- 2 weeks ago
The veteran and Senate candidate from Maine talks to David Remnick about the affordability crisis, his campaign’s controversies, and why he isn’t ashamed about his past offensive comments.
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00:00Grant, from what I know, you were recruited to run for senator.
00:04And what was happening?
00:05You were driving around in your car, and some guy calls you up and says,
00:07because we want you to run for senator?
00:09Tell me the story.
00:09No, not quite.
00:10No.
00:11I was like, my wife and I were down in Brooklyn, Maine,
00:14where we shuck oysters at the Brooklyn General Store.
00:18And we were driving home.
00:19It's about a little over an hour drive.
00:21So it was like 9 o'clock at night, and I get a phone call from an unknown number.
00:27And it's a gentleman asking if it's me, and I said yes,
00:32and saying that they were at my mother's restaurant.
00:35They'd stopped in for dinner, and that they wanted to talk to me about a project
00:44to recruit a candidate in Maine to run for U.S. Senate.
00:48And I've been engaged in a lot of community organizing,
00:51and through that I've made lots of friends around the state
00:55in the organizing world.
00:56So I assumed that they were just calling to ask me about for names.
01:01And so I was like, yeah, it's late at night.
01:03We can't.
01:04So if you want to come over tomorrow morning before I go out on the boat for coffee,
01:08that sounds good.
01:09And they agreed.
01:09And what time do you go out on the boat?
01:11Well, I wanted to come over at 4.30,
01:14but my wife told me that was too early to invite people over to the house.
01:19So I told them 6, I think, or 5.30, something like that.
01:24Yeah, they came over and made it clear that they were part of this project
01:29with the Maine AFL-CIO, a couple of labor union groups,
01:32trying to recruit a candidate.
01:33And I started listing off names, and essentially they were like,
01:37no, you don't understand.
01:39We think you would be a good candidate.
01:42And my wife and I laughed and said, that's insane, because it is.
01:47We make $60,000 a year.
01:51And the Senate is not for people like us, or at least we don't really,
01:55you know, I'd never thought of running for the United States Senate.
01:58But then essentially they came back with the harder sell
02:03and an idea about how this could actually look.
02:06And at that point, we decided that it was the right thing to do.
02:10Tell me a little bit about your political experience.
02:13You refer to community organizing.
02:15You know, you're working a long day.
02:17Yeah.
02:18And tell me about the time that you spent, you know,
02:22outside the workday and what you were doing.
02:23In the winter months, I have less going on.
02:29I have a lot of projects, boats to fix, gear to fix.
02:32It's farming is farming is farming.
02:35So you've got your in-season where you're out.
02:38For me, I'm out on the boat pretty much all day long, all summer.
02:42It's very busy.
02:44In the winter months, starting after December through April,
02:47I tend to have a bit more free time.
02:49And in that time, I put time into organizing around mostly local economic justice issues
03:00or social justice issues.
03:02And it's what I've been kind of at the extent of my politics outside of local governance,
03:08where I've been the chair of the planning board and also was harbormaster.
03:12And those were areas that I enjoyed thoroughly.
03:16You get to see the outcome of policy.
03:19Then you get to craft policy based around the very material reality that you engage with,
03:25which I actually found to be quite educational.
03:30I mean, it is something to be able to write policy, implement it,
03:35and then essentially see the outcome of it within a week's time.
03:39Only at the local level do I think you actually get to engage with things like that.
03:43Graham, tell me a little bit about your family.
03:46From what I've read, you, for a very brief time, were at a pretty distinguished prep school.
03:50Very briefly.
03:51It didn't last very long.
03:52Yeah, what happened?
03:53I got thrown out.
03:54What'd you get thrown out for?
03:55I didn't go to class.
03:56I went to a very small rural middle school.
04:01And my mother wanted me to have a better education, I suppose.
04:08So she had me apply to a bunch of these, like, New England prep schools.
04:14We got a really good financial aid package from Hotchkiss in Connecticut.
04:18So she sent me down there.
04:20I didn't want to go.
04:22I went down and just had a—I'd never been around that level of wealth before.
04:29I just felt very out of place.
04:30And then I figured out very quickly that if I didn't go to class, then I got to go home.
04:35And that is exactly what happened.
04:38That was the conclusion you drew.
04:39Much to my mother's chagrin.
04:41How did she react?
04:43Poorly.
04:43She was very—I did not get to go on the family vacation that year.
04:47I had to stay home with my dad.
04:50How did they react to your decision to go into the military?
04:52And tell me about that.
04:53Yeah, my dad became a teacher, so he could not get drafted during Vietnam.
05:02He thought the war in Iraq was deeply stupid.
05:04I did, too, to be fair.
05:07So he thought my joining the Marine Corps was just a—or enlisting was not a good use of my time.
05:14And he was afraid I was going to go fight and die in a stupid war.
05:17Like, he had seen friends from his generation.
05:21When you look back on it, why did you go into the military?
05:24If you thought the war was stupid, it was just a thing that a young man can do to rebel in some way?
05:30Since my earliest memories, I wanted to be a soldier.
05:34I grew up loving military history.
05:37I did civil war reenacting.
05:40I really—and, like, I don't know why.
05:44I don't have an answer.
05:45I think about this fairly often.
05:48It was just something that spoke to me.
05:51I mean, for me, it was an inevitability.
05:55Yeah, after graduation, I was working for the Appalachian Mountain Club.
06:02I'd spent two years in the professional trail crew in the White Mountains.
06:05So I went back to work for the AMC for the summer.
06:08And then I deferred a year to go to college to keep my parents happy.
06:14But I knew what I was doing.
06:15I knew that I wasn't going to go.
06:17How did the reality of Iraq and being a soldier match with what you had imagined?
06:23So I had—I went into it, I think, in many ways, more informed and already fairly cynical than most.
06:34I—I read a lot of literature from the Vietnam War in high school.
06:41I—one of my favorite books was A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan.
06:46Neil Sheehan, yeah.
06:46I read a book about John Paul Van, who was a very competent and great soldier who then found himself in a war that he thought was being fought—fought poorly.
06:58So when I got to Iraq, early on, I thought it was working.
07:02I mean, I remember coming home from my first deployment and telling people that, like, I was wrong because I'd been against the war.
07:09And I was wrong that I was wrong.
07:11I was, in fact, right the first time around.
07:13Um, but I—I really believe—what I—what I interacted with was what I thought were tactical failures.
07:23I thought that we weren't doing the thing properly.
07:26I—I really believed in—in the concept of counterinsurgency.
07:30By the time I got out of the Marine Corps in 08, Petraeus and—and General Mattis had written the counterinsurgency manual.
07:37There was this whole, like, ream of thinking that the United States military really needed to focus on this counterinsurgency concept.
07:44So I started reading all the old writings from the French and the British and Malaya.
07:49And I really believed, truly believed, that we had just been doing it wrong.
07:58Yeah.
07:58That it wasn't that it, as a concept, was a failure.
08:01It's that we needed—and it's so funny now, looking back on it, because you can read guys in Vietnam having the exact same realization.
08:09And then coming to the exact same realization that I eventually did, too, which is that, ah, it's not a tactical failure.
08:14This whole thing is a failed concept.
08:16It cannot work.
08:17Strategically, yeah.
08:18It's—it's—it's—it's—it's not gonna—it's not gonna work.
08:20But—but, you know, when you're young, and you're engaged in something, and you believe—and you want to believe in it, you want to make it work, um, I—I really—I threw my heart and soul into it.
08:31Graham, you know, I was thinking about you in the last couple of days, knowing that we'd be talking, and I was—this—this past Sunday was just a miserable day.
08:40You know, the news from Providence, Rhode Island, and then the news from Sydney, Australia, and then the day ending with the murder of Rob Reiner and his—and his—his wife.
08:53And then what followed is the president of the United States issuing a truth social post that just betrayed—I mean, it wasn't surprising, in a sense, which is part of what's so awful about it.
09:06Yeah.
09:06But it—it just—the idea that somebody holding that sense of responsibility would say something so morally bankrupt and—and worse.
09:17But we also know that human beings say some pretty stupid things over time.
09:22Um, and you've had to contend with this, um, you know, you—your comments on Reddit from the past, um, came up, uh, issue of your tattoo became infamous because of the link to a Nazi symbol, and you've apologized, uh, repeatedly.
09:41How do you view the notion of what mistakes people can make and then still hold positions of real responsibility, like saying?
09:52Well, I think, one, did you do it when you were in power?
09:57Mm-hmm.
09:57I mean, I think that that's a really important thing, that if—if someone knows that they're—that what they say has so much gravity because other people are paying attention, like, what do you—how do you use that?
10:10How do you act in that manner?
10:12I—I do think that if we're going to—I'm an elder millennial.
10:16I'm 41.
10:17If we're going to rehash everyone's social media posts from their existence, people from my generation, I don't know what politics is going to look like.
10:26We'll, uh, we'll just never—we'll never get around to the policy part.
10:29So, I think that there is a—I mean, there—if someone spends 20 years being an avowed white supremacist, yeah, that's probably a sign.
10:40Uh, if someone over the course of their time on the internet uses slurs or stupid language and then ceases to do so, probably a sign of growth.
10:51Probably a sign of how many of us change over time.
10:53How old were you when you were making these comments on Reddit, and how do you look back on them?
10:58I'm in my late 20s, early 30s.
11:00Mm-hmm.
11:01And, uh, I mean, I was—
11:03Is that not old enough to know better?
11:04Well, I mean, I—which comment do you mean?
11:08I made a lot of comments that I'm not—that I'm not, like, ashamed of.
11:12It's not—it's not as though I have this ream of comments in which I look back and I'm like, oh, my God, I was a terrible person back then.
11:20So I—I guess it could—
11:21Oh, comments about victims of sexual assault, for example.
11:24Yeah, well, one, that comment.
11:26I made that right when I got out of the infantry.
11:28And all the—I mean, I don't know if you've read it, but—
11:31I sure have.
11:32Yeah.
11:32So the comment was is that I said that people—men and women—shouldn't get too drunk and should take some personal responsibility.
11:41I don't—I also said that sexual assault didn't occur in the military as much as people said it did.
11:48Mm-hmm.
11:48Um, it does.
11:50I learned that very quickly.
11:51I came out of the infantry.
11:53At the time, it was a male-only organization.
11:55I never interacted with it in the service.
11:58So I—for me, those comments were very much informed by my immature mindset coming out of my, frankly, 20s in the combat infantry.
12:11Uh, I then very quickly met people and had conversations and realized that I was very incorrect.
12:21Uh, sexual assault occurred often in the military and was often covered up.
12:25But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, those comments I made, uh, were at a time in my life where I was—yeah, I came out of the combat infantry.
12:30When you decided to run for the Senate, which is a gigantic leap for anybody, much less somebody who hasn't been in politics for a long time or conventional politics, did you think to yourself, I'm going to have a problem because of these past comments?
12:45No.
12:45Uh, if you—if you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you need to believe in the ability for people to change, for people to grow.
12:59If we are all just ossified in who we are right now, then there is no point to this.
13:06If we can't ever give people the ability to change minds, if we can't give people the ability to grow as human beings, then we're all—and we're all just stuck.
13:16I mean, we also know this isn't true.
13:18People grow all the time.
13:20And for me, this, as uncomfortable as it is and personally unenjoyable to have to talk about stupid things they said on the internet 13 years ago, it also allows me to publicly model something that I think is really important, which is that a lot of us go through transitions in life.
13:40A lot of us change our minds, have new experiences, meet new people, are informed by those experiences, and come to different conclusions.
13:49Our politics change, our views on the world change.
13:53And, again, while it's not fun to do this for me, it also really gives me the opportunity to very publicly show that you can believe things once, and then you can, over time, believe other things.
14:12You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff, change the way you talk.
14:15And I think that's a good thing to model.
14:18I think it's—and that that isn't something that is—that you should be ashamed of.
14:25You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person.
14:32You can think about the world in a different way.
14:34I want to get into how you see the world, and I want to get a sense of how you see the Democratic Party these days, and what you intend to do to help transform it.
14:47I think the Democratic Party today's biggest problem is that there is an element of it that has become as attached to corporate interests as the Republican Party is.
15:00And, by the way, this isn't just, like, my opinion.
15:04I mean, everybody thinks this.
15:06Everybody—well, you hear people say things like, I don't vote because it doesn't matter.
15:11Both sides are the same, all that kind of stuff.
15:13And I don't—I don't agree with that.
15:15I mean, there's a reason I'm running as a Democrat.
15:17There's a reason I'm running.
15:19If I thought that none of this—if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this.
15:22I have an immense amount of hope.
15:23However, I do think that there is an innate contradiction in trying to be a party that represents working people, representing those that struggle, those that labor, those that are often exploited or taken advantage of.
15:41It is impossible to represent their interests while also trying to represent the interests of those that exploit them.
15:48I think that that is a fundamental contradiction that you cannot get past.
15:54And my problem is that the Democratic Party used to be the party that represented those people.
16:00It was the party of labor unions.
16:01It was the party of thinking of large structural change that brought about things like Social Security or Medicaid and Medicare.
16:10It was the party that understood that protecting working people was going to require some form of imposition on those with wealth and power.
16:23When do you think the Democratic Party, in your view, abandoned that?
16:26In the 1990s.
16:28Under Clinton.
16:29Under Clinton.
16:29I think, you know, I think the lesson that was learned after Reagan was that—and it was the—I believe it was the wrong lesson, but, you know, other people can disagree.
16:40The lesson that was learned was that, like, oh, the money matters.
16:43And we do have to kind of lean into this government's bad.
16:47We should lean into the kind of deregulation corporate side of things.
16:51And in doing so, the party sold out organized labor.
16:56And the party, in many ways, sold out that kind of—that—the movement side.
17:02Did you feel that Barack Obama, for example, was in the same camp as Bill Clinton?
17:06Yeah.
17:07In that way?
17:08I think so.
17:08I mean, you know, 2008 financial crisis happens, right?
17:11There was a—there was a moment.
17:12I mean, and Obama's on record saying this.
17:15There was a moment where there were two options.
17:17We give money to homeowners or we give money to the banks.
17:22And we chose to give the money—to give the money to the banks.
17:25To rescue the banks, yeah.
17:26To rescue the banks.
17:27And, you know, that was a—that was an option.
17:31There was—and I—for me, that's just kind of indicative of this creeping influence in the Democratic Party where we find ourselves—and this is, I think, why we often find ourselves—
17:47in this weird—everybody's so confused as to what we're trying to do.
17:52Because we go from the—we have Zoran Mondani on one end and Joe Manchin on the other.
17:59The argument, which you well know, is that the only kind of Democrat that's going to win in West Virginia is a Joe Manchin Democrat.
18:08Otherwise, you're going to get a, you know, a MAGA Republican in West Virginia.
18:11My counter to that is that it's—I think you can win someone in West Virginia if you run on working-class populism.
18:23But Joe Manchin also very much did not represent the—I mean, he's the reason that we didn't get or we couldn't renew the child tax credit.
18:32And then we just chose not to—not to go—not to continue doing that.
18:39That's not the behavior of someone that's representing the interests of working people.
18:43Are you getting a lot of love from the leader of the Senate caucus from Chuck Schumer?
18:48No. I am not.
18:50How would you describe the lack of love there?
18:52It's just been a lack of anything.
18:54We've—we've—I've made it very clear that I would love to have a conversation, would love to talk about what we're trying to do here.
19:02No one's reached out.
19:03We're almost five months into this thing.
19:05Not a single phone call.
19:06Not a single email.
19:08From the—from the National Party Organization.
19:10From the—yeah, from either Chuck Schumer or from the DSCC and—
19:14The Senatorial Campaign Committee.
19:16I continue to not have been contacted.
19:19Governor Janet Mills has decided to run, um, and you've got a hot race there.
19:24Is she getting the love from the—from the Democratic Party establishment?
19:28Well, the DSCC set up to fundraise with her the day after she announced, so my assumption is yes.
19:37It looks like Schumer and the—and the DSCC is going to endorse Janet Mills in the—in the primary.
19:44And you've got endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna and others.
19:48How does that look on the ground in Maine?
19:52What are Maine Democrats actually feeling?
19:55How are the polls looking for you?
19:57Where are you having success?
19:59Where are you having difficulties?
20:00To be frank, the—the polls continue to be great for us.
20:06And on—and that mirrors what I feel on the ground.
20:09Like, there is a—people are fed up.
20:13People are disgusted with the system as it stands.
20:16And they don't think that the answers are going to come from establishment politicians who've been chosen by Washington, D.C.
20:24How will you run against Susan Collins, presuming that she's the Republican nominee?
20:29And she's—she's been in that office for a very long time, and incumbents have all kinds of advantages.
20:35Essentially the exact same way.
20:37We are building a campaign that is focused on field organizing.
20:42We're focused on building the ground game.
20:44We've held 35 town halls around the state of Maine the past couple months.
20:48We've talked to tens of thousands of Mainers already.
20:51We have 12,000 volunteers.
20:54Maine's not a big state.
20:56Or it is geographically.
20:57It doesn't have a lot of people.
20:59And these people are from all over the state.
21:01We've got folks coming down from Arista County.
21:03So it is a—for me, this is very much a much—it's a larger project than merely a Senate seat.
21:10This is about rebuilding organization, organization in communities, organization and cooperation between existing groups like labor unions, community organizations, the party itself.
21:24We re—in my opinion, we need to reconnect with that kind of politics, the politics of movement building.
21:30And that speaks to what people are feeling right now.
21:34People, myself included, I mean, why I'm doing this.
21:36We feel unrepresented.
21:37What do you want to get done in the Senate?
21:40What are, say, three top policies that you would concentrate on?
21:43Because you can't concentrate on everything.
21:46No.
21:46Continue pushing for universal health care, Medicare for all.
21:49We also need to restrict the ability of senators and congresspeople to trade stocks and bonds.
21:58It's essentially legalized corruption.
22:00And it needs to end.
22:01And we also need to fix the tax code because we cannot continue to tax wages at a higher rate than we tax wealth.
22:14That's a math equation that when you run to the end, it's easy to see who winds up with all the money.
22:18So those—I think those three things are going to be priorities for me legislatively.
22:24I know Medicare for all is going to be a heavy lift.
22:27The other two, I think, are going to be a much easier lift.
22:30I mean, we've already got some Republicans who are happy to come over on the stocks and bonds issue.
22:37Josh Hawley put something forward not too long ago.
22:40So I think there's definitely opportunity for winds there.
22:44Now, you've run an ad talking about how you refuse to accept money from a pack.
22:48Are there any other groups that you won't take money from?
22:52Oh, yeah.
22:52Yeah.
22:53Fossil fuel packs.
22:55I mean, frankly, any large corporate pack, any dark money pack, we don't take money from them.
23:00All the money we're taking in is individual donations.
23:04We will take money from labor packs, any kind of pack that exists that's kind of, you know, not part of the corporate dark money apparatus.
23:12But that's it.
23:14So we need to know where the money comes from.
23:16That's important for us.
23:17I want to ask you a couple of questions in view of your military experience.
23:21We had former Secretary of Defense and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, on the show recently.
23:27And he said this about having thousands of troops stationed off the coast of Venezuela.
23:31We're putting our men and women in uniform in harm's way.
23:34We have to assure them that the orders we give them are not going to violate the law.
23:38We're going to, in fact, defend our national security in a way that is not legally questionable.
23:45What do you make of this, especially coming from someone who saw America's forever wars really up close?
23:52I mean, I agree wholeheartedly.
23:54I mean, at this point, what we're seeing in Venezuela is just a rehash of what we saw with Iraq.
24:00But somehow even worse and even dumber, which is magnificent to behold.
24:05How is it even worse and even dumber?
24:08I mean, with Iraq, we at least had, I don't know, 10 years of previous engagement.
24:15We had U.N. hearings.
24:17It was at least this sort of well-crafted propaganda machine that a lot of people ate up.
24:23And this is just laughable.
24:26We're just murdering people.
24:28I think the death count now is up to 95.
24:31We're just murdering people.
24:34No declaration of war.
24:35No even concept of why this is a war.
24:40And it's all happening, frankly, because the Republicans know that their policies are failing.
24:45The economy is getting worse.
24:47People are not happy.
24:48And the best thing to do is just drum up a war for political purposes.
24:52And I think, you know, a lot of people can see it, including a lot of Republicans.
24:57And that's what I mean by dumber.
24:59It's less sophisticated.
25:02You know, the run-up to the Iraq War, I think, was a sophisticated operation in propaganda.
25:10This is just, they realize they have the power and they can do it.
25:14And so they're doing it.
25:15And that's it.
25:16How long were you in the military, active?
25:18Eight years.
25:19I was four years in the Marine Corps, four years in the United States Army National Guard.
25:24With that experience behind you, you've seen a lot of military leaders on the ground.
25:28And you've experienced them from afar as well.
25:31And you look at Pete Hegseth, who's the Secretary of Defense, or he calls himself Secretary of War.
25:38What view do you have of him?
25:40I view a guy who is deeply insecure about his military service.
25:44Why would he be insecure about his military service?
25:46I don't know.
25:47I'm always curious about that.
25:48I mean, look, he was an infantry officer.
25:50He served at Guantanamo, and I think he did a deployment to Iraq.
25:55Not every deployment to Iraq is the same as other deployments to Iraq.
25:58I'm not sure what his was like.
25:59But you definitely get the feeling that this is someone who is trying to make up for something, is trying to be this, like, vision of masculinity and warrior prowess that he, frankly, does not represent at all.
26:15If he did, why didn't he stay in?
26:18Why didn't he continue?
26:20Why didn't he go be a special forces officer?
26:22I mean, they're like, there were other places in the service to go to really embody that.
26:28And he didn't.
26:29He got out and became a talking head on television.
26:31And I get the vibe that, yeah, there's a bit of insecurity about that.
26:36And now he gets to be in a place of power to make up for it.
26:38What was your deployment like?
26:40Oh, I did four.
26:42Yeah.
26:45Two of them were fairly violent.
26:48One of them was kind of violent.
26:51What does that mean?
26:52Well, I, that's a good question.
26:56I was in Ramadi in 2006 with Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Eighth Marines.
27:01Um, that was a very, very violent deployment.
27:06We were, we, we.
27:07You were in active combat.
27:08Yeah, we were at the government center in downtown Ramadi.
27:11Um, it was a place that was, well, it was the government center, uh, for Al-Ambar province.
27:16So if you had a grievance with the coalition or the Iraqi government, you came down and, uh, expressed it generally using direct fire RPGs or, or suicide car bombs.
27:25Um, so that's, uh, that was.
27:28So you were in the line of fire for an extended period of time.
27:30I mean, I was a machine gunner.
27:32So, yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I usually say I saw more combat than most, less than some.
27:40So.
27:41There are currently 20 members of the Senate who are veterans.
27:45What do you think you all could be doing if you, assuming you get elected and you, you darn well might, what should you be pushing for in terms of legislation for soldiers and veterans?
27:56Well, I think the number one thing we have to do is claw war powers back from the executive branch.
28:01I mean, this is something that is.
28:03This has been going on for decades.
28:05Decades.
28:05You know, and, you know, as, as ridiculous as what's happening in Venezuela is right now, we have to remind ourselves that this is the outcome of Congress abdicating its role in war making.
28:19We have handed off more and more power to the executive branch over decades.
28:25And now we're at a point where they're just dropping bombs on people's boats and that shouldn't even be an option, but it is because we've let it become one.
28:34So, I mean, I'm very much, I'm a firm believer that we need to be passing legislation that is going to make clear that congressional input is necessary for military action.
28:47We, we cannot continue to go down this road.
28:49And also, I mean, it's a constitutional duty.
28:52The Constitution lays out clearly who is supposed to be in charge of war powers.
28:57And it is the bodies that represent the American people most directly, which is Congress.
29:02We have a fair number of senators and Congress people that come on this show.
29:06And I invariably ask them about what, if this job is so awful and they all complain about it, they, they're one of many.
29:15They can't get anything done.
29:16There's no party discipline.
29:18The list is very long.
29:20Their list of frustrations is endless.
29:22And yet no one seems to want to give it up.
29:26Very, very few.
29:27Very, very few.
29:28And in the Republican Party, you know, if you, if you look at it and the MAGA movement and how it has pushed people into being something they might not have been 10 years ago, they're willing to give up some chunk of their soul.
29:44So what makes you believe you can come to Washington, put on a suit and a tie, if that's what you choose to do?
29:51I will.
29:52Unless you, you're not going to go the Fetterman route.
29:54Well, I mean, I, I want, I would like to be a senator that accomplishes things.
29:58And to do that, you have to be on the floor at some point.
30:02Fair enough.
30:03But what thinks, what makes you think that you as one of a hundred people and as a junior senator will be able to get much done?
30:11Because I think we are coming into a different era in American politics.
30:17I think we are entering an era of, I think we've already entered actually an era of American politics that in many ways is going to look a lot more like that of the late 19th and early 20th century than the last 50 years.
30:30We're entering into an era of a politics of power, an understanding of what power actually is.
30:39It's not merely knowing the rule book.
30:43It's about understanding how to organize people and how to utilize a relationship between activists and organization on the ground and the more structural levers of power.
30:57Where does Trump and Trumpism fit into your view of these eras of American politics?
31:02Is this a post-Trump era or did Trump in his own way exploit that?
31:06No, I think Trump exploited it.
31:07And the reason for it is much like the end of the Gilded Age, there is an immense amount of working class angst in this country.
31:17And for good reason.
31:18You know, this is something that I find very telling.
31:21I go around the state of Maine.
31:23I talk to...
31:23What are people talking about to you?
31:25Independents, Republicans, Democrats, if you ask any of them, do you think you live in a political or economic system that benefits you?
31:34Nobody says yes.
31:35What would they have said 20 years ago?
31:37I think 20 years ago, they probably would have said yes.
31:39Most of them might have said yes.
31:41What changed?
31:42What changed is the fact that life got harder down here.
31:46And we're also witnessing the ultra-wealthy and corporate interests consolidate wealth and power in ways that we can hardly comprehend.
31:56I mean, everybody understands that everything is owned by five companies now, right?
32:03People get...
32:03People know that.
32:04Go around, ask the average person.
32:06They know.
32:07People understand that the reason that their healthcare is collapsing here in rural Maine is because of corporate greed.
32:15But people are getting denied because an AI program gets run and tells them a life-saving procedure isn't covered.
32:22Meanwhile, the people that run those systems go home with millions of dollars.
32:28What changed is that we can see it.
32:31What changed is that us down here in the real world, we're not idiots.
32:36We're not...
32:37The wool has not been pulled over our eyes.
32:40And we're angry about it.
32:42And what Trump did is Trump came along and he told people that what they knew was true was true.
32:48Which is that they are being robbed.
32:51That the system is not representing them.
32:54He's giving them all the wrong answers.
32:55He's laying the blame at the feet of all the wrong people.
32:58We understand.
32:59You know, those of us who don't...
33:01Like, I don't agree with anything Donald Trump does except for maybe a little bit of nationalizing of some companies.
33:07I mean, if public money gets invested into a company, public ownership should come with it.
33:12Seems fair.
33:13But, besides that, I don't agree with very much.
33:17However, I do understand why people voted for him.
33:21Like, my neighbors voted for him.
33:22And I get it.
33:23It's because they're pissed.
33:25Because they feel like this whole thing does not represent them.
33:30Have they stayed with him?
33:31And it doesn't.
33:32It's cracking.
33:33Like, the rising costs are just impossible to ignore.
33:38There's going to be an element of the base that's never going to leave them.
33:40But I think there are a lot of working people right now.
33:43They voted for change.
33:45He was a change candidate.
33:47Change did not come.
33:49Not in the way they wanted.
33:50I mean, we are watching our healthcare system in rural Maine collapse at the moment.
33:56Hospitals are closing as we speak.
34:00Services are diminishing.
34:02People's paychecks are going less far.
34:04And the housing crisis continues to be a problem in a rural state like this, which is wild.
34:11When you look at it systemically, do you think the problem is distorted capitalism somehow?
34:18Or is it natural to capitalism?
34:20And do you consider yourself a democratic socialist like Momdani or Bernie Sanders?
34:25I don't consider myself a democratic socialist.
34:29I do say that I certainly have a critique of capitalism.
34:33But would it be possible to have a viable political career in the state of Maine if you did call yourself a democratic socialist?
34:40Well, probably.
34:41It would.
34:41But it's not my politics.
34:45What I would say is that we need to engage with our economic system in a way that does not allow the worst version of it to run rampant.
34:55Which is essentially where we are right now, whether it's through taxation, whether it's through regulatory structures, whether it's through anti-monopoly law, which we already have on the books.
35:07We just choose not to enforce.
35:09These are mechanisms that we need to be utilizing to make our system not be one that is purely built on the exploitation of working people, which is what we have right now.
35:21Tell me about your own life.
35:22You say you and your wife have an income of $60,000.
35:25Yeah, roughly in the aggregate.
35:29What's your experience of, not to put too fine a point on it, what's your experience of being screwed by the system in recent years?
35:37I mean, when I got out of the service, I was going to college on the GI Bill.
35:43And I was dying.
35:45Where'd you go?
35:45I went to George Washington, down in D.C.
35:48And I, there was a moment where I, at the time, I still wanted to go work for, I wanted to go work for an intelligence service or maybe federal law enforcement.
35:59That was my kind of plan.
36:00Although my, because of my combat service, I was, I became quite cynical and jaded and began to not want to do that anymore.
36:08So I was in school and then living in Washington, D.C., I just became close enough to the power.
36:13I saw, I met people, I had interactions, and I was like, you're the ones I fought a war for?
36:20You guys?
36:21What pissed you off?
36:22Oh, I mean, the fact that, like, these people didn't seem to care about the human cost.
36:27To them, this was all political stuff.
36:30They were just making decisions based upon, like, well, this might be good for us next election or something like that.
36:36And I'm like, people are dying.
36:38We're killing people.
36:39I mean, this is not like, the toll is not, it's not theoretical.
36:46The human cost is real.
36:49And yet, in Washington, nobody seems to think like that.
36:53Well, there's some, but, like, on the whole, it really does seem that, like, all of this has just become so academic.
37:01And when you got back to Maine and started building your life there, what was your experience as a veteran?
37:07Oh, no, and so this is where, this is why my politics are the way that they are.
37:12The reason my life is the way that it is is because I am lucky enough to be a disabled combat veteran.
37:18I get health care.
37:20I don't think about it.
37:21I don't deal with insurance companies.
37:24I don't deal with co-pays or premiums.
37:26When I need help, when I just, when something feels a little funny, I go to the doctor and I do not think about the cost.
37:32It is provided to me by the VA.
37:35And if it wasn't for that support, I would not have been able to build the life I lived.
37:41But because I didn't have to go get a job that was going to provide me with health insurance that I then, so I could get treated for things,
37:49it gave me an immense amount of freedom.
37:52It gave me the freedom to take some time and think about what kind of life do I actually want to live.
37:59And I found that I wanted to work on the ocean.
38:01And then I got to put the time into working on the sea.
38:04I became a diver, I became an oyster farmer, I got to learn the skills, how to fix outboard engines, how to do fiberglass work, how to dive in the cold and murky waters of the Gulf of Maine.
38:18And technical skills, real things that take a lot of time and commitment, quite frankly, to mastering.
38:27I got to do that because the VA gave me healthcare.
38:31And I look around at a community that I'm from, where I was born and raised, full of extremely hardworking, creative people who don't get to start those businesses.
38:44Who don't get to figure out how they want to live, who don't get this kind of freedom to live a life that fulfills them, that brings them dignity.
38:55Instead, they are stuck just scraping by, trying to make it, trying to afford rent.
39:03And in your area, what does scraping by look like?
39:06I have a friend of mine.
39:08She works three jobs.
39:10Her rent is 60% of her monthly income.
39:14And her rent just went up because rent everywhere is going up.
39:18But the reason she told me is because she's thinking about moving.
39:22The problem is she doesn't know where to move to.
39:24Yeah, where would you go to?
39:25Exactly.
39:26I mean, this is like, this is Eastern Maine.
39:29I mean, this is a, we're a poor community.
39:32There are already not a lot of options.
39:35And the fact that people here are struggling and can't make it, like, where does somebody with that kind of income go?
39:42Where, where, where else in the state or the country is she going to go?
39:48And more importantly, why should she have to go anywhere?
39:51This is where she's from.
39:52This is her home.
39:53And I just, I refuse to believe that I've watched people in my community watch their material conditions deteriorate at the exact same time that we watched Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk exist.
40:05I refuse to believe that these two things are not connected.
40:08I'm sorry.
40:08Like, I just can't, I fundamentally cannot believe that I'm watching my community suffer and become harder and harder to live in for working people while we watch the richest people in the history of people exist.
40:22Those two things are not disconnected.
40:25Graham Platner, thank you so much.
40:27Thank you, David.
40:28I really appreciate it.
40:29Now, are you the kind of oyster guy who is so sick of oysters you can't stand the sight of them or do you eat them all the time?
40:34No, I eat them all the time.
40:35Straight up?
40:36Straight up.
40:36Okay, no cocktail sauce bullshit.
40:40Cocktail sauce is heresy.
40:42I agree.
40:43I will allow, allow occasionally maybe a spritz of lemon or some mignonette.
40:49Mignonette can be quite nice.
40:50Gotcha.
40:50Okay.
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