The Trump-Musk administration wasted no time in driving the country into a full-on constitutional crisis: from dismantling key federal agencies and threatening trade wars with US allies, to trying to eliminate birthright citizenship and racking up dozens of lawsuits. So what are Democrats doing to push back?
Prominent progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal joined Mehdi for a Zeteo Town Hall to answer that very question, and answer questions from Zeteo’s paid subscribers on the president’s plans to “take over” Gaza, whether or not she supports trying to impeach Trump for a third time, and the prospects for free and fair elections in the US in 2026 and 2028.
Jayapal, the first South-Asian American woman elected to the US House of Representatives, is a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She was one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and voted against sending military aid to Israel.
“Arab leaders don’t subscribe to what Trump is saying about displacing Palestinians out of the West Bank, out of Gaza,” says Jayapal, and it is difficult to subscribe to those ideas, especially when they involve a weird AI video depicting Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on tanning beds in Gaza.
The influential congresswoman recently joined dozens of House Democrats in signing a letter denouncing Trump and Musk’s effective elimination of the US Agency for International Development.
“This is a constitutional crisis in the middle of a coup,” Jayapal says.
But at the moment, she says the Democratic party is “leaderless,” adding that Democrats “don’t have the same vision of what happened in this election, and therefore, we don’t have the same solutions.”
Jayapal also refers to the “stealing of authoritarian power by a dictator” that is going on right now, and warns her fellow Democrats that they have to do better than bringing a “butter knife to a gunfight.”
If you are a paid subscriber, you can watch the Town Hall in full above to hear Jayapal discuss the need for civil disobedience, why AIPAC failed to oust her from Congress, and how she keeps hope alive.
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