RALPH NADER: Well, Amy and Juan, thereās going to be a lot to digest here. This is a collapse of the Democratic Party. They didnāt get their vote out that they wanted. They were several million votes below what they expected, and, of course, that made the difference in an Electoral College system in the swing states.
But the problem is much more serious than that. Basically, we now are a country under a dictatorial corporate state. Trump is basically a magnet and a trap for the Democrats. They spent tens of millions of dollars on ads going after Trump, instead of going after the four years that Trump deep-sixed so many critical issues and positions in his term as president. So, the problem is, itās so many variables here to deal with.
It all started, Amy, when the Democrats abandoned half the country to the red states. Thatās devastating. Then they started getting corporate cash in 1979, dialing for the same commercial values. That blurred their difference from the New Deal-type Democrats to the corporate Democrats. Then they contracted out the election to these corporate-conflicted profiteering consulting firms, which the mass media never seemed to want to investigate in this campaign. And then they abandoned public media. Basically, they abandoned radio to the Rush Limbaughs and created the Reagan Democrats. And then they never learn from their mistakes. They didnāt learn from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then, they never fire anybody after they lose, in one state after another, to horrendous, the worst Republican Party in history.
And so, what is the message that they gave to the American people? The message is Trump is terrible, and you canāt believe how bad the Republican Party is. Itās too general a message, too simple. A vast majority of people think corporations have too much control over their lives. They didnāt fill the blanks, denial of healthcare benefits. And they didnāt fill the blanks on a living wage. They didnāt fill the blanks on cracking down on corporate crooks. They didnāt fill the blanks on reversing a tax system which undertaxes the very wealthy and the big corporations. They didnāt reverse themselves really on trade. They didnāt know how to rebut Trump on immigration. He called the people coming in rapists, criminals, drug traffickers, etc. Instead of saying, āWell, theyāre fleeing oppressive countries that are backed by the U.S., dictators and oligarchs in Central and South America,ā they didnāt say that millions of Americans trust immigrants to harvest their food, to care for their children, to care for elderly, to provide critical services that nobody wants to work in in the U.S.
So, you know, thereās such a bill of particulars against this Democratic Party. And whatās happened, of course, is that millions of people are basically saying, āWeāre sick of throwaway lines. Weāre sick of not having the government return the benefits of massive taxation to us. Weāre sick of ā all we hear about is empire abroad. All we hear about is more military budgets by the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress, giving the generals more than they ask for, eating the public budgets that should be providing public services and public infrastructure in communities all over the country, creating key jobs.ā
Now, we tried to straighten out these Democrats. Twenty-four civic leaders in 2022, going into the present time, tried to tell them how to communicate, what to communicate with all the people. And they didnāt listen. The Democratic Party severed any kind of response ā thatās Nancy Pelosi, thatās Chuck Schumer, you name them ā with the civic community in Washington, D.C., the ones that ā
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