Reid: “Good to see you, Stacey. I feel like — so, when I wrote my Trump book, ‘The Man Who Sold America,’ I interviewed dozens of people. The most consistent story I would hear is that Trump essentially is very influenced by whoever the last person is to talk to him. And Stephen Miller in the last administration, and this one, was very much in his ear, and you just heard his obsession, his obsession with racial minorities, in his mind, taking things away from white men. And I feels like Donald Trump right now is being led, and the White House is really being led by people like him and by the people who wrote Project 2025, because they’re obsessed with these issues of what they see as sort of racial theft from white men. Do you read their EOs that way?”
ABRAMS: “I read it more broadly, because we have to recognize that while Donald Trump may be the avatar, he’s not an outlier. As long as the rest of the Republican Party suborn what is happening, whether it’s Stephen Miller at the podium or a U.S Senator, they are all agreeing to the premise of Project 2025, which is, they want to hoard opportunity and legalize discrimination. We have spent 248 years as a nation undoing our original sins, which include slavery, silencing women, denying Native Americans their citizenship, a whole host of challenges. But what we’ve done since then, we’ve passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which, by the way, you can’t rescind with an executive order. We passed the 19th Amendment, but we also passed Title 1, which focuses on poor children having access to education. So if you are a vice president who graduated from high school in the Appalachian Mountains and you went to a Title 1-funded school, you are a DEI graduate. We know that across this country, service-disabled veterans who have access to resources do so because of the Americans With Disabilities Act, a DEI law. So let’s be clear. They may try to make this a racial issue, but they’re coming for everyone that they don’t believe is worthy of their very narrow-minded ideal of what it means to be an American. DEI is foundational values — diversity, meaning all people; equity, meaning fair access to opportunity; and inclusion having a pathway to the American dream — they are trying to block it and they’re hoping we don’t notice.”