Leader Schumer Floor Remarks, In Exchange With Senator Merkley, On Trump’s Descent Into Authoritarianism

Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor in an exchange with Senator Merkley (D-OR) after Merkley held the floor through the night and into today, and discussed President Trump’s attacks on democracy, censorship of the media, and Republicans’ deafening silence in the face of rising authoritarianism. Below are Senator Schumer’s and an excerpt of Senator Merkley’s remarks:

Leader Schumer: Well, first, thank you and I do have a question for you. I want to commend you for your fortitude and strength on a subject that is so important to the future of this country not only for our generation but for our grandchildren. We need a democracy.

And my question is this: in many authoritarian regimes, there are many characteristics, and we see a lot of this happening in Hungary, in fact. Orban. Orban has had his friends take over the media. Orban has used the prosecutorial authorities as a weapon, as Trump has turned our whole Justice Department into an attack dog to go after his enemies and help his friends and we see this in so many other countries.

Now, there are many people in the United States who say it can't happen here and our roots of democracy are stronger and deeper certainly than in Hungary's, but the danger is real. And could my friend – and I so respect what he has done all night - could my friend just elaborate on the question, it is different here, but why can we not be complacent when we’ve seen what happens in other countries, like Hungary, like Turkey and of course, and even more severe dictatorships? Why - when people say it won't happen here, why should we even though we're different, why should Americans from every political corner, Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, be fighting this authoritarian rise in this country led by Donald Trump who, as you said, wants to be king?

Senator Merkley: I so appreciate the question from the minority leader from New York. And one of the things that I certainly felt was this can't happen here. Our institutions are too old. We have 200 years of practice. We have features that have helped reinforce our constitutional framework. We have a solid middle class. We have a good education system.

We have deep traditions in the House and Senate. We have norms that reinforce our constitutional understandings. And yet it turns out that my confidence that authoritarianism cannot take hold in America is wrong. And one of the things I have done over the course of the night is to read multiple chapters and commentary, two professors who looked at countries all over the world, including Hungary, and said, here's how it happened. They said we used to think about the end of a democracy as being something done by men with guns. They burn down the presidential palace, they shot the president, maybe they killed his family, they tore up the constitution and said here's the new deal. But now that rarely happens in comparison to the new version in which democracies are put into the grave. And that new version is by elected individuals who start to erode the separation of powers. And if you think about it that way, you just really need three things to become an authoritarian state.

You need a congress that says our role is to just back up and do what the president says, a rubber stamp congress. And in large part we have that right now. I can't tell you how many times colleagues have said, I can't take that position because it would upset the president, even though I'm not happy about the situation. Well, so there's that and then there is – you need a court that confirms or conveys more power to the president. And we have seen court decision after court decision that have conveyed more power, like Trump vs. United States, saying the president is above the law.

And you combine the president being above the law, as long as it's shielded by an act of government, and pardon power, and now the whole executive branch feels, well, we're all above the law. And then the president comes into office and just starts ignoring one law after another, I think a real early one that got a lot of attention was the firing of inspector generals. And of course, the law says you have to fire them for cause. And the law says you have to give 30 days notice. But the president did neither. And in the end, he didn't really get the courts saying you can't do that. And then Trump says, you know what, I'm just going to start establishing tariffs around the world. Well, tariffs are not a power delegated to the president. The very first bill the U.S. Senate ever worked on was a tariff bill. They spent three weeks assigning a tariff to different things, a keg of nails or a barrel of molasses and so on and so forth. And so, this collective factor brings us to the third element that creates the authoritarian state, which is a president who wants to defy the law, create a space in which saying the laws do not apply.

So suddenly the checks and balances are gone, and it's not the authoritarianism that we need to fear a year from now. It's here at this very moment. And so, this is why we should all, if we had any doubts a year ago, we should all now be going, oh my God, we are not immune from the same strategy that's been pursued with the same authoritarian playbook in country after country after country.

Schumer: I thank my colleague for that really, right on the money exposition of this, and I'd just like to ask one more question related to the first, the supine Congress. Our Republican colleagues seem to just do whatever Trump wants. And we hear lots of mumbling and grumbling. We don't like it. But I hear from some of them saying to me, it wouldn't make a difference if I spoke up. Does my colleague from Oregon agree with that? That it wouldn't make a difference, that if Republicans, whether it's the leadership in the House or Senate, or a large number or even a decent number of members spoke up against the kind of authoritarian direction that Trump is taking, does my colleague think it wouldn't make a difference as they say, or does he think it would?

Merkley: Well, I believe it would make an astounding difference. Because when I come to the floor, or any of my Democratic colleagues come to the floor and say, look at this attack on due process, this is just wrong. Look at this effort to tell universities what to teach, this is just wrong. Look at the attack on law firms and they've been essentially blackmailed into a billion dollars of free legal help to groups that Trump wants, that's wrong. Look at the effort to ship people out of this country because of what they say on foreign policy. That's just - the violations of free speech and due process. And we say it's just wrong. But in essence, we are speaking within a communication bubble that exists around our urban communities. And there is a different communication bubble that exists around our rural communities. We have driven this into this situation through cable news, where people in my state who live in cities watch one version of the world on cable. They see a different version if they're in rural areas watching a different cable, and then it's reinforced by social media. So, when a colleague across the aisle speaks up, now a whole new audience is hearing about what's going on in our country. And it has the act of integrity because it's not coming from across the aisle. It can't be dismissed as a partisan comment. It is clearly a comment of principle. So, when you have both a comment that is absolutely principle and a comment that reaches into a different media sphere, now you start to have an enormous impact. And others will have courage to follow. Because I have heard from my colleagues about some of these pieces that they are worried about but are not speaking up on. One person steps forward, maybe takes the hits from some of their right-wing commentators and maybe actually gains some respect from others who say, you know, that is for sure the truth.

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Schumer: I had a few questions this morning of my great colleague — and once again, his strength, his indomitability, and his caring about this democracy, which we all know is at risk, is just amazing and so my question relates to something he touched on before, in his discussions with our great senator from New Hampshire. There are so many ways this administration is trying to rip apart democracy and one of them, you mentioned a minute ago, is the threatening of media to just do what Trump wants and the man who's head of the FCC seems to be an instrumentality of that. Trump has said, things they say I don’t like should not be put on the air, and they've held over the heads the broadcast licenses of some of our great media companies. In other ways, they're getting some of their friends to take over some of our media companies. And isn't one of the greatest blows to democracy — I would ask my colleague — one of the greatest blows to democracy when we don’t have a fully free press? And has it been a hallmark of so many of the countries that he has mentioned that are autocracies or absolute dictatorships to have no free press, so no information can come out? And doesn’t that dramatically hurt the American people, when government is shielded and can do whatever it wants — and hurt as many people as it wants — because you don’t have a free press? Shouldn’t it really frighten every American that this is a large step on the road away from democracy towards tyranny and towards authoritarian government?

Merkley: My colleague from New York, absolutely. Benjamin Franklin wrote that “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” And I’ll just roll into that speech and the press. And we have seen what Trump has done. He sued CBS News for $10 billion because he didn’t like the way that a program was edited on the television. There is no way that suit would ever have held up in court — but what happened? CBS said, ‘Hmm, we are involved in a merger,’ and that merger involves Paramount's controlling shareholder and they wanted approval for a sale of Paramount to Skydance — and Paramount was CBS's parent company.

So here is President Trump, holding the approval of that merger over the head of the network to get a payment for himself out of the company. And that was a $16 million in the end. But then, CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the top-rated late-night show. Surprisingly, three weeks after CBS canceled it, the merger was completed between Skydance and Paramount. Trump didn’t like all the things Colbert did to make fun of the president.

You know you can judge a freedom of a country by how much people feel that they can say funny things about the president. And I’ve thought many times — I come to this floor and I criticize the President of the United States. I've come to this floor and criticized the Democratic presidents for things they are doing. And I do not leave here thinking someone’s going to jump out of a car, grab me, throw me into a van, and going to be disappeared or tortured. Yet that is so common in authoritarian settings. And it’s so actually disturbing to me is one reason I constantly raise the fact that I hate that we are seeing forces deployed across the United States that do not have an individual identifier, because that makes me think about when people jump out and grab people — and they did this at the protests in 2020 in Portland. No label, threw them into vans, unmarked vans. You didn’t know what the hell was going on.

But ABC, well ABC had their own challenge with Jimmy Kimmel. And there was a situation where Nexstar and Sinclair — they own dozens of ABC affiliates. So let me just say that the list is long — including excluding companies or broadcast writers, reporters from the White House briefings. And now, most recently, telling all the reporters at the Pentagon that they have to not ask any questions in the Pentagon or they’re going to lose their access to be reporters on the Department of Defense.

Schumer: I thank my colleague for once again a great answer. The freedom of the press is at risk. And if the freedom of the press is at risk, so is our entire democracy.

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