Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the first major Democrat to officially launch a presidential bid, sat down with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night for her first interview since launching her exploratory committee. Maddow began by highlighting Warren's consistent, decades-long focus on explaining how financial institutions are ensnaring the middle class in ruinous debt traps. And Warren quickly laid out her pitch for the Democratic nomination: "Washington is working great, fabulously for the wealthy and the well-connected — they have bought the government they want, they have bought the rules that they want. I think that Washington ought to work for everybody else," and "I want to be in this fight."
Inequality isn't new, Warren said, but "Donald Trump is an accelerant," and "he's pretty damned open about" his view that "this government works for the rich." With Trump, Republicans are "just wallowing in the corruption, but the problem is a long, systemic problem," she added.
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Warren actually found some common ground with Trump on foreign policy, however. "I think it is right to get our troops out of Syria and, let me add, I think it's right to get our troops out of Afghanistan," she said. There are "lots of different problems in Afghanistan, and what seems to be the answer from the foreign policy establishment? Stay forever. That is not a policy. We can't do that. Now, having said that, when you withdraw, you've got to withdraw as part of a plan. You've got to know what you're trying to accomplish throughout the Middle East," she said, and Trump's foreign-policy-by-tweet is the opposite of that. Watch below. Peter Weber
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