Senator Elizabeth Warren arrived on the political scene during the 2008 financial crisis with a very specific story about the economy — that it’s rigged against hardworking Americans. But it was Donald Trump who ran with that message all the way to the White House. In this episode, David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Times Opinion, talks to Senator Warren about her vision for a progressive economic story and the lessons Democrats need to learn going forward.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. This is America’s Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again.
Today I’m talking to Senator Elizabeth Warren. I wanted to talk with Senator Warren because she has always been driven by ideas. And her main idea that the American economy is rigged against ordinary people is much more widely accepted today than it was a quarter century ago, when she started making that case as a little-known bankruptcy law professor. She was ahead of the curve and her skill at telling that story propelled her to the forefront of American politics.
But a funny thing has happened along the way. The country elected someone else who says the economy is rigged: Donald Trump. And his policies seem likely to aggravate inequality. So I wanted to talk with Senator Warren about why this has happened and what could be a more persuasive story for her side going forward.
In the conversation that follows, you’ll hear us agree about the importance of housing policy and disagree about the importance of social issues. You’ll also hear Senator Warren make a fascinating comparison between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Senator Warren, it’s good to see you.
Elizabeth Warren: Good to see you, David.
Leonhardt: You and I got to know each other in the early 2000s when I was an economics columnist here at The Times. At that time you had just written a book about struggling middle-class families. I remember there was this moment when you started getting a lot more attention, specifically because you were explaining the financial crisis in ways that people could understand.
You obviously weren’t the first person to say that the modern American economy was failing hardworking families. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both centered their presidential campaigns around that message. And I’m curious, how is it that you think your story was different from the story that people had previously been hearing from politicians?
Warren: I think of it this way: I just kept punching harder because nobody was listening. Nobody overstates it, but people just weren’t paying attention.
My work was all about what’s happening to America’s middle class and you point out the book where you and I met — it was sort of my first effort to write a popular book, you know, read by tens of people. But I was looking at what was happening to America’s families in the ’80s and ’90s through the lens of bankruptcy. Here were all these middle-class people who had one of three things happen to them, usually two out of three: one, huge medical debt; two, an extended job loss; or three, a death or divorce in the family.
That’s how they ended up in bankruptcy court. Bankruptcies were going through the roof, and the conflicting story here was that those are layabouts: “Those are people who are just trying to achieve the system. Those are not hardworking folks like you. Let’s ostracize them, let’s push them out. Let’s make bankruptcy laws harder.”
And so that’s the context in which I wrote the 2003 book you’re talking about, “The Two-Income Trap.” And the point of this is to say the problem is structural. It’s not you. You didn’t fail to work hard. It’s that the structure changed. When I came along to talk about this, it’s obviously to talk about data, because I’m a data nerd, but it’s also to talk about what the human story is behind this and the damn political story that is being fed to Americans and just how fundamentally wrong I believe that is.
Leonhardt: And you connect that to what causes the financial crisis.
Warren: Yup.
Leonhardt: The New Yorker has this nice line in a profile of you that you represent a throwback to a more combative, progressive tradition. It’s obviously not just you, it’s Bernie Sanders and others too. And there have clearly been some big successes as a result of this progressive economic movement.
On a personal level, it catapults you into the Senate. On a policy level, there’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which you helped create. The minimum wage rises in a lot of states. Then the Biden administration comes along and it enacts a really progressive economic agenda relative to previous Democratic administrations. You helped shape that agenda. And I imagine when you look over the last 15 or 20 years, you’re quite proud of those developments.
Warren: Oh, God, no. I hadn’t even thought of it that way, David. I feel so frustrated that we didn’t deliver more — that when we had the opportunity, we didn’t deliver more and frankly, when we got into those elections, we didn’t lay out a more ambitious agenda. More was needed.
Damn! I wrote the book “Two-Income Trap,” what has it been now? Twenty or so years ago? I wrote it at a time when I talked about how I couldn’t get child care, and how I almost ended up not being able to go to school, not being able to finish my education, and ultimately quitting my first job because I couldn’t get child care.
I was literally on the floor in the kitchen crying on the phone to my Aunt Bea because I didn’t have child care. And there I am, 22 years later with my daughter who has her first baby, who’s on the phone crying, trying to hold down a job, and her problem is she can’t get child care. And now here I am, my granddaughter is going to be out there and it looks like for her, there are no better prospects for child care than there were for her mama or for her grandmama. Am I proud? No. I am furious. This is a problem we should have solved long ago.
Leonhardt: I think that takes us right to the current president. There’s this huge contradiction in American politics. The story that you and others have told about how broken our economy is is a much more widely accepted story than it was 15 or 20 years ago.
Even Republicans now admit that the free market has a lot of big problems, but it’s Donald Trump who has proven especially effective at using a version of that story — the game is rigged against you — to win elections and then to enact policies that I think you and I would agree usually make the problem worse rather than better. I’m interested in how you analyze Trump’s ability to tell that story so well. When you diagnose it, what is it that he has done that has worked politically?
Warren: If I can, let me just back up your question a little bit. I just want to tell you something that I don’t think I’ve ever said publicly, and it fits in this conversation. As you rightly point out, the crash happens in 2008 and I become the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel. Obama signs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law and brings me down to Washington. I spend a year setting up the agency. At the end, the Republicans won’t let me run the agency, so I come back here and I’m getting these calls saying you should run for Senate.
So I end up running for the Senate in Massachusetts. I start out behind by a bazillion points and then I get it down to maybe just a trillion points. Then it’s the summer before the election in November 2012 and the Democrats invite me to do a keynote speech at the national convention. I’m going to do a keynote speech one night, and I am excited. The team that’s working with me is excited. People around Massachusetts are excited. This is the big moment.
So I sit down, I write my speech. I go back and forth with the folks on my team on this speech, and the line I have in this speech is something like, “People all across this country feel like the game is rigged against them. And they’re right. It is.” Then I talk about the things I think we should do. So we send this speech in to be approved by the powers that be in the Democratic Party ——
Leonhardt: Which is basically the Obama White House at this point.
Warren: And they say, no. Take those lines out. You cannot say that this economy is rigged. And I said, huh? But it is. And they said, no, you can’t say that.
And the back and forth over just identifying the problem in 2012 is a huge tug of war. Now, ultimately, I got to leave it in. It was my speech and they let me leave it in. And I’m grateful for that. But four years later, when Donald Trump ran, he talked about “rigged” every day.
And he becomes president and for four years he kind of loses that thread, right? It’s more, “Let’s go beat up on immigrants.” And then Covid hits and Joe Biden becomes the nominee for president for the Democrats. Donald Trump loses. He becomes this very embittered person. But then the year leading into the 2024 election, what does he grab hold of? He grabs hold of this phrase that he uses over and over and over. On Day 1, I will lower costs for American families. I will do it. I, Donald Trump, will do it.
He kept saying “on Day 1.” In other words, he saw the problem and he said, “I get it. This is painful for you.” I mean, in his words, and he said, “I am making a credible claim that I am going to make your life better economically starting on the first day I got sworn in.”
How do I know that was really effective? Partly because he used it, but partly because right after he was elected, you may remember he is interviewed and when he sits down for his first interview one of the first questions is, “So, you know, Donald Trump, why? Why did you win this election?” And he said, “Because I promised on Day 1 to lower costs for American families.”
Audio clip of Donald Trump: When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time. And I won an election based on that, we’re going to bring those prices way down.
Warren: That is what he promised to do.
Leonhardt: How do you think about the experience of the Biden administration? Because the Biden administration really did pursue a progressive economic agenda in a bunch of ways, both symbolically (he walked a picket line) and substantively (he passed laws to promote American manufacturing). He cracked down on antitrust. I think there are some moderate Democrats, the neoliberals as it were, who liked to say, “Well, the reason that didn’t resonate is because it failed.” And I’m confident that you have a different diagnosis.
I’m interested in how you think about the fact that Joe Biden, in many ways, pursued the kind of economic policy I’m not sure you thought was exactly right, but really was much closer to what you think was right than any Democrat in a very long time.
And yet the economic results, at least in the short term, were not that good, and he just got almost no political credit for it.
Warren: Yeah. You know, I start this answer by saying Joe Biden is a good and decent man, and he cared. What Joe Biden didn’t do in those years was get out and talk about people’s pain. And while he did the hard work — and it was hard work to pull some progressive policies across the finish line — most of them didn’t go into effect immediately. They’re the long-delay things that we’ll see the effects of after the next election. Lordy. He didn’t make the case that “I am making a down payment on your future.”
I think that’s the part that people hunger to hear. And for me, that’s what this moment is about — that we, as Democrats, have to show that we get it, we got a plan to deal with it, and we are by God determined to deliver on it. Not a nibble around the edge, not a highly diluted version, but we are willing to fight for bold change, for big structural change, and then to deliver that change and stay after it until we have fundamentally made this economy work better for working people.
Leonhardt: You’ve brought us right to the purpose of this podcast series, which is to imagine what comes next, what comes after Trump. Look, Trump’s not going to be president forever, and because of the weird way in which his two terms have staggered, I think people sometimes lose sight of the fact that he really is in his second term.
We’re just not that far from thinking about what a post-Trump America will be, even if we’re still several years from being there. I’m curious how you think about specifically this idea of what an anti-inequality narrative — that’s probably a bad phrase, you can come up with a better one — but a story like the one that you have devoted your career to telling. What is a version of that? And if we’re being honest, specifically for the Democratic Party in this case, that can be more politically effective than the story that the Democratic Party has been telling. Because they’ve been trying to tell us a version of the story, but it just hasn’t worked.
Warren: Well, let me do both halves because these are actually separate questions. Let me do the front one. It seems very clear to me that the place we go now is about affordability. It’s about can you afford to live in America? And if not, what can we do about it? What needs to shift to work better and what role does the government have to play in that? You can’t fight with people and tell them they’re just doing fine financially because you looked at some average spreadsheet and it looked like they were doing OK.
Leonhardt: And I think you’d agree, the Biden administration sometimes committed that mistake.
Warren: It’s clear to me that you have to hear people where they are and that nobody in America wants to stand up and declare themselves losers in the great American financial game.
I think back on this, when I think about where we are right now. When the crash came in 2008, I was doing this oversight panel. I remember going around the country and we’d hold these local hearings. I initially thought, OK, we’ll get out, we’ll tell them what the bailout looks like, and so on. And what people really wanted to do is to stand up and talk about what had happened in their lives. I can remember the guy in Clark County, Nev., who talked about how he and his wife and his two little girls were now living in a van because the bank had come and taken their house.
It was this sense of: What happened to the America that I believed in, that I fought for? And the answer is: The rules changed and they changed against you. The game is rigged and it’s rigged against families. It was in 2008. Since then, have we made some things better? Yep. We passed Dodd-Frank. Put some more constraints in place — the right thing to do. Put a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place.
And then — money talks in Washington. Here come the lobbyists. Dodd-Frank gets weakened in 2018. The Republicans were gung-ho for that, but a bunch of Democrats signed up for it as well. Five years later, we see the second, third and fourth biggest bank failures in American history. It’s like nobody wants to learn the story here that we’ve got to make this country work better for working families, so that we have an economy where a family can work hard, play by the rules and build real financial security and the promise that their kids can do better than they did.
Leonhardt: I want to ask you to be pointed here because on the one hand, the idea that we need an economy that works for ordinary Americans, we need to tax rich people, we need health care, we need child care — that is a very familiar Democratic message that we’ve been hearing for a long time. On the other hand, I know you well enough to know that you don’t think the Democratic Party has the right message. So, can I ask you to be very specific about why Democrats have not been able to deliver that message in a successful way and what needs to change going forward?
Warren: Well, for openers, Democrats have always temporized on that message. They said, “Hmm,” “Yes …,” and “A little bit.” Right?
“Yes, we want to make sure that everybody pays a fair share, but we don’t really want to talk about what the taxes are.”
“Yes, we want to put a little more money into child care, but you know, a big package would be really expensive and the big donors don’t want to pay taxes.”
Look, I really want to draw a distinction here because I think it’s really important — the Republicans aren’t even trying. Donald Trump said, “I will lower costs on Day 1.” I didn’t hear any other Republicans saying that. And here comes the best part: We are now on Day 220 and what’s happened? The cost of groceries is up. The cost of utilities is up. The cost of housing is up. The cost of baby strollers is up. Up, up, up. All of these costs. Donald Trump has not delivered.
So, right now the Democrats are at a moment where we know what our values are. We have to articulate those values, and then we have to demonstrate that we really will fight for them. It’s why I was in New York City with Zohran Mamdani. Why? Because one of the things he says it will take to make New York City affordable for people other than millionaires and billionaires, is we have to make a big investment in child care. Good for him. I think that’s exactly the right thing to be out there arguing about.
If Democrats want to win, then we need to be clear on the kinds of investments that we want to make, on the fact that we have plans to pay for them and that we damn will really fight for them.
Leonhardt: I’ve spent a lot of time watching the TV commercials of Democrats who’ve won tough races — purple districts in the House, even red districts, tough states. And I think that one thing people sometimes fail to understand is actually just how populist many of those Democrats sound. Jared Golden in Maine, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio — the way they talk about the economy and the game being rigged and trade, it often sounds a lot like you and it sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders.
But they do something else as well, and that’s what I want to ask you about, which is that they are substantially more moderate on some social issues than the national Democratic Party. Whether it’s immigration, whether it’s crime, they really send these signals that “I am not a faculty-lounge Democrat.” I’m curious how you think about that because I do think most Americans are left of center on economics. I think they’re more moderate and maybe right of center on many social issues.
To me, that’s a big part of the answer to the mystery of how it is that people could be so angry and vote for the historical party of business, the Republican Party. That many, many Americans just think the Democratic Party has become too elite and out of touch with their values. You’re from Oklahoma. You’re originally a Republican. Is there any part of my diagnosis that you reject or any part that you accept?
Warren: Look, I accept the notion that the Democrats need to be a big tent party. We’re not going to agree 100 percent down the line on every issue. I understand that. But look at the same data that you’re talking about on analyzing where Americans are. What do they say are the most important issues to them?
Leonhardt: The economy.
Warren: The economy. The economy. The economy. It’s really interesting to me because it’s like every time you can ask a question that really intersects with the economy, it moves to the top. That’s what they care about. They care about their homes. They care about their jobs. They care about child care. They care about inflation.
There may be a lot of different words that trigger it, but it’s the economic anxiety that is driving this moment. Look back at the elections. Almost every election for — I’d have to count back — the last 10 have been: “Change.” “Help me.” “You didn’t do enough.” And that’s true whether it was a Democrat in office or a Republican in office. You, the person in charge, did not do enough to shift this system. Your point about the Republicans — I want to push back on you to go back to my point. Donald Trump did not run as a traditional Republican. Donald Trump did not run as Mitt Romney.
Leonhardt: No, he ran to the left of Mitt Romney on economics.
Warren: Are you kidding? He ran to the left of Hillary Clinton. He ran to the left sometimes of Bernie Sanders. Come on. He ran left, left, left on the economy and was smart enough to say, “And that’s why I got elected.” The problem with Donald Trump is he isn’t delivering on that. And he can’t deliver on that.
Leonhardt: I agree with you that Americans care about the economy more than anything. I mean, when you see these rankings of what’s your biggest issue? It’s five different versions of the economy, right? It’s like the economy, inflation, prices, jobs.
Warren: Right. The cost of school shoes.
Leonhardt: Exactly. But that still does leave this question of if they think both parties are too in thrall of the establishment, why do they choose the Republicans? And I do think a big part of that answer is that many voters essentially eliminate the Democrats because of what they see as the Democratic Party’s attitude on social issues. They think the Democratic Party is scolding. They think the Democratic Party looks down on them. They think journalists and professors look down on them.
So, while I agree with you that a kind of successful Democratic story almost certainly has to be centered on the economy, I just think the party’s effort to essentially adopt very progressive — I would say very elite — social positions and then try to never talk about them and always switch the subject to the economy has failed.
There should be some more introspection about moving to the middle on some of these things so that the economy can actually become the dominant subject in American politics. But I worry that if Democrats don’t do that and aren’t willing to moderate on all those social issues, voters aren’t going to be willing to listen.
Warren: Well, like I said, I believe in big tent. I’m not going to fight you over that. But we haven’t really tested that, David, because the last time we had a Republican who ran as a Republican for president of the United States was Mitt Romney — and he lost big time.
The last time Republicans ran as Republicans, they did very, very poorly. That’s because what the Republicans are selling is really bad for hardworking American families. And what Donald Trump is doing right now is really bad for American families.
It’s not that the American people sit around and worry about the economy. What they’re really talking about is their own finances, their own future and whether they see a path for greater economic stability or they just see a path of struggling harder and harder and harder. That’s the moment the Democrats find themselves in as we go into the 2026 election and 2028.
Leonhardt: So, for both 2026 and 2028, you would say if Democrats find themselves running against a junior version of Trump — whether it’s JD Vance or someone else, which I think is most likely; I don’t think the Republicans are going back to Mitt Romney — the right way to counteract that is a bolder economic message that promises real change and that says Donald Trump and his successors don’t mean it when they say they’re going to do that.
Warren: It is a bolder economic message and call them out for their lies. When they tell this story about how they’re going to come in and make us all safe on immigration because they’re only going to deport the rapists and murderers, call them out for the fact that no, they’re actually tearing families apart. They’re taking your barber who’s worked here 20 years, they’re taking kids who’ve been here since they were 5 years old. They’re taking grandmas out of this country.
They’re not making us any safer. What they’re doing is they’re just terrorizing people. They’re disappearing people in this country. Call them out for the lies. Call them out for the lies. And our fight is for hardworking families who themselves are fighting so hard every day just to build a little piece of security for themselves and their families.
Leonhardt: Let’s end by lifting up in two ways. As much cynicism as there is in American life, I do still think the American dream is among the most powerful ideas we have in this country. I’m curious, what is Elizabeth Warren’s version of the American dream? What do you think we should say to people in terms of this is the modern American dream and we can get there?
Warren: We can dream big again. I worry so much about the generation that’s coming of age now. The majority of young people think: “I’ll never get a house. Not going to happen. I just can’t see how the economics will ever work.” They’re moving that out of the American dream box for themselves. I don’t want that. I want an America where we’ve pulled some of the structures back around so that, yeah, you can own something. Now, it may be different from what your parents had. It may not have a big lawn, it may not have a garage. In fact, you may not end up with a car. You may decide that you’re going to live in an urban area near mass transit. Have at it. And you’re going to have a condo, a box in the sky.
But the point is, you’re going to have something that is yours. I want people to understand that the things they think they can’t have — like housing, like a good education, because they’re too expensive, because they’re out of reach — understand that’s only because of a bunch of policies we put in place. These are the choices we make as a country. What we have today didn’t happen because of gravity. It happened because of a bunch of choices.
Leonhardt: The house part of that answer is so interesting because housing is, in many people’s minds, fundamental to the American dream. And I think if a politician had come along 30 or 40 years ago and said, “Vote for me and I’ll help you buy a house,” a lot of Americans would have said, “I can already buy a house.”
But just as you said, with young people today, that isn’t the case. So maybe it argues for putting the idea of homeownership back at the center of the aspirational American dream that we’ve had. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is — you just alluded to this when talking about younger people — so many people are so pessimistic today. Look, there are some reasons for pessimism and worry. I get it. Climate change, Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law. But it seems to me that unless we can retain some optimism, we’re not going to be able to solve any of our problems.
And you are someone I think of as retaining optimism, as persisting. I’m curious how you retain your optimism in dark times and what advice you would give to people who say: “I just can’t take it anymore. I just want to tune out. I don’t want to have anything to do with politics anymore.”?
Warren: OK, let me start with: Hey, look, running for office is an act of optimism. Why do I do this instead of teach school or tend to my garden? And the answer is because I truly believe. We get together, we join hands, we push hard enough, we can make change. And how do I know that? Because people have made change in the past and they weren’t any smarter than we were, and they didn’t work any harder than we did. We just have to get organized and do it. So, that is part of the answer. Of course, we can do this.
But the second part of the answer is to stir, I hope, just a little bit of anger. Look, if you don’t like what’s going on, if you don’t like Donald Trump invading Washington, D.C., if you don’t like having your neighbor’s family torn apart by some guys wearing masks who won’t even tell you what their names are, then don’t cover up your head with a blanket. That’s what they want you to do.
The idea that it’s a neutral position just to say: “I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. Nope. Nope. Sorry.” That is saying: “I’m going to be one of the supporters of the people who are doing the immigration raids. I’m going to be one of the supporters who are cutting off cancer research.” It is giving them license. It’s giving them your proxy to go ahead and do that. So that’s my fired-up part of this.
But I want to say one more part, and that is: Yeah, this is hard. You bet this is hard. You have to take care of yourself. So what are the best ways to do that? Get some partners in this. Never underestimate the power of organizing — whether it’s a political group or a union group or a moms who drop off the kids at kindergarten group. Find some friends who can be in this with you because you keep each other going in the hard times and because you come up with other good ideas.
Look, I would just love it if democracy were easy. I would just love it if right now everybody was voting for all the stuff I like and we had a majority of Democrats in the House and in the Senate and we had the White House. I would love that. But that’s not where we are. So it comes down to us to make the decision: what are we going to do about it? And if you really think that there is a chance that we could build an America, we could build an America where people could say, “Yeah, I work hard. I’m going to have a house.”
I believe in an America where I can change jobs and not have to worry about whether or not I could lose my health care. I believe in an America where I can have a baby and know that I won’t have to quit work to stay home, and that I will actually be able to get high-quality child care. I believe in an America that works not for a handful at the top, but that works for all of us. If you can just feel the tiniest little spark of that belief, keep it alive, get in the fight and we actually could make this happen.
Leonhardt: Senator Elizabeth Warren, thank you so much.
Warren: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to have this conversation with you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Emily Willrich. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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