TRANSCRIPT: Leader Schumer Joins Morning Joe To Discuss Trump’s Reckless Military Actions In Venezuela And The Rising Cost Of Living
Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today joined Morning Joe to discuss the Trump administration’s military actions in Venezuela, and Democrats’ focus on lowering health care, housing, and everyday living costs for American families. Below is a transcript of Leader Schumer’s remarks:
Joe Scarborough: Let's first just lay the predicate. Maduro, a thug, a horrible guy, a dictator who destroyed his country. You would agree with all of that, right?
Leader Schumer: 100%. Bad guy.
Scarborough: And there is a possibility, you would also agree, that Venezuela may very well be a much better place in time with him gone?
Schumer: Well, I'm not so sure of the second premise. We don't know who's going to take his place. They don't have any idea. You know, when Trump first announced it, he says, oh, the new vice president will listen to what I want. The next day, she says something different. This morning, something different still. There are a lot of very bad guys there. The head of the military has a lot of power. The head of the information services has a lot of power. One of them could take over and be just as bad as Maduro. The whole point here, Joe, is this is reckless. There's no planning. Rubio says something one day, and then Trump contradicts him.
Scarborough: So let me stop you right there. If they, in fact, had done what Marco Rubio said they were doing, which sounds like what 41, Bush 41, did in Panama, that would be one thing. But what the president keeps saying is, quote, we're going to run everything there. Does that, do you think that moves Republicans to say, okay, if you're going to run everything down here and this isn't just a snatch and grab, we, the United States House and Senate, have to get involved.
Schumer: That should happen. And I believe the American people will demand that it happens. This is, first, it is reckless. It is dangerous. Whenever our country has gotten involved in this kind of regime change and nation building, American families pay the price in blood and treasure. That's what happened in Iraq. That's what happened in Libya. It's happened over and over again. So it's reckless. And then last night, Trump doubles down and says, well, maybe we'll do this in Colombia. Maybe we'll do it in Cuba, even Greenland. And the American people are scratching their heads and saying, this is not what Trump said he would do. This is not what we bargained for. This is not America first. Everyone's saying, what the hell is going on in the White House? And Trump seems to just do this on an ad hoc basis, contradicted by his own people. It is reckless and dangerous. And we have the War Powers Act, which you mentioned. I have the right to put that on the floor. Tim Kaine is the sponsor along with myself and Rand Paul, so it's bipartisan to a degree. And the Republicans must, if there was ever a time, they must step up to the plate. This is the time. And if they don't, they're going to feel the heat from their constituents.
Scarborough: You talked about the American people. The economist YouGov Poll asked Americans whether the Congress should be involved if there were military steps that were taken. And these are the numbers that we see. 60% said they opposed the U.S. using military force to invade Venezuela. 19% supported the idea. 52% opposed using American military force to overthrow Maduro. 22% supported. And for your purposes, 74% of Americans said President Trump should first seek congressional approval to use force in Venezuela. Only 11% said he didn't need to. So you look at those numbers. That's why I ask Republicans who have started to be a bit more expressive on the filibuster, on the blue slip, on some of these important procedural issues, have actually started to say, we're at the Article I branch. Will they do it here with numbers like this?
Schumer: Well, look, we're going to push him as hard as we can, and we're going to make this point. And, you know, we can bring this resolution up again. But I'll tell you another poll question which would do even better. Should the President and the Congress be focusing on lowering the costs I have to pay for my groceries, for car repair, for a new home, instead of this kind of adventurism? And I'll bet it's 90 percent. I mean, President Trump is so off base in terms of what the American people want. We Democrats, this week, we are on our front foot for this year. We are making the high cost of living, the fact that people can't pay the bills of things they need as our first and number one focus for all of 2026. And with Trump saying, let's spend 100, you know, all these questions that I'm going to ask them in the briefings that we're having today. How many troops do you think it needs? How much does it cost? How long will it take? How do you restore the oil fields, which have been a mess for 20 years? They have no answers, to any of this. This is the Gang of Eight briefings, closed. But I demanded it. And we're going to ask them a lot of hard questions. I frankly don't believe their answers, but we need to ask them the hard questions.
Jonathan Lemire: Leader Schumer, your colleague, Senator Gallego, was here a few moments ago saying that Secretary of State Rubio gave a briefing to the Senate a few weeks back, and Gallego says he lied. He lied about what the administration's intentions were in Venezuela. He said this was not going to happen.
Schumer: I asked him in these private briefings face to face, are you doing any planning for regime change? And they said they were not. They obviously were. They lied. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be putting them on the spot and asking them the tough questions. But the number one question, I'd like to get back to it, is what the American people want us to do is not these adventuristic things abroad. And last night, Trump doubles down on the reckless, he's reckless in Venezuela, and now he's doubling down. Maybe we should do it in Colombia. Maybe we should do it in Cuba, Greenland. What is going on? And the American people are going to be asking themselves that. And Republican senators, if they have any integrity, are going to ask themselves the same question. And they know that it's what the American people want. They know also that this kind of stuff is going to hurt them politically.
Lemire: Well, on that idea, Senator Lee, the Republican Senator said in the hours after the attack, when word was just coming this has happened. He took to Twitter and said, well, they need to really offer an explanation here. They need to justify why this is in America's interest. Yet hours later, he'd swung around and said, well, President Trump was right.
Schumer: Yeah, I don't know what happened with Lee because for months he's been saying that we need to get Congress involved and he totally reversed himself. But the ultimate judge here, Abe Lincoln, public sentiment is everything, are going to be the American people. And they are left, right, and center, are going to say, what the hell is going on in the White House? What is going on in Venezuela? They don't have any plan. They contradict each other. When Rubio says one thing and Trump says another, you say, what? What is going on here? These are American lives that are going to be at stake. These are American dollars that should be going to reducing the costs that people pay. And they're advised in this kind of adventurism, this kind of escapade.
Mika Brzezinski: It's a very violent country to be adventurous.
Schumer: Yes, and that's what I'm saying.
Scarborough: Let me ask you about it. Let me ask you about this. You just said the Democrats are going to focus on costs over the next year. And obviously groceries, still, so many people think still too high. Rent too high. Homes too high. Our kids that are coming out of college can't find jobs because of AI. And so those are all massive problems that are going to play out over the next year. But no issue is more massive than health care. Premiums are skyrocketing. Doctors will prescribe somebody in your family a treatment, and then the health insurance company will say, no, we're not going to pay it. Somebody in your family will come home after the doctor's appointment, and then they get blindsided by hidden costs. And there was, I think it was a Washington Post story that a family in Montana that makes $110,000, $120,000 a year are now having to spend over $40,000 on health care, and then we'll have health care monopolies basically say, no, no, we're not going to cover that.
Schumer: You got it.
Scarborough: So how did Democrats make that more workable for middle-class Americans and for working Americans?
Schumer: First step, which we've been saying for months, we said it from the whole summer through the shutdown, is first extend the premiums, the tax credit premiums.
Scarborough: Will Republicans do that?
Schumer: Well, they're feeling the heat. Some of them are sort of talking, but here's the problem. Their leadership, Thune and Johnson, said they won't extend the premiums by one day. All those costs you're talking about because the premiums will go away. And they've gone away. I shouldn't say will go away. They went away after January 1st. Right now, a lot of things are happening. There are millions of Americans who no longer have health care. I have a child, you know, or a sick spouse. I don't have health care. That's the number one thing I want. I don't have it if my child is sick, what am I going to do? Then there are many others who have had to go on reduced plans and get rid of their whole doctors. The doctors won't take them under the existing law. You know how it is. You have a doctor who you trust. I've had a GP who I trust. If he had to walk away and I had to put in a new person, that alone causes me a lot of anguish because you really—
Scarborough: But what if the doctor says to you, Chuck, You really, really need this procedure. And then you get it, and then the insurance company says, I'm not paying. We're not going to pay you. Or what do we do then about insurance companies that a lot of times will deny using, from what I've heard, AI?
Schumer: We have to go after the insurance companies, and we have to go after a lot of the health care providers, particularly the middlemen who charge these premiums. Look, first step, renew those tax credits, because that's causing the immediate damage. The person you mentioned in Montana is because of those. This is happening in every corner of the country. A couple who makes $85,000, who's 55 years old, their premium is about $22,000 a year. So I just spoke to somebody the other day, and they said to me, I have to decide whether to stop putting away for my retirement to keep my health care system. I don't want to make that choice. So we have to go after the infrastructure of the industry, which has too much gotten away with much, much more than they should have. But first step, we have to do this because it's causing chaos. We have to renew the premiums. Look, it got every Democratic vote in the Senate. You've got a bunch of Republicans who say they want to do it. Thune has said he will not do it. Johnson has said he will not do it. And half their caucus is so right-wing that they say, we don't want to improve, let people be on their own. That is not what America wants. And Democrats are, as I said, it's overall costs. There's the housing cost. How is it that the average first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old? How is it that you, you know, in the old days, a down payment was 3%. Now it's 25 or 30%. How is it, how is it that your electricity costs—
Scarborough: I came from a middle-class family. Yeah. First house I owned, I think it was 25 or 26. Yeah. It wasn't that much of a stretch. Now, we're seeing kids become young adults, becoming adults, moving into middle age, still struggling to buy a home.
Schumer: And when you pay that monthly payment for a mortgage, you know you're building equity. You're gaining your own wealth. You're going to pass something on to your children. When you put it for rent, it's just gone. And people feel it. The anguish that so many young people, a lot of people, Joe, can afford the actual mortgage payment if they're two-couple family doing well. But they can't afford the down payment. One of the things we're looking at is how we get a down payment, overcome that hump of down payment. We are looking at costs of electricity. We're looking at the cost of health care. We're looking at the cost of groceries. We're looking at the cost of daycare. These are the costs that plague the American people. And Donald Trump is up in some escapade talking now about Venezuela where he doesn't have any idea. This seems to be a back-of-the-envelope thing they're doing. And here's one of the other problems in this administration. There's no one who says no to him. My guess, I don't know. He got up and said that we are going to, the United States is going to run. I'll bet the people standing behind him said, what the hell? But then they listened to him. And they didn't curb him because now he's doubling down on this reckless policy that he's doing in Venezuela and thinking about Colombia and thinking about Cuba and Greenland. I mean, the average American is going to say, what is going on in the White House?
Brzezinski: Yeah, they're worried about just getting by every day.
Schumer: Exactly. And that's why we are making that our number one issue. Yeah, can I say one more thing, you know, back in 2005, we didn't have the House, we didn't have the Senate. George Bush said, I'm going to privatize Social Security. We made, Nancy and myself and Harry and Rahm, we decided to make that the issue. We fought on it for a whole year. We took back the House, took back the Senate. This health care dilemma is worse than the Social Security because it's hitting people right now.
Scarborough: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, thank you very much. We look forward to hear how things go today.
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