INTERVIEW: Rep. Randy Fine explains why he wants the Nobel Peace Prize named after Trump and why the Schumer Shutdown is devastating Florida real estate
Rep. Randy fine tackles Middle East peace and the Schumer Shutdown in his latest interview with the Washington Reporter.
If President Donald Trump successfully brings peace to the Middle East — in spite of Hamas terrorists blowing up his deadline of last weekend for a deal — Rep. Randy Fine (R., Fla.) doesn’t just want him to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year; he wants the prize named after Trump.
“If Trump can make that happen, that it’s an extraordinary achievement, far greater than the Nobel Prize,” Fine said in an interview with the Washington Reporter. “They shouldn’t just give him the Nobel Prize. They should just rename it and call it the Trump Prize.”
But, given Hamas’s unprovoked assault and rampage across Israel on October 7th, nothing is guaranteed, even though Israel and Palestinian terrorist leaders have both ostensibly agreed to Trump’s peace deal.
“There won’t be a lot of sleep in the Fine household until Monday,” Fine said. “The idea that these people who have been held in unbelievable conditions by these Muslim terrorists might be released is extraordinary. If President Trump can bring the hostages home and bring a lasting peace to the Middle East, it will be the greatest diplomatic achievement in American history by far.”
Fine has been one of Congress’s fiercest critics of Islamic terrorism since his election, and one of his current projects is passing legislation to ban Sharia law in America, which has already garnered support from his colleagues in the House like Rep. Brandon Gill (R., Texas).
The move, Fine said, is necessary. “We can see what will happen if we don’t solve this problem. America is on the same path that the United Islamic Kingdom is on, and we’re maybe 20 years behind, and maybe 10 years behind.”
“Do we want to be the United Islamic States, or do we want to be the United States?” he asked. “And what’s clear is the goals of these people are not to integrate, but rather to destroy and defeat and conquer, and we can see what’s happened in England. We can use that as a case study of what we don’t want to happen here…We need to go back and take a look at the people who’ve become Americans over the last 25 years, and say are these people who really agreed to follow our rules in order to become citizens? If they haven’t, we need to strip them and send them home.”
Fine painted a bleak picture of other American allies, especially ones that have recently moved to recognize the non-existent country of “Palestine.”
“These countries that have fallen to Muslim terror were not part of it,” Fine said of the peace talks that America and Israel led the way on. “In fact, they made it worse.”
“Without the U.S. and Israel, the world would be done,” he added.
America, he said, came perilously close to joining other western nations in embracing civilizational collapse. “Kamala Harris was a threat to Western civilization, and Elon Musk said as much during the during the campaign, and I think America and Israel really have been the only two countries that have been standing up against our ultimate destruction as a civilization,” he said.
Fortunately, he said, Trump won instead — and he praised the administration for having roughly half of the Cabinet attend the Kennedy Center’s commemoration of the horrors of October 7th.
While the Trump cabinet commemorated the horrors of the day, and while Trump himself met with former hostages and their families, some Democrats cited bogus Hamas propaganda figures or outright ignored the day’s events, as the Reporter covered.
Some Democrats, Fine said, were “not ignoring the events [of October 7th]. They’re celebrating with their friends.”
“For them, October 7th was a great day,” he said. “You probably would find some of them wearing a mask at some of these protests we saw in New York. We have to accept that. This is when I talk about people who hate America and seek its destruction, this is part of what I’m talking about. When Zohran Mamdani puts out a post which was repulsive on so many levels, but when he talks about 67,000 Gaza Arabs killed, that number, even by their own admission, includes terrorists. Why would we mourn the death of people in Hamas?”
Unfortunately for seniors in Florida, some of those Democrats may be needed to reopen the government. Fine painted a bleak picture of Florida’s real estate landscape during the Schumer Shutdown.
“The biggest effect that we’ve seen is that the real estate market in Florida has shut down, and that affects seniors who want to move to Florida, and it affects seniors who want to sell their homes,” he said. “And the reason it’s shut down is that in order to buy a house, if you need a mortgage, your mortgage company typically wants your home to be insured, and one of the forms of insurance they require you to buy is flood insurance, because we get hurricanes here, and hurricane insurance is provided by the federal government, and that federal flood insurance program is run by FEMA, which is shut down, so you cannot obtain federal flood insurance right now, which means you can’t close on your house if you’re trying to buy one, and it means you can’t sell it.”
Fine wasn’t optimistic about the odds of a deal emerging any time soon.
“I believe that on the other side, not every Democrat, but many Democrats, believe that America is fundamentally an evil enterprise, and so hurting America is not a bug, it’s a feature, and a shutdown hurts America,” he said. “That’s a win — taking money from Americans to give to illegal immigrants hurts America. That’s a win. Borrowing a trillion and a half dollars that’s not paid for that sends us closer to financial ruin? That’s a win for them. Hurting the country is the goal, and that’s part of what makes this difficult, is that we’re dealing with people who don’t want the same end result. We want a strong and free and prosperous America.”
“They want a weak and damaged America,” he lamented. “It’s hard to negotiate with those people.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Randy Fine, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman, we meet again. Obviously you represent Florida. You’ve got a lot of seniors in your district. Can you talk about how the Schumer Shutdown is either already affecting this community in particular, or how you see it impacting them if it continues?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, I’ll tell you, the biggest effect that we’ve seen is that the real estate market in Florida has shut down, and that affects seniors who want to move to Florida, and it affects seniors who want to sell their homes. And the reason it’s shut down is that in order to buy a house, if you need a mortgage, your mortgage company typically wants your home to be insured, and one of the forms of insurance they require you to buy is flood insurance, because we get hurricanes here, and hurricane insurance is provided by the federal government, and that federal flood insurance program is run by FEMA, which is shut down, so you cannot obtain federal flood insurance right now, which means you can’t close on your house if you’re trying to buy one, and it means you can’t sell it. It also means that if a hurricane were to come right now and your insurance lapsed on its annual expiration date, like if October 9th was your renewal date, you can’t renew your insurance. So there are now people who want insurance for their existing homes to stay protected who can’t buy it. That’s the single largest effect. A lot of people are nervous. They may not be getting the same kind of service they want, and they just don’t like it. Things seem slower, but where the system is truly seized up and stopped to function is the Florida real estate market.
Washington Reporter:
Looking at the other end of the age spectrum, younger people like myself are flying, hopefully, to Miami this weekend. Is the air traffic control situation something you’re already hearing about having delays?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Yes, people are having delays where they want to go. It’s because Democrats expect air traffic controllers to go to work and not get paid. They pay themselves. They won’t give up their salaries, but they expect our key frontline federal workers to go to work and not get paid. We’re seeing these sporadic slowdowns and shutdowns, and they’re only going to get worse with time, all so illegal immigrants can get free health care.
Washington Reporter:
How do you enter the second week of the Schumer Shutdown yourself? As far as thinking about the demands from the Democrats, do you think that ultimately they will cave and vote for the continuing resolution that they’ve basically all voted for 13 times?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, they don’t all need to do it. That’s the first thing. We need five of them to do the right thing out of 45, so it’s around 10 percent of them needing to do the right thing. As the pressure builds, as their constituents get angrier, I think that some of them will start to do the right thing. So for example, if we had Democrat senators in Florida, and thank God we don’t, they probably would have flipped already, because people are spitting mad that they can’t sell their homes. Most of the effects of the shutdown haven’t been as overwhelming. For example, we’re talking about air traffic control. That’s a slowdown, right? It’s not that you can’t get on an airplane, but you can’t sell a house in Florida right now. And so people are spitting angry. They call my office and they go, ‘what are you going to do about it?’ I said I voted to keep the government open. So did Ashley Moody and Rick Scott. I tell them they need to call their friends who live in New York and tell their senators to get off their butts and do their job. I think as the consequences rise, the pressure will build.
Washington Reporter:
Are there other consequences that you’re already seeing with the shutdown that are impacting Florida, for example, that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries aren’t thinking about in their New York ecosystem?
Rep. Randy Fine:
What you’re really seeing is a lot of slow down in service. Everything’s taking longer. The lines aren’t answered, the responses aren’t as quick. In terms of the system seizing up, that’s going to start to happen when people don’t get paid. Donald Trump is doing everything he can to shelter the American people from the Democratic shutdown. You have to remember, I believe that on the other side, not every Democrat, but many Democrats, believe that America is fundamentally an evil enterprise, and so hurting America is not a bug, it’s a feature, and a shutdown hurts America. That’s a win — taking money from Americans to give to illegal immigrants hurts America. That’s a win. Borrowing a trillion and a half dollars that’s not paid for that sends us closer to financial ruin? That’s a win for them. Hurting the country is the goal, and that’s part of what makes this difficult, is that we’re dealing with people who don’t want the same end result. We want a strong and free and prosperous America. They want a weak and damaged America. It’s hard to negotiate with those people.
Washington Reporter:
You’ve got your work cut out for you there. I want to shift to your committee work here. On Ed and Workforce, for example, we’re now a couple months into the school year. What’s your assessment at this point, in October 2025, and on K-12 and higher ed? And what do you want to see that committee do for the rest of this Congress?
Rep. Randy Fine:
That’s a great question. We’ve done a lot of hearings exposing the problems. Now we have to start to advance legislation that’s going to actually fix them, so I will shortly be filing the federal version of the bill that I passed in Florida that has largely eliminated the anti-Semitism problem in our K-12 system and in our higher education system. We know it works because we passed it in Florida six years ago. It doesn’t mean Florida is perfect. It’s not. But whereas I give Florida a B in dealing with anti-Semitism, most of the world gets an F, so if we can bring this model to the federal level, I think we will make massive impact.
Washington Reporter:
Can you talk about what that bill was in Florida that was so successful, and how that how that will translate, for example, to Berkeley?
Rep. Randy Fine:
It’s actually a very simple bill. It defines anti-Semitism using the IHRA definition, which is the most comprehensive popular definition used by governments in the world. And then it says, however an institution treats racism, they must treat anti-Semitism. See, we have 60 years of experience in this country dealing with discrimination in education, and the left acts as though they don’t know what to do. Well, if a white student calls a black student the N word, they know what to do. If the Ku Klux Klan wants to show up on campus, they know what to do. But when it comes to Muslim terrorists, everyone gets all confused. So what we said is, we’re going to figure this out. We’re just going to copy and paste, and wherever you have the word black in your codes, you’re going to put the word Jew, wherever you have the word racism, you’re going to put the word anti-Semitism, and overnight, the problems all go away.
Washington Reporter:
The Ed side of Ed and Workforce gets a lot of attention. Do you have things on the workforce side of that committee that you’re particularly excited about that pertain to Florida?
Rep. Randy Fine:
I don’t know that they pertain to Florida per se. Look, Florida is doing great. If we could just make America Florida, that would be incredible. On the workforce side, to be honest, it’s mainly doing things that we’ve already done in Florida and bringing them to the rest of the country. That’s why I think I’ve been able to be value add on that committee, because I sit in the hearings and I go, ‘we already did this, or I already did this in many cases in Florida.’ On the workforce side, I think we’ve got work to do on the union side to make sure that unions aren’t shutting down free commerce, whether it’s the gig economy or lack of democracy, and how union elections can sometimes work. We have work to do on the on the public union side, which I think is a real public policy problem, when the employees can exert this much influence over their bosses. But we’re doing great work, and Chairman Tim Walberg has been really great to work with, and I think he’s been fantastic. And you’ll see some more legislation from me on union stuff coming up pretty soon. We won’t do anything till after the shutdown, but we’re working on it behind the scenes right now.
Washington Reporter:
You were mentioning some of these Islamic terrorist groups and entities. I wrote a story earlier this week about Jim Jordan’s work with the Rockefeller brother orbit.
Rep. Randy Fine:
I read that, thank you for covering it.
Washington Reporter:
I saw him yesterday at Newsmax. I thanked him for doing it. What do you want to see from Congress? Where do you think that the legislature can be more aggressive in exposing these ties and working with the Trump administration, which is clearly prioritizing this as well?
Rep. Randy Fine:
I think it’s critical, and here’s why: the left has taken advantage and has perverted common sense, and here’s what I mean, when you see a protest on Capitol Hill, you’re programmed to believe that that’s organic people, that these are people who’ve taken time from their lives, who aren’t going to work, who are being away from their families, because they’re so passionate about an issue, that they are willing to get involved, and that’s a big deal. Most people aren’t willing to do that on anything, and the left has perverted that, and what they’re doing in the vast majority of these things is that these people are paid, and a paid protester is no different than anybody else doing a job. It’s not because it’s about a passion. It’s because it’s about money. And it’s the same, by the way, in the influence world, in the online world. It’s one thing when a couple hundred thousand people gives their opinion, it’s another thing when they’re doing it because they’re being paid. I’m a politician. I’m a political actor, and if someone gives me money, I have to share who it is, and then people can make their decisions as a result. What Jim Jordan is exposing, and what your article talks about, is this insidiousness, where money is being laundered to create fake protests and fake influencers, and it is a real problem that is dividing the country.
Washington Reporter:
So is it disclosure? What would you like to see more of? You deal with the Code Pink protesters. We made the featured image of our most recent interview with you a picture of you shooting lasers out of your eyes at these people. Who have you found to be the most concerning actors? Some of your colleagues in Congress have been exposing the CCP funding that Code Pink is connected to, but where do you see that going?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, they’re the most obvious, and I think exposing the funding is important. I’ve taken to, when they hassle me, saying that ‘I’ll answer any of your questions if you tell me how much you’re getting paid,’ and they start sputtering because they know they’re paid. They know it’s not organic. And I believe that a lot of this is being done to foment divisiveness, it’s being done to create a sense that there are political views that do not happen, that people are pro-Muslim terror or whatever it is. But why would China be paying for this? They just want to foment division in the country. That’s what they want. I don’t think China gives a hoot about what’s happening in the Middle East. They just want America to be divided. And so I believe that we’ve got to come up with reporting mechanisms and transparency mechanisms that say if you’re being paid to protest, there must be disclosure. If you’re being paid to put your opinion out into the world, you can still do it, but there must be disclosure. That’s what I have to do as a political actor. And all political actors should have to do the same thing. And what Jim Jordan and your story talks about, is them trying to launder money in order to create these lies of organic protests and organic and opinions that are not that are not actually organic.
Washington Reporter:
On the flip side of that, you’re going to the RJC, the Republican Jewish Coalition’s, conference later this month in Las Vegas. Give us a sense of where you see American Jewry in October 2025?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, I’m going to parse your question. American Jewry is not the RJC, that’s going to be Republican American Jewry. There are real issues in it. We see some of the so-called American Jewish groups, they don’t really back all Jews. We could have a whole conversation about AIPAC, but at the RJC, you won’t want to miss my speech. I will tell you that I’m going to say some things I’ve wanted to say for a while that we on our side are going to have to address the loud but small group of anti-Semites that are in our party. Those, I think, are largely being driven by the same forces that we are talking about. I think a lot of this influencer anti-Semitism on the right is simply paid for. And then obviously, we have a few elected officials who’ve gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs as well. A lot of this stuff is funded by Qatar. And it will be interesting to see if the peace deal holds, if Qatar cuts the funding for all of this Muslim terror that they have been paying for, if Qatar tell tells Al Jazeera, for example, to cut it out, that will stop one of the major sources of this propaganda, if Qatar stops paying Tucker Carlson to say crazy things, that will help with the issue, so we’ll see.
Washington Reporter:
You talked in our last interview about your Minyan plan to get more Republican Jews elected to Congress. Why is that a priority? And how’s that going so far?
Rep. Randy Fine:
We’re going to talk about it out there. I think the focus right now is making sure our Republicans Jews that we have come back. It’s a long term goal. It’s an idea that there should be more of us as possible, because I think it helps when we’re a meaningful percentage of the conversation. And right now, there are four Republican Jews. I think that’s great. There’s one who wears a kippah, and that’s me. I’m wondering if I can wear a sombrero the next time I’m on the House floor. But having more conservative Jewish voices helps get that perspective infused in the party, but it also helps address the concerns that Jews have about being Republicans. I’ve worked very hard for 10 years to make Jews feel comfortable being in the Republican Party, and there are certain people who are doing real damage to that. We need to just drown them out.
Washington Reporter:
Obviously we’ll end by talking about the peace deal that came out, but let’s focus on HFAC. We’ve seen Islamic terrorists literally named Jihad, stab Jews to death in Manchester, where my brother lives and was going to synagogue. How do you see that whole saga connecting with your push to ban Sharia law in America? We saw earlier this week that Tommy Tuberville on the Senate side is working on similar legislation. How’s that going?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, it’s going great. We’re up to 14 cosponsors. We can see what will happen if we don’t solve this problem. America is on the same path that the United Islamic Kingdom is on, and we’re maybe 20 years behind, and maybe 10 years behind. Do we want to be the United Islamic States, or do we want to be the United States? And what’s clear is the goals of these people are not to integrate, but rather to destroy and defeat and conquer, and we can see what’s happened in England. We can use that as a case study of what we don’t want to happen here. We need to devote resources to go take a look at much of the legal immigration of the past 25 years. And when you saw the story about Minneapolis, where everyone wonders, how did all these Somalis show up? Well, it turns out half of them engaged in immigration fraud. I think we need to go back. I think Democrats have been evilly smart. They have flooded the system so that the system stopped working. They wanted to flood the zone with illegal immigrants. You just overwhelm everything, and they’ve overwhelmed the legal immigration system. Somehow, bad people like Zohran Mamdani have been able to come up to become Americans. I think we need to go back and take a look at the people who’ve become Americans over the last 25 years, and say are these people who really agreed to follow our rules in order to become citizens? If they haven’t, we need to strip them and send them home.
Washington Reporter:
Is there something bigger at play here? How do you see this massive influx of numbers from these countries, mostly to Western Europe, but also to Canada, and also to America, happening? Is there some Is there a bigger driving force behind that? Or is it just ‘okay, our countries are falling apart. We need to move somewhere else’?
Rep. Randy Fine:
If that were the case, they would not move to those countries and make them fall apart like the places they came from. A great example of how this doesn’t happen is looking at Indian-Americans. They don’t want some of the dysfunction that they find in India. They come to America and become incredible entrepreneurs and doctors and they are incredible additions to our society. We don’t see that with some of these other groups. I think it’s a function of conquest. I think they are trying to establish a universal caliphate. You don’t go to other countries and then demand that people wake up at five o’clock in the morning to listen to your call to prayer, which says that your religion is superior to everybody else’s. You don’t go and block streets in order to do those things. You don’t go to those countries and wave the flags of the countries you came from, if you want to integrate. We have allowed people to become Americans who do not share our values, who do not wish to integrate, who do not love this country, and who do not want to add value to it, and that was a mistake. And if people lied to get citizenship, we need to strip them of it and send them home.
Washington Reporter:
I reported earlier this week also that several of your colleagues in Congress — Ed Markey, on the Senate side, for example — either were using fake Hamas death counts in their October 7th statements, or on the House side, people like Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, said absolutely nothing about October 7th. I’m curious what you make of that, and do you think it’s worse for them to be citing Hamas fake death counts, or ignoring the events altogether?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, they’re not ignoring the events. They’re celebrating with their friends. For them, October 7th was a great day. You probably would find some of them wearing a mask at some of these protests we saw in New York. We have to accept that. This is when I talk about people who hate America and seek its destruction, this is part of what I’m talking about. When Zohran Mamdani puts out a post which was repulsive on so many levels, but when he talks about 67,000 Gaza Arabs killed, that number, even by their own admission, includes terrorists. Why would we mourn the death of people in Hamas? No one should be sad about that unless, as Zohran Mamdani does, you love Hamas. The death of the bad guy is good. We didn’t go ‘it’s terrible that Nazi soldiers were killed.’ No, that’s great. Fewer Nazis is great. Look, we are dealing with people who are enemies within, and that’s something I’m very, very concerned about. I’m concerned about the future of the country right now, because I don’t feel like I serve in a room in Congress where everyone wants a prosperous America.
Washington Reporter:
I want to get your thoughts on the peace deal that the Hamas terrorists have allegedly agreed to after they ignored President Trump’s deadline from over the weekend. What do you think is going to happen there?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, there won’t be a lot of sleep in the Fine household until Monday. The idea that these people who have been held in unbelievable conditions by these Muslim terrorists might be released is extraordinary. If President Trump can can bring the hostages home and bring a lasting peace to the Middle East, it will be the greatest diplomatic achievement in American history by far, because it won’t be solving a two year old war. It’ll be solving a war that goes back to 1948. Israel’s never been safe. Israel’s never been at peace from the day it was founded. And if Trump can make that happen, that it’s an extraordinary achievement, far greater than the Nobel Prize. They shouldn’t just give him the Nobel Prize. They should just rename it and call it the Trump Prize.
Washington Reporter:
What comes next on the importance of combating anti-Semitism after a peace deal does happen?
Rep. Randy Fine:
Well, now’s the time to do it so you have the tools in place when it spins up again. It’s easier to take steps to make sure a fire doesn’t break out than it is to put a fire out once it’s blazing. The reason that Florida didn’t have encampments is not because of policies that were established after October 7th. It’s because of policies that were established in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, so we need to continue to take these steps, because anti-Semitism has been around for thousands of years. It probably won’t go away, so we need to continue to do it, and I’ll continue to push it. It’s easy to fight anti-Semitism when you have some idiot standing in New York saying we need to bring October 7th home and kill more people. When they’re quiet is when it’s harder.
Washington Reporter:
We saw about half of Trump’s cabinet go to the Kennedy Center earlier this week, on October 7th, to commemorate the horrors of October 7th, to meet with former hostages, to meet with families whose loved ones are still held, either living or dead, in Gaza. You’ve probably given some amount of thought to this. What would October 7th 2025 have looked like, both on a commemoration standpoint, and what would the world would look like if Kamala Harris had won in 2024?
Rep. Randy Fine:
That’s a great question. I wish I had been there at the Kennedy Center. I had been invited to the event on October 7th, but when we got told we didn’t need to come back to town, I commemorated it here in Florida. So thank you for your coverage, because I got to see what I missed. I believe that had Kamala Harris become President the United States, you can see what it would have become. It would have become the United Islamic Kingdom, or France-istan, or Canada-istan. These places have now fallen to Muslim terror and this deal that President Trump has negotiated was negotiated on the western side of the world by the U.S. and Israel. These countries that have fallen to Muslim terror were not part of it. In fact, they made it worse. We know what would have happened if Kamala Harris would have become president. We can see it in these other countries, and it would not be good for the West. Kamala Harris was a threat to Western civilization, and Elon Musk said as much during the during the campaign, and I think America and Israel really have been the only two countries that have been standing up against our ultimate destruction as a civilization. Without the U.S. and Israel, the world would be done.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Fine, thanks for chatting.