Mfume: 'Where we are is a real test point, a real point of temperature checking in our country.'

Q&A with Rep. Kweisi Mfume: With 14 years in Congress in two different stints, he says, 'It's gotten worse. I've never seen anything like this.'

Rep. Kweisi Mfume, Democrat of Maryland, is in the fifth year of his second stint in Congress. He first served in the House from 1987, when Ronald Reagan was president, until 1996, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. He returned to Congress in 2020, easily winning the seat that had been held by the late Rep. Elijah Cummings.

Mfume serves on the House Oversight Committee. I caught up with him this week to talk about Congress and the Trump cult, Musk and the DOGE cuts and ICE and the shift in public opinion on immigration. Of course, Jeffrey Epstein got a mention, too. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

DR: How does being in Congress now compare with your earlier stint?

KM: Well, it's night and day. It really, really is. It's two different sets of norms, because the norm today would not have existed then. I mean, back then, you had Republicans who actually decided that, on a number of issues, they could not be with their party, and you had some Democrats who decided they could not be with their party. So the thing to do was to seek consensus. And that was the case over and over again. In those days, most people were not extremely far left or far right; most people were in the middle, and that's where you had to govern from, the center. Today, there is no middle because Donald Trump has galvanized Republicans under threat. They're afraid to do anything, because their seats mean so much to them that their conscience gets put in the back pocket. I thought, once the [2024] election was over, folks would stand up and be themselves. But it's gotten worse since then, and I've never seen anything like it. It is a cult, in my opinion. My friends on the other side of the aisle tell me, “No, no, it's just our turn.” But nobody goes after things that are basic to America the way Trump is going after them now. It’s a scorched earth policy. I mean, it's very hard to find compromise.

DR: Were you surprised at how fast the Trump administration moved on so many fronts and how destructive they've been?

KM: I don't know that I was surprised. I anticipated that, if he were to be elected, with no need to run for re-election again, that he’d be the worst version of himself, and that he learned enough the first time around to know that he had to do some things to secure the buffers around him — make sure he had people at the Justice Department [and] the FBI that he could count on, to make sure that the people he had appointed to the Supreme Court were reminded how they got appointed. I’m sure he did that coming into office. . . . He knew he would have total control of the House and the Senate. So I assumed that he was going to be far more dangerous, far more authoritarian, and far less caring about what history said about him. . . . We were trying to get people to focus on the fact that the things [in Project 2025] were planned and would, in fact, be executed. But I think that the general public, by and large, thought that nobody's going to go that far. There was a lot going on because it was an election year, so you had to cut through a lot of noise to get folks to think about the fact that this could, in fact, happen.

DR: They flooded the zone with harsh executive orders, Musk and DOGE right away.

KM: It's an old military strategy that you just drop every bomb you have at the same time when you attack your enemy, and they're so taken by surprise that all they can do is try to cover one flank after another after another, and you keep flooding the zone until you overwhelm people. And that's what happened. They didn't waste any time whatsoever. They just went straight for the jugular, and, in the process, said, “To hell with the Constitution and the laws and everything else. We'll take our chances in court, but right now, we're going to move very quickly in an authoritarian way.”

“In many of these African countries, the only thing they know is, who came to help and who didn't come to help.”

DR: There’s a lot that’s disturbing. But the most disturbing is the sudden cutoff of medical and food assistance to poor countries through USAID. Research at Boston University shows that people have already died and that millions more could die.

KM: Congress doesn't have the backbone to stand up for [USAID] or understand what was, in many respects, our greatest foreign affairs asset. We were, by the essence of our presence there, helping people [in poor countries] to understand what America was about, and lessening the anti-American rhetoric and everything else that we saw going on. What Republicans did was find the worst aspects of USAID funds, and they put together a talk sheet of about 25 of those out of billions and billions of dollars, and that's what they went after, over and over again. When you look at it in a comparative way, the amount of money that we spent annually on USAID is a very, very small portion of the overall budget. But, you know, rhetoric and words matter in our society, and you keep telling people that the bogeyman is there over and over again, and pretty soon, you're going to start seeing the bogeymen. So they took the worst of the programs that they could find, which was minuscule, and they focused on their talking points. Every radio show, every TV show, every town hall — until they stopped doing their halls — all of it focused on that. There are a lot of people, regrettably, who remember the last thing they heard and they don't necessarily look to get the facts. And that's how they convinced themselves and many other people that [USAID] was a bad thing. Nobody ever looked at the lives at stake. They didn't bother to look at what this is doing to American farmers, who, in many instances, were shipping lots of products overseas. That product just sat on docks after Musk and DOGE started [tearing down USAID]. And so the American farmer was hurt. The profile of America was really, really damaged. And what happens now? China is moving to fill the void. Russia, to the extent that they can — because they're under great pressure in terms of their own economy — they're trying to fill the void. And in many of these African countries, the only thing they know is, who came to help and who didn't come to help.

“I think that the end game is to change normal everywhere you see it.”

DR: At home, the attack on the federal government continues. The State Department just had a mass firing. The Internal Revenue Service is down 26,000 staffers and more constituents are complaining about tax refund delays.

KM: And the new [Republican] budget is attempting to cut $2.8 billion more out of the IRS. They hate the IRS on the Republican side. When you look at the lack of the ability of the IRS to collect taxes, among the people who are really the cheats . . . . People making $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 are not cheating the IRS; it's those folks that are making so much more than that who are looking for more loopholes and trying to find a way to overwhelm the agency so they don't get audited. They hate the IRS, so they’re getting more money out of the IRS budget. At the same time, you know, the Defense Department is the largest [discretionary] portion of our budget. Trump proposed, and is getting now, a 13% increase above and beyond what was already the highest amount of defense spending in the history of this country. We've just got priorities mixed up. And of course, they don't want to hear the fact that the Defense Department hasn't passed an audit in seven years. They've failed seven straight audits. And I'm trying to get [Defense Secretary Hegseth] to respond. It's difficult when he refuses to even mention or talk about the audits, when we challenge him in my committee, saying, ‘What in the hell is going on here? You haven't passed an audit in seven years, and you want a 13% increase over what was the highest amount of money ever appropriated?”

DR: Public opinion has turned on immigration because, I think, of TikTok and Instagram, the cellphone videos that citizens have taken of ICE agents manhandling people. It's so aggressive and cruel beyond what even the right imagined Trump would do. So public opinion has shifted, but what do you do about it? The Republicans just gave billions more for hiring ICE agents.

KM: They've got enough money to hire [10,000] more agents now, and yes, people in this country still do have a conscience. Some things just don't sit well, no matter what your politics are. And when you see something like that, with people jumping out of cars with masks on, grabbing somebody, wrestling them to the ground, and then throwing them into a car, and there's no accounting, no reporting of what went on or where they're going, people start thinking, “Wow, that could be me.” I think the reason you are seeing the turn [is] people think that we've just gone too far, too fast on immigration — where 80% of those that were grabbed in the last two months didn't have criminal records. So where we are is a real test point, a real point of temperature checking in our country. Because, you know, Dr. King used to say all the time that the worst thing is when good people who know better don't speak up. There's got to be more people who speak up, whether it's on immigration or cutting millions of dollars out of food assistance for children and families, or wiping out the health care of 17 million people, or forcing now one out of every four nursing homes to shut down because of these bills they're passing. November 2026 looks like it's forever away. That's the only opportunity that people have. And you gotta wonder what's going to be left by then.

What are MAGA Republicans after, an autocracy that runs America, that dumbs down the government so that people hate the government even more? What's the end game?

I think that the end game is to change normal everywhere you see it. And I think that there are some who believe that if they can push back the hands of the clock, the clock has to start all over again. . . . A lot of this is driven by race, and the belief that, you know, that Black people and Latinos are overtaking the country. This whole “great replacement theory” is really, really scary. That's the far extreme side of it, but the middle portions of it are just as scary, and yes, it does look like a cult. It’s very vindictive. When you see law firms capitulating to a man who has threatened them, that's pretty bad. He's attacked the universities and the brain trust in this country, believing that the universities are responsible for so much of what is wrong in this country. It's a blame philosophy. So, you know, you look at how many people, how many institutions, how many organizations you can blame, and you blame them all. And then you talk about your predecessor, Joe Biden — “Joe Biden didn’t do this; the reason we’re here is because of Joe Biden” — and then, when you really look like you’re in a jam, you say it was the Democrats that should have solved the Jeffrey Epstein story.