The youngest person in Congress, Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost of the Florida 10th, says he’s “very pissed off” about the eight senators who agreed to a deal with the GOP to end the shutdown. He says that group — average age 69 — is behaving as though we’re not in a new political era. “Republicans have been here for a while, right? And I would even argue even before Donald Trump.” He says to be effective, Democrats need to “unshackle ourselves from the way things have been so we can be more like ourselves.” And the party needs to really fight for Americans to get decent health care, not just restore Republican cuts. “A lot of people have healthcare and it sucks,” he says. “So it’s not just that we need everyone to have sucky healthcare. It is: we need everyone to have good healthcare.” Before that, Jen and Democratic strategist Lis Smith rewind the emotional rollercoaster of the last seven days — a blue wave crashing into a backroom deal.
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NOTE: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Jen Psaki: Hi, I’m Jen Psaki. And this is the last episode of season two of “The Blueprint,” and what a week to go out on.
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Jen Psaki: On the heels of a blue wave, which last week was, in an off-year election, including a 34-year-old winning the New York City mayoral race, some Democrats struck a deal over the weekend to end the shutdown and got not much of a lot. But the question is where you go from here. We’ve talked a lot this season about the gerontocracy and about intergenerational tension in the Democratic Party. So we thought, why not have the youngest member of Congress on to kind of close us out? His name is Maxwell Alejandro Frost. He’s a congressman from Florida. I’m really excited to share what he had to say about all of this. But, first, my conversation with Democratic strategist and my dear friend, Lis Smith, and the emotional roller coaster, we are all on right now.
Lis Smith, I’m so glad to see you. We are back for episode six of “The Blueprint.” Now I will start by saying last week when we talked with our friend, David Plouffe, we were all overcaffeinated, undercaffeinated. We were on the high of the election. It just all felt great.
Our whole goal was to make sure people understood there was a long way to go. And then, bam, just five days later, the Democrats, well, not all the Democrats, I should just say eight members who caucus with the Democrats folded. And here we are.
So I just wanted to start there, because I think there’s a lot about this that is important to understand or discuss as it relates to politics, and the party and the future of the party, and what the heck is happening. I would also note that happened on Sunday and there was no Bengals game because I think the universe knew that you could not handle both of those things at once. That’s what my gut instinct is.
Lis Smith: Yeah. I came in slightly less agitated than usual because I did not get to watch the Bengals blow what should be an insurmountable lead again, but that’s the only silver lining I can find.
Jen Psaki: Instead, you got to watch eight people, members of the Senate just blow what was a massive victory last week. Okay. So let’s dig into this. So this “deal”, quote, did not get any extension of the Affordable Care Act healthcare subsidies. What they “got,” I’m putting in quotes, is an agreement for a vote in the Senate, which basically means nothing because you need 60 votes and Mike Johnson is not going to do a vote in the House, so that’s very little.
Their explanations for this also make very little sense to me. One includes SNAP benefits. And of course, 42 million people were impacted by SNAP benefits being withheld. But the courts had already ruled on Sunday night, the appeals court, that they were going to have to move forward with this funding. So it was going to be a battle in court, but the Democrats or the people on the side of SNAP benefits were winning that argument. So, really, we’re talking about delays at airports, which are a massive headache, and also we’re talking about rifts or federal employees being fired when they shouldn’t be fired, not minimal things, but they could have waited longer, including until closer to Thanksgiving and maybe gotten more.
Okay, that being said, what this all made me think about was that time that Chuck Schumer just a few weeks ago, who completely flubbed on the shutdown battle in the spring, went out and he was pretty aggressive. And I just want to play this because it’s just a reminder of where we were just a few weeks ago.
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Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): How the hell did we get here? Donald Trump and the Republican Party are hell-bent on taking healthcare away from 60 million people, closing community clinics, rural hospitals, nursing homes. Also, they can keep giving tax breaks to their billionaire friends. It’s a disgrace. S,o Democrats have three words for this, no (BLEEP) way. It’s literally life or death.
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Jen Psaki: No fucking way. I was like, all right, you’ve come a long way since the spring, when I heard that, right? Now, here we are. And Chuck Schumer says he was against the deal. We don’t really know. Who knows? But there still was a deal. There’s no healthcare subsidies extended, very little they got out of it. I want to talk about why this was so bad and what it means, and the political reaction. But let’s talk about the people who voted for this and why we think they may have voted for it.
Lis Smith: Yes. So you had a group of eight Democrats, including independent Angus King from Maine and, you know, a few of them opposed the shutdown from the get-go. A few of them probably would’ve liked to oppose the shutdown from the get-go, people like Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire, institutionalists, former governors who just don’t believe in government shutdowns.
You had the two senators from Nevada where you have a lot of federal workers and a big tourism industry that is going to be impacted by the shutdown. You had Tim Kaine from Virginia, who also large federal workforce that’s going to be impacted by this. And Virginia has been hit really, really, really hard by everything that the Trump administration is doing. Then, of course, you have John Fetterman who —
Jen Psaki: We don’t have to analyze that one.
Lis Smith: Right. But, to me, this was a failure of leadership from the top down, starting with Chuck Schumer. And the way I was reading a lot of this is that after that kerfuffle in the spring, where the Democratic base was like, hell, no, if you do this stuff again, we are revolting. We’re going to do our own tea party. The leadership decided, okay, well, we got to fight. We got to fight.
But the way it came across to me is just like fighting for fighting sake. A lot of fighting tactics, a lot of videos with like inauthentic cuss words, and a lot of political theater, but no actual strategy. No explaining to the American people, to the Democratic base, to members of the House and Senate, what the actual end game is, which is why when this news came down on Sunday, everyone was like, WTF.
Jen Psaki: What? Yeah. I mean, I think there was an effective message that was pretty aligned on the need to extend the subsidies, right? A better aligned message than we have seen through the course of this year, coming out of Washington and elected officials in the Senate. There wasn’t universal agreement. That should be the only thing they were fighting on, but that was a pretty high level agreement. They were out there making that argument.
But then what is perplexing to me, one of the many things, is that there were these huge victories last Tuesday, which should give some leverage, wind at your back, right? And then there also is this kind of unofficial deadline of Thanksgiving, because members are motivated by wanting to go home and be with their families, by the impact that would’ve had on travel, by any range of impacts, people being home in their districts for a period of time.
So striking this deal five days after the election felt, to your point, like maybe it would’ve ended up this way. But they didn’t even go to the nth degree on the leverage they could have used, and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s so perplexing. They didn’t come back with another offer. They didn’t go down to the wire of Thanksgiving, to make it feel forced. They didn’t do anything where they were out there with a big, broad push on healthcare and what this would mean for people. It was just like a weekend dark of night deal. It was just bizarrely implemented.
Lis Smith: Yeah. And I think this says a lot about Schumer, his inability to lead at this moment in time. One, a really important thing that I think people like you and I understand is that when we don’t have the White House, the Senate leader becomes one of the de facto leaders of the Democratic Party. So you got the Senate leader, the House leader, DNC chair. And you know, I’ve got some issues with that crew, in general. But Chuck Schumer has shown that he is not effective at communicating about what he’s doing, what the caucus is doing. And I think that if he had been clearer about what the strategy was, what the likely end goals were, why we were having this fight, you would see less of a revolt among the base right now.
But, two, it’s also part of a pattern with Schumer and, like, call me crazy, call me quaint, but I think that leaders need to actually sometimes show leadership. And twice in the last week, we’ve seen this with Chuck Schumer, big mayoral election in New York City and he’s asked repeatedly. He would not say whether he voted for the Democratic nominee for mayor and, you know, either he is afraid of the left or afraid of his donors. That’s not leadership, that’s weakness.
And then with the shutdown now, he’s playing this weird game where he’s saying, oh, well, I wasn’t with that group who did it, and sort of trying to distance themselves from them. But you are the leader. You are the person who was supposed to be holding the caucus together. So either you knew about it and you were tacitly signing off on it, or you were simply too weak to hold the caucus together. And I think both of those things are unacceptable, and both of them speak to why there are so much frustration among Democratic senators in the Senate with him, and even more frustration among the base. Like, we’re not just talking among Bernie Bros. There is, you know, (inaudible) normie libs. They are out there with their pitchforks on the streets for Chuck Schumer.
Jen Psaki: It’s pretty across the board. You know, it’s interesting. And you and I talk to a lot of people behind the scenes. Even though nobody, as of this taping, has called for Chuck Schumer in the Senate to step back from being in leadership, privately, people are just waiting for this long nightmare to be over. And I will say he was a great leader at one time. Even 5 years, 10, 15 years ago, he could raise a lot of money. He knew how to move the caucus. But the problem is he has not kept up with the times, and he is not kind of working in the tactics of the moment. And that’s why I frankly feel like having this deep knowledge of what happens during government shutdowns, or what candidates typically work to defeat vulnerable Republicans, it’s kind of irrelevant right now —
Lis Smith: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — because we’re in a very different moment. Let’s talk about some of the candidates, because I think, you know, if people in the Senate are being a little careful publicly right now, even though some members of the House have been out there, the candidates are being less so. And this is quite telling because it tells you sort of the politics of the moment.
One of the most interesting ones, Stefany Shaheen, who is the daughter of, of course, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who was part of the group of eight who voted with Republicans on this reopening of the government, while getting very little. She’s running for a House seat in the state, and she was critical of the deal. And here’s where she said, “Improving healthcare has been the cause of my life. It’s why I’m running for Congress. So I cannot support this deal.” That could not be any more clearer.
There are, across the board, candidates with very different ideologies, who are extending similar messages. And one of the first videos I saw was from Mallory McMorrow who’s, of course, running the Senate primary in Michigan. I just want to play that and we’ll talk about that race in a moment.
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Mallory McMorrow: All right. We got to talk about this deal that just passed through the Senate because it is a bad one. We got to do things very differently. The old way of doing things is not working. We need new leaders in the Senate. Now is not the time for a deal. That is nothing but a broken promise.
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Jen Psaki: Look, she’s called for that before. But it’s interesting because that is representative of what you hear from a lot of people who are running for office, including people who are vulnerable, who are sitting members. Like, Jon Ossoff is a Senator from Georgia, perhaps the most targeted member of the current Senate, up for reelection next year. He voted against this deal. But what do you think this all should tell people about where people are in the country? I guess people running for office are in a very different place than a certain set of members in the Senate.
Lis Smith: Right. And full disclosure, I’m a long-term brand and advisor to Mallory McMorrow. But I thought our video was good, very plain-spoken, saying there was no strategy here and we need new leadership. And it’s not just her saying that.
Jen Psaki: Well, all the Michigan candidates are saying it in the primary.
Lis Smith: They all said at least that it was a bad deal.
Jen Psaki: A version of that. Yeah.
Lis Smith: And in other Senate primaries, big ones like in Illinois, Iowa, you similarly see the Democratic candidates saying this is a bad deal. Some of them also echoing what Mallory said, which is we need new leadership in the Senate. And what that reflects, honestly, is what Democrats are hearing on the ground. You know, I go to a lot of these state party dinners. They’re campaigning every day.
The base is pissed off with Chuck Schumer. They’re so pissed off about the gerontocracy. They’re so pissed off about what they see as tactless leadership. They are so pissed off about just losing over and over and over again to Donald Trump. They really want new leaders who will fight, but also who know how to message, right? So that we’re not saying, hey, no effing way we’re backing down. And then two weeks, it’s like, well, actually, yeah, effing way, we’re backing down.
A lot of the energy in these Senate races, of course, is going to be against the Republicans. But I think in the primaries, you are going to see a lot of energy against Chuck Schumer, the status quo, the failed politics of the past that continue to lead us to these moments, where we get all jazzed, we get this excitement, and we fold once again.
Jen Psaki: Yeah. I mean, I keep thinking about what David Plouffe said to us last week, if you’re running right now, you have no obligation to support or endorse the institutions or the current leadership. And that is so different from how it used to be. And many of the races you and I have been a part of over the course of years, it used to be, be gentle about any critiques. You wanted their support. You wanted their money. And now, it’s like off to the races with people criticizing.
Lis Smith: Yeah. I think it could be more of an impediment, frankly, to have the imprimatur of Chuck Schumer’s support than positive.
Jen Psaki: Yeah, no question about it. So you mentioned before, and I’m a huge believer in this too, this is kind of about more than the shutdown. This is about the need to wake the F up and think about the tactics and the approaches and the strategies that people are deploying. And some of that we’re seeing take place in a lot of the races out there. One of them is kind of interesting that I don’t think there’s been a lot of conversation about, it’s this New York governor’s race. You are one of my New York sources of information because you know a lot of things. What is going on there?
Lis Smith: Well, I was hoping to take a little bit of a breather from New York politics after —
Jen Psaki: You can’t.
Lis Smith: Oh, my God, I cannot.
Jen Psaki: It’s never over.
Lis Smith: Right.
Jen Psaki: There’s always something.
Lis Smith: So I’ve worked on New York gubernatorial campaigns before, most notably for Andrew Cuomo, and his successor, Kathy Hochul is the incumbent right now. A year ago, after the election, she looked like she was in sort of a tough spot. She looked like she was in a weak position. She hadn’t really grown into the role of being governor. You know, you have to deal with so much stuff, all the proceeds (ph) in Albany, the mayor of New York, the president sniping at you, and it’s a big job.
But over the last year, she’s really shown that she’s grown into it. I think she’s gotten a lot better at handling the Trump administration. And she did something pretty surprising a few weeks ago. When you had Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Hakeem Jeffries, sort of keeping Zohran Mamdani at arm’s length. She went out and endorsed him at a rally, and has appeared with him multiple times since, not because they agree on everything, but because she realized, this is going to be the likely next mayor of New York and we need to put up a united front against what we expect is going to be coming our way from the Trump administration. And we also need to be working together. That’s something New York mayors and governors haven’t done along in the past.
And in doing so, did she probably piss off some of her donors, probably piss off, you know, some of her more right-leaning Democratic supporters? Yeah. But I think she showed a little bit of backbone and strength in willing to take that risk. And now, you know, back then, there was a thought that maybe Ritchie Torres would challenge her. He dropped out saying, you know, I’m impressed by her. She’s got a challenge right now from the left, from her former LG Antonio Delgado. Does not seem to be picking up a lot of steam, which again was why it was smart for her to go out with Zohran Mamdani.
Meanwhile, the mess is on the Republican side. And you’ve got Elise Stefanik announced the other day, and Elise Stefanik who —
Jen Psaki: No one has gone through more of a political evolution than her. She might be the winner of the political evolution.
Lis Smith: Right. No one has aligned themselves closer to Donald Trump. She’s running, early on a very Ciattarelli as campaign, where she does not disagree with Donald Trump on anything. And not only is she getting criticized by Democrats for that, Republicans are saying that. Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive is looking to run for that seat and, frankly, would be a much stronger candidate. We’re seeing people like Mike Lawler decline to endorse Elise, because he could help Republicans potentially pick up seats on Long Island. So what we thought was going to be a very messy race for Democrats is now looking like it’s going to be a very messy race for Republicans in New York.
Jen Psaki: Now, even New York state is not the same politics as lots of other places in the country. And there are going to be people running who are going to have to distance themselves if Republicans try to tie them to Mamdani. No question about it. But, like, Hochul has not been hurt by this, to date. In fact, she looks a lot less scared of her own shadow than she did a year ago.
Lis Smith: She does. And a smart thing she’s done is even as she has gone out and endorsed Zohran Mamdani, she said, I disagree with a lot of his proposals.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Lis Smith: And you know what, you know who’s not doing that, with someone who plays probably statewide? The Republicans like Blakeman and Stefanik, because they’re terrified of distancing themselves from Trump. I think that will be a big problem in a general election in New York, especially if we see some of the trends that we saw in New Jersey, where Latino, Black voters, Asian voters started to move back toward Democrats. That would be bad for Republicans and good for Democrats here.
Jen Psaki: Lis Smith, thank you so much for doing this with me. We’ve talked about all of the things, including Joe Burrow and Joe Flacco and the Bengals, but mostly politics. But thanks again.
Lis Smith: Yeah. It’s been full of ups and downs just like the Bengals’ current seasonm and I enjoyed every second of it, thrilling, and always love to talk with you, Jen. Thank you for having me.
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Jen Psaki: Thanks as always to Lis Smith. We’re going to take a very quick break. And when we come back, my conversation with Congressman Maxwell Frost.
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Jen Psaki: Congressman Maxwell Frost, it is so great to see you. A long time ago, long before a lot of these things happened, we went to a record store, and you’ve been very busy and active as a member of Congress, as an activist, as somebody calling for big bold ideas, and I want to talk to you about all of that.
There’s so much I want to dig into with you, including the Democratic Party, what the hell is happening. But I just want to start with the shutdown because it’s just on the minds of a lot of people, and you’ve been critical of the deal. I’ve been critical of the deal, I think for good reason. I mean, Democrats, frankly, didn’t get much. They definitely didn’t get what they said they were bargaining for. You’re also familiar with the mechanics of Washington. What do you kind of wish for people out there who are trying to understand what could’ve been done and what should’ve been done? What frustrates you most about what you wish they would’ve done?
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL): Well, yeah, I struggle to even call it a deal, right?
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Because that would assume that —
Jen Psaki: Fair.
Maxwell Frost: — we really got something out of it, and I would argue that we really didn’t get much, if anything, out of it. A lot of what frustrates me and, you know, part of the issue is that we’re a team, or we’re supposed to be a team, right? And we’re coming into something together. I think that it’s important to realize, number one, not just the election on Tuesday, but every poll, everything we see shows us that the people were with us on it. I don’t like using the term “winning the shutdown.”
Jen Psaki: Yeah. It’s kind of gross.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah, it’s a very gross thing to say. But what I will say is people were understanding our argument, and people were blaming Donald Trump and the Republican Party, rightfully, for them losing their healthcare or the healthcare costs going up. And the election helped solidify that for us. And so, for me, after Tuesday, I said, well, we got to keep going with this, understanding that we’re trying to open the government, right? That’s what we’re trying to do. We want the government to be open, but we also want to save healthcare.
And I actually got a heads-up about this deal or whatever, and the thing I asked was, when did these conversations start? And part of what I learned is that, and I’m not sure how much of this is reported, but part of what I learned is really almost from the jump, there were groups of these senators who had kind of expressed to Republicans that, at some point, they’d come around.
Jen Psaki: Yeah. Ali Vitali reported on that this morning, actually.
Maxwell Frost: Well, I mean, what the hell. I mean, that takes the entire thing and the entire tactic, the entire fight. Yeah, it makes it hard to see a place where we’re going to actually come out and save people’s healthcare at the end of this. But the one thing I’ll say, though, that I think is important. I’m not saying this to calm people down, because I’m furious at what those Senate Democrats did, and I’m also furious at the fact that they did it, like, alone. We’re supposed to be a team working together.
Jen Psaki: And sort of weirdly over the weekend, but, yes, continue.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah, weirdly over the weekend. But the thing I want to tell people too is that this fight isn’t over for healthcare, and that you can hold both things at the same time. You’re going to hear people tell you the fight isn’t over, to try to get you to calm down. I’m not trying to get you to calm down. I’m telling you the fight isn’t over so you can stay involved in it because we still have time here to help save, not just the ACA tax subsidies, but help reverse stuff that we’ve seen happen through Build Back Better, and we still need to, you know, be engaged in it.
Jen Psaki: I mean, the fact that there were members saying that they were going to come around early on is not particularly surprising to me, though it’s very frustrating. Is it generational? Is it misunderstanding kind of the game, that everything has changed, or it’s protection of the institution they’ve been a part of? What is it?
Maxwell Frost: I think it is generational. And I think, number one, and you know this more than most people, is that the way the Senate used to work, a tradition that people, you know, I think miss and a lot of members of Congress miss, and that they’re still grasping for. And I think that’s part of the issue that we’re in here is that we have Democrats living in a political world that doesn’t exist anymore, and Republicans living in reality. We will lose.
I saw someone on TikTok approached a staffer on the Senate side that were talking about this, and they were saying, well, this, you know, I think will dissuade Democrats who went to vote. And the person said, well, this isn’t about votes. What are you talking about, this isn’t about votes? This is about everything. It’s about the politics. It’s about the votes. It’s about the healthcare. It’s all the things all the time.
And I don’t want to say generational and that I think it’s age thing. I don’t necessarily think it’s an age thing. But I do think there’s people who have, in their mind, moved to reality of where we’re at. And the fact of the matter is we’re in a completely new political time. Republicans have been here for a while, right? And I would even argue even before Donald Trump to a degree, right?
But now we’re at this point where it’s full-blown authoritarian government. We’re fighting neofascism. We’re fighting a president who doesn’t care about the law. And it doesn’t mean we need to break the law. I’m not saying we need to be more like him, but we need to unshackle ourselves from the way things have been, so we can be more like ourselves. And I think that is really what we saw during the shutdown is we were being ourselves, full unapologetically for working people. And guess what? People were with us on it, and I think that’s important.
So, yeah, I’m very pissed off about the whole thing. And I also feel for a lot of people in tough races in the House, who stood strong on this as well and have been screwed over by these senators too.
Jen Psaki: Look, I’ve been in this town. I’ve been working in politics a long time, and politics is always about the moment in time you’re living in, right? And not sticking your head in a sand like an ostrich and pretending that things haven’t changed, because things do change and we’re in a very different world.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: I think this applies to everything from redistricting to the kind of candidates running out there, to what scandal even means anymore. It applies much beyond the shutdown.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: And I have not found a single Democrat running for Senate in primaries, all of them may disagree on things who have said that this deal is good, right? What’s also interesting is, historically, there’s been sort of an embrace of leadership, current leadership by candidates, right?
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: Because that’s where you get money from, right? The DSCC and the DCCC, or you’re kind of valuing institution. Things feel a little flipped on their head in that regard. I was talking to David Plouffe about this last week. If I were advising candidates, I would say don’t feel obligated, right? I mean, those rules are kind of out the window.
What do you think about Chuck Schumer? Can Chuck Schumer lead this fight to get healthcare affordability, I mean to get the Obamacare subsidies passed? I mean, he is currently, but can he lead it moving forward? What about Jeffries? I mean, how do you think about current leadership in this moment?
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. Well, I’m obviously not happy with what happened in the Senate. You think about someone like Jeffries who obviously has to wrangle a lot more members.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Right?
Jen Psaki: The House is the Wild West.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. Right. It’s like more to manage, logistically, and also in terms of people, where they’re at around the country and what they believe in. We were able to keep things together, right? There weren’t people going off to try to make deals without everybody knowing about it and moving things forward. Now, obviously, I know that the power was in the Senate at this point, but we held together, which I think shows that our leadership is solid in this moment, and which I think is really important.
On the Senate side, I mean, there’s a lot of reports as to what happened with what if he sanctioned it, if he did it. I don’t know the specifics and —
Jen Psaki: Me neither.
Maxwell Frost: — yeah, I don’t like to talk about it. But at the end of the day, we do know that this happened, and we do know that there was an inability to keep it from happening. This is the second big time I’ve been very disappointed with this Senate this year, obviously there in the first CR as well. I think it shows something that you have candidates essentially running on this as a part of their platform, which I think shows that, yeah, I mean, it’s probably a time for new leadership on that side.
I was listening to this interview with Bernie and he was talking about this as well. Well, you know, he’s thinking about the next step and what happens after that. I respect that a lot because he’s in that body and I’m not. He knows the politics of it more than I do, and he probably knows something that a lot of us, you know, don’t, in terms of where things would go.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: It might not be where people want it to go, I think is what he was trying to tell us there.
Jen Psaki: Bernie Sanders will surprise you. I don’t have to tell you this. I know he’s been sort of a mentor to you. Let’s talk about Bernie, because you’ve talked about Senator Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama a different way, as being sort of two people you’ve looked to at different moments. How have they each guided you in your own career, in different ways, I suspect, but tell me about it.
Maxwell Frost: Well, yeah. I mean, Obama was the first political figure I looked up to in my entire life, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that, you know, I’m a kid, I’m watching his speeches. This is someone who more or less had the same hair as me. I used to have shorter hair, the same hair as me, and I was very inspired by him off rip. I’d go to school and I was always involved in these speech competitions in elementary school. And of course, everyone would say, you’re like Obama, because I’m a young black kid who’s doing speeches.
Jen Psaki: Yeah, it’s a little.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah, I know. But people saying that actually led me to listen to him a lot more, and actually seek out his speeches. He was really the first person that got me inspired about politics, and I saw myself represented in it. I remember one of my first months in D.C., I had this like surprise meeting on my calendar and I pulled up somewhere, and it’s Obama. It’s President Obama. He met with me and a few other members of Congress. There was AOC and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez across ideological spectrum, just a lot of young people, and we just kind of chopped it up for a while and it was surreal to me.
Jen Psaki: People think he’s not paying attention, but he is very much paying attention.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. I mean, in the room too, he’d go across and speak to each one of us, and he was talking about my race.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: And I was like, Obama knows about my race.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: I was like, what?
Jen Psaki: It gives him life —
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — seeing people like you and all of the people you mentioned who are kind of out there doing the work. I think he feels somewhat restrained right now, which there’s critics of that and things, but I love that story.
Maxwell Frost: And then I would say the next big figure that comes along is Bernie. And Bernie’s role in my life, before I even knew him or worked for him or said anything to him, was that I think he helped me refine my politics, and he helped me connect my values to policy that reflected my values. You know, before that, it was more black and white for me and I wasn’t really diving into the policy of things.
I’m a Democrat, true blue. I believe in this generally, but I couldn’t really talk about policy.
But Bernie questioned that for a lot of people, across the entire country. He helped me kind of refine what I believed in. For people who don’t know, I used to work for Bernie, like producing events.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: And so, I take a lot from him and, you know, he’s someone who has been a mentor to me. And I think he shows, number one, how to galvanize a movement and use that movement for political change. That is something that the right has done for bad, for evil, and galvanizing this kind of righteous anger working people have. And I think Bernie taps into that as well.
I mean, a lot of these swing voters, when you talk to them, because when we say swing voter, people often think that that automatically means that on an ideological scale, they’re a moderate person and they might be, they might not be. I mean, there are swing voters who are way to the left and way to the right and all in between. But what I find that connects them all is less like a policy or less that, but more of like an attitude towards the way things are going. And so a lot of these folks, you ask them, who’s your top two politicians? They might say Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: That’s interesting to me. Right?
Jen Psaki: It’s wild. Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. That’s really interesting to me. And a lot of people will hear that and, you know, brush it aside. But I think within that is a lot of answers that Democrats need.
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Jen Psaki: We’re going to take a short break here, but stick around for more of my conversation with Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
Jen Psaki: You know, the Democratic Party has kind of a good united front on fighting for healthcare, right?
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: Fighting against the authoritarian tendencies of Trump. And now, everybody has got to kind of move forward, right?
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: So when you think about the fight to kind of get the premium tax credits passed, which is very, very popular, I like to always just throw out the statistic that in little Mike Johnson’s district, 20% of people rely on SNAP benefit. I mean, you know, these are things that —
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — are incredibly important and people benefit from. How can House members who are not for this, be pushed to realize they need to be for this and vote for it? Is that out of the realm, unrealistic, given Trump’s hold, or what do you think?
Maxwell Frost: I don’t think it’s out of the realm because I think Trump’s hold is still on the Republican Party, but I do think that it’s easing up. Not because he wants it to ease up, but I think this last election has freaked a lot of people out, and especially people in kind of more frontline, more difficult Republican districts.
So we’re going to see one of three things happen with these type of people. One, they’re either just going to say, I’m not going to run for reelection, which is happening. They’re running for a different office. They’re not running for office at all. They’re doing this, they’re doing that. Two, we’re going to start to see more distinction in them, trying to distinguish themselves from Donald Trump. We saw this in the first Trump term, in the midterms toom, a little further out. And then, three, they’ll just stay full MAGA Trump and then they’ll lose the race. And so, I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of this.
The new news about the files that we received regarding Epstein —
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: — and these emails, I mean —
Jen Psaki: That story is insane.
Maxwell Frost: — that story is insane. But like that and then these offices getting bombarded with calls and emails about people’s healthcare going up, I think it can move people, I really do. Now, do I think it can move everybody? No. But we don’t need everybody. We just need, what, like two more, I think, to join us. And I know that there’s some members of the House that are pushing through a discharge petition, which I think is important.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: You got to think like an organizer, right? You take a step back. We want people to do something, but you got to give them the vehicle to do it, right? And they’re not going to produce this vehicle out of nowhere. The discharge petition is simple and it’s easy, and it’s go sign this to help save our healthcare.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: It’s not go, like say you’re for this. No. It’s go do this thing. And it makes it easy. Like, I always think during Black Lives Matter, when we’d be in some person’s house, like 20 of us organizing Orlando, figuring out how we’re going to push the local politicians on our issues and stuff. And there would be a million things people would want to say, and I’d always say, let’s get one. Let’s get one that we think can happen and that would be transformational, and let’s just be relentless every single day and pushing it.
People should think about that in this moment too. What’s the one, or two, or three? But I’m a fan of like getting it down. And then how are they going to do it? Are we asking for something abstract, or are we being specific? Go sign the damn petition to save our healthcare. And I think that is important.
Jen Psaki: That is such a good point. There’s a discharge. That’s so interesting. I mean, a discharge petition is sort of a tactic, a tool I should say —
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — that hasn’t been used successfully a ton in the past, right?
Maxwell Frost: No.
Jen Psaki: But in the past, you had a Speaker of the House that’s waiting for a call from the President to basically tell him that he can go eat lunch, right?
Maxwell Frost: Exactly. Right.
Jen Psaki: So this is like a new, interesting tactic.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: So there could be one on healthcare, it sounds like one circulating. Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. That’s a discussion going on. I’m very pro doing it.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: My hope is that it gets done because I think it’s important. Like, it’s us using our tools here in Congress, but it’s also us giving a tool to advocates, to organizers, not just on the left, like across the entire spectrum, to give their representatives a very specific thing they want them to do. Because this whole thing of like calling for Mike Johnson to do something, the dude is a full-on —
Jen Psaki: Not going to do it.
Maxwell Frost: — yeah, billionaire protector, Donald Trump’s lap dog. That’s it. He’s locked into that role. And so, I think we got to like not shift, we should still yell at him, but look at the members as well, because a lot of them are very nervous. I can tell you that.
Jen Psaki: Yeah. Grassroots movements do not start typically from pressure on the top person.
Maxwell Frost: No.
Jen Psaki: You know better than I do. Let me ask you, it’s so funny, I feel like people like you wear this mantle of like, you’re the youngest. Are you still the youngest member of Congress? Yes?
Maxwell Frost: I’m still the youngest and my hope is that that needs to change in next Congress because I am getting older.
Jen Psaki: Yeah. You’re ready. You’re ready to pass the mantle.
Maxwell Frost: Okay, I’m ready to pass the mantle. And I am getting older. So if I’m still here in two terms and I’m still the youngest, that means we’re not electing young people, which is a big problem.
Jen Psaki: I don’t know if it makes you feel better. We have this like genius, young woman, Leah, on our team, who described you as not as young anymore, you know, meaning like —
Maxwell Frost: Oh, wow. Okay, great.
Jen Psaki: Because she’s younger than you. Meaning like you’ve been around a while, you know. And I was like, he’s rightful there (ph).
Maxwell Frost: I am the elder Gen Z.
Jen Psaki: You’re elder.
Maxwell Frost: I am the elder Gen Z. I’m the oldest of Gen Z there can be, right? I’m 28.
Jen Psaki: Elder Gen Z. Okay. You can’t translate for your entire generation. I know you’re asked this all the time. But when you look out there, kind of what the Democratic Party is doing, or people who are running to be leaders of Democratic Party, and trying to appeal to people, I’m going to say under the age of 35, what is super cringey to you and what do you think is actually spot on?
Maxwell Frost: I mean, it’s like hidden in the question you asked, right? A lot of times I’ll get asked about like how do young people want to hear this?
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Like, what words can I say? What trend can I do?
Jen Psaki: You’re like, can I speak for the whole generation?
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. I’m like, I don’t speak for the whole generation. I represent Florida’s 10th Congressional District.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: But what I think is really important that’s part of the problem is people trying to find like this magic silver bullet.
Jen Psaki: Yes.
Maxwell Frost: Like, what can I say? What trend can I do? Can I throw in some like slang and stuff? And it’s like, no. No, no, no. What young people want is authenticity, right? Be authentic, be consistent, and give your message in a high quality way, and also have a message that actually resonates with people. I think that’s what’s really important. There is no trend. There is no this, there is no that.
I talk to members a lot about this on social media too. I was never really great at social media, growing up. It wasn’t really a big thing for me. I was like a band nerd and that’s really what I did. Honestly, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I think my team and I really kind of found out how people wanted to hear from me online. And that’s honestly something that I think my first term, you know, we were figuring things out. We were throwing stuff out the wall. We were trying to see what made sense. And we found out that really just direct the cameras on my couch and different things like that. Like, I did this video. Remember the Coldplay controversy thing?
Jen Psaki: Did anyone not remember that? I feel like that woman is still speaking out and I’m not sure why.
Maxwell Frost: I know. But I spent like five seconds talking about it, and then I went to talk about Alligator Alcatraz and the work I was doing there. And that video educated a lot of people, millions of hits. And the reason I bring it up is because I always encourage members to think about the content they put out and the message, but also realize that if you put out a video of you doing some trends, some funny thing with no substance in it, that’s fine. Like, people can do what they want. It’s not my style. But everyone can do what they want. You might get some followers from it. But remember that the way you build your following matters.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: Because if you build it that way, people will expect that from you. And when you try to talk to them about serious stuff, it might not perform as well.
Jen Psaki: They don’t want it.
Maxwell Frost: They don’t want it. And you see it all the time with creators who have huge followings, and then you’ll see some videos they have, that have not really a lot of engagement. You look at it. It’s usually something that’s like a departure from their normal thing. Don’t chase a viral moment. Don’t chase something to talk to the young people. Be yourself. I realize that a lot of what young people want isn’t someone like necessarily talking their slang or this and that. All the issues that everyone is facing right now is in terms of cost of living, in terms of being a working class person in this country. Young people are feeling heavily, right? Hungry, no place to live.
We’re at the highest rate in our country’s history of people graduating college and not being able to find work, full-time work, right? This is a huge deal, and I see it in my own friends. That’s why I have to tell folks, it’s not just a messaging thing. If you say that we just have a messaging problem, it means you’re saying we’re doing everything right. Not enough people are hearing about it.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: I don’t think that’s the truth. I think that’s part of it, but people are hungry for big, bold transformational politics. No one is interested in like your solution that’s going to help some people sometimes around the edges. And I think this is part of the reason why people like Zohran were so successful in New York City. And candidates like that, not just talking about cost of living or some abstract, we’re going to make life more affordable, but giving people solutions that they see themselves in, I think is important. That’s a really big piece of this puzzle that oftentimes, politicians don’t think of at first. It’s kind of hard to say, well, maybe my politics aren’t right —
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: — in this moment. There’s a lot of people in the Democratic Party that that’s true, right?
Jen Psaki: That’s so true. I mean, it’s interesting too because I feel like the desire for big, bold ideas has kind of always been around, but it feels so present right now. Sometimes when politicians hear big, bold ideas, they think the opportunity agenda, which there was a lot of —
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — good stuff in there, but it was like a terribly named thing. So how do you think about big, bold without being something that sounds poll-tested, something that feels digestible, but also bold, right?
Maxwell Frost: I think part of what’s happened too, Jen, is over time, you know, we talk about practicality in politics, or like what’s the center of politics. When I say big bold, a lot of times people think automatically like ideological spectrum and this and that.
Jen Psaki: Sure.
Maxwell Frost: I’m not talking about that. It’s like big ideas that people will feel, and that they can see government working for them. And I think over the last many decades in politics, this conversation of what’s the center of our country, what’s the center of politics has come to be not what most people want, which is really what the center should be, but what is easiest and most achievable in D.C. at this moment? That’s what most politicians think when they’re saying the center of politics.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: I would say the center of politics is policy like single-payer healthcare, and I don’t mean that in terms of it’s the easiest thing to do right here, right now.
Jen Psaki: No. Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: I mean that in terms of that’s what most people want.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: So that’s the center of our country in terms of the healthcare debate. And the more that we have people who understand this, the more we can do it. I always bring it up to people like the way we vote is we put a card in a card reader and we put yay, nay or present. The difference between us being able to pass bold legislation like Medicare for All and different things like that, and not being able to do it, is influencing or changing the people pressing the buttons. And they’ll be one day that we’re in there and it passes by a few votes, and the world thinks it happened overnight, but it was anything but overnight. I think that’s important.
There’s always this binary in politics between like are you for the big ideas, or are you for taking steps to get there? You meet both. And the fact of the matter is any big thing that’s ever happened in this country, there was a ton of steps to get there. The issue is when you have politicians value one at the expense of the other, right? Oh, Medicare for All will never happen, and so let’s not even think about it. Let’s put together this piecemeal healthcare system that doesn’t help anyone. Or people will say that making little changes in our system isn’t worth it unless we get the big thing. All of it’s important.
I think my job is about filling cracks in the system and also looking at the full thing too. I think we need more people to think that way because this whole like head-butting is just such a waste of time and it’s keeping our party further away from where the hearts of the people are at.
I’m not a litmus test person, but as we look at the people who want to run for president, the question is, do you think the rebuttal to Republicans removing healthcare from 17 million people, and then raising healthcare costs for 25 million people is let’s get it back to where it was? I’m not sure that’s the rebuttal. I think the actual thing to respond to that is let’s simplify this system and make sure that everybody has healthcare in this nation, and that it’s actually good healthcare. Because it’s part of my problem when we talk about the universal healthcare conversation, a lot of people have healthcare and it sucks.
Jen Psaki: Yeah.
Maxwell Frost: So it’s not just that we need everyone to have sucky healthcare, because we need everyone to have good healthcare.
Jen Psaki: We don’t want everyone to have sucky healthcare. This is actually a great place to end because I think I could talk to you for three hours. But you are a member of Congress, so you have other things you have to do. Because one of the things I’m hearing from you, which I think is so important for people to hear from someone like you who, like, really kind of came up as an activist, has become a very impactful member of Congress, is that change doesn’t happen in a month or two months. Sometimes it takes years, and it’s about continuing —
Maxwell Frost: Yeah.
Jen Psaki: — the fight forward. And it still means having bold ideas to be proud of —
Maxwell Frost: Exactly.
Jen Psaki: — and keep fighting for. Congressman Maxwell Frost, it is such a delight talking to you. Thank you. I feel I’ll put this conversation in my veins.
Maxwell Frost: Yeah. No. Thanks for having me on. Anytime.
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Jen Psaki: And that’s a wrap on season two of “The Blueprint.” But we’re not going away forever. As big news breaks in the election cycle, as there are special elections or big developments in Democratic primaries, or just news that we want to weigh in on, we will be back in this feed. Keep your eyes peeled because there might be a special bonus in your feed very soon.
Thanks so much for listening to “The Blueprint.” You can subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to get this and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free. As a subscriber, you’ll also get early access and exclusive bonus content.
You can also subscribe to my newsletter, “The Blueprint with Jen Psaki,” where every week, I look at the debate within the Democratic Party over how to win back voters. Sign up for that at msnbc.com/blueprintnewsletter. All episodes of “The Blueprint” are also available on YouTube. Visit msnbc.com/theblueprint to watch.
“The Blueprint with Jen Psaki” is produced by Frannie Kelley, alongside Leah Collins, Michelle Hoffner, Andrew Joyce, Trisha McKinney and Iggy Monda. Additional production support from Makena Roberts. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory, Greg Deavens II, and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid. Katie Lau is the senior manager of audio production. Our senior producer is Miguel Susana, and Alex. Lupica is the executive producer of the briefing. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC audio, and Madeleine Haeringer is senior vice president in charge of audio, digital and long form.
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