Governor Shapiro has made it clear that these midterms will be a referendum on the chaos, cruelty, and corruption of Donald Trump and his allies and an opportunity to elect strong Democratic leaders who will deliver for Pennsylvania families

PENNSYLVANIA – Yesterday, Governor Josh Shapiro joined The Jim Acosta Show and The MeidasTouch Podcast to discuss what’s at stake in the 2026 midterm elections: making life more affordable for working families, protecting free and fair elections, and holding Donald Trump and his allies accountable for putting their own interests ahead of Pennsylvanians.

Governor Shapiro continued to make clear how Trump’s failed economic agenda is driving up costs for Pennsylvania families, farmers, and small businesses — from imposing yet another reckless tariff on Pennsylvania’s largest trading partner, Canada, to his continued war of choice in the Middle East, to cutting healthcare and food assistance for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians while enriching himself, his family, and wealthy MAGA allies.

The Governor also discussed Pennsylvania’s critical role in electing a Democratic majority in Congress and defending our very democracy against Trump’s repeated efforts to undermine confidence in Pennsylvania’s free, fair, and secure elections.

Watch and read below for key excerpts from Governor Shapiro’s appearance on The Jim Acosta Show and The MeidasTouch Podcast:

Gov. Josh Shapiro on The Jim Acosta Show

Jim Acosta: I mentioned the affordability crisis — Trump says the affordability thing is a hoax — but I was just looking at the AAA gas prices, and they’re up, it’s up around four bucks a gallon, and Pennsylvania is especially hard hit right now. What’s happening in your neck of the woods? How is all of this impacting you?

Josh Shapiro: Everything Donald Trump has done has caused things to cost a whole lot more. From the war of choice in Iran that he was wrong to get into and has no idea how to get out of. The Iranians now control the Strait of Hormuz, whereas before it was wide open to commercial vessels. They’re controlling it. They’re choking it. As a result, energy prices across the country are rising again, back up around that $4 a gallon mark. It had been going down a bit, but the war of choice in Iran has caused gas prices to go up, and then his tariff policies have caused grocery prices to go up. It’s had a particularly hard-hitting impact on Pennsylvania farmers, especially with the news today of the added tariffs with Canada. They are our largest foreign trading partner. We do about 14 billion [dollars] of exports and roughly 14 billion [dollars] of imports. We’ve got a real balanced trade there. Those prices are going up because of Trump’s tariff policies. Interest rates remain high, which is choking our housing market.

Overall, everything Donald Trump has touched has caused things to cost a whole lot more, and Jim, that’s before we even get into the full effects of that budget bill that he passed. They gave a tax cut to the people at the very top, and paid for it on the backs of people’s healthcare, middle-class and working-class folks who are losing access to healthcare in in my state, 510,000 Pennsylvanians either have [already] or will lose their healthcare by early next year, and 140,000 are losing SNAP. […] Everything Trump has touched has made things worse and made things cost way more.

Jim Acosta: There’s been a lot of talk about sending federal agents to polling places, they have not ruled this out. […] What do you, as governor, do if they attempt something like that?

Josh Shapiro: Well, first off, it’s illegal to have law enforcement in the polls in Pennsylvania, and we will uphold the rule of law here in the Commonwealth. Second, I’m the Commander in Chief of the Pennsylvania National Guard, and we are not deploying the Guard to interfere with one’s right to vote. That is your most fundamental right as an American, and we’re going to protect it. I do expect Trump and his enablers to try and scare people, particularly in our Latino communities and immigrant communities, to try and scare them to not even show up because they see that those communities don’t like what Donald Trump has been selling. This is all part of their effort to try and thwart the will of the people and not just have a good old-fashioned election. I think they understand that what they’ve sold the American people has hurt the American people. That their chaos, their cruelty, their corruption is something people see right through, and so they’re playing these games to try and scare people from showing up. And so, what I would call on all Americans to do is to rise up and show up, and have record numbers of turnouts, and have a national referendum on Donald Trump’s chaos, cruelty, and corruption. If we do that, I would hope we would be able to win big and send a clear message to Donald Trump that we’re not buying what he’s selling, and that we’re now going to be a check on him.

Jim Acosta: Governor, you mentioned your work as an attorney general. I do want to get your attorney general take on Trump’s crypto stuff, his stock trading stuff. […] They’re planning to charge for special high-speed access to his Truth Social posts, including possibly his own affecting national security and financial markets. […] What has been your reaction as somebody who has been in this law enforcement realm as to what he’s been up to with all of this?

Josh Shapiro: I think his presidency can be defined by three words: chaos, cruelty, and corruption. Deep corruption. Where he and his family are making billions of dollars off the insider access that they have, where the deals they’re cutting overseas are not in the American people’s best interest, but in their own best interest. I want to stress that point for a moment. When you have a corrupt president making deals to enrich himself, that means that when he’s sitting at a negotiating table, or on the line with a world leader, or making a decision, it is not a decision in the best interests of the American people, but rather how it enriches himself or his family, which takes money out of our pockets, which makes it harder for the American people to get ahead while the Trump family prospers. You know, I think one of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court has made in the last half century or so was the decision to, in effect, give Donald Trump absolute and total immunity. And it really flies in the face of what our founders were worried about […] their worry that the executive would accumulate too much power, and that America would once again be led by a tyrant and slip into tyranny. […] We have a president of the United States who is focused on doing right by himself, focused on enriching himself and his children and the people who are closest to him. The fears that our founders had are now sadly being realized. It’s one of the reasons why I think we need real reform in this country. We need to pass anti-corruption laws. I think we should honestly consider a 28th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, putting some guardrails on any future president and enshrining in our Constitution as an amendment, those anti-corruption laws. I think we have a lot of work to do, and Donald Trump has exposed some of the weaknesses, if you will, in our system because he’s been so brazen about his corruption and so willing to engage in it, and now we’ve got to correct for it.

Jim Acosta: What would be a reform that you would like to see, for example?

Josh Shapiro: Well, I think we need real anti-corruption laws enshrined in our laws and considered to be put into the Constitution. The Emoluments provision, which says that, in effect, an executive can’t enrich themselves, we’ve seen that picked apart as well. I think what we need to do is make sure that conflict of interest laws are strengthened. I think we need to make sure that a president can’t make money off of his presidency — this guy is insider trading every day. I think you need to have higher standards for those elected officials, including the president of the United States. All of those things need to be considered, and all of those things, I think, need to be a part of what a new Congress, hopefully led by Democrats, is talking about. And I think it needs to be central to who we are as Democrats that we’re the party of good government, we’re the party of reform, and we’re the party who has seen the errors of the ways of this Supreme Court taken advantage of by a president who lacks integrity, and we’re going to correct for it going forward.

Jim Acosta: How worried are you that Trump will not honor the results of these midterms? And what do we do as a country if that occurs?

Josh Shapiro: If past is prologue, that is what he will do again. The good news is as you look at the experience I went through in Pennsylvania back in 2020, our courts held, the public held firm, and Donald Trump left. Now it wasn’t a peaceful transfer of power, and he sent people to the Capitol on January 6th to try and upset that. You still have election deniers out there who claim he won in 2020. Heck, my opponent claims that he won in 2020. I ran the first time against a guy who was there on January 6th, who participated in that riot. Now I’m running against someone who stood up at a podium and said Donald Trump won the 2020 election. So I think, in addition to pushing back on Donald Trump, we’ve got to push back on his enablers, the people who enable this behavior, and make clear that there’s no place for them in our government. There’s no place for them in positions of leadership and power.

Gov. Shapiro on The MeidasTouch Podcast

Ben Meiselas: I want to give you a quote from the Premier of British Columbia because this hit me hard. He said, “I feel sorry for Americans today under Trump. If you can’t be friends with Canada, then you almost certainly do not have friends anywhere in the world, and that is a very lonely place to be. And when I wake up, I feel with this Trump regime controlling America, it feels painful, it feels lonely, and it feels chaotic, and frankly very dangerous.” I just want to get your take, being the governor of a commonwealth like Pennsylvania. What do you make of that when you hear leaders in other countries say things like that?

Josh Shapiro: I was in Canada about a month or so ago, they’re one of our most important trading partners in Pennsylvania. We do about 14 billion [dollars] in both imports and exports, really, really balanced. And I got to tell you, when I was there, I gave a few speeches, and one of the things I made very clear is that I respect Canadian sovereignty and appreciate the relationship we have with Canada. And folks clapped for that. They were grateful for that. A line that a few years ago would have just sort of been, you know, something that sort of washed over people because of course we would have respected Canadian sovereignty. Now it’s different. Now, Donald Trump continues to poke his finger in the eye of our allies and coddle our enemies. It makes us less safe, it makes us more isolated, and it makes things cost a whole lot more for the American people. Here in Pennsylvania, we’ve seen our craft brewers pay higher prices because of the tariffs on Canada. We’ve seen our farmers in Pennsylvania lose significant market share because of the tariffs on Canada, they’re an important trading partner for our farmers. And so what you really have is an agent of chaos who makes us more isolated, makes things cost more, and makes our allies look for new alliances that don’t include the United States, which ultimately makes us less safe and less prosperous. It’s very very sad, but this is the Trump doctrine. This is his approach, and it’s bad for America.

Ben Meiselas: I want to get your perspective of when you watch [Donald Trump’s speech] because to me we could play it as “Okay, Donald Trump, look what he did again. He’s horrible.” But, there’s a national injury that we suffer when the president does that.

Josh Shapiro: Yeah, and I think that’s an important way you just said it. You know, a national injury. It hurts us as a country. I actually thought it was a sad day for our nation to have a president of the United States from the White House speaking and acting in such an unhinged manner, totally disconnected from reality. And you point out as a lawyer, you know, it’s one thing to make these claims in a press conference, but as we learned back in 2020, when Donald Trump and his enablers sued me 43 different times to try and throw out the votes of the people of Pennsylvania, thwart the will of the people in Pennsylvania, when he had to go to court and he had to back up these claims, what happened? He couldn’t, and in the few cases where his lawyers lied, we sanctioned them, and ultimately, like Rudy Giuliani, they lost their law license for lying to a court. He’s got nothing to back up these claims. What he’s really trying to do, and what his enablers are trying to do, is distract from their chaos, from their cruelty, from the corruption, from the war in Iran, from the tariffs that have given everybody higher prices, from the soaring interest rates that are hurting our housing market, hurting businesses, hurting families, it’s all a grand scheme at distracting the American people from their failures.

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