Chris Murphy: Travel Ban ‘Distracts’ from Big Beautiful ‘Stealing’ from the American Public

PSAKI: “Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you — when we started the show, I mentioned this. Trump signed a new travel ban targeted at 12 different countries. The ban is going to go into effect on Monday. It’s a much bigger travel ban than what Trump issued during his first term. I mentioned it feels to me — it’s important for people to understand what it is. No doubt people will be impacted, of course, in these countries, but also an effort to distract from what’s happening with this bill and Elon Musk and a lot of the disarray that’s happening within the party and, frankly, within the White House. But what do you make of it?”
MURPHY: “Okay. It’s so important we talk about this, because this is the whole game, is that the actual agenda here is to steal from us. The actual agenda is to steal from regular Americans in order to pad the pockets of the rich. So, what does this bill do? It actually costs money for 40% of the American public. You get poorer if you were in the bottom 40%, and the richest families get a tax cut of $270,000, okay? Nobody wants that. That’s super unpopular. So how do you get that done? You distract people by making them think that they’re at war with other Americans, making them think that they have something to fear from people who look different from them or speak a different language. This is what demagogues have done all throughout time, is to divide us from each other, make us feel like we need to be fighting ourselves, while on the side they’re stealing from us, either through legislation like we’re debating in the Senate today, or old-fashioned thievery, as has also been happening in this administration as well. So, yeah, understand that this is important, you know, anytime you ban people coming to the United States from other countries, it has a real impact, but it is chiefly in service of trying to get us all talking about that or talking about the Biden investigation they launched today, instead of talking about the centerpiece of this story, which is this bill to make the rich even richer at the expense of everybody else.”
PSAKI: “I could not agree with you more. We’re going to keep talking about this bill, and we’re not even going to talk about all the random things that he posts, who knows, over the next couple of hours, because that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.”