Sen. Mark Kelly delivered a blistering assessment of the Trump administration’s economic policies, its bungling of the war in Iran, and what he described as an unprecedented assault on American democracy — all while laying out a vision for restoring opportunity to struggling families.
More than 100 veterans, union workers and educators packed the town hall at American Eat on S. 4th Avenue.
“Right now we’re living in a time where people are really struggling,” Kelly told the crowd. “Half of Americans are having a hard time affording food.” It was a theme he returned to again and again: an economy that looks strong on paper but isn’t working for the people who built it.
“Our country is the richest it has ever been today,” Kelly said. “Does it feel that way to you?” The crowd’s answer was an emphatic no. “I think it doesn’t feel that way to probably ninety-nine percent of the country,” Kelly said, “but literally, we are the richest we have ever been… And folks can’t afford their lives anymore.”
Tax giveaway to the super wealthy
Kelly placed the blame squarely on Trump and the Republican Party’s tax policy, which he said funneled the benefits of that wealth upward. “We just gave a very large tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, and that tax cut has been put on the back of future generations,” he said, noting that seventy percent of the cut went to the richest people in the country. “To give that giant tax cut should be insulting to everybody else.”
He connected that tax giveaway directly to cuts in the safety net that families depend on. Kelly pointed to Arizonans who lost coverage as ACA premiums spiked, Arizonans kicked off Medicaid, and “the 167,000 children that don’t get SNAP benefits anymore.” As he put it: “We have kids that now go to school hungry because the president wanted the big tax cut. And by the way, it still adds trillions of dollars to our debt.”
That fiscal recklessness, Kelly said, has pushed the country to a breaking point. “This administration is adding significantly to the deficit,” he said, calling the nation’s $40 trillion debt load a crisis: “I got to say, this is the first time I’ve felt like the trajectory we’re on is unsustainable, and we got to get some people to turn it around.” He contrasted that with runaway defense spending, noting the Pentagon is now requesting $1.8 trillion—more than the rest of the world’s militaries spend combined. “Do we really feel so unsafe that we have to spend as much money on defense as every other country on the planet together? I don’t feel that way.”
Kelly criticized the administration’s approach to the war in Iran as rudderless. “We got into this thing with no strategic goal, no plan, no timeline, and no way out,” he said, taking a direct shot at Trump’s reliance on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to broker peace: “The son-in-law just isn’t getting it done… There’s no chance that that is the case.”
Corrupt Trump attacks on democracy
The senator reserved some of his sharpest language for what he called an attack on the democratic process itself, citing whistleblower reports that the U.S. Postal Service was ignoring court orders to process mail-in ballots. “That starts to, at some point, become a constitutional crisis,” Kelly warned. “You have a president that’s not doing what he is supposed to and follow the judiciary.”
He argued the motive was transparent: “This president realizes if you make it really hard for people to vote, he thinks it benefits him and helps him stay in power.” Asked to size up Trump’s ethics record, Kelly didn’t equivocate: “You could take all the corruption that has ever existed from any other president… and every other member of Congress, and add it all up, and multiply it times a thousand — you’re not even getting close to this guy.”
He also blasted reports that public lands may be sold off to wealthy developers, referencing plans involving Yosemite. “That’s pretty awful,” Kelly said, adding that some of his Republican colleagues would happily privatize national parks entirely. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d be okay selling the Grand Canyon to somebody.”
Kelly tied it all back to a simple diagnosis: an economy engineered for those already on top. “Most of the benefit of this great economy that we built… went to the executives in the corporation and the shareholders,” he said. “It didn’t go to the people actually doing the work. They got ripped off. And it’s because of people like Donald Trump, who prioritize the wealthy, and they prioritize corporations over everybody else.”
His closing pledge drew applause: “So we’re going to fix that.”
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