John Deaton, age 59, was born in Highland Park, Michigan and now lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. He currently works as a trial attorney at Deaton Law Firm, which he founded in 2006. It is his second time running for U.S. Senate from Massachusetts with the Republican Party; Deaton defeated Robert Antonellis and Ian Cain in the Republican primary for the office in 2024, but was defeated by incumbent Elizabeth Warren in the general election of that year.
Deaton earned a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1992 and a juris doctor from New England School of Law in 1995. Following law school, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1995 to 2002. He worked as Marine Senior Defense Counsel and Chief Prosecutor at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona and later as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona. After he medically retired from the Marines in 2002, he worked as an attorney. Highlights of the role included funding the testing of Claire’s products for asbestos in 2017 and defending cryptocurrency token holders from a lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020. He published his memoir “Food Stamp Warrior” in 2023.
According to Open Secrets, John Deaton has raised the third-most funding out of any candidate for his Senate campaign ($1,398,731), behind Democratic candidates Ed Markey and Seth Moulton. The top three organizations contributing to Deaton’s principal campaign committee were Ripple Labs (a blockchain technology company which has also donated substantially to President Donald Trump), digital wealth management firm Digital Ascension Group, and commercial real estate firm Carruth Capital. His campaign committee has received no money from PACs.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. It is part of a series of conversations with the candidates running to serve as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. The other interviews in this series can be found here.
CHLOE CRAFT: Thanks for sitting down with me. We’ll get to the politics, but first, I’d love it if you could introduce yourself as a person.
JOHN DEATON: My background is quite unique. Everything you want to know and don’t want to know is in my memoir, “Food Stamp Warrior.” I wrote it a couple few ago and it was really a cathartic exercise. I didn’t know if I’d ever publish it, because it involved a lot of unexamined trauma that I had really never dealt with in my life.
I come from a single mother on welfare and food stamps and a deadbeat dad who abandoned us. I grew up in Highland Park, near Detroit, which is ranked among the top ten worst neighborhoods in the country [Note: Deaton did not cite a source for this ranking]. At six years old, I saw my mother get stabbed in front of me during a mugging. Three years later, a child predator began brutally raping me for a period of two years and threatened to kill my mother if anyone found out. After watching her almost bleed out three years earlier, you can imagine what that did to the mind of a kid. At 17, my best friend Derek died in my arms from a drive-by shooting of a rival drug gang. My first day of high school, I had a gun shoved in my mouth so I became a high school dropout just like my family members before me…
I eventually found a tiny Catholic high school in the suburbs of Detroit. The principal felt bad for me, but he also made me earn it. He agreed to cut the tuition in half if I played two sports, maintained a 3.5 GPA and stayed active in the church. So at 14, I began commuting and working eighteen hours a week washing dishes and waiting tables to pay my way through high school and then college…
For 25 years, I’ve been a lawyer representing working-class people — plumbers, pipe fitters, shipyard workers — against multi-billion-dollar corporations and insurance companies. And the last thing I’d really tell you is that I’m the father of three daughters, who are the loves of my life. The reason I led with the book and the reason I wrote the book is because I learned that I broke the cycle of violence and extreme poverty and that when my daughters finally grew up, I was a good father unlike my father because I broke that cycle…
When my daughters moved to college, I had all this time to reflect, and that unexamined trauma just came rushing to the forefront of my life and it almost broke me. In my book, I talk about my own battle of addiction…
The good news, from a political standpoint, is I wrote every bad decision I’ve ever made in my life into that book, and so there’s nothing that my political opponents can find about me that I haven’t readily admitted and talked about. So that’s sort of me in a nutshell. I’m the walking, living, breathing embodiment of the American dream and everything that is possible in this great country if you’re willing to work hard.
I decided to run, despite not being a political person by nature, because I fear that the American Dream is dying in front of me. I don’t know if what I did would be possible today. I have this never quit attitude, but could a kid in Springfield, Brockton, Roxbury, do what I did today? Do they have the same opportunity?
I don’t want to be one of the last poor people to make it in America, and that thought gets me emotional. People ask me what drove me, and I know it’s not a politically correct thing to say, but hatred, in many ways, drove me in my life. Early on, my hatred of poverty drove me… My mother is my hero in life. Only a sixth grade education, the strongest person I ever met, never gave up despite it. … And what poverty did to my beautiful mother, it stripped her of her self esteem. We were subclass human beings because of where we lived and how we lived, and being that poor and that hatred of that and never wanting someone like my mother to be beaten down like that is what drove me.
CRAFT: You could be an advocate, you could run as a representative, you could do a lot of different things. Why run for the U.S. Senate?
DEATON: It’s not just Massachusetts, it’s the country. It’s a federal seat, and one-third of Massachusetts’ budget comes from the federal government. So senators can have an impact at the state level and at the federal level. We face multiple crises in this country. I’m talking about inflation, housing, foreign wars, fentanyl; there’s just one crisis over another. The wealth gap, my God, it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. But the biggest crisis we face is a crisis of leadership. In this politically divided world today, there are these two polar opposite sides and each side tells you to hate the other side, and each side tells you that the other side is a threat to democracy and doesn’t love their country and they’re bad, and I reject that. I think we need people who will put people before politics and we need people who are not going to get seduced by Washington and the swamp. The fact that I’m a good father and the fact that I graduated high school means I already beat expectations, so there’s nothing that they can give me. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, give me power and I’ll sell out.’ I’m not loyal to a person, unlike some politicians, and I’m not loyal to a party, I’m not loyal to an agenda, I’m just loyal to regular people.
I’m pretty confident Ed Markey is going to win the Democratic primary, so I’ll face Ed Markey, and I’m not going to attack him personally. He’s had 50 years, right? His first year in Washington, you were not born yet. I don’t have to ask you how old you are and I’m not going to, but I know that you weren’t born in 1976. I believe that the true problem in this country is career politicians. As the Republican nominee for Massachusetts, let me say that Lindsey Graham needs to STFU. He’s a Republican. Mitch McConnell has had three strokes on national TV. He’s a Republican. Dianne Feinstein was wheeled into the Senate at 90 and she didn’t understand what was going on. There’s a video of people whispering in her ear, unelected handlers saying, ‘Just say aye, just vote aye’ and she’s all discombobulated. Chuck Grassley is 92 and he’s thinking of running again. What’s sad is they don’t realize they’re the bad guys. I’m not going to say negative things about Ed Markey, but poor Ed doesn’t know he’s one of the bad guys.
That’s why I favor term limits. I think if you stay there, you just succumb to the process, you start selling out and you start rationalizing why you’re selling out. I think we need fresh ideas. Everything about Congress is broken. Here’s a great question for everyone: Why are there these omnibus spending bills going through? Why is a piece of legislation 2,000 pages? Why aren’t there single issue bills? A Ukraine funding bill should be called the Ukraine funding bill. It shouldn’t involve Social Security, public education, Medicaid and this and that. Maybe I’ll go there and I won’t be able to change anything, but before I leave this planet, I want to be able to say I tried at a big level, and I think I could have the most impact at the federal level. That’s why I’m running.
CRAFT: You mentioned how you’re not loyal to a party, but of course, you are running as a Republican. And there is the fact that Massachusetts is a historically blue state. Why did you decide to run as a Republican?
DEATON: I’d have no chance at ever challenging Ed Markey as a Democrat. That’s just never going to happen. And quite frankly, I’m not liberal or left enough to be competitive in a Democratic primary, even though The Boston Globe said that on some issues, I’m downright socially liberal [Writer’s note: A Boston Globe article about the 2024 general election debates between Deaton and Elizabeth Warren read, “Deaton repeatedly asserted he was a moderate, embracing more-liberal stances on issues such as abortion.”] The Boston Globe, which is not a bastion of conservatism, described me as a reasonable alternative against Elizabeth Warren [Writer’s note: a 2024 editorial in the Boston Globe opinion section endorsing Warren for reelection described Deaton as, “in many ways an attractive alternative — the kind of reasonable Republican who went out of fashion in Massachusetts after former governor Charlie Baker left the State House.”]
We live in a two-party system and the only way to run as an independent, in my opinion, is if you have massive name recognition. Charlie Baker, if he decided to come back and run as independent, he’s got that name recognition. Everyone knows former Governor Charlie Baker, or they know his name. Or you have to be able to self-fund, not do what I did and put $1 million in, but be able to write a check for $20 million or $30 million to be competitive. And so for me, as someone who was an independent for 30 years, the best option, even though it’s Massachusetts, was to run as a Republican. When I ran against Elizabeth Warren, during the primary, people said, ‘Well, you’re not conservative enough to win a Republican primary, and you’re not Trump enough to win a Republican primary.’ But I won it by 65%. To really get to your question, I thought the only chance I could win was if I avoided a contested primary and I decided to run this year because I was confident that I could clear the field for the Republican Party…
Still, I’m at a disadvantage because I’m a Republican in Massachusetts. But Ed Markey has a primary. Him and Seth Moulton are fighting it out. I can avoid a primary, and I’ll tell you why this is such a big deal in Massachusetts and why I viewed it as the only way I’d have a shot. Unlike other states, the primary is in September. It is incredibly late compared to other states…
For a no-name candidate, you spend all your time trying to convince the conservatives or Republicans, which aren’t very many here, that you’re the candidate for them but you just don’t have enough time. I won the primary last time by 65% and I had $800,000 left in my campaign. Elizabeth Warren had $23 million, and she’s Elizabeth Warren and everyone knows her. No one knows me and I spent my whole time trying to just convince the few Republicans to vote for me. And that is a recipe for failure. It is an incumbent-friendly system. This time, I’m pretty confident someone’s going to challenge Ed [Markey] and while he’s spending money and they’re moving way left — if you look at Seth Moulton, he’s no longer considered a moderate right, he’s moved pretty left — I can now, to be blunt with you, ignore Republicans. I’m the nominee.
My message to folks your age, is to just give me an honest look. Ed Markey is all about Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat. Green New Deal? It’s never going to happen. Medicare for all? It’s never going to happen. How about a guy that says, ‘Hey, let’s not scrap on. Let’s reform our health care system.’ There’s 23 million that don’t have insurance, let’s make sure they get insurance. Let’s not scrap the whole system and experiment with a government-controlled system, but let’s get those 23 million insured and then go back and break up the three insurance companies that have a stranglehold on our Medicare, on our healthcare system. … How about we have one person who’s described as a reasonable alternative, more of a moderate person. I’ll see if I can convince enough voters. It’s going to be challenging, but I think I can do it. I think I can reach disenfranchised Democrats who think they went too far left. I think I can reach the 64% unenrolled who think, ‘50 years is a long time, Ed, maybe it’s time we give this guy a shot. He doesn’t seem to be an extreme guy. He seems like he’s in it for the right reasons.’ It’s all about whether I can reach those people.
CRAFT: I want to talk a bit about your opponents. Have you met them, and what do you think of them? Is there anything you agree on, or anything you really don’t?
DEATON: Yeah. I mean, you know, we probably agree that on some of the things, we probably have agreements related to President Trump on some issues, you know. I don’t think President Trump has communicated in the administration why Iran was necessary, for example, right now. The only thing I think we agree on is that health care is a fundamental right for every American. We may disagree on the path right on how to get there, like Medicare for all, is not going to happen. It’s not but I bet that if they looked at my plan for health care, I want to break up those three insurance companies. You know, the reason affordable here, the Obamacare was never affordable is because it allows for three insurance companies that are vertically integrated from manufacturing all the way down to the pharmacy, they control 90% of our healthcare. That’s not real capitalism to me. And you know, it was a Republican Teddy Roosevelt who came in and broke the railroad tycoons and oil barons and broke those trusts up so that we could get fair competition.
I’m sure we agree that the wealth gap is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. And so I think we agree on principle ideas, it’s just how to get there that is the real fundamental difference. I know you asked about what we agree on, but the real fundamental difference is, if you look at both Seth [Moulton] and Ed [Markey], their whole message is fighting Trump. It’s a six-year term, right? And so it’s, we’re just gonna fight Trump, fight Trump. Fight Trump. Fight Trump. Well, he’s not going to be the president in three years. I think people are ready for someone who will fight for things. I didn’t support President Trump, but I don’t suffer from this hatred either. Like I would tell you, the number one criticism of me is just opposite sides of the same coin. I get from both directions. I either don’t love President Trump enough, or I don’t hate President Trump enough.
And my whole approach is to have one test, and that test is, ‘Is this policy good for Massachusetts and America?’ Excuse my French, but I don’t give a sh-t who the president is. I don’t give a crap whether you label it progressive or conservative. Is it good? Yes, it’s good for America. It’s good for Massachusetts. All right, I’m for it. It’s not, I’m against it. And I don’t care if Trump is disappointed. I don’t care if the Republican leadership is disappointed.
And they don’t have that approach. Their approach is Democrats, good, Republicans, evil. And remember, I’m the guy that stood on the stage and told Elizabeth Warren that same thing. Elizabeth Warren keeps telling you, all Democrats, good Republicans, evil senator, all of you suck. And that’s what I said to her on stage. And it’s still who I am as a person. I believe career politicians – Ted Cruz has to go, Lindsey Graham has to go, Chuck Schumer has to go, Mitch McConnell has to go, and Ed Markey has to go, you know, like that. That’s my approach. Vote all the bums out.
CRAFT: Recent polling found that young Americans are increasingly losing faith in the political system, with those expressing low trust being less likely to say they plan to vote. Massachusetts is a state densely populated by these young university students who want to know if representatives have any policies to protect them. If you were to speak to a young person here who’s unsure about voting, maybe it’s their first time voting, what would you say?
DEATON: I’m running for you because I have children your age and career politicians of both sides have robbed young people of their prosperity. We live in an America that’s different when I grew up and for the first time, your children are not guaranteed to have a better chance than you. They can’t afford houses, they can’t afford rent. They’ve been priced out of the economy. You need someone who’s recognizing that and who’s rejecting the politics of identity that all of these politicians are engaging in. You’re the people who need to vote the most, because it’s your future.
People my age grew up in a different era. I’ll just be blunt, we had an easier time. I’ve lived a difficult life, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve had challenges and I’ve worked hard for it, but you know, the reason I’m running is because, will you or will my daughter — I have a seven year old — if she was poor, would she have an opportunity to succeed in this life? They’ve sold you guys out. They really have.
I have very fresh ideas that no one has. I have a ‘5 million homes in five years’ plan where we take federal and state property that’s not being used and we incentivize affordable housing. I have an energy plan that brings in nuclear and renewables which will bring the prices down. I have a reform plan for student loans. … I have ideas that are addressing college students’ age bracket and I’m not blinded by all this toxic division that’s going on. Because I really, sincerely want to be able to say that I just didn’t make a difference in my life, but that I really did make a difference in other people’s lives before I die.
CRAFT: Let’s switch to a couple of light-hearted, quick-fire questions. What is a song that you’ve listened to lately?
DEATON: ‘Dear Mama’ by Tupac was something I was playing about four or five days ago in the car.
CRAFT: Do you have any book recommendations?
DEATON: By Ed Gryphon, what’s it called, “The Creature From Jekyll Island.” It’s about how the Federal Reserve was created by these five bankers in secrecy. It shows you that it’s a cartel. The Federal Reserve is actually not a government agency, but they made it sound like one, and it’s these bankers who got back in 1910 to really favor the banking industry. People would be outraged if they found out how our banking system was created. But that’s very interesting.
CRAFT: Who’s someone you look up to, in politics or otherwise?
DEATON: My mom, first. In politics, Teddy Roosevelt is the kind of Republican that I want to be. He created the natural parks and nature, but also I think he saved capitalism, to be honest with you, by breaking up the oil bearings and the railroad tycoons. And I also think Dwight Eisenhower was an honorable person as well.
CRAFT: What’s a good piece of advice you’ve gotten lately?
DEATON: To ignore the consultants and just rely on your own personality and what’s made you successful so far in life, and not let consultants get in your head, telling you, ‘You shouldn’t say this, you shouldn’t do that, this and that.’ Just be who you are and be authentic. Whatever happens is going to happen. Just be true to yourself at all times.
CRAFT: If people only remember one thing about you, what should it be?
DEATON: Father.
CRAFT: Thank you for your time. To wrap up, if there’s any question you want to answer that I didn’t ask, I’ll give you that space.
DEATON: Your earlier question was on point, which is whether or not I’m going to win this campaign is based on if I can reach young people. If I can reach them and give them a reason to vote, and that’s the challenge, because it’s very easy to be demoralized and disenfranchised and feel like, ‘what’s the point, nothing changes’ and all of that. But they do have the power to make a difference in these elections and so that’s why I talked a lot about that, because that was such a good question, because if I’m successful, it’s only going to be because I reached folks in your age demographic.
