Sen. Ron Wyden on “Progressive Change” in the New Trump Era

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Now, as we discussed earlier, President Trump has signed a number of executive orders on day one, including rescinding 78 Biden era executive actions and delaying the TikTok ban that was signed into law just last week. Now, while this is a blow to Joe Biden’s presidential legacy and the Democrats, like the title of his new book suggests, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden believes that, it’s just like that title, “It Takes Chutzpah” to fight fearlessly for progressive change. And just before Trump’s inauguration, Wyden spoke with Walter Isaacson about his thoughts on the new administration.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Paula. And Senator Ron Wyden, welcome to the show.

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-OR): Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You have a new book out called “It Takes Chutzpah.” It’s about how to fight for progressive — how to fight fearlessly for progressive change. First of all, explain to me what do you mean by chutzpah in that title?

WYDEN: Well, chutzpah is inherently good, Walter. It is the best of America. You look, for example, at the founding fathers. When they told the British to go fly a kite, that was chutzpah. And I try to make sure that people understand that bad chutzpah or warping or misappropriating, you know, chutzpah is something that we want to reduce and good chutzpah we want to spread. And I have basically 12 rules of chutzpah in this book so that you can take your inner chutzpah and apply it to the rules and polish them up and make a difference.

ISAACSON: Do you think that the problem has been that the progressive left has not been aggressive enough?

WYDEN: Certainly, if you look at the past year on economics, it is not been a blunt, straightforward message. For example, I’m going to have town hall meetings 1,100 so far, and I can tell you the second word of what people bring up is always bill. It might be grocery bill. It might be medical bill. It might be electric bill, and that’s sort of gotten lost in the last year or so. And, you know, the late Gerald Ford knew that you couldn’t whip inflation after a while because that was his old button, but we had to have a better message than we did.

ISAACSON: You know, one of your chapters is taking hits and bouncing back. Boy, the Democratic Party, I mean, up and down the line, took a lot of hits in this last election. What’s the best way to bounce back?

WYDEN: I mentioned the kinds of issues you zero in on. The social issues for example. I’ll give you a perspective. I was the first United States Senator to support marriage equality, and I did it really 15 years before anybody else. It was in the campaign to succeed Bob Packwood, and nobody was talking about it much, and I was asked, and I said, if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one. And I can walk into practically any group now, regardless of their politics, and they say, here’s a Democrat who’s like a live and let live guy. And I’m focused on those issues that people are talking about in their kitchens and living rooms.

ISAACSON: Well, does that include things like trans rights, trans playing in sports, or as a Democratic Party got beaten back on that issue?

WYDEN: No, those issues, I think are much the same. We ought to, at a local level, make sure that we provide freedom and liberty to all, but they’re not the first issues that are going to come up.

ISAACSON: So, on the economy, you’re saying people worry about paying their bills or whatever. What is it that should be done to fight for the middle class since the Democrats seem to have lost the loyalty of the working and middle class in these past elections?

WYDEN: Well, let’s take food prices. I was one of the senators who led the fight against the Albertson-Kroger merger. Walter, if that had gone through, that would have been the biggest merger in the food and grocery business in the history of the United States, and I believe all that consolidation is driving up the prices, and I believe it’s time to dust off the antitrust laws. We’ve got good Democrats, people like in Amy Klobuchar who’s been involved in these issues. I fought for these kinds of reforms. Let’s talk to people about things they can understand in corporate power, driving up prices is right at the top.

ISAACSON: And so, you think food prices have mainly gone up because of corporate price gouging?

WYDEN: That’s been a big factor. And let me give you an example. When it came up in the campaign there was a question of price gouging and people said, well, are there price controls? They came to me because I was chairman of the Finance Committee. I said, look, we believe deeply in liberty. We are markets people and we focus on markets and liberty. When the markets are having problems, you need some guardrails. And by the way, more than 30 states have guardrails today. So, there are concrete alternatives here on food, on concentration, on markets, that’s what we’re going to be pursuing.

ISAACSON: One of the big pieces of news this week, other than the inauguration of President Trump, is trying to figure out the TikTok situation. And there’s been a law that made the Chinese divested or banned TikTok. Supreme Court on — last Friday said that law could stand, but you want to extend the enforcement of that law. Explain to me your position there.

WYDEN: Well, I’m a big speech and freedom guy. I mean, people always say I’m the senate’s First Amendment hawk, and I say, thank you very much because I believe in speech. My dad was a writer and an author. Millions of Americans really enjoy TikTok, both for business and for their personal life. I think we ought to be looking for an American buyer, and that’s what our legislation seeks to do. I will tell you —

ISAACSON: And wait, well, if you can’t have an American buyer, should it then be shut down? Because TikTok says it’s hard to separate the American part from the rest of the company.

WYDEN: Let me raise the biggest concern I have as we look for an American buyer. If Donald Trump were to order the Chinese to sell to Elon Musk, I would say that sounds corrupt to me, because Elon Musk has been his big campaign benefactor. So, I’m going to focus, with my colleagues in the Senate, on getting more time, trying to find an American buyer. I’m doing it because I’m for speech and I’m for this country having choices in the communication sphere.

ISAACSON: And do you think it would be permissible to allow it to continue with Chinese owners?

WYDEN: I want an American owner. I want a red, white, and blue owner.

ISAACSON: Why’s that?

WYDEN: Because we want — in this country, you’ve seen it with the chips issue. We want to build back our best into institutions in terms of businesses, in terms of consumers, I don’t want to go back to the days when we had big giants and not communications largely controlled from elsewhere.

ISAACSON: When you talk about, you know, building back in the United States, what do you feel about some form of tariffs to try to stimulate manufacturing back in the United States?

WYDEN: Well, let’s step back for one second, then we’ll talk about tariffs. Chinese surveillance is also very much on my mind when we talk about these issues, Walter, because I’ve been leading the fight to respond, which is, according to many of my colleagues, very conservative senators, been the biggest hack in American history with the Chinese climate around our phones. So, this is an issue where we’ve got to focus on protecting American rights, and that was particularly Salt Typhoon, a big problem.

ISAACSON: When you talk about wanting to bring things back to America and, you know, have the companies there, to what extent should tariffs be part of that mix?

WYDEN: Walter, I have been for using tariffs in a carefully targeted kind of way. It’s kind of like you have a tool bag. A tool bag of resources to work in the trade, you know, area. Tariffs ought to be one of the tools in the toolkit. But what Donald Trump is using is this universal tariff approach, which I believe is going to be bad news for American consumers and American small businesses. I think it’s going to contribute to raising inflation. I believe deeply in trade in our part of the world, in Oregon. We like to grow things and make things we like to add value to them, we like to ship them all over the world. And these tariffs, I think, the way Trump envisages them are going to be across the board. Now, the nominee, Mr. Bessant, for Donald Trump’s secretary of treasury came. I asked him about, you know, tariffs, and he gave this very academic kind of issue about how everything’s going to be hunky dory, and I started off by saying, Mr. Bessant, Donald Trump lied through the whole campaign about tariffs. All through the campaign, he said foreigners are going to pay the tariffs. And I said to Mr. Bessent, that’s just a bunch of baloney. American workers and small businesses are going to pay the taxes involved here. And he basically just offered more academic theory and it’s sure not in line with what mainstream economists and citizens say is going to happen if you have an across-the-board tariff approach. Targeted tariffs, they can be useful, not this.

ISAACSON: but in your exchange with the potential Secretary Bessent, he did talk about on a 10 percent tariff, not all of that has passed through the consumers. And you may have seemed, as you say, academic, but there is some explanations of what that would do and how that would ripple forth. Do you think it’s a more subtle question than that?

WYDEN: I think the overwhelming evidence is that across-the-board tariffs are going to hit consumers very hard. Trump’s tariffs, his approach are going to hit very hard. And what they were talking about, Mr. Bessent, I thought was, and in fact, you know, many of the economists that we follow pretty much said the same thing. They said Bessent tried, but sure didn’t make them think that his kind of tariffs would be OK and wouldn’t hurt consumers. And I think there’s — in fact, I’ll tell you this way, Walter, one of the reasons Trump keeps trying to gussy up his approach on tariffs is because people don’t think it adds up. You know, he also had — instead of an internal revenue service, he said, let’s have an external revenue service. What’s that about? This is all about the Commerce Department. And it really is an effort to kind of gloss over what’s going on. And if you go beyond targeted tariffs, as I’ve said here, and just say, we’re going to have tariffs across the board, American consumers and American small businesses are going to get hurt.

ISAACSON: Almost 30 years ago, you were instrumental in creating what’s known as Section 230, which basically says that social media platforms, whether it be X or Facebook or even TikTok, cannot be held responsible or liable legally for what other — what users post. That has changed the whole way social media has affected democracy. Do you have any changes you would make in retrospect in that approach?

WYDEN: I don’t think there’s a law out there that you can’t make better. I just want to make sure you don’t come up with approaches that are worse than what the challenges are. And I’ll give you an example, Walter. At one point, The New York Times wrote a long piece with Chris Cox, my Republican partner and I, about how we wrote Section 230. And underneath it, it said, Ron Wyden and Chris Cox wrote the law that is responsible for increased hate speech in America. And we called them up and said, look, we don’t kind of complain very often, but the reality is most of the stuff, Walter, we hate online. The filth and the misogyny and all the really stuff that are bothering us is driven not by Section 230, but by the First Amendment. 90 percent of what we don’t like plus online is the First Amendment. I don’t think anybody wants to unravel that. We can always find ways. That’s why we have the moderation provision in the legislation Chris Cox and I wrote, and I continue to be open to ideas. But I will tell you today, just like when we wrote the original law, the people who benefit are the users, these small groups, you know, knitting groups and the like. I don’t think Black Lives Matter and MeToo movement could have even gotten off the ground without our legislation, because I don’t think there would have been websites that would have taken it. So, yes, to being open to improvements. Let’s not make the so-called cures worse than the challenges.

ISAACSON: You know, President Biden and what was, sort of, called his farewell address talked about the oligarchy and the tech industrial complex. You’ve been very involved in those issues. What did — what was he talking about? And is that something that worries you?

WYDEN: Very much so. I want an economy, Walter, that gives everybody in America the chance to get ahead. And I think that Trump and some of these oligarchs that we’re talking about are not interested in that. They want to give the breaks to the people at the top. And the idea was that people who are on Medicaid and hunger programs got cut, and it would just sort of trickle down to people. So, what I’ve been working on is a tax code, for example, that says that when teachers and firefighters and nurses pay taxes with every, you know, paycheck, the billionaire shouldn’t be allowed to buy, borrow, and die and pay little or no taxes for years on end. And yes, I’m very concerned about a thousand billionaires and Musk, for example, having a special carve out of rules that benefits them. Even enforcement of taxes, which I talked about with Bessent, is very different. Because the working person pays taxes with every paycheck, the government has all of their data. So, if they think something is going off the rails or is wrong, they can use that data. But, you know, what the billionaires can do is bring in their accountants and their lawyers to make sure I don’t pay much of any income this year and they don’t get taxed. And we were dealing with Mr. Bessent not having paid Medicare taxes for several years.

ISAACSON: In your book, you talk about the need for principled bipartisanship. First of all, what do you mean by that? And in this new administration, to what extent do you think there may be chances for you to work with the Trump administration on principled bipartisanship?

WYDEN: Bipartisanship is not about taking each other’s crummy ideas. Anybody can do that. Principled bipartisanship is about meeting around ideas and approaches that can bring both sides together. For example, you know, I felt very strongly that to fix health care, you got to get everybody covered. If you don’t have everybody covered, there’s too much cost shifting and not enough cost containment. Democrats believe in that. Republicans say, what about the private sector? I’m open to that. I think particularly in areas of health research and innovation. We very much need a robust national institute of medicine and the like. So, principled bipartisanship is not about taking each other’s bad ideas. A lot of times in Congress, people say they’re being bipartisan, but really what they’re doing is looking for ideological trophies that they can claim have support. I think there’s a very different kind of alternative, and I gave example after example, whether it was with Chris Cox in technology, Bob Bennett, you know, in healthcare. I’ve worked with a number of my colleagues on tax questions. This is something that connects with people. And by the way, you need chutzpah to do it, because if you’re going to take on these special interests,l rigging the tax system, you got to take them on with some chutzpah.

ISAACSON: Senator Ron Wyden, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

WYDEN: Thanks for having me, Walter.