Representative Madeleine Dean discusses the rescue of a downed American crew member in Iran and reacts to the president’s request for unprecedented defense spending in his budget proposal.
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Representative Madeleine Dean is a Democrat from Pennsylvania. He sits on the Foreign Affairs and Appropriations committees of the House of Representatives. We discussed Iran and the proposed budget to finance the war there, which includes major cuts to healthcare and scientific research. I started by asking about President Trump’s profanity-laden Sunday morning Truth Social post we just heard, where he warned Iran that if it didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday, it would be, quote, “living in hell.”
MADELEINE DEAN: I don’t know why I’m still surprised by what this president is doing. I don’t know why, except that maybe it’s a sign that he can’t break us with his repeated indecencies. Of all days, on Easter Sunday, my, oh my, how devout he must be. But it also reminds me of something: that this is a deranged president with really flawed notions. Violence just creates more violence, and now he’s impatient and using terrible swear words on Easter Sunday because he got caught. I guess he just didn’t understand the risk to the Strait of Hormuz, even though everyone else did.
SCHMITZ: And let’s dig a little deeper into that. You know, at the beginning of the week, the president said, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz is the duty of the countries that obtain oil from that route. You serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. What happens if the United States withdraws from the war and Iran still controls the strait?
DEAN: It’s a global disaster. It is an economic disaster. And of course, the president should have consulted with our allies before waging this war with Netanyahu. Because you don’t talk to your friends and allies, you face a deadly war (we’ve already lost 13 service members, hundreds of others wounded, thousands of civilians dead in the Middle East, in the rubble) and then you say, it’s up to you to fix this. It is such an incompetent and dangerous way of operating. We are in a war of his choosing with no idea why he entered it. He has given six or seven explanations and obviously has no plan to abandon this war.
SCHMITZ: Let’s move on to the budget. The White House on Friday asked Congress to approve its priorities for federal spending in 2027, including about $1.5 trillion for defense. That’s a 42% increase. That amount would be the highest level of military spending in modern US history. Will you approve that money?
DEAN: I certainly won’t. The president’s budget is… well, let me get back to basics. It may seem trite, but it’s true. Budgets reflect our values. I feel like an appropriator. That’s why I want to make sure that my votes, the amendments I offer, and the legislation I helped craft reflect the values I believe my constituents want me to defend.
SCHMITZ: And this is what the president said about these cuts in a video released by the White House.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We can’t take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it at the state level. You can’t do it at the federal level. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to protect the country.
SCHMITZ: So you’re talking about daycare. He also mentioned healthcare. There are a variety of cuts proposed here by the Trump administration. What are you hearing from your constituents about what these cuts would mean for them on a day-to-day basis?
DEAN: My constituents are extremely upset. It’s Easter Sunday, if you’ll excuse me, and I recently visited both the Dilley detention camp in Texas and the ICE detention camp in Philadelphia, which is located in the federal prison in Philadelphia. When we were in Dilley, Texas, Rob (I want to tell you) we met with several families, parents who were talking about their children who were terrified and couldn’t eat or sleep. We saw medical negligence. One little girl (I think she was about two) had such a bad infection in her mouth that it was green to the eye.
What we didn’t see, I didn’t see toys. I didn’t see books. I didn’t see anything that could help these children overcome their trauma. The children cried and said: I just want to go back to school. I just want to be with my friends.
We went to what they wanted to look like as an educational unit. And this relates to this budget because of all the funds that have been invested in ICE. So they wanted to show off the classroom. Do you know what it was? It was staged. It was a Potemkin classroom, with art…
SCHMITZ: How do you know that?
DEAN: …Cubes that had… I picked up the art cubes. It was so obvious that no children had been there. I have seven grandchildren. I said, if I had established it… if my seven children were here for seven minutes, there would be evidence of it. The art cubes were new and still had stickers on them. The crayons were unopened and unused. There wasn’t a book. They had played with cardboard on a table and claimed that it was an educational unit. And I screamed, and I said to the administrator, how many teachers do you have here? One for 99 children, sometimes hundreds of children, from dozens of languages.
SCHMITZ: Representative Dean, I want to end this conversation where we began, with the war in Iran. You served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as we mentioned. Many Americans want to know where this war is headed from now on. President Trump says it will take another two or three weeks. Your rating?
DEAN: I don’t think we can know. The only thing I believe is the pattern of behavior of this reckless president, who really – I don’t say this with joy – is deranged and sick, if you hear him communicate. The only thing I’m counting on is that he gets bored of things very, very quickly. And I think you know that you’re fueling this economy with the price of gasoline, with the price of every good increasing as a result of diesel increases. So I think he will get tired and try to leave, but what a dangerous situation the world will be in as a result of what has happened there.
SCHMITZ: That’s Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. Representative Dean, thank you for your time this Easter Sunday.
DEAN: Thank you very much.
SCHMITZ: In a statement to NPR, a DHS spokesperson said, quote, “the Dilley facility is family-friendly. Children have access to teachers, classrooms and curriculum handouts for math, reading and spelling. Residents at the facility have continued access to on-site medical professionals.”
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