Rhode Island U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says Democrats need to do a better job at politics.
With Republicans in full control in Washington, Democrats hope voters will vent anger at President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterm elections. But that’s cold comfort for Democrats today.
Whitehouse spoke with The Public’s Radio political reporter Ian Donnis about the Trump administration’s plans, what Democrats can do better, and what he’d like to accomplish in his fourth term in the U.S. Senate.
Interview Highlights
On whether President Trump will succeed in remaking America in his vision
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: He’s doing damage that is going to be very hard to repair. So if that’s ‘remaking it in his vision,’ I guess. You know, it’s easier to wreck a house than it is to build one. But I do think he’s going to leave areas of lasting damage.
If you meet with the four-star (general) who leads (the U.S. military’s Africa Command), he’ll say that USAID was pretty essential to the success of their military mission on the African continent. And all of that just got torn apart. And when the people leave, when the contractors are gone, when the on-the-ground people who had been working with USAID have had to go find other things to do, it’s very hard to rebuild networks in those areas. And the more dangerous the area, the greater the difficulty of rebuilding the network. So that’s a tough one.
On cuts to research funding
Whitehouse: Why on earth would you want to interrupt research into diseases that Americans suffer from? Why on earth would you want to interrupt the experts who tell us what weather is coming at us? I mean, some of this stuff is really self-injurious — it’s bizarre behavior.
On whether Democrats bear responsibility for not addressing waste and fraud in government spending
Whitehouse: First of all, the waste, fraud and abuse ‘logo’ that the Trump regime is imposing on its campaign of destruction is essentially a fraud.
A perfect example: Social Security. They claim that there’s all this fraud in Social Security — that there are people who are collecting Social Security at 130, 140 years old. The president repeatedly went to it during his big speech to Congress as if it were real. None of it is real. It’s not a Ponzi scheme.
The whole thing is strategically designed, I believe, to cause people to have second thoughts about Social Security, to derogate Social Security as a program. So that when they then put their — what I call them, the ‘Muskrats,’ the little ‘Muskrats’ that went into Social Security to screw things up — when they screw things up so much that then there’s an interruption in benefits, now you’ve got an interruption in benefits. You’ve got a public, at least a large part of it, that thinks maybe there’s something wrong with Social Security. You’ve got the perfect moment to make your move to privatize Social Security to turn it over to the private equity guys and the tech bros.
And so I think sometimes there’s some real strategy at work behind the fakery of this being about fraud, waste and abuse. If they were serious about fraud, waste and abuse, why are the first people they fired the inspectors general who spent all day ferreting out fraud, waste and abuse?
On whether Whitehouse — who comes from old railroad money, went to Yale and belongs to an exclusive Newport beach club — thinks elites hold too much sway over the Democratic Party
Whitehouse: I think the issue with the Democratic Party, in my view, was very clearly a lack of fight and a failure to defend against Republican efforts to paint us as the party that only cared about trans kids and not about the economy, for instance.
We care a lot about the economy. We want everybody treated fairly — absolutely. But we also care a lot about the economy.
But we got barraged with ads that made us look like we only cared about one, or two, or three things. And we let that happen again. It’s very hard to be in a political fight and be characterized by your adversaries as ‘X’ and then spend your time saying, ‘No, we’re not X.’ That still leaves ‘X’ as the topic. What you need to have is your own set of topics that you fight on.
On if Republicans are better at politics and political messaging
Whitehouse: They are.
Part of it is institutional. The Republicans have had built for them by their billionaire funders a massive apparatus: the apparatus that captured the court; the apparatus that has propped up climate denial and misled the American public about what we’re looking at; the apparatus that runs the dark money. They are rich with apparatus.
On if the legal system is an effective backstop to overreach by the Trump administration
Whitehouse: It’s been a pretty robust response by those [federal] District Court judges around the country. And they run from Biden and Obama appointees, to Trump appointees, with Reagan and Bush and all sorts of other appointees in the middle.
The dangerous spot is, obviously, the Supreme Court.
On what would make his fourth term in the U.S. Senate a success
Whitehouse: Get rid of the damn dark money. Get that court under a proper ethics code where there’s actual independent fact-finding, which is the basis of rule of law. Clean up a very rotten and corrupted tax code and get carbon pricing in place so that we can promise our children and grandchildren there is a pathway to climate safety, that we’re not gonna leave you ruined natural systems on this planet earth.
On if those hopes are practical, given the state of politics in Washington
Whitehouse: You know, if it’s the right thing, you just fight like hell and do your best, and every once in a while, you get lucky. Every once in a while, it pays off.
