Senator Brian Schatz has been one of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s most outspoken opponents as they rampage their way through the federal government. The Hawaii Democrat, long a voluble social-media presence, announced this week that he would block all of Trump’s State Department nominees in protest of Musk and Marco Rubio’s demolition of USAID. With outrage mounting over the Trump administration’s likely illegal tactics, his move is part of a renewed Democratic push to gum up the works of Congress, even though the party has little concrete power at the moment. I talked to Senator Schatz on Wednesday, hours before he and fellow Democrats pulled an all-nighter to speak out against the nomination of Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. We discussed what elected Democrats can actually accomplish right now, whether he regrets voting for Marco Rubio’s nomination, and his allergy to certain liberal-leaning pundits.
First of all, what’s your take on Trump’s sort-of plan to take over the Gaza Strip?
A Republican president proposing that the United States occupy a Middle Eastern country? We’ve seen this before and it ends very, very badly.
You’ve focused a lot of your attention this week on the gutting of USAID, putting a blanket hold on all the Trump administration State Department nominees in an effort to restore funding. It’s a bold move, but as I understand it, you can only slow down, not necessarily stop, these nominations. So how do you rate the prospect of success with this tactic, and what are you trying to do generally?
Look, I think we have to use whatever levers we have, but I think the public needs to understand how limited they are in the context of nominations. They only need a bare majority to confirm people, and they have that. So I can make life difficult for them, but I can’t make it impossible for them to confirm people. There’s going to be a point in this year after this flurry of executive orders when many of them will be overturned, and then the president and his team will have to come to Congress if they want to enact anything.
I’m not suggesting people should not be alarmed. I think they should be alarmed, but it’s just to say that we are out of power, but we are not powerless and that we intend to use whatever leverage we can muster at the appropriate time. And no, I’m not going to tell you exactly what that looks like.
A possible government shutdown and debt-ceiling negotiations — is that what you’re referring to in part?
I’m not referring to anything in particular other than after the Cabinet is confirmed, most things they need require 60 votes.
Right, but it does seem like Democrats’ best leverage in the near future is the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown. Republicans have been the party of that kind of brinkmanship. There seems to be more of an appetite among Democrats to do it this time. Would you say that’s true?
I wouldn’t say that’s true or untrue. I’m just saying that they’re going to grind through their nominations and there’s very little we can do but to scream about it and cause delays at the margins. Today, we didn’t agree to waiving the mandatory forum call, which delayed them by all of 12 minutes. So people need to understand there is no magic button called “courageously obstruct.”
I’m just talking about down the road where you might win concessions during negotiations, which seems more realistic than the “Do something, Chuck Schumer!” rally cry.
Yeah, we’re just not there yet.
That, along with legal avenues — many of Trump and Musk’s plans are already tied up in court, and there were already a couple favorable court decisions today — seem like the most practical paths. But a lot of people are asking, “What can I do as an outraged citizen right now?”
I think showing up peacefully in person is the most important thing. People need to see each other in three dimensions. We need to have a sense of energy and hope, and that not all of this is going to be intermediated by our screens and our apps — that we’re going to have to rebuild a movement for American-style democracy and we can do it. It’s not going to be the resistance again, but just because the resistance made some practical and strategic errors, just because that’s an eight-year-old movement doesn’t mean you should fit the alternatives to do nothing. I think people realized that it’s time to wake up from our collective slumber and start kicking ass again.
What is the mood of the Democratic caucus right now? Is there a divide between people who want to do anything they can to obstruct Republicans, to throw their bodies on the gears, so to speak, and those who want to be a little more deliberative and wait this out?
If you think that’s what’s happening — I mean, that’s not how I view it. I think everybody’s pretty unified in being outraged. I think everyone’s trying to sort out their politics, their conscience, and their strategic objectives.
Do you get the sense that your Republican colleagues are freaked out about what’s going on and just not saying it out loud? Or are they really onboard with all this?
I think it’s a mix. I think some of them are freaked out and putting on a brave face, and some of them truly don’t care.
Going back to USAID for a second. You voted for the nomination of Marco Rubio, who’s overseeing this demolition of the agency as secretary of State. Do you have any second thoughts about that vote now?
Ask me in a week.
Why, because something might change?
Yeah. I mean, whenever we’ve talked about USAID, we don’t totally agree, but I think there’s a potential for common ground. But he’s landing back in the States today, and I’m hoping he establishes that he’s in charge of the State Department.
He doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the destruction of the agency he was calling to be better funded a few years ago.
I think we’re about to find out what he wants to do, because he’s been gone and once he hits American soil and sits down and starts to be told of the impacts across the planet — I mean, there’s food in the Port of Houston that is spoiling because it can’t be shipped in the Food for Peace program. There are clinics closing, there are mass layoffs of foreign service officers. There are medicines spoiling at the dock in Sudan. None of this is good for American interests, and it’s not exactly going to create a hero’s welcome the next time he travels overseas.
But obviously the domestic political considerations may outweigh all that.
Maybe, but looking like we’re creating instability across the planet also is bad domestic politics.
So you think there’s actually still hope that at least some of the program could be salvaged?
I just want to be clear: not hope, certainty. It’s a federal law. They can do a ton of damage, but it’s arson. They’re not permitted to do what they’re doing. USAID will remain a creature of statutory law funded by the Congress. They can make the agency way less effective and they can cause death and destruction across the planet, but they’re actually not allowed to shut down an agency established by law. And I think we’ve sort of raced past the unlawfulness. There’s this idea that if you don’t like something, you can just write a memo getting rid of it. That’s literally not how anything works.
But what about folding it into the State Department? Is that also flatly illegal? I’m unclear on that.
I think it’s a little unclear, because it depends on what they mean by folding. If it’s just better alignment or a change in the organizational chart — depending on how they do it, it might be permissible. I don’t know.
Meanwhile, Musk and his associates continue to gain access to important federal systems. Do you think it’s smart strategy for Democrats to be focusing on that particular aspect of things above almost anything else — that Musk, an unelected billionaire, is wreaking all this havoc, and so on?
I want to question your premise, because all day, every day, I am asked about Democratic strategy. So I’m always doing this meta-commentary, as if I’m a podcaster. “Is it smart Democratic strategy?” I think there’s a lot of that, where we consider success to be whether someone ratifies our strategy via the punditocracy, and I just want us to get out of that habit.
That’s a fair point.
Bad things are bad, and you should fight bad things. One of the things people like about Republicans is they’re very determined to do the things they promise to do, and they’re willing to temporarily lose a news cycle in order to win a bigger argument that will cause a bigger shift in the national conversation. And we just have this left-of-center left punditocracy. It’s Morning Joe, it’s Axe and Carville — whose whole profession is, once they do their perfunctory criticism of Trump, then they get into the thing they really wanted to say, which is how much better things would be if they were in charge. And none of these people have run a Democratic campaign or enacted legislation in more than a generation.
And so it’s not that people shouldn’t use a skeptical or critical eye when evaluating what Democrats are up to, it’s just that the chin-stroking of it all is just a little exhausting. We just need everybody to jump in the boat and start paddling in the same direction, at least roughly speaking. And I have noticed this online — half of activism now is people rephrasing the things that I post. And I’m thinking of all the activities you could engage in online or offline, rephrasing the way a politician decided to say something is like the goofiest bullshit I’ve ever heard. So I think that we have to operate from some core principles, that we’re trying to protect people from a billionaire takeover of the United States government, of their government. And if that makes me sound corny, so be it. But I think that we have had too many pundits and pollsters and strategists who have been losing decade after decade. And I think it would be great if they all made some room for some new thinking.
Are you afraid of all this chaos escalating to some crazy degree we haven’t even really confronted yet? Like a court issues an injunction and the Trump administration just doesn’t follow the order?
I think we’ve got enough bad stuff happening at this moment that I don’t want to engage in new and terrifying hypotheticals. But I would just say everybody has to strike the balance between being appropriately alarmed, but not to the point of feeling defeated. We’re in this fight and we will win. I just don’t know how quickly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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