Schiff takes aim at Trump and affordability

In first year in Senate, he remains a White House foil and carries his party’s message.

- BY KEVIN RECTOR

ERIC LEE Getty Images

SEN. Adam Schiff has gone after President Trump and also focused on bringing down costs for Californians.

Five months after joining the U.S. Senate, Adam Schiff delivered a floor speech on what he called “the top 10 deals for Donald Trump and the worst deals for the American people.”

Schiff spoke of Trump and his family getting rich off cryptocurrency and cutting new development deals across the Middle East, and of the president accepting a free jet from the Qatari government. Meanwhile, he said, ordinary Americans were losing their healthcare, getting priced out of the housing market and having to “choose between rent or groceries.”

“Trump gets rich. You get screwed,” the Democrat said.

The speech was classic Schiff — an attempt by the former prosecutor to wrangle a complex set of graft allegations against Trump and his orbit into a single, cohesive corruption case against the president, all while serving up his own party’s preferred messaging on rising costs and the lack of affordability.

It was also a prime example of the tack Schiff has taken since being sworn in one year ago to finish the final term of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a titan of California politics who held the seat for more than 30 years before dying in office in 2023.

Schiff now serving his own six-year term has remained the unblinking antagonist to Trump that many Californians elected him to be after watching him dog the president from the U.S. House during Trump's first term in the White House.

He’s also continued to serve as one of the Democratic Party's most talented if cerebral messengers, hammering Trump over his alleged abuses of power and the lagging economy, which has become one of the president's biggest liabilities.