- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- My hope is that this is gonna be, unfortunately, it's a painful learning process, but for the community, a real learning process to be more skeptical of the kinds of claims that somebody like Donald Trump has made to the community when he's running, and then how he treats them once he's in office.

(uplifting theme music) (uplifting theme music continues) (contemplative music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the library was dedicated over a half a century ago by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now, we bring those conversations straight to you.

Julian Castro began his political career on the San Antonio City Council at the age of 26 before rising to become the city's mayor eight years later.

He remained in the position until his appointment by President Barack Obama as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 2014.

Tonight, we talk about his uniquely American story, what today's Democratic Party stands for, and what gives him hope for America's future.

Julian Castro, welcome.

Good to have you.

- Great to be here.

- Well, so you were drawn to politics at a very young age.

You got elected to the San Antonio City Council at 26.

You were mayor of San Antonio at the age of 34.

At 39, you were the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

What drew you to politics?

(Julian sighs) - You know, my mom, in a big way.

She was a hell-raiser when she was young.

When she was 23, she ran for city council in San Antonio at a time when very few women and very few Hispanics were able to get elected, and she raised my brother and me mostly as a single parent, and so we got dragged to rallies and speeches and handed out leaflets, you know, during elections, and I think she brought my brother Joaquin and me up with this idea that public service was something that could be good, and also in a time, you know, we were born in '74, growing up in the '80s during the Reagan era, when helping people was somehow seen as bad.

We very much grew up with this idea that government, if done right, could really help people to achieve their full potential in life, and that's what drew me as somebody who also felt very blessed that I'd had a lot of opportunity in life to want to try and use public service to create more opportunity for other people.

- Is that a quaint notion today?

We're living in a time when young people are very disillusioned by government.

We see mistrust among young people and our government at record levels.

So is that a thing of the past?

- I don't think so, and I think that, these days, you can sort of see it in the hunger that young people have for people in politics that speak honestly to them and that address the issues that they're really concerned about.

The cost of housing, right?

The cost of healthcare.

The cost of their education.

Yes, there's a lot of cynicism out there, and there's no question that, you know, in politics today, there are a lot of folks feeding that cynicism, but at the same time, I think, no matter the generation, there's this universal yearning for people to be transparent and honest with them, and also for their needs to be met by the people who represent them, and I still, you know, whether it's the mayoral race in New York City or, you know, other races around the country, I still see that.

- You mentioned Mamdani, who, like you, took the helm of his city at the age of 34, and since we're in the LBJ Library, Julian, and I want to quote LBJ, who said, "When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse.

I could be mayor."

(Mark chuckles) Those are tough positions, and you were very young when you led one of America's biggest cities.

What did you learn from that experience?

What did you take away from being mayor of San Antonio?

- Well, that there's a real pride that you get to have when you serve as the mayor of a community.

I mean, people have probably heard it a million times, but it's true.

When you're mayor, you know people in the community that you're serving.

It's much more up close and personal.

I used to joke that, you know, I can't count how many times I had people almost cussing me out 15 feet away from me.

There's no distance in the way that there is if you're in a State House or if you're at the Capitol or if you're in the White House, of course, and so I learned about that pride.

I also learned that, whether people were liberal or conservative, people start nodding their heads when they're listening and they hear solutions, and I saw that on the presidential campaign trail and all of those town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina.

People, you know, they may not agree with you on the solution, but that's what they want to hear.

That's what they want to hear.

People want to understand how you're gonna fix something or how you're gonna rise to a challenge.

They wanna understand how you're gonna make their life better in a very practical way, and so I think the people who succeed at the local level are often the people that have more of an ability to explain the solution and make that real for people.

- You've credited affirmative action with getting you and your brother Joaquin into Stanford University.

We see affirmative action under siege today, along with, more broadly, DEI, which is now illegal under the Trump administration, which asserts that it is unlawful, corrosive, and a pernicious identity-based spoils system.

What are the ramifications of eradicating DEI in this country?

- I think it's a mistake.

DEI, although it didn't exist as, called DEI for, you know, until relatively recently, but the idea that, in the least, to try and remedy the discrimination of the past in the United States, that there should be pipelines created of opportunity.

So if there's an entrepreneur, a woman entrepreneur or a minority entrepreneur, oftentimes it didn't have the same access to capital or opportunity coming up, that, you know, the government would do a little bit to go the extra mile and create that path.

Affirmative action was never about ensuring a result and DEI was not about ensuring a result.

It was about trying to make sure that there was the same kind of opportunity for everybody.

The consequence of doing away, I think, with initiatives that try and create greater opportunity for those who have been marginalized, who have been kept away from that opportunity, is gonna be that you're gonna see more inequality in our country.

You're gonna see, for whole groups of people, that it is even harder to start a business, to get a good education, ultimately to lead the same good quality of life, and it's gonna hurt the country.

Think about the Latino community.

The Latino community is 20% of America now.

It's 40% of Texas, 40% of California.

Already, more than a quarter of the children in our country, according to the census, are Hispanic.

That means that the destiny of the Hispanic community and the destiny of the United States are intertwined like never before.

We can only succeed as a country if the Hispanic community succeeds and vice versa, so I think it makes sense to help ensure that the community is able to have good opportunity, and every other community, and DEI and affirmative action were never about trying to keep opportunity out of the hands of certain people.

It was trying to make sure that there was a more level playing field, and in truth, it never hit the mark when you looked at the numbers, and so when this entire attempt to crush any kind of efforts to provide opportunity came along, you know, my question was, when in full was that opportunity ever offered?

- Mhm.

- If we're being truthful with ourselves, you can look at the numbers, whether it's on access to capital or it's in college degrees or it's in any number of other measures.

Communities that had been discriminated against, including Hispanics and so many others, never were provided robust opportunity to be able to get to the same places that others have been, and that's the truth about our country.

Now, some people don't want to believe that, but anybody that does the research and is honest about it I think would agree with that.

- If you look at the Latino community in 2020, it's very different.

As a voting block, it's very different than the community that we saw in 2024.

In 2020, when Joe Biden squared off against the incumbent president Donald Trump.

Joe Biden took the Latino vote by 25%.

When Donald Trump squared off against Kamala Harris in 2024, Kamala Harris only won by 3%.

How do you explain that shift, Julian?

- I think there was a lot going on there.

There was a concern about inflation in 2024, the economy.

I think that Donald Trump sold himself as one thing, and now, in office, is doing something different in terms of immigration policy.

There were a lot of people, for instance, that believed that, when Donald Trump talked about closing the borders and going after the criminals, that he only meant, you know, these serious criminals, and now we see even US citizens that are being rounded up by masked ICE agents, and we see dreamers and we see people with a green card.

There's a whole dragnet that's taking in many, many more people, and, of course, a lot of them Latino.

So, you know, Donald Trump over the years, from when he started running in 2015 until he won his election in 2024, that support that he built up in the Latino community, that was gradual.

It happened over time, but it also happened on a mountain of lies, of misrepresentations, and my hope is that this is gonna be, unfortunately, it's a painful learning process, but for the community, a real learning process to be more skeptical of the kinds of claims that somebody like Donald Trump has made to the community when he's running, and then how he treats them once he's in office.

- So let me just go through the vicissitudes that we have seen since you became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 2009 for the first African American president, Barack Obama.

A major change in our country.

You served for eight years, and then Barack Obama ceded the White House to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump serves one term.

Joe Biden comes, with whom you served also in the Obama White House, becomes our president, and then Donald Trump is back.

So we're seeing these major changes from one side to the other.

How do you explain that?

- One of the ways I think we explain 2024 and 2020 before that is that, you know, when we think about this time period that we've been in in the last decade, it's unprecedented.

- Hmm.

- The COVID pandemic was unprecedented.

The growing inequality that we've seen probably does have some precedent in our nation's history, but the growing inequality deeply has affected people and their frustration, and so I think that's part of what has created this back and forth.

One of the other things that is notable when you look at these presidential races is that, yes, the electoral vote count may have been, you know, like 332 or 303, and it wasn't 269 to 269, but all in all, they were relatively close elections in these seven or so swing states, and so in that sense, if we go back and look at the 2000 race, right?

Or look at a couple of races before then in the last 60 years, that's not all that different.

Even though the result at the end of the day is, you know, from one party to the next, it's still an American body politic that is very competitive, very, very, very close, and that makes me feel like there has, at least in that sense, been a stability to it.

- Mhm.

- You know?

- A consistency.

- A consistency in terms of a competitiveness.

- Yeah.

- I think what's gonna happen in 2028 is very likely a Democrat is gonna win the White House.

- Right.

- And with the change in party, what we've seen are these swing-backs in terms of policy and in terms of where the country is at.

So, under Biden, for instance, on immigration, people were very worked up about the open border, as they called it, although the border was not open, but an open border and about migrants that were coming, and they saw the images of people being bused to New York and Washington and Chicago, and now people are watching viral videos of masked ICE agents rounding folks up, even some American citizens, and so they're really amped up against that kind of government overreach and violation, you know, sometimes of the Fourth Amendment.

It's just going back and forth, and I think for the country, the question is how are we gonna find a more steadied and stable path forward.

- Right.

- And how are we gonna rebuild so much of what is being torn apart right now when it comes to respect of the rule of law, the infrastructure of a healthy democracy, you know, just respect for one another, and the divisions that have been stoked.

It's gonna take quite a leader post January 20th, 2029 to be able to get us on the journey to put it back together and hopefully to be able to achieve what can be a very exciting future and I think will be an exciting future for the country, given all of the technological changes and, you know, the ways that we have made progress in the country.

- So the moment can change and a candidate can rise to meet that moment.

Does that mean, in your view, that we can get back to a time of relative civility and construction and hope in our country?

- I think we can.

I hope we can.

I think it's harder now.

Social media itself- - Right.

- As many people have said, makes it a lot harder.

When you have, I mean, let's not even deal with the fact that now a real person feels more disconnected from the consequences of what they say or what they post online, because they're, you know, on their phone somewhere thousands of miles away from somebody they're aiming that at or just putting it out there.

Now you have bots that are not even real, right?

Trolls and bots and all sorts of factories of misinformation and disinformation.

As long as you have that, that in and of itself makes it qualitatively harder for us to ever come together, and so, you know, my hope is that we're gonna find a way.

Some of it will happen naturally, I think, because as we get more used to this environment, you know, as humans, we have this great capacity to start to adapt and to filter better and understand and take it in stride and with a grain of salt more.

That's happening.

That will happen, but I also think that we need to figure out ways, along with, you know, other nations, of being able to address social media and its impact more smartly.

- You are a stalwart Democrat.

What does the Democratic Party stand for today?

- I think they stand for making sure that people can afford to pay the rent and afford their healthcare, and that they can, you know, raise their kids with the confidence that that kid's gonna get a good education and that they're gonna be able to have a better life.

Democrats have always stood for making sure that there is good opportunity for everybody, and throughout my time in public service, and Joaquin, you know, Joaquin and I, as you know, are still joined at the hip, even though he's the only one in politics right now of the two of us.

What excited me about getting into it in the first place was this idea that you could create opportunity for everybody, and to me, that's what Democrats have always stood for.

Not, you know, Republicans have stood for big corporations.

They've stood for tax breaks for people who are wealthy and for corporations.

Democrats have stood for the working class and for making sure that, no matter where you start in life, you can finish where you want if you work hard for it.

- And yet, the working class, by and large, lined up behind Donald Trump in 2024.

Did the party lose its way in the 2024 election cycle?

- Well, I think the party didn't do as well with working class voters.

Democrats still did overall relatively well with working class voters, and that was particularly true underneath the presidential ballot, right?

I mean, in several of those seven swing states in 2024, you had the Democratic Senate candidate win, and so there was a success that Democrats had.

There's no question that, you know, Trump has made appealing to the working class more of a priority.

I think Republicans' problem is they failed to deliver in this term.

They're not standing up for people's healthcare, willing to let the ACA healthcare subsidies go by the wayside and jack up people's healthcare costs.

Just on issue after issue.

For the Democrats, I think what we have to do a lot better of a job on is explaining that and connecting with voters on that, and finding ways to reach people that meet them where they're at.

Trump has been very good about that.

Whether it's on these social media platforms, podcasts, the UFC, wherever it is, I mean, he's been willing to experiment and go places that Mitt Romney would not and did not go, right?

And Democrats have to be just as creative.

They have to be just as intentional about meeting people where they're at and showing the record, and, you know, if Democrats do that, then I'm confident that they're gonna win in 2028.

- We have seen under the Trump administration systematic eradication of government.

Services that we took for granted, perhaps, as Americans have gone away, and I don't think we've yet seen what the downstream effects of that eradication of government is.

As you look forward, Julian, what gives you the greatest concerns about where we are governmentally in terms of meeting the needs of the people?

- You know, I grew up in a time during the Reagan era where government was supposed to be a bad word, but in the '80s, you still were, the country was still benefiting from all of the significant investments that had been made during the FDR era, during the Great Society under President Johnson, in the '70s even, and so we didn't feel the effect of crumbling infrastructure, of a deteriorating healthcare system, of growing inequality the way that we do, I think, today, and when you added in back then the benefits of the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement and other movements, I think you had this opportunity, let's say, in the late '70s or early '80s to really go on and create a country where government was serving its people effectively and serving a community of Americans that were more equal than they ever had been before.

We could have continued on that trajectory, but instead, when it comes to government, the anti-tax movement of the late 1970s and Prop 13 in California came along and Reagan was elected in '81 and did all sorts of tax cuts in that first term, and we instead went down this path where we saw inequality grow, we saw stagnating wage growth, we saw manufacturing jobs flee the country, and people lost a lot of confidence in the ability of government to deliver.

What Democrats need to do is they need to find a way, and working as much as they can with the other side, to be able to get things done to restore that confidence, and that's gonna happen in the local level.

When I was mayor of San Antonio, we did something called Pre-K for SA, an eighth-of-a-cent sales tax to provide high-quality full-day pre-K to 22,000 four-year-olds over the course of eight years.

There are other examples of those kinds of things where you're using government in a positive way to get things done.

I think a lot of it is gonna go on at the local level and the state level.

The federal government is just harder to get those things done, but if the next Democratic president can build on the ACA and build on things like the Inflation Reduction Act and other investments that were significant that were made under the Biden administration, then maybe we can get some of the good work of government done and show people that it does have a strong place to ensure they have a good quality of life.

- You spent the bulk of your life in public service, as you mentioned.

Your brother, Joaquin, serves in Congress, continues to be in the arena.

What's next for Julian Castro?

- Well, these days, I lead the Latino Community Foundation.

It's the nation's largest Hispanic-serving foundation, and so I'm gonna be doing that.

You know, my vision is to create the foundation for the Latino community, a strong national foundation that is robust enough to support a whole network of excellent nonprofits, and I still follow politics and still talk to my brother about it all the time.

My kids now are, my daughter's gonna be 17 and my son is gonna turn 11 soon, so trying to enjoy as much time with them before they're out of the house, but, you know, I'll find ways to continue to use my voice.

And people often ask me these days, you know, are you gonna get back into politics?

And I never say never.

It may be that, one day, I do, but it's not likely that that's gonna happen right away.

- Julian Castro, thanks for being with us.

- Thank you.

(uplifting theme music) (uplifting theme music continues) (uplifting theme music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(gentle musical jingle plays) (upbeat music)