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Speaker 1: Good morning, Welcome to Counterpoints. Emily Broke, Liberated, liberated.
Speaker 4: How liberated are you today?
Speaker 1: I'm not retiring for a while ever, so not even
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna.
Speaker 4: Look sonsco of one to ten.
Speaker 5: You're very liberated, look quite liberated, full full revolution, liberate,
Speaker 5: EL Day.
Speaker 1: I really celebrated EL Day. For sure. You're gonna be
Speaker 1: another L Day today. Probably it would taut And we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about this in a moment. China justin
Speaker 1: nownounced that it is retaliating against the American tariffs. Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's plan was he was going to put tariffs on
Speaker 1: the entire world and then warn them not to retaliate. Yes,
Speaker 1: he does not. I don't know if he had a
Speaker 1: plan B. I hope he does. Because Plan A did
Speaker 1: not work. The world is retaliating, and we'll talk. We'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that. There's full blown warfare
Speaker 1: inside the Trump administration. Although it's funny because it's like,
Speaker 1: do David Sachs and Elon Musk like, do they count
Speaker 1: as the administration? You know, in the old days, you
Speaker 1: knew who the senior government officials were, and if they
Speaker 1: were out on cable attacking each other, then you had,
Speaker 1: you know, staffer on staffer violence. David Sachs is the
Speaker 1: cryptos are for the White House. Elon Musk is was
Speaker 1: the co president and sort of running DOGE, but not
Speaker 1: running DOGE a special government employee. But is he a
Speaker 1: government employee or has Trump kicked him out? Or is
Speaker 1: he actually still running things and he's going to fire
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people over the next several months.
Speaker 1: Is not totally clear. So does that count as an
Speaker 1: administration official criticizing another one? I don't even know. Because
Speaker 1: the membrane between what is the administration and what is
Speaker 1: the oligarch class is just so thin that they just
Speaker 1: move right in and out of it. Whatever. In any event,
Speaker 1: Musk thinks Navarro's moron. We're going to talk. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk more about that. The Supreme Court a little
Speaker 1: bit of a victory sort of, you know, so far
Speaker 1: for the Trump administration's effort to keep these probationary employees
Speaker 1: that they fired from being hired back, except for the
Speaker 1: ones they need to hire back because they accidentally fired them.
Speaker 5: And these people's jobs just keep ping ponging through the court.
Speaker 1: Really absurd, not efficient.
Speaker 5: And so then Ryan, you've well on Capitol Hill right now,
Speaker 5: Republicans are actually raging against Donald Trump's budget, his big, one,
Speaker 5: big beautiful bill. He met with some of them last
Speaker 5: night and they are still not super pleased.
Speaker 1: But lose three.
Speaker 5: He can only lose three. And Freedom Caucus at least
Speaker 5: as it yesterday, was saying he might lose up towards
Speaker 5: a dozen.
Speaker 1: They always say that, but we'll get into it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll get into that. And then Ryan, you have a.
Speaker 1: Guest for us, Yes, Congress and the Luzio from Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: Rust Belt Democrat. He has really been making a lot
Speaker 1: of Democrats angry by not just completely towing the party
Speaker 1: line that Trump bad, therefore tariff's bad, and Trump's tariff
Speaker 1: plan obviously dumb, therefore all tariffs are dumb. He's trying
Speaker 1: to find a middle ground where he's saying no, like, actually,
Speaker 1: we do need some industrial policy, and it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of people mad at him. So this is a
Speaker 1: refuge for those kinds of people.
Speaker 5: Well said, we will talk to him all about that.
Speaker 5: Drop site scoop as of this morning.
Speaker 1: Also, yes, so Hamas filed with a lawyer in the
Speaker 1: UK a one hundred plus page brief to demand that
Speaker 1: the UK delist it from its terror designation. And so
Speaker 1: we're going to go through the We're going to go
Speaker 1: through some of the pleading, because it's an absolutely fascinating
Speaker 1: document no matter where you stand on the question, because
Speaker 1: they talk about they talk about anti Semitism, they talk
Speaker 1: about the role of Zionism and Israel, they talk about
Speaker 1: what their position is when it comes to a future
Speaker 1: settlement in the region, and they make a straightforward argument
Speaker 1: that we do not belong on this terror list. And
Speaker 1: here's why.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that'll be pretty interesting to go through.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting, interesting indication of the way that Hamas
Speaker 1: is increasingly relating to Western institutions in a way that
Speaker 1: where it used to be more standoffish and consider all
Speaker 1: of them to be considered all of them to be
Speaker 1: just enemies.
Speaker 5: N you had a really interesting conversation with Naomi Klin,
Speaker 5: and I'm excited for everyone to see and we'll talk
Speaker 5: about it a little bit as well. But Ryan sat
Speaker 5: downe with Naomi Klein yesterday actually to get I mean,
Speaker 5: it's interesting because I think her work was really formative
Speaker 5: for you back in late nineties early sure, for many,
Speaker 5: many many people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Naomi Klin was the man back then, and you know,
Speaker 1: nineties we still had a bit of a monoculture and
Speaker 1: so and she was, I mean, she still is a
Speaker 1: very big name, obviously in left spaces and in journalism
Speaker 1: in general, but in the nineties she was almost hegemonic
Speaker 1: when it came to representing the anti globalization side of
Speaker 1: the debate over you know, the post post Soviet Union
Speaker 1: world order, which and so it was your idea and
Speaker 1: I thought it was a really good one to get
Speaker 1: her take on this wild arc from you know, Seattle
Speaker 1: to Trump and because you've got some people on the
Speaker 1: right being like, ha, you guys got what you wanted.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 1: Look And there was this line that said, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the chants in Seattle was another world as possible,
Speaker 1: like well, hey, here's another world. But look, we didn't
Speaker 1: mean all other worlds are better, Like we always acknowledged
Speaker 1: things could get worse, and it does appear that that
Speaker 1: was always going to be the better bet. Things getting
Speaker 1: worse is always the most likely outcome.
Speaker 5: I had a chance to watch.
Speaker 1: It's on her own that that's what's happening.
Speaker 5: People should Yeah, I had a chance to watch the
Speaker 5: interview and it's really really interesting through that lens, so
Speaker 5: exciting segments. Stay tuned for that.
Speaker 1: Let's jump into our gondo this morning. She lives in
Speaker 1: Canon on the West coast, so right, that's like six
Speaker 1: am for her.
Speaker 5: That would be absurd, that would be unkind but globalization
Speaker 5: zoom prerecorded.
Speaker 4: Let's jump into the A block.
Speaker 5: China is now retaliating retaliatory tariffs is a day zero.
Speaker 5: We can put it up on the screen. This was
Speaker 5: announced last night early this morning. It's been developing. They've
Speaker 5: slapped hertalitary tariffs of eighty four percent on US goods
Speaker 5: in response to Trump takeaways just from the CNBC breakdown here,
Speaker 5: they said, this has arise from eighty four percent to
Speaker 5: thirty four percent.
Speaker 4: It is starting on April.
Speaker 5: Tenth, and we export about one hundred and forty four
Speaker 5: billion dollars worth of goods to China. That's as of
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four, so obviously this is very significant. This
Speaker 5: is a statement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bestent on Wednesday
Speaker 5: after this announcement. He said, I think it's unfortunate that
Speaker 5: the Chinese actually don't want to come and negotiate because
Speaker 5: they are the worst defenders in the international trading system.
Speaker 5: They have the most imbalanced economy in the history of
Speaker 5: the modern world, and I can tell.
Speaker 4: You this escalation is a loser for them.
Speaker 5: Ryan, you made an interesting point as we're opening up
Speaker 5: here that this is what Trump said everyone can't do.
Speaker 4: This is America has the upper hand.
Speaker 5: And you see a little bit of that in Bestent
Speaker 5: statement that the United States has the upper hand, and
Speaker 5: so if you want to retaliate, you're going to get
Speaker 5: something so much worse that it's probably worth you coming
Speaker 5: to the table. I think I think that's probably an
Speaker 5: argument he's going to find to be a winner with
Speaker 5: the EU, with Australia, with Japan. I don't know that
Speaker 5: he probably had high hopes for China, but it probably
Speaker 5: had some hopes for China.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know IM. I've kind of given
Speaker 1: up trying to get into this guy's head. At this point,
Speaker 1: China has spent the last twenty years building up its
Speaker 1: manufacturing capacity. It's it's capital markets as well, it's it's
Speaker 1: supply chains and its ability to operate distinct from the
Speaker 1: United States. Like, we can't we can't live without them.
Speaker 1: They currently they can live without us. We start a
Speaker 1: war trade war with them. At that point, he's like,
Speaker 1: all right, what do we like? So what's the point
Speaker 1: of even analyzing any of this? Like they're just gonna
Speaker 1: whoop us, and like they need they have all the
Speaker 1: things that we need for our manufacturing capacity. There's an
Speaker 1: article in one of these clean tech trade publications that
Speaker 1: talked about how just a few days ago they added
Speaker 1: export license requirements to a bunch of things. I've never
Speaker 1: even heard of, dysprosium, turbium, tungsten, that one, I've heard of, indium, yttrium,
Speaker 1: a bunch of others. These are the rare earth minerals
Speaker 1: that they produce that they export to US for us
Speaker 1: to use to complete the assembly of automobiles, electric vehicles,
Speaker 1: solar panels, all the things of the modern economy. Like
Speaker 1: they have the productive capacity to produce it.
Speaker 5: Hippies like you prevent us from mining here.
Speaker 1: Mine at all you want, go for it an well,
Speaker 1: we don't have it yet from Ukraine.
Speaker 4: It's an important distinction with Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Lie, they don't even have a bunch of that stuff.
Speaker 5: The distinction with trying to think those importantly, the reason
Speaker 5: that they just go comple it puddled to the metal
Speaker 5: on a lot of this stuff, including labor corosts. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's one of the most important contrasts is that it's
Speaker 5: been the way that they have built up their industrial
Speaker 5: capacity is you know, the way we built up our
Speaker 5: industrial capacity wasn't all sunsets and roses, was not great.
Speaker 5: What they've done is also really, really really not great
Speaker 5: and is still happening under our noses to some extent
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 1: They've done it like they are they're ready for this,
Speaker 1: and we're not. They're smart, We're not. They have the
Speaker 1: world with them, we've lost the entire world smart smartest,
Speaker 1: like the smartest in like they have a meritocracy, like
Speaker 1: the people who are the most talented at economic policy
Speaker 1: rise up in the ranks. In China, we have Peter Navarro,
Speaker 1: Elon musk and and Wharton graduate Donald Trump. Yes, we're
Speaker 1: not sending our best into this battle.
Speaker 5: King of Wharton's finest. Donald Trump last night was at
Speaker 5: the National Republican Congressional Committee's at dinner here in Washington, DC,
Speaker 5: and he talked about some of this. Again, this is
Speaker 5: just from the last like twelve hours. So let's take
Speaker 5: a listen to President Trump.
Speaker 7: If we follow through this agenda, we will be rewarded
Speaker 7: with a phenomenal economy and a massive victory at the
Speaker 7: ballot box in twenty six because we will have a
Speaker 7: record of triumph like no president has ever had, like
Speaker 7: no Congress has ever had. They will not be able
Speaker 7: to even touch your seat. Your seat is secure, and
Speaker 7: we'll pick up forty fifty or even sixty seats, and
Speaker 7: we'll have something that's going to be smooth sailing for
Speaker 7: years to come. If we don't get it done because
Speaker 7: of stupidity or a couple of people that want.
Speaker 1: To show how great they are.
Speaker 7: You just have to laugh at him, or smile at him,
Speaker 7: or cry right in their face. But it is the
Speaker 7: largest transaction in the history of our country. And don't
Speaker 7: let some of these policies to go around and say,
Speaker 7: you know, because I'm telling you, these countries are calling
Speaker 7: us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make
Speaker 7: it you please, please make it to you. I'll do anything.
Speaker 7: I'll do anything, sir and criticized because the globalists will
Speaker 7: go after you. For seven decades, American ships have patrolled
Speaker 7: the seas, American troops have kept the pace and peace,
Speaker 7: and American wealth has enriched the globe. But despite all
Speaker 7: we have given to them, you will not find an
Speaker 7: American car in Berlin, in Tokyo, in Seoul and Shanghai.
Speaker 5: Not a car.
Speaker 7: Beautiful guys, I didn't want to have any arm wrestling
Speaker 7: contests with any of them. I can tell you that
Speaker 7: they're good, strong guys. That's what they want to do.
Speaker 7: They love to dig hole, that's what they want to do.
Speaker 5: They don't want to do.
Speaker 7: Gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don't want to build
Speaker 7: cell phones with their hands. Their big strong hands doing
Speaker 7: a little thing. Remember when Hillary Clinton went to West
Speaker 7: Virginia and she had decimated them three weeks before in
Speaker 7: like sub state where they make little tiny circuit boards.
Speaker 5: The gidgets and wadgets and they're big strong hands.
Speaker 1: Guy's mentally ill.
Speaker 4: Even for Trump.
Speaker 5: That was a hell of a riff.
Speaker 7: Guy.
Speaker 1: The guy's just.
Speaker 5: He's talking about the big strong hands, like hours before
Speaker 5: the tariffs actually went into effect. And obviously that's the
Speaker 5: reality that we've woken up to this morning. We're filming
Speaker 5: this before markets have opened.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of all of these when you
Speaker 1: read through history and you there are periods of time
Speaker 1: where people had a mad king and you're like, god,
Speaker 1: that must have sucked, like literally a mad king, not
Speaker 1: like a king where like he's like ridless. You disagree
Speaker 1: with him on this issue, but this is this is
Speaker 1: the king's prerogative at this moment, like an absolute mad
Speaker 1: king where he's just nuts. I think this guy's lost it.
Speaker 1: This guy's nuts. You say he's gonna win, He's gonna
Speaker 1: win fifty seats, are you like, are you insane? Yes,
Speaker 1: like you're you are on the cusp of a financial
Speaker 1: crisis that you have sparked for no reason. You're going
Speaker 1: to go down as like the worst president in American history.
Speaker 1: If you continue with this and he's you're not going
Speaker 1: to touch us, we're going to win fifty seats.
Speaker 5: Well, so that's the I mean, if you continue with
Speaker 5: this is the I was gonna say a million dollar question,
Speaker 5: but multi trillion dollar question.
Speaker 1: She shows no signs of back and down.
Speaker 5: So I want to get in all of that after
Speaker 5: we roll through some of what else happened yesterday, because
Speaker 5: Jameson Greer was testifying in front of the Senate, and
Speaker 5: Andrew ross Orkin will start with us is going to
Speaker 5: be a two made quite an interesting point on CNBC
Speaker 5: yesterday that I think we'll probably probably learn more about
Speaker 5: like a year or two from now.
Speaker 4: So let's roll into ross Orkin.
Speaker 8: Given what the government's been doing and this administration's been doing,
Speaker 8: it would not shock me, and I hate to speculate
Speaker 8: if we were to find out that a whole bunch
Speaker 8: of people who work in Washington as a elected leaders
Speaker 8: one way or the other, ultimately sold stocks last week
Speaker 8: or potentially worse than that short of the market.
Speaker 5: Okay, so Ryan, they don't have to disclose this, what
Speaker 5: is it, thirty days they're supposed to disclose their trades Washington.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's I think something like that for the executive Yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 5: They're supposed to. This came out of the Stock Act
Speaker 5: of was twenty twelve, after the revelations about Nancy Pelosi.
Speaker 5: They passed this saying that they would disclose their trades
Speaker 5: within and John Bayner and John Bayner within thirty days.
Speaker 5: And so we have no idea.
Speaker 1: And what's his name, Max bought Spencer Spencer. Baucus was
Speaker 1: the Financial Services chairman or ranking member on the Financial
Speaker 1: Services Committee. Came out of the meeting with Bernanke and
Speaker 1: Hank Paulson in two thousand and seven when they told him, like, hey,
Speaker 1: this thing is about to go down. He walked out
Speaker 1: of the meeting and sold his stocks. And that one
Speaker 1: in particular rattled the public to a point where they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, you got it, Like you need to do
Speaker 1: something about it. In Congress is like, sure, we'll let
Speaker 1: you know what we're doing after we do it, but
Speaker 1: we're not going to stop doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And by the way, if we don't disclose it, it's
Speaker 5: not that big of a deal. It's fine. Get over it, right, Okay,
Speaker 5: So that's just something to keep in mind. Obviously, people
Speaker 5: could be short in the market, they could be doing
Speaker 5: all kinds of things. A lot of times, the way
Speaker 5: that members do this is they say that their wife
Speaker 5: was trading or their husband was trading, or you know,
Speaker 5: they have a really flimsy excuse and say, my broker
Speaker 5: does all of this. It's not a blind trust.
Speaker 1: I don't have no members of Congress of the issue here.
Speaker 1: It's more the White House.
Speaker 5: And people in the White House potentially. Right, let's put
Speaker 5: a three up on the screen. This is from David Sachs.
Speaker 5: I think we have this here. Black Monday hoax is over.
Speaker 5: This is a post from cryptos are As David Sachs.
Speaker 5: And then there was a community note, and I say,
Speaker 5: what was because if you go to this tweet there
Speaker 5: is no longer The note readers added contexts they thought
Speaker 5: people might want to know, as a three forty five
Speaker 5: easter in the same day this was this tweet was written.
Speaker 5: The SMPA is down two point six percent for the day,
Speaker 5: racing overnight gains and down.
Speaker 4: About six percent.
Speaker 1: So he posted this in the morning six percent.
Speaker 5: From when the tweet was written, yeah, and so now
Speaker 5: if you go to this post, actually, he added.
Speaker 4: He added an additional tweet to the threat.
Speaker 5: He said, after wrongly predicting a crash yesterday, some people
Speaker 5: are gloating. This is around six pm yesterday because the
Speaker 5: Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down point eight four percent
Speaker 5: today on the real black Monday, the DJIA plunged by
Speaker 5: twenty two point six. People use these terms without having
Speaker 5: a clue what they mean.
Speaker 1: He is right about that, and what he's talking about
Speaker 1: is that throughout the day there was there was a
Speaker 1: bounce like that, and the markets were actually up for
Speaker 1: a while, and there was some hope that maybe the
Speaker 1: countries wouldn't retaliate very quickly and that Trump might revisit this.
Speaker 1: And it was the same false hope that led them
Speaker 1: to kind of, you know, run up the market in
Speaker 1: January and February, and then when it became clear that no, no,
Speaker 1: this guy's dug in on this thing and China is
Speaker 1: going to retaliate, then the market crashed again.
Speaker 5: So we still don't know how it's going to open today,
Speaker 5: of course, But Jameson Greer was testifying before the Senate
Speaker 5: yesterday and got some really some genuinely very tough questions
Speaker 5: from Democrats, no surprise there, but Ryan some interesting question
Speaker 5: from Democrats that we wanted to roll through as well.
Speaker 5: So let's go This is questions from Mark Warner, a
Speaker 5: question from Tom tillis obviously at establishment Republican, and then
Speaker 5: we'll have other clips to get through with jameson Greer
Speaker 5: as well. He is the US Trade Representative, so he's
Speaker 5: basically the guy in the office who's tasked with managing
Speaker 5: the US's trade relationships across the world. So hell of
Speaker 5: a time to be Jamison Greer. He is very much
Speaker 5: of this kind of new right world, very much on
Speaker 5: board with this agenda, is not being forced to be
Speaker 5: in this situation. He's a kind of true believer in
Speaker 5: restructuring these global trade relationships.
Speaker 4: So let's go ahead and roll a four here.
Speaker 9: We already have a free trade agreement, we have a
Speaker 9: trade surplus, so getting the least bad Why did they
Speaker 9: get whacked in the first place.
Speaker 10: We're addressing the one point two trillion dollar deaths in
Speaker 10: the largest in human history that President Biden left us with.
Speaker 10: We should be running up the score in Australia.
Speaker 9: And the question on Australia they banner have a trade
Speaker 9: surplus with Australia, we have a free trade agreement. Why
Speaker 9: they are incredibly important national security partner? Why were they
Speaker 9: whacked with a tariff?
Speaker 10: Senator, despite the agreement. They ban our beef, they ban
Speaker 10: our pork. They're getting ready to impose measures with your company, with.
Speaker 9: Your Greek letter formula. The fact that we have a
Speaker 9: trade surplus, we.
Speaker 10: Have a global tariff on everywhere we're trying to address
Speaker 10: the one point two trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: I think that Biden left us with.
Speaker 9: I think that answer, Sir, You're a much smarter person
Speaker 9: than that answer.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming this all got gamed out, because because it's
Speaker 1: a novel approach, it need to be thought out.
Speaker 5: Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves
Speaker 5: to be wrong?
Speaker 10: Well, Senator, you can certainly always talk to me, but
Speaker 10: I won Are you at the tip of the spear? Well,
Speaker 10: I'm at the tip of the spear.
Speaker 5: It's an interesting insight into how Republicans are thinking about
Speaker 5: all of this, which is, who do I get to
Speaker 5: blame if it all blows up in our face? And
Speaker 5: that if is a huge.
Speaker 1: And Mark Warner is asking a reasonable question, but he's
Speaker 1: asking it into a completely unreasonable environment. Like he and
Speaker 1: I don't normally defend Mark Warner, but he's an insane
Speaker 1: person in an insane asylum. He's like and so I
Speaker 1: get why he's yelling. He's like, guys, you said that
Speaker 1: if we have a trade deficit with the country, then
Speaker 1: if so facto they have trade barriers against us, and
Speaker 1: then we're going to screw them Australia. We have a
Speaker 1: trade surplus with them, So what is your problem? And
Speaker 1: it's just talking points.
Speaker 5: Well, I think that's interesting because the yeah, soccer, if
Speaker 5: soccer were here, he would be going through the roof
Speaker 5: because the beef is beef. One of the things beef.
Speaker 5: It's insane. We are pushing the beef x sports are
Speaker 5: like hormone Leyden beef exports on other countries and expecting
Speaker 5: them to just take it. But I think there's so
Speaker 5: we have another clip here. Actually that will be helpful too.
Speaker 5: This is a finance committee, so same committee that you've
Speaker 5: been here.
Speaker 1: We ship a cow all the way to Australia. By
Speaker 1: the way, what kind of global system is that? Nobody
Speaker 1: around here? And he's the eat beef.
Speaker 5: Our food system is so insane. I mean, we don't
Speaker 5: have to open up that Pandora's box, but.
Speaker 1: Cow is I don't know really heavy?
Speaker 5: How much could a banana cost? Michael ten dollars? Here
Speaker 5: is Senator Bennett talking to Jamison Greer. We can roll
Speaker 5: this next club.
Speaker 11: I understand your position is that the long term gain
Speaker 11: is worth the short term pain. But what is that
Speaker 11: short term pain that'll look like?
Speaker 10: So, Senator, I think we can look at I think
Speaker 10: we should look at history and data for this. You know,
Speaker 10: it's hard to project what's going to happen with prices,
Speaker 10: but we know in the first term, first Trump term,
Speaker 10: the President imposed historic tariffs on China on an enormous
Speaker 10: amount of goods coming from China, and during that time,
Speaker 10: inflation went down.
Speaker 11: And I know you're smart enough to know that the
Speaker 11: likelihood is that prices are going to go up for
Speaker 11: the American people as a result of the tariffs that
Speaker 11: you put in place.
Speaker 1: Do you disagree with that?
Speaker 11: I mean, when you say that the American in your testimony,
Speaker 11: that you expect the American people will bear the burden
Speaker 11: or that, and I'm sure they will bear any burden
Speaker 11: on some level, But what do you think that what
Speaker 11: do you think that burden is actually going to look like.
Speaker 10: Well, I think the challenges, frankly, are going to be
Speaker 10: more for companies that are largely dependent on imports from
Speaker 10: from China and Asia, where they have to adjust their
Speaker 10: supply chains in a quick set of time.
Speaker 4: Right, and you're laughing, I'm just going to toss right
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 1: Well, that's great news. So these tariffs are only going
Speaker 1: to be a problem for companies that have, you know,
Speaker 1: global entanglements in their supply chains. That's good. I'm glad
Speaker 1: to hear that. Let me let me check which company. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's all of the companies, that's every company. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: guess we're back back to square one with that on
Speaker 1: your point. By the way, on the on Dow futures
Speaker 1: based on this China news that we opened with DW
Speaker 1: Nasdaq SMP all down about two percent. But here's the
Speaker 1: good news. As your wealth shrinks every day as a
Speaker 1: as a country and as a person, when you lose
Speaker 1: two percent every day, you're actually losing just a little
Speaker 1: bit less in absolute numbers. Okay, So there is really
Speaker 1: in light at the end of the tunnel. Well, let's
Speaker 1: put this and it's a big zero.
Speaker 5: Well, so as how long this goes on, let's put
Speaker 5: this Kaitlin huey Burns post this is the next album.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If you have nothing and the Dow crashes two percent,
Speaker 1: you didn't lose a thing.
Speaker 5: You will own nothing and you will be happy.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 1: Genius.
Speaker 5: Kaitlyn huy Burns says. She asked s gott Best on
Speaker 5: the Hill yesterday whether the tariff's going into effect tomorrow,
Speaker 5: so they are in effect right now? Are set in
Speaker 5: stone or negotiating tactic? And Bessent replied, quote, they are negotiable,
Speaker 5: but not a negotiating tactic. There's a lot to get
Speaker 5: into with that.
Speaker 1: I kind of I'm with Bessent on this one. All
Speaker 1: the let me stand up for Besson.
Speaker 5: Here, stand up for Beson.
Speaker 1: I get what he's saying there. He's saying, look, all right,
Speaker 1: the tariff is fifteen percent, or it's eighty five percent
Speaker 1: on Lesotho, maybe it could be seventy five. Like the
Speaker 1: number is negotiable, yes, but the idea that we are
Speaker 1: putting forward, that we are going to break the back
Speaker 1: of the global trading system and create something new in
Speaker 1: its place, that's not negotiable. That's what he's saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't believe him, because like Trump in that speech
Speaker 1: was like, they're all begging me for a deal, and
Speaker 1: you know, he's going to make some deals and he's
Speaker 1: I think he's eventually going to have to either back
Speaker 1: off this reforced off of it, because you can't break
Speaker 1: the global system as one person. Yeah, without or we
Speaker 1: just have no system left.
Speaker 5: I mean, you can break the global system.
Speaker 1: But he's breaking it. What I mean is at some
Speaker 1: point Republicans have to step in. I mean they would
Speaker 1: need sixty seven votes to override his veto. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you keep shaving two three percent off every single day,
Speaker 1: So there's gonna that that's gonna that pressure is gonna build.
Speaker 1: So here's where people spent too long building up. People
Speaker 1: spent their entire lives building up what they have. And
Speaker 1: I don't think they're going to let this mentally ill
Speaker 1: guy just take it away. Maybe they will though.
Speaker 5: Well so Politico, I think this was in playbook the
Speaker 5: other day. I was talking about how Republican. The incentive
Speaker 5: for Republicans, this is the implication I'm paraphrasing it right now,
Speaker 5: is they know they're voters trust Donald Trump. Republican voters
Speaker 5: trust Donald Trump. That may chip away, that trust may
Speaker 5: trip away, but right now, Republican voters trust Donald Trump
Speaker 5: more than when they trust his opponents. When it comes
Speaker 5: to I mean, he's his numbers. Harry Entton has pointed
Speaker 5: this out. We'll get to it. His numbers on the
Speaker 5: economy are slipping. But Republican voters have confidence in Donald
Speaker 5: Trump to the extent that it means they trust him
Speaker 5: more than other people. And so if the choice is
Speaker 5: Donald Trump or you know someone who opposes Donald Trump's approach.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about this polling more in a minute, but
Speaker 1: here's a good one for it that backs up your point.
Speaker 1: You Gov asked April second, will forever be remembered as
Speaker 1: the day American history was reborn, the day America's destiny
Speaker 1: was reclaimed, in the day that we began to make
Speaker 1: America wealthy again. Do you agree or disagree with that
Speaker 1: following statement regarding tariffs. Republicans, by seventy to fourteen either
Speaker 1: strongly or somewhat agree with that independence. Fifty one percent
Speaker 1: of independence disagree with that. Forty one percent strongly disagree. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Democrats are like spitting to spittake to that one and
Speaker 1: so you know, overall the country does not agree with
Speaker 1: that statement, but Republicans still do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so I just think this is important because,
Speaker 5: like I think Trump's tactics and this is a question
Speaker 5: we'll have for the that I'll definitely have for the
Speaker 5: congressman later. I think Trump's tactics are completely like bananas.
Speaker 5: There's no disagreement on that. I think a lot of
Speaker 5: voters make the calculus that it's between these banana tactics
Speaker 5: or the status quo, which is shocking levels of debt
Speaker 5: and deficit raising under the Biden ministry. You really the chart,
Speaker 5: just the skyrocketing. It wasn't Jess Biden, but after COVID
Speaker 5: Trump contributed to that as well. It was just crazy levels.
Speaker 5: And people feel like that contributed to inflation. And they
Speaker 5: look at the establishment and status quo, and then they
Speaker 5: look at Donald Trump and they look at for example,
Speaker 5: China's you know, they look at China, they look at
Speaker 5: different places in the world, and they say, this is unfair.
Speaker 5: Trump taps into that, and the response it's it's not
Speaker 5: persuasive the opponents of Donald Trump. For a lot of
Speaker 5: Republican voters, it's not persuasive, and so I think also
Speaker 5: there's a genuine question as to whether, and this speaks
Speaker 5: poorly to our politics.
Speaker 4: You have Jamison Greer, who I.
Speaker 5: Think was pretty it was a pretty capable defender of
Speaker 5: a weird process, a bad process that is a policy
Speaker 5: in and of itself. But when did you see how
Speaker 5: the tweet, the Walter Bloomberg tweet shift of the market
Speaker 5: day before yesterday? It was the craziest thing in the world,
Speaker 5: predictable but insane, and I think part of what may
Speaker 5: happen here. I'm not saying it will happen, but I'm
Speaker 5: saying there is still a possibility that we see a shift.
Speaker 5: Trump pulls back, probably a month from now. I shouldn't
Speaker 5: say probably, but let's just say hypothetically a month from now,
Speaker 5: a few weeks from now, Trump pulls back. There was
Speaker 5: a shock for a long time, and then markets go
Speaker 5: back up and we see companies having maybe there are
Speaker 5: significant layoffs, maybe there are jobs brought back in. That's
Speaker 5: what we see right now is this push and pull,
Speaker 5: Big Stalantis temporary layoffs, and then the Honda Civic manufacturing
Speaker 5: coming back to Indiana, for example. And I just I
Speaker 5: don't want to discount the possibility that this is better
Speaker 5: in the long run than the status quo. I'm not
Speaker 5: saying it's the possibility. I'm not saying it's the thing
Speaker 5: that's actually going to happen. But I still think that
Speaker 5: there's what we have no idea where Trump stops, and
Speaker 5: I don't think he has any idea where he stops,
Speaker 5: so that, I mean, I think a lot of voters
Speaker 5: are probably making that calculus too. I think that's what
Speaker 5: allows him politically to keep stringing Republicans along with it.
Speaker 4: But that's not going to last forever.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think you can get away with that
Speaker 5: for another two to three weeks maximum maximum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the problem with Trump's approach here, besides the approach,
Speaker 1: is the sudden nature of it and the way that
Speaker 1: it has struck fear in everybody. So even if he
Speaker 1: was completely right about the fact that you need to
Speaker 1: put these blanket tariffs on everybody, including Canada and Australia like,
Speaker 1: which he's not. But let's say he was doing it
Speaker 1: the way he did it without getting buy in from
Speaker 1: Wall Street, from union, well, he got some buy in
Speaker 1: from some unions, from some members of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: Has meant that there's this fear among the public that
Speaker 1: we're going to have a recession, and these are self
Speaker 1: fulfilling situations in an economy like ours that is based
Speaker 1: so heavily on consumer spending and business investments. So if
Speaker 1: you are a business now, you're not hiring, you're probably
Speaker 1: laying off and trying to build up your cash reserves
Speaker 1: to the extent that you can. If you're a custom
Speaker 1: if you're a consumer, you're out. You might actually be
Speaker 1: out there trying to buy that washer that you've needed
Speaker 1: before it doubles in price, but in general, you're not
Speaker 1: spending money. And in fact, this poll said that one
Speaker 1: fifth of one out of five people were considering a
Speaker 1: quick purchase because of the looming tariffs and so like
Speaker 1: that could give a little sugar high, and it said
Speaker 1: another one in five we're stopping purchases because of them.
Speaker 1: But the overall all the coime means people aren't going
Speaker 1: to spend it. So then now all these businesses that
Speaker 1: rely on anything going on overseas are going to start
Speaker 1: getting hit with duties and in order to pay, like,
Speaker 1: in order to pay this tariff, you need cash. You
Speaker 1: haven't sold your product yet. This whole thing we've got
Speaker 1: here relies on cash flow and credit. You can't really
Speaker 1: throw in it. Oh like, oh, by the way, you
Speaker 1: own extra twenty percent right now, and it's still well, whoa,
Speaker 1: I don't have that. I only have exactly what I
Speaker 1: need to make it. Everyone's just you know, gasping for.
Speaker 5: Air in the China tariffs. So we started talking about
Speaker 5: our fifty percent increase, like thirty four to eighty four
Speaker 5: percent increase, And I'll skip ahead to a ten here
Speaker 5: and put this element up on the screen. The Law
Speaker 5: Street Journal reported on a survey the Chamber of Commerce
Speaker 5: did which was very very interesting and said most businesses
Speaker 5: were still or many businesses were still planning to keep
Speaker 5: their financial entanglements with China. Interestingly, this survey also saw
Speaker 5: many of those companies see China as like the biggest
Speaker 5: geopolitical risk. And that's the line that Donald Trump is
Speaker 5: telling between saying, hey, you see China as a risk,
Speaker 5: so bet on the United States. The problem with that
Speaker 5: is the tactic here has created uncertainty. Donald Trump sees
Speaker 5: the uncertainty as his leverage to get people to bet
Speaker 5: on the US. But that uncertainty is precisely why people
Speaker 5: are just being risk averse and not taking risks at all.
Speaker 5: So maybe this, this retaliatory tariff changes the calculus for
Speaker 5: some of those companies in the survey. It's obviously taken before,
Speaker 5: but I mean, it just it's it's very, very hard.
Speaker 5: The possibility that it just laid out is just that
Speaker 5: it's a possibility. I think it's a possibility that's not
Speaker 5: being treated a series. It should be in the media.
Speaker 1: Who's but who's financing that? Like who? Like the major
Speaker 1: companies are not they don't expect Trump's tariffs to be
Speaker 1: here four years from now. Yeah, so they wouldn't. They
Speaker 1: would have no reason to build a plant. The he
Speaker 1: hates the Chips Act, he hates industrial policy from the
Speaker 1: top down.
Speaker 5: So it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1: So then like who's right, Who's Who's who's financing these
Speaker 1: these projects? You just had Microsoft that you saw this
Speaker 1: announced that their their billion dollar three data centers in
Speaker 1: Ohio that they're they're pulling out of those. So the
Speaker 1: conditions aren't just the economic conditions aren't right for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not good timing for that, So like who just theoretically,
Speaker 1: who would who's betting who would lead this renaissance? Would
Speaker 1: Who's who's who's putting their chips in on the US here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Greer laid out the case that he thinks plenty
Speaker 5: of the pointing of the Honda Civic. And what's the
Speaker 5: other one that they've pointed to you so far. There's
Speaker 5: they have a couple of things that happened just in
Speaker 5: the last week or so, but certainly are offset by Stilantis,
Speaker 5: by Microsoft, and by some of these other like negative
Speaker 5: effects as well. So it's pretty it's pretty hard to
Speaker 5: make the case that it's, you know, on like that
Speaker 5: there's some objective metric by which it's it's clearly already
Speaker 5: a roaring win.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And if you I mean, if you know, why
Speaker 1: why would a company bet on us over China? Given
Speaker 1: their education system compared to ours, their manufacturing capacity compared
Speaker 1: to ours, their supply chain access compared to ours, their
Speaker 1: stability and like leadership compared to We're a basket case.
Speaker 1: We have authoritarianism but instability. We're rounding people up and
Speaker 1: throwing them in gulags, but we can't even get a
Speaker 1: stable system. Is it's the point of the gulags? What
Speaker 1: are you talking about criticized Israel?
Speaker 4: Oh, you're which gulags are you talking about.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of salvador Ones, but also the
Speaker 1: detention centers all around the rest of where students are
Speaker 1: being rounded up for op eds and participating in protests
Speaker 1: and sent to.
Speaker 5: Let's watch this clip of Harry Enton on CNN reacting
Speaker 5: to this was going pretty viral on the right yesterday.
Speaker 4: I saw it when Charlie Kirk posted it.
Speaker 1: But let's a eight.
Speaker 5: This is a eight. Let's rule Harry Enton on CNN yesterday.
Speaker 12: So Trump's approach here, what are we talking about Trump's
Speaker 12: approach to presidential power? I think the American people recognize
Speaker 12: what he's doing here is completely from we're talking Get this,
Speaker 12: eighty six percent of the American public believes that Trump's
Speaker 12: approach to presidential power is completely different from past presidents,
Speaker 12: compared to only fourteen percent who believe it is in
Speaker 12: line with president And we're talking about at least seventy
Speaker 12: nine percent of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. So again, you
Speaker 12: can agree or you can disagree with Donald Trump, but.
Speaker 5: What you can't.
Speaker 12: Disagree with is that he's doing things very differently.
Speaker 1: And this is interesting.
Speaker 12: So Trump's presidential power is too much the right amount,
Speaker 12: too little. Well, forty seven percent say too much, but
Speaker 12: then you get thirty six percent who say the right amount.
Speaker 12: Then you get seventeen percent.
Speaker 5: Who say too little.
Speaker 12: So you're essentially dealing with a majority of the American
Speaker 12: public fifty three percent who do not say that Trump
Speaker 12: has too much power.
Speaker 5: Ran I think it's funny that some I Maga world
Speaker 5: saw that as like a brief glimmer of hope, the
Speaker 5: Harry Enton thing, which is basically just voters saying we
Speaker 5: think the guy is doing things differently. Charlie Kirk pulled
Speaker 5: out the tweet the quote Trump is not a lie
Speaker 5: him duck. If anything, He's a soaring eagle. But the
Speaker 5: context of it was Harry Enton basically saying that, yeah,
Speaker 5: voters look at or looking at Donald Trump being like,
Speaker 5: this dude's doing all kinds of different stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean I'd have been in that, just like, yes,
Speaker 1: I would have been in that eighty seven or ninety
Speaker 1: percent or whatever. Yeah, yeah he is. Yeah, he's the
Speaker 1: first one to ship people to dungeons and El Salvador
Speaker 1: and then to suggest that he might do it to
Speaker 1: American citizens too, That is, he wants to yeah, he
Speaker 1: wants to Bush is like Wow, I could do that.
Speaker 5: He's like, whoa, that was a possibility that was on
Speaker 5: the table.
Speaker 1: We had to use that Guantanamo thing. Well, they send
Speaker 1: him anywhere. Here's the way to do I thought we
Speaker 1: had to do it secretly and send him to the
Speaker 1: Egyptian dungeons where they torture them, and but pretend that
Speaker 1: we didn't do it.
Speaker 5: Well, here's the difference.
Speaker 1: Just do it out loud.
Speaker 5: George W.
Speaker 4: Bush now gets lots of press.
Speaker 5: His daughter's on Today's show, and people think very warmly
Speaker 5: about George W. Bush in you know, men Hattan and
Speaker 5: you know these these newsrooms whereas and he could send
Speaker 5: people to you know, torture sites and black sites. But
Speaker 5: Donald Trump is actually honest about what he's doing.
Speaker 1: And so he's hated and again Obama.
Speaker 4: The answer is why not dislike both?
Speaker 1: Obama not prosecuting the people responsible for the torture program
Speaker 1: continues to aunt us.
Speaker 5: That's a good point.
Speaker 1: Let's put this one would at the time.
Speaker 5: Let's put this poll on the screen. This is a
Speaker 5: nine as you go polling results. Ryan, did you take
Speaker 5: a look at these as are some post quote Liberation
Speaker 5: Day polling fifty one to thirty eight agreement with Republicans
Speaker 5: are crashing the American economy in real time and driving
Speaker 5: us to a recession. And then fifty one to twenty
Speaker 5: agreement with the tariffs of the largest peacetime tax hike
Speaker 5: in US history. Those numbers are the combination of strongly
Speaker 5: in somewhat degree on both. So that's where you get
Speaker 5: the both fifty one numbers and eight. So I don't
Speaker 5: find that particularly surprising.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you go if you go through this entire poll,
Speaker 1: you see a public that you see a public where
Speaker 1: Democrats are like massively against all of this, Independence are
Speaker 1: hugely against all this by like two to one margins,
Speaker 1: and Republicans are pretty squeamish on it. They still like Trump,
Speaker 1: But when you dig into Republican support for what's going
Speaker 1: on here, it's not that great. I noticed one here
Speaker 1: where they said they asked why do so, they asked
Speaker 1: why Trump was doing this, And one of the theories
Speaker 1: that they asked people about, they said, the tariffs are
Speaker 1: a means to compel loyalty from every business that will
Speaker 1: need to petition Trump for relief. That's a theory I've
Speaker 1: seen Crystal put out that this is part and parcel
Speaker 1: of Trump's consolidation of power. That now, if just exactly
Speaker 1: what they said, If you're Apple, or if you're a
Speaker 1: small company from Columbus, Ohio, and you're like, look, I'm
Speaker 1: going to go under, then you call your congressman, you
Speaker 1: call whoever you know who knows Trump, and you plead
Speaker 1: to the king for mercy, and the King grants you mercy,
Speaker 1: or else your whole town goes up in amphetamines. And
Speaker 1: the independence said by a forty six to twenty two.
Speaker 1: You know, the rest are like, I'm sure forty six
Speaker 1: to twenty two so more than two to one. Independence
Speaker 1: are like, yeah, that's why he's doing this. He's consolidating
Speaker 1: his own power. And it fits with what people understand
Speaker 1: to be his personality that he loves to be the
Speaker 1: guy who's like, you're fired or you're the man, and
Speaker 1: he loves to keep people in suspense and to have
Speaker 1: control over them. And I don't think people want their
Speaker 1: lives at the being messed with for that reason.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, nobody wants their I mean that's the reason
Speaker 5: we have the system we have. You shouldn't be at
Speaker 5: the whim of a president. I mean, this is congressional power.
Speaker 5: He's evoking emergency authority to do this. This is Article
Speaker 5: one power and that's part of the problem that's probably
Speaker 5: going to come back to him. It is just like
Speaker 5: just final point the strange position that people like myself
Speaker 5: and probably Stagger to some extent find themselves in, which
Speaker 5: is and on the left as well, that it's like
Speaker 5: these there's there's something very serious here. And I don't
Speaker 5: discount the possibility at all that you know, I'm not
Speaker 5: saying it's a huge possibility, the possibility that there's some
Speaker 5: some good that comes out of this because he can
Speaker 5: reverse course on a whim. And that's the sort of
Speaker 5: strange situation that we find ourselves in in the United States,
Speaker 5: is that he's he's he's consolidated emergency authority to do this,
Speaker 5: and I mean where we just kind of have to
Speaker 5: wait to see if he blinks and what that if
Speaker 5: he does blink, what it looks like in the particulars
Speaker 5: of it. And we're talking to seventy countries that he
Speaker 5: says are bagging to make deals. The amount of power
Speaker 5: there is just enormous. So it's just we have no idea,
Speaker 5: We have no idea what's coming down the next few weeks,
Speaker 5: which is why we will be here covering all of it.
Speaker 1: Maybe, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 5: Let's move on to the feud between Peter Navarro and
Speaker 5: Elon Musk. If you haven't heard how the feud is
Speaker 5: escalating between Elon Musk and Peter Navarro, you are going
Speaker 5: to want to stay tuned for this because I dare
Speaker 5: I say, Ryan, it's been a little bit entertaining. Carolin
Speaker 5: Levitt at the White House Press briefing yesterday weighed in
Speaker 5: on that rift. Elon Musk is coming from a more
Speaker 5: libertarian basically pro free trade. He said he wanted a.
Speaker 4: Free trade zone between the United States and the EU.
Speaker 5: The other day he has been posting videos of Milton
Speaker 5: Friedman talking about the many benefits of free trade libertarian
Speaker 5: economist Milton Freedman. That is so. Peter Navarro, on the
Speaker 5: other hand, is one of the more vocal protectionists who
Speaker 5: some people feel is pushing Trump in the direction that
Speaker 5: he's gone, maybe to the chagrin of advisors like Scott
Speaker 5: Bessant and Howard Lutnik, who probably would prefer a policy
Speaker 5: that has pauses and all of that built into it
Speaker 5: and hasn't effected stock markets quite in the same way
Speaker 5: that it has. So let's roll Carolyn Lovett getting asked
Speaker 5: about that relationship, which is spilling into the public a bit.
Speaker 13: Yesterday, there's been some public sparring between Elon Musk and
Speaker 13: the President's.
Speaker 6: Trade advisor Peter Navarro on some of these tariffs.
Speaker 13: Must actually refer to Navarre jay as being quote dumber
Speaker 13: than a sack of bricks?
Speaker 6: Are you what of our is the administration? The President
Speaker 6: all concerned that.
Speaker 14: This is maybe impacting the public's understanding of these tariffs,
Speaker 14: It might be messing with the message on it.
Speaker 13: You know, look, these are obviously two individuals who have
Speaker 13: very different views on trade tariffs. Boys will be boys,
Speaker 13: and we will let their public sparring continue. And you
Speaker 13: guys should all be very grateful that we have the
Speaker 13: most transparent administration in history. And I think it also
Speaker 13: speaks to the President's willingness to hear from all sides
Speaker 13: that he has people at the highest levels of this government.
Speaker 13: In this White House, you have very diverse opinions on
Speaker 13: very diverse issues, But the President takes all opinions in mind,
Speaker 13: and then he makes the best decision based on the
Speaker 13: best interests of the American public.
Speaker 9: Ryan.
Speaker 5: I don't think that's completely crazy that it's in some
Speaker 5: ways beneficial for us in the public to see where
Speaker 5: Elon Musk actually is on trade, and to see how
Speaker 5: he treats other people in the administration, and to see
Speaker 5: the tension that exists within the administration not just over
Speaker 5: the question of trade, but actually over the particular tactics
Speaker 5: of this approach. I don't know. I'm curious how Elon
Speaker 5: Musk would be reacting if, say Bob Lelittheiser had been
Speaker 5: in charge of this I approach. I think there's a
Speaker 5: sense that maybe with Leithheiser in the administration obviously he
Speaker 5: was with the first Trump administration, he was with the
Speaker 5: Reagan administration, he seen this kind of a serious policy
Speaker 5: type guy who has Trump's ear, would this would this
Speaker 5: rollout have been less chaotic? I don't know. The chaos
Speaker 5: is also clearly part of the point here, But wood
Speaker 5: Elon must be reacting this way.
Speaker 4: Under those circumstances.
Speaker 5: I don't know. I think maybe he just really hates
Speaker 5: Peter Navarro.
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 1: I also think it's the policy. Like you know, he
Speaker 1: is like probably the world's greatest more on at this point,
Speaker 1: he invested all of his energy, and you know, many
Speaker 1: millions of dollars into electing a guy whose stated policies
Speaker 1: would destroy his companies.
Speaker 5: That's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: And then he then enacted those stated policies, and the
Speaker 1: guy lost his mind. Now he's talking about a free
Speaker 1: trade deal with Europe, after he has spent the last
Speaker 1: year savaging all of the neoliberals who would agree with
Speaker 1: him in making that kind of a free trade deal
Speaker 1: and propping up far right wing nationalists across Europe, and
Speaker 1: then and then being shocked when those leopards eat his face.
Speaker 1: It's like, you can't be this stupid. And yes, it's
Speaker 1: nice that we're getting some transparency, but it's also come on,
Speaker 1: it's Elon Musk. It's impossible to not know his every thought.
Speaker 1: He forces it right in front of your face.
Speaker 5: Right, it's not an intentional.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows his stupid thoughts.
Speaker 5: It's not an intentional strategy of transparent. It's not like
Speaker 5: we are going to finally let the American people in.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: The consequence of it, I think is helpful for the
Speaker 5: American people. But yes, it's not them being like we
Speaker 5: are so we have such pure heart that we are
Speaker 5: going to let you do this. So we're going to
Speaker 5: play a clip now of Peter Navarro talking about Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: Elon Musk responded to it, and man does that spiral
Speaker 5: from there? So let's go ahead and roll this next element.
Speaker 15: When it comes to tariffs and trade. We all understand
Speaker 15: in the White House and the American people understand. And
Speaker 15: Elon's a car manufacturer, but he's not a car manufacturer.
Speaker 15: He's a car assembler. In many cases. If you go
Speaker 15: to his Texas plan, a good part of the engines
Speaker 15: that he gets, which in the EV case is the
Speaker 15: batteries come from Japan and come from China, the electronics
Speaker 15: come from Taiwan. The tires come what we want and
Speaker 15: the difference is in our thinking and elons On this
Speaker 15: is that we want the tires made in Akron, we
Speaker 15: want the transmissions made in Indianapolis, we want the engines
Speaker 15: made in Flint and Saginaw, and we want the cars
Speaker 15: manufactured here. It's like this business model where BMW and
Speaker 15: Mercedes come in to Spartansburg, South Carolina and have us
Speaker 15: assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions. That doesn't work for America.
Speaker 15: It's bad for our economics. It's bad for our national security.
Speaker 15: We want them to come here. And with the Eon,
Speaker 15: it's fine. He's a car man. If he's a car person,
Speaker 15: that's what he does. And he wants to achieve foreign
Speaker 15: parts and we understand it. But we want him home.
Speaker 15: We want him home. National security, I'm sure, and everything's good.
Speaker 5: That absolutely said Elon musk Off, and not yeah, there's
Speaker 5: nothing surprising about that setting Elon musk Off. So Elon
Speaker 5: musk responded to post of a post of that clip,
Speaker 5: and you know, put the little asterisk in his response
Speaker 5: to someone who posted the clip and said, this is
Speaker 5: what Peter Navarro said, he put little ascaris Peter Ritardo.
Speaker 1: Well, I hope Musk is happy. He at least gets
Speaker 1: to say that.
Speaker 5: He gets to say that golden age. And then he
Speaker 5: also replies Navarro is truly a moron. What he says
Speaker 5: here is demonstrably false. Tesla has the most American made cars.
Speaker 5: Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks. And then
Speaker 5: he tagged the account I find retards and then he
Speaker 5: tagged Peter Navarro's account in his response. There that's what
Speaker 5: set off the Caroline Levitt exchange. So again, like it
Speaker 5: makes sense that this is how they're responding to one another.
Speaker 5: And Peter Navarro is somebody who there are a lot
Speaker 5: of people in Trump's orbit who are quite uncomfortable with
Speaker 5: Elon Musk's aggressive libertarian economic policy, particularly because it's led
Speaker 5: him to have deep financial entanglements with China, and a
Speaker 5: lot of people actually just have you saw this, Like
Speaker 5: you saw this spill into the surface with Deep Bannon
Speaker 5: over the HMB stuff.
Speaker 4: A lot of this is like simmering.
Speaker 5: It doesn't it doesn't erupt every day, but it's shimmering
Speaker 5: beneath the surface between a lot of true believers in
Speaker 5: Trump protectionist circles Trump like the sort of maga industrial
Speaker 5: policy realignment circles who have a deep distrust of Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: And I think that's where you get. Peter Navarro asked
Speaker 5: publicly about Musk, just openly saying like Elon's fine, you know,
Speaker 5: it's all fine, We're glad he's in the administration, but X,
Speaker 5: Y and Z, he's just shooting from the head, and
Speaker 5: that created this public controversy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and consumers of this news program would never kind
Speaker 1: of mistake me for some Elon Musk fanboy. But he
Speaker 1: does assemble a lot of the batteries here because he
Speaker 1: has a big plant in Nevada that makes batteries for Tesla,
Speaker 1: and Navarro does sound like a moron when he starts
Speaker 1: talking about the difference between an EV car assembler and
Speaker 1: an EV car manufacturer, because the problem that a lot
Speaker 1: of unions and the UAW for instance, has with the
Speaker 1: transition from the from the kind of cars they've been
Speaker 1: making for one hundred years to the evs is that
Speaker 1: there's so much easier to assemble. Like an EV is
Speaker 1: it's like a battery and some and some wheels and
Speaker 1: then a really you know, advanced software system wrapped around it,
Speaker 1: and then some panels that fall off as soon as
Speaker 1: you drive the car off the lot. But it he
Speaker 1: keeps kind of reverting back to language about that that
Speaker 1: it that that fits better with the old Detroit, like
Speaker 1: we're going to do the transmission and okay, yeah, like
Speaker 1: anyv technically, I guess it has a transmission, but it's
Speaker 1: like a one speed transmission. It's like that's it, Like
Speaker 1: you press the gas and it and it goes. Doesn't
Speaker 1: have the multi speed transmission. It's not you know, you're
Speaker 1: putting the putting the collutch, you know, in V six
Speaker 1: and V eight and like all of these, all of
Speaker 1: the fine tuning that requires sophisticated manufacturing isn't there with
Speaker 1: the quote unquote engine of an EV, which is just
Speaker 1: the battery and it goes so uh yeah, more on
Speaker 1: is fair. I think in this point. I think Muscus
Speaker 1: Muscle's right. There are a lot of musks. Chinese production
Speaker 1: is for the Chinese market and for other markets like
Speaker 1: Tesla's a gold global brand, and you know, the other
Speaker 1: American auto companies should maybe try to figure out why
Speaker 1: that is.
Speaker 5: It's not that he was to your point, it's not
Speaker 5: that he doesn't import materials. It's that he does it last.
Speaker 1: Than Chinese where Earth's and other you know, he needs
Speaker 1: other elements of the Chinese supply chain, but not necessarily
Speaker 1: the ones that Navar was talking about here.
Speaker 5: It's so this is the last element, be five.
Speaker 1: This is also what I mean by we're not bringing
Speaker 1: our best against the Chinese and these negotiations. These these
Speaker 1: are morons, all of them.
Speaker 5: These two. You can just see there's something like this
Speaker 5: is what happens internally in every presidential It's like the
Speaker 5: long running bit here in DC about how actually Washington
Speaker 5: is viep. It's not west when it's not house of
Speaker 5: cards like it is, it is veep. It's completely true,
Speaker 5: it's at this point. But this is the type of
Speaker 5: stuff that happens internally all the time. Now we can
Speaker 5: put the next element up on the screen. Caroline Levett
Speaker 5: total Daman jabbers yesterday, we are the most transparent administration
Speaker 5: expressing our in history, expressing our disagreements in public. You
Speaker 5: know again, this this is whatever, I love it whatever.
Speaker 5: That's basically I mean, that is the best possible response,
Speaker 5: right Like they're not even trying to spin it and
Speaker 5: saying everyone is united here this is a totally a
Speaker 5: white house or everybody's on the same page. We're running
Speaker 5: like a well oiled machine. And the reason I think
Speaker 5: is important, which is fundamentally, this is Donald Trump's policy.
Speaker 5: I don't think Scott Bessett knows or Howard Lutnik knows
Speaker 5: where Donald Trump wants to stop with any of this.
Speaker 5: I don't think they know. I don't think Jamison Greer
Speaker 5: knows what Donald Trump wants to see in negotiations with
Speaker 5: Australia and what that means, how long that means he'll continue.
Speaker 5: You know, they might know that he wants them to
Speaker 5: address non tariff barriers, great, I don't think they know
Speaker 5: when he's willing to say that's enough. We have struck
Speaker 5: a deal with Australia and we will you know, completely
Speaker 5: come to the table finalize this thing. And tariffs are
Speaker 5: off or tariff's are much lower than they were, Tariff
Speaker 5: increas is much lower than it was. And I think
Speaker 5: that's what this reflects at the end of the day,
Speaker 5: is like they can't be on the same page because
Speaker 5: there's one person whose opinion on all of this matters,
Speaker 5: and he plays it close to the best, and he's
Speaker 5: doing that because he thinks it's his leverage. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, they have no idea. Like that's what
Speaker 5: that means at the end of the day, is that
Speaker 5: it's just this is what we were talking about this earlier.
Speaker 5: It's what Donald Trump decides, and he's speaking of not
Speaker 5: being transparent, like we actually don't really know because he
Speaker 5: hasn't said where this stops.
Speaker 1: It's good enough, And in the end, this is a
Speaker 1: rare moment where it doesn't it doesn't matter, like the
Speaker 1: propaganda doesn't matter, the messaging doesn't matter the infighting, the
Speaker 1: ex fighting, none of that really matters. What matters because
Speaker 1: it's the public is not going to experience this refracted
Speaker 1: through the media. They're going to experience it. And this
Speaker 1: stuff is either going to work or it's not going
Speaker 1: to work. And it doesn't work, it does not matter
Speaker 1: what they say about it. And if it works, people
Speaker 1: will be very happy. So far not working, and that's
Speaker 1: all that's going to matter. Like if we get a
Speaker 1: financial crisis cent a recession out of this, it's it
Speaker 1: really isn't going to matter how the White House messaged
Speaker 1: it and whether they were on the same page, whether
Speaker 1: their fights were internal and leaking or playing out on Twitter,
Speaker 1: won't matter. If you lost your job, you don't care.
Speaker 5: Let's move on to this big decision from the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court yesterday. We can put c one up on the screen,
Speaker 5: the Supreme Court. This is the CNN headline, Supreme Court
Speaker 5: backs Trump for now on fired probationary federal employees. We'll
Speaker 5: read a bit from CNN's reporting. They say Supreme Court
Speaker 5: allowed the Trump administration to keep several thousand probationary federal
Speaker 5: employees it is attempting to fire off the payroll while
Speaker 5: lower courts wig whether the downsizing efforts are legal. The
Speaker 5: latest in a series of wins for the White House
Speaker 5: at the Conservative High Court, and so that's referencing obviously
Speaker 5: the decision the day before that Amy Conny Barrett dissented from,
Speaker 5: but the rest of the Conservative justices agreed on and.
Speaker 1: The argument what they the argument they made was that
Speaker 1: the unions don't have standing to sue here.
Speaker 5: Oh in yesterday's decisions.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, So it's not that they didn't rule
Speaker 1: on the merits of the case. They said, which to me, like,
Speaker 1: how could a union not have standing? Like what is
Speaker 1: the point of a union if not to be the
Speaker 1: representative of the workers in a lawsuit like this? But whatever,
Speaker 1: they that's where the Republican court is. The unions don't
Speaker 1: have standing in a case that involves all the firing
Speaker 1: of all of these workers. But also one kind of
Speaker 1: funny quibble I would have with the payroll, the point
Speaker 1: about whether they're on the payroll. These firings involved first
Speaker 1: putting people on these long administrative leaves, then giving them severance,
Speaker 1: and then once that's wrapped up, then they're on unemployment benefits.
Speaker 1: So if you think you taxpayer are saving money. You're
Speaker 1: not just that these people are not working, You're still
Speaker 1: paying them. By the end of this, the process of
Speaker 1: firing these people could be the most costly example of
Speaker 1: waste fraud abuse in government. Like ever, you're going to
Speaker 1: end up paying billions of dollars to many thousands of
Speaker 1: people to not work, which, by anybody's definition is waste
Speaker 1: fraud and abuse.
Speaker 4: Not I'm true, although is it.
Speaker 1: Imagine if I came to you and I was like,
Speaker 1: I found a government agency that is spent, that is
Speaker 1: actively and purposely spending billions of dollars to get people
Speaker 1: to not work on your behalf, You'd be like, Wow,
Speaker 1: that's a scandal. It's called doge, it's.
Speaker 5: Called doggie, it's called doggie. So the question is whether
Speaker 5: it's waste running an abuse that justifies the end of
Speaker 5: the means of waste abuse, to justify the.
Speaker 1: End of that limiting ways for musc of these oligarchs,
Speaker 1: that is a feature like these people not working. If
Speaker 1: they are regulating them, if they're enforcing laws on companies,
Speaker 1: that is a feature for them, not a bug. They
Speaker 1: don't want these people at the EPA telling you, oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, you can't do this thing to this river.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, so this is more from So, this is
Speaker 5: more from the CNN article. They say labor unions and
Speaker 5: other groups had challenged the OPM so Officer Personal Management's
Speaker 5: rule in the firings, which affected thousands of employees and
Speaker 5: sent shockwaves through various federal agencies, some of which later
Speaker 5: rehired the workers. US District Judge William also nominated by
Speaker 5: Bill Clinton, ordered the administration to immediately offer over sixteen
Speaker 5: thousand probationary employees their jobs back. Each agency had and
Speaker 5: still has discretion to hire and fire its own employees. Here,
Speaker 5: the agencies were directed by OPM to fire all probationary employees,
Speaker 5: and the executed. They executed that directive to staunch the
Speaker 5: irreparable harms to organizational plaintiffs caused by OPM unlawfully slashing
Speaker 5: other agency staff required immediately reinstating those employees. And so
Speaker 5: with the Supreme Court said here is that the unions
Speaker 5: didn't have standing to make that case to the point
Speaker 5: you were making earlier on So what this means is
Speaker 5: thousands of probationary employees. By the way, the probation employees
Speaker 5: have been a subject of controversy among people supportive of
Speaker 5: DOGE because the probation probationary employees oftentimes are people that
Speaker 5: maybe recently got a raise and so we're on probationary
Speaker 5: status in this new position, and so they might be
Speaker 5: some of the best and brightest. The second of all,
Speaker 5: they're new employees in many cases who are just coming
Speaker 5: in to the administrative state and haven't been molded by
Speaker 5: the decades of bureaucratic procedure and processes and ideology, just
Speaker 5: the ideology of the bureaucracy in and of itself. And
Speaker 5: so if you're DOGE, you might look at probationary employees
Speaker 5: and say, these are the people to keep, These are
Speaker 5: the better people to keep. So even within DOSH goals,
Speaker 5: the fate of these probationer employees is a question in and
Speaker 5: of itself. But right now, what they're trying to prove,
Speaker 5: and they're excited to keep proving through the courts, is
Speaker 5: that they can do this because that is the unitary
Speaker 5: executive theory that Trump is and rust Boat and others
Speaker 5: are borrowing from Richard Nixon and saying this is the
Speaker 5: president's administration. It is under the will of the president.
Speaker 5: The president can do what he wants, and he can,
Speaker 5: you know, do it through the process that he wants.
Speaker 5: That's what they're the point that they're trying to make
Speaker 5: through the courts right now, And what it means in
Speaker 5: practical terms for these employees is that their jobs. It's
Speaker 5: like incredible whiplash. I know a lot of people don't
Speaker 5: have sympathy for bureaucrats in Washington.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: People, Well, it's not a particularly sympathetic group of people
Speaker 5: in the aggregate. When you dive into some of these individualations,
Speaker 5: you're like, oh, my gosh, that's what this person is doing.
Speaker 5: That sounds very important, like VA work, for example, some
Speaker 5: work at the VA. Like, oh, maybe we should keep
Speaker 5: that person. But the aggregate not the most sympathetic group
Speaker 5: of people. But nevertheless, their livelihoods are just pinging through
Speaker 5: the courts right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not ideal.
Speaker 5: Not I deal.
Speaker 7: Ryan.
Speaker 5: Let's move on to Capitol Hill, where a mutiny, to
Speaker 5: quote Politico is brewing, and that's actually the correct terminology here.
Speaker 5: There really is a mutiny brewing on Capitol Hill at
Speaker 5: the moment over Trump's one big beautiful bill. They want
Speaker 5: this pass before Easter, which gives them House Republicans, Republican
Speaker 5: leadership on Capitol Hill in the House and Senate forty
Speaker 5: eight hours to get this through the House of Representatives
Speaker 5: before the House leaves for a two week recess. Right now,
Speaker 5: this is we could put d one up on the screen.
Speaker 5: The state of affairs is pretty bad for Trump. So
Speaker 5: this is the chairman of the Freedom Caucus yesterday before
Speaker 5: going into a meeting with Trump saying he's just not
Speaker 5: going to change my mind. And actually I correct myself,
Speaker 5: Andy Harris did not go to the meeting. Other people
Speaker 5: went to the meeting. Andy Harris said he's not going
Speaker 5: to change my mind. So I'm not even going to
Speaker 5: meet with Donald Trump over this bill. And there's a
Speaker 5: new political article out this morning from Meredith Lee Hill
Speaker 5: about that mutiny where they this is actually really well said.
Speaker 5: In the lead of the piece, it says, first they
Speaker 5: caved on the speaker election, then last month they fell
Speaker 5: in line on a budget vote and again on divisive
Speaker 5: government funding bill. But now it seems House Conservatives are
Speaker 5: ready to make a stand. Dozens of House Republicans are
Speaker 5: undecided or outright opposed to rubber stamping a Senate approved
Speaker 5: budget blueprint for the GOP's domestic policy megabill and an
Speaker 5: all out whip effort from Johnson. Mike Johnson and his
Speaker 5: leadership team has only produced modest gains. If Johnson and
Speaker 5: Trump can't flip most of those members in the next
Speaker 5: forty eight hours, lawmark makers will start to board flights
Speaker 5: for a two week recess, denying the president a show
Speaker 5: of legislative progress as financial markets wobble over his tariffs.
Speaker 5: And that's exactly the question here. Trump wants this bill
Speaker 5: passed right now. He applied more pressure throughout the day
Speaker 5: yesterday at that meeting and then at the National Republican
Speaker 5: Congressional Committee dinner. Is very very intent on getting this
Speaker 5: bill passed because they think it's something that can And
Speaker 5: I'm curious for your take on this, Ryan Steady, the
Speaker 5: markets a little bit that can, you know, be something
Speaker 5: that shows if you get the corporate tax rate permanent,
Speaker 5: it helps with restoring et cetera.
Speaker 4: And that's why they want this right now.
Speaker 5: They want it before Easter two week recess, within forty
Speaker 5: eight hours. And what we're starting to see is both
Speaker 5: establishment pushback on Trump. We posted that clip of Tom
Speaker 5: Tillis yesterday saying whose scalp can I have to jamis
Speaker 5: secure USTR. So you see Republicans who are actually uncomfortable
Speaker 5: with the tariff and sort of libertarian perspective, and now
Speaker 5: Republicans who are uncomfortable with the way Trump is handling
Speaker 5: the budget from almost a libertarian perspective, but on the
Speaker 5: populace side.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so this is the this is more of
Speaker 1: the reconciliation, right, This is where they're they're writing the
Speaker 1: underlying reconciliation bill, which is only kind of the guideline
Speaker 1: then for the next bill that they where they end
Speaker 1: up where they fill in the details about what the
Speaker 1: tax rates would be and what the different different policies
Speaker 1: would be. So which makes it a little easier for
Speaker 1: Trump to say, look, just just vote yes on this,
Speaker 1: and then I promise you when we do the final bill,
Speaker 1: I'll make sure that I take care of your your
Speaker 1: your demands here on the tax rates and on and
Speaker 1: on the spending cuts and what Andy Harris, you know
Speaker 1: that is saying I don't trust I don't trust the
Speaker 1: president to be able to do that. Not that I
Speaker 1: don't trust the president, but I don't think that he
Speaker 1: has the power really to go to go forward and
Speaker 1: do that, especially as he's floating that he's going to
Speaker 1: raise taxes on the rich m hm, when whereas the
Speaker 1: Freedom Callers generally wants them to, you know, either keep
Speaker 1: the taxes on the riches saying, or cut them and so.
Speaker 1: But but the Freedom Caucus, I'm curious why you think
Speaker 1: this is different. I'm just so used to the Freedom Caucus.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have a theory for why this could
Speaker 1: be different. I'm curious for yours. I'm just so used
Speaker 1: to the Freedom Caucus talking this huge game and then
Speaker 1: the night before the vote, they're promising that this time
Speaker 1: they're really going to hang together against and it's this
Speaker 1: is against Trump, like against Bayner. You know, they got
Speaker 1: a spine against McCarthy. They've got a spine against Trump.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They have always just uh talked to talk, and then
Speaker 1: when a time comes time to walk to walk, they
Speaker 1: they they get just enough no votes that it still passes.
Speaker 1: So why I have a theory, But I'm curious for
Speaker 1: why you think this is different.
Speaker 5: Well, my theory is that they feel like they've been
Speaker 5: taken for Trumps for the last roughly.
Speaker 1: The last every time they are Chumps.
Speaker 5: Well, I'd say that's they would say that every time
Speaker 5: over the course of the last year. Whereas before, I mean,
Speaker 5: when you're in opposition, you know, it's it's easier. But
Speaker 5: whereas before they feel like they were being they were
Speaker 5: able to make more significant concessions, whereas because of the
Speaker 5: Trump factor they have acquiesced and said we trust Trump.
Speaker 4: There's this new thing where.
Speaker 5: Conservative media used to be like conservative media itself, not
Speaker 5: like Fox News. But you know, the ecosystem of alternative
Speaker 5: conservative media used to be very in favor of the
Speaker 5: Freedom Caucus and still is for the most part. But
Speaker 5: when Trump is on the other side of the Freedom Caucus,
Speaker 5: a lot of that mediabal side with Trump, right, you know,
Speaker 5: you get the bright parts of the world, well or
Speaker 5: the Bannons of the world, will get on board with
Speaker 5: Trump and say this is Trump's plan.
Speaker 4: We're going along with Trump. This is the point that
Speaker 4: Trump is making.
Speaker 5: But at this point that's going on so long that
Speaker 5: the Freedom Caucus is like, hey, we cannot pass this
Speaker 5: budget resolution without spending cuts that offset what's going on,
Speaker 5: Like you just this is a quote to the Hill
Speaker 5: from Eric Burleson, who's a Freedom Caucus member who called
Speaker 5: Trump's budget bill quote financially immortal. They're not, you know,
Speaker 5: quibbling with the bill. They see it as being like
Speaker 5: really significantly messed up. And that's where this is Lloyd's
Speaker 5: smucker quote. We've got to that's a hell of a name.
Speaker 5: We've got to reduce spending to put the country on
Speaker 5: a better path fiscally. Yeah, I think the disagreement is
Speaker 5: some of us really believe that the resolution is an
Speaker 5: important foundation on which to build a good bill, and
Speaker 5: so we want to ensure that some of the principles
Speaker 5: that all of us agree to are included. Man, good luck,
Speaker 5: that's all I can say.
Speaker 1: Yeah. My theory for why they would they might hold
Speaker 1: the line here is that it's not a big it's
Speaker 1: not the stakes aren't that high. Like if you don't
Speaker 1: pass this reconciliation instruction now, you can still do it
Speaker 1: in two weeks. There's not gonna be a government shutdown.
Speaker 1: Like there's there's no Trump wants it. But it's as
Speaker 1: my kids say, or I would say to my kids,
Speaker 1: it's a want, not a need. So he doesn't need it.
Speaker 1: And so he doesn't need it. It's like what leverage
Speaker 1: does he have? And also I think Trump is going
Speaker 1: to find out something about the law of political capital
Speaker 1: in Washington that there's only there's only so much you
Speaker 1: can do to your own approval rating and to the
Speaker 1: hopes and the feelings of the American public. Like if
Speaker 1: they turn and they're like, we think we're headed for
Speaker 1: a recession and this all sucks. You don't have as
Speaker 1: much power. When you call up Andy Harris and they're like,
Speaker 1: I really need you here, it's like, well, you know what,
Speaker 1: maybe you shouldn't have like wrecked the country in three months.
Speaker 5: It's completely true that, you know, one of the people
Speaker 5: leading this current resistance from Trump's right flank is chip
Speaker 5: Roy and Tip Roy and Trump have had many differences
Speaker 5: and trade barbs and sort of it's baked into their relationship.
Speaker 5: But chip Roy is a leader in freedom coucice circles.
Speaker 5: Hee's somebody even in like conservative media that people look
Speaker 5: to as kind of a weather vein, you know, to
Speaker 5: see what the conservative take is or the kind of
Speaker 5: hardcore conservative take is on a given situation on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 5: And he's being really adamant right now. And I think
Speaker 5: ran part of the reason is while there is support
Speaker 5: for industrial policy protectionism even from people who would have
Speaker 5: previously in the Tea Party Arab been very skeptical of that.
Speaker 5: There's some support for restructuring our trade relationships, there's not
Speaker 5: support for this indefinite testing of the market and of
Speaker 5: these major companies' bottom lines because to a certain extent,
Speaker 5: it doesn't it gets away from popular. We've talked about
Speaker 5: this entire show, but like at a certain extent, it
Speaker 5: doesn't become populist, it becomes like oligarchical. So I think
Speaker 5: that's right now probably factoring in and this is I
Speaker 5: think the point you're making is probably factoring into why
Speaker 5: there's a sort of invigorate, reinvigorated wave of frustration among
Speaker 5: folks in Freedom Caucass circles like, hey, we have to
Speaker 5: codify these spending cuts. These spending cuts can't just we're
Speaker 5: cutting all these taxes. Great, if we don't codify these
Speaker 5: spending cuts, now, when are we ever going to do that?
Speaker 1: So Freedom Caucus might wind up with some of the
Speaker 1: same bad luck that the Democratic populists wound up with,
Speaker 1: which is that the moment that they they had like
Speaker 1: had neoliberalism on the run, they've and they've got the
Speaker 1: American Rescue Plan, and they've got the child tax credit,
Speaker 1: and they've got all of this kind of industrial spending.
Speaker 1: The exact moment that they're that they're notching win after
Speaker 1: win after win. The economy is coming back from a pandemic.
Speaker 1: You've got all these corporations jacking up prices, you've got
Speaker 1: supply chains collapsing, and you've got these price increases. So
Speaker 1: it was the most difficult political environment to push a
Speaker 1: lot of new federal spending, even popular federal spending, into
Speaker 1: the economy and into in the public, and a lot
Speaker 1: of it was rolled back as a result. People were
Speaker 1: very angry then when it was rolled back. Now, just
Speaker 1: as the Freedom Caucus is getting the ability to really
Speaker 1: slash spending in a serious way, they might be doing
Speaker 1: it into the teeth of a fierce recession, which is
Speaker 1: the absolute last time the public wants to hear about austerity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just unfair. The world isn't fair.
Speaker 5: The world is not fair.
Speaker 4: Life lessons from Ryan Grinn.
Speaker 5: Ryan Grinn, I just said I was trying to say
Speaker 5: Ryan grimm on counterpoints, and it turned out to be
Speaker 5: Ryan Grin counterpoints. So either way, I think it works great.
Speaker 5: Let's move on to this interview set up with Congressman
Speaker 5: de Lucio, who has taken some arrows in a really
Speaker 5: interesting way for his criticism of Donald Trump, while also
Speaker 5: supporting just.
Speaker 1: The idea that may be some tariffs are okay, well
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit. Yeah, all right, stick around for that,
Speaker 1: all right, to talk more about these tariffs and the
Speaker 1: Democratic response, Joined by Pittsburgh Democratic Congressman Chris Deluzio. Congressman,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining.
Speaker 6: Us, Thanks Yan, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: So you found yourself kind of at the center of
Speaker 1: this controversy as somebody who has you know, actually cares
Speaker 1: about industrial policy and manufacturing. All of a sudden, the
Speaker 1: entire world is focused on this. You wrote a piece
Speaker 1: in the New York Times that got a lot of
Speaker 1: attention fairly recently and also had a post go kind
Speaker 1: of viral on the interwebs where you made the case that, Okay,
Speaker 1: Trump's tariffs are wrong, but here's where tariff policy and
Speaker 1: industrial policy you can play a role. And man, I
Speaker 1: was stunned to see how many Democrats were furious about that.
Speaker 1: They're like, how dare you?
Speaker 7: Like?
Speaker 1: What all we should be saying is that Trump had
Speaker 1: So we want to get get into that in a moment,
Speaker 1: But I wanted to start with Carolin Levitt over in
Speaker 1: the White House talking about iPhone production in the wake
Speaker 1: of some news that if we completely reshored all of
Speaker 1: our iPhone production and iPhone would cost something like twenty
Speaker 1: nine thousand dollars. I don't know what kind of deal
Speaker 1: you get from your carrier that makes it a little
Speaker 1: bit cheaper. Maybe you can get that down to twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand with the right bargaining in the Verizon store.
Speaker 1: But let's roll miss Levitt here, and I want to
Speaker 1: get some of your response to this.
Speaker 14: Does the President endure something that Howard let They've said
Speaker 14: on television this weekend, which was that the army of
Speaker 14: millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws
Speaker 14: to make iPhones, that that kind of thing is going
Speaker 14: to be moving to the US. Is that how the
Speaker 14: President envisions manufacturing shifting and if so, how.
Speaker 16: Long would that take?
Speaker 13: Roughly, the President wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in
Speaker 13: the United States of America, but he's also looking at
Speaker 13: advanced technologies. He's also looking at AI and emerging fields
Speaker 13: that are growing around the world that the United States
Speaker 13: needs to be a leader in as well. So there's
Speaker 13: an array of diverse jobs, more traditional manufacturing jobs as
Speaker 13: you discussed, but also jobs in advanced technologies. The President
Speaker 13: is looking at all of those.
Speaker 5: He wants them to come back home.
Speaker 14: But iPhones specifically, is that something that he thinks is
Speaker 14: the kind.
Speaker 6: Of technology that can move to the US.
Speaker 13: Absolutely, he believes we have the labor, we have the workforce,
Speaker 13: we have the resources to do it. And as you know,
Speaker 13: Apple has invested five hundred billion dollars here in the
Speaker 13: United States. So if Apple didn't think the United States
Speaker 13: could do it, they probably wouldn't have put up that
Speaker 13: big chunk of change.
Speaker 1: So is this talk of three thousand or thirty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars iPhones? Is this fear mongering to push back against
Speaker 1: a decent industrial policy or is this something that needs
Speaker 1: to be be taken into consideration. Where do you come
Speaker 1: down on this questions of costs versus the ability to
Speaker 1: make a living right?
Speaker 17: Like your question gets to the heart of this, which
Speaker 17: is why the President's across the.
Speaker 6: Board blanket approach has been terrible.
Speaker 17: You cannot use this one tool of tariffs, throw them
Speaker 17: on everybody and expect you're going to magically at manufacturing
Speaker 17: in this country. You got to look where there are
Speaker 17: trade sheets and be tough on enforcing them. And that's
Speaker 17: communist China around things like steel, for instance. You've got
Speaker 17: to have the industrial policy. You've got to incentivize manufacturing
Speaker 17: in this country. You need real policy from Washington to
Speaker 17: do it, especially when you've got sectors and companies here
Speaker 17: that have to compete with foreign competition that's being propped
Speaker 17: up by their governments.
Speaker 6: This is not some equal playing field. And I come
Speaker 6: back to the.
Speaker 17: Fundamental problem of what Trump did, grow in tariffs on
Speaker 17: everybody friend and foe alike, does not work. You've got
Speaker 17: to be specific to the sector. You've got to have
Speaker 17: industrial policy with it. And we're seeing the cost of
Speaker 17: this right now and the way markets are responded, the
Speaker 17: way workers are responding.
Speaker 1: This isn't it.
Speaker 17: And that doesn't mean that you should ignore when a
Speaker 17: country like China breaks the rules. Tough enforcement includes things
Speaker 17: like targeted tariffs. I don't think people are comfortable with, say,
Speaker 17: slave labor making goods that get important to this country.
Speaker 17: But that is so far afield from what Donald Trump
Speaker 17: just did. We can't turn the blind eye to getting
Speaker 17: industrial policy right in this country, and.
Speaker 5: If I were to channel a sentiment, I think some
Speaker 5: of the voters in your district to are still with
Speaker 5: Donald Trump. I don't know how many it is, but
Speaker 5: I presume some people just knowing the Republican electorate will
Speaker 5: probably say to you, Congressman, well, if it's not Donald Trump,
Speaker 5: then what is it? Is it, Connala Harris, is you know,
Speaker 5: is my alternative some moderate Republican? Nobody else wants to
Speaker 5: take on these problems quite like Donald Trump. And this
Speaker 5: gets to the point that Ryan was making when we
Speaker 5: were speaking earlier, that this is I mean, you're almost
Speaker 5: an outlier in your own party, and it has to
Speaker 5: be sort of tough to convince other Democrats that there's
Speaker 5: a nuance that's important to talk about. Right now. We
Speaker 5: were talking before we went to air that you were
Speaker 5: on the front page of Politico and an article that's headline,
Speaker 5: Democrats find Trump's haphazard tariffs are uniting them on trade.
Speaker 5: But there's a quote in that piece from Charlotte Climber
Speaker 5: that says Democrats are pretty uniform.
Speaker 4: If not entirely or this is from you.
Speaker 5: You say Democrats are pretty uniform, if not entirely uniform,
Speaker 5: and making the case that.
Speaker 4: What's happening right now is really dangerous.
Speaker 5: Charlotte Climber says, trying to offer nuance on Trump's disastrous
Speaker 5: tariffs policy in this moment is like telling someone with
Speaker 5: alcohol poisoning, you know, red wine and moderation is actually
Speaker 5: good for heart health. It's missing the point. It's bad messaging.
Speaker 5: Can I just get you to respond to that, because
Speaker 5: I think there are probably a lot of Trump fans
Speaker 5: in your own district who say, well, what is my option?
Speaker 5: What's the alternative? Maybe this is crazy, but the alternative
Speaker 5: seems crazy.
Speaker 9: To me too.
Speaker 17: Well, I think you get to the heart of whether
Speaker 17: they're saying the other guy's bad is just enough. I
Speaker 17: don't think it's good policy. I think it's good politics.
Speaker 17: Right we now have Donald Trump in a second term
Speaker 17: and the presidency and Democrats have lost the House in
Speaker 17: the Senate.
Speaker 6: I don't think us saying the.
Speaker 17: Other guy is bad, which we should say, and I
Speaker 17: am saying, is a guy from the rust belt. Trade
Speaker 17: policy right now is reckless and dangerous.
Speaker 6: We should say that.
Speaker 17: We got to tell the American people what the heck
Speaker 17: we're going to do if they trust us to govern
Speaker 17: in two years and four years.
Speaker 6: There is never a bad time to say what.
Speaker 17: You're doing to protect your people when they're getting hurt,
Speaker 17: and what you will do if you're trusted to govern.
Speaker 6: And I don't shy away from that ever.
Speaker 1: To that point, let's put up E three, which is
Speaker 1: your New York Times article. This ran about a month ago.
Speaker 1: You know you could see you could see this coming
Speaker 1: at a time. I'm a rust belt Democrat from a
Speaker 1: swing district, anti tariff, absolute absolutism is a mistake. And
Speaker 1: then let's put up E four. Let's play this, this thought,
Speaker 1: which is what got the likes of Charlotte Clymer and
Speaker 1: others just absolutely lived at you. It's about it's about
Speaker 1: a minute, and let's roll that here.
Speaker 17: Chris Deluzio here from Western Pennsylvania, proud son of the Rosspelt,
Speaker 17: and I think are wrong. For decades, can sens us
Speaker 17: in Washington on free trades been a race to the bottom.
Speaker 17: It's hollowed out our industrial power, cost us good jobs.
Speaker 17: The president's tariff announcement, though in his trade strategy, has
Speaker 17: been chaotic but inconsistence. We should not treat our economic
Speaker 17: allies like Canada the same as trade cheats like communist China.
Speaker 17: I do not want to see corporations use the cover
Speaker 17: of these tariffs to now price gouge families. Terifts are
Speaker 17: a powerful tool. They can be used strategically or they
Speaker 17: can be misused. They've got to be used in sectors
Speaker 17: that make sense. They've got to be paired with real,
Speaker 17: meaningful industrial policies, pro worker policies. I'm talking about tax
Speaker 17: incentives to Jews American manufacturing, get those supply chains back
Speaker 17: home to go after corporate price gouging and stock buybacks,
Speaker 17: and better protections for workers, have the freedom.
Speaker 1: To form and join a union.
Speaker 6: We've got to get a better trade approach in this country.
Speaker 1: We've got to put workers in American fas families at
Speaker 1: the heart of it. For me, from the left, it
Speaker 1: was kind of depressing to see something that seemed to
Speaker 1: me to be fairly straightforward and sensical treated as some
Speaker 1: type of capitulation to Trump. Like like you listen to that,
Speaker 1: You're like, yeah, that all makes sense? Was that viral response?
Speaker 1: Do you think not real life and isolated on the internet.
Speaker 1: Does that represent a significant faction within the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: that is genuinely still you know, dug In on you
Speaker 1: pure free trade and against any industrial policy. How have
Speaker 1: your colleagues responded to this versus how it was received
Speaker 1: by the kind of blue sky public. Yeah.
Speaker 17: I mean, look, I'll say from where I sit Western
Speaker 17: Pennsylvania and communities like mine across say the rust belt
Speaker 17: people want us to have more manufacturing jobs, they want
Speaker 17: us to have a better trade policy, and overwhelming they
Speaker 17: think what Donald Trump just did is not it that
Speaker 17: it is a mistake, and we can chew gum and
Speaker 17: walk at the same time, we got.
Speaker 6: To be able to criticize the other guy and say
Speaker 6: also what we think and believe.
Speaker 17: And I don't know who the heck thinks it is
Speaker 17: smart policy or politics to tell people that what we
Speaker 17: shouldn't have manufacturing jobs in America, that we should turn
Speaker 17: the blind eye to exploited workers and environmental pollution that
Speaker 17: we all pay for.
Speaker 6: That's not the answer.
Speaker 17: And we even saw President Biden, I think correctly respond
Speaker 17: to trade cheats and breaking the rules and chining around
Speaker 17: steel for instance, to do strategic targeted tariffs there pair
Speaker 17: it with some incentives here at home that is so
Speaker 17: far afield from what Donald Trump just did. And yet
Speaker 17: I think you finally see some Democrats saying, Okay, what
Speaker 17: he did was wrong. Here's what we think the Democratic
Speaker 17: Party ought to do to revitalize American manufacturing. And I
Speaker 17: serve on the Armed Services Committee. There's a lot of
Speaker 17: time sped over there worrying about our defense industrial base.
Speaker 17: If you don't have an industrial base in this country,
Speaker 17: you are not ever going to be able to mobilize
Speaker 17: the way you had to and say the Second World War,
Speaker 17: god forbid, we're in something like that again. You have
Speaker 17: to have an industrial base in this country for a
Speaker 17: lot of reasons. In national security. It's a big part
Speaker 17: of it.
Speaker 5: How optimistic are you that Democrats are? Let'ld say, there's
Speaker 5: a concern that a lot of people have that because
Speaker 5: of the way that Donald Trump has approached this tariff
Speaker 5: is now going to become a culture war word that
Speaker 5: people are going to kind of polarize in elite spaces
Speaker 5: even further than they already were against tariff's period. And
Speaker 5: I guess are you optimistic? Joe Biden had an industrial policy.
Speaker 5: He kept Trump's first term China tariffs, but that feels
Speaker 5: almost like a relic of the past of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 5: And I'm curious if you think that's true, especially as
Speaker 5: as Democrats have sort of, to paraphrase this political article,
Speaker 5: unified against the Trump tariffs. Is there a risk that
Speaker 5: Democrats just sort of become not just anti tariffs, but
Speaker 5: disinterested in industrial policy, disinterested in balancing some of these
Speaker 5: genuinely problem matic relationships.
Speaker 1: I hope not.
Speaker 17: We still have to make stuff in America, and you know,
Speaker 17: we can't just be focused on the past. We got
Speaker 17: to make stuff that we can compete and that we
Speaker 17: need in the economy of tomorrow. I think it would
Speaker 17: be a mistake for Democrats to walk away from caring
Speaker 17: about manufacturing jobs. Isle sense that either right. I think
Speaker 17: it's fine to criticize the president. I criticize the president here,
Speaker 17: but I think there are a lot of us, most
Speaker 17: of us, many of us who want to have strong
Speaker 17: manufacturing jobs and have that industrial policy with labor alongside.
Speaker 6: At the heart of putting those policies together.
Speaker 17: That's the Democratic Party coalition that I know that is
Speaker 17: rock solid in Western Pennsylvania places like it, and it's where.
Speaker 6: We go in the future to win.
Speaker 1: How is this going to end? Do you have any
Speaker 1: for people who are scared watching this? Do you are
Speaker 1: you in touch with the White House at all, Like,
Speaker 1: what does democratic leadership think about this?
Speaker 5: Like this?
Speaker 1: How do where do we go from here? Like Walster,
Speaker 1: it seems to think it's going to back down. I
Speaker 1: don't think so.
Speaker 17: And I don't think you say, the White House man,
Speaker 17: I don't think there's one one there.
Speaker 6: What the heck they're doing? I mean, that's that's the
Speaker 6: other problem here, and our allies and our adversaries and
Speaker 6: like see that. And even you talk to business leaders,
Speaker 6: they don't know how the.
Speaker 17: Heck to plan investment if they want to bring manufacturing
Speaker 17: back when they've got the trade environment changing day to day.
Speaker 17: You need certainty to even make the kind of investments
Speaker 17: you'd want to grow American manufacturing. So this is also
Speaker 17: reckless and nuts and is divorced from any real meaningful
Speaker 17: industrial policy or strategy that you would actually need to
Speaker 17: supercharge the kind of jobs we want in this country.
Speaker 1: All right, well, thank you so much, is right?
Speaker 17: And I say that as a guy from the rest
Speaker 17: special investimania who wants to see these jobs grow.
Speaker 6: It's just nuts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's how that's how I feel too. It's
Speaker 1: like you're given a bad name to the entire idea
Speaker 1: of trying to do this like the next as you're
Speaker 1: kind of finding out that the next person that comes
Speaker 1: forward with ideas about how to revitalize American manufacturing people
Speaker 1: are gonna be like, that's cool, but are you going
Speaker 1: to make it so I can't retire again? Because that
Speaker 1: wasn't fun so sucks. Anyway, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 5: Thank you tigers Man.
Speaker 1: Hamas, through attorneys in the United Kingdom, has filed suit
Speaker 1: to have its terror listing delisted. We can put this
Speaker 1: first element up on the screen. This is reported in
Speaker 1: drop site News by Jeremy ska Hill this morning. It's
Speaker 1: a there's a it's a more than a hundred page
Speaker 1: legal filing that includes several components, one of which we
Speaker 1: want to go. I want to go just go through
Speaker 1: here because it is kind of a historic and kind
Speaker 1: of fascinating document. One of the one of the founders
Speaker 1: of Hamas, Musa Abu Marzouk, filed a kind of eleven
Speaker 1: or twelve page kind of accompanying letter along with it,
Speaker 1: in which he makes the case for why Hamas should
Speaker 1: not actually be listed as a terror group.
Speaker 7: UH.
Speaker 1: The the basis for the case is, uh Hamas has
Speaker 1: never this is this is the argument that that they
Speaker 1: make Hamas has never engaged in any attacks, you know,
Speaker 1: outside of history what they call historic Palestine.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 1: They specifically note that despite the UK's role in facilitating
Speaker 1: the ongoing genocide they have, they have never and will
Speaker 1: never attack Britain in any way. They said, if if
Speaker 1: a if a British citizen signs up for the I
Speaker 1: d F and comes into Gaza, then their fair game.
Speaker 1: But otherwise they they they, unlike some other Palestinian factions,
Speaker 1: have never engaged in any terrorism or milton action outside
Speaker 1: of what they would call historic Palestine or the zionistdentity
Speaker 1: or whatever. They also have and we want to go
Speaker 1: into detail of this because it's because it's I think
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. They also talk about free speech, the
Speaker 1: threat that Zionism poses to free speech in the West.
Speaker 1: They talk about anti Semitism, and not only do they
Speaker 1: decry the scourge of anti Semitism, they argue kind of
Speaker 1: echoing arguments that you've hear on this program that conflating
Speaker 1: anti Zionism and anti Semitism, conflating anti semitism with criticism
Speaker 1: of Israel waters down the definition of anti Semitism and
Speaker 1: actually makes it more likely that you're going to see
Speaker 1: more anti Semitism. They Hamas specifically praises Jewish students who
Speaker 1: have participated in protests around the world and in the US,
Speaker 1: and even praises Jewish Israelis who have protested against the
Speaker 1: slaughter of civilians. That I don't think any Hamas official
Speaker 1: has ever done that before, ever praised an Israeli citizen
Speaker 1: who's a Jewish Israeli citizen, like I think that, I
Speaker 1: think that's a they think that as a first. They
Speaker 1: also talk about what they would see as quote unquote
Speaker 1: national liberation. There they do not in this document they
Speaker 1: do not recognize Israel, say they will never recognize Israel,
Speaker 1: say that the only solution long term is complete liberation,
Speaker 1: meaning no Israel, no Israel. That is that's their political line.
Speaker 1: The very next line, and we can get into this.
Speaker 1: The very next line says, however, and you know they
Speaker 1: always say ignore everything that comes before the butt. So
Speaker 1: Hamas's butt is, but we are willing to accept a
Speaker 1: long term truce that is a basically a two state
Speaker 1: solution along nineteen six the seven lines, and what and
Speaker 1: the reason they call it a long term truce is
Speaker 1: that it allows them to maintain their pride of not
Speaker 1: having to say that they are willing to recognize Israel
Speaker 1: and accept a two state solution while still accepting it
Speaker 1: as an objective reality, because they would be saying, well,
Speaker 1: this is just a long term truce. Of course, that's
Speaker 1: all anything is in this world is a long term
Speaker 1: troops that's all. That's all you get. And then after
Speaker 1: this long term truce, they there would be negotiations that
Speaker 1: they could that you do then enter into that that
Speaker 1: yields an actual you know, so it's two state solution
Speaker 1: and actual recognition. But they're not going to not going
Speaker 1: to do that preemptively, and they think that Arafat doing
Speaker 1: that preemptively recognizing Israel without getting the recognition of a
Speaker 1: Palestinian state was a mistake that led to the currency
Speaker 1: wa endless occupation. I can read some parts from this,
Speaker 1: but I'm curious if you have any any thoughts in
Speaker 1: general on this. The notion of even the notion of
Speaker 1: Hamas engaging with attorneys can't pay them because they'd be
Speaker 1: under sanctions if they got paid pro bono, and but
Speaker 1: engaging with the West in this way suggests kind of
Speaker 1: a shift in strategy.
Speaker 5: I mean, it seems clearly to suggest a shift in strategy,
Speaker 5: and one that perhaps could be attributed to the West,
Speaker 5: especially the United States, shifting perspective on Israel. It's not
Speaker 5: to say the West is embracing Hamas, although some of
Speaker 5: the some of the Israel backers would certainly say that's
Speaker 5: what's happening and gets equated anti Zimism gets equated conflated
Speaker 5: intentionally with support for Hermas, but because or increasingly skeptical
Speaker 5: of fully backing Israel, not just on the kind of
Speaker 5: far left, but we see in opinion pools that creeping
Speaker 5: more and more into the kind of mainstream public perspective,
Speaker 5: especially here in the United States. I actually I'm very
Speaker 5: careious for your perspective on this, right if that seems
Speaker 5: to be something that's that's juicing Hamasa's I guess approach
Speaker 5: to negotiating with the West, as they feel as though
Speaker 5: now they're in a position where Israel's narrative is slipped
Speaker 5: a bit, for better or worse in the West and
Speaker 5: they can now come in and operate like a state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is that kind of yeah, I think, and
Speaker 1: I think they have been heartened to see the amount
Speaker 1: of support from the global public from so many countries
Speaker 1: joining South Africa's I see JKS for instance.
Speaker 5: So support not for Hamas though, because what you just said,
Speaker 5: people would say, you're saying Hamas is heartened by the
Speaker 5: support for.
Speaker 1: Her, for the support for resistance against Israel.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they a lot of them equate that to
Speaker 1: some support for Hamas because as like Hamas argues.
Speaker 5: Hamas poins that was support for her masque, even though
Speaker 5: many of the people who are backing.
Speaker 1: A support mus Hey and Hamas makes Hamas actually addresses
Speaker 1: that in this legal filing or or at least in
Speaker 1: this in this side letter. What they say is, look,
Speaker 1: a lot of what they say is we understand people
Speaker 1: are against the genocide, people are against what Israel is doing,
Speaker 1: and we are the ones that are fighting against that,
Speaker 1: like literally fighting against it. So therefore you've got to
Speaker 1: give us some credit for doing that. But the anti there,
Speaker 1: the discussion of anti Semitism is truly fascinating. So let's
Speaker 1: let's roll through some of this and you can put
Speaker 1: that first element back up on the screen. For some ofime,
Speaker 1: they'd say they're right, or he writes, we reject any
Speaker 1: allegations that we are anti Semitic or that we target
Speaker 1: Jewish peace. And this is a fascinating line. He says,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that there is a level of controversy surrounding
Speaker 1: some of the wording of our founding Charter. The Founding
Speaker 1: Charter includes explicit antisemitists. Yes, so he explains then or argues,
Speaker 1: this was drafted without consultation with the senior leadership, who
Speaker 1: were either in prison or in exile at the time.
Speaker 1: Hamas has published a series of other documents since then,
Speaker 1: culminating in our Document of General Principles and Policies of
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, all of which expressly distinguished between Jews and Zionists.
Speaker 1: I have incorporated parts of that policy within this witness
Speaker 1: statement as continuing to reflect the positions of the movement.
Speaker 1: So that is as close as you're going to get,
Speaker 1: I think, to an apology for the language that the
Speaker 1: anti Semitic language that was in the original charter documents.
Speaker 1: And then so then he goes on to say explicitly,
Speaker 1: our struggle is not against Jewish people because of their religion,
Speaker 1: but against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. It is the
Speaker 1: Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jewish people and
Speaker 1: with their own colonial project and illegal entity. We acknowledge
Speaker 1: and appreciate the solidarity shown to our people and our
Speaker 1: struggle by many Jewish people around the world, including within
Speaker 1: quote Israel, whose stance against Zionism exposes the dangerous lies
Speaker 1: that conflates Judaism with Zionism. And that that's the line
Speaker 1: that I was saying. I was talking to Jeremy about
Speaker 1: this this morning, and he was saying, he thinks that
Speaker 1: that's kind of an unprecedented statement from a member of Hamas,
Speaker 1: a founding member of Hamas, even to say to say
Speaker 1: we acknowledge and appreciate the solidarity shown to our people
Speaker 1: by many Jewish people, including within Israel. I mean they
Speaker 1: put it is reel in quotes because that's what they do,
Speaker 1: because they don't recognize it officially, but that is that
Speaker 1: is that is a significant step. Then so they go on,
Speaker 1: we are particularly appo and this is the part that
Speaker 1: I said, sounds like they're watching this program. We are
Speaker 1: particularly appalled by the weaponization of antisemitism to attempt to
Speaker 1: silence those standing against apartheid, occupation, and genocide. The Zionist
Speaker 1: entity and its supporters have completely undermined the struggle against
Speaker 1: genuine anti Semitism by manipulating the term to protect the
Speaker 1: Zionist entity from criticism and censure. Over the past year,
Speaker 1: Zionists have accused numerous officials and institutions of being anti Semitic,
Speaker 1: including the UN Special Rappertoire, the UN General Secretary UNRA,
Speaker 1: the ICJ, the ICC, the Government of South Africa, the
Speaker 1: Irish Dousach Simon Harris, and the President of Ireland Michael Higgins.
Speaker 1: In the process, Zionists have debased and degraded the important
Speaker 1: definition of antisemitism until it means almost nothing. Zionists, many
Speaker 1: of them not Jewish, have deliberately fashioned an utterly warped
Speaker 1: definition of anti Semitism, and they consciously wield it to
Speaker 1: shield Zionism and Israel from entirely legitimate criticism at a
Speaker 1: time when actual anti Semitism is on the rise. This
Speaker 1: shameless crying wolf is a staggeringly irresponsible and dangerous policy
Speaker 1: to pursue. It diminishes our ability to combat anti Semitism
Speaker 1: when and where it does actually arise. Where's where's the lie?
Speaker 5: I mean, there's plenty of genuine anti Semitism.
Speaker 1: That's and that is Hamas's point, which is fascinating. Hamas
Speaker 1: is calling out the rise, No, no, no, Hamas is
Speaker 1: saying anti Semitism is on the rise, Genuine anti Semitism
Speaker 1: is on the rise, and this conflation of Zionism and
Speaker 1: anti anti Semitism is fueling it, which is true.
Speaker 5: And their argument is going to be that they are
Speaker 5: now the bulwark.
Speaker 1: There they are, they are arguing more than the anti Semitism.
Speaker 5: Yes, I mean that's I feel like the you know,
Speaker 5: the galaxy brain meme where it's like the game of
Speaker 5: forty chess.
Speaker 1: The but if you step back, like why is like
Speaker 1: Hamas's argument is our problem is with the Zionists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm just like skeptical that it's actually representative of Hamas'
Speaker 5: leadership's views. It sounds like tactically it's I think tactically
Speaker 5: it's very clever. I'm just genuinely skeptical that you know
Speaker 5: that charter was changed what in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: Except well twenty seventeen is when it was codified, Like
Speaker 1: he was saying, there were many steps taken in that
Speaker 1: direction right to move away from that anti Semitic language
Speaker 1: that was that was inserted in the beginning.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean we could talk about there is a
Speaker 5: non significant portion of people who are in the godless
Speaker 5: trip who aren't even in Hamas, who have I would say,
Speaker 5: like deep bigotry, and it doesn't I'm not saying it
Speaker 5: doesn't exist on the other side, but have deep bigotry
Speaker 5: towards Jews. And so I suppose I think it's it's
Speaker 5: both substantively important and interesting that they're making this tactical
Speaker 5: I think you're right, like tactical shift. I also think
Speaker 5: I'm skeptical of how genuinely that represents their position.
Speaker 1: And so they spell they spell this, They go further
Speaker 1: into the h's really interesting of the history here and
Speaker 1: make the point, which historically is an accurate point that
Speaker 1: there was there has been, that there has been far
Speaker 1: far more anti Semitism in Europe, and if you include
Speaker 1: Russia and Europe than in the Middle East over the years.
Speaker 1: That's just been the case. So here they write the
Speaker 1: Palestinian people have always stood against oppression and justice and
Speaker 1: the committing of massacres against civilians, regardless of who commit them,
Speaker 1: based on our religious and moral values. We clearly stated
Speaker 1: our rejection to what the Jews were exposed to by
Speaker 1: the Nazi Germany. Hamas is of the view that the
Speaker 1: quote Jewish problem, anti Semitism, and the persecution of the
Speaker 1: Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history, and not
Speaker 1: to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or
Speaker 1: to their heritage. The Arab and Islamic environment was an
Speaker 1: example of coexistence, cultural interaction, and religious freedoms. The current
Speaker 1: conflict is caused by the Zionist aggressive behavior and its
Speaker 1: alliance with the Western colonial powers. Therefore, we reject the
Speaker 1: exploitation of the Jewish suffering in Europe to justify the
Speaker 1: oppression against our people in Palestine. The Zionist movement, which
Speaker 1: was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine,
Speaker 1: is the most dangerous form of settler colonialism. That form
Speaker 1: has already been defeated and eradicated from much of the
Speaker 1: world and must similarly be defeated and eradicated from Palestine. So,
Speaker 1: and that's an argument. You hear a lot that obviously
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany was a European that this was that was
Speaker 1: Europe And you'll often hear people, So what does what
Speaker 1: did Palestine have do with that? Why did why did
Speaker 1: Palestine pay for the genuine sins of Europe which flowed
Speaker 1: out of their their history of anti Semitism? M hm
Speaker 1: like what Yeah, the Ottoman Empire, you know, Ottoman Empire
Speaker 1: compared to Europe, far far better place for I mean, indeed,
Speaker 1: Jewish people, Jews were fleeing anti semitism in Europe to yeah,
Speaker 1: and to the Automan Empire and being recruited to go there. Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, I mean there's gonna be interesting. So there's this.
Speaker 5: This is the point I was making. This was back
Speaker 5: in twenty nineteen, a Hamas officially.
Speaker 1: When did's Spain really kick off its real anti Semitic
Speaker 1: purge when the Muslims left?
Speaker 5: This Hamas official back in twenty nineteen, Fatihamad had said,
Speaker 5: all of you, seven million Palestinians abroad, enough of the
Speaker 5: warming up. You have Jews everywhere, and we must attack
Speaker 5: every Jew on theory. This is a twenty nineteen quote
Speaker 5: from a Hamas official, Fatihamad, who said, all of you,
Speaker 5: seven million Palastins broad enough of the warming up. You
Speaker 5: have Jews everywhere. We must attack every Jew in the
Speaker 5: globe by way of slaughtering, killing, if God permits enough
Speaker 5: of the warming up. Well back in twenty nineteen, so
Speaker 5: before October seventh, obviously he walked that back. The point
Speaker 5: that you're making, he was clearly under pressure from Hamas's
Speaker 5: pull up the leadership. You right, and he's a policy
Speaker 5: and he said in a statement that was posted on
Speaker 5: Hamas's website, Hamas is consistent adopted policy of limiting its
Speaker 5: resistance the Zionist occupation that U SERPs Palestine's land and
Speaker 5: defies defiles its holy sites. That he said, that's what
Speaker 5: he supports now, limiting its resistance to the Zionist occupation
Speaker 5: that he serves Palestine's land. And this is both the
Speaker 5: point you're making and I think the point that I'm making,
Speaker 5: which is it's not new for Hamas to start trending
Speaker 5: in this direction, but this represents a significant tactical shift.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, my point is just that I
Speaker 5: don't think you go from point A to point B
Speaker 5: if you were Fazi Hamad because you've suddenly had a
Speaker 5: change of heart and don't think Palestinians everywhere should kill
Speaker 5: Jews everywhere. I think you do that because you're under
Speaker 5: political pressure, and so all I'm saying is that I
Speaker 5: am skeptical that this represents some type of genuine, some
Speaker 5: type of genuine dissolution of bigotry among the ranks across
Speaker 5: the board.
Speaker 1: Let's say there is anti Semitism and hatred in the
Speaker 1: hearts of some members of a MOSSU, which I don't
Speaker 1: doubt for a second. The question is whether that as
Speaker 1: a policy is suppressed or whether it is encouraged.
Speaker 5: Right, No, I agree, Yeah, I think that's a good question.
Speaker 1: In the US, for instance, there's there are all kinds
Speaker 1: of ugly sentiments that some American people have. Whether whether
Speaker 1: the government and a political movement is celebrating those and
Speaker 1: exact pouring gasoline on them, versus whether they're telling you
Speaker 1: and there, through education and through messaging and and through
Speaker 1: modeling good behavior, are saying no, that's not actually how
Speaker 1: we as Americans are going to treat immigrants or you.
Speaker 5: Know whoever cultural norms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just let's do the British part for a second.
Speaker 1: Marzook writes the British government's decision to proscribe Hamas as
Speaker 1: an unjust one that is symptomatic of its unwavering support
Speaker 1: for Zionism, apartheid, occupation at the cleansing and Palestine for
Speaker 1: over a century. Hamas does not and never has posed
Speaker 1: a threat to Britain, despite the latter's ongoing complicity in
Speaker 1: the genocide of our people. Is perhaps out of colonial
Speaker 1: guilt that Britain fears that one day those it oppresses
Speaker 1: will strike back against the sponsors of the Zionist entity.
Speaker 1: Britain should have no such fear unquote like, look, guys,
Speaker 1: we're like our beef and they're like, look, our beef
Speaker 1: is not with you think it's so.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think from like a realist perspective, there's
Speaker 5: a there's an argument for dealing with Hamas as a
Speaker 5: state entity that makes negotiating. We saw this with actually
Speaker 5: Steve Whitkoff and Whitcoff got a ton of flack for
Speaker 5: actually stepping in when the Biden administration's negotiations with Hamas
Speaker 5: had stalled for a long time, so that you can't
Speaker 5: talk to Hamas, you can't deal with mass you can't
Speaker 5: negotiate with Hamas, and Whitcough came in actually yielded result
Speaker 5: to have direct negotiations. I mean, it was going through
Speaker 5: cutter obviously, but to have more direct negotiations with Hamas.
Speaker 5: Does that put the world on a better track to
Speaker 5: some lasting peace. I think, as you know, uncomfortable as
Speaker 5: it is for the West, it probably does.
Speaker 1: And while we're talking about uncomfortable things, let's let's do
Speaker 1: let's do another one. Here. They have a section on prisoners.
Speaker 1: So I want people to hear this, whether they agree
Speaker 1: with it or not. It is a tragic reality that
Speaker 1: almost every Palestinian household has a family member being detained
Speaker 1: in an Israeli prison. Well, they forgot to put the
Speaker 1: quotes around Israeli there. I guess they just recognized Israel.
Speaker 1: Since nineteen sixty seven, over eight hundred thousand Palestinians, including children,
Speaker 1: have been incarcerated by the Zionist military. The thousands of
Speaker 1: Palestinian political prisoners or prisoners or hostages currently languishing in
Speaker 1: Zionist prisons, where they are routine routinely tortured, raped, and mistreated,
Speaker 1: include hundreds of women and children, many of whom are
Speaker 1: subject to administrative detention, which can be renewed indefinitely. That
Speaker 1: is true. The release of the Palestinian prisoners is a
Speaker 1: consensus position. This is where it gets uncomfortable for Western ears.
Speaker 1: The release of the Palestinian prisoners is a consensus position
Speaker 1: among Palestinians, with strong support from all sectors of society.
Speaker 1: Where appeals to the international community to release our prisoners
Speaker 1: have fallen on deaf ears, our experience has demonstrated that
Speaker 1: the most effective method of liberating our prisoners is through
Speaker 1: the prisoner exchange process. So in case that needs translation
Speaker 1: for anybody. They are explaining to the public and to
Speaker 1: the British government here why they take hostages. That there
Speaker 1: are thousands of Palestinian prisoners riding away an administrative detention facing,
Speaker 1: according to human rights groups, torture, sexual assault in a
Speaker 1: systematic way. The world public has been unable to get
Speaker 1: them out, so they're going to take them what they have.
Speaker 1: What they're saying, what they have found is the most
Speaker 1: successful way to get them out is to take hostages
Speaker 1: and then exchange the hostages. And that has that's true,
Speaker 1: like that you know that that has been and that
Speaker 1: was the that was the real goal of October seventh,
Speaker 1: was to take a lot of hostages, right and then
Speaker 1: exchange them for the thousands of prisoners. They're saying the
Speaker 1: root cause of their hostage taking is your hostage taking?
Speaker 1: Like that's the that's the argument that they're that they're
Speaker 1: making here. Like I said, that's not going to be
Speaker 1: a comfortable one for Western years. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: But it's that's what's what people mean when they say
Speaker 1: history didn't start on October seventh.
Speaker 5: Well, it's also the problem with just putting everybody into
Speaker 5: this like a box that can't be opened or dealt with,
Speaker 5: is you end up flattening people and not understanding they're
Speaker 5: like how they see their intentions and intentions and which
Speaker 5: if you want to quote defeat Hamas or crush Hamas,
Speaker 5: you have to actually understand Hamas. You can't just dismiss
Speaker 5: how they see their intentions and motivations. So have to
Speaker 5: say those intentions of motivations are right. It is to
Speaker 5: say it's actually useful to understand their intentions and motivations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple other couple other pieces they try to
Speaker 1: take credit for the Great Marsh Return. This was the
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen non violent Civil Society led demonstrations that every
Speaker 1: Friday would kind of march to the fence and Picnick
Speaker 1: and it was kind of celebratory, and it was the
Speaker 1: kind of nonviolent resistance that defenders of Israel have always said,
Speaker 1: this is what the Palestinians should do, This is what
Speaker 1: we would respect. This is like Gandhi, this is like Mlka.
Speaker 1: Do that and we'll give you your liberation. Instead they
Speaker 1: gave them bullets in their knees and create an entire
Speaker 1: generation of crippled people in Palestine. Hamas initially kind of
Speaker 1: resisted the Great March of Return, but because it was
Speaker 1: so popular in Gaza that eventually endorsed it the way
Speaker 1: they covered here. As they say, Hamas has a history
Speaker 1: of both armed and unarmed resistance. The latter was manifested
Speaker 1: in its support and facility and facilitation of initiatives like
Speaker 1: the Great March of Return and Hamas's involvement in parliamentary elections. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: such initiatives were only met with further military assaults by
Speaker 1: the Zionist entity and Gencile sanctions imposed by the Western world.
Speaker 1: Let's I think we can finish with Let's touch on
Speaker 1: their their writing of October seventh, because this is also
Speaker 1: at the center of obviously everything. This is why, eighteen
Speaker 1: months later is still being flattened. So he writes on
Speaker 1: the morning of October seventh, Cassam Brigades executed a military
Speaker 1: maneuver targeting the Gaza division of Israel's Southern Commands, so
Speaker 1: very clearly situating it in as a as a military effort,
Speaker 1: not at civilians. So that's the point he's trying to make.
Speaker 1: There much has been said and written about the operation,
Speaker 1: but there has been little coverage in the English speaking
Speaker 1: world about the intended nature of the operation, as articulated
Speaker 1: by the movement itself in its various written statements and
Speaker 1: interviews over the past seventeen months. I've prepared a separate
Speaker 1: witness statement focusing on the operation. Suffice to say here
Speaker 1: that the instructions given to our elite forces, our Nukba,
Speaker 1: were to kill and capture Zionist soldiers and not to
Speaker 1: target women, children, and the elderly. To the extent that
Speaker 1: any individual crimes were allegedly committed by our soldiers, we
Speaker 1: have internal mechanisms for investigating and disciplining them. Unlike the
Speaker 1: Zionist entity, we take justice and accountability very seriously, and
Speaker 1: to that extent, we remain as always prepared to cooperate
Speaker 1: with any international investigations and inquiries into the operation, even
Speaker 1: if Israel refuses to do so. As we know, hundreds
Speaker 1: of civilians were killed, particularly those attending UH their festivals,
Speaker 1: as well as people who were in the in theki
Speaker 1: in the kibbut seem uh this so this is there,
Speaker 1: This is their effort to say that that was not
Speaker 1: their policy, that they regret it, and that they're open
Speaker 1: to investigations. I don't know what investigations they have now.
Speaker 1: Their claim they're sort of claiming here that they would
Speaker 1: have carried out some internal investigations and found people who
Speaker 1: committed these war crimes and brought them to justice. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen any evidence that that has happened. Doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it has, hasn't, has or hasn't, but I haven't seen
Speaker 1: any evidence. A lot of those soldiers would have been killed,
Speaker 1: like never actually made it back to Gaza to face
Speaker 1: that alleged inquiry. But anyway, how do you, how do you?
Speaker 1: How do you? How do you read that writing of
Speaker 1: October seventh?
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't find it surprising, it's a it's all,
Speaker 5: this is the the report here overall is just a
Speaker 5: I think indicative of something changing, and that's why it's
Speaker 5: not entirely surprising. But it does seem new.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's it's it's it's it's something new. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's trying to meet it. It's trying to acknowledge it.
Speaker 1: Actually it is what it is. And they use the
Speaker 1: word alleged, but what they're doing is acknowledging that war
Speaker 1: crimes were committed, Yeah, and that there should be an
Speaker 1: investigation into those, into those war crimes. The the the
Speaker 1: the fact that the rave was happening there has changed
Speaker 1: history in such a profound way. And we've been working
Speaker 1: on investigation and we'll have out soon a drop sight
Speaker 1: I hope about why that rave was given an extra night,
Speaker 1: Like do you know the story here, Like it was
Speaker 1: not supposed to even be there on Saturday, and by
Speaker 1: Friday there were all sorts of intel warnings that something
Speaker 1: was happening, and they applied for an extra night and
Speaker 1: they're like a mile from the fence and were granted it.
Speaker 1: What were they doing there in the first place when
Speaker 1: there was there's like so much area in the desert
Speaker 1: where they could be Like what if they had not
Speaker 1: been there, the number of civilian casualties would have been
Speaker 1: met many hundreds less and the number of passages many
Speaker 1: significantly less. That does not forgive or excuse the decision
Speaker 1: by the Bilitins there to teraris there to kill innocent
Speaker 1: people or just their celiberty. Doesn't forgive that. For a second,
Speaker 1: last last piece, I'll just so I can because I
Speaker 1: went over this, but I'll just read it. This is
Speaker 1: This is their proposed sixty seven solution. Hamas believes that
Speaker 1: no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised
Speaker 1: or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances, and the pressures,
Speaker 1: and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects
Speaker 1: any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine
Speaker 1: from the river to the sea. So there is there's
Speaker 1: the peace that devendors of visuals say. See, I told
Speaker 1: you they all they want is the eradication of Israel,
Speaker 1: complete total genocide of Israel. However, without compromising its rejection
Speaker 1: of the Zionist entity, and without relinquishing any Palestinian rites.
Speaker 1: And this is where their compromise comes when they say
Speaker 1: they're not compromising. Hamas considers the establishment of a fully
Speaker 1: sovereign and independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,
Speaker 1: along the cease fire line of the fourth of June
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, with the return of the refugees and
Speaker 1: the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled
Speaker 1: to be a formula of national consensus. Hamas on numerous
Speaker 1: occasions for over two decades, proposed to hudnah or long
Speaker 1: term truce on this basis. It's goodwill has been abused
Speaker 1: by Desionists who have assassinated members of its leadership to
Speaker 1: undermine such efforts. So that's a reference to there have
Speaker 1: been internal there are internal fight schisms within Hamas over
Speaker 1: this question. There are people who support this basically what
Speaker 1: is a two state endgame within Hamas, and then there
Speaker 1: are those who do not. And Israel has systematically assassinated
Speaker 1: all of the ones who are in the moderate camp
Speaker 1: in order to elevate the extremist camp and then to
Speaker 1: point to the extremists as the reason that you need
Speaker 1: to do you to do endless war. And notice how
Speaker 1: what they call they don't say they support it. What
Speaker 1: they say they consider it a formula of national consensus
Speaker 1: because they're really being pulled to it, yeah, kind of
Speaker 1: being forced. They're like, they're like, we understand that outstanding
Speaker 1: a national consensus is that this would be an acceptable
Speaker 1: outcome and we're not going to get in the way
Speaker 1: of that. So anyway, that's so, anyway, that's well, the
Speaker 1: rest of the Arab world and the right of return,
Speaker 1: that's like the Israelis will also say, well, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're calling for the return of hostages to their homes,
Speaker 1: which makes it impossible because you'd have to uproot people
Speaker 1: who are in there currently in their homes. But that's
Speaker 1: where you negotiate, what is that? What is it? What
Speaker 1: do you do with that right? Like you have that right,
Speaker 1: but is that right? Can that right then be assigned
Speaker 1: to a different home, Like you're not you're not going
Speaker 1: to actually physically remove people from their homes like settlers
Speaker 1: do in the West Bank on a regular basis.
Speaker 5: More great reporting from drops It Ryan. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting stuff, that's for sure.
Speaker 5: Truly. Speaking of very interesting stuff, let's move on to
Speaker 5: your interview with Naomi Klein. Maybe you can set this
Speaker 5: up because you had you had a great conversation. She
Speaker 5: was name checked in a Compact Magazine SUBSEAC article. But
Speaker 5: Jeff Stollenberger, who's a really interesting writer and was reflecting
Speaker 5: on his own memories of what the left was like
Speaker 5: at the end of the nineties and in the early aughts,
Speaker 5: when the No Logo movement that Naomi Klein obviously gave
Speaker 5: name to but was inspired by and then became a
Speaker 5: part of through the work of No Logo, was reflectingcy
Speaker 5: this was a real push against globalization. And I went
Speaker 5: back and watched a documentary that Naomi Clem did. I
Speaker 5: think she tells you in this interview that it was
Speaker 5: back in two thousand, where there's a clip of her
Speaker 5: talking about globalization's impact. Much of the documentary is focused
Speaker 5: on globalization's impact on spoatshop labors, and they'll be very
Speaker 5: familiar to people who remember these these days, but a
Speaker 5: lot of it also was focused on what happened to
Speaker 5: American workers. And there was the slice of the interview
Speaker 5: about a minute long where she sounded back in two
Speaker 5: thousand a lot of the same notes that people on
Speaker 5: the right are sounding now in defense of Trump's tariff
Speaker 5: policy overall, if not the particular tactics, but of the policy.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, and credit to you for suggesting this interview.
Speaker 1: We wanted to have her on the show this morning,
Speaker 1: which she lives on the West coast of Canada. So
Speaker 1: it's like way too early for that. So I interviewed
Speaker 1: her yesterday afternoon. Well let's roll some of that, all right,
Speaker 1: joining us now to talk more about this global collapse
Speaker 1: of the New World Order or whatever we want to
Speaker 1: call it.
Speaker 16: I think they call it a great reset, right.
Speaker 1: The Great reset? This is the Great Reset. Is none
Speaker 1: other than Naomi Klein, who, relevant to this conversation, is
Speaker 1: the author of many books, but in particular No Logo,
Speaker 1: published in nineteen ninety nine, which kind of drew inspiration
Speaker 1: from and also provided inspiration to the burgeoning anti globalization
Speaker 1: movement at the time. I don't know if I told
Speaker 1: you this. I got my kind of radical political awakening,
Speaker 1: you know, from that and from the from Seattle, and
Speaker 1: then I ended up going. You know, Seattle was end
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety nine. I was in college on the
Speaker 1: East coast, so I was not about to go to Seattle,
Speaker 1: but I did go to They called it A sixteen.
Speaker 16: This was the Yes, it was IMF World Bank in Washington,
Speaker 16: d C.
Speaker 1: Yeah, April twenty twenty, this like two or three day protest.
Speaker 1: One day was beautiful, another day it was like forty
Speaker 1: degrees in raining, and I remember just getting drenched the
Speaker 1: entire day and then they finish it off by pepper
Speaker 1: spraying everybody, tear gassing. Were you at the did you
Speaker 1: go to the Washington One?
Speaker 16: I was at the Washington One. Yeah, yeah, I actually
Speaker 16: wasn't in Seattle. I was no logo, was at the
Speaker 16: printer i and you know, I was writing about it,
Speaker 16: but I couldn't convince anyone to send me because at
Speaker 16: that point you couldn't you couldn't convince sort of mainstream
Speaker 16: editors that this there was a possible story to be
Speaker 16: told because the movement had yet to sort of write
Speaker 16: first onto the world stage.
Speaker 1: As Seattle was kind of the yeah, the introduction of
Speaker 1: that movement to the world. Then they understad okay, okay,
Speaker 1: there is something going on here, which and then it
Speaker 1: and then and I'll put this piece up real quick
Speaker 1: because they talk about this, this phenomenon, this this compact
Speaker 1: magazine piece that has a very funny headline, what did
Speaker 1: y'all think post neoliberalism meant? Vibes? Papers essays the strange
Speaker 1: career of anti globalization politics and this is a reference
Speaker 1: to you know, obviously this famous kind of I guess
Speaker 1: it was a tweet on October seventh. What did y'all think,
Speaker 1: you know, post colonialism or decolonialism? You know, meant so
Speaker 1: it's a it's a kind of satirical riff on this.
Speaker 1: But they mentioned that after September twenty September eleventh attacks,
Speaker 1: the energy around the anti globalization movement really moved into
Speaker 1: anti war politics, trying to stop the looming invasion of
Speaker 1: a racks unsuccessfully trying to stop that, and you know,
Speaker 1: obviously failed to do so and didn't really bubble back
Speaker 1: until twenty ten. And so now here we are more
Speaker 1: than twenty five years later, and the biggest wrecking ball
Speaker 1: that's brought to the system of global free trade is
Speaker 1: brought by Donald Trump and brought in a way that
Speaker 1: is I don't want to put any words in your mouth,
Speaker 1: what's been so I'm just curious, like, what's been your
Speaker 1: reaction to seeing the arc from Seattle to Trump.
Speaker 16: I mean, I have to say that quite a few
Speaker 16: of the think pieces I'll put that in air quotes
Speaker 16: a little bit, including the one that you just put
Speaker 16: up there, are based on a bunch of really wrong
Speaker 16: assumptions about what that movement was in the first place.
Speaker 16: Not to say that there weren't protectionist elements to it.
Speaker 16: It was always a kind of an awkward coalition of
Speaker 16: more nationalists, trade unions and internationalists, human rights activists, environmentalists.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 16: The slogan in Seattle was Teamsters and turtles together again,
Speaker 16: which was a reference to the fact that there was
Speaker 16: this coalition between big unions like the Teamsters that were
Speaker 16: more interested in just protecting American jobs and environmentalists who
Speaker 16: were looking at how environmental deregulation or a race to
Speaker 16: the bottom was impacting in this case, turtles who are
Speaker 16: being caught up in fishing. The point is we spent
Speaker 16: a ton of time back in the day actively correcting
Speaker 16: the record that we were not opposed to trade. We
Speaker 16: were opposed to the phrase we used that the time
Speaker 16: was corporate rule, you know. And there was huge teachings
Speaker 16: in Seattle and Washington that were all about the fact
Speaker 16: that this thing that was just calling itself, you know,
Speaker 16: this kind of anodyne you know, free trade was not free.
Speaker 16: That it was a wish list for multinational corporations overwhelming
Speaker 16: the US corporations to just maximize their profits. And we
Speaker 16: are very very far into that successful revolution. What we
Speaker 16: were naming at the time, was that what this particular
Speaker 16: set of trade rules that were all about deregulation and
Speaker 16: pushing privatization and economic austerity would deliver would be a
Speaker 16: race to the bottom globally on labor, on environmental standards.
Speaker 16: And you know, I think anybody who thinks that Trump
Speaker 16: represents an end to corporate rule and that you know, no,
Speaker 16: he is the fulfillment of it. Musk is the fulfillment
Speaker 16: of it. Definitely, there are riffs inside their strange and
Speaker 16: awkward coalition about exactly how to go about this, but
Speaker 16: I would say the race to the bottom has been successful.
Speaker 16: And I think the reason why there is even the
Speaker 16: prospect of reassuring some production in the United States is
Speaker 16: because unions have been so successfully weakened over these thirty
Speaker 16: years because they're counting on a huge amount of automation,
Speaker 16: so they're not planning on paying any workers for most
Speaker 16: of this on shore production. And they've been saying this openly, right, like,
Speaker 16: we're going to be bringing like the iPhone assembly jobs back,
Speaker 16: but it's not going to be humans who are going
Speaker 16: to be assembling them, right, And the other piece of this,
Speaker 16: and it's kind of driving me mad that people aren't
Speaker 16: connecting the dots. Is where doge fits in with all
Speaker 16: of this, right, because here is Musk and the boys
Speaker 16: who are decimating the regulatory state. So if there is
Speaker 16: to an extent that there will be so on shoring
Speaker 16: under this new new regime, like bringing jobs back to
Speaker 16: the US, it's going to be precisely under the conditions
Speaker 16: of that race to the bottom that we were trying
Speaker 16: to stop in the first place. Right, So this is
Speaker 16: this is not an end to neoliberalism in many ways,
Speaker 16: it's it's it's sort of logical culmination. And yeah, we
Speaker 16: tried to stop it, so you know, Sue us, we
Speaker 16: did try.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so my colleague Emily who couldn't join us
Speaker 1: for this, So I found this clip from many years ago.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can tell us when when exactly this was
Speaker 1: wanted to get your I'll play this for you the
Speaker 1: the much younger Naomi kleinb and then get your get
Speaker 1: your reaction to it now, how you would have how
Speaker 1: you would say it now.
Speaker 16: But the significance of for a company like Nike is
Speaker 16: that building these kind of utopian branded world costs much
Speaker 16: more than just advertising a product. So you often hear
Speaker 16: companies openly saying that we have made a choice. We
Speaker 16: have decided to build our brand. But that choice has consequences,
Speaker 16: and one of the consequences is that when that decision
Speaker 16: is made, it is often accompanied by a decision to
Speaker 16: sell off factories and to embrace the Nike model, the
Speaker 16: company that owns all this intellectual property but doesn't own
Speaker 16: any factories. When a company decides to embrace this model,
Speaker 16: that obviously immediately affects their workforces. In North America and Europe,
Speaker 16: people who had steady unionized jobs were paid enough to
Speaker 16: support a family lose those jobs, cutting.
Speaker 7: Six thousand jobs now unemployed, lost another forty two.
Speaker 5: Thousand jobs, cutting eleven and a half thousand over their.
Speaker 1: Jobs from factories across the South to plants overseas where
Speaker 1: labor is cheaper.
Speaker 16: The communities that were built around a factory that depended
Speaker 16: on these factories are often gutted, and the jobs that
Speaker 16: often come to replace these manufacturing jobs are these new
Speaker 16: economy jobs that are often service sector jobs.
Speaker 1: I would guess that you still agree with I agree
Speaker 1: with that, Annalys. When was that from, by the way,
Speaker 1: do you.
Speaker 16: Think probably two thousand?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 16: I think yeah. I was trying. I was describing a
Speaker 16: business model that a lot of a lot of the
Speaker 16: reporting on offshoring at the time was described as companies
Speaker 16: closing factories in one location and opening factories in another location.
Speaker 16: So when I was what I was articulating in that clip,
Speaker 16: and it remains true in most sectors. There are some
Speaker 16: sectors that never fully embrace this model. But I'll just
Speaker 16: put an asterisk there. But this idea that really owning
Speaker 16: your own factories is is kind of a loser's game,
Speaker 16: right that that that if you're smart, you keep it light,
Speaker 16: you own your intellectual property, you lloy you know, designers
Speaker 16: and marketers, but you are going to produce through a
Speaker 16: web of global outsourcing. The exception to this was the
Speaker 16: are the auto companies, like the really heavy manufacturing that
Speaker 16: tended to continue to own their assembly plants, right, but
Speaker 16: everything that they could outsource to this web of contractors
Speaker 16: where you'd have some plausible deniability, they did. And that
Speaker 16: remains true. And this is you know, one of the
Speaker 16: people who really represents this very very powerfully is Donald Trump, right.
Speaker 16: I mean, he is a quintessential sort of hollow brand that,
Speaker 16: particularly after the Apprentice realized that he could make more
Speaker 16: money not opening his own hotels and buildings, but leasing
Speaker 16: out the Trump brand to whoever wanted to slap it
Speaker 16: onto their development and so on. And so when you
Speaker 16: talk about the US companies bringing the jobs home, it's
Speaker 16: completely anacrotistic to how most of these companies actually function.
Speaker 16: They don't want to own the kinds of factory at
Speaker 16: the level that they used to because they it's much
Speaker 16: much more profitable to outsource all of that to a
Speaker 16: web of contractors. So some of them will will come
Speaker 16: to the US, but they'll still continue to use the
Speaker 16: leverage of being able to pit different contractors and subcontractors
Speaker 16: against each other for who can deliver you know, the
Speaker 16: pieces of the of the assembly line at the at
Speaker 16: the lowest price. None of that is changing.
Speaker 1: So let's say that the Trump administration, you know, watched
Speaker 1: that clip and said, wow, this this author really diagnosed
Speaker 1: the problem. Well, come on in, like, tell us how
Speaker 1: we can fix this for for American workers, and we
Speaker 1: can like, what what should they be doing if they were.
Speaker 16: Serious zooms that that Donald Trump and Elon Musk of
Speaker 16: any interest in actually and genuinely helping American workers if
Speaker 16: they wanted to do that that you know, the surest
Speaker 16: way that they that they would do that is support
Speaker 16: labor rights instead of trying to undercut.
Speaker 1: Them, destroy the NLRB, destroy.
Speaker 16: The MLRB, you know, fight unionization and in your own plants,
Speaker 16: as Elon Musk has done. So, you know, I think
Speaker 16: that this is really the cover story for their US,
Speaker 16: you know, and I think unfortunately, we have got a
Speaker 16: lot of labor leaders who are willing to play along
Speaker 16: with it. And you know, maybe there will be some
Speaker 16: some marginal gains, but but that remains to be seen.
Speaker 16: I mean, I think it's a very big gamble for
Speaker 16: for for big unions like the the u A W
Speaker 16: to support this terraff regime. And you know, I think
Speaker 16: the global impact of this, you know, I'm talking to
Speaker 16: you from Canada, and you know, the way we, you know,
Speaker 16: many of us understand the impact of these terrorists is like,
Speaker 16: this is not the US returning to protectionism, as Trump
Speaker 16: says again and again, it's about leverage, right, if you
Speaker 16: listen to what he's actually saying, He's saying Canada is
Speaker 16: being unfair. Why are they being unfair because they're not
Speaker 16: letting our banks in in the you know, they're not,
Speaker 16: you know, and the US healthcare sector desperately wants in.
Speaker 16: So you know, there are a few protections that remained
Speaker 16: in place under the neoliberal trading regime. And you know,
Speaker 16: I think that there's a calculation now and there isn't
Speaker 16: agreement you know, across the board among US corporations that
Speaker 16: now the US has the leverage to to to get
Speaker 16: even more right to knock down the remaining barriers. So
Speaker 16: you know, I don't believe he really is a protectionist
Speaker 16: in the way that he wants to market himself to
Speaker 16: to US manufacturing workers, for whom he represents a kind
Speaker 16: of a you know, I called it toxic nostalgia in
Speaker 16: the past, like this idea that you're going to return
Speaker 16: to some you know, manufacturing heyday that has passed and
Speaker 16: it isn't going to happen. And you know where I
Speaker 16: think you really see the lie of it is around
Speaker 16: AI because you know, some of his like the centerpiece
Speaker 16: of the biggest investments that he has announced so far
Speaker 16: as president, have been with the big tech companies around
Speaker 16: massive data centers that you know, are unleashing technologies that
Speaker 16: will decimate American jobs. So this idea that he would
Speaker 16: bring me in to figure out how to help American
Speaker 16: workers is absurd. I reject the point premise. I don't know.
Speaker 16: I think he's a marketer and and you know part
Speaker 16: of how he's marketing himself as the champion of American workers,
Speaker 16: who he has screwed his entire life.
Speaker 1: Now, last question for you. One thing you've been really
Speaker 1: good at throughout your writing career has been seeing where
Speaker 1: things are going next, seeing around the corner that's that
Speaker 1: that others couldn't quite see around. Do you still have
Speaker 1: that vision? Like do you and do you see like
Speaker 1: where do you see this going? Like where where is this?
Speaker 1: Where is the United States headed? Where's the where's where's
Speaker 1: this world system headed?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 16: Well, I mean this is where I think that these articles,
Speaker 16: these you know, these takes around. Okay, this really is
Speaker 16: This is what the left always wanted, the end of neoliberalism,
Speaker 16: as opposed to understanding that this is a new stage
Speaker 16: of deregulated capitalism. You are really dangerous because where I
Speaker 16: see it going and here this is not like some
Speaker 16: prophetic power. This is like actually listening to Peter Tiel,
Speaker 16: to Elon Musk, to the people who are underwriting the
Speaker 16: Trump administration who it's if you listen to what they
Speaker 16: say and also where they have put their money in
Speaker 16: what they're doing. What you see is they no longer
Speaker 16: believe in the nation state at all. You know, they're
Speaker 16: excited about things like Freedom City. They're excited about places
Speaker 16: like Prospera in Honduras where they manage to create like
Speaker 16: a sort of a corporate city state. They're very excited
Speaker 16: by the possibilities or what AI can can accomplish, you know,
Speaker 16: in this kind of corporate secessionist movement. And so I
Speaker 16: think this really is a fulfillment of the corporate rule
Speaker 16: dream beyond the nation state. So they still see a
Speaker 16: role for the nation state at this phase, but I
Speaker 16: think beyond it they want to shed. They want to
Speaker 16: shed it. So yeah, I think that's where we're headed.
Speaker 16: And I think acting as if this has been a
Speaker 16: like a wish fulfillment for the left, is it a
Speaker 16: really dangerous.
Speaker 1: Distraction from no logo to no state next.
Speaker 16: And once again you can find leftists who will make
Speaker 16: that same argument.
Speaker 1: This is not what they meant, right, Yes, that's not
Speaker 1: what we meant. That's not the withering that we meant.
Speaker 1: Naomi Klein thank you so much for joining me. Very
Speaker 1: much appreciing and good luck in Canada. Sorry that we're
Speaker 1: all of a sudden enemies.
Speaker 16: I don't quite we're going to gang up on you
Speaker 16: with the rest of the world. All right, take care, all.
Speaker 1: Right, I'd say it, all right, Emily, what did you think?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 5: This is what's interesting. It's sort of like you're faced
Speaker 5: with either She's completely right about Elon Musk and Trump
Speaker 5: is such an interesting point or such an interesting case
Speaker 5: study in this incredible argument she makes about the brandification
Speaker 5: of American companies that they've Nike, for example, owns intellectual
Speaker 5: property and then has other factories that they buy from.
Speaker 4: But it's the Nike IP that Nike is based around.
Speaker 5: It's not making Nike, it's it's buying for people who
Speaker 5: make Nike, and then it's branding it with the IP.
Speaker 5: Trump truly is that, like everything Trump steaks, I mean.
Speaker 4: Just unbelievable. How Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: But that's what's so almost Shakespearean about this is that
Speaker 5: Trump as that man that the man who is her
Speaker 5: case in point is also now the person who is
Speaker 5: pissing off all of the multinational corporate corporations, all of
Speaker 5: the investors. He is the one who is like giving
Speaker 5: the middle finger that I think, you know people who
Speaker 5: were lobbing Molotov cocktails at the wto or Seattle in
Speaker 5: nineteen ninety, like that is what if it were coming
Speaker 5: from one of them, or Bernie Sanders, he'd be like,
Speaker 5: I am watching.
Speaker 4: This burn and it's feeling great now.
Speaker 5: That might not be a substantive teak of Naomi. I
Speaker 5: just I thought it was really interesting to hear her
Speaker 5: reflect on that, and it is so Shakespeare and that
Speaker 5: Donald Trump is the guy who represents everything she was
Speaker 5: arguing exists rightfully arguing exists. But on the other hand,
Speaker 5: I think there's something to be said for like Trump
Speaker 5: may embody all of those bad things, but the alternative,
Speaker 5: there's no alternative. There's Bernie. But other than that, like
Speaker 5: Bernie doesn't control the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has
Speaker 5: said no to Bernie over and over again, and Republicans
Speaker 5: did that. They said no to their populists over and
Speaker 5: over again, and they got Trump. And now it's like
Speaker 5: who if it's not him, who And if it's not
Speaker 5: the only way you get it with Trump is this
Speaker 5: insane process. And I just don't think the jury's fully
Speaker 5: out on whether or not what Trump does. I'm not
Speaker 5: saying it's a big possibility. I have said this all show,
Speaker 5: but there is a possibility that he does actually restructure
Speaker 5: global trade in a way to do that's what restricts
Speaker 5: your global trade in a way that is ultimately productive.
Speaker 4: Not saying it's a.
Speaker 5: Ninety percent chance, but there's a chance. Maybe I'm too hopeful.
Speaker 1: And the analogy I was thinking of, and I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that Trump is Hitler, but like let's say in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, Rose Luxembourg is out there and the
Speaker 1: German communists and socialists are out there saying, like, look,
Speaker 1: another world as possible. If I'm a republic terrible, we
Speaker 1: want to get rid of it and replace it with
Speaker 1: something different. And then the national socialists end up winning
Speaker 1: and replacing it with something different. You wouldn't be like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I guess you're happy, then right, you got something different.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, it's worse. Yeah, it can always be worse,
Speaker 1: it's my point. Yeah, and just because you were against
Speaker 1: something doesn't mean you're necessarily for the thing that replaces
Speaker 1: that thing.
Speaker 5: Now, I think that was a really good point to
Speaker 5: hear from both you and Naomi, like, I do agree
Speaker 5: with this, and I'm probably I don't want to ascribe
Speaker 5: this to her because I don't know that it's essentially true,
Speaker 5: but I do think that there's sometimes just this, because
Speaker 5: Trump is such a polarizing and bizarre figure, sometimes there's
Speaker 5: just this. It's like a I don't know what, a
Speaker 5: cultural barrier that people on the left are still like
Speaker 5: really icked out about ever transgressing and ever saying we
Speaker 5: wanted radical politics, and here's the radical politics of Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: It's like when Susan Sarandon, one of my favorite moments.
Speaker 5: Long time viewers of the show will know, I was
Speaker 5: talking to Chris Hayes and got, you know, just massive
Speaker 5: viral attention for saying that that maybe by not voting
Speaker 5: for Hillary, if Trump wins, he will bring the revolutions.
Speaker 5: And Chris Haynes was like, you mean in a Leninist way,
Speaker 5: It's just yep. Sometimes it's just to me, some of
Speaker 5: these leftist politics are so and I think fascinatingly radical.
Speaker 5: I feel like that's the world that you were steeped in.
Speaker 5: And it's like the Schallenberger headline that you talked about
Speaker 5: what did y'all think post nibilism meant vibes?
Speaker 4: Papers essays.
Speaker 1: It's pretty funny. I'll give them on that.
Speaker 17: It is.
Speaker 5: It is, so I'll give him that that was a
Speaker 5: great interview. I'm really like, I thought it was fascinating
Speaker 5: and I was really appreciative that she had sat down
Speaker 5: and you did such a great job.
Speaker 1: So yeah, thank you, Nailmi. We really appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: thank you for the idea.
Speaker 5: Oh anytime, I'm full of ideas.
Speaker 1: There you go. All right, Well, so we'll be back
Speaker 1: I assume on Friday we'll be down another ten percent
Speaker 1: by then we'll see headed towards zero.
Speaker 5: Ryan's the one who's community noting David Sachs just every
Speaker 5: hour it's correcting him.
Speaker 1: Good luck out there, people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for tuning in, and we will see you
Speaker 5: back here with Crystal. Maybe Soger. Maybe we can pull
Speaker 5: Soger into one of my Friday sessions. He's very busy
Speaker 5: right now, but maybe we.
Speaker 1: Can pull the time conflict, but maybe we can get
Speaker 1: him this Friday. We'll try, all right, see you then,