Transcript:
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And as we said, with the Republican Convention in the spotlight this week, we now turn to a former member of the party who simply had had enough. Beth Fukumoto served in the Hawaii House of Representatives for three terms. But the party forced her resignation after she publicly denounced President Trump’s policies and his rhetoric. She is now openly acknowledging what she calls her political failings and is now a Democrat. Here she is talking with our Michel Martin about the racism she endured and what led to her resignation.
MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Beth Fukumoto, thank you so much for talking with us.
FMR. STATE REP. BETH FUKUMOTO (D-HI): Of course. Thank you.
MARTIN: You served three terms in the Hawaii House of Representatives. You rose to minority leader. You were one of the youngest people ever in a leadership position like that. So, you were clearly on the rise there before all the events took place that we’re now going to talk about. But I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking us back to why you were attracted to the Republican Party to begin with.
FUKUMOTO: Sure. well, I think, for context, I was — it was 2008 when I was graduating from my master’s program, and went back to Hawaii because of the recession, and found a job working in the legislature. And I found a job working with the Republicans in the legislature. And I think what I saw — my state had been Democratically controlled since 1954. And so most of the policies that were in place were all Democratic policies, or at least they have had the ability to implement their policies since 1954. And I felt like, as somebody who was watching my community really suffer from the recession, and just economically, nobody was being able to build wealth, people were having trouble having a place to live, it — our cost of living was just skyrocketing. And I didn’t feel like the legislation was taking that seriously enough. And as somebody that was newly out of graduate school, and didn’t have much of a political background, the natural conclusion for me was that it must be that those principles didn’t work. So perhaps we should try Republican principles, and specifically things like being more careful with money, being cautious with government spending, not overtaxing people. All of that really appealed to me at the time, from the world view that I had.
MARTIN: Well, in fact, you were one of the standard-bearers, as I recall.
FUKUMOTO: Yes.
MARTIN: I mean, that was this initiative that was announced by the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, a multimillion-dollar initiative to kind of recruit, train and support diverse candidates across the country, particularly at the state and local level, as I recall. And weren’t you one of the people who were selected to kind of roll that out?
FUKUMOTO: Yes, I think one of the first events that I did — it was, I think, the first event I did at the RNC was this announcement that we were going to be putting money into state level races, specifically to get women and other candidates, specifically people of color to have backing, so that they could run for office, so they can achieve — we could achieve a better balance and more diversity amongst even our candidates.
MARTIN: So, what happened for you. When did you start to feel disaffected? When did you start to feel, well, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was?
FUKUMOTO: There were multiple things going on, right? You definitely — I knew that a lot of — at least some portion of the party was only doing this because they wanted to be able to win. And I thought that, as long as that coincided with what I actually wanted, which was more diversity on our tickets, then it was fine. We could work together. We could move forward. I think what — that was something I thought was going to be OK with me and, over time, realized that it wasn’t going to be. Part of it was that I was in this position where I should have been able to set policy. I should have been able to set the vision. And I was to a certain extent in Hawaii. But what I noticed fairly quickly, especially as Donald Trump and — I guess as Donald Trump started to pick up speed, what I realized very quickly is, I was only valued in the party, and my diverse face, if you will, was only valuable as long as that’s all it was. And if I had different opinions, if I wanted to voice something else, then quickly people didn’t want me on the stage anymore.
MARTIN: Well, give an example of that. How did that become clear to you?
FUKUMOTO: So, I think the example would be when I started talking about Donald — specifically, Donald Trump in December of 2015 was the first interview that I did, saying that I thought that the comments that he made about Japanese-American internment were appalling and didn’t have any place in the Republican Party. That, to me, should have been a perfectly good message, given that we were trying to make this new party. That’s what we said we were trying to do. So, when I realized that — first of all, when Donald Trump started talking about the Muslim registry, I started to get very concerned, started to talk to other Republicans who were much less concerned, and many of them said, this is not something that’s ever going to happen, he’s just using it as rhetoric, and brushed it off. And then when I tried to talk to RNC and say, this is impacting the message we’re putting out, it’s the exact opposite of all the things you told me to say, let me talk about it, they basically said, we don’t want to talk about this, because it’s not in the news cycle. And so, for me, I started speaking out then, and then quickly, within a few months, there was a complaint against me. A few months later, I said the same things again at the state convention, and was booed for 15 minutes. But I just really thought we needed to talk about this, because it was so different than what we said we were doing, that we needed to at least acknowledge what had gone wrong.
MARTIN: You were actually removed from your leadership position.
FUKUMOTO: That’s right.
