Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and a majority of US companies say
Speaker 1: they need to raise prices because of tariffs. We have
Speaker 1: such a great show for you today. MSNBC's own Laurence
Speaker 1: O'Donnell stops by to talk about Trump's need to exaggerate everything.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to the economists Mike Byrd about how
Speaker 1: the tariffs are going to affect the economy.
Speaker 2: But first the news, Molly.
Speaker 3: As we know, Democratic Representative Shreith thatt Adar was trying
Speaker 3: to introduce seven articles of impeachment. But you'll be shocked,
Speaker 3: mister Trump, who often talks about how aggrieved he is
Speaker 3: about his previous impeachments, he's shutting the whole thing down.
Speaker 1: Yes, I am completely shocked. So let's just talk about this.
Speaker 1: There aren't the votes for Trump to be impeached because
Speaker 1: Democrats don't control the House. So not only are there
Speaker 1: not the votes to impeach him, the votes to bring
Speaker 1: the impeachment of for a vote, right because Republicans control
Speaker 1: the House. So this was a guy who wanted to
Speaker 1: bring it up anyway. Part of this is because voters,
Speaker 1: I know you're going to be shocked to hear this,
Speaker 1: but voters mostly want Democrats to run a check on
Speaker 1: Trump and not to relitigate Biden's age.
Speaker 2: I know you're going to be shocked.
Speaker 1: They actually think the twenty twenty four election happened already
Speaker 1: and now they want you to move on and to
Speaker 1: try to prevent the sliding autocracy which we are seeing
Speaker 1: before our very eyes. I think that when Democrats do things,
Speaker 1: it matters. Think back to Corey Booker, I think back
Speaker 1: to all of the videos that Chris Murphy has been doing.
Speaker 1: They've actually broken through the noise. So I actually think
Speaker 1: this was good. You know, in Tromp's first term, we
Speaker 1: had Al Green from Texas and he did this and
Speaker 1: Pelosi was sort of not pleased with him because he
Speaker 1: didn't have the vote. So it's a stunt and not
Speaker 1: necessarily something that you can bring to fruition. But honestly,
Speaker 1: I think this is good. I think it's good to
Speaker 1: just try. And I don't you know, I might. I
Speaker 1: was at one point more cynical, and now I'm just like, actually,
Speaker 1: trying is good. Good to try, try, try, that's not
Speaker 1: bad also, you know, I think that there will be
Speaker 1: many opportunities to impeach Donald Trump over the next thousand
Speaker 1: plus days.
Speaker 3: So speaking of reasons to impeach Trump, Homeland Security Secretary
Speaker 3: Christy nom was again testifying, which is another thing Democrats
Speaker 3: could do every day if they want to make themselves
Speaker 3: look good.
Speaker 2: They really could.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we have a saying in the business not
Speaker 3: ready for primetime. This doesn't seem like she's ready for
Speaker 3: three o'clock at the boarding with no one's watching. Right
Speaker 3: here because these answers, I.
Speaker 2: Sort of love her. What I love about her?
Speaker 3: Tell me, what do you love about her? Is it
Speaker 3: the dog killing Baly?
Speaker 2: It's the dog killing the makeup.
Speaker 3: The listeners might have just heard by dog growed as
Speaker 3: I said that, right.
Speaker 1: The injectibles and crazy injectibles, all of the makeup, the
Speaker 1: enormous expensive watch. No listen, nobody likes Christy Nome. Let's
Speaker 1: be honest here. But what is incredible is that she
Speaker 1: doesn't know what habeas corpus is.
Speaker 2: And I think that what Maggie.
Speaker 1: Hassen, Democrat from New Hampshire did here is she really
Speaker 1: did point out an important thing, which is it's much
Speaker 1: more effective in these Senate hearings just to ask these
Speaker 1: people questions which they clearly cannot answer, than to grand
Speaker 1: stand for twenty minutes. So a lot of Senate hearings
Speaker 1: and House hearings, any number of hearings, you'll have a
Speaker 1: member grandstand and then they'll be a question sort of
Speaker 1: and then the person will yell.
Speaker 2: Back at them.
Speaker 1: But this simple idea of asking a member of Trump's
Speaker 1: at second administration what a phrase means, in this case,
Speaker 1: habeas corpus, it's pretty clarifying. So she asks, She says,
Speaker 1: what does habeas corpus mean? And Christy Noms says, habeas
Speaker 1: corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to
Speaker 1: be able to remove people from this country.
Speaker 2: It's not that's not what it is.
Speaker 1: It's nice that she thinks it's a right, by the way,
Speaker 1: So habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires the
Speaker 1: government to provide a public reason right for detaining and
Speaker 1: imprisoning people. It's a pretty serious protection.
Speaker 3: And it does not what made say, one of the
Speaker 3: things that makes America great, right.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know, it would argue maybe, but anyway,
Speaker 1: it's sort of exact with the opposite of what Christy
Speaker 1: Gnomes said. It really shows like I just wonder if
Speaker 1: you sat down and you just asked these people to
Speaker 1: define things, if you would do better during some of
Speaker 1: these hearings, you know, what does this mean?
Speaker 2: What does that mean? What do you do in here?
Speaker 2: What are you doing there?
Speaker 1: But the point is either way, Christy Noom, while having
Speaker 1: a lot of make up, quite a bit of injectibles
Speaker 1: and very expensive watches, is a moron SAMAI.
Speaker 3: Elon Musk says he'll do a lot less political spending
Speaker 3: moving forward ed. Some people are saying, oh, look, STOs
Speaker 3: was a failure. Other people are saying, kind of feels
Speaker 3: like he accomplished his mission. If we look back to
Speaker 3: when he said to Tucker Carl said that Trump had
Speaker 3: to win or else who's going to go to jail?
Speaker 3: That he was kind of hitting at that, what are
Speaker 3: you thinking?
Speaker 1: We don't know, right, This is like with so many
Speaker 1: of these things from Trump world. We don't really know
Speaker 1: what's true, right. We don't know if Elon is doing
Speaker 1: this or if Elon is saying he's doing this. We
Speaker 1: know that Elon polls about as well as the bubonic
Speaker 1: plague that we know, right, You know, we just don't
Speaker 1: know any more than that. So as much as I
Speaker 1: certainly would like to see less Elon and American politics
Speaker 1: for any number of reasons, but.
Speaker 2: I wonder if it's true or not.
Speaker 1: And and I'm very suspicious of anything Elon says because
Speaker 1: there's no reason to trust Elon.
Speaker 3: You know, he does often say we're going to do
Speaker 3: this in two years, and then quite the opposite happens. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so my in more grim news. After President Biden's advanced
Speaker 3: cancer remarks, you'll be shocked at the right responded with
Speaker 3: kindness and empathy and just really well done, decorum, You're hilarious. Yes, yes,
Speaker 3: we have a despicable tweet and remarks from both Donald
Speaker 3: Trump Junior and JD Vans here.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the thinking here is that the pundit world
Speaker 1: wants Democrats to talk about Joe Biden's age. They want
Speaker 1: a discussion of Joe Biden's age, they want a reckoning
Speaker 1: about Joe Biden's age. But I'm gonna give you guys
Speaker 1: a hot take. Voters told us what they thought about
Speaker 1: Joe Biden's age. They thought he was too old, and
Speaker 1: the polling showed that, and that's why he dropped out
Speaker 1: of the election. So is he too old because he's
Speaker 1: too old? Or is he too old because he's too old?
Speaker 1: He's too old to being old is the best case
Speaker 1: scenario in case you're wondering, because there are a lot
Speaker 1: of other things that can happen that are less good
Speaker 1: than being old.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know. I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Understand that Tapper has a book he wants to sell
Speaker 1: and God bless him, but it doesn't make any sense
Speaker 1: to me why we have to engage in this story.
Speaker 1: He lost, he's old, he's got cancer. Now this is
Speaker 1: all really dark and sad, and I don't.
Speaker 2: Know that it matters. Look, we thought he was old.
Speaker 2: He had good days and bad days.
Speaker 1: It's just you know, I was talking behind the scenes
Speaker 1: with some people I work with in TV Land, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about it was like he had good days
Speaker 1: and he had bad days, and sometimes he was good
Speaker 1: and sometimes he was less good, like all eighty one
Speaker 1: year olds. That's not a conspiracy. That's just getting old.
Speaker 1: If only it were a conspiracy. You know, just like
Speaker 1: the administration, they did a lot of good stuff, they
Speaker 1: couldn't message it. They did some bad stuff, like they
Speaker 1: couldn't settle the war in Gazo or in Ukraine, or
Speaker 1: protect Taiwan. I mean, there were a lot of failures there,
Speaker 1: but there were also a lot of really good things, reshoring, manufacturing,
Speaker 1: chips and sciences. So again I don't get what the
Speaker 1: goal here is except to sell books about the election,
Speaker 1: which was really fucking horrible election and really dark and
Speaker 1: ultimately Harris was set up for a glass cliff. This
Speaker 1: is the end of the biden Age discourse. In this podcast.
Speaker 1: We will no longer be speaking of it because my
Speaker 1: man was old and now he has cancer and I
Speaker 1: feel really badly for him, and quite frankly, you know,
Speaker 1: that's it from it. Lawrence O'Donnell is the host of
Speaker 1: the Lawrence O'Donnell Show on MSNBC.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics, Lawrence.
Speaker 4: It's so great to be here, and I'm so out
Speaker 4: of shape a podcasting because I forgot my headphones and
Speaker 4: luckily you reminded me, so here we are.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not so different than you know, television,
Speaker 1: all things just longer and slower.
Speaker 4: I think you get clearer thinking in podcasts because you
Speaker 4: don't have control rooms screaming about getting to a commercial
Speaker 4: in the next You know forty seconds, and so I
Speaker 4: like it a lot.
Speaker 1: You don't find someone screaming in your ears, rap rap rap,
Speaker 1: not soothing.
Speaker 4: Well by the way they I mean, they've they've learned, uh,
Speaker 4: And I learned to ignore that. So they've learned not
Speaker 4: to do that for many, many years now. And so
Speaker 4: that's why I never interrupt guests. And the control room
Speaker 4: used to be screaming at me to interrupt the guest
Speaker 4: and in the segment and I and the first time
Speaker 4: I didn't do it, I noticed that they figured out
Speaker 4: how to do the show. Even though even though I
Speaker 4: didn't do the really ugly, messy interrupting thing and throwing
Speaker 4: to a commercial. The only time that becomes incredibly tense
Speaker 4: is when you're really coming up to the last second
Speaker 4: of your show. Then you really have to stop. But
Speaker 4: I pretty much design it so that we never have
Speaker 4: anybody in that space where where they're going to get
Speaker 4: jammed that way and I'm going to get jammed that
Speaker 4: way as a host, I just I hated it. It looks
Speaker 4: so rough and it's just hard. It's hard for the
Speaker 4: audience to understand what this urgency of interruption is about.
Speaker 1: So let speaking of the urgency of interruption. I feel
Speaker 1: like you and I we have lived through Trump one
Speaker 1: point Oh, we have lived through Biden. You know, it's
Speaker 1: four years now we are in Trump two point zero.
Speaker 2: Has America learned anything?
Speaker 4: Not that I can tell no, Because, for example, Trump
Speaker 4: has been wrong about pretty much every declarative sentence he's
Speaker 4: ever spoken as a politician or as a present or act.
Speaker 4: And he's certainly wrong about every single number he mentions,
Speaker 4: every number of any kind. I mean, let me just
Speaker 4: throw out one from the present. He talks about the
Speaker 4: current Air Force one planes. There's two of them as
Speaker 4: being forty two years old. They are thirty five and
Speaker 4: thirty four. Now, that's the smallest exaggeration he's ever done
Speaker 4: with a number ever. But it's just the proof that
Speaker 4: there's not a single number he can say that he
Speaker 4: won't lie about in a direction that he thinks helps
Speaker 4: to make his point about whatever he's talking about. And
Speaker 4: there is not a single person in the White House
Speaker 4: Press Corps who has ever figured out how to deal
Speaker 4: with that. And there is not a single interviewer of
Speaker 4: you know, Trump team people who have ever figured out
Speaker 4: how to deal with that. They accept, you know, at
Speaker 4: their best the people who do the best interviews of
Speaker 4: Trump team players, and I think they're all bad interviews
Speaker 4: by conception, by definition, they're not going to be good interviews.
Speaker 4: But within that group of bad interviews, the best ones
Speaker 4: can test a very tiny percentage of the falsehoods, a
Speaker 4: very tiny percentage of the falsehoods that are said right
Speaker 4: to them to their face. And you know, most of
Speaker 4: us don't have data available on every single subject that
Speaker 4: Trump or a Trump team player is going to lie about.
Speaker 4: So how many people are sitting around knowing how old
Speaker 4: the Air Force one planes are? Brett Bear certainly isn't
Speaker 4: one of them, because when Donald Trump told him they're
Speaker 4: forty years old, Brett Bear goes, oh, you know, I
Speaker 4: didn't think the audio the uniist knows they're forty years old. Yeah, no, kidding, Brett,
Speaker 4: because they're not. And I didn't know how old they
Speaker 4: were either, so I looked it up before I ever
Speaker 4: said anything about it. So this is unbelievable flood of falsehood.
Speaker 4: And what's interesting about it is those same reporters retain
Speaker 4: all the muscle memory of the kind of reaction you
Speaker 4: would have to something like that, only and exclusively to
Speaker 4: be applied to Joe Biden or other Democrats. If Chuck
Speaker 4: Schumer gets a number wrong, he's going to be really pressed.
Speaker 4: And if Joe Biden gets a name wrong, we might
Speaker 4: just have to write a book about that. It's a
Speaker 4: disastrous non learning curve, zero none, and voters, you know,
Speaker 4: have learned as far as we can tell, the worst
Speaker 4: possible lesson from the era, which is that character doesn't
Speaker 4: matter at all, and the number of criminal convictions you
Speaker 4: have between presidencies doesn't matter, and the number of criminal
Speaker 4: indictments that have been landed on you don't matter. And
Speaker 4: that's that is not the news media's fault, you know,
Speaker 4: I think the news media across the board did their
Speaker 4: best to stress that this matters. I think, you know,
Speaker 4: everybody other than the right wing news media did their
Speaker 4: absolute best. But you know, it's like, you know, it's
Speaker 4: it's like being in a classroom with kids, you know,
Speaker 4: who here two plus two and is four and they
Speaker 4: just can't they just can't retain it. They just can't
Speaker 4: do it. And so that's that's an unsolvable thing, is
Speaker 4: that you have. It's not a small number of voters, right,
Speaker 4: you have this, you have this possibly controlling number of
Speaker 4: voters who have completely eliminated the issue of character, which
Speaker 4: means they've eliminated the issue of fidelity to oath, which
Speaker 4: means they've eliminated the issue to fidelity to the purpose
Speaker 4: that the founders initiated in the creation of this government.
Speaker 1: So we now can talk about something I've been thinking about,
Speaker 1: which is this idea. So I was on TV yesterday
Speaker 1: with an abundon who I like, and he said, the
Speaker 1: mainstream media has to reckon with and the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: has to reckon with publicizing Jake Tapper's book. Basically it
Speaker 1: was what it was. And I thought to myself, No,
Speaker 1: they fucking don't. They knew he was old. They told
Speaker 1: us he was old, that he pulled poorly because they
Speaker 1: felt he was old.
Speaker 2: Reckon what they reckoned it happened. I mean, can you
Speaker 2: explain this to me?
Speaker 4: Yeah, of course they reckoned. And this is the most
Speaker 4: ludicrous political challenge that the news media, and the news
Speaker 4: media alone has decided to pose to one side of
Speaker 4: our politics and never posed anything like it to the
Speaker 4: other side of our politics. About the convicted felon who
Speaker 4: that side of our politics fully embraced every day so
Speaker 4: much so that they would compete to get in the
Speaker 4: front row of his criminal trial to show how much
Speaker 4: they personally supported paying off porn stars for their silence. Okay,
Speaker 4: there's never been any kind of similar media demand, and
Speaker 4: you know, book publishing demand. You know that the Republicans
Speaker 4: deal with They to put it mildly, range of infirmities
Speaker 4: moral to intellectual in Donald Trump. And no, I think
Speaker 4: any Democrat who feels like they have to explain, you know,
Speaker 4: why they didn't think it was a good idea, or
Speaker 4: they didn't jump up and down as soon as they
Speaker 4: read their first up ed piece saying Biden should drop
Speaker 4: out in the middle of a presidential campaign. Why they
Speaker 4: didn't embrace that, Why they didn't embrace the thing that
Speaker 4: has never happened before in history. And let me define
Speaker 4: for a moment, And this is the this is this
Speaker 4: is the section of the puzzle that every one of
Speaker 4: these you know, theories of the case decidedly avoids. The
Speaker 4: definition of the middle of a presidential campaign. The middle
Speaker 4: is two years in to a presidential term. Because the
Speaker 4: puzzle parts that are left out every time the subject
Speaker 4: comes up, is that a presidential campaign is not two
Speaker 4: years long or one year long. It is four years long, okay,
Speaker 4: four years long. And so the day after inauguration day,
Speaker 4: actually usually before that, the next presidential campaign is being planned.
Speaker 4: The minute Hillary Clinton lost, the minute she lost to
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, Democrats the next day were planning deciding who
Speaker 4: among them would run for president. They were thinking about
Speaker 4: it within the latest, by the weekend. By the weekend.
Speaker 4: I mean, I can assure you Kamala Harris was thinking
Speaker 4: about running for president by the weekend. Joe Biden was
Speaker 4: thinking about running for president by that weekend. And they started,
Speaker 4: they all did. And so you have to accept with
Speaker 4: this idea that what the real menu choice was. And
Speaker 4: the real menu choice was Joe Biden, you know, saying
Speaker 4: to Ron Klain day after inauguration, Okay, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to run for reelection, So what do we want to
Speaker 4: accomplish in our four years? And Ron Klan would have
Speaker 4: to say what Joe Biden would already know, which is, well,
Speaker 4: I guess we're going to accomplish nothing because you will
Speaker 4: be a lane duck instantly, and we have a fifty
Speaker 4: one seat you know majority in the United States. Senate
Speaker 4: Joe Manchin won't vote for a single thing We do
Speaker 4: And next week Joe Manchin will be running for president
Speaker 4: and he'll be running against your do nothing presidency. And
Speaker 4: he'll be and we'll have a large primary field, and
Speaker 4: Kamala will probably be in it being attacked for your
Speaker 4: do nothing presidency. And that's what the primary will be about.
Speaker 4: And from that primary, we'll get a nominee, and that
Speaker 4: nominee will go against Trump and wish us luck. That's
Speaker 4: your real menu choice. It's that versus what happened. It's
Speaker 4: that versus what actually happened, which is Biden's decides. What
Speaker 4: we're going to do is we're going to govern. We're
Speaker 4: going to do our best at governing. We're going to
Speaker 4: accomplish everything we can possibly accomplish, and we're going to
Speaker 4: present that to voters. And he accomplishes more than any
Speaker 4: president with a fifty one seat majority in the United
Speaker 4: States Senate, than any president in history. Like, there's no
Speaker 4: legislative accomplishment package even close to that, given the tiny, tiny,
Speaker 4: tiny majorities that he had. And so that's the real
Speaker 4: menu choice. And if someone wants to embrace every piece
Speaker 4: of that puzzle and then make a menu choice, that's
Speaker 4: okay with me. But I have never once heard a
Speaker 4: single person who was a champion of the get rid
Speaker 4: of Biden as a nominee at any point on the calendar,
Speaker 4: including after the debate. I've never heard them include every
Speaker 4: single piece of the puzzle that has brought us to
Speaker 4: that decision point. And they still never do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true and that, but I also think that
Speaker 1: you know, there, it's a news cycle that has a
Speaker 1: lot of purpose, right, it obfuscates for Trump. I think
Speaker 1: what is the most interesting too, is that you see Trump.
Speaker 1: There's so many enablers in Trump world, right from the people.
Speaker 2: Who I mean, just at every point. The man is
Speaker 2: so enabled.
Speaker 1: And the criticism of Democrats is really that they enabled
Speaker 1: Biden right ultimately, and I just think that's a bit ironic.
Speaker 4: The thing that this approach has to ignore is that
Speaker 4: Joe Biden, the oldest president in history. On March seventh,
Speaker 4: I think it is of twenty twenty four, March seventh
Speaker 4: delivers the best State of the Union address ever delivered ever, ever,
Speaker 4: you know, like not even like not just of the
Speaker 4: time television age, but ever, Okay, better than any of
Speaker 4: FDR's State of the Union addresses. And it includes ad libbing,
Speaker 4: which no State of the Union dress had ever included before.
Speaker 4: And it is both comedic ad libbing and policy ad
Speaker 4: libbing at the same time. And he tricks the idiots,
Speaker 4: the Marjorie Taylor Green idiots in the audience into forcing
Speaker 4: a public agreement with Republicans on policy that they will
Speaker 4: not try to cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid.
Speaker 4: He does that in the room. He governs in the
Speaker 4: room with the clowns in the back of the room,
Speaker 4: and the agility of that was something we've never seen before.
Speaker 4: When Barack Obama became the first president to be heckled
Speaker 4: in a State of the Union address, Barack Obama is
Speaker 4: the most deft stand up comedian in the history of
Speaker 4: the presidency. Barack Obama said nothing. He stood there and
Speaker 4: he looked, and he couldn't, for the life of him,
Speaker 4: think of a single thing to say after being heckled
Speaker 4: in his State of the Union address. That's and that's
Speaker 4: not a criticism of Barack Obama. I understand that it
Speaker 4: was the first time. But what the whole concept of
Speaker 4: Biden was unfit to run and was obviously unfit to run,
Speaker 4: must studiously ignore is that the entire section every section
Speaker 4: of the news media that's saying, not now granted that
Speaker 4: that State of the Union address was the best State
Speaker 4: of the Union address that they had covered. They've never
Speaker 4: covered a better State of the Union dress ever, And
Speaker 4: so what the one hundred and ten days later, Biden
Speaker 4: goes into that debate and Biden does what we all
Speaker 4: saw Biden do, and the idea that oh, we knew
Speaker 4: this all along, No we didn't, because one hundred and
Speaker 4: ten days ago we saw the opposite. We saw the opposite,
Speaker 4: So we were shocked and surprised. And anyone who's pretending
Speaker 4: that they weren't shocked and surprised is lying about their
Speaker 4: own exposure to Joe Biden, including public disposure in the
Speaker 4: State of the Union address.
Speaker 2: I had completely forgotten.
Speaker 4: One hundred and ten days. It's one hundred and ten days.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: You got to go back and look look at CNN's
Speaker 4: coverage of the State of the Union address. Try to
Speaker 4: find any one of those anchors saying Biden did a
Speaker 4: really bad job tonight because he's old and he can't think,
Speaker 4: he's and he got really wiped out by the hecklers
Speaker 4: because he was just lost. Did you see how lost
Speaker 4: he was no, that doesn't exist, does not exist, you know,
Speaker 4: And so listen, I find it incredibly challenging. And I
Speaker 4: think the ultimate question there is, you know, did something
Speaker 4: happen in those one hundred and ten days, you know,
Speaker 4: did something happen you know in the in the age curved?
Speaker 4: You know, what was it? I mean, Joe Biden had said,
Speaker 4: you know, he was he was feeling really sick. He said,
Speaker 4: you know, he was feeling really sick with a cold.
Speaker 4: He has also said in private, he has also said
Speaker 4: I fucked up that debate. Those are words he has
Speaker 4: used in private, Okay. And there's a difference between the
Speaker 4: way politicians talk in private the way they talk in
Speaker 4: the view. And there's always going there's always going to be,
Speaker 4: you know. And so it's an approach, this idea that
Speaker 4: it's so obvious, you know, what the Democrats should have
Speaker 4: done in a situation that has never existed in campaign
Speaker 4: history before. It's never obvious what you do when something
Speaker 4: happens for the first time. And by the way, one
Speaker 4: of the tiny proofs of that is it's never obvious
Speaker 4: what a president should do if he suddenly, for the
Speaker 4: first time in history, gets heckled in a State of
Speaker 4: the Union address and Barack Obama chose silence, which I
Speaker 4: think was a noble choice, but it wasn't obvious what
Speaker 4: to do because it had never happened before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really good point.
Speaker 1: And I also think that, you know, as we're talking
Speaker 1: about this and talking about this, sort of the way
Speaker 1: in which the confidence with which these people are looking
Speaker 1: back on what happened.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting.
Speaker 1: And I also want to bring up you know, John
Speaker 1: Allen and Amy wrote this book about the election and
Speaker 1: they talked about how Biden had flown back and forth
Speaker 1: to Europe numerous.
Speaker 2: Times, you know twice.
Speaker 1: That's right back and forth right before the debate, And
Speaker 1: you and I both do a lot of performing, etc.
Speaker 1: And it's not so easy, and then debates are ten
Speaker 1: times harder. I mean, obviously, whatever we're going to have,
Speaker 1: I think we're cursed for another week of this discourse.
Speaker 1: But it does strike me that I could see a
Speaker 1: world in which is it's just hard.
Speaker 4: It's going to disappear. I mean that's my prediction, but
Speaker 4: I think predictions are worthless. But it's inconceivable to me.
Speaker 4: I mean, look, I think there are absolutely, relentlessly goofy
Speaker 4: Washington reporters who will be on the campaign trail in
Speaker 4: Iowa and they will be sticking their very stupid microphones
Speaker 4: in front of Democratic candidates and saying, why didn't you
Speaker 4: turn on Biden? Did you lie? Were you part of
Speaker 4: the conspiracy? They will do that. In fact, I've seen
Speaker 4: one on CNN promising to do that four years from now.
Speaker 4: That's how crazy they are. That crazy child who's a
Speaker 4: veteran campaign reporter, not a CNN employee, but a panelist.
Speaker 4: That crazy child believes that he knows what the most
Speaker 4: important question will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South
Speaker 4: Carolina in twenty twenty eight. He's convinced he knows what
Speaker 4: it is, and it'll be about Joe Biden. That's what
Speaker 4: it'll be about. I mean, that is the proof of
Speaker 4: the just rank mental incompetence of the people who are
Speaker 4: herded into this herd mentality that they so desperately embrace
Speaker 4: because they don't have any higher intellectual framework to use
Speaker 4: in campaign coverage. Don't get me started about this, Okay,
Speaker 4: I have strong feelings about this.
Speaker 2: Tell us what you really think. Thank you, thank you,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 4: Lawrence, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: Mike Bird is the economist Wall Street editor. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Fast Politics.
Speaker 5: Mike, glad to be here.
Speaker 2: Talk to me about the tariffs.
Speaker 1: What I think is so interesting about this tariff situation
Speaker 1: is Trump was like, we're gonna have one hundred million
Speaker 1: trillion dollar tariffs on China.
Speaker 2: No we're not.
Speaker 1: Now nobody's talking about it anymore. But they are still
Speaker 1: the largest tariffs at least on China since when.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean since since ever essentially, Right, it's the
Speaker 5: biggest single increase even still in tariffs at least in
Speaker 5: you know, a century. I think the best example I've
Speaker 5: heard of this someone talked about anchoring. It's like a
Speaker 5: salesperson tactic, you know, and once you get someone's mindset
Speaker 5: towards a certain level, you know, anything belower above that
Speaker 5: seems like anything below that seems like an improvement. And
Speaker 5: that's clearly what's happened with the tariffs. Right. You come
Speaker 5: in thinking you're going to get one hundred and forty
Speaker 5: five percent on China, which is like functionally in bargo,
Speaker 5: right that that means more or less no trade. You
Speaker 5: get them down to thirty and it sounds like a
Speaker 5: big win. But coming up from from nothing on a
Speaker 5: lot of these product lines. That's it's an absolutely huge increase.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about all of this, the China tariffs.
Speaker 1: We had somebody on this podcast recently was talking about
Speaker 1: the shipping right that there were these ports, the big
Speaker 1: China ports, which are the Port of Los Angeles, the
Speaker 1: Port of Long Beach, you know, just weren't having ships come.
Speaker 2: Now is the shipping back on? What does the supply
Speaker 2: chain look like?
Speaker 5: Yeah, my understanding is that there has been a sort
Speaker 5: of bull whip effect that a lot of things are
Speaker 5: coming back. Basically, i'd say to thirty percent, it's no
Speaker 5: longer essentially an embargo, right, one hundred and forty five
Speaker 5: percent tariffs means that just a huge number of these
Speaker 5: product lines, people just won't buy these products. Right. It's
Speaker 5: it's not even that they'll be produced somewhere else, it's
Speaker 5: that they just won't exist. They won't be purchased. At
Speaker 5: thirty percent, that's a huge increase. But for a lot
Speaker 5: of product lines, in the short at least you still
Speaker 5: need these items. And yeah, so there's been there's been
Speaker 5: a bounce back. What you will see because of this
Speaker 5: is that unlike before where one hundred and forty five
Speaker 5: percent is so steep that the nobody ends up paying
Speaker 5: the tariffs. What you will see now is the huge
Speaker 5: sort of ripple effect of the price increases going into
Speaker 5: US consumer goods. And that's sort of because of the
Speaker 5: shipping effect, sort of ripples out from the west coast
Speaker 5: travels east, and as the inventoryes decline and decline and
Speaker 5: decline across the country, you see the price increases come through.
Speaker 5: You might not see it on day one. You might
Speaker 5: wake up in six months and not understand why your
Speaker 5: air conditioning unit replacement seems to cost twice as much
Speaker 5: as it did before, But that that's what will happen.
Speaker 1: So Amazon said they were going to put in the
Speaker 1: tariff increase. So would say, like this ink well because
Speaker 1: we all use inkwells, is five bucks. Now with tariffs,
Speaker 1: it's going to be fifteen. You know, one be fifteen?
Speaker 1: It would be eight, okay or seven?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 1: And you can tell I can barely do math, right,
Speaker 1: I think we can all be clear here that but okay,
Speaker 1: so there was certain transparency. Trump got furious because then
Speaker 1: people will know what he's done, and he pushed back.
Speaker 1: And since Jeff Bezos has all these rockets he wants
Speaker 1: to put up in the sky. He said, fine, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: so you won against Amazon. The prices are just going
Speaker 1: to be raised. No one's going to know why they're
Speaker 1: more expensive. But I think people may be able to
Speaker 1: figure it out. Now we see Walmart says we're going
Speaker 1: to have to raise prices. Trump goes after them, says
Speaker 1: you should eat the tariffs because you make so much money.
Speaker 1: And also I've never liked the Waltons basically, And then
Speaker 1: now and we saw this again. Now Daily Mail has
Speaker 1: an article about Target employees totally flamoxed by how much
Speaker 1: the tariffs are affecting prices. So, but the equity markets
Speaker 1: have recovered.
Speaker 2: Make it make sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the most important
Speaker 5: thing to think of about when it comes to businesses
Speaker 5: like Target, like Walmart, even to a lot of Amazon,
Speaker 5: is that these are massive businesses. But go go and
Speaker 5: look at the profit margins, Go and look at the
Speaker 5: operating margins for these companies. These are extremely competitive markets
Speaker 5: with pretty tight margins, and you are basically just blowing
Speaker 5: them out with these tariffs, right, You are completely erasing
Speaker 5: the margins. So the idea of Walmart eating a lot
Speaker 5: of these increases is just wildly implausible. There were always
Speaker 5: going to be price increases because of this, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean you could argue with like a five percent tariff,
Speaker 5: maybe maybe some of the retails can can eat that,
Speaker 5: but at the levels we're talking about, it's not even
Speaker 5: sort of remotely plausible. The equity market recovering, I think
Speaker 5: there's a bit of anchoring going on there as well.
Speaker 2: So explain that to ask what that means anchoring.
Speaker 5: It's basically people got very upset about the tariffs, and
Speaker 5: then when the announcement came out that there'd be a
Speaker 5: ninety day pause, they were like, oh wow, so that's
Speaker 5: one piece of good news and one piece of bad news,
Speaker 5: and these two effect actively wash each other out. Now,
Speaker 5: the reality is that it doesn't anything like wash itself out.
Speaker 5: You know, you've see these sort of the content of
Speaker 5: these deals, the one of the UK and the subject
Speaker 5: of the negotiations going on between the US and China.
Speaker 5: There's not much in them, right. The tariff levels are
Speaker 5: going to remain high relative to what they'd otherwise have been.
Speaker 5: So I do find the recovery of the equity market
Speaker 5: a little bit perplexing. One thing that I will say
Speaker 5: is definitely happening is retail buyers of stocks, really sort
Speaker 5: of ordinary Americans and certainly not big institutions, have been
Speaker 5: relentless buyers of declines in stock prices. This is like
Speaker 5: the opposite of how you would expect this to work.
Speaker 2: Right, They're buying the depth.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, and it's a fascinating thing because it's almost like
Speaker 5: a form of really strongly engendered behavior. Now, and I
Speaker 5: think this partly comes out of twenty twenty, where you
Speaker 5: sort of sort of massive pandemic slump that then immediately rebounded.
Speaker 5: I think there's maybe a little bit of sort of
Speaker 5: the c SO world leaking into what is happening in
Speaker 5: the equity market here. But yeah, this has been relentless behavior.
Speaker 5: You see big institutions, big investors selling, and you see
Speaker 5: retail buying the dip, and they're still doing that.
Speaker 1: So the equity markets whatever, they're high on their own supply.
Speaker 1: The bond markets are not high on their own supply.
Speaker 1: If anything, they're panicked like the rest of us. So
Speaker 1: explain to us what's happening with the bond markets and
Speaker 1: also the fact that they become such an indicator.
Speaker 2: I think it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, totally. So, I guess put this in context that
Speaker 5: the two markets where you still can see significant tariff
Speaker 5: related effects. The bond market, as you say, you know,
Speaker 5: the tenure treasury yield is still about four and a
Speaker 5: half percent, that's you know, above where it was when
Speaker 5: all of this started at the beginning of April. And
Speaker 5: the other one you can see is in the currency markets,
Speaker 5: where the dollar is still down quite a bit, right,
Speaker 5: So it's not everyone sort of going insane over this.
Speaker 5: I think in a the bond market, the important thing
Speaker 5: to know, I guess in terms of the basics of
Speaker 5: how it works. If you expect US economic growth to
Speaker 5: be lower going forward, you would think, oh, the Federal
Speaker 5: Reserve will come in and cut interest rates. The Federal
Speaker 5: Reserve cuts interest rates, and bond yields go down. But
Speaker 5: the last few years have made the Federal Reserve panicked
Speaker 5: about inflation and their right to be relatively panicked. Inflation
Speaker 5: expectations are higher than they have been. You saw that big,
Speaker 5: big burst of inflation that really took them by surprise
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty two in particular. So basically the concern
Speaker 5: is the US economy slows, inflation remains high, interest rates
Speaker 5: remain high, and you have this sort of prolonged nasty
Speaker 5: effect in the bond market where yields stay high, which
Speaker 5: ultimately means that the US government spends a lot more
Speaker 5: on debt interest payments than it previously would have done.
Speaker 5: And with the current sort of deficit discussions going on,
Speaker 5: the current budget discussions going on in DC, this is
Speaker 5: all the more worrying because the sort of yeah, there
Speaker 5: seems to be very little seriousness frankly on either side
Speaker 5: of the aisle, especially from the Republicans, but on either
Speaker 5: side of the aisle about the long term projections here,
Speaker 5: which look increasingly dicey four and a half percent on
Speaker 5: tenure borrowing is loads. That's pretty high. We had a
Speaker 5: very very long period where ten year yields were much
Speaker 5: much lower than that during the pandemic and before the pandemic,
Speaker 5: after global financial crisis, long periods of time when it
Speaker 5: was below two percent. So you know, over time, you're
Speaker 5: more than doubling the debt interest on those ten years
Speaker 5: as they mature and they have to be refinanced. So yeah,
Speaker 5: and that's not fixed at all. The bomb markets certainly
Speaker 5: not back to where it is. Foreign buyers of the
Speaker 5: US government bonds, those that I speak to, they're a
Speaker 5: lot more worried about buying US government assets in general,
Speaker 5: just because for sort of implicit trust, the implicit safety
Speaker 5: that they have regarded the US government with for decades.
Speaker 5: It's not gone, but it's certainly shaken relative to where
Speaker 5: it was.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about Moody.
Speaker 1: Is this downgrading of credit not the first time credit
Speaker 1: has been downgraded during OBI During the credit crisis, credit
Speaker 1: was downgraded to an AA. But all of this again,
Speaker 1: the anxiety with the bond market is that there's going
Speaker 1: I mean, there are a number of anxieties, but dollar
Speaker 1: flight is a big one, right, the idea that somehow
Speaker 1: the dollar will no longer be the currency that everybody
Speaker 1: has made it, and that will mean servicing our debt
Speaker 1: will be more expensive, and it'll be a cascade of
Speaker 1: other things that will happen. But the thing that I
Speaker 1: keep thinking about that was all of Biden's administration was
Speaker 1: really his financial policy, among other things, and I think
Speaker 1: it was the best part of that administration actually, because
Speaker 1: it got us this soft landing. I mean, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of things that were not that where they
Speaker 1: didn't do a great job. But this I think they
Speaker 1: really did do a great job. And one of the
Speaker 1: things they did a great job with was they avoided statflation.
Speaker 1: It strikes me because of the tariffs, because they're so inflationary,
Speaker 1: because they also slow the economy, because we're having every
Speaker 1: month questions are we not in a recession? It does
Speaker 1: seem like, And then you have consumer confidence way way
Speaker 1: down right. We're seeing these crazy consumer confidence numbers. As
Speaker 1: soon as we get one quarter that chose we're in
Speaker 1: a recession or one month that so we're in recession,
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to imagine we don't dip into stagflation.
Speaker 1: So talk about stagflation, which is when things get more
Speaker 1: expensive and also in a recession, and then explain to
Speaker 1: us what you think is going to happen, and also
Speaker 1: what we could do to get out of it or
Speaker 1: are we going to get stuck in it.
Speaker 5: It's a great question, and I think the basic building
Speaker 5: blocks of it stagflation, portmanteau, stagnation, and inflation. You've had
Speaker 5: periods of US history where you've seen this. You know,
Speaker 5: there's lots of countries that they've got lots more experience
Speaker 5: of this. The UK has had it for various periods.
Speaker 5: Lots of countries in Europe, basically portions of the nineteen
Speaker 5: seventies nearly nineteen eighties, you had this phenomenon, very high
Speaker 5: inflation paired with a economy that they looked pretty rubbish.
Speaker 5: We usually think of inflation as a phenomenon, you know,
Speaker 5: amount of economists that comes at a time when the
Speaker 5: economy is running hot. Right, Unemployment is low, Employers have
Speaker 5: got to compete to pay higher wages. They've got to
Speaker 5: pay more and more for the goods that they need.
Speaker 5: Consumers are doing the same. Prices go up because the
Speaker 5: basic supply in the economy is outstripped by this rapacious demount. Now,
Speaker 5: what you get in a stagflation scenario is that often
Speaker 5: you'll have unemployment that seems far too high for the
Speaker 5: economy to be running hot. So you've got low growth,
Speaker 5: you've got falling real terms incomes because inflation is so high. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so it's a pretty it's a pretty bad scenario. And
Speaker 5: it puts the Federal Reserve in this awful position because
Speaker 5: they have these two dual mandate, right, these two competing goals,
Speaker 5: one of which is to keep unemployment low as low
Speaker 5: as possible within the context of its inflation mandate, which
Speaker 5: is to keep inflation at around two percent. Now, if
Speaker 5: in running at three, four, whatever percent, it's very, very
Speaker 5: difficult for them to cut interest rates and try and
Speaker 5: stimulate the economy to reduce unemployment. And historically, historically the
Speaker 5: FED has tended to lean on the side of if
Speaker 5: both of its mandates are being missed, it would rather
Speaker 5: take the inflation side more seriously, So interest rates will
Speaker 5: be higher than you'd otherwise. Like I think, in terms
Speaker 5: of what I expect, basically, I can't see any scenario
Speaker 5: where this isn't bad for US growth. I feel like
Speaker 5: people sometimes get hung up on the recession stuff, and
Speaker 5: my concern is that you don't see a recession this year,
Speaker 5: and that people who wanted the tariffs and who like
Speaker 5: the tariffs say, oh, well, look at all those people.
Speaker 5: They went crazy. They were screeching and screaming about a recession.
Speaker 5: We avoided a recession. It was all fine, right, Even
Speaker 5: if we avoid a recession, it's not fine. Growth will
Speaker 5: be lower, living standards will be lower, Economic opportunity for
Speaker 5: Americans will be lower or be worse. There's also no
Speaker 5: scenario where this isn't bad for prices, right, the prices
Speaker 5: aren't going to go up. The real risk with the
Speaker 5: price increases, I think, is that you see this sort
Speaker 5: of self fulfilling thing. Right, So people have gotten used
Speaker 5: to prices rising more quickly in the last few years,
Speaker 5: and they've previously been used to, and you get what
Speaker 5: economists refer to as unanchored inflation expectations, where people start
Speaker 5: to think, oh, well, I used to think inflation was
Speaker 5: sort of running at two percent a year, but now
Speaker 5: I think, based on this experience, is probably going to
Speaker 5: run at more like four or five or whatever it is.
Speaker 5: And you get all of these behavioral things where you know,
Speaker 5: an individual business will start raising the price of its
Speaker 5: own goods more rapidly because it thinks that its input
Speaker 5: prices are going to go up. These things tend to snowball,
Speaker 5: and that's how you get into a situation that's really
Speaker 5: really difficult in control, like it was in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 5: like it was in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, so I
Speaker 5: think that's a meaningful risk, and that's one of the
Speaker 5: reasons that I think you're not going to see a
Speaker 5: sort of big sudden ride to the rescue from the
Speaker 5: Federal Reserve, slashing interest rates and trying to rescue things,
Speaker 5: even if the economy does look pretty pretty dismal by
Speaker 5: the end of the year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's hard to imagine a world where they
Speaker 1: cut interest rates, especially when cutting interest rates is inflationary.
Speaker 1: There's a world in which Donald Trump backs off the tariffs,
Speaker 1: like really backs off the tariffs.
Speaker 2: We've already seen it back off.
Speaker 1: It a little bit, but it seems likely to me
Speaker 1: that as we get more economic pain, Trump will back
Speaker 1: off the tariffs.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: The idea of entering manufacturing was an idea he had,
Speaker 1: but clearly you can't ontour manufacturing by making everything more expensive.
Speaker 1: And even if he is unable to learn, I think
Speaker 1: someone will explain this to him sooner or later. So
Speaker 1: the question is, say tomorrow, he's like, tariffs were bad,
Speaker 1: that was stupid. Let's not do this anymore, and he
Speaker 1: takes all the tariffs down to zero. Why can you
Speaker 1: not undo this and explain to me because it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think you can undo the full effect. I mean,
Speaker 5: I put it this way. I didn't think that's going
Speaker 5: to happen. I think if it did happen, the equity
Speaker 5: market would be up like ten to fifteen percent. I
Speaker 5: think everything would explode. But I was talking before about
Speaker 5: foreign investors, which would.
Speaker 2: Be actually inflationary, right.
Speaker 5: It would depend. It could be because you see there's
Speaker 5: like the wealth effect. People get excited when the stocks
Speaker 5: go up, and now you know, they spend more. It
Speaker 5: could be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, talk about the foreign investors.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the difficulty of sort of putting this properly back
Speaker 5: in the jar and sealing it off again is in
Speaker 5: those sort of foreign investors. Right now. I've likened this
Speaker 5: before to asking an investor internationally or in America or
Speaker 5: basically anywhere in the world, anyone in finance what it
Speaker 5: would be like to live without the dollar as the
Speaker 5: dominant currency is like asking fish what it's like to
Speaker 5: live without water. Right, None of us for any benchmark
Speaker 5: for any of this, Right, It's not a world we've
Speaker 5: ever lived in that sort of the basic metric by
Speaker 5: which you live by is dollar denominated, right. So it's very,
Speaker 5: very tough to imagine. But I think there's a problem
Speaker 5: here that it demonstrates a sort of fundamental unseeriousness, lack
Speaker 5: of competence at the highest levels of the US government,
Speaker 5: and I think it's really difficult to address that. I
Speaker 5: think that even in the instance that the Republicans lose
Speaker 5: the next election and you get another Democrat administration, what
Speaker 5: you have Among the people I spoke to that they
Speaker 5: were basically, to some degree, a lot of them willing
Speaker 5: to consider that the first Trump administration is a bit
Speaker 5: of an aberration. Right, it's like, you know, an oddity.
Speaker 5: You got that, but then it went away like Brexit, Yeah, exactly, exactly,
Speaker 5: you know, I mean more temporary than Brexit. Right, it's
Speaker 5: not locked in forever. People say, Okay, that was crazy,
Speaker 5: but whatever, you know, back to normal now. I think
Speaker 5: the second time has made people think, no, okay, this
Speaker 5: is something fundamentally different going on. There's something in American
Speaker 5: politics now that I as a foreign investor, and you know,
Speaker 5: American politics isn't set up to satisfy foreign investors. But
Speaker 5: they say, no, okay, this isn't for me anymore. I
Speaker 5: need to reduce my exposure to the US by five
Speaker 5: to ten percentage points. And I'm talking about over decades. Right.
Speaker 5: These people have really really large portfolios, and they're thinking
Speaker 5: over really really long time horizons. But that's a lot
Speaker 5: of money. That's a lot of money in the long term,
Speaker 5: and I think it's really really difficult to put the
Speaker 5: cat back in there.
Speaker 1: And that really is actually dollar flight, Yeah it is.
Speaker 5: It's not going to be like flight from an emerging
Speaker 5: market currency where you get these crazy outflows. What it's
Speaker 5: going to mean is lower American asset prices, higher American
Speaker 5: bond yields, higher American borrowing costs. You look at the
Speaker 5: federal deficit. We're talking about six seven percent of GDP
Speaker 5: and it's forecast to grow, and nobody has any thoughts
Speaker 5: about about seriously reducing it. And if everyone wants dollar assets,
Speaker 5: that's fine to some degree. You know, it's maybe not fine,
Speaker 5: but it's the most affordable currency to borrow in by
Speaker 5: the most trusted government in the world. The international demand
Speaker 5: is always there. I don't know what that looks like
Speaker 5: when the international bidders just stop showing up. Right, they're
Speaker 5: not fire sailing everything they have, but they're saying, actually,
Speaker 5: we don't want to fund all this, right, we don't
Speaker 5: want that many treasury bills. We don't want that many
Speaker 5: treasury bonds. It could get ugly and you haven't really
Speaker 5: seen those dynamics before, precisely because the US dollar is
Speaker 5: the only reserve currency, there's nothing to compete with it.
Speaker 5: But even people choosing a little bit of extra everywhere else, right,
Speaker 5: they'll raise my allocation to euros a bit. I'll raise
Speaker 5: my allocations to any number of smaller currencies British pound,
Speaker 5: Canadian dollar, Australian dollar. There's all sorts that you could navigate.
Speaker 5: You know, a few billion dollars into tens of billions
Speaker 5: of dollars whatever. It is, tiny percentage points of an
Speaker 5: enormous international portfolio. You get rid of that in dollars,
Speaker 5: and things can get quite ugly over time.
Speaker 2: Definitely quite ugly over time. Thank you, Mike Bird.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Nor Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 6: So I am always hearing from the Tim Dillons and
Speaker 6: all these people who love to say that democrats hate democracy.
Speaker 6: But it's kind of funny because when the will of
Speaker 6: people is expressed in these ballot initiatives, there's one party
Speaker 6: that constantly overturns them, even when they're overwhelmingly voted for,
Speaker 6: like we're seeing in Missouri right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't really like democracy. The Republican Party Missouri
Speaker 1: Republicans vote to repeal state's new paid sick leave law. Again,
Speaker 1: Republicans have decided that the way to cut government spending
Speaker 1: is to cut healthcare, cut sick leave, cut the things
Speaker 1: that people desperately need and at this point really rely on.
Speaker 1: They're just doing it because they don't want to cut.
Speaker 2: Taxes for very wealthy people.
Speaker 1: It's going to be terrible, and it's also again punishing
Speaker 1: the people who put Donald Trump in office. So just
Speaker 1: like the tariffs punish the people who put Donald Trump
Speaker 1: in office, these cuts to the social safety net also
Speaker 1: punish the people who put Donald Trump in office. Make
Speaker 1: it make sense, I can make it make sense, but
Speaker 1: at all points this is just incredibly fucked up and bad.
Speaker 2: That's it for.
Speaker 1: This episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Speaker 1: and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make.
Speaker 2: Sense of all this chaos.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
Speaker 1: friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.