How a Red-District Democrat Is Navigating Trump

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her win re-election. But now the reality of the Trump era is coming home. Gluesenkamp Perez faced raucous crowds at town halls in Washington State recently, with some of her more liberal constituents furious that she isn’t opposing the administration more forcefully. At the same time, the White House has started making economic arguments that sound very similar to ones that she’s made – that we should consume less, produce more and import less stuff from abroad. So I wanted to talk to her about how she’s navigating this moment. What does she think of Trump’s economic agenda? What reactions is she seeing across her district? How does a Democrat now represent both terrified liberals and loyal Trump voters? This episode contains strong language. Book Recommendations: The Wheelwright’s Shop by George Sturt Experiences in Visual Thinking by Robert H. McKim Children’s poetry anthologies from Jack Prelutsky Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The You go back a couple of decades in American politics, and it is extremely common to have members of the House who represent a district.
0:39.7	It was one at the presidential level by the other party. But year by year, election by election,
0:45.0	it's becoming a lot less common. At this point, only a handful of Democrats represent districts
0:50.1	at Donald Trump one. But one of them is Marie Glucincap Perez from Washington's
0:54.8	third district. And Glucincap Perez doesn't sound like other Democrats. She's a pretty
1:00.7	different economic philosophy they do, one built around the right to repair, built around,
1:05.5	I would say, a moral critique of what our economics has come to look like, who we value, what we value, the way we have
1:12.4	lost respect for those who work with their hands, and the economy has become profoundly
1:18.2	imbalanced towards a consumerism away from a producerism, which makes it particularly interesting
1:23.5	in this moment, because all of a sudden, people in the Trump administration began saying
1:28.4	kind of similar things, that we should be making so much more at home, that we're addicted
1:33.0	to cheap stuff from abroad, that we're on a sugar-high economy, that we need to detox.
1:38.2	So let's talk a little bit about what we believe in the Republican Party. We believe that a million
1:44.1	cheap knockoff
1:45.5	toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.
1:49.7	If they had a choice between a doll from China that is not as well constructed as a doll
1:55.5	made in America, and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would
1:59.9	be willing to pay more for a better made American product.
2:03.3	The market and the economy have just become hooked.
2:07.0	We've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
2:11.8	Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, it's happening and it will happen rather quickly.
	...

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