It's Time to Fight Back Against Trump's Fascist Regime (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report
As the Trump administration's repression increases by the day, Ralph Nader reminds us that we are not "nobodies," and that together, with collective power, we can invoke serious change.
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you’re a nobody? You know things about those roles. You’ve experienced them. You’ve been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you’re going to be treated like a nobody. You’re going to be treated like someone who doesn’t count, someone who doesn’t matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed.
Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.
Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.
With Donald Trump’s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.
His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos and Victor Castellanos
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript:
Chris Hedges
There is no functioning opposition party that can halt America’s rapid descent into an authoritarian state. The Democratic Party, which in the last presidential election saw the party hierarchy anoint a candidate who ran a vapid, issueless, celebrity-driven campaign, was soundly rejected by the voters for the grifter and demagogue Donald Trump.
The party, which is a minority in the House and the Senate, stands for nothing and fights for nothing. Indeed, it does not even function as a political party, with the concerns of its voting base routinely ignored. Democratic Party voters, sixty-two percent of whom say the party leadership should be replaced, seventy-five percent of whom oppose sending more military aid to Israel and sixty-six percent favor socialism, are little more than props trotted out as extras at the highly choreographed convention.
The sinking poll numbers — the Party has a twenty-four percent positive rating and a fifty-six percent negative rating — have done nothing to jolt the party back to reality. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, each of whom are from New York state, have refused to endorse the party’s official candidate for mayor in New York, Zohran Mamdani, despite his energized grassroots campaign and high polling numbers.
It has ignored Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy” tour which drew large crowds across the country and did all it could to sabotage Sander’s campaign to be the party’s presidential nominee. The party continues to cravenly serve the interests of its corporate and oligarchic donors, including the Israel lobby, at the expense of its own viability.
It refuses to mount little more than a symbolic challenge as the Trump administration dismantles democratic institutions and eviscerates civil liberties. With government funding set to expire tomorrow, the party could deliver a significant blow to the Trump administration by orchestrating a partial government shutdown.
This tactic was rejected earlier this year by Schumer when he supported a continuing resolution, but the widespread outrage over the abject failure by the party to throw up roadblocks to Trump’s authoritarianism may finally see the Democrats reluctantly react.
Joining me to discuss the crisis in the American political system, what it means if the Democratic Party continues to capitulate and the Trump administration’s war on democratic norms and lawful dissent is consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
I want to begin, Ralph, by looking at the Democratic Party. I think you have long blamed the party for this rightward drift and even the election of Trump.
Ralph Nader
Chris, I have to bicker with you. Stop using the word authoritarianism to describe Trump’s fascist dictatorship, which meets every criteria of dictatorship, moving into a police state with only terror to look forward to.
He has violated every law that would obstruct him. He has defied judicial decisions. He has ignored congressional exclusive authority over spending and declaration of war and other authorities under the Constitution.
There’s almost no impeachable offense that he has not committed. We have drafted over 23 impeachable articles and we’re talking impeachment now and removal from office. That’s the only thing left under the Constitution that he has not ravaged and been able to control.
He has turned the Justice Department into a crooked, illegal persecutor of innocent people. He is self-enriching himself and his cohorts using the office of the White House. He lies seriously and violently, turning realities into fantasies.
He is basically laying the groundwork with tariffs and other policies that are going to increase prices to the American people, which has already started. Unemployment is increasing, people are having a hard time finding new jobs and they’re having a very hard time in terms of housing and other necessities of life to protect and nurture their families.
So you have but all the criteria — repression of free speech, cracking down on dissent, kidnapping people with masked ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents including people who have green cards and they stumbled over people who are actually American citizens, thrown into dungeon concentration camps. They’re called “detention centers” by liberals as well as right wingers.
The second thing in addition to dropping the word authoritarianism is to show that the Democrats, they don’t have a party per se. They contract out their campaigns, their fundraising, their strategies, their tactics, their choice of schedules and traveling to corporate conflicted consulting firms, which have been immune from investigation by the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal for years.
And I have talked to all the reporters and I said, you’re missing a big story. This is the only party we have that can save the republic from the ravages of what JD Vance in 2016 before he turncoat called America’s Hitler, meaning he’s referring to Trump.
So having said this, it’s so easy for the Democrats to throw the Republicans on the defensive on issues that are supported by left/right voters but they don’t stand for anything because they’re not in charge of their campaign policies and programs.
They got all these greedy consulting firms that go back and forth between the Democratic apparatchiks and their own business. It’s a huge scandal that needs to be exposed. So if the Democrats made a big issue out of increasing the minimum wage to at least $15 federal from $7.25, that’s 25 million workers who would live better.
They can say, vote for a raise. You’ve long denied it. They can raise Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years and pay for it by raising the Social Security tax on higher income individuals.
In 2022, 200 House Democrats voted for such a bill by John Larson, congressman from Connecticut, but Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t take it to the floor. That would help 65 million retired Americans.
You could restore this child tax credit, providing $300 a month to 61 million children from both liberal and conservative families. The Republicans are against all of these. So you cut the difference between the priorities sharply with huge polling.
If you went into the next issue, which is cracking down on corporate crooks that are stealing the hard-earned earnings and savings of all Americans, that comes in at 85% in the polls. What’s there to lose?
Campaign money from Wall Street to Chuck Schumer and to Hakeem Jeffries. And then the other big one is, which Kamala Harris raised but never really emphasized, it was a throwaway line, raise taxes on the hugely under-taxed, super-rich and multinationals. And that comes in at 85%.
That’s a lot of conservatives who are fed up with how these big companies are getting away with it. So you’re dealing with just endless opportunities that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, even Lyndon Johnson would have adopted to landslide the Republicans.
So now the Democrats are hours away from a potential shutdown, but they haven’t made the case. They say that they want to reverse ending the subsidies for Obamacare, that’s almost 30 million.
We’re going to experience very high increase in health care premiums as of January and they want to get rid of the depletion of Medicaid. 10 to 15 million people are going to lose it in order to pay for tax cuts for the super wealthy including Trump’s family. So that’s not enough.
They don’t say it. They don’t know how to say it right. They don’t know how to talk about how many people would be benefited by continuing the subsidies and stopping the hemorrhaging of Medicaid. They just are letting consultants use the words they use.
So in 2001, Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under [Bill] Clinton, wrote an article for the [Washington Post], and he basically said the Democratic Party is dead, dead, dead. And that’s the problem for the American people.
And that’s why the clamoring at town meetings where people are shouting at the Democratic senators and representatives “start fighting, start going after the GOP, protect us, defend us, represent us,” is still not breaking through. Schumer and Jeffries should resign immediately.
They have turned themselves into trojan horses and if the government shuts down partially on October 1, I’m not sure they can make the case in the polls yet because they have surrendered their integrity and independence to these commercial consultants who have corporate clients throughout the year. What are they doing hiring them for the Democratic Party?
Chris Hedges
Do you see any hope in the [Zohran] Mamdani campaign?
Ralph Nader
Yes, it looks like he’s going to win. The more he’s battered by the billionaires and the real estate industry and the Israeli lobby, his polls keep going up. So the key thing is turnout. There are huge numbers of younger New Yorkers who are registered to vote who don’t vote. They came out for the primary, a small number, but [Andrew] Cuomo is relying on a low turnout.
So the issue is he’s got over 16,000 volunteers that should be able to get a major vote turnout. He’s getting a lot of media, even critical media he turns to his advantage. But the one thing he hasn’t done is answer the question, how are you going to pay for these programs like free childcare, free bus service, etc.
The way to do it is for him to come out with his colleagues in Albany, who have already come out for a bill to end the daily rebate of over $40 million a day, maybe $80 million, of the tiny sales tax on stock transactions, 1/10th of 1%.
Chris, you know what you pay when you go to New York. You pay a state and city tax that’s over 8% for the necessities of life in stores in New York, 1/10th of 1% will bring in anywhere from $16 to $30 billion a year.
And for some reason, even though he’s been asked by 1099 Union, he’s been asked by a statewide religious group, he’s been asked by a coalition of consumer groups, including us, to come out and end the rebate so you can answer the question, how you can pay for daycare and bus fare.
And this bill targets money. It actually targets money to mass transit, to healthcare, to environment, to education. All these unions should be fighting for it, but only a very few are because the state labor federation guy has been listening to [Thomas P.] DiNapoli, the state [comptroller] who’s in the pockets of Wall Street and saying, oh this will harm pension fund investments. Total nonsense.
It will be paid primarily by very high frequency traders, so it’s a wonderful progressive sales tax for only 1/10 of 1%. Otherwise, he’s running a good campaign.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I mean, they will, they’ve already announced, they will do everything they can to destroy him and to make his tenure in office untenable.
Ralph Nader
Well, he’s got to appoint some very smart, experienced people, and he’s fully aware of that. He’s a pragmatic guy. He’s not a skydiver.
Chris Hedges
If the Democratic Party continues in this trajectory and Trump continues to consolidate, and I have used the word fascism, I did not use it in my introduction, but I do use the word fascism, this fascistic, and we’ve just seen this presidential memo that essentially equates criticism of capitalism, criticism of ICE with acts of terrorism. Where are we headed and how fast?
Ralph Nader
We’re headed fast into a police state and terrorism. He’s already going after James Comey, and he’s persecuting him. The indictment was two pages. It was totally flimsy by the grand jury, which is a narrow decision.
And he now says he’s going after Senator Adam Schiff from California. That’s another very serious bright line. He’s starting to go after lawmakers. So that’s what fascists do. They’re going after the press. He’s extorting them. He’s going after universities.
This is technically extortion. When you say you’re going to cut off funds, they’re going to block law firms from representing clients by not letting them into federal buildings, that’s the perfect definition of extortion. That’s a serious crime, impeachable crime, clearly. It’s not only his repression, Chris.
Who’s he leaving alone and who is he cutting funds for? You know, cutting funds for FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] with approaching hurricanes. He’s cutting funds that warn on weather patterns. He’s cutting funds that warn on pandemics.
He’s cutting funds that warn on global warming catastrophes. He’s cutting the funds of Head Start, which Republicans and Democrats have supported. Cutting the funds on Meals on Wheels. Cutting the funds on Medicaid.
All these affect Trump voters as well and they’re not coming to their senses and turning against him in fast enough numbers. His polls are dropping but not fast enough because he’s betrayed them. But it’s not just all of that that you’ve written and talked about, Chris. Repression, violence, defamation, incarceration, unemploying people, firing them illegally.
300,000 have left the Federal Civil Service since January 20. Some of them were retirements, but most were pushed out. Closing down scientific research, NIH [National Institutes of Health], and CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].
But who’s he leaving alone? And this is the definition of fascism or the corporate state. He’s leaving alone hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate handouts, giveaways, subsidies, bailouts a year. He’s leaving alone, along with [Elon] Musk, all the corporate crooks that are bleeding federal programs like Medicare.
$60 billion fraud a year, billion with a B. Medicaid, heavy tens of billions of dollars by the vendors, by the people who, the companies who sell or who are contracted out to administer programs like the inflated Medicare Disadvantage program, poking a huge hole in Medicare and with deceptive ads that are not prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission.
And of course the military budget. He’s added $150 billion dollars more to the bloated military budget than the generals have asked for. $44 billion more to Homeland Security, hired tens of thousands of masked agents, kidnapping people, throwing them into jail without charges, sometimes exporting them to dictatorial torture regimes.
So you got the complete definition of fascism defined by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 in a message to Congress. He basically said, when private power takes over our government, that’s fascism.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about his deployment of National Guard troops in cities, Washington [D.C.], Chicago, now Portland. What’s he doing?
Ralph Nader
Well, basically this attack on Democratic-controlled cities, most of them with Black mayors, like Los Angeles and New York, other places, Washington, D.C., it’s part of the fascist takeover. You federalize the state National Guard. He’s using fake national emergency declarations.
This is Congress’s fault. They gave them all this wide open discretionary power to declare insurrection, to declare foreign invasion, to declare emergency powers without any criteria or standards. So it goes back a long way when Congress just abdicated its role. It doesn’t want to do its job under the Constitution. Those are not executive powers.
Those are congressional powers delegated without any restraints and accountability to any reckless president. We’ve never had one more reckless. He’s an egomaniacal, unstable, dangerous personality. He is set on the record and we printed him in our book on destroying America on Donald Trump. He said that he knows more than experts in 15 different areas.
He knows more about banks. He knows more about construction. He knows more about trade than anyone. This is a deranged megalomaniac person. He just said the other day before the UN [United Nations], I’ve been right on everything. There’s a very dangerous personality here.
Chris Hedges
And let’s talk about ICE. The massive expansion of ICE will get more, its budget will now dwarf all other federal law enforcement agencies and this planned building of huge detention centers all across the country…
Ralph Nader
They’re not detention centers, they’re concentration camps!
Chris Hedges
Concentration camps. Yes, you’re right. And how is that mechanism going to be used? One assumes that that’s not simply for undocumented people.
Ralph Nader
Well it’s already starting like he kidnapped the Tufts graduate student because she wrote an op-ed criticism of him. There’s a lot of people in that category — citizen groups, labor groups, better government groups, reform groups, and he’s getting away with it.
And one reason, by the way, you might wonder, Chris, and your audience might wonder why people aren’t suing for malicious prosecution, abuse of power, the way that they have successfully sued out of control police violence in cities around the country under tort law.
It’s because, with the help of the Supreme Court, they’ve made it very hard to sue federal employees who, even under contract, who basically plead the government sovereignty defense.
So that’s why the ICE agents feel that they’re not going to be sued, because they come under that protective cloak, which the Supreme Court has been expanding. That’s what the concentration camps are for. Now, obviously, public opinion is turning against him. And that’s where he’s going to fail.
He’s losing ground, even significantly among Trump voters and independent voters who voted for him because they’re seeing the betrayal even though there’s been a delay in the impact because he delays the tariffs but a whole bunch of them are going in effect October 1st.
And they will see the price increases in necessities of life, kitchen table necessities, very shortly so I expect that his polls are going to drop to thirty percent and it’s only at thirty percent that Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer say that’s when they can go after him.
Well, that waits to be seen. What does it mean to go after him? There’s only one remedy. It’s called impeachment in the House, removal of the Senate. Now people say impossible, GOP controls both. It’s not at all. Here’s why.
When the GOP sees his polls plummeting for 2026, it’s either them, up for reelection and loss of the Congress, or Trump, who is not up for reelection. What do you think they’re going to pick? What’s the precedent? Let’s go to Richard Nixon. He won 49 states in 1972.
He was a 60% approval. Less than two years later, he resigned. Why? Because he was about to be impeached and removed from office. For what articles? Listen to this in comparison. Listen to the transgressions of Nixon that led to his ouster: One count of obstructing justice and I think two counts of obstructing justice and one article of defying a congressional subpoena.
Trump defied 125 congressional subpoenas in his first term alone. 125. Obstruction of justice, John Bolton said in his memoir, the former security assistant to Trump, who Trump is going after, by the way. He’s raided his home with FBI agents. He said, “obstruction of justice was a way of life, a daily way of life in the White House first term.”
So the Democrats have hundreds of more impeachable offenses, and they’re not one-time events like Watergate. They are continually impeachable. He brags about it openly. He boasts about it.
He indicts himself every day. And the Democrats on Capitol Hill are telling us, now is not the time for impeachment. Now is not the time. When is the time, Jamie Raskin? When is the time, Adam Schiff? When is the time, Schumer? When is the time, Jeffries?
After he’s prosecuted you with rump prosecutors for crimes and got you before a grand jury? Is that what you’re waiting for? Have you ever seen a more craven, corrupt, cowardly party in American history, Chris?
Chris Hedges
No. And it’s always, you know, look at Weimar [Germany] or anywhere else, it’s always a bankrupt liberalism that sows the seeds for fascism.
Ralph Nader
Well, you wrote the book on it: Death of the Liberal Class, when I had you on my podcast radio show, I accused you of understatement and really, it’s much worse. For example, we’re asking Jamie Raskin, he is now the ranking member of this House Judiciary Committee.
There’s nothing stopping him from holding shadow hearings publicly with witnesses and media on impeachment, educating the public, getting them ready for impeachment if and when the Democrats take control of the House.
Now, the House Democrats under Pelosi, they impeached Trump twice. Once on a Ukraine extortion type thing with Hunter Biden, not exactly a tabletop issue, kitchen table issue. And the other was on January 6th, insurrection.
Now they have 24 serious, serious impeachable offenses, many of which are criminal violations with jail terms, like the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits presidents from not obeying appropriation fund orders by the Congress, which he violates every day. He’s closing down AID, impeachable offense, Congress has authorized funds to keep it open.
He’s done the same thing with the Education Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects people and has returned $21 billion from corporate crooks, including from Wall Street. So what are they waiting for? The longer they wait, the more they’re going to have to deal with the police terror state.
This guy has no boundaries. He’s a deranged, unstable personality. He’s ignorant, monomaniacal, he knows more than everybody and he’s put entrenched yes people that can be the counterparts of Hermann Göring, [Heinrich] Himmler, [Joachim von] Ribbentrop, guys like [Pete] Hegseth, Secretary of Defense. He can’t wait for a war.
They’re pushing the country to war. And he’ll put us into war to try to avoid impeachment and send US troops. So we have retired military who despise Trump. They worked under him. They were Secretary of Defense, remember [Jim] Mattis?
The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his security advisor, John Kelly, all former generals, retired now. They have a network. What are they waiting for? They cannot be told to obey an illegal order under the Constitution and a Trump war without congressional authorization is ipso facto an illegal order to every soldier that they are under a legal requirement under the Nuremberg rules, international law, to disobey that illegal order and go fight an illegal war in some foreign land.
Chris Hedges
So Ralph, before I ask you about your new book, do you have any idea what this concave of all the senior military and Hegseth is about?
Ralph Nader
It’s about not to disobey illegal orders that are forthcoming. To do things from Trump to the Pentagon to people overseas and to use the military domestically in our cities and towns in rural areas which violated federal law and he can’t get away with by just declaring one fake emergency after another.
It’s basically to whip potential dissenters among the generals and admirals, people who grew up West Point Air Force Academy, Naval Academy, saying that their first obligation is their oath to support the Constitution, not the Secretary of Defense or the President.
It’s very dangerous whipping them into a very pliable force for illegal action against the American people domestically and abroad.
Chris Hedges
So let’s talk about, at the end here, your book, Civil Self-Respect and what you call a civic personality as opposed to a personal personality.
Ralph Nader
Let me just put it this way. I want to use this metaphor. The mighty Mississippi starts with a few rivulets in Minnesota and Montana. The rivulets then become brooks. Brooks then merge to become streams. The streams then merge into mighty tributaries, which then, like the Missouri River, feed into the giant Mississippi River. The giant Mississippi River would not be a river without the rivulets, trucks, and the streams.
So that’s the metaphor. Now the reason I wrote this book, it’s critical to all we’ve been discussing. The ballgame now is back in the hands of the people. They’re turning out at various town meetings. 1% of them are marching and very active. We need more than 1%. Even 2% is 5 million adults right there.
And so I write this book because I would be speaking to large audiences, Chris, around the country in past years. And at the end, people would come up to me, rather hesitantly, and they would say, Ralph, I know I’m a nobody, but I have to ask you this question.
And when I hear that, I flare. I say, what do you mean you’re a nobody? How can you ever say you’re a nobody? You live as a citizen in this country. How can you say you’re a nobody?
Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you’re a nobody? You know things about those roles. You’ve experienced them. You’ve been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you’re going to be treated like a nobody. You’re going to be treated like someone who doesn’t count, someone who doesn’t matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed.
So let me tell you something. And that is, you don’t have to go out of your way. Just in your ordinary shopping, you get ripped off, you become more of an advocate, you move into a citizen dimension.
Some of the examples in this book, it’s full of examples called Citizen Self-Respect. A woman was kept on a tarmac in Michigan for hours with her fellow passengers. The plane heated up. It was awful. And so when she got out, she looked into it and she saw there’s no remedy for the passengers. So she started a group called FlyersRights, Kate Hanni was her name.
And until she stopped getting support because people often look the other way and think other people are going to support these citizen groups, she made a lot of changes on the basis of her experience. She became a citizen advocate. And there are people who’ve done this recently and they’ve been in the news, in the food safety area.
They mobilize because of their bad experiences with junk food, contaminated food. So this is full of examples. And so your daily role as a consumer, a worker, taxpayer, voter, whatever, you can go out of your personal role and develop an additional civic energy, civic protest, civic advocacy.
And some of you are going to be so excited, you’re going to join existing citizen groups that want more members and more supporters around the country focusing on Congress, for example. You’ll get the CapitolHillCitizen.com, the new Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper that we’re putting out.
You’ll connect with some local groups on housing and really basic community necessities that are recognized by left/right families don’t fall prey to the divide and rule tactics of the ruling classes because they want the same things for their children and for themselves — public services adequate benefits that they’ve already paid into as well as clean air, clean water and other protections locally in the community and the neighborhood.
This is why I call this my most important book. This is a short book, very readable, full of examples, but it’s very personal. The chapters are chapter names that have never been written about before in a preface.
I, the citizen, I, the worker, I, the consumer shopper, I, the taxpayer, I, the voter, I, the parent, I, the veteran, I, the philanthropist. People say philanthropy? I’m not a philanthropist. Are you kidding? Lower and middle income people give a higher portion of their money to charity than rich people. They’re all philanthropists.
They can all decide where to put their money, how to aggregate their money, how to talk to enlightened rich people, to fund activities, which we outline in this book at the local level. So you can get an autographed copy of this book. If you’re inclined that way, you can go to Nader.org and it describes the book or you can get it directly from the publisher, Seven Stories Press, or you can get it in other ways you buy books online or from your independent bookstores.
It’s called Civic Self-Respect. It has a nice commentary, very brilliant commentary by Patti Smith on the front page as well as other encomiums that I appreciate including yours, Chris Hedges.
Thank you very much winner of the Pulitzer Prize for war [reporting] and author of the book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and I always thought, Chris, that’s one of your greatest books because it really cuts deep into the self-respect, or lack of, by citizens around the country who have allowed themselves to lose their government, have it be taken over by corporations into a military corporatist plutocracy.
Chris Hedges
Great, thanks Ralph. That’s Civic Self-Respect. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Victor [Padilla], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Hearty thank you Chris Hedges for having Nader here. Am forwarding to friends.
Great interview