Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss President Trump's first 100 days.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Joining me now is Congressman Mike Levin. Congressman, thank you so much for joining me.
00:04Thanks, Brittany.
00:05We have just surpassed President Trump's second first 100-day milestone in the White House,
00:12and we have seen a lot. He has signed dozens of executive orders. He has started, stopped,
00:17paused trade wars with allies and adversaries alike. And in this milestone, I'm curious,
00:24how exactly would you characterize his performance so far?
00:28Well, Brittany, I would characterize it as chaos, dysfunction and extremism. And the president
00:35ran successfully last year on a couple of big issues. One was getting costs under control and
00:42improving the economy. Another was on immigration. And on the economy, we see the tariffs and the
00:51really reckless nature of trade policies around the world. The arbitrary tariffs that were announced
01:00then walked back and paused. The business community doesn't know which way to turn. And consumers are
01:06already seeing higher prices as a result. I'm worried about empty shelves this summer. And I'm worried
01:13about higher prices for the average American for some time to come. It's very easy to break things
01:19when it comes to the economy. It's sometimes much harder to fix them. And there's just a recklessness
01:24and a chaos around the economic choices the president has made that I think will cause not only the short-term
01:30pain, but long-term pain as well. And then on immigration, I think the president really had a huge
01:36opportunity to work with Democrats and Republicans alike interested in securing our border and coming up with
01:43a bipartisan solution on having a path to citizenship for our agricultural workers, for others who are seeking
01:52to contribute positively to our society and our economy. But instead of that, we've seen mass deportation and
01:59really lack of due process and an extremism that I didn't fully anticipate, given the, you know, maybe
02:09that was naive. Maybe given some of the rhetoric, I should have anticipated just how bad it's been.
02:14But I think a chaos, dysfunction and extremism for the first hundred days, which means that given a
02:20historic opportunity at a second chance, only Grover Cleveland has gotten a second chance as president
02:26of the United States and the hope and the belief that the president would actually focus on lowering
02:33costs and trying to come up with a fix on immigration, quite the opposite. And that's why he's upside down
02:40overall. That's why he's upside down on the economy and why he's upside down on immigration, which really
02:46were his superpowers to become elected both the first and the second time.