Today, I’m talking with Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and you’ll hear me start with the only question I think anyone should be asking any politician in the federal government right now: What the hell is going on here?
Sen. Markey didn’t mince words with his answer. You’ll hear him compare the Trump administration to the fascist dystopia in Orwell’s 1984 and say that democracy itself is on the line. And one of the places that Sen. Markey and I agree that it most seems like democracy is on the line is when it comes to the First Amendment and the increasing pressure the Trump administration is putting on free speech.
Of course, if you’ve been listening to this show or The Vergecast this year, you know that I’ve been particularly focused on the pressure FCC chairman Brendan Carr is putting on free speech. Carr talks like a mobster when it comes to threatening broadcasters with fines and merger conditions — and many media companies, like CBS parent company Paramount, are going along with it to get what they want. Sen. Markey has a lot to say about all of this, especially ahead of Carr’s scheduled appearance in front of Congress coming on December 17.
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Oh, but there’s more: I also have a lot of questions about the supposed TikTok ban, which no one seems to know anything about, even though the House and Senate actually passed a law that would force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to either sell some assets or stop operating in the United States. The Supreme Court held that law to be constitutional, even though it has profound free speech implications for all of TikTok’s users.
But despite being the person who originally tried to ban TikTok during his first term, President Trump has promised a deal with ByteDance that would keep TikTok operating in some way. So instead of enforcing the law, his administration has repeatedly pressed pause on any possible enforcement of the law. And having an administration just flat-out ignore laws it doesn’t like is a pretty big problem. Sen. Markey voted against the TikTok ban, and I wanted to know if he’s heard anything about the status of the app or if anything he’s learned since has changed his mind about the potential national security issues that might actually support a ban.
Of course, we also talked about the bigger picture, especially as we head into the midterm election year. His answers about how to push back against authoritarianism were pretty forceful — although I pushed him pretty hard on whether the rest of the Democratic party, especially its current leadership, is as interested in fighting back as he is.
He gave us a lot of interesting answers. I think you’re going to like it.
Okay: Sen. Ed Markey. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sen. Ed Markey, you are the senator from the state of Massachusetts. Welcome back to Decoder.
It’s great to be with you again. It’s been four or five years now, but I loved it the last time, and I’ve actually been looking forward to it.
Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. I have to reveal something to you. The last time we spoke, the last time I interviewed you, I was, in the background, furiously refreshing a window to buy Taylor Swift tickets. I was like, “I’m interviewing a senator, I have to sound smart, but my niece and nephew want these tickets.”
I got the tickets, and I think the interview went well, but I’ve always wanted to let you know that.
I will say that it was a brief interlude in the middle of a political race that I was in against Congressman Joe Kennedy to win the Democratic primary for the Senate seat in 2020. So I’ll be honest about that too. Actually, it was almost like a palate cleanser for me, because otherwise I’m right back into the nitty-gritty of a campaign. So I loved it the last time too.
You were thinking about Taylor Swift at the same time, and I have to admit, while I would’ve liked to have thought of only the questions that you asked me about technology and its role in modern American life, I was also thinking about my campaign at the same time. So I guess we all have to multitask in a world of social media distraction, and I’ve learned how to at least minimally cope with it.
Sadly, we have only distractions to talk about, once again, here on Decoder. There’s a lot to talk to you about. I want to talk about Brendan Carr and the FCC. I’ve covered the FCC very deeply over the years. As you know, I want to talk about AI regulation, which seems to be coming up in a lot of different ways lately. I want to talk about the TikTok ban.
But first, I want to ask a question that I’ve been asking basically every politician who comes on Decoder that I think really sums up what I’ve been hearing from our audience, which is simply: Senator, what the hell is going on?
Well, Donald Trump is channeling Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984. He wants the control; he wants the Thought Police to be in charge of who we are as a country, and he has weaponized the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to enforce his goal of having thought control over the American people. He turned the Federal Communications Commission into the Federal Censorship Commission and installed Brendan Carr as the chairman. It’s all towards the goal of ensuring that no one is ever able to criticize Donald Trump, Big Brother. And there is a backlash to that, overwhelmingly, as people learn about what he is doing in weaponizing his administration, but it’s not going to stop. It’s who he is. He admires Putin; he admires authoritarian leaders in countries around the rest of the world. He just doesn’t understand why he can’t do the same thing that they do in their countries, and all we can really do is fight him every single day.
Democracy is on the line. The First Amendment is the heartbeat of democracy, of freedom in our nation. As he seeks to inject himself into the business of the media in all of its forms, it’s really just meant to give him absolute authority to become King Donald. And that’s why we saw the No Kings movement get created and put 5 to 7 million people out on the streets of America a few weeks before an election. That’s why we saw the election results in the first week of November across this country repudiating this political philosophy, but we’re not done. We’re in a battle, and we just have to do it every single day because he’s not going to stop; therefore, we cannot stop.
So I want to ask you about that. I want to ask about specifics. Obviously, there are specific areas where Trump and the Trump administration’s use of power is succeeding and failing. There is the general nature of Americans not liking to be told what to do, which seems to be pushing back. There’s a structure of the American government itself, and whether that is holding fast in the face of an authoritarian leader.
The thing that strikes me, though, is that it turns out there’s a lot of latent power in the executive in the United States, and Trump and the people, his administration, are just trying to use that power as aggressively as possible in a way that maybe is new but relies on that power existing. I think Brendan Carr is actually a great example of this, right? His thesis of the FCC is, “Look at all this authority we have that we don’t use. Look at my interpretation of news distortion to go and punish broadcasters that have licenses. Look at the authority that I might give up in terms of making telecom providers do cybersecurity measures.”
There’s a lot of authority there, and at least what Trump and his administration have figured out is that we should try to use it in a way that other administrations have not tried to use it. Do you think the presence of that authority itself is a problem, or is it just the judgment of Trump in using that authority?
Well, I think it’s, yeah, the judgment of Trump using it, but it’s also from my perspective, it’s the judgment of CBS, other networks, or other social media companies to just roll over and not contest what the government is trying to do. They have First Amendment rights. First Amendment rights are preeminent. And unfortunately, what we have seen in 2025 are companies, media companies that are willing to bend the knee. They’re willing to pay the fine, willing to accept the actual illegal use of power by the Federal Communications Commission or by the White House.
Rather than contest it, they just try to put it behind them. And I think it’s pretty clear that in each of these instances, they had a very high probability of winning in court, in terms of the exercise of their First Amendment rights. In the same way that WilmerHale, the law firm in Massachusetts that contested Donald Trump, won in court, law firms from New York City, like Paul Weiss and others, bent the knee.
But there’s no question that if they had taken the same kind of strong defense of their First Amendment rights, their due process rights, as did WilmerHale, the law firm in Boston, they would’ve won. I would say the same thing for all of these media companies. They would win because the First Amendment is at the heart of the protection of our democracy. And because these companies are so wealthy or so afraid, they don’t exercise the right, and instead, they just pay the piper. They pay Donald Trump whatever tribute he is looking for. But ultimately it’s a disservice to our country, especially given the role which those companies play in being the ability, providing the ability for the voices of the American people to be heard.
Let me complicate this a little bit. I want to come back to the relative strength of the media industry, its appetite for fighting Trump, and its ability to pay the bill for fighting Trump compared to the tech industry, which certainly has the money to pay to fight. There’s some structural stuff I want to dive into with media versus tech there, but lemme complicate this by asking about TikTok.
You talk about the voices of the American people and the First Amendment being preeminent. I think a lot of young people, particularly in our audience, saw TikTok as being the channel for their voice, as being where they actually got their news. We just ran a story on The Verge about young people overwhelmingly preferring news influencers on TikTok to traditional media like The New York Times.
I have a lot of thoughts about that, but the data is clear, the sentiment is clear. They prefer TikTok. The Congress of the United States passed a law banning TikTok or at least forcing a sale of TikTok that went to the Supreme Court. It was upheld as an appropriate use of power to perhaps silence the speech of Americans on certain platforms.
Trump stated, “We don’t know.” He basically told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law. What is going on with TikTok right now? Do you know? Because it feels like a lot of this is wrapped up in, “Hey, we have this power, and we’re choosing not to use it, and we have this power that isn’t traditionally used this way, and we’re using it as aggressively as possible.”
Well, Trump is seeking to cut a deal with Oracle and others in order to resolve the issue. What I’ve done is introduce legislation just to say very clearly, “Where is the transparency? What are the protections that have been built in order to protect against a compromise of the information of American citizens? At the same time, how do we protect our national security?”
The details are going to be very important in this deal that Trump wants to cut with Oracle. There’s actually a deadline in another couple of weeks, the middle of summer, in terms of the expiration of the negotiating period. He could extend it again, of course, he’s in complete violation of the law to begin with. He doesn’t seem to be bound by that, and the Republicans are not in any way holding him accountable under that law. So our goal has to be to keep TikTok alive, to make sure that it continues to exist, but to also deal with these national security and transparency issues.
Unless Trump reveals the details of the deal, then it’s no different than the deal that he says he’s going to be able to cut with Ukraine and Russia, and he’s very close to a big deal, and yet it never happens. It’s an ever-disappearing oasis in the distance. So that’s where we are right now. We don’t have the details, we don’t know. It is possible that we could resolve this in a way that deals with the issues that revolve around it, and that’s what I want. But at the same time, the American people have to know the details to ensure that our interests are being protected as well.
We are aware of that deadline in mid-December. Last month, Verge reporter Lauren Feiner went and asked about a dozen lawmakers what’s going on. Basically, no one answered. I think we got a statement from Sen. Maria Cantwell saying this is a problem, but no answers. Have you heard any answers? Have you heard from the Trump administration about what the deal could look like or if there’s even any progress?
No, I have written to the Trump administration, I’ve asked them for the answers. I have not received any answers. So it’s still impossible to evaluate the overall quality of the deal, which Trump says that he’s cut with the Chinese, and unless all of the details are made public, no one else is going to be able to do that kind of evaluation either.
One of the proposals that we’ve heard floated is that Oracle will take over the data, but the algorithm will get split off, and everyone will have to download a new app. TikTok, as we know it, will be shut down. There’ll be a new Oracle version of TikTok, Larry Ellison-Tok, and then that will be what we have. Would that be acceptable to you?
Well, I haven’t seen it. I don’t know what the details are. I don’t know what the safeguards are. I don’t know what kind of transparency it will have. I have no idea what the national security implications of it are. So, only at the point at which you can actually see the contract, which has been agreed to, would it be possible to do an evaluation. Otherwise, we’re just playing fantasy baseball. We’re talking about any kind of potential construct that may or may not ever happen. And the only thing we can really deal with is the actual deal that’s put on the table for consideration by the American people and the United States Congress.
The reason the United States Congress felt comfortable passing a bill that would force the sale of TikTok, effectively banning the app in some way, and the Supreme Court felt comfortable saying that the law was constitutional, was the national security concerns that you’re talking about.
The Chinese government controlled an algorithm that would shape what people would see, and they would collect a massive amount of data on the American people that was not transparent, and it could not be controlled. Having that in American hands or at least allied hands would be safer. That thinking hasn’t changed, right?
I mean, this is why the law was passed. This is why the Supreme Court upheld the law. The Chinese government, by chance, still has an awful lot of control over the algorithms. Why has that not been a concern for your Republican colleagues? Is it just wiped away? Or is it just that TikTok is too popular to deal with?
Well, Congress is hiding. They’re afraid of Donald Trump. They passed a law when Joe Biden was president. But once Donald Trump takes over, they’re afraid of him. Again, I voted no on that ban, by the way. So, to the extent to which I have been trying to police this issue effectively, it is to get the information that Congress should have. And unfortunately, that’s not what the Republican Chairman and the House and Senate are doing, and it comes to me to write these letters to demand the answers.
But we will not know if the national security of our country is threatened unless and until we actually see the details. And Trump is not sharing that with anyone thus far except for his business buddies, who he’s trying to make happy and even more super wealthy than they already are. But beyond that, the rest of us are still operating in the dark.
I want to zoom out and connect this to the selective enforcement of power at the FCC and other agencies. It does all feel like a piece to me, but I just want to ask one more question here. Our young audience is convinced that the reason TikTok got banned was because lawmakers saw how young people were talking about the war in Gaza and how pro-Palestinian they were and anti-Israel’s actions in Gaza — which rise to war crimes in some cases, it appears — and that the United States government decided to shut that avenue of discussion down. They see that very clearly.
Looking back on it, that seems to be what drove a lot of the conversation inside of Congress, even though that was never really revealed to us — that the Chinese government was somehow fomenting anti-Israel sentiment with their algorithm. So we got to ban this app. Have you seen anything else besides that that would lead to a ban? Because that is very much what our audience believes.
Well again, I absolutely strongly believe in the robust debate over Gaza. In fact, there was a young woman, Rümeysa Öztürk, who was a graduate student at Tufts University, who was whisked off the streets of Tufts University back in the spring and then moved to a prison a hundred miles outside of Baton Rouge.
I had to go down and visit her in order to put a spotlight on her. She was a Fulbright scholar working on her PhD thesis, which was going to be on the positive uses of social media for children. Clearly, a real danger to our country. She had co-authored with five other people an op-ed in Tufts’ undergraduate newspaper on Gaza. And that was the crime that she was being charged with.
She was actually never charged with the crime legally. Because of the spotlight I helped put upon her, they had to release her. But that just reemphasizes what you’re saying about this whole subject of Gaza and how there has been an effort to try to suppress the kind of discussion that we need about what was occurring in Gaza on behalf of Netanyahu and Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Ben-Gvir throughout the entirety of this war. So we have to defend free speech in order to ensure that we have, not just on TikTok but everywhere, the ability to have our voices be heard.
Do you think that the public perception of Gaza, the public opinion has shifted so much that that’s why there isn’t more pressure to make TikTok divest itself and be sold? The dynamic that I’m really asking about. Has public opinion moved so far that fighting that fight on that ground is no longer politically viable, so we’re just not going to enforce the law?
I’ll be honest, Nilay, it’s very hard for me to get inside the internal workings of the cerebral mechanism. I got right-wing Republican senators, okay. That’s uncharted territory for me. So, understanding the totality of all of their thinking and motivations is just impossible for me to dissect beyond the fact that we need free speech. And the only answer to any attacks on free speech is more free speech, so that the American people can have the information they need in order to make decisions on important public policy issues. So I don’t know the answer to that. I wouldn’t rule it out as a motivation then and now. But to be honest with you, I just don’t know.
The reason I started there, and the reason I said I think I’m going to complicate this to begin with, is because the theme for me really is selective and perhaps unconstitutional enforcement of the law. So here you have a very clear law. The outcome was obvious; the goal was obvious. The Supreme Court was asked to rule on it, and it is being unenforced, maybe for political reasons, maybe because we can’t get a deal on it, or maybe because of public opinion on Gaza.
On the other hand, you have Brendan Carr who is taking a bunch of laws that have not been enforced for decades, who is reasserting the authority of the FCC over content in a way that even previous Republican chairs of the FCC walked away from and saying, I have all this authority, I’m going to use it to make sure the speech is correct. How are you interacting with the FCC? How is Congress overseeing the FCC? Is there a sense that his actions are appropriate or need oversight?
Well, obviously, whether it be TikTok — that’s 170 million American users and 7 million small businesses — they have a right to be able to think that the government would be able to find a solution so that our national security concerns could be dealt with. And then over on the broadcast area, you have Brendan Carr, who honestly threatened ABC, threatened Jimmy Kimmel with almost the Godfather (part one) offer they can’t refuse: either punish him or the FCC will punish you, ABC. So they responded to that.
Now, I’m thinking back to when I was a boy, that if Johnny Carson ever told a joke about a president, it would’ve been unimaginable that the next day that the president of the United States and his FCC commissioner would say, “We’ve got to just shut down NBC, we’ve got to shut down Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. They can’t be allowed to do it.”
So this is a hypersensitive president who believes that he is all-powerful, and he has an FCC commissioner who is now suffering from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He’s no longer the Brendan Carr of the previous era, which was kind of a good conservative Republican lawyer. He is now willing to do the bidding of Donald Trump in any way that he wants if Donald Trump is offended. So, unfortunately, that is a condition that we are going to have to live with. CBS bent the knee in terms of its 60 Minutes programming. NBC was threatened by the president, saying that jokes by Seth Meyers should be illegal. You have, kind of in the background, an FCC chairman who’s nodding his head the whole way, very, very concerned about your local TV stations whose licenses might be put in jeopardy if you allow that kind of programmer to be on TV anymore.
So there is a very serious, powerful threat to the economic well-being of these companies that they’re weighing compared to their First Amendment rights of free speech. Telling jokes on television about a president is not illegal and can never be illegal any more than telling jokes about senators can be made illegal. That’s all part of what they constructed into the First Amendment. That is the protection of our democracy.
When I first started covering the FCC 15 years ago, I spent a lot of time with Michael Powell, who was a conservative FCC chairman, and what he had been trying to do was unwind the excesses of what you might call the Janet Jackson era of the FCC, right? Justin Timberlake pulls down Janet Jackson’s shirt at the Super Bowl, the whole government goes crazy: “We’re going to censor CBS and Viacom.”
Quite a lot happened in that time, and that case ran for a long time. What Chairman Powell, I think it was former Chairman Powell, when I was talking about it, but his point was, this is ridiculous, right? The future of media is not on broadcast airwaves or TV stations. The future of media is on the internet. These broadcast companies are just part of the mix with internet content that Americans are getting, and we should deregulate them to let them compete more fairly and even let them get bigger so they can go after the scale of Google and Facebook, which he saw as rising.
I would say he was broadly correct, right? The idea that the delivery mechanism of the media should change how the government regulates it is alien to a young American today, as any other idea from the past. That since this is coming over the broadcast airwaves, the government gets to say what it is, versus this is coming over my internet pipe, and the government has no say.
Brendan seems to be totally reversing that and saying, if this is the broadcast airwaves, I have a lot of control over it, and if it’s on the internet, I shouldn’t have any. That seems untenable, right? Because Americans are largely on the internet. Do you see him trying to regulate the internet as well, because that’s actually the prize?
Well, he doesn’t want to regulate the internet to protect against the harms, which he says are emanating from broadcast TV. So, to the extent to which the Republican Party, Brendan Carr, and Donald Trump shed their crocodile tears about the impact that broadcast television could have upon American society… When it comes to Meta, Google, and all those people who were sitting right behind Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, we’ve got a crisis in our country.
One in four teenage girls contemplated suicide in 2023 in our country. One in eight teenage girls actually attempted suicide in our country in 2023. One in five LGBTQ youth attempted suicide in 2023. And the Surgeon General of the United States has pointed an accusatory finger towards social media, not as the exclusive, but as one of the principal culprits in this crisis that we have in our country.
If the Republican Party, the White House, and Brendan Carr really cared about this issue, we’d be hearing them speak out on it. It’s a crisis. We have a mental health crisis amongst teenagers and children in our country right now that goes unaddressed by this administration, by the Federal Communications Commission, because of the information that is being targeted towards young people in our nation. But at the same time, hypocritically, he’s very concerned about jokes about the president and the president’s eggshell psyche that he cannot bear to have anyone ever criticize him at any time. Well, grow up, Mr. President, and grow up, Brendan Carr.
And by the way, you only need three things to be in politics: backbone, backbone, and backbone. Take on Big Tech, take on where the real problem is. Take on where we have a culture that is undermining the mental health of children, undermining democracy, undermining the very well-being of our whole nation. They’re afraid to do that because of the cash-and-carry nature of this administration. Where the more money you contribute, the more money you pour into the coffers of Donald Trump, his campaigns, his presidential library, the more likely you are to escape any scrutiny, notwithstanding the magnitude of the danger that you’re posing to our society.
Meanwhile, relatively benign comments made on traditional television are attacked as though it’s a dagger to the heart of our democracy, when it’s nothing more than more jokes and more critical analysis of public policy, which is being broadcast by the traditional sources.
This brings me to the structural question that I was thinking about earlier. Big tech companies have the resources, and they’re getting ahead of the regulation or the potential for regulation by building the ballroom today, by buying the crypto on the side today. They’re the ones who are most able to fight.
I think, in your estimation, they’re also the ones that most definitely need to be regulated, right? You see a mental health crisis, and there needs to be some regulation of these platforms to address that crisis that has some connection to the First Amendment in some meaningful way. And they will fight that fight, and they will spend the resources to fight that fight. Thus far, they have escaped almost all regulation in this country.
On the other hand, you have the media companies that are as weak as they have ever been. They do not have the resources, are lacking trust from the American consumer in real ways, do not have the distribution, depend on the platform’s distribution, and Trump is putting pressure on them because they absolutely cannot fight. I don’t know how you fix that structural problem.
If you want to go after one of the big media companies, the idea that they have unlimited money to fight the fight all the way up and survive along the way, that’s a little shakier than if you want to go fight Apple, Google, Meta or whoever else, who do have unlimited resources to just wait you out, to just spin you in litigation until you go away. How do you resolve that structural discrepancy?
Well, I don’t think there’s too much of a difference, to be honest with you. It’s clear that they allow themselves to be extorted, those big tech companies. They walk in with presents for Trump in the Oval Office. They pay whatever they are asked to pay and tribute, but they simultaneously take down the safeguards that were built in earlier periods before Trump, that ensured there were some protections built into these online social media sites.
They just give. They’ve folded. And what’s happening over on the traditional broadcast side looks very similar. They are responding in the same way. They’re saying, “We’ll pay the fine, or we’ll accept the chilling effect that you’re now creating the terms of our ability to program entertainment or news for the American people.” That chilling effect is impossible to fully quantify, but we know it’s real. We know it’s there for both the broadcasters and the social media companies, and I’m very afraid of what the consequences could be from an out-of-control Justice Department and an out-of-control FCC that can easily be weaponized by the White House.
I think in terms of the impact on the American people and their ability to receive information unfettered, it’s now the same in both sectors. It’s a systematic attack that has been made, unfortunately, successfully by the Trump administration. There are some notable exceptions, I will say, but in general, he’s having the intended effect put into place across the entire media spectrum.
One of the weirder aspects of this FCC, of Brendan Carr in particular, is that you mentioned earlier how he used to be a fairly traditional conservative lawyer, and now he’s fire-breathing MAGA. He’s cutting against some of his own positions from the past, some of the positions from the first Trump administration that his predecessor, Ajit Pai, used to take, like disclaiming all authority over state-level net neutrality rules.
They got rid of net neutrality by saying, “We actually have no authority over broadband.” Now, I’ve seen Chairman Carr say, “Well, we should have authority to preempt state AI regulations because that’s part of broadband,” which makes no sense in the context of, “Well, you disclaimed all your authority. How can you possibly now have the authority to narrowly preempt AI regulations?” Has this been presented to you in any way that makes coherent sense, or is this just more, let’s see how much power we can acquire and use?
Yeah, I think that’s all you have to understand. What you are saying is that it’s all about power, and it’s the power of whoever can pay the most to the White House. The AI industry wants state preemption. The AI industry wants preemption of state privacy laws like those in California, New York, and other places. This administration is, without question, not interested in the public policy consequences of those kinds of repeals, but is instead interested in what kind of monetary benefit can flow to the Republican Party at the highest levels because of the capacity of these companies to pay.
So there’s a reason for us to really be concerned right now. We have an industry, this social media industry, that right now is unwilling to stand up to the president in any meaningful way. And simultaneously, the most extreme element amongst that social media industry is coming to Washington and asking for an override of all state legislation across the board on everything that could, in fact, deal with protection against AI and its impact on the environment, workers, civil rights, and children.
All of it is now subject to a real threat from the Trump administration, from the most extreme elements in the Trump administration, and from the most extreme elements in the AI industry. So we’re kind of at a turning point. We’re at a real juncture right now where the power is now concentrated so fully in the hands of those who have great wealth that there is a real danger that we could have an AI revolution be unleashed without the safeguards that we know have to be put in place. Yesterday, I did a press conference introducing my AI Civil Rights Act with the civil rights leaders of the United States, Black Caucus members from the House of Representatives, Corey Booker, and others. We’re talking about the need for us to have a movement of all of those civil rights protections, which have been out in the physical world, be moved over to AI.
Otherwise, we’re going to see discrimination in housing, in education, in applications for financing for mortgages, all across the board. We have to act right now. In the earlier era of the introduction of new technologies, the federal government, state, and local governments moved in when the automobile was deployed. Public policy makers said you’ve got to have brakes, airbags, seat belts, rear view mirrors, some guard rails, and some safety features. We like the idea of an automobile. We just don’t like the idea of the law of unintended consequences being unleashed to the max. That’s what’s happening with AI right now. We know what the safeguards have to look like. We know what protections have to be built in, and they would not inhibit our ability to compete against the Chinese.
One of the functions here is congressional oversight, which I would say has been at a low point throughout the Trump administration so far. But Brandon Carr is coming to testify in front of Congress on December 17th. What’s your goal there? Do you think you can meaningfully get him to change his behavior, or are you just trying to figure out what he’s doing?
Well, I was heartened that Senator Ted Cruz was very critical of the chemical, the Kimmel controversy. So I’m hoping that it’s bipartisan. I’m hoping that people are willing to stand up and ensure that the Federal Communications Commission knows that there is bipartisan concern about this censorship that Carr is seeking to impose upon the media. At the same time, I brought out two resolutions on the Senate floor, one on the Kimmel situation, a resolution condemning it, and a Republican senator got up and objected. Then, when the Seth Meyers situation unfolded, I brought out a resolution on the Senate floor and debated it. The Republican got up to object to it even being considered.
So while I appreciate the fact that Senator Cruz stepped up, I’m still awaiting any evidence to convict other Republicans of being guilty of actually standing up for the First Amendment, standing up to fight for the rights of comedians and news gatherers to be able to present the information as they see a fit and not after having received a permission slip from the White House or the FCC.
I know you said it’s hard for you to read the minds of MAGA members of Congress. From where I sit, there’s a pretty notable split between what you might call the tech part of Trump’s coalition and the MAGA part, the populist part of Trump’s coalition. It’s the idea that the tech companies and the AI companies should run unfettered over public policy, which is running directly into the more populist impulses of the Trump coalition.
Are you experiencing that split in Congress? We’ve seen that Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to retire from Congress. There’s something happening there where it seems like the tech bros are not as ascendant or are not as unchecked as they might have been early on in the Trump administration.
Well, you’re right. Hell was freezing over back in July when there had been an insertion of an AI moratorium into the One Big Beautiful Bill coming over from the House, and the Republicans really didn’t know about it at the rank-and-file level. When it came to the Senate, it was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ed Markey. Yeah, hell’s freezing over. Pigs are flying. We’re agreeing that that language should not be allowed to pass in the Senate as well, and it was taken out. So there is some recombinant political DNA that is now being created, and I think it’s kind of heartening at a certain level that some Republicans, at some level, are now willing to stand up to the tech bros and to say, No, we need some safeguards. We need some protection.
And to the extent to which Marsha Blackburn is doing it, Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing it. We actually then had a vote on the Senate floor, at like two in the morning, on that provision. It passed 99 to 1 on the Senate floor to delete the moratorium on a ban on AI at the state level in terms of new legislation. Right now, they’re trying to insert that into the defense bill.
My own belief is to go ahead and test us. I think we can put together a coalition here to really raise such a stink about the sacrosanct defense bill that if you try to include a ban on any AI legislation at the state level, you just might run into a bipartisan coalition that no one has seen on a defense bill in the history of our country.
The architect of that bill we’ve heard is David Sacks, who is the White House crypto and AI czar. There’s a lot of conversation about his investments, about his potential conflicts of interest, just about what kind of character he is inside the Trump administration. The distinction I’ve been drawing is that there’s sort of the formal policymaking process — the front door, the FCC, Congress, and bills and committees — and then there’s the Trump world, which is the back door. It’s where things happen and don’t happen.
Things are announced on Truth Social, and maybe they’re real, maybe they’re not, and that’s the David Sacks world. Have you interacted with David Sacks? Have you seen how that side of the house is operating and how much it is influencing what Congress is actually doing?
No, I have not met David Sacks. I would have a 50 percent chance of picking him out of a lineup of two people. I have absolutely no idea who he is and what he does in the White House, except to the extent to which that eye-opening expose in The New York Times last week laid out what he is doing that enriches himself and enriches Trump’s allies. It is almost indifferent to what the impact might be upon a policy that serves the American people rather than the enrichment of a small number of well-connected Americans and overseas allies. So that needs a lot more attention.
Again, we’re limited in terms of our ability to actually subpoena people as Democrats. The Republicans control the House and Senate. Although I would say the election in the first week of November is highly predictive, that this will not be the case in one more year, and they should start to get ready in the Republican party to have a blizzard of subpoenas sent their way. They’re now under a year away from having those subpoenas sent their way. But yeah, it’s frightening what is going on, and at the bottom line, I just see self-enrichment as the core of what the agenda is.
I’m really just trying to draw the connection. The reason that preemption of state AI laws keeps coming back up again is because of whatever’s happening in Trump world, right? That group of people has this idea that there should not be state-level AI laws, and then it keeps showing up in Congress, and you might have to keep voting it down. Can you make that connection clearer for your colleagues, for the American people? Because it is strange that there are shadowy back rooms full of special advisors to the President who might have conflicts of interest getting bills on the floor of Congress in this way, over and over again, even after they’ve been voted down.
Well, I think that happens on every bill. We can’t quite see what Steven Miller does every day.
Well, he’s on X. You can see he is just being racist on X. That’s the main thing.
What I’m saying is just in terms of what conversations precede whatever call that is made by Steve Miller up to the leadership of the House and Senate Republicans, we don’t know everything that’s going on. But Sacks fits into that profile as well as several other people who work in the White House right now.
It’s all part of this kind of very clandestine, cozy coterie of people who are very close to the President. They slosh between public policy and private self-aggrandizement, do the bidding of the President, understand what the agenda is for Trump’s children and for the children of others who are inside the Trump administration, in terms of their ability to become fabulously wealthy. I think everyone understands it, but the Republicans… There’s an old saying that it’s hard to understand something when you’re paid not to understand it.
That’s where we are right now with the Republican leadership. They’re paid not to understand it. They know what’s going on. They can see it on a daily basis, and the revolt has to come from the rank and file. The revolt comes from Marjorie Taylor Greene. It comes from Marsha Blackburn within their own party. My own belief is that they’re on very dangerous terrain right now with this AI revolution, very, very dangerous terrain. They don’t understand the public revolt, which is building against a small coterie of super-wealthy people in conjunction with the Trump administration, making decisions for 340 million people. They’re going to pay a high political price.
Let me ask about that revolt more generally and specifically about the Democrats. You brought up midterms. Obviously, there was an election just recently. The voters based in New York were inundated with Zohran Mamdani every day. He’s obviously a phenomenon in the party, and appears to be a phenomenon with Donald Trump himself. Those are some adorable photos of the two of them together.
Our audience perceives both parties as being out of touch, as being beholden to billionaires or outside interests in some way. You’ve been in the Senate for a long time. You’re turning 80 next July. You have a primary opponent in Seth Moulton, who’s 47. Does the current Democratic leadership have the fight it needs? Are they also paid to not see it? Because I hear from our audience that what they want is younger, more energetic people who are going to take the fight to Trump more directly, in maybe a way that Chuck Schumer hasn’t.
Well, first of all, it’s not your age, it’s the age of your ideas. So I’m still the youngest guy in the room. I’ve introduced legislation on AI and workers, AI and the environment, AI and social media, and AI and civil rights. So I’ve introduced the legislation. It’s not easy to get co-sponsors, by the way. Not easy. People don’t really want to sign up, young or old. Okay. Just so you understand, it has nothing to do with age; it has to do with, as I said earlier, backbone, backbone, backbone.
Are you willing to take on the most powerful, wealthy people in the history of the world? That’s what it’s all about. And I think that’s what the public is getting very, very concerned about. It’s that they see a government unable to muster the courage to take on these powerful forces that are basically reshaping our society.
That’s been at the heart of my entire career — building in the safeguards, from E-Rate to make sure that every kid gets the education they need, paid for by the media companies, paid for by the communications companies, to the safeguards for children online. That’s my 1998 law, which I’m trying to update up to age 17 and under for families. It has nothing to do with the age of people who are willing to step up and fight.
A lot of young people are kind of enthralled by the AI industry. They buy into this whole idea that, “Oh, if there’s any regulation at all, you’ll be responsible for not finding the cure for cancer.” They want to be part of this generation, and so what we need is young and old willing to stand up to them.
Let me take age out of it for one second. I think the thing people are really seeking is vigor and values, right? You mentioned that there’s probably some sort of tsunami coming for Republican leadership as the rank and file splits, as MAGA splits from the tech bros. Do you think there’s one coming for democratic leadership? Do you think the current democratic leadership can lead this fight?
Well, we are fighting on healthcare. We’re fighting on these tech issues. We’re fighting on environmental and educational issues. We just saw a big return on that on election day in November 2025 that exceeded the expectations of all of the experts out there observing what was going on. Thirteen and 15-point victories in Virginia and in New Jersey. There’s now polling out there at 12 to 13 points that people are more likely to vote for a Democrat for the House and for the Senate next year.
So that is what I think is going to frighten the Republican Party, because that translates into a 60-seat victory for the Democrats next year — a 60-seat victory. So our message is working, but Democrats just have to stand up. They have to fight to make sure that AI is controlled in a way that is compatible with our American political and moral traditions.
We have to stand up to ICE. We have to make sure that we’re not allowing masked agents to be sweeping people up off the streets the way they did with Rümeysa Öztürk and thousands of others across our country on an ongoing basis. We have to show that as a Democratic party, we understand that Donald Trump is a walking, talking, constitutional crisis every day that he’s in the Oval Office. And we have to align ourselves with the No Kings movement. We have to align ourselves with Indivisible. We have to align ourselves with 50501 and all the other organizations that are out there standing up and saying, “No, we’re going to fight for democracy.”
We’re 250 years in. I’ll tell you what people want to hear. Those minutemen and minutewomen, they got knocked down, but they got back up, they fought, and they won against King George. The abolitionist movement: they got knocked down, they got back up, they fought, and they won. The suffragette movement: They got knocked down, they were not knocked out. They got up, they fought, and they won. The Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr., that whole movement, they were knocked down. They were not knocked out. They got up, they fought, and they won.
That’s where we are right now. We were knocked down, but we’re not knocked out. And that’s what the No Kings movement’s all about. That’s what the Democratic Party has to be all about. It has to be about that movement.
Let me just push you on this a little bit. Do you think Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are as aligned with that messaging, the No Kings movement, and the aggressive fight against this administration as you are right now, the way you’re talking to me?
Well, it’s what won the election on —
That’s not what I asked. I asked if the leaders of Congress, the Democratic leaders of Congress, are aligned with what you’re saying.
I’ll tell you what: I think a year from today, we’re going to see that we’ve won the House overwhelmingly, and we very well may win the United States Senate. And let’s, at that point, make our judgments about what this movement is and what the message has been that is now winning out there.
By the way, I’ll just say this parenthetically, the Republicans have a big problem in the next four weeks because 22 million Americans are about to lose their healthcare or see a 50 to 75 percent increase in their healthcare premiums. So they’re about to have nitro-meet-glycerin politics, and the Democrats are aligned 100 percent on that issue to ensure that the Republicans are made accountable for the pain they’re about to inflict upon the American people. So that’s our job.
We have to stay organized, we have to stay focused. And if we do it, I think that the American people, next year, will resoundingly throw out the Republicans and then, in the House and Senate, give us the subpoena power we need to almost buy a paper mill for all of the subpoenas we’re going to be sending out. Not just to the Trump administration, but to all of those people out there who have been enriching themselves at the expense of the American people.
Senator Markey, this has been a great conversation. You’ve got to come back faster than five years next time. I look forward to the oversight you intend to conduct.
Loved being with you. Thank you.
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