Rep. Madeleine Dean talks about the rescue of a downed U.S. crewmember in Iran and reacts to the president’s request for unprecedented defense spending in his proposed budget.
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Representative Madeleine Dean is a Democrat from Pennsylvania. She sits on both the House Foreign Affairs and Appropriations Committees. We discussed Iran and the proposed budget to fund the war there, which includes major cuts to health care and science research. I started by asking about President Trump’s profanity-laden, Sunday morning Truth Social post that we just heard about, where he warned Iran that if it didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday, it would be, quote, “living in hell.”
MADELEINE DEAN: I don’t know why I’m still stunned by what this president does. I don’t know why, except maybe that’s a sign that he cannot break us with his repeated indecencies. Of all days – Easter Sunday – boy, oh, boy, how prayerful he must be. But it also reminds me of something – that this is an unhinged president with really broken notions. Violence just creates more violence, and now he’s impatient, using terrible profanity on Easter Sunday because he got trapped. I guess he just didn’t understand the risk to the Strait of Hormuz, though everyone else did.
SCHMITZ: And let’s dig into that a little bit further. You know, earlier in the week, the president said, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz is the duty of the countries that get oil from that route. You sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. What happens if the U.S. withdraws from the war and Iran still controls the strait?
DEAN: It’s a global disaster. It’s an economic disaster. And, of course, the president should have checked with our allies before taking on this war with Mr. Netanyahu. Because you don’t talk to your friends and allies, you take on a deadly war – we’ve lost 13 service members already, hundreds others wounded, thousands of civilians dead in the Middle East, in the rubble – and then you say, it’s up to you guys to get this thing straightened out. It is such an incompetent, dangerous way to operate. We are at a war of his choosing with no notion of why he went in. He’s given six or seven explanations and obviously no plan to leave this war.
SCHMITZ: Let’s move on to the budget. The White House asked Congress on Friday to approve its priorities for federal spending in 2027, including about $1.5 trillion for defense. That’s a 42% increase. That amount would be the highest level of military spending in modern U.S. history. Will you approve that money?
DEAN: I certainly won’t. The president’s budget is – well, let me go back to the basics. It might sound trite, but it is true. Budgets reflect our values. I sit as an appropriator. And so I want to make sure that my votes, the amendments I offer, the legislation I helped craft, reflects the values that I believe my constituents want me to uphold.
SCHMITZ: And here is what the president said about these cuts in a video released by the White House.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s not possible for us to take care of day care. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country.
SCHMITZ: So he’s talking about day care. He also mentioned health care. There are a range of proposed cuts here by the Trump administration. What are you hearing from your constituents about what these cuts would mean for them on a day-to-day basis?
DEAN: My constituents are extremely upset. It is Easter Sunday – if you’ll forgive me – and I recently visited both the Dilley detention camp in Texas, as well as the Philadelphia ICE detention camp, which is housed in the Philadelphia federal prison. When we were in Dilley, Texas, Rob – I do want to tell you – we met with multiple families, parents talking about their children who are terrified, unable to eat or sleep. We saw medical neglect. One little girl – I think she was about two – had an infection so bad in her mouth that it was green to look at.
What we didn’t see – I didn’t see toys. I didn’t see books. I didn’t see anything to help these children through their trauma. The kids were crying and saying, I just want to go back to school. I just want to be with my friends.
We went to what they wanted to show off as an educational unit. And this relates to this budget because of all of the funds that have been poured into ICE. So they wanted to show off the classroom. You know what it was? It was staged. It was a Potemkin classroom, with art…
SCHMITZ: How do you know that?
DEAN: …Buckets that had – I picked up the art buckets. It was so obvious no kid had ever been in there. I have seven grandchildren. I said, if I had set – if my seven kids were in here for seven minutes, there’d be evidence of it. The art buckets were brand new, with stickers still on them. The crayons were unopened and unused. There wasn’t a book. They had splayed construction paper on a table and claimed this was an education unit. And I railed, and I said to the administrator, how many teachers do you have here? One for 99 kids, sometimes hundreds of kids, from dozens of languages.
SCHMITZ: Representative Dean, I want to end this conversation where we began, with the war in Iran. You sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as we mentioned. Many Americans want to know where this war goes from here. President Trump says it’ll take another two or three weeks. Your assessment?
DEAN: I think we can’t know. The only thing I believe from the pattern of behavior of this reckless president, who I really – I don’t say this with any glee – he is unhinged and unwell, if you hear him communicate. The only thing I do count on is that he bores of things very, very quickly. And I think he knows he’s tanking this economy with the price of gas, with the price of every single good going up as a result of diesel increases. So I think he will tire of it and attempt to walk away, but what a dangerous predicament the world will be in as a result of what has happened there.
SCHMITZ: That’s Representative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. Representative Dean, thanks for your time on this Easter Sunday.
DEAN: Thank you very much.
SCHMITZ: In a statement to NPR, a DHS spokesperson said, quote, “the Dilley facility is retrofitted for families. Children have access to teachers, classrooms and curriculum booklets for math, reading and spelling. Residents in the facility have ongoing access to on-site medical professionals.”
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