Abdul El-Sayed’s Argument for America—and Against His Own Party
Abdul El-Sayed, the front-runner in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, is sometimes lumped together with other rising stars on the left. He does refer to the Democratic Party’s “brand” as “bullshit” and has taken clear left-leaning positions on health care, Israel, and much else. But, at the same time, he is a self-described capitalist. He is also a former public-health official and a Rhodes Scholar. As he told me when we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour, his influences include both Bernie Sanders, a socialist, and Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat. He refers to Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide, but unlike, say, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is almost certainly going to win a congressional seat in New York, he denounces the October 7th massacre—and certainly would not have attended, as Chavalier did, a pro-Hamas rally on October 8th, or ever.
El-Sayed is forty-one and the son of Egyptian immigrants. If elected, he would be the first Muslim ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. His opponent in the August 4th primary, Haley Stevens, represents the Party establishment: she has won endorsements from Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. She is a former Obama Administration official who worked on the rescue of the car industry, which is an especially appealing credential in Michigan. Stevens and groups supporting her have spent sixty million dollars on ads—half of that sum has come from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. At this point, polls suggest that El-Sayed is leading Stevens in the Democratic Party race, but in a general election he is trailing the Republican Mike Rogers by ten points, while Stevens is running even.
El-Sayed, who is both fluid and charming, also shows flashes of bravado and hauteur, particularly directed against his opponents. It was perhaps not a good idea, considering his Oxford and Ivy League bona fides, to say that Stevens could not “string together two coherent sentences.” According to Politico, El-Sayed recently said on a call with donors, referring to Senator John Fetterman, “You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.” He is strong with younger voters; he is trailing with Black voters. He would ban ICE, withhold funding for arms for Israel, push for Medicare for All, and “get money out of politics.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to start by going back to a formative moment, in 2007, when you were the commencement speaker for your class graduation at the University of Michigan. Bill Clinton addressed the class that day. He approached you afterward and told you that you were not only a terrific speaker but that you should consider a career in politics.
I’ll be honest with you—I literally laughed in his face. I mean, my name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. I got three names. Two of them, nobody knows how to pronounce. The first one is eleven letters long. To learn how to say it, you’ve got to realize that you got parts of your throat you didn’t know you had. People like me didn’t get to run for office. And that was 2007. So the first thing he asked me is, Why are you going to medical school? Which, when you’re a graduating senior who was the top student in your class, people don’t usually ask you that question, right? “Why are you doing that?”
In an accusatory way.
As if to sneer at your life choices. I was, like, Wait, what? I’m, like, Don’t you understand I’m brown and Muslim? It’s what we do. I was just grateful for the implicit compliment, but I was, like, I don’t get to run for office. And he thought about it for a minute, then he kind of chuckled and walked away.
Were you a Bill Clinton fan at that time?
I had really appreciated a lot of the global-health work that he had done. And obviously he was the President of my childhood. I was twenty-two years old in 2007. I had not seen Barack Obama. I mean, I watched him give the 2004 D.N.C. floor speech, but I hadn’t seen him on the national stage. That was still an untested hypothesis. And, also, as much as I enjoyed politics, I never saw myself as a participant. I wanted to be a doctor’s doctor. I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. I thought I wanted to take care of kids with spinal malformations, working in underserved places, and probably doing research in the area.
So you didn’t feel yourself to be a person of the left then? You weren’t critiquing Clinton—and eventually even Obama—as “neoliberal,” as the critique often goes from the left. You were looking at politics as something that you were interested in, only in a kind of more narrow way. Is that what you’re telling me?
I was, but not in the sense that there was anything I could do about it. I was more likely to be the kid you saw in the stacks at 11 P.M. than the kid you saw at the protest. We did some protesting when I was in college, but for me it was always, like: The way I want to change the world is as a doctor, and by getting health care to people who don’t have it. And, in some respects, in so many ways as a government official, and now running for office, a lot of folks want to paint me as, Oh, he wants to burn down the systems. No, I don’t. I want to bring my screwdriver and systematically deconstruct the parts of the system that are malforming and working for the wrong people. And I want to take the parts that have been misused there, and I want to rebuild that whole system so that it works for the people it needs to work for. I’m not a “burn it down” kind of personality. I’m a lot more of a: study it, understand how it works, think about how you could rebuild it—and then rebuild it.
Now, are you getting advice telling you that you need to say that, too? Because some people, I think it’s fair to say, in the press that I’ve read, Abdul, do see you as a “burn it down” kind of guy. And, running in the state of Michigan, maybe that’s not of universal appeal.
I’ll tell you this, David. The best single way to caricature me, as someone who has qualms with the system, is to try to flatten my personality into what they say they want me to be. And there are parts of me that say, Look, when I come with my tool kit to try and deconstruct it, and you want to stop me from doing it and you get in my way, we’re going to have words. I’m not afraid of a fight. But I also am not the kind of person who’s just coming to destroy anything. I’m coming to build things that people need and deserve.
Obviously the narrative is what it is. When you get sixty million dollars spent against you, they’re going to “burn it to the ground.” I mean, they’ve tried to construct all kinds of narratives about me—as a function of my personality, as a function of my background, and as a set of tropes that are easily told about somebody like me. But the thing I have learned, after having run for office twice now, is that there’s going to be a narrative built around you. And the best thing that you can do is just to show up and be who you are.
You mentioned the Obama ascension, the Obama [convention] speech in 2004, and then his Presidency from 2008 onward. How do you look at that Presidency? What was constructive about it, and what’s your critique of it?
I don’t get to do what I’m doing without President Obama doing what he did. The parallels are kind of uncanny. And I remember watching that 2004 speech and just being, like, I didn’t know politics could look like that or sound like that. His dad emigrated from Africa. My dad emigrated from a different part of Africa. He had mixed parents. I was raised by my dad and my stepmom, Jackie, who’s a Daughter of the American Revolution. I mean, he had a funny name; I’ve got a funny name. The one place it doesn’t work is he’s tall and skinny, and I’m pretty short and thick. But I don’t get to do what I do without him.
At the same time, when you love somebody like that, you’re going to look at them and say, Could we do more? It’s kind of like the way you think about your parents. You know what I mean? You love and revere your parents, and you’re grateful for all they did to help you. And, look, my dad was a child of an illiterate homemaker who was the smartest person I ever met in my life, who lost two of her infant children. And his father, who had an eighth-grade education, sold vegetables in a fish market. My dad studied my life into existence. I’m so grateful for him. And, at the same time, anybody who watches their parents will always look and say, Hey, if I don’t build off of what I saw, then what am I even doing here? I kind of think about President Obama the same way.
I was in medical school during the Affordable Care Act fights. And the big frustration I had is, like, why are we not going all the way? Why are we accommodating the private-health-insurance industry? And that, to me, was a righteous kind of frustration. And, at the same time, I have had my career in the world of the A.C.A., and I can’t imagine just how much worse it would be had we not gotten that. So you can both say the A.C.A. was incredible, and, as the President said, this was a starter home. I think it’s about damn time we move out of the starter home. We’ve outgrown it.
I spent some time with Obama, in writing about him, and I had a very interesting experience with him once. I was asking him about race—we were in the Oval Office talking about that. And he was very hesitant to answer the questions I was asking him. I even asked him about Malcolm X. And it’s not that he got up and ran out of the room, but—he’s a gifted politician, and he knows how to not answer something while answering it. And then he left the Oval Office, was three-quarters of the way down the hall, and then came all the way back and said to me, “You know, no matter what I say about these things, it has an incredibly volcanic effect on the public, as President. No matter what.” Temperamentally, you can see he’s a very deliberative, careful guy. What about that do you admire, and what about that do you depart from?
I ran for governor in 2018. I was thirty-three; I’d never run for office in my life. And I learned what it was like to be in the public eye to that level. And it is a very difficult thing, because you’re not necessarily offered your full humanity, because you’re constantly speaking in the context of a set of narrative efforts to try to frame what you say against you. You can say three sentences, but they’ll pick one sentence out of context to frame you in the narrative that they choose to frame you in.
Can you give me an example?
If I speak at all about righteous anger, then I’m an Arab guy speaking about anger. If I criticize my male Republican opponent and also criticize my female Democratic opponent, then the only thing that is talked about is my criticism of my female Democratic opponent, specifically around her gender. And it’s just the nature of what this system is, and how our politics are transacted in sound bites. So I empathize entirely. And I’ll tell you, this time around, I do think that we’re operating in a very different moment than he was operating in, because of the ubiquity of social media. So I can move a lot more of myself, and the full dynamism of myself, to tell my whole story. This time, when I decided to run, there was still always this question of, like: How mad on behalf of other people can I be?
I’m pretty damn pissed off on behalf of other people. I went to medical school because I wanted to be a doctor only to realize that our health-care system was actively—actively!—pushing out the people I wanted to take care of. And I’ll be honest with you: Very few people say they got radicalized in med school. But when I watched our health-care system, on the ninth floor of the extremely prestigious hospital that I was training in, we had people playing pianos for foreign dignitaries coming to get heart procedures. Then, in the basement, watching indigent New Yorkers get, in effect, pushed out of the health-care system before they got the care they needed—it really changed the way I thought about our system. And that’s the side of things that I’ve had to struggle with. How righteously mad can I be on behalf of people who’ve had a system that is architected against them in ways that actively lie to them? That shit pisses me off!
Is there, in the global picture of things, a health-care system that you look at that you’d like to transplant into the United States?
There are parts of different health-care systems I’d like to. And here’s the thing about it: Look, my life is an accident of history. I know what my life would have been, but for the accident that I was born in America. And, my grandmother, when I’d go to Egypt, she would do everything that she could to hammer that in. To be, like, The only thing you’ve got over any of your cousins, who are just as smart, just as anything as you, is that you get to go back to America at the end of the summer.
And the thing about America is that we don’t do things like other people. We do them better. I mean, I love that about our country. And, it’s funny, when we talk about health care, there’s always this sense of, like, Well, whose health-care system do you want then? I’m, like, I don’t know. I want an American health-care system that’s just better! I think we could do a single-payer system better than any country in the world. Do you know why? We already spend nineteen per cent of our whole G.D.P. on health care.
I’m just, like: Why do we ever limit ourselves on anything? We are the richest, most powerful, most innovative country in the history of the world. And you want to tell me that the best we can do is charge people so much effing money that we owe two hundred and twenty-five billion dollars of medical debt as a country? That’s the best we can do? Come on, y’all, this is America! I’ve seen what America can do for people. I also see too often what America does not do for too many of her kids. And that’s why I’m doing this.
We’re right now looking at a health-care system that’s not only characterized by all the faults that you’re describing but also the specifics of having R.F.K., Jr., and the MAHA movement as the most prominent voices in the health sphere. How do we go about rebuilding trust in public health?
Let me tell you a story, David, because I think it helps to explain this. During the height of the pandemic, I was talking to a group—outdoors, fully masked, et cetera—about taking the vaccine. And I’m never going to forget this gentleman. I had been the health commissioner for the city of Detroit, talking about getting this vaccine, how critical it was. He said, “Look, man, I know you. I’ve seen you”—I was on CNN at the time—“I trust you. I’m going to get my vaccine, but it’s just weird to me that you all are out here, trying to get me to take a vaccine that didn’t exist a year ago, for a disease that didn’t exist a year ago, when I can’t afford my insulin, which is a medication that’s existed for, like, a hundred years, and is for a disease I have had my whole life. When are you all going to show up to make sure I get to take my insulin?” And I was, like, Damn—you’re right.
I’m not quite clear what you’re saying. You’re saying, Abdul, that the mistrust was such that it opened the door to conspiracy thinking?
Exactly. It’s that, once you don’t trust the industry, because it’s so expensive, and they’re so clearly trying to pick your pocket—at that point, it’s not that hard for somebody like an R.F.K., Jr., to come in here and then say, “Well, you don’t even need the things that they make anyway. Here are these alternatives that they’re keeping you from. They don’t want you to know!” And I think, to build trust again, we have to address the greed part in the system. Because, once people feel like they can get access to the things that science has delivered, I think it becomes a lot easier, then, to have an honest conversation about: What is the best way to prevent measles? What is the best way to protect ourselves from cyclosporiasis? But we live in a moment right now, in Michigan, which is crazy to me, where we’re dodging lettuce.
And we just had the worst air quality of our history, for the second summer in a row. I mean, air quality and lettuce were the two things that I tried to dodge in my summers in Egypt. And so I think we’re at a moment right now where we’re seeing the end outcome of disinvesting in public health. And I think we have an opportunity—if we’re serious about taking on the corporations that have been monetizing our health-care system and killing trust—to actually be able to rebuild trust again.
Now, a freshman senator—they can vote on everything, but in order to make real headway, they usually come down to one issue. Would you say that health care is going to be yours?
Health care and the thing that’s keeping us from having health care, which is money in politics.
Tell me what your first steps are.
So, God willing, we take the majority. We’re in the Senate. I’ve got two jobs from that point on. And I also want to remember that politics is path-dependent. There’s a story that’s constantly being told. And the fact that you and I are having this conversation is a function of the fact that this is not just any Senate race. AIPAC and all the powers that be have effed around, and made this the highest-stakes Senate race, probably this cycle and for a long time. And when you spend sixty million dollars to beat one person and they beat you, you just turned that person into David. You gave me a gigantic platform. Thank you so much, AIPAC donors. I’m so grateful for you. And that means that I have an opportunity here to use that platform to move a set of conversations.
I’ve got two jobs when I get to the U.S. Senate. No. 1, throw as much sand in the gears of the Trump Administration as possible. If I get a seat on that HELP committee [the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions], which I hope I will, then it’s the opportunity to haul up a guy like R.F.K., Jr., and start asking and start connecting dots to how much money he’s actually made on the grift, and people around him have made on the grift. It’s hauling up Big Pharma and talking about how much money they’ve made on their grift.
You’re accusing R.F.K. of making money on the grift. What do you mean?
That reporting is out there, around his many connections to folks who have profiteered off of an anti-vaccine movement. And then, for Big Pharma—I mean, this is an obvious grift. They just are able to buy off politicians on both sides of the aisle to make sure that they can continue to have very little pushback when they want to raise prescription-drug prices. So I want to call that out, because they’re connected.
And then the other thing I’ve got to do in those first two years is use the incredible platform that AIPAC and all these mega-donors are giving me, to move the conversation about who we are and who we want to be, to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for All, and lay the groundwork, through the state of Michigan, for a President who is going to act on Day One to do these things.
Abdul, your name has been connected quite often with the kind of left-leaning energy in the Party—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani. And yet you have not joined the Democratic Socialists—the D.S.A. Why not?
Too much of a scientist, I guess. I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work.
Abdul, forgive me. I’m sure people in Michigan know the answer to this—but the presumptive Republican candidate in the race, Mike Rogers, recently told supporters, in a private call, that if you win the nomination, he is “in good shape.”
Man hasn’t been in good shape since the nineties, but, yeah.
Well, this was reported by CNN, I think. What’s your reaction to that? Why do you think he says it, and why do you think he might be wrong?
I think he says it because all of his base understands the risk of actually having to go up against somebody who’s willing to take the fight to them. And here’s why he’s wrong: In the nineties, you asked for tens of millions of dollars from your benefactors. Then you put thirty-second ads on TV, and then you won because you were able to get more money and spend more on TV. What I’m proving is that you can win a race without that. I mean, we’re being outspent, what, twelve to one, right now? AIPAC, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Blue Cross Blue Shield, [the Detroit-based energy company] D.T.E., our local utility—all of them bearing down. They’re so mad that we’re still up. And we’re going to win. And I think what we’re showing is that if you can move your message, and it is consistent and authentic to who you are, people see past the thirty-second ads on TV—because, guess what? Nobody likes the commercial part of a TV show. Nobody’s ever, like, Man, I can’t wait to watch the commercials.
So all that is to say that he’s just got an old-fashioned view of politics. And this is why, in fact, it’s that old-fashioned view of politics, which is itself so hypocritical and damning. It’s the idea that you got to cozy up to the people with all the money who can then buy you all the ads that help you win. And it’s the fact that he’s cozying up to all the money, which, in effect, I’m going to wrap around him over and over and over again. This is a guy who took six figures from the pharmaceutical industry; voted, I don’t know how many times, to raise prescription-drug prices; helped to architect the opioid epidemic! And then made fourteen million dollars after his time [in Congress] from Florida, where he moved into a McMansion. I mean, the guy would rather be golfing in Florida. And even there, he’s, like, the beta character in the show. He’s the one who laughs extra loud. He’s just confused about who he is. He wants to be ultra-MAGA, but he was very against Donald Trump, which is why his own base is kind of circumspect about him. I’m, like, Bro, you can’t serve three masters. The people, Donald Trump, and then your golf buddies: which one are you going to actually serve? I’m going to force him into conniptions, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Abdul, for the sake of clarity, because we get this kind of information in bits and pieces in the way of the information universe here—I totally understand your outrage about the Gaza war. I totally understand your critique of October 7th. It’s not like you endorsed October 7th, as unfortunately some people have. But it seems that you get very prickly when you’re asked the question: Does Israel have a right to exist? You come from a country that, in the late seventies, made its accommodation, a kind of rough peace, between Egypt and Israel, under Anwar Sadat, as did Jordan, eventually. And God knows there are still problems in the region between and among those countries. But what is your hope for a resolution in the Middle East? Is it two states? Is it one state? What underlies your sense of the situation there?
Well, David, since you’re giving me some time for nuance—I deeply appreciate it—allow me some nuance.
Sure.
No. 1, I think we often frame the conversation around what’s happening there rather than what’s happening here. What’s happening here is that there are communities where the median income is fourteen thousand dollars a year. And those kids go without good schools and those kids go without functional infrastructure.
I think the foundational question to me is: What do we owe those kids around their tax dollars? No. 1. No. 2, I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike. And I believe that it is not my job as an American policymaker to decide what the ultimate peace should be. But it is my job to make sure that our resources are stewarded correctly for the people I’m responsible for: those kids going to those broken schools.
I also believe that it is my job to do that doubly when we exist in a kind of hypocrisy around how we’ve thought about that issue for a very long time. The very same people who tell you you have to believe in a two-state solution are constantly aiding, arming, and abetting an Israeli government that has been dead set on foreclosing on the possibility of a Palestinian state since we’ve been funding them. So forgive me if I’m not going to play the cosplay thing, where I allow the money that should be spent taking care of our kids to be sent to a military that has done a genocide—at baseline, does apartheid, and is now attempting the annexation of southern Lebanon—to foreclose on the possibility of Palestinian self-determination.
So here’s what I believe. I believe we have a responsibility to uphold international law. I believe we have a responsibility to treat every single state the same way, around international law. I believe in a process that offers a free Palestinian people the equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination that a free Jewish Israeli people ought to have. And then I will support whatever the outcome is that a free Palestinian people and a free Jewish Israeli people decide is the right outcome. If that’s two states, great, I’m for it. If it’s one state, I’m for that. If it’s this “land for all” model, or twenty-three states, or whatever it is that they decide. But I am not O.K. saying that, as a senator from Michigan, I’m going to take tax dollars from Michigan, send them to a foreign government that does heinous things in contraposition to the ideals that I support, and then sit here and be, like, Yes, but I’m for a two-state solution—when I know that the current status quo is never ever going to allow that to happen.
You campaigned with Hasan Piker. And I don’t think anybody would say that you have to be in complete accord with anybody that either supports you or votes for you or campaigns for you—but that was a prominent thing. It was in the national press. And he has said things like he “doesn’t have an issue with Hezbollah.” That was a quote. He said that Mao Zedong was a great leader. How much do you depart from Hasan Piker? Where do you accept his support, and where do you get down in the trenches with him and argue?
I mean, he and I are not going to agree on everything. And we’ve debated this. He has some positions—
Do you find those statements repellent?
Yeah, I disagree with him. But here’s the thing, right? On the same day that I campaigned with Hasan, I went on “Fox & Friends.” I find a lot of the things that the people on “Fox & Friends” say repellent. The fact that they platform Donald Trump. The fact that Donald Trump himself had dinner with Nick Fuentes—
Wait. I don’t think anybody has any illusions that your next job is going to be as a cast member on Fox.
Fox is basically W.W.E., verbally, for old folk. And, if I’m the face, you could imagine I just go on there and just get the steel chair in my head every day. Not going to be my next job—because I’ll be in the U.S. Senate.
The point that I’m making here is that I think there is this failure that we have in understanding what democracy is for in the first place. Democracy is the technology by which we solve our differences peaceably. And, in going and talking to different groups of people, what I’m trying to do is create a pathway for people into the democratic process by offering them a perspective that they might agree with. And I think there’s this platform politics that we’ve had since the twenty-twenties. And I thought we rejected it—because, let’s not forget, Hasan was invited to stream from the D.N.C. by Vice-President [Kamala] Harris in 2024. Let’s not forget that.
But, in campaigning with him, everybody was, like, Well, how could you possibly? And I was, like, Did we not learn our lesson that we need to go talk to people who have large audiences, who have felt locked out of the political process for a very long time? And even though he and I might have differences—there are things I disagree with him on—he has an audience of nearly three million people who watch him regularly. And I really want to show that audience that there is a way forward, where you can stand up for a politics that’s more about guaranteeing you health care than sending bombs to drop on other people, that is willing to stand forthrightly against genocide wherever you see it. And though he and I might disagree on China or cars, and certainly he said some things that I find deeply distasteful, that does not mean that I should not go and speak to his audience and speak to him. And I think the faster Democrats recognize that, the faster we’re going to be on a pathway to actually winning elections.
One of the illusions that Trump held out is that he would bring manufacturing back to big manufacturing states. And anybody who knows anything about Michigan—and not just Detroit but across the state—knows that it has suffered terribly from deindustrialization over time. Is he selling snake oil there? Is that something to bring back? Is that a desirable thing? How do jobs come back to a Midwestern state like Michigan?
I think it is possible. I think it is not possible the way he’s done it. The through line for Donald Trump is, Donald Trump will do whatever gives him attention and adoration in the moment. That’s kind of what he is. And he wants money, which gives him attention and adoration. That’s the Donald Trump trick. He is a pathological narcissist who is, like, the endgame of narcissism—and he’s very, very charming. He’s very, very good at telling you what you want to hear. When he came in, he was not a part of the political system, and people give him a lot of credit for that. Ask yourself: How much must people hate the political system if they were willing to give their vote to a narcissistic, megalomaniac billionaire? People gave him the benefit of the doubt because they hated the system worse.
So, I think you can actually build manufacturing jobs again, but not this way. If you were to do it, here’s how you do it. No. 1, you would need to invest massively in research and development for high-manufacturing-potential industries. To me, that is, yes, auto, but it’s auto in the place that auto is going—both maintaining our lead when it comes to internal-combustion engines, but also the future of E.V.s, which have overtaken markets all over the rest of the world. It’s also green technology and the ability to create renewable energy quickly. And then what you would do is invest in early-stage startups and legacy corporations in ways that were targeted on jobs and jobs and jobs, not targeted on stock buybacks and stock performance. And then you would create very specific tariffs that were extremely transparent, specifically around protecting those growing industries. And then you would subsidize those industries in a big way. If we want to actually win the future of auto, we need to continue to be the best at building internal-combustion engines.
I would also love to see us subsidize E.V. manufacturing so that you can get a twenty-five-thousand-dollar, three-hundred-mile-range car, anywhere and everywhere. And we have the charging-station infrastructure to do it. If we were willing to do that for ten years—not these seventy-five-hundred-dollar tax credits for cars that only rich people can afford. I’m talking about a twenty-five-thousand-dollar, three-hundred-mile range E.V. That’s the metric. And we’ll get it to twenty-five thousand dollars. If we did that, we would immediately become the world’s leader in E.V.s. Why? Because we have the best manufacturing technology, best manufacturing talent, and best engineering talent in the world. We’re just not investing in them. And, too often, the Big Three have been more interested in the quarterly bottom line and stock buybacks than they have been in the next ten years of their industry, which is why we see this schizophrenic approach to whether or not we are going to, or are not going to, make E.V.s.
How do you feel about artificial intelligence and its potential as an economic driver and its effect on the job market?
I’m worried as hell. And I’m worried as hell because this is the first technology that young people are rejecting outright. I see the risk on three different fronts. The first one is in the built environment. You’ve got this data-center explosion that is being done in ways that are not protecting people from the real risks. The second is the existential risk of A.I. itself. I mean, we just had, last week, an OpenAI model that slipped its human-design sandbox and went and did a cyberattack on a website. And then the third is the way that A.I. can foundationally change the social contract. And I think we need leadership and we need leadership now. And here’s the danger: there are two warring A.I. super PACs out there—each a nine-figure super PAC—and they’re trying to make it ungovernable. So, if we don’t have leaders who both understand the tech and are not bought off by the tech, I’m worried about where we go.
Well, in the medical field—and I speak to you as somebody of real knowledge—A.I. is potentially going to be an incredible boon, both to medical research and medical practice.
It could. And, look, I think that’s great. The problem right now is that that’s not the incentive that they’re driving. They keep telling us this, but then I keep hearing headlines about how many jobs are lost. And here’s the other side of it: toward what incentive? The technology, David—I’m not against the technology. I think the technology’s incredible. I’m against the incentives driving the technology. And I think we need to rethink those incentives.
Now, many Democrats would like to distance themselves from identity politics, trans rights, saying that so-called kitchen-table issues are the prime issues, and that any emphasis on identity drives people away. You’ve heard this a lot from Rahm Emanuel; you’ve heard it from Gavin Newsom. How do you respond to that impulse?
The idea that we can assent to the taking away of anybody’s rights, and think that somehow the government won’t come for all of our rights, is itself the problem. And, look, I don’t need people to understand how they use their rights. I just need people to agree that the government shouldn’t be able to take any of our rights. I put my face on the ground thirty-four times a day, David. Most people don’t understand why I do it. I don’t need them to understand. I just want to have the right to do it. And when people decide that they want to take away my right to do that, I’ve got a problem.
Now, I hope that everybody’s going to show up and say, No, no, no. You can’t stop that person or that community from reflecting and praying as they choose. Similarly, when it comes to trans rights, this is the right to get the health care that you need. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s the right to be who you are. It’s the right not to be discriminated against by your government because of who you are. Because what tends to happen is they come for theirs, then they come for yours, then they come for theirs. And at some point you live in a society where rights are negotiable, and that is not the America I was born in. It’s not the America I know and love. It’s not the America I’m going to allow somebody like Donald Trump to give us.
Finally: Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Democrats take the House and maybe even take the Senate—although that’s a far more difficult proposition. How does that change the course of politics for the next two years?
It sets us on a pathway to being able to hold Donald Trump accountable, and actually reflect the rule of law, because we’ve enforced it. It sets us on a pathway toward electing a President who actually wants to govern with purpose, rather than just not be Donald Trump. People are not asking this question of, like, Where am I on a left-right spectrum? What’s the future of the Democratic Party? They’re asking, Am I going to be able to afford getting health care if I get sick? Am I going to be able to pay next month’s mortgage? What the hell—I can’t actually fill up my tank of gas. Who’s going to do something about that?
That has to be the be-all and end-all of our politics. Everything else starts from there. So we’ve got to stop compromising when it comes to the corporations who are making people’s lives harder. We’ve got to stop compromising when it comes to anybody’s rights. We’ve got to stop compromising on the idea that ICE is bad and immigration is good. These are not hard arguments to make in America. Have some courage and go make them. ♦