The Scene
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Wes Moore is not running for president. The governor of Maryland will say that anywhere: In a TV studio, at a press conference in Annapolis, at a Democratic Party gathering in an early presidential primary state. After a roaring response from the crowd at the Democrats’ Blue Palmetto dinner and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s (R-S.C.) “world famous fish fry,” Moore skipped the party’s all-day convention, which might have fueled even more 2028 speculation; he met instead with an early 2008 supporter of Barack Obama at his home in the suburbs.
Moore did take time, during the trip, to talk to Semafor. His speech had urged Democrats to take a page from Donald Trump and act boldly and quickly, not get bogged down in studies or meetings. We followed up on that, as well as local criticism of how he’d vetoed a study of reparations for the descendants of slaves, and how the deportations and asylum cancellations affected Maryland and every other state. And Moore described an active, faith-based liberalism that could respond effectively to the Trump administration, now and when it’s over. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.
The View From Wes Moore
David Weigel: When you talked about the speed Trump moves at, I was curious — how much of what he’s dismantled should Democrats be rebuilding?
Wes Moore: I don’t think that’s what Democrats should do. That’s basically making the argument that everything was perfect before, and he’s just dismantling something that was perfect. I’m not defending that, because I think you’re trying to defend the indefensible. There were real problems before. I think about my own life and journey — my journey has been the consequences of, in many cases, some really bad policies that have been put in place, and not just by Republicans.
So I don’t think that the answer is: Let’s just go and rebuild what was there before. Truthfully, there were people being left behind before. Saying we have to move with a sense of speed and urgency does not mean we have to put things back the way they were, as fast as possible.
On immigration; The Supreme Court just let Trump remove temporary status from 500,000-odd people. Some got asylum status while they were here, but most of these people, from Venezuela and Haiti, lost their TPS. Why was that wrong?
What we’re seeing is an exploitation of an already broken process. Immigration has been broken for a very long time, and again, Donald Trump didn’t break it. Donald Trump is actually exposing breakage. We know that Congress, actually, is the one with the authority to really reform and rethink and make sure that we have an immigration process that matches the aspirations of our country and comes up with a sane and systematic way for allowing immigrants to come into the country. Congress has decided that they’re not going to do this. The President has decided that he is not going to work with Congress to do this… so, in the last five months, we’ve taken a broken immigration process and we’ve just thrown kerosene on it.
Were the people who fled those countries enriching our country by being here? Haitians in Springfield, Venezuelans around Florida — was the country better because they were here, and weaker because they’re not?
We have to fix the immigration side. It’s — we have a system that is now allowing for exploitation. We have a system that is now allowing for choices about what rules to follow and what rules not to follow, what court decisions to enforce and which not to enforce. We have an absolute mess on our hands… [it] highlights the problem in the first place. Because what the President is doing, in many cases, the President doesn’t have the authority to do. The President is taking advantage of the fact that we have a broken system.
Tim Walz spoke here; he’s compared ICE, recently, to the Gestapo. You agree with that assessment?
I think we have an immigration system in this country that allows way too much room for interpretation. It allows way too much space for people to try to fill into the void — and in some cases, illegally. That’s the reason that the guidance that I’ve given to all of our state agencies is, in the state of Maryland, we’ve got to follow the Constitution. The constitution is very clear about where jurisdictional authority on immigration enforcement begins and ends.
One legislator here, John King, told Politico that he would skip the dinner because he was frustrated with your veto of the reparations study in Maryland. Was the issue with that, hey, we don’t need another study? Or was it, reparations are not worth pursuing?
This would be the fifth study in 25 years. What are we studying? We have got to stop being the party of bureaucracy and multi-year studies on things that we know the answers to, and be the party of action. There is nobody in the state of Maryland or elsewhere who can legitimately question my commitment to these issues, right? Just in the past two and a half years, we’ve had over $1.3 billion of investments in our state’s HBCUs. That’s a 60% increase. We’ve been able to have the largest mass pardon in the history of the United States of America for misdemeanor cannabis convictions. We’re giving assistance when it comes to first time home-buying. We’ve been able to address procurement policies and invest over $800 million in black-owned businesses. There is nobody who can argue that we are not doing the work of repair right now.
My point is, the bill says we are going to spend two years studying this and then bring the recommendations to the governor. Well, I am the governor, and I don’t need two years. Let’s work now. I have the largest amount of vetoes from a Democratic governor of Maryland in a generation. There was something about a data center study — vetoed it. We did something around an energy study — vetoed it. I don’t need studies. Just do the work.
Do you find, talking to people in Maryland, some who look at Trump and say: Hey, he’s doing something? At least he’s acting?
That’s where this goes, back to this idea that Donald Trump doesn’t need a multi-year study to dismantle the Constitution. Donald Trump doesn’t need a multi-year study to be able to say that he is going to put together a tax package that is literally giving billionaires a tax cut and leaving the rest of us with the bill. He didn’t need a white paper to explain that to him. So I think people, we have to look at his actions as, in many cases, inhumane and unconstitutional, and we have to be able to call it out, but we would be foolish not to understand there is something about speed that Donald Trump gets that we need to start getting as a party too.
Maryland’s a trans refuge state. When Republicans pass the laws people are fleeing, it’s sometimes couched in religious terms. How does your faith inform your tolerance toward transgender rights?
My faith informs how I think about humanity. I mean, I’m a deeply faithful person. I believe that if we’re all God’s children, then by definition, we’re brothers and sisters. And I think it’s important that we act accordingly. My faith really does shape how I think about the love of humanity, a love for the least of these, our ability to fight for those who need and deserve a champion. It’s part of our responsibility to emulate and try to be vessels of God on earth. There’s nothing Christian about bullying.