congress and in the White House. As long as they stay in their safe seats in New York, they seem to be okay with that. So, we not only have corporate Democrats, Jeffries and Schumer, we have political masochists who’ve made tons of mistakes, especially Schumer, raising $200 million for two candidates against Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and losing big time because he chose the wrong candidates. There’s $200 million. This was two years ago or four years ago.

So, that’s another reason they have to be removed. It’s not just that they are corporate Democrats and they’re in hock to their paymasters from Wall Street to AIPAC to the military industry, but they’re politically incompetent. They had very little to do with this win by the Democrats. This win by the Democrats was two parts. One, Trump won it for them rather than they beat Trump. Trump’s plunging polls, his stupidities, his disastrous campaigning, his illusions, his mental frailty, etc. Created a huge backlash even by people who voted for him.

Then the other thing is that people in the midterms historically always have an ‘It’s time for a change.’ It’s time for a balance. And the president loses very often in American history in the 20th century in the following midterm. That’s just what happened to Obama. He lost tremendous number of seats in Congress in 2010. So that’s why we’ve got to develop a network for example, RootsAction, Norman Solomon, Progressive Democrats of America, other foreign policy peace groups, consumer groups, environmental groups, health groups. You all got to get together and demand a new leadership in the House and Senate otherwise they’re going to entrench their power.

They’re very arrogant and they’re going to entrench their power with corporate chairs and subcommittees and they’re going to be very hard to dislodge and you know in mid 2027 or thereabouts.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you very much Ralph. And I want to thank Thomas [surname unclear—check audio] and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.