Rep. Brendan Boyle thinks all the Republicans who are telling him privately that the new White House is “absolutely crazy, and that [Donald] Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing” should be ashamed of themselves for not saying it publicly.

Rep. Marc Veasey says “there’s high-profile Republicans that you talk to on the House floor, in committee, and if you even bring up the president’s name, they just roll their eyes.”


But the two Democratic congressmen—one representing Philadelphia and part of its suburbs, the other representing Dallas—say they're more concerned about the members of their own party who haven't come to terms with what went wrong for them in last year’s elections, and why.

Over beers at Bullfeathers, the two congressman talked in POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast about their new project, the Blue Collar Caucus, which aims to reconnect Democrats with working class Americans.

Boyle says people laughed at him when he made a big deal out of an Oreo plant in his district moving jobs to Mexico. Then a few months later, an even bigger Oreo plant closed outside Chicago. “There was one candidate who latched onto it," Boyle says, "and it was Donald Trump.”

The caucus already has 26 members, say Boyle and Veasey. They're planning to bring in blue collar leaders to see them in Washington and to organize trips around the country to help Democrats understand what they’ve been missing.

Boyle and Veasey agree on a lot. Not everything, though: Boyle boycotted Trump’s inauguration, and Veasey felt it was his duty to go. For Trump’s joint address to Congress at the end of the month, Boyle says he’s definitely in, and Veasey is still figuring out what to do.

“I prayed. I asked God to give me to some guidance on what I should do about going to the inauguration,” Veasey says. “I’m sure I’ll do the same thing as it relates to State of the Union.”

Even as they organize their own party to better address the issues that drove Democrats to vote Trump, Boyle and Veasey say they want to keep the pressure up on their Republican colleagues to express their criticisms of Trump in public.

Veasey says that after Trump signed his executive order barring travel for visa holders from seven Muslim-majority countries, one of his colleagues on the House Armed Services Committee was incredulous. “They were like, “Can you believe that he did that? That was the most foolish thing in the world to do,” Veasey says.

“If I had a dollar for every time that I’ve used that phrase or I’ve heard that phrase in the last year,” Boyle adds, “we wouldn’t be in the Blue Collar Caucus. We’d be making too much money.”