Speaker 1: Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.
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Speaker 3: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. We are sadly not
Speaker 3: joined by Ryan grim or Segar and Nettie, although there
Speaker 3: will be plenty of Segar and Nettie and today's show
Speaker 3: because you got some questions at the White House briefing yesterday,
Speaker 3: as he talked about on the channel. But Crystal is
Speaker 3: in and I am so excited. Crystal, thanks for being here.
Speaker 4: It's always my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Ryan home with some sick kiddos, but we are hoping,
Speaker 2: he said, if things are chill at home and like
Speaker 2: relatively you know, peaceful. He's going to join us later
Speaker 2: in the show for an update on Mackmood Khalil. And
Speaker 2: they're like a million things that we have in the
Speaker 2: show today. I was looking at the lineup Emily, Literally,
Speaker 2: any one of these blocks could have led the show. Normally,
Speaker 2: there's yeah, normally there's some stuff that's clearly like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're interested in it, but we recognize it's not all
Speaker 2: that important, and you try to put the most important
Speaker 2: things at the front of the show. Today, literally, any
Speaker 2: of these blocks I think could have gone first, because
Speaker 2: each one of them is extremely consequential.
Speaker 3: It is a whole show of a blocks, and the
Speaker 3: news cycle just keeps changing. Crystal, we were talking about
Speaker 3: how yesterday we had to rework the show like several
Speaker 3: different times because yesterday's news cycle. I mean many such cases, right,
Speaker 3: There have been a lot of crazy news cycles, but
Speaker 3: yesterday was one of the crazier ones. So we're going
Speaker 3: to start by talking about the tariffs, which was a
Speaker 3: roller coaster yesterday. We have some new footage of Howard
Speaker 3: lutnek answering questions. We have some footage of Sager getting
Speaker 3: questions in a White House briefing, and some updates on
Speaker 3: where the tariffs stand right now. Jeff Stein is going
Speaker 3: to join us to talk even more about the tariff policy. Particularly,
Speaker 3: we're going to start talking about Wall Street and tariffs
Speaker 3: and all of that. But then Jeff is going to
Speaker 3: be in the show. We're excited to have him with
Speaker 3: us to go through how particularly the tariffs are being
Speaker 3: viewed around the world and how they're affecting or how
Speaker 3: the Trump administration is approaching them. Then Crystal, late yesterday
Speaker 3: we learned the Education Department was taking its first step
Speaker 3: towards shutting down by laying off fifty percent fifty percent
Speaker 3: of its staff. So we're going to talk about that.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about how the House of Representatives
Speaker 3: actually passed a spending bill to avert a government shutdown
Speaker 3: and is now in the hands of the Senate and
Speaker 3: leaves Democrats with a sort of interesting question on their
Speaker 3: hands as they head into the second half of this week.
Speaker 3: Ryan will hopefully join us for a conversation about Mahmoud
Speaker 3: Khalil Saga was able to ask the White House about
Speaker 3: that at the briefing yesterday. So we have footage and
Speaker 3: we have new updates from drop site and other sources,
Speaker 3: and then we will be talking about another massive story,
Speaker 3: another a block. Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike
Speaker 3: Waltz walked out of a marathon meeting with their Ukrainian
Speaker 3: counterpoints counterparts. If there is a Ukrainian counterpoints I would
Speaker 3: love to see that, but counterparts with a ceasefire proposal
Speaker 3: that they sent over to Russia. Steve Witkoff is headed
Speaker 3: for a meeting with Vladimir Putin this week. So now
Speaker 3: that we have the run of show laid out, everyone
Speaker 3: can see. Man, what a time to be alive, Crystal.
Speaker 3: Let's start with the economy and this incredible snippet of
Speaker 3: a new interview that Howard Lutnik gave. If this is
Speaker 3: a zero watch.
Speaker 1: This, will these policies be worth it if they lead
Speaker 1: to a recession, even a short term recession.
Speaker 3: These policies are the most important thing America.
Speaker 4: Has ever had, So it is worth it.
Speaker 5: It is worth it a I don't think that the
Speaker 5: only reason that could possibly be a.
Speaker 4: Recession is because of the Biden nonsense that we have
Speaker 4: to live with.
Speaker 3: Okay, so JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs are now putting the
Speaker 3: likelihood of a recession around forty sixty, so forty percent
Speaker 3: likelihood of a recession, and you have massively wealthy people
Speaker 3: like Howard Lutnik obviously Commerce Secretary there saying a recession
Speaker 3: would be worth it. Crystal, this is just to pause
Speaker 3: on this clip before we get to Sager's question at
Speaker 3: the White House. It's the messaging, the optics. Just on
Speaker 3: the surface level, you have a bunch of billionaires walking
Speaker 3: around saying, don't worry about it, it's worth it.
Speaker 2: It's worth it, and it's worth it for what exactly?
Speaker 2: Like that's the other piece is I'm not sure that
Speaker 2: they've really explained what all of us, all of like
Speaker 2: regular Americans out there, are meant to be sacrificing in
Speaker 2: service of. Is the other piece of it, which is
Speaker 2: what we've talked about with the tarraf policy, where Trump
Speaker 2: has had like eighteen different explanations for why we're putting
Speaker 2: on tariffs, including making Canada the fifty first Aid, something
Speaker 2: that was not proposed on the campaign trail and no
Speaker 2: one voted for, but you know, suddenly as a major
Speaker 2: priority in US policy, and you're supposed to suffer in
Speaker 2: order to make this happen, like it's insane, and you know,
Speaker 2: there's a few things with regard to to Lutnik here
Speaker 2: that are important to point out as well. I sent
Speaker 2: you guys this article yesterday from Politico. Apparently Trump aids
Speaker 2: are preparing to throw Howard Lutnick under the bus for
Speaker 2: the you know, poor economic numbers and poor economic political
Speaker 2: standing of Trump. In fact, there's a new CNN poll
Speaker 2: out that has him at his lowest numbers ever in
Speaker 2: terms of how people feel.
Speaker 4: He's handling the economy.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously this has been a traditional area of
Speaker 2: strength for Trump. It is arguably the core reason why
Speaker 2: people decided to re elect him as president of the
Speaker 2: United States, and now he is profoundly underwater there. His
Speaker 2: approval rating has slipped, you know, decidedly negative at least
Speaker 2: in terms of the CNN poll. Significant movement there for
Speaker 2: Trump elon even more profoundly unpopular with the America and public.
Speaker 2: And so people are positioning or preparing to throw Lutnik
Speaker 2: under the bus and say, how this guy is doing
Speaker 2: crazy stuff. He's saying crazy things, and you know clip
Speaker 2: like this where he's like, yeah, recession, I think that's
Speaker 2: probably worth it. That certainly adds to their arsenal of
Speaker 2: what they'll use. But you know, it's never Trump's fault.
Speaker 2: It's always got to be someone else's fault if things
Speaker 2: are going sideways.
Speaker 3: That's always an interesting line for the White House to walk,
Speaker 3: taking credit for the effects of the tariffs when they
Speaker 3: see them as positive bringing jobs back to Indiana, for
Speaker 3: example with the Hana Cimic situation, or then you know,
Speaker 3: shouldering the making Howard Lutink shoulder the blame when things
Speaker 3: go south. Let's listen to this question that Sagar got in.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry Sagar got in at yesterday's briefing. Here he
Speaker 3: is talking to Caroline Lovett.
Speaker 6: Today we have Sagar Annetti, who is the host of
Speaker 6: Breaking Points, a popular political YouTube news and podcast show.
Speaker 7: Really appreciate you having me, Caroline. A couple of questions
Speaker 7: for you, if I may, versus first on this stock market. Currently,
Speaker 7: it's the twenty fifth anniversary today of the dot com
Speaker 7: bubble crash. There's a lot of concern for a lot
Speaker 7: of Americans right now about the state of the economy.
Speaker 7: President Trump has refused to rule out of recession. Secretary Lutnik, however,
Speaker 7: has told us there will not be one. So can
Speaker 7: the White House just tell and sure Americans today that
Speaker 7: there's not going to be a recession.
Speaker 4: Well, there's a lot to unpack there.
Speaker 6: So let me start by saying that, first of all,
Speaker 6: when it comes to the stock market, the numbers that
Speaker 6: we see today, the numbers we saw yesterday, the numbers
Speaker 6: we saw we will see tomorrow, are a snapshot.
Speaker 3: Of a moment of time.
Speaker 6: And as President Trump has said, and I'm here to
Speaker 6: echo the remarks of this president of this White House,
Speaker 6: we are in a period of economic transition. We are
Speaker 6: in a period of transition from the mess that was
Speaker 6: created under Joe Biden in the previous administration.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Chris, Well, that's really the new messaging is
Speaker 3: this is a period of quote economic transition. And again,
Speaker 3: it's one thing to have Trump making that case. It's
Speaker 3: another thing to have Howard Lutnik and non Trump. Trump
Speaker 3: is such a singular figure, but to have other billionaires
Speaker 3: running around making that case, it's clearly the best that
Speaker 3: they've landed on. Though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm curious from your perspective, Emily, I mean,
Speaker 2: I think people were willing to give Trump a bit
Speaker 2: of a grace period. You know, he came in hot,
Speaker 2: did a whole lot of stuff. People were like, all right,
Speaker 2: let's see where all of this goes. You know, we're
Speaker 2: now fifty days into the administration, and I don't think
Speaker 2: that it is going to I don't think people are
Speaker 2: going to buy that this is all Biden's fault, because
Speaker 2: because Trump has made so many moves, he has really
Speaker 2: taken ownership of everything that happens in the country, including
Speaker 2: what happens in the country economically. So I know they
Speaker 2: want to say, like, oh, this is all Biden's fault
Speaker 2: and so we've got to clean up his mess, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. I'm sure his base will buy that, but
Speaker 2: I don't think that that rationale is going to land
Speaker 2: very effectively much beyond his sort of like hardcore supporters, because,
Speaker 2: like I said, because he has taken so much action.
Speaker 2: You know, on the one hand, people sort of liked
Speaker 2: that sense of like, oh, things are happening. But now
Speaker 2: that things have turned and you're looking at recession and
Speaker 2: you're looking at days on days of stock market crashing
Speaker 2: and consumer confidence is down, we're actually going to get
Speaker 2: inflation reading today that you know a lot of people
Speaker 2: are anticipating. We'll see what happens there as well, but
Speaker 2: now that things are turning south, I think he is
Speaker 2: going to shoulder the blame because he's in charge and
Speaker 2: he really has, you know, sort of taken hold of
Speaker 2: this thing in a way that's pretty undeniable.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because, yeah, there's a there's such a The
Speaker 3: style is part of the substance here. Obviously for Trump,
Speaker 3: he's trying to keep things completely unpredictable. We talked about
Speaker 3: this actually after his joint address last week, Like part
Speaker 3: of the plan here is so that nobody, even close
Speaker 3: analysts of this who watch, have any idea what you're doing,
Speaker 3: because that takes it to China and Canada and Mexico
Speaker 3: and they have no idea what you're doing. And that's
Speaker 3: really the only way Trump thinks, you know, the fifty
Speaker 3: first state thing for example, like he's really needling them.
Speaker 3: But that's also ends up being part of the substance
Speaker 3: when it comes to the market. So there was an
Speaker 3: interesting story in Reuter's yesterday going around and actually talking
Speaker 3: to folks in Wisconsin and manufacturing Wisconsin who would be
Speaker 3: affected by the tariffs. And we've seen this with farmers
Speaker 3: as well in Midwest and all those different products. In
Speaker 3: Trump's first term that were affected by tariffs and then continue
Speaker 3: to be affected by the Biden tariffs. You often hear
Speaker 3: and it seems that you're still hearing some patients with
Speaker 3: Trump's policies because there was an expectation that they would
Speaker 3: be radical, that they would be hard to predict, that
Speaker 3: they would be significant, and so people sort of prepared
Speaker 3: in advance. That's what Reuters was talking to some of
Speaker 3: these manufacturing and agriculture people about. They expected to not
Speaker 3: know what to expect, and so they had already started
Speaker 3: looking into their supply chain and all of that. But
Speaker 3: the question is, you know, when does that truly wear off?
Speaker 3: And I Crystal WoT Donald Trump, he's tethered himself so
Speaker 3: closely to the market during his campaign and looking back
Speaker 3: on his first presidency that it may ultimately be one
Speaker 3: of the things that screws him in terms of the
Speaker 3: public perception. He's really going to have to find more
Speaker 3: cases like the Honda Civic. He's really going to have
Speaker 3: to find just all of these examples of jobs like
Speaker 3: flooding back to the United States to make the case
Speaker 3: that we're in a quote transition period in a way
Speaker 3: that's successful, that successfully persuades voters who are looking at
Speaker 3: their portfolios or in their communities and going, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, he's tied himself historically over the course of
Speaker 2: his career and certainly over the course of his first
Speaker 2: presidency to the markets. He's also, in this presidency tied
Speaker 2: himself to Elon, who is increasingly profoundly unpopular and doesn't
Speaker 2: have some of the I mean, Trump has like magic
Speaker 2: powers when it comes to his political standing. We all
Speaker 2: know he can do things and say things, get away
Speaker 2: with things that literally no one else in history has
Speaker 2: ever done. Elon doesn't have quite those same powers. Now,
Speaker 2: Elon has his own powers. Obviously, he's got his own
Speaker 2: base and following and culture personality, and in a certain
Speaker 2: way he is a similar sort of branding genius in
Speaker 2: the same way that you know that Trump is just
Speaker 2: with like a different kind of a flavor. But Elon
Speaker 2: doesn't have that same political teflon that Trump does.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I think early on the thought was that Elon could
Speaker 2: serve as a kind of a heat shield. So as
Speaker 2: he's making all of these dramatic cuts and imposing this
Speaker 2: radical austerity on the federal government, including in things that
Speaker 2: are really popular, like, for example, public education is really popular.
Speaker 2: Are we talking about that? Social security really popular? Airplanes
Speaker 2: safely landing really popular. You know, they thought, I think
Speaker 2: that Elon could sort of shoulder take the blame and
Speaker 2: you know, serve as as as his heat shield as
Speaker 2: this sort of protected barrier. But the flip side of
Speaker 2: that is, because Elon is taking on so much water
Speaker 2: without having that teflon coating that Trump seems to that
Speaker 2: it actually could have an increasingly negative impact directly on
Speaker 2: Trump and weigh him down in a way that he
Speaker 2: hasn't been weighed down in the past. I want to
Speaker 2: skip ahead and then we'll come back to the CNBC
Speaker 2: said if we could put eight three up on the
Speaker 2: screen because I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 4: This is from Jail Partners.
Speaker 2: They do these word clouds, which are always fun asking,
Speaker 2: and they ask people what is Trump's biggest grew up
Speaker 2: so far, and tariffs jumps right off the page, you know,
Speaker 2: even at their most popular. And by the way, Tariff's
Speaker 2: spelled incorrectly two different ways also ranks up there pretty closely.
Speaker 2: Keep this up on the screen though for a second,
Speaker 2: just so people can take a look at and really
Speaker 2: digest this. You know, tariffs, even at Trump's when Trump
Speaker 2: was doing his best job pitching them the campaign and
Speaker 2: saying this is what's going to bring jobs back, and
Speaker 2: people are thinking about, you know, tarifs on China in particular,
Speaker 2: which is the most.
Speaker 4: Positive territory for terriffs.
Speaker 2: People are less favorable towards tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
Speaker 2: Even at that point, they were kind of a fifty
Speaker 2: to fifty proposition. Now when you've had this, they're on,
Speaker 2: they're off. It's Canada, it's fentanyl, it's jobs. No, it's
Speaker 2: we're going to make them the fifty first state. It's everything. No,
Speaker 2: it's half of the goods. No, we're taking them off again.
Speaker 2: At this point, I think it is one of the
Speaker 2: biggest liabilities and he can't certainly can't blame Elon for
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 4: But if you look at.
Speaker 2: The next level of what people say are like his
Speaker 2: biggest grew ups, You've got a bunch of things related
Speaker 2: to Elon. You've got Musk, Elon firing DOGE, federal workers.
Speaker 2: So if you kind of put all those together, you
Speaker 2: can see those are the two dueling pieces that people
Speaker 2: are most upset about with regard to Trump and the
Speaker 2: way that he has approached the government.
Speaker 3: So far, super super interesting. I would have been the
Speaker 3: person who spelled tariff's wrong on the word cloud.
Speaker 8: Let's jump back to Jesson jun Let's jump back to
Speaker 8: the CNBC just thought that of Crystal Tease, because this
Speaker 8: is how the tariff whirlwind, where basically Trump is and
Speaker 8: different advisors who are talking to the media are saying
Speaker 8: different things.
Speaker 3: I mean, over the course of one day yesterday, there
Speaker 3: were different lines about how the tariffs were being implemented,
Speaker 3: what level of targeting was happening, and then what level
Speaker 3: targeting wasn't happening with which country. So here's how the
Speaker 3: NBC reacted. Let's roll a two.
Speaker 9: I'm going to say this at risk of my job, Kelly,
Speaker 9: but what President Trump is doing is insane. It is
Speaker 9: absolutely insane. It is about the eighth reason we've had
Speaker 9: for the tariffs, and now he's saying he's putting fifty
Speaker 9: percent tariffs on Canada unless they agree to become the
Speaker 9: fifty first state. That is insane. There is just no
Speaker 9: other way of describing it. And the trouble, Kelly, is
Speaker 9: that it shows there are no bounds around President Trump.
Speaker 9: This is very different from the first and mintministration, where
Speaker 9: there were people around him who seem to I don't
Speaker 9: know what the word is, but smooth over some of
Speaker 9: the edges now. And the other thing that's not talked about, Kelly,
Speaker 9: is what's going on within the administration in terms of
Speaker 9: how they're treating the constitution and laws. I think all
Speaker 9: of that is bad for the attraction of capital. And
Speaker 9: the gentleman from Bridgwarter is one hundred percent right. We
Speaker 9: need massive amounts of capital if we want to have
Speaker 9: fund our deficits, pay for the things we want to
Speaker 9: pay for, sell our bonds, and have high stock prices.
Speaker 9: And it seems as if this administration is doing everything
Speaker 9: it can to chase foreign capital away.
Speaker 3: Okay, I like how he says. The gentleman from Bridgewater
Speaker 3: is absolutely correct.
Speaker 2: Like they're in Congress, I think, to you, it's funny
Speaker 2: to me how these guys think, because he's like, you know,
Speaker 2: is wild violations of the Constitution. What really matters here
Speaker 2: is this is bad for capital. Like everything just runs
Speaker 2: through good for profit motive, bad for profit motive. And
Speaker 2: he's come to the conclusion that, like you know, completely
Speaker 2: tearing up the constitution might be bad for capital attraction,
Speaker 2: so that's his issue with it. The other part I
Speaker 2: found kind of funny is that he said at the
Speaker 2: risk of losing his job, Like why would this cause
Speaker 2: you to risk your job? But anyway, the main point
Speaker 2: here being first of all, just you know how aggressive
Speaker 2: he is there and how much he thinks this policy
Speaker 2: is totally insane, which obviously I agree with and I
Speaker 2: think many people at this point agree with. But I
Speaker 2: think it also reminds us that this is something we
Speaker 2: can talk more to Jeff Stein about that these guys
Speaker 2: really didn't take Trump seriously on the campaign trail when
Speaker 2: he was repeatedly like, no, I'm really into tariffs. I'm
Speaker 2: going to put on a lot of tariffs. They are
Speaker 2: going to be across the board tariffs. Tariffs is the
Speaker 2: most beautiful word in the English language. And they were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that part I don't think he's really serious about. We
Speaker 2: think he just means it when he talks about giving
Speaker 2: us tax cuts and deregulating everything, and that part we're
Speaker 2: excited about. So that's what we're going to focus on.
Speaker 2: So I think now you have a realization setting in
Speaker 2: which is partly reflected in the way that the you know,
Speaker 2: the market has been crashing. I do think I looked
Speaker 2: in the futures were up this morning. But the way
Speaker 2: that the market has responded this far, which has been
Speaker 2: terrible for the first fifty days here of the Trump administration,
Speaker 2: I do think it is a sort of setting in
Speaker 2: of reality for these guys of like, oh shit, this
Speaker 2: dude was actually serious about the stuff that he was saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted actually On that note, take out this
Speaker 3: quote from a CNN article IM reading right now. This
Speaker 3: is from Ross Mayfield, who's an investment strategist at Baird
Speaker 3: He says, quote, there's a tolerance for pain that maybe
Speaker 3: some investors hadn't priced in related to the Trump administration's
Speaker 3: tolerance for pain is what he's referring to there, Because
Speaker 3: you're seeing Donald Trump say, for example, markets are going
Speaker 3: to go up and they're going to go down, but
Speaker 3: you know what, we have to rebuild our country. And
Speaker 3: then obviously Howard Lutnik, as we mentioned earlier in Caroline
Speaker 3: Levitt As Soccer, got her on the record about all
Speaker 3: of that. So CNN continues to say, we haven't gotten
Speaker 3: into some of these hard numbers yet, but the S
Speaker 3: and P five hundred dipped about It closed about nine
Speaker 3: point three percent, down from that February record high. Yesterday,
Speaker 3: all three major indexes dropped after Trump doubled down earlier
Speaker 3: in the day yesterday, but by the afternoon CNN rights
Speaker 3: markets had paired some lessons as officials from both the
Speaker 3: US and Canada said they would meet this week to
Speaker 3: de escalate tensions and renegotiate trade policy. Crystal. It's quite
Speaker 3: interesting though, that's giving anybody some hope because it's now
Speaker 3: like Trump negotiating over the fifty first state right with
Speaker 3: Canadian negotiators. So I actually don't know how much can
Speaker 3: come out of those meetings at this point. Canada, I
Speaker 3: was I'd forgotten this, but Canada has one hundred percent
Speaker 3: tariff on Chinese EV's like they're not at all many
Speaker 3: people are aware of this. They're not at all averse
Speaker 3: to their own tariff agenda. So maybe that's a bargaining
Speaker 3: trip for the Trump administration going forward, but I don't
Speaker 3: know what right.
Speaker 2: I think they'd be pretty happy about Canada having those
Speaker 2: tariffs on Chinese ev that favorable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, yes, absolutely, but just that Canada uses tariffs
Speaker 3: as its own type of policy and I think you'll
Speaker 3: see some of that probably as they sit down at
Speaker 3: the table and talk. There's some of these things, but
Speaker 3: I don't know. I mean, it's genuinely hard to know.
Speaker 3: We were talking about this earlier. What Trump wants from Canada.
Speaker 3: Canada doesn't know. Trump's advisors don't seem to know what
Speaker 3: he wants from Canada at this point. My best guess
Speaker 3: is that he wants to he wants companies to do
Speaker 3: business in Canada to not know what his end goal is,
Speaker 3: so that they end up betting on the United States
Speaker 3: rather than betting on Canada. I think that's the read
Speaker 3: that's most likely, but it's really hard to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is what I want to talk
Speaker 2: to Jeff Stein about and see what his best read
Speaker 2: of the situation are, because I've seen like eighteen different
Speaker 2: theories floated, including that they just like the market chaos,
Speaker 2: because if you're an insider and you can predict where
Speaker 2: when to buy the dip and when he's going to
Speaker 2: make a new announcement about tariffs a spikes market, you
Speaker 2: could be in a pretty profitable position. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: want to talk to Jeff about what he thinks is
Speaker 2: actually going on. Here, not that I think that. I mean,
Speaker 2: if anyone could figure it out, it would be Jeff.
Speaker 2: But I'm not sure that anyone, including maybe Trump, really
Speaker 2: knows what he's up to you here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So let's actually move on to this Tesla commercial
Speaker 3: that happened on the White House at the White House yesterday,
Speaker 3: because we have the video. This is going to be
Speaker 3: a four. To the control room. Trump was doing a
Speaker 3: It was talking to reporters actually next to Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: next to x little ex, Elon Musk's son, and they
Speaker 3: had all kinds of Teslas outside of the White House,
Speaker 3: parked on the driveway, and Trump made a little bit
Speaker 3: of an announcement so we could go ahead and roll
Speaker 3: a four.
Speaker 10: I bought for a very special young woman, do you know.
Speaker 10: I'm sure you've never heard of Herkai And she's a
Speaker 10: great golfer and she puts the clubs in the back
Speaker 10: and I guess it's a very safe deal.
Speaker 7: She loves it.
Speaker 10: And I actually bought one about a year ago, and
Speaker 10: she loves it. And it's very safe. It's very strong, heavy,
Speaker 10: it's all steel stainless, ye know, but the cars themselves,
Speaker 10: So what is this one? You know that's a that's
Speaker 10: a lot of Why so I have a lot of
Speaker 10: information that's put it into price. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 10: make a good deal here. You know, I do notice
Speaker 10: this they have won, which is thirty five thousand dollars,
Speaker 10: which is pretty low.
Speaker 7: What is that you.
Speaker 3: Find a Tesla will boost Tesla sales and boost Look,
Speaker 3: look is that I care about one thing.
Speaker 10: When somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn't be hurt.
Speaker 10: He's a great patriot. He didn't know me from Adam
Speaker 10: until we met a little bit when I was in
Speaker 10: my first term, but he came out he endorsed me
Speaker 10: very strongly.
Speaker 3: So when somebody is a great patriot, they shouldn't get hurt.
Speaker 3: Is like what I'm going to say to a cop
Speaker 3: if they complain that I'm violating like open container laws.
Speaker 3: If somebody is a patriot, if somebody is the patriot,
Speaker 3: they should not be hurt. Officer Chris So, this was
Speaker 3: somewhat extraordinary. I think you've seen presidents I'm thinking of
Speaker 3: Obama in particular with social media highlight great American Companies
Speaker 3: perceived great American companies Before bringing the Teslas onto the
Speaker 3: White House line and talking about how much of a
Speaker 3: genius Elon Musk was that was an and interesting move
Speaker 3: that just seems unnecessary. I don't actually even understand what
Speaker 3: the point of that conversation was.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the point is that Tesla's stock is
Speaker 2: particularly in the toilet they're down fifty percent from they're
Speaker 2: high in December. Sales are plummeting around the world. In
Speaker 2: Europe they're down like fifty percent.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: In addition to Elon just being a completely toxic character,
Speaker 2: especially for your average ev buyer, they also have a
Speaker 2: stale product line. They also have increased competition for China,
Speaker 2: so the company is truly struggling.
Speaker 4: And then you've.
Speaker 2: Got you know, Elon who not only put quorder of
Speaker 2: a billion dollars into Trump's can pain, but just yesterday
Speaker 2: after this whole you know, sales pitch on the White
Speaker 2: House lawn, turning it into like a car lot. After that,
Speaker 2: we learn, oh, and Elon just happened to have right
Speaker 2: now at this moment, offered to put another one hundred
Speaker 2: million dollars into Trumpelne packs. So you know, when you
Speaker 2: ask what's different between this and let's say, you know,
Speaker 2: Joe Biden went to the Ford factory and drove one
Speaker 2: of their ev lightning f one fifties.
Speaker 4: What's different?
Speaker 2: Show me the Ford CEO who gave him a quarter
Speaker 2: of a billion dollars and is now putting another one
Speaker 2: hundred million into his campaign, coffers, That's what's really different.
Speaker 2: Not to mention, of course Elon himself having this insanely
Speaker 2: powerful position in government where he really is deciding who stays,
Speaker 2: who goes, what happens, what's a priority, and funneling contracts
Speaker 2: into his own companies while he's at it, defenestrating the
Speaker 2: regulatory environment so that none of them can investigate his many,
Speaker 2: you know, alleged abuses of our regulatory system, including we
Speaker 2: just had yet another SpaceX rocket that blew up. So
Speaker 2: that's what makes this just so insanely nakedly corrupt, is
Speaker 2: you literally have the President filming an ad on the
Speaker 2: White House lawn for his largest by far campaign contributor.
Speaker 3: Well, and it just to me, I don't understand what's
Speaker 3: in it for Donald Trump to be this And I
Speaker 3: know you have an answer to this, Crystal, but to
Speaker 3: be this gratuitous and to be this just completely fawning
Speaker 3: drooling over Elon Musk and Tesla We can actually put
Speaker 3: a seven on the screen. Skip ahead here. Trump was
Speaker 3: I don't want to say cock because I don't think
Speaker 3: he was trying to hide it, but he had some
Speaker 3: talking points in his hand as he was discussing the
Speaker 3: Tesla's where he had all of the prices listed out,
Speaker 3: sort of like you're doing a sales pitch.
Speaker 4: The sales pitch notes. That's what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So yeah, and it's just it does you know,
Speaker 3: make you truly wonder? I mean, one hundred million dollars.
Speaker 3: It's kind of sad because that's less than half of
Speaker 3: what Elon Musk infused into Trump's campaign in the late stages,
Speaker 3: which is just the amount of money that he's able
Speaker 3: to just throw around is stunning. But it does just
Speaker 3: like for Trump to go to that links to sell
Speaker 3: electric vehicles. I mean, we're not even talking about we
Speaker 3: know he loves you know, Caterpillar. We know he loves
Speaker 3: the fun trucks and the big toys, but it just
Speaker 3: this isn't that these are like electric vehicles. These are not.
Speaker 3: Trump has himself come around on electric vehicles because of
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, but to go to all of the effort
Speaker 3: that they went to yesterday it just you, really it does.
Speaker 3: It does make you wonder. It's so out of character.
Speaker 3: I think for Trump that it really makes you wonder.
Speaker 2: So just buying buying evs to own the libs is
Speaker 2: a pretty funny development, you know.
Speaker 3: Not even just buying them, but like obsessing, fawning over
Speaker 3: the product.
Speaker 2: Kannity too, Sean Hannity doing the same thing. He was
Speaker 2: running some promotion on his show and whatever. Like it
Speaker 2: is really preposterous and frankly humiliating. I mean, I also
Speaker 2: think it's sort of pathetic for Elon that he's gotten
Speaker 2: to this point with Tesla where he's got to beg
Speaker 2: the president for favors and to buy one and tout
Speaker 2: his product, et cetera. And Elon has been aggressively using
Speaker 2: x as well to promote, like people who were posting
Speaker 2: that on social media that they bought a Tesla to
Speaker 2: support Elon and how great Tesla is, et cetera. He's
Speaker 2: been using his platform a lot to do that because
Speaker 2: I mean, I think the company genuinely is in trouble.
Speaker 2: I also think their stock parts has long been like
Speaker 2: wildly overvalued. You know, there was an expectation not unreasonable
Speaker 2: after Trump was elected. Of course, Elon has this prominent
Speaker 2: position that that would be really beneficial for the company.
Speaker 2: But I think what wasn't priced in, to use the
Speaker 2: law of Wall Street lingo, is the fact that Elon
Speaker 2: would become this incredibly increasingly toxic figure for their primary
Speaker 2: customer base. And so you know, most people like they're
Speaker 2: not trying to make a political statement with their car,
Speaker 2: and now having a Tesla has become a political statement
Speaker 2: and like a divisive one. So yeah, that's going to
Speaker 2: turn off a significant portion of your likely consumer base,
Speaker 2: especially since it's mostly Libs who buy Tesla's, So it's
Speaker 2: it's a major problem. But you know, I just I
Speaker 2: can't get over the corruption aspect of this and how
Speaker 2: out in like out in the open it all is
Speaker 2: like literally the day he does the sales pitch, you
Speaker 2: announced you're doing this hundred million dollar cash infusion. Like,
Speaker 2: I mean, the Biden crime family couldn't dream, right, Pelosia
Speaker 2: insider trading, couldn't dream of this level of just naked
Speaker 2: pay for play that everyone's just like, yeah, that's just Trump, That's.
Speaker 4: Just what he does.
Speaker 2: The state has really taken on characteristics of both a
Speaker 2: sort of clienteleism which is just this very like transactional
Speaker 2: government where it's like, you know, patronage, and you do
Speaker 2: for me, and I'm going to do for you. I'm
Speaker 2: going to reward my friends, I'm going to screw over
Speaker 2: my enemies, and overt oligarchy. I mean, the fact that
Speaker 2: Elon is the richest person on the planet and Trump
Speaker 2: has stocked his cabinet with billionaires, and you've got Bezos
Speaker 2: and Zuckerberg and everybody else rushing in to be part
Speaker 2: of that favored oligarch class. I mean, I think those
Speaker 2: are sort of the two competing frameworks you should use
Speaker 2: to understand the choices that are being made here and
Speaker 2: the way Trump has decided to run his run the
Speaker 2: country this time. And you know, it's very consistent with
Speaker 2: if you're a CEO of a company, of a big company,
Speaker 2: and you're used to trying to kind of, you know,
Speaker 2: both being that transactional person and also being sort of
Speaker 2: like the king of this corporate empire. You can see
Speaker 2: how it appeals to him to run the country in
Speaker 2: exactly the same way, and this time that is precisely
Speaker 2: what is happening, because any of the checks and the
Speaker 2: guardrails that existed any of the like genuine resistance to
Speaker 2: him that existed in the first term is just completely
Speaker 2: like either melted away or they have taken affirmative staf
Speaker 2: apps to make sure that those guardrails do not hold
Speaker 2: this time around.
Speaker 3: I actually think if I were a Tesla investor, would
Speaker 3: make me nervous that Musk is so close to the government.
Speaker 3: It was always close to the government, but is this
Speaker 3: close to the government, because I think that just engenders
Speaker 3: a sense of complacency that would I mean, you end
Speaker 3: up getting so many favors that it's yeah, and we've
Speaker 3: talked about that before. Is like it's it's not it
Speaker 3: doesn't create better products. So we have to before we
Speaker 3: move on from this block and get to Jeff Crystal
Speaker 3: roll this clip of Peter Deucy from Fox News getting
Speaker 3: a great question in at this little daggle on the
Speaker 3: White House lawn yesterday. This is a six.
Speaker 11: Well, there are some folks to schools see this clip
Speaker 11: at home, and they are struggling with their retirement accounts
Speaker 11: down at the moment, uncertainty about work ahead.
Speaker 12: Well, I think are going to do great.
Speaker 10: I think we're our country had to do this. We
Speaker 10: had to go and do this. They've taken away other countries.
Speaker 10: If taken away our business, they've taken away our jobs.
Speaker 10: I did it initially very strongly against as you know,
Speaker 10: China and some others in the first term, and it
Speaker 10: was a very successful term. We had no inflation, we
Speaker 10: had the greatest economy in the history of our country.
Speaker 3: So crystal again, Trump can get away with it. You know,
Speaker 3: at least we've seen that so far, and there's no
Speaker 3: sign that that pattern is going to stop when it
Speaker 3: comes to him as this very singular figure in American politics,
Speaker 3: but he surrounded himself with other billionaires essentially, and particularly
Speaker 3: with Elon Musk, and I think it's so long as
Speaker 3: they're doing the messaging, going to be harder and harder
Speaker 3: to say things like, yeah, you know, we're buying new
Speaker 3: cars and we're waiting out this transition period in the economy.
Speaker 3: So we just need you to be sort of patient
Speaker 3: with us billionaires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's worth it. The recession is worth it. In
Speaker 2: the words, to return to you know, Howard Lutnik at
Speaker 2: the beginning of the show, and I got to hand
Speaker 2: it to Peter Deucy, that was a great question and
Speaker 2: a really apt question, as much as I love Sargar's
Speaker 2: Annetti's questions. Yesterday in the briefing room, Peter Deucy also
Speaker 2: had a really great one too.
Speaker 4: He was like, you know, it's.
Speaker 2: Kind of like a offhanded one, but also very legit.
Speaker 2: He was like, sure, nobody around here shorten the stock market,
Speaker 2: you know, gesturing towards this theory that's out there of like,
Speaker 2: you know, with you generating all of these wild swings
Speaker 2: in the market, Hey, if you're an insider and you
Speaker 2: know what's going to happen, you could really be in
Speaker 2: position to profit off of this. And you know, this
Speaker 2: White House has done away with inspectors generals. They've rolled
Speaker 2: back some of the ethics provisions for the White House
Speaker 2: that were in place during the Biden administration. They engage
Speaker 2: in activities like selling tessels on the White House lawn
Speaker 2: while Elon Musk is funneling another one hundred million dollars
Speaker 2: into Trump aligned packs. Trump is there, people are paying
Speaker 2: CEOs are paying five million dollars for the honor of
Speaker 2: being able to have a dinner with Trump, and again
Speaker 2: that goes into like trumpell packs so that they can
Speaker 2: make their case directly in this sort of like oligarchic
Speaker 2: or clienteleist way to the King and receive his favor.
Speaker 2: And this is the way business is being done with
Speaker 2: Elon and Doge as well. Where you know, if you're
Speaker 2: a Republican senator, not actually a member of the House,
Speaker 2: but a Republican senator, you have Elan's personal phone number,
Speaker 2: and if there's a project in your district that gets
Speaker 2: cut that is causing you problems, you can call him,
Speaker 2: and you can petition the King for a favor and
Speaker 2: for special relief. If you are not in his political favor,
Speaker 2: which means every Democrat you know, whether you're in a
Speaker 2: red state or a blue state, or your state, whatever,
Speaker 2: then you don't have that same opportunity to petition the
Speaker 2: King and get the painful cuts to your constituents rolled back,
Speaker 2: even though many of those constituents will also be Republicans
Speaker 2: who voted for Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Well, let's bring Jeff Stein into drill down even deeper
Speaker 3: on this question that is rocking the economy. Excited to
Speaker 3: be joined now by Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein, who
Speaker 3: has been all over the story. Jeff, thank you for
Speaker 3: joining us.
Speaker 13: Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 3: As we start, I want to get your reaction to
Speaker 3: this clip. I'm sure you've seen it by now, but
Speaker 3: of Donald Trump on the White House long yesterday, all
Speaker 3: those tesla's behind him, Elon Musk by his side, responding
Speaker 3: to a question about Doug Ford. Let's go ahead and
Speaker 3: roll b one.
Speaker 10: Well, already Canada, and I respect very much. As you know,
Speaker 10: there's a very strong man in Canada who said he
Speaker 10: was going to.
Speaker 3: Charge a search charge.
Speaker 10: You're a taraphone electricity coming into Ochiga. He is called
Speaker 10: and he said.
Speaker 13: He's not going to do that.
Speaker 10: Okay, he's not going to do that, and it would
Speaker 10: have been a very bad thing if you did. And
Speaker 10: he's not going to do this. So I respect that.
Speaker 10: But we were just informed that he's not going to
Speaker 10: do that.
Speaker 3: So that's Trump referring to Ontario, Doug Ford of Ontario,
Speaker 3: and Jeff, I think that is you know, I don't
Speaker 3: know what actually happened there. Maybe you have a better
Speaker 3: idea of what actually happened between Trump and Doug Ford,
Speaker 3: a very strong man, as Trump says, But I guess
Speaker 3: it speaks to the complicated interpersonal dynamics that are affecting
Speaker 3: the tariffs overall. As Trump negotiates with Canadian leaders. So
Speaker 3: do you have any insight into what went down?
Speaker 13: I don't have the specific time on that call. We
Speaker 13: know for sure that the Canadians had threatened not just
Speaker 13: to raise the price of electricity for you know, roughly
Speaker 13: a million Americans, but to actually shut it off. And
Speaker 13: you know what the you know, administration announced yesterday was
Speaker 13: that the doubling of the steel aluminium tariffs that Trump
Speaker 13: had proposed from twenty five to fifty percent, which would
Speaker 13: have been really bad for Canada. One of the top
Speaker 13: Canadian exports to the US is steel, and had that
Speaker 13: gone into effect, it would have probably you know, invited
Speaker 13: the retaliation that Ford was alluding to. So it's a
Speaker 13: little hard to know exactly what the sequence was of this,
Speaker 13: And not to make excuses for my reporting gaps, but
Speaker 13: this is playing off, playing out across dozens, if not
Speaker 13: hundreds of countries right now, trying to avoid the import duties,
Speaker 13: the massive you know, tariff taxes that Trump is imposing,
Speaker 13: and what I guess what what ringing between the lines.
Speaker 13: It seems what happened was the Trump people had been
Speaker 13: back channeling that this twenty five to fifty percent hike
Speaker 13: and stale aluminum was likely, and that came off yesterday
Speaker 13: back to twenty five percent around the time that Trump
Speaker 13: announced that the this you know that that Canada was
Speaker 13: not going to retaliate on American electricity, you know, on
Speaker 13: the users and in those northern states. But the degree
Speaker 13: to which this can just fly off the handle at
Speaker 13: any moment is pretty unnerving, especially if you're someone who
Speaker 13: needs you know, Canadians have provided electricity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would, I would say so, I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: to kind of bring people up to speed. Yesterday, there
Speaker 2: was this back and forth between Trump and the Canadians.
Speaker 2: At the end of the day, Trump decided to roll
Speaker 2: back the things that had been threatened. But there are
Speaker 2: still other terrorists that are going into effect today. I mean,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of theories, Jeff out there about
Speaker 2: what the hell Trump is up to, Like is this
Speaker 2: really about reindustrializing the country, because the approach doesn't really
Speaker 2: make sense for that. It's definitely not really about fentanyl,
Speaker 2: like I think we can all see through. That's kind
Speaker 2: of ridiculous given the very small amounts of that drug
Speaker 2: that come from Canada. There have been some theories about
Speaker 2: how this is an attempt to actually do some sort
Speaker 2: of controlled demolition of the economy, both to keep inflation
Speaker 2: down and also to trigger interest rates being lowered so
Speaker 2: that a refinance on the treasury debt will be more affordable.
Speaker 2: Trudeau certainly thinks that Trump is serious about using economic
Speaker 2: warfare to annex some or all of Canada. I've seen
Speaker 2: some other sort of like eight D chess type theories
Speaker 2: out there. The other you know, then there's more sort
Speaker 2: of like the various theories, like they just want to
Speaker 2: use these market spikes to insider trade and people are
Speaker 2: profiting off of it, or they want to trigger a
Speaker 2: recession because guess what coming out of recessions, usually the
Speaker 2: rich people get even richer, the banks get even bigger,
Speaker 2: and given that the government is being run, you know,
Speaker 2: effectively as like an oligarchy, maybe that's the end goal here,
Speaker 2: is they actually want to generate a recession.
Speaker 4: Like, have you been able to come up.
Speaker 2: With what is your theory of the case of what
Speaker 2: he's actually up to here with all of this?
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean, as a reporter, we sort of help
Speaker 13: the traffic in the facts we have, and while we
Speaker 13: should look very carefully to answer some of those questions
Speaker 13: that you're posing. I mean, is there instead of trading
Speaker 13: going on or Trump's you know, allies or family profiting
Speaker 13: from the wild swings in the market that he seems
Speaker 13: to be just himself self controlling with you know, who
Speaker 13: knows the DJ is even investigating those carefully. While we
Speaker 13: have to take those issues seriously, I think it's worth
Speaker 13: saying that, you know, Trump has been very clear for
Speaker 13: over a year now that he sees tariffs as able
Speaker 13: to do several different things, these things or intention He's
Speaker 13: sort of the most generous possible interpretation we can give him,
Speaker 13: I think, is that he views these these goals, these
Speaker 13: separate goals for tariff policy as sort of all all worthwhile,
Speaker 13: but maybe not all worthwhile simultaneously, or maybe some can
Speaker 13: be accomplished and others can and that's okay. So just
Speaker 13: to back up and try to explain this a little
Speaker 13: more clearly, Trump has said, I think, really really importantly
Speaker 13: to understanding Trump's motives that from his perspective, the US
Speaker 13: is getting screwed by the existing state of trade barriers,
Speaker 13: where they believe with some reason we can get into
Speaker 13: why this is more complicated than they say, but that
Speaker 13: other countries have far higher import duties on our exports
Speaker 13: than we do on there. So that's clearly a goal,
Speaker 13: I think. But there's also the goal of can we
Speaker 13: raise revenue because we know that the Republicans are trying
Speaker 13: to pass four trillion dollars in tax cuts, and Trump
Speaker 13: is not wrong that if you impose massive taxes on
Speaker 13: every import coming to the US, even though it would
Speaker 13: be devastating for a lot of poor Americans who depend
Speaker 13: on imports for cheap food and other necessities, it could
Speaker 13: raise a lot of money. Now, these two things don't
Speaker 13: mesh together. Either the tariffs are a vehicle to lower
Speaker 13: import duties, in which case you reach a deal where
Speaker 13: the US tariffs come off, or there are a tool
Speaker 13: to raise lots of revenue to pay for the tax
Speaker 13: cuts and in which case they stay on. It cannot
Speaker 13: be both, and so be as generous as I can
Speaker 13: be as possible to Trump.
Speaker 5: There is just an incompatibility here. Maybe what he's thinking.
Speaker 13: Is if I if I do this and it doesn't work,
Speaker 13: at least we get the revenue. And if I do
Speaker 13: this and then they lower the trade barriers on our exports,
Speaker 13: I'll take that win instead. That's the most reasonable assumption,
Speaker 13: I think you could possibly make being as generous as
Speaker 13: possible to the president for all the reasons you're alluding to, Crystal.
Speaker 13: There's there's been a lot of questions about how, even
Speaker 13: with the president's own goal, this doesn't make make sense
Speaker 13: because right like he says twenty five percent tariff on Mexico,
Speaker 13: let's say on all goods, and.
Speaker 5: Then like three hours later it's like, no, it's not on,
Speaker 5: it's off. It's all in and solah blah blah blah,
Speaker 5: And that is incompatible with this idea of we're gonna
Speaker 5: impose these tariffs to bring domestic manufacturing and production and
Speaker 5: factories back to the US.
Speaker 13: I've talked to a number of business leaders executive CEOs
Speaker 13: in the last few days so have said, look like
Speaker 13: if Trump just said, like this is the tariff policy,
Speaker 13: even if we didn't like it, even if we thought
Speaker 13: it was too high, we could like do something around it.
Speaker 5: But it's not just that they don't know if the
Speaker 5: tariffs are it come off. They also don't know if
Speaker 5: the tariffs are going.
Speaker 13: To stay on. So the uncertain team both directions is crippling.
Speaker 13: And I know that was a rambling answer, but I
Speaker 13: hope hopefully give you some sense of where I'm seeing this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's actually so so helpful. And let's run through
Speaker 3: a couple of elements that relate to what Jeff just said.
Speaker 3: If we put the CNBC Terror Street on the screen,
Speaker 3: this is B two, This is about just what happened yesterday.
Speaker 3: The headline is sort of amusing. Trump will not in
Speaker 3: post fifty percent Canadian steel aluminum tariffs tomorrow, says top
Speaker 3: trade advisor. And this is a quote from Peter Navarro
Speaker 3: to CNBC yesterday afternoon, and CNBC Roads writes quote. The
Speaker 3: reversal came six hours after Trump announced his plan to
Speaker 3: double import duties on the Canadian medals in response to
Speaker 3: Ontario's decision to slap a twenty five percent tax on
Speaker 3: electricity exports to the US. And then if we put
Speaker 3: B three up on the screen, this is news about
Speaker 3: more news about Canada. Canada files to sell usd bonds
Speaker 3: size undisclosed. That's again from yesterday. And finally I want
Speaker 3: to at this true social post from Trump on the screen,
Speaker 3: which is B four, which sees Trump asking why would
Speaker 3: our country allow another country to supply us with electricity
Speaker 3: even for a small area who made these decisions and why?
Speaker 3: And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to
Speaker 3: use electricity all caps that so affects the life of
Speaker 3: innocent people as a bargaining chip and threat they will
Speaker 3: pay a financial price for the so big that it
Speaker 3: will be read about in history books for many years
Speaker 3: to come. And I know Crystal wants to make a
Speaker 3: point about some of the decisions in Gaza on that,
Speaker 3: but before we do, Jeff, I want to get your
Speaker 3: reaction to just how we see different things coming from
Speaker 3: different people in the administration. The President is saying one thing,
Speaker 3: Peter Navarro is then talking to CNBC and saying something,
Speaker 3: there's this update that seems a country nict what's happening
Speaker 3: according to the President. So I wonder just your sense
Speaker 3: from people who work on these issues in the White House,
Speaker 3: is that intentional? I mean, is it intentionally haphazard? Because
Speaker 3: that speaks to whether or not the uncertainty is itself intentional.
Speaker 3: And you know, you just kind of got into whether
Speaker 3: that would make sense for the end goal of the
Speaker 3: Trump administration. But I'm wondering, you know, if it seems
Speaker 3: like they are purposefully causing confusion or if there's genuinely
Speaker 3: a lot of confusion, and there's nothing strategic about it.
Speaker 13: I mean, I think if there is intentional confusion, it's
Speaker 13: going on between Trump's ears, like it's it's not something
Speaker 13: that the advisors, according to the people I've talked to,
Speaker 13: like the people close to Trump, are not excited about
Speaker 13: looking like, you know, fools might be an overstatement, but
Speaker 13: looking uninformed on national television almost every day, having their
Speaker 13: exact utterances immediately contradicted by their boss, whose views they're
Speaker 13: supposed to be reflecting. But I think, as we're seeing
Speaker 13: not just here but across you know, almost every issue,
Speaker 13: Trump is like, you know, I won twice. The media
Speaker 13: hit me with everything, They tried to put me in
Speaker 13: jail or whatever, you know, the Democrats, whatever conspiracy theories
Speaker 13: he has about that. And so he's unabout and he's
Speaker 13: doing what he wants to do. And he seems, you know,
Speaker 13: wholly unperturbed by the stock market, his approval ratings, his
Speaker 13: own advisors, America's closest allies, the fate of the American
Speaker 13: economy at large, like none of these things seem to
Speaker 13: be really enough to move him. And that leaves us
Speaker 13: in a kind of a scary place.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, I wanted to get your opinion, Jeff,
Speaker 2: on whether that piece of information about Canada doing a
Speaker 2: sale of US bonds, which is not an unusual thing
Speaker 2: to do, but I you know, a lot of people
Speaker 2: kind of were interested in the fact that that was happening.
Speaker 2: And it's also comes with the Liberals in Canada just
Speaker 2: elected a new leaders, the new Prime Minister, Mark Karney,
Speaker 2: who's himself a former central banker both of Canada and
Speaker 2: actually of England as Brexit was going on. So I
Speaker 2: wonder if you could reflect a little bit just specifically
Speaker 2: on that development and more broad on having Mark Kearney
Speaker 2: in charge in Canada now and how that could impact
Speaker 2: the way that they respond.
Speaker 13: Well, I mean, I actually hadn't seen that until you
Speaker 13: showed it. I think it reflects a really interesting question though,
Speaker 13: which is is the sort of Trump fuselade, all out
Speaker 13: attack on all of our global trading partners going to
Speaker 13: change the way the world views the safety and security
Speaker 13: of the US dollar as the world sort of reserve
Speaker 13: currency and sort of you know, the way that treasuries
Speaker 13: over the last forty fifty years have served as the backstop,
Speaker 13: the trusted sort of foundation of the global financial system,
Speaker 13: and it is not inconceivable at all to me. And
Speaker 13: I don't know what the problemance of that tweet that
Speaker 13: I should figure out that out, but I didn't.
Speaker 4: Check it out that it was it was accurate. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I know, but it is accurate.
Speaker 13: My early point there is that.
Speaker 5: The US has an enormous fiscal imbalance relative to most countries,
Speaker 5: and that deficit allows us to fund social services, you know,
Speaker 5: not in the way that the Nordics do, but greater
Speaker 5: than our very very very low tax.
Speaker 13: Revenue allow us to do. And the US is able
Speaker 13: to do that because we are able to lend money
Speaker 13: on global capital markets pretty cheaply, like, much more cheaply
Speaker 13: than any other comparable country in the entire world. We
Speaker 13: have sort of this golden goose that allows us to
Speaker 13: print money. And we can debate whether that money is
Speaker 13: used well, but it has been a foundational feature of
Speaker 13: the American economy for thirty four years and the idea
Speaker 13: that that is at risk now is a very scary
Speaker 13: thing because other countries, as it could follow suit and
Speaker 13: not buying US debt, which could cause sort of the
Speaker 13: premiums that the US has to offer on its debt
Speaker 13: to get investors to buy it to spike, and that
Speaker 13: would be something that would trigger a rise and borrowing
Speaker 13: costs that could be to a crisis for the US
Speaker 13: government very quickly. And it's something that we're shocking because
Speaker 13: it's the vulnerability as Trump sort of lashes out against
Speaker 13: the whole world simultaneously. Right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because one of the theories that I've seen is
Speaker 2: that you know, normally in times of instability, there's a
Speaker 2: flight too into US bonds, Like that's sort of like
Speaker 2: you know, the bedrock gold standard of stability as we're
Speaker 2: still sort of the global hedgebon And so when Canada,
Speaker 2: which now you know Mark Karney against central banker as
Speaker 2: their leader, like, you know, we're actually going to do
Speaker 2: the opposite of that, We're going to sell We're going
Speaker 2: to take at this moment to sell US bonds. It's
Speaker 2: very possible people are reading too much into it, but
Speaker 2: it was an indication to me of like, this may
Speaker 2: not go the way that you think it's going to
Speaker 2: because the country gets the world gets to say in
Speaker 2: how they respond as well. And you know, we are
Speaker 2: in this moment where there's a geopolitical rebalancing and you know,
Speaker 2: I think some of the moves to the Trump administration
Speaker 2: certainly are aggressively trying to reshape that geo political balance
Speaker 2: in the way that they want it to appear. And
Speaker 2: so that's why I thought that that was that that
Speaker 2: was really noteworthy, And like you said, a potential warning sign.
Speaker 2: I mean, what do we mostly use that surplus and
Speaker 2: that incredible quote unquote Golden Goose to do. It's to
Speaker 2: have a gigantic military and then to you know, have
Speaker 2: the social safety of programs like Medicare and Social Security
Speaker 2: and Medicaid that are really important to people. And I
Speaker 2: do think that is one of the profound risks of
Speaker 2: this moment. That and just you know, the dedollarrization, like
Speaker 2: moving away from the dollars the global reserve currency.
Speaker 3: There's a great article in Compact. I don't know if
Speaker 3: either of you read it, basically about the emergent ideological
Speaker 3: belief among like the Howard Latinx, who's by the way,
Speaker 3: a big backer of stable coin, that Trump's approach to
Speaker 3: crypto is now actually he's been sort of converted to
Speaker 3: the ideological school that crypto is something that boosts the
Speaker 3: dollar because stable coin is pinned one one to the
Speaker 3: US dollar. Therefore, all of this is actually sort of
Speaker 3: galaxy brain helpful to the United States. I don't know, Jeff, Like,
Speaker 3: do you what do you make of everything that crystal.
Speaker 13: Check the price of bitcoin?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean that tweet you put up is incredible, right,
Speaker 5: Like why would we trust the Canadians to sell us electricity?
Speaker 5: And I don't know, I mean the twenty twenty four
Speaker 5: presidential election, like I covered it, it was not about
Speaker 5: animist towards Canada. Trump was not running on on destroying
Speaker 5: Ontario and encouraging Americans to boo the Canadian national anthem
Speaker 5: at hockey games Like this is like, I think fundamentally weird.
Speaker 5: I think this is not what Trump campaigned on at all.
Speaker 5: And the fact that he seems to think or believe
Speaker 5: or at least be willing to try to get Americans
Speaker 5: psyched to like want to fight Canada?
Speaker 13: Is that a winning message for Republicans in twenty twenty six?
Speaker 13: Is that? Like, is there a ground swell of people
Speaker 13: throughout the country who are like, have always hated Canada
Speaker 13: and like, yeah, why why do we let them sell
Speaker 13: us electricity? Like it's it's it's bizarre. Isn't it, Like,
Speaker 13: I hope I'm not overstepping that, but like, where does
Speaker 13: this even come from? This animus towards Canada. There are
Speaker 13: some legitimate debates about various tariff that they have on
Speaker 13: our dairy or whatever, but the extrapolation of that, so
Speaker 13: We're going to destroy the Canadian economy and take their
Speaker 13: land is like, like, what are we even talking about here?
Speaker 13: It's like reminds me of playing like a video game
Speaker 13: or something, or he's just trying to expand the board.
Speaker 3: It's also incoherent because it's like, we can't stand Canada.
Speaker 3: Canada is a terrible country, but also we want it
Speaker 3: give us the fifty first state, right Crystal, Speaking of
Speaker 3: that tweet we wanted to put B five up on
Speaker 3: the screen or that truth Social post, I should say,
Speaker 3: this is from the Times Israel turns off gas electricity
Speaker 3: to force hostage release, which I think, as you were saying,
Speaker 3: is quite an interesting juxtaposition with the truth Social post
Speaker 3: of Donald Trump saying, can you imagine Canada' stooping so
Speaker 3: low as to use electricity that so affects the lives
Speaker 3: of innocent people as a bargaining trip and a threat?
Speaker 2: Yeah, just I mean, you know, I'm making the obvious
Speaker 2: just point about hypocrisy here and how there are no
Speaker 2: principles involved, right, It's all just whatever Trump wants to
Speaker 2: do in the moment. But I mean there's a couple
Speaker 2: things to pick up on on your point, Jeff is, like,
Speaker 2: I guess one way to read Trump's animals towards Canada is,
Speaker 2: you know, he's long hated Trudeau. Trudeau's this kind of
Speaker 2: like Obama like figure. Now the Liberals are led by
Speaker 2: this other like sort of you know, liberal technocrat hype.
Speaker 2: He hates these certain European leaders also that he feels
Speaker 2: like are part of this democratic liberal order that look
Speaker 2: down their nose at him. So one of the ways
Speaker 2: to read this is just like this sort of like
Speaker 2: personal grievance and animus, which does seem to be an
Speaker 2: animating force for Trump. But then the other way to
Speaker 2: read it is in this broader context of you know,
Speaker 2: he really is doing this sort of like throwback colonial
Speaker 2: or at least you know, brazen empire building territory acquisition
Speaker 2: plan if you take seriously, we want to make Canada
Speaker 2: the fifty first date, or at least we want to
Speaker 2: change the boundaries. We want Greenland, we want Panama, we
Speaker 2: want Gaza. We're just going to go and take the
Speaker 2: things that we want. We're going to go back to
Speaker 2: the Monroe doctrine where we're going to throw our weight around.
Speaker 2: This is our backyard, et cetera. So you know, and
Speaker 2: maybe it's some of both, but that's kind of how
Speaker 2: I read it, is that this is a part and
Speaker 2: part soul with that return to an older, stire style
Speaker 2: of direct imperialism that isn't like the usaid We're going
Speaker 2: to use our soft power or the China Chinese model
Speaker 2: of like the Belton Road initiative.
Speaker 4: It's like, no, We're actually going to.
Speaker 2: Take your land and mine your minerals and let our
Speaker 2: oligarchs like buy up the pieces of your country that
Speaker 2: are going to be valuable to them.
Speaker 13: That's such a great point, Crystal. The way I think
Speaker 13: about it is that it's like simultaneously contingent and structural.
Speaker 13: Like I think about this a lot in the context
Speaker 13: of sort of what Mosque is doing in the government,
Speaker 13: because on the one hand, it's clearly true that the
Speaker 13: Trump movement and Trump personally personifies an ideological sort of
Speaker 13: attack on the non partisan career civil service that Republicans
Speaker 13: have come to view with great deal of suspicion nanimous
Speaker 13: over the last you know, many years. That is a
Speaker 13: structural sort of force in American politics which Trump is
Speaker 13: in the process of codifying and implementing. At the same time,
Speaker 13: Musk is sort of just one guy who, by all
Speaker 13: sorts of somewhat random reasons, ended up being a very
Speaker 13: sort of close ally of this president specifically, and through
Speaker 13: what certainly appears to be sort of contingent factors of
Speaker 13: place and time and what's going through one guy's head,
Speaker 13: ended up being put in charge of this effort that
Speaker 13: he's now sort of distinctively supercharged with his own fingerprints
Speaker 13: in a way that is genuinely different, I think than
Speaker 13: what the standard bog Republican would have done to the
Speaker 13: federal government in a second Trump term anyway, right, Like,
Speaker 13: Musk is doing that differently than he would have than
Speaker 13: Trump would have if Musk had never come around. And so, yeah,
Speaker 13: I think you're describing it well where it's simultaneously these
Speaker 13: underlying structural factors that may even supersede Trump in many ways.
Speaker 13: Like there was an interesting piece over the weekend by
Speaker 13: a conservative writer whose name, and forgetting sort of about
Speaker 13: how we might be in this sort of we had
Speaker 13: this post World War two era where our entire politics
Speaker 13: was defined by sort of this liberal international order viewed
Speaker 13: as with its with its sort of most important goal
Speaker 13: to avoid the sort of territorial acquisitiveness that Hitler defined.
Speaker 13: I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler. I'm just saying that
Speaker 13: that the world order that was built after World War
Speaker 13: Two seems to be crumbling.
Speaker 5: And maybe that's not even a Trump specific or Trump
Speaker 5: dependent phenomenon, but the fact that Trump and is executing it,
Speaker 5: it has given it sort of a Trump distinctive.
Speaker 13: And as to your point about you know, individual the
Speaker 13: Trump distinctive, you know, flavor and approach.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting. Jeff, thank you for coming on to
Speaker 3: break this down. It was like just you must have
Speaker 3: been like just on a swivel all day yesterday, your
Speaker 3: reporting it was such a roller coaster. So thank you
Speaker 3: for helping the rest of us catch up to speed.
Speaker 13: No thanks, guys, I appreciate it, Ja, thank you.
Speaker 3: News broke late yesterday from Front of the Show Shelby
Speaker 3: Talcot of Semaphore that the Education Department had taken its
Speaker 3: first giant leap towards totally shuddering during the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: We can put C one up on the screen, shall
Speaker 3: be reported per person familiar. A quote reduction enforced notices
Speaker 3: for the Education Department are expected to go out today
Speaker 3: at six pm. Nearly half of the department is expected
Speaker 3: to be eliminated. Now if we put C two B
Speaker 3: up on the screen. This came shortly after that scoop
Speaker 3: from Shelby she got the report. She confirmed the report
Speaker 3: that these notices had gone out. All Education Department offices
Speaker 3: in DC will be closed tomorrow no reason beyond quote
Speaker 3: for security reasons, and workers were instructed to leave by
Speaker 3: six pm two day shall be reported, per a source.
Speaker 3: She also later reported that the Education Department has confirmed
Speaker 3: a quote reduction in force that will impact nearly fifty
Speaker 3: percent of its workforce. Staffers will be placed on administrative
Speaker 3: leave beginning March twenty first. So it's not as though
Speaker 3: the educate Education Department is half as full today this
Speaker 3: morning as people are going into the office. It's that
Speaker 3: they are starting to scale down over the course of
Speaker 3: the next couple of weeks. And that is again a
Speaker 3: fifty fifty percent reduction of force at the Department of
Speaker 3: Education and Krystal, like you said earlier in the show,
Speaker 3: all of these blocks could basically have been in a block.
Speaker 3: This is, you know, obviously very significant news and I
Speaker 3: want to get your reaction to this clip. Of Education
Speaker 3: secretary recently confirmed Linda McMahon on Laura Ingram Show last night,
Speaker 3: confirming again this is the first step on the road
Speaker 3: to total shutdown. Let's roll this next element.
Speaker 8: First, welcome to the show, because you haven't been on
Speaker 8: in studio with me before.
Speaker 4: Now, is this the first step on the.
Speaker 3: Road to a total shutdown?
Speaker 12: Yes, actually it is, because that was the president's mandate.
Speaker 12: This directive to me clearly is to shut down the
Speaker 12: Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work
Speaker 12: with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what
Speaker 12: we did today was to take the first step of
Speaker 12: eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat. And that's not
Speaker 12: to say that a lot of the folks, you know,
Speaker 12: it's a humanitarian thing too. A lot of the folks
Speaker 12: that are there, you know, they're out of a job.
Speaker 12: But we wanted to make sure that we kept all
Speaker 12: of the right people and the good people to make
Speaker 12: sure that the outward facing programs, the grants, the appropriations
Speaker 12: that come from Congress, all of that are being met
Speaker 12: and none of that's going to fall through the cracks.
Speaker 3: So there it is, Crystal. It's happening. To quote the
Speaker 3: Ron Paul meme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's happening so long as federal courts
Speaker 2: don't intervene and block. I mean, certainly you can't dismantle
Speaker 2: the entire Education Department without an Act of Congress, and
Speaker 2: even these massive cuts I think will certainly face court challenges.
Speaker 2: But you know, to zoom out here and Emily you
Speaker 2: can speak to this as well. You know, this is
Speaker 2: a long time conservative movement priority.
Speaker 4: I think really.
Speaker 2: Going back to the era of you know, the federal
Speaker 2: government being directly involved in desegregating schools and the fight's
Speaker 2: over bussing. You know, the Department of Education has sort
Speaker 2: of had a target on its back for much of
Speaker 2: its history from the right because of those interventions, which,
Speaker 2: by the way, you know, the times when the federal
Speaker 2: government has been most involved in public school education are
Speaker 2: actually some of the times when we've seen some of
Speaker 2: the best results, especially in terms of black students and
Speaker 2: white students. Test scores being more equivalent. You know, back
Speaker 2: in the seventies in particular, when the federal government was
Speaker 2: super involved, you saw massive increases in terms of the
Speaker 2: scores of black test students. You've seen more controversially and
Speaker 2: the George B. A. Bush era, the Republican parties sort
Speaker 2: of like laid down their arms against the Department of Education,
Speaker 2: took a different tack, decided to be aggressive in terms
Speaker 2: of pushing sort of like, you know, increased test standards.
Speaker 2: This was the era of the bipartisan no child left behind.
Speaker 2: Obama continued somewhat in that direction. Then there was a
Speaker 2: bit of a backlash against you know, oh, we're testing
Speaker 2: students too much.
Speaker 4: We need to pull back.
Speaker 2: And so it's interesting because right now, while the Department
Speaker 2: of Education is being you know, attacked and gutted in
Speaker 2: this way, it's one of the times when it's been
Speaker 2: less involved in local public school life than it has
Speaker 2: been at different parts of its history. I think the
Speaker 2: other way to look at this, and then we can
Speaker 2: get into more specifically, like what is the Department of
Speaker 2: Education even do? What does most of its funding and
Speaker 2: personnel go towards? But you know, conservatives have also long
Speaker 2: had a political project to push students away from public
Speaker 2: schools towards private schools, towards charter schools, you know, towards
Speaker 2: voucher systems.
Speaker 4: Towards homeschooling.
Speaker 2: And I certainly think that the energy around that was
Speaker 2: increased significantly by the you know, local reactions and the
Speaker 2: federal reaction, but specifically the local reactions to COVID and
Speaker 2: all the school shut downs and you know, all of
Speaker 2: the conversation about book bannings and all of those sorts
Speaker 2: of things. So I think this is you know, right
Speaker 2: in line with that right in Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: long time conservative ideological project. And before I get into
Speaker 2: sort of like the categories of what the Education Department
Speaker 2: actually does, it just love to for you to, you know,
Speaker 2: reflect as a conservative, how you would situate these moves
Speaker 2: within the Department of Education.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and your point about the history of the Education
Speaker 3: Department is really important because I think that was Carter
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy nine. Under the Carter administration, I think
Speaker 3: the Education Department comes in and Reagan campaigns, I'm getting
Speaker 3: rid of the Education Department. So it's kind of interesting
Speaker 3: because I feel like actually a lot of conservatives would say,
Speaker 3: we want to go back to the education system of
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies, before so much of this became centralized
Speaker 3: in Washington, DC. And this is of all of the
Speaker 3: departments that the right wants to eliminate in this like
Speaker 3: Doge fantasy, this is the one where I think they
Speaker 3: have the most particular plan as to how to do it.
Speaker 3: So the explanation would be a lot of the things
Speaker 3: that the Education Department does and we're going to see
Speaker 3: this in the next element, will still happen. They will
Speaker 3: just be managed on the state level. Same thing with
Speaker 3: so like civil rights, for example, they want to meld
Speaker 3: that into the Justice Department. So it's not as though
Speaker 3: some of these things won't continue to happen. It's just
Speaker 3: that they'll be administered on the state level. But and
Speaker 3: this is a huge butt that obviously is on the
Speaker 3: off ramp being executed competently and efficiently. To borrow the
Speaker 3: phrase from Doge, So, I think one way to see
Speaker 3: this is as though you're doing like a like a
Speaker 3: life saving surgery and you're like, Okay, I think this
Speaker 3: the surgery has to happen. That doesn't mean there isn't
Speaker 3: a significant there's a significant chance that it could go
Speaker 3: very wrong if you, you know, take some incorrect steps.
Speaker 3: I say that as someone as a conservative who thinks
Speaker 3: a lot of this should probably go back to the States.
Speaker 3: I think the plan to have some of the civil
Speaker 3: rights stuff under the Department of Justice, which is perfectly equipped,
Speaker 3: uh to handle it. I think that's all great, But
Speaker 3: if you don't handle the surgery in a competent way,
Speaker 3: then you're in big trouble. You can make the situation,
Speaker 3: you can essentially make the situation even worse to you know,
Speaker 3: continue playing out that metaphor. So we could go ahead
Speaker 3: and put this up on the screen. CEE four Chryst.
Speaker 3: So this is a chart that you hold of the
Speaker 3: largest spending categories in the Department of Education. So you
Speaker 3: see a huge chunk of that is federal student aid,
Speaker 3: so loans and peligrants K through twelve education comes in
Speaker 3: at second, and then early childhood education a very distant
Speaker 3: third career in technical education. Civil rights and school safety
Speaker 3: are the lowest category. So, Crystal, can you talk to
Speaker 3: us a little bit about how you see the future
Speaker 3: of the Education Department in the context of what that
Speaker 3: spending looks like as of right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean I think there again, I think
Speaker 2: it's important to keep the broader ideological goals in mind,
Speaker 2: which is number one. I mean, this also fits with
Speaker 2: the later block about Makmu Khalil, in that there is
Speaker 2: an ideological war also against higher education, you know, and
Speaker 2: they're using this sort of like pro Palestine movement as
Speaker 2: a cudgel to hobble universities. And you know, sixty universities
Speaker 2: have received letters. So they love the civil Rights division
Speaker 2: of the Education Department when they're weaponizing it to hurt
Speaker 2: universities and to you know, go after students who were
Speaker 2: part of the pro Palestine movement. But so, you know,
Speaker 2: that's part of the ideological project, is like this sense
Speaker 2: of oh, universities are churning out all of these like
Speaker 2: liberal lefties. We don't like that, so we want to
Speaker 2: hurt these universities. We'll use whatever pretext we can. And
Speaker 2: so the efforts to trump has already rolled back some
Speaker 2: of the student loan relief that has been put into
Speaker 2: place previously, and certainly this you can see from that chart.
Speaker 2: You know, the number one category of spending is actually
Speaker 2: things like pelgrants, which make college more affordable. For poor students.
Speaker 2: I think that's a part of the priority. And then
Speaker 2: I think the other priority is, Listen, we're just not
Speaker 2: really big on public education in general. We think kid
Speaker 2: should be homeschooled, we think they should have vouchers and
Speaker 2: go to private schools, we think they should go to
Speaker 2: charter schools, et cetera. And so there's been a, you know,
Speaker 2: a long time also attack on the public education system.
Speaker 2: I will say, you know, there's some recent historical warnings
Speaker 2: against aggressively attacking the public school system, in particular the
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen teacher strike wave, which was mostly concentrated in
Speaker 2: red states. And there's a good reason for that. It's because,
Speaker 2: you know, those states were more rural, and the more
Speaker 2: rural the area, the more central the public school is
Speaker 2: to the community. You know, these are first of all,
Speaker 2: that the teachers and the administrators will be some of
Speaker 2: the most important people in the community. It will be
Speaker 2: one of the most important centers of community. I don't
Speaker 2: remember if it was you or Ryan who was talking
Speaker 2: about the fact that like As Church has declined as
Speaker 2: the pillary community. And again, this is part of what
Speaker 2: the right doesn't like about the school As Church has declined.
Speaker 2: School has become like these sort of central meeting place
Speaker 2: and gathering point for community and way to be active
Speaker 2: and involved in community. And so if you are attacking
Speaker 2: that and people feel like this really important pillar is
Speaker 2: being you know, is being stripped back as being is
Speaker 2: really being intact by the federal government, there is going
Speaker 2: to be a negative reaction to that, and not just
Speaker 2: from you know, liberals and cities. In fact, you know,
Speaker 2: there'll be some of the people who suffer the least
Speaker 2: from this because they have the most options in terms
Speaker 2: of other school choices available to them. You know, in
Speaker 2: a small town, all you've got is the public school,
Speaker 2: that's it, or homeschool, and for you know, if you're
Speaker 2: both parents are working, whatever, that's just not really a
Speaker 2: feasible option for you. So I do think there's a
Speaker 2: lot of political warnings here, but there is no doubt
Speaker 2: this is a long time conservative priority. It to your
Speaker 2: point Emily laid out in Project twenty twenty five, which
Speaker 2: Trump and Sistity had nothing to do with and didn't
Speaker 2: want anything.
Speaker 4: To do with, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Of course, we all knew that was a lie the
Speaker 2: whole time, and now they're acting on that, and I
Speaker 2: think the only thing that could stop them is potentially
Speaker 2: a core decision that said, hey, like these funds have
Speaker 2: been appropriated, you have to spend them. And by the way,
Speaker 2: you can't just destroy an entire agency without going to Congress,
Speaker 2: since this is like a congressionally authorized agency, and you
Speaker 2: cannot just take the power of the purse for yourself
Speaker 2: health and do whatever you want like you're a king.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'd argue that the community focus, especially in
Speaker 3: rural areas, is potentially an upside here in that you
Speaker 3: would have state governments who are more responsive to localized
Speaker 3: concerns or even like pared back to city level governments
Speaker 3: that are more responsive to localized concerns than the federal government.
Speaker 3: I think that's been a problem in different cases. But
Speaker 3: to your point, and to the like return to the
Speaker 3: surgery metaphor, you know that can that can obviously go
Speaker 3: wrong in ways that are politically disastrous for the administration.
Speaker 3: There's no question about that. And you flagged this. This
Speaker 3: is C five this political article about usai D and
Speaker 3: usai D is really the momentum or that's really where
Speaker 3: the right and the Trump administration is getting its momentum
Speaker 3: from still because they felt like they politically prosecuted that
Speaker 3: case successfully for closing usa i D. Now political is
Speaker 3: reporting that an official has told staff, quote, shred and
Speaker 3: burn your documents. That's the political headline. And so it
Speaker 3: is sort of interesting that the usaa D case is
Speaker 3: seen as this sort of positive case study for how
Speaker 3: these political attempts to shut down institutions that have existed
Speaker 3: for a long time that Americans are sort of used to,
Speaker 3: even if they don't think about them very often. When USAAD,
Speaker 3: for example, Elon must said, well, we made the mistake
Speaker 3: with Abola funding and people are still upset about how
Speaker 3: PETFAR was handled. So these things are enormously fragile, and
Speaker 3: I think that was part of the reason for Project
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. Interestingly enough, was that they sort of
Speaker 3: didn't want haphazard approaches to difficult questions. They wanted to
Speaker 3: use what was seen as a once inner generation opportunity
Speaker 3: with political political capital and will to start enacting these
Speaker 3: conservative fantasy lists like Christmas lists wish items, and they
Speaker 3: wanted it to be done carefully and to look at
Speaker 3: USAID as an example. You know, it does it makes
Speaker 3: you wonder what will come out of pairing back the
Speaker 3: Department of Education that will create political obstacles to going
Speaker 3: about the entire project. I mean, I obviously think USAID
Speaker 3: should be dramatically scaled back and should be a better
Speaker 3: run organization. And also you know that they shouldn't have
Speaker 3: been quite as careless with some of the funding as
Speaker 3: they were. But then when you're talking about the Education Department,
Speaker 3: I think the stakes are even higher because it's much
Speaker 3: much closer to home for your average voter, your average American.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, the Education Department in addition to
Speaker 2: funding things like pel grants, which really important for you know,
Speaker 2: lower income students to be able to go to college.
Speaker 2: In terms of the local public school system, they're primarily
Speaker 2: involved number one and poor school districts where you have
Speaker 2: a disproportionate number of kids who are eligible for like
Speaker 2: free introduced lunch. So if you meet this designation, you
Speaker 2: get additional funding for from the federal government. You know,
Speaker 2: that's really significant in states, Actually it's most significant if
Speaker 2: you look by the numbers.
Speaker 4: It's more significant red states and blue states.
Speaker 2: A lot of southern states where this Title one funding
Speaker 2: is really important. The other place where federal government funding
Speaker 2: becomes extremely important is for students with disabilities, and that's
Speaker 2: a wide range of those sorts of services that are
Speaker 2: you know, public schools are required to be able to
Speaker 2: provide everything from you know, speech therapy to sort of
Speaker 2: more intensive interventions. And that funding also is you know,
Speaker 2: distributed from the federal government and obviously is really really
Speaker 2: critical to millions upon millions of families in this country.
Speaker 2: And I have kids who went through speech therapy and
Speaker 2: you know, have benefited from these programs, and many families
Speaker 2: across the country do. So when you start messing with
Speaker 2: those sorts of things, yeah, you're gonna you know, this
Speaker 2: is not politically popular.
Speaker 4: Like if you ask people.
Speaker 2: Should you spend more or less money on education, You're
Speaker 2: going to get in a resounding response, say seventy percent.
Speaker 2: That's say we should be spending more money actually on education,
Speaker 2: not less. And so, you know, if this could really
Speaker 2: be one of the things that touches communities and especially
Speaker 2: rural communities, especially in poor states you know, across the country,
Speaker 2: including many red states. I mean again, we saw with
Speaker 2: the teacher strike wave that that was places like West Virginia,
Speaker 2: places like Kentucky, places like Arizona, actually was another place.
Speaker 4: Oklahoma had a significant movement as well.
Speaker 2: These were a lot of red states where there was
Speaker 2: a huge backlash because the public school was important to them.
Speaker 4: So I think you're right, Emily.
Speaker 2: If it can be sold as like now your local
Speaker 2: government is going to have more control and your funding
Speaker 2: is going to stay the same, maybe they can sell
Speaker 2: that politically. But if there starts to be a sense
Speaker 2: of like, oh, our schools are going to be under
Speaker 2: resource now because of this attack, I think that hits
Speaker 2: very different than perhaps conservatives are expecting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. Chris. Well, let's move
Speaker 3: on to the big news out of Congress where the
Speaker 3: massive shutdown spending bill, or the spending bill to avert
Speaker 3: the shutdown, I should say, passed last night by a
Speaker 3: thin margin. Well, continuing the theme of the show, every
Speaker 3: block is an a block today, and certainly one of
Speaker 3: those significant stories was the House of Representatives managing to
Speaker 3: pass a spending bill, one of those famous continuing resolutions.
Speaker 3: Infamous actually, I should say, by a margin of two
Speaker 3: seventeen to two thirteen. They pulled one Democrat over and
Speaker 3: one Republican was a no vote. I will let you
Speaker 3: guess who it was. It was Thomas Massey. You probably
Speaker 3: you probably knew that though, because if you saw Sager
Speaker 3: at the White House yesterday, he got in a question
Speaker 3: about some of the attacks from Chris Losavita, truan'sformer campaign manager,
Speaker 3: and Trump himself on Thomas Massey. This was before that
Speaker 3: Continuing Resolution actually ended up passing. Massey held firm he
Speaker 3: did not negotiate with Republican leadership. So let's take a
Speaker 3: listen to how the White House responded.
Speaker 7: President Trump came out today in a primary challenge against
Speaker 7: Congressman Thomas Massy. Congress and mass He's been a supporter
Speaker 7: of dose, He's been a supporter of make America healthy again.
Speaker 7: What kind of message is this White House sending against
Speaker 7: a Congressman who's sticking out for principles that he's long
Speaker 7: held in the Chamber and voting against Continuing Resolution and spending.
Speaker 6: I think the President has made it very clear that
Speaker 6: he believes it's critical for conservatives and Republicans and frankly
Speaker 6: all members of Congress to get behind this Continuing Resolution
Speaker 6: to keep the government funded. The President wants to continue
Speaker 6: the momentum that he has built over the last fifty
Speaker 6: one days in order to keep the government funded. We
Speaker 6: got to keep moving with these deportations. And he believes
Speaker 6: that everybody needs to get on board with this bill.
Speaker 3: Go everybody to not get on board with the bill,
Speaker 3: but almost everybody did. The question then is kicked to
Speaker 3: the Senate, which has until Friday to avert a government shutdown.
Speaker 3: The deal here is to kick funding to September. Kick
Speaker 3: the funding battle to September. And what Donald Trump actually
Speaker 3: did was bring in members of the House Freedom Caucus
Speaker 3: like chip Roy to the early stages of this negotiation.
Speaker 3: And so Roy made the pitch to other Freedom Caucus members.
Speaker 3: And Massy isn't a Freedom Caucus member, He's just adjacent
Speaker 3: to the Freedom Caucus. It's all very confusing. But what
Speaker 3: chip Roy was arguing is that let Doge find all
Speaker 3: kinds of easy sort of budget vetos. You know, you
Speaker 3: can just sort of start slashing all of this spending.
Speaker 3: Give Doze the space over the next several months to
Speaker 3: find cuts, and then you know, have this fight over
Speaker 3: adding to the national debt in September when there's more
Speaker 3: political capital. Because Doge will have found all of this,
Speaker 3: you will have avoided the shutdown. We'll give for The
Speaker 3: next element up on the screen. Jade Vance's message when
Speaker 3: he was he's become a big not entirely unexpected because
Speaker 3: he just came out of the Senate, but he's been
Speaker 3: a big go between from the White House to Capitol Hill.
Speaker 3: And what he was saying is the House Republicans will
Speaker 3: take the blame if it comes to a shutdown. Sort
Speaker 3: of amusing because that's always been something the Freedom Caucus
Speaker 3: guys have said, sure, we would love to take the
Speaker 3: blame for a shutdown, and it's now also what Democrats
Speaker 3: are dealing with because they now have the ball in
Speaker 3: their court. You can put the next element up on
Speaker 3: the screen. This is Jake Sherman on the margin. We
Speaker 3: mentioned this earlier. I was two seventeen or two thirteen,
Speaker 3: and Jared Golden, He's of Maine, was the only Democrat
Speaker 3: who voted yes. Thomas Massey obviously was the only Republican
Speaker 3: who voted no. So Crystal, now, this is maybe the
Speaker 3: first shutdown battle I can remember where it did. Really,
Speaker 3: I think it does really look to the public like
Speaker 3: the ball is in the Democrats court, and it's a
Speaker 3: fascinating dynamic because a lot of Republicans in their own
Speaker 3: resistance era to Obama and Biden have said there's political
Speaker 3: capital in going to the brink of a shutdown or
Speaker 3: actually going through with a short shutdown itself. And now
Speaker 3: we're seeing some demands on that for Democrats to play
Speaker 3: brinksmanship with a potential government shutdown.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean the difference is, of course that Republicans hate
Speaker 2: government and Democrats in theory like government, so it creates
Speaker 2: more ideological tensions for Democrats than it does for Republicans.
Speaker 2: But I can tell you the base of the Democratic Party, liberals, lefties, whoever,
Speaker 2: they want their leaders to push to the brink on this,
Speaker 2: and I'll tell you why. I mean, what you explained
Speaker 2: is exactly right. The Republicans are pitching this and I
Speaker 2: think accurately. So it's basically a free license for DOGE
Speaker 2: to do what it wants to do, and what Democrat
Speaker 2: outside of John Fetterman wants to, you know, wants to
Speaker 2: give a green light to this slash and burn destruction
Speaker 2: of the federal government, including social security, including veterans affairs,
Speaker 2: including the Department of Education, etc. And so that's the
Speaker 2: way hikeem Jeffries, who is again an incredibly weak leader,
Speaker 2: was able to hold together all of his caucacy for
Speaker 2: Jared Golden is basically like, you vote for this, you
Speaker 2: are co signing Doge.
Speaker 4: That's what you're doing.
Speaker 2: And Democratic Party, you know, very united against Elon and
Speaker 2: the attacks on social security, the attacks on you know,
Speaker 2: potential attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, etc. So Republicans are betting
Speaker 2: that because they did not even try to negotiate the
Speaker 2: CR with Democrats, they just negotiated amongst themselves. Their betting
Speaker 2: on Democrats blinking in the Senate. And they might, but
Speaker 2: I will say that Fetterman is the only one who
Speaker 2: has really come out indicated he'll vote for this.
Speaker 4: They need to get seven.
Speaker 2: Even some like more moderate members, people like Tim Kaine
Speaker 2: and Mark Warner have expressed hesitation, you know, at voting
Speaker 2: for this particular CR. And you know, and you know,
Speaker 2: maybe that's because they're from Virginia and that's a state
Speaker 2: that obviously there's lots of federal government workers, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But that is kind of an indication of where more
Speaker 2: of the moderate members may be headed in the Senate.
Speaker 4: So you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Republicans, like I said, are thinking that Democrats because they're
Speaker 2: committed to the government are going to go we need here,
Speaker 2: and that usually is a safe bet, but I'm not
Speaker 2: sure in this case.
Speaker 4: Schumer has played a pretty coy.
Speaker 2: You know, Jeffreys came out and was like, we're gonna
Speaker 2: whip no, and we talked about that previously. Schumer has
Speaker 2: said like, I'm gonna wait and see what happens in
Speaker 2: the House before I really weigh in here. Well, now
Speaker 2: we know what happened in the House, So the ball
Speaker 2: is in a sense in Senate Democrats court. That being said,
Speaker 2: I think Jade Vance is one hundred percent correct that
Speaker 2: if the government shuts down, it's going to be blamed
Speaker 2: on Republicans because Republicans control everything, So like, who else
Speaker 2: are you gonna blame? When Republicans are in control of
Speaker 2: the House, the Senate, and the White House.
Speaker 3: Less Democrats really lean into owning the blame. And this
Speaker 3: is something that I think the media often gets wrong
Speaker 3: with shutdown politics is conflating goals for the base with
Speaker 3: goals for the broader public. And the broader public does
Speaker 3: not like shutdowns. They're never excited about a shutdown. It
Speaker 3: feels like chaos, and it feels sort of reckless and childish.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, the Republican base, because this
Speaker 3: hasn't really come up much for the Democratic base, but
Speaker 3: I think it's true of both bases. They do like
Speaker 3: shut down politics. They find it to be actually like
Speaker 3: invigorating to everything you just said, Crystal, is like showing
Speaker 3: a damn spine and using the leverage that you have,
Speaker 3: And in this case, Democrats have a significant amount of leverage.
Speaker 3: So what we might end up seeing is one of
Speaker 3: those really short shutdowns over the weekend. Actually it could
Speaker 3: be something that is very very temporary, and Democrats lean
Speaker 3: in rally the base and say we're not opening back
Speaker 3: up the government until we get this, and they get
Speaker 3: part of it and can claim a partial victory with
Speaker 3: their own base, who desperately wants them to show a
Speaker 3: spine and showing up at town halls, is showing up
Speaker 3: at events with people like Chris Murphy, for example, is
Speaker 3: protesting at Tesla dealerships. So the shutdown lessons for Republicans
Speaker 3: have been that's always a shot in the arm with
Speaker 3: the base and Democrats. Now Rand Paul is not voting yes,
Speaker 3: so that's where the seven number comes from. Democrats. Democrats
Speaker 3: have a real opportunity to learn from a lesson Republicans
Speaker 3: have taken over the last ten or so years about
Speaker 3: shutdown politics. I am super curious to see how this proceeds.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and the last thing I'll say about this is
Speaker 2: part of what is informed Republican approach to shutdown politics
Speaker 2: is that they've been more fearful of primary challenges from
Speaker 2: their right then. You know, most of these members, including
Speaker 2: most Senators, are in you know, relatively like safe red
Speaker 2: or blue district slash states, and so they're constantly looking
Speaker 2: over their shoulder at like, who's the you know, more
Speaker 2: radical or more trumpy or more whatever person who could
Speaker 2: come out of the woodwork and challenge me from the right.
Speaker 2: Democrats have not had as much of that same dynamic. Obviously,
Speaker 2: there was some you know, high profile justice Democrats wins
Speaker 2: AOC taking out Joe Crowley, but by and large, they
Speaker 2: haven't really felt like they are threatened significantly from their left,
Speaker 2: and that is.
Speaker 4: What could be changing now.
Speaker 2: I don't think that they've adjusted their politics to reckon
Speaker 2: with the fact that it's no longer just like you know,
Speaker 2: progressives and lefties who are critical of Democratic leadership that
Speaker 2: this is the mainstream liberal democratic normy DEM voter position
Speaker 2: is to be disgusted with Democratic leadership and their total
Speaker 2: lack of fight. I don't think that they've really like
Speaker 2: incorporated that into their view of the world. They still
Speaker 2: see it as this like, you know, for ingennoying group
Speaker 2: that they can just feel free to disregard as evidence
Speaker 2: by the way that some of these quote unquote leaders have.
Speaker 4: Approached this particular era.
Speaker 2: But I do think that that reality has changed significantly
Speaker 2: and should change their calculus. Whether it does or not
Speaker 2: is another matter. Now, I will say a bunch of
Speaker 2: these people, I mean all of them, are having their
Speaker 2: offices flooded with calls from the liberal base that wants
Speaker 2: them to fight, wants them to challenge Trump and Elon
Speaker 2: more aggressively. You know, any of them that have done
Speaker 2: town halls. It's not just Bernie who is getting huge crowds.
Speaker 2: Any politician who shows up are garnering huge crowds to
Speaker 2: come and either support them or yell at them, or
Speaker 2: encourage them on the Democratic Party side to put up
Speaker 2: more of a fight. So they're certainly receiving that message.
Speaker 2: Whether or not they're going to adjust their approach to
Speaker 2: reflect that energy among the Democratic base is an open question.
Speaker 3: So risk averse, it really is the open going like
Speaker 3: this to me is maybe a litmus test for Democrats
Speaker 3: in this new wilderness era that they're in after Trump
Speaker 3: one post law fair twenty twenty loss. You know it,
Speaker 3: can Democrats finally be forced into a a less risk
Speaker 3: averst position. The last thing I wanted to mention Crystal
Speaker 3: is the step by step This is Bradley J of
Speaker 3: Breitbart kind of charted this out after chip Roy was
Speaker 3: talking to Steve Bannon. He said, the plan really is
Speaker 3: to pass the clean cr which they did, elon continues
Speaker 3: finding waste, fraud and abuse. Three russ vote, will formulate
Speaker 3: those findings into a plan, and then four Trump will
Speaker 3: use the impoundment power to enact savings. So their new
Speaker 3: theory of the impoundment it's not new theory, but the
Speaker 3: unitary executive theory that they are completely enacting and testing
Speaker 3: in the courts right now about impoundment and the president's
Speaker 3: ability to just say we're not spending this congressionally appropriated
Speaker 3: money is was a huge, huge factor and convincing the
Speaker 3: chip Roys to go along with a plan that doesn't
Speaker 3: play the same kind of debt politics, or maybe subverts
Speaker 3: the typical Freedom Caucus line on debt politics, because now
Speaker 3: they have someone who's willing to be that unitary executive. Finally, Crystal.
Speaker 3: The other thing for Democrats that's a little complicated time
Speaker 3: around is with a shutdown, they're currently trying to defend
Speaker 3: federal workers, and federal workers are always, you know, sort
Speaker 3: of the political football in a shutdown, and the agencies
Speaker 3: are always a political football in the shutdown, So that
Speaker 3: definitely complicates their calculus as to how far they push
Speaker 3: this on Friday into Saturday and Sunday.
Speaker 2: I don't doubt that what you're saying is correct about
Speaker 2: Doge helping make this an easier pill to swallow for
Speaker 2: the chip Roys of the world. But I don't think
Speaker 2: that's really what's going on. I think what's really going
Speaker 2: on is Elon's billions and the fact that he said, Hey,
Speaker 2: if you don't do what we want you to do
Speaker 2: and what the President asked you to do or I
Speaker 2: ask you to do, I'm going to primary you and
Speaker 2: I'm going to put however much money I need to
Speaker 2: put to make sure that you are defeated.
Speaker 4: And then you've got Trump out.
Speaker 2: There and Chris Lasovida making a test case of Thomas
Speaker 2: Massey and you know, threatening him, who's a very popular
Speaker 2: figure with a lot of the Republican base and certainly
Speaker 2: popular in his district as well. So you know, you're
Speaker 2: really going after someone who's quite prominent. So it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: if even Thomas Massey is going to be put in
Speaker 2: their see, anyone really can be. And so that's why
Speaker 2: I think that the Elon and Trump era of MAGA
Speaker 2: has crushed the remaining rebellion among the Tea Party, like
Speaker 2: the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, outside of
Speaker 2: Thomas Massey and Rand Paul are probably the only ones
Speaker 2: who are really willing to dissent. It's kind of interesting
Speaker 2: they're both from Kentucky because Kentucky is not actually that
Speaker 2: libertarian of a state. But whatever, that's a side note.
Speaker 2: But I think that they have ended effectively the Tea
Speaker 2: Party rebellion era of Republican politics, just through the sheer
Speaker 2: force of cultive personality, the megaphone that is X and
Speaker 2: Elon being the richest man on the planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that is absolutely a factor, There's no
Speaker 3: question about it. Sort of a sort of Damocles Crystal.
Speaker 3: Let's go ahead and get to Ryan Grimm, who we're
Speaker 3: delighted to have joined us this morning. We're so happy
Speaker 3: to be joined now by Ryan grim You may have
Speaker 3: heard of him, Ryan, thank you for joining us. I
Speaker 3: know you have a quarantine zone in your house right now,
Speaker 3: so we appreciate it.
Speaker 14: It is. It is quite something.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's just I was just as I was just mentioning,
Speaker 11: we've got you haven't really lived until you know your
Speaker 11: wife's getting chemo and two of your kids get flu
Speaker 11: right before that. Oh, okay, this is this is gonna
Speaker 11: this is this is going to be a tight wire act.
Speaker 11: So yeah, she's so she's not even in the house.
Speaker 11: She went to a friend's house after getting it.
Speaker 3: Truly father of the Year. There's no competiby.
Speaker 14: Well, it's I mean there's fewer people in the house now, so.
Speaker 4: It's silver lining.
Speaker 2: The silver lining is the rest of life is going
Speaker 2: to seem really easy after this.
Speaker 4: That's right, Like I can't believe that this problem before.
Speaker 14: Just coasting downhill from here.
Speaker 3: Gat point. Well, let's start, because we wanted to have
Speaker 3: you come and talk to us about some updates in
Speaker 3: this incredibly important case of Mahmoud Khalil. But let's start
Speaker 3: with Soccer's question at the White House briefing yesterday. Soccer
Speaker 3: was able to get one question in about this situation,
Speaker 3: so we can go ahead and roll e one. Here
Speaker 3: saga at yesterday's White House Press briefing talking to Press
Speaker 3: Secretary Caroline Lovett.
Speaker 7: Does the administration believe that it needs to charge a
Speaker 7: Green card holder with a crime to be eligible for deportation?
Speaker 6: Well, in fact, Secretary Rubio reserves the right to revoke
Speaker 6: the visa of Mamoud Khalil, And I'm glad you brought
Speaker 6: this up. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary
Speaker 6: of State has the right to revoke a green card
Speaker 6: or a visa for individuals who serve our adversarial to
Speaker 6: the foreign policy and national security interests of the United
Speaker 6: States of America. And Mahmood Khalil was an individual who
Speaker 6: was given the privilege of coming to this country to
Speaker 6: study at one of our nation's finest universities in colleges,
Speaker 6: and he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege
Speaker 6: by siding with terrorists hamas, terrorists who have killed innocent men, women,
Speaker 6: in children, this is an individual who organized group protests
Speaker 6: that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish
Speaker 6: American students and made them feel unsafe on their own
Speaker 6: college campus, but also distributed pro hamas propaganda.
Speaker 3: So the legal question here is actually really interesting. There
Speaker 3: is a i would say, overly broad law that the
Speaker 3: administration is citing that does allow the Secretary of State
Speaker 3: to exercise discretion here, and the administration confirmed, actually to
Speaker 3: the Free Press a couple of days ago now that
Speaker 3: this is not because Khalil broke any law. They're very
Speaker 3: much not arguing that he broke any law. They're arguing
Speaker 3: that they have the discretion to toss people legal permanent
Speaker 3: residents out of the country if they are essentially violating
Speaker 3: like the or they're undermining America's national security by protesting
Speaker 3: and doing other sort of acts like that. So, Ryan,
Speaker 3: just give us your reaction to Lovett's answer in the
Speaker 3: context of everything we've seen, fairly messy sort of attempt
Speaker 3: to explain all of this from the administration.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I'm glad Sager pinned her down on that, because
Speaker 11: now we understand that the administration is, like you said,
Speaker 11: making the claim that they don't need to charge a
Speaker 11: Green card holder, and you're probably a lot of Green
Speaker 11: card holders. That means you're a lawful permanent resident. You're
Speaker 11: on the you're on this on the pathway to citizenship.
Speaker 11: Next and next you take your take your test if
Speaker 11: you if you want to that, if you're in that
Speaker 11: status lawful permanent resident, that Rubio can kick you out
Speaker 11: without any due process, without charging you with a crime,
Speaker 11: without even administrative process, kind of inside of the State Department,
Speaker 11: that if he decides that you are a threat to
Speaker 11: national security, he can get rid of you. The argument
Speaker 11: that they are making is that anti combating anti Semitism
Speaker 11: is a foreign policy priority of the United States, and
Speaker 11: that having somebody who's anti Semitic in the United States
Speaker 11: undermines the US ability to pursue its fight against anti Semitism.
Speaker 11: So you could also imagine if Democrats said that as
Speaker 11: they did, that climate change is a national security threat
Speaker 11: and foreign policy is organized around combating climate change, that
Speaker 11: anybody who's here who's a permanent resident who doesn't approve
Speaker 11: of the Biden administration's climate policy is therefore a threat
Speaker 11: to climate policy, or protests it.
Speaker 3: It hands out anti climate denying posters or whatever it is, yeah.
Speaker 11: Or yeah if they said that, look, January sixth was
Speaker 11: an insurrection and the Proud Boys are domestic terrorists, and
Speaker 11: that then anybody who says anything about the twenty twenty
Speaker 11: election is therefore supporting domestic terrorists. And if they're a
Speaker 11: permanent resident, then they can be expelled. You know, you're
Speaker 11: right that there is this law in the books that
Speaker 11: could be read to grant the Secretary of State this authority.
Speaker 11: We've been around for two hundred and fifty years. That
Speaker 11: history has been dark at times. There are an awful
Speaker 11: lot of ugly laws and traconian laws on our books
Speaker 11: that we understand today are in complete and obvious conflict
Speaker 11: with the Constitution, and this is one of them. So
Speaker 11: we'll see though whether or not the court ends up
Speaker 11: agreeing with that. There's supposed to there'll be a hearing
Speaker 11: late this morning between the Council and the government.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can just imagine the freak out if
Speaker 2: the shoe was on the other foot as you're laying
Speaker 2: out Ryan like, let's say that Biden declared that combating racism,
Speaker 2: anti black racism was a foreign policy priority, and let's
Speaker 2: say maybe Elon Musk still was a permanent resident and
Speaker 2: not a citizen.
Speaker 4: You're like white South Africa. Sorry, you gotta go.
Speaker 2: Steve Bannon says, you're the most racist people on the
Speaker 2: face of the planet.
Speaker 4: So that's it for you.
Speaker 11: And you've defended these people who say that they are racist,
Speaker 11: like that one Doggie dog Kid who said, like, I
Speaker 11: was a proud racist before being racist was cool, and
Speaker 11: they defended him. So okay, now are you all terrorists
Speaker 11: because you're all like in contravention of this US policy
Speaker 11: against racism Like that would be absurd, but that's certainly
Speaker 11: the precedent they're setting up.
Speaker 2: So let me go ahead and get your reaction to Trump.
Speaker 2: During his you know, Tesla sales pitch on the White
Speaker 2: House lawn situation, got asked a question about this as well,
Speaker 2: and indicated that mach Mukhalil would.
Speaker 4: Be the first of many. Let's take a listen to that.
Speaker 10: I think we are to get them all out of
Speaker 10: the country. They're troublemakers, they're agitators, they don't love our country.
Speaker 10: We are to get them the hell out.
Speaker 3: I think that guy, we.
Speaker 7: Would to get him.
Speaker 10: I heard his statements too, there were plenty bit and
Speaker 10: I think we are to get him the hell out
Speaker 10: of the country.
Speaker 2: His statements were plenty bad. So I mean, just again,
Speaker 2: this isn't about a crime. This is about things that
Speaker 2: he said that the administration doesn't like. And this alleged
Speaker 2: Hemus material, which is so bad Caroline Levin couldn't even
Speaker 2: bring into the briefing room to share with us just
Speaker 2: how terrible this propaganda he was distributing or affiliated with was.
Speaker 2: But you know, there was what seems to have unfolded here,
Speaker 2: and this is your reporting as well as other outlets,
Speaker 2: is that when they went to pick up to arrest Khalil,
Speaker 2: they thought he was there on a student visa, and
Speaker 2: then he and his wife were like he's a green
Speaker 2: cardle like he's a permanent resident, and they're like, don't care,
Speaker 2: we're taking him anyway. And so the theory was basically
Speaker 2: like the administration kind of bungled this and they overreach
Speaker 2: went far beyond what they had intended to. But they're
Speaker 2: certainly not backing away from it. Instead, they're using this
Speaker 2: as a justification and go even further and say, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right, student visa green card holder. If we don't
Speaker 2: want you here, if Secretary of Rubio decides that you're
Speaker 2: an anti semite, that's it.
Speaker 4: You're gone.
Speaker 14: Yeah, and what's wild.
Speaker 11: And we reported this at drop site that Elvin Hernandez
Speaker 11: was the ICE agent who had the conversation, particularly with
Speaker 11: Amy Greer, who is Boo Khalil's attorney. Elvin Hernandez was
Speaker 11: the twenty nineteen guest at the State of the Union
Speaker 11: of President Trump. Interesting coincidence if it is that. But yes,
Speaker 11: he told her we're picking him up because we're revoking
Speaker 11: his student visa, and she told him he is a
Speaker 11: permanent resident, he's a green card. And his response, according
Speaker 11: to the court finally was oh, well we're revoking that.
Speaker 14: Too, So yeah.
Speaker 11: Clearly it's like you know, they called it an audible
Speaker 11: and we may end up getting this extraordinary rollback in
Speaker 11: civil liberties over incompetence, over a failure to just go
Speaker 11: in their own database and check whether or not he
Speaker 11: was on a student visa or or whether he was on.
Speaker 14: A green card.
Speaker 11: Because once you're on a green card, you do have
Speaker 11: more protections than when you're here on a student visa.
Speaker 11: Student visa, you really or are other kinds of visas
Speaker 11: you really can be you know, set back out of
Speaker 11: the country, you know, with with with very little rationale
Speaker 11: or in some cases no rationale at all. But once
Speaker 11: you're a legal permanent resident, the paperwork is that you
Speaker 11: that all Green card holders get is very clear you
Speaker 11: have to be convicted of a crime to be expelled.
Speaker 11: They don't mention this like obscure. You know, you're you're
Speaker 11: endorsing terrorism thing. But by the way, one one detail
Speaker 11: on that on that Hamas propaganda that they said he
Speaker 11: was distributing, we don't actually know if he was handing
Speaker 11: it out or if it was being handed out in
Speaker 11: the same building where he was. But aside from that,
Speaker 11: the law on this, as it's been decided by courts
Speaker 11: has always been that it's actually okay to support illegal things,
Speaker 11: support terrorism even you know, you can support drug trafficking, whatever,
Speaker 11: as long as you're doing it as speech independently of
Speaker 11: the criminal activity and so like the to take the
Speaker 11: most extreme example, you could say that I support al
Speaker 11: Qaeda's right to behead people or whatever like. You can
Speaker 11: say that legally, that's protected speech. What you can't do
Speaker 11: is coordinate with al Qaeda in order to push forward
Speaker 11: that that propaganda. That that's when it becomes material support
Speaker 11: for terrorism. There's no claim that Hamas like while it
Speaker 11: was like, you know, fending off this assault, was also
Speaker 11: like on the side, like advising campus protesters like how
Speaker 11: to like and the history of the kind of palcitting
Speaker 11: movement inside inside Gaza and the West Bank suggests that, like,
Speaker 11: they've never really done that. There's been criticism of them
Speaker 11: for their absolute lack of outreach them the PLO and others.
Speaker 11: And so even if it is the case that he
Speaker 11: was distributing this material, which doesn't seem to be the case,
Speaker 11: it would be okay because obviously it's we quote Hamas
Speaker 11: you know regularly in news reports. There's nothing wrong with
Speaker 11: doing that as long as not coordinating and materially supporting them.
Speaker 2: Well, Emily, I don't know, maybe what's the name of
Speaker 2: the Trump negotiator who went and was talking directly to Hamas,
Speaker 2: is he's materially supporting terrorism as well. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: it's it is a funny time for them to be
Speaker 2: pressing this case at a time when they're also making
Speaker 2: I think the correct point that you know, you got
Speaker 2: to talk to these people and you got to deal
Speaker 2: with them and his words. You know, you may find
Speaker 2: out that they don't have horns coming out of their head.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're maybe they're good guys.
Speaker 3: The flyers in question, there's one of them that says
Speaker 3: something like crush Zionism and it's a boot coming down
Speaker 3: the star of David. But there are two others, and
Speaker 3: that one, by the way, is very explicitly anti Zionists
Speaker 3: and not explicitly anti Semitic, as you know the administration
Speaker 3: is implying. But of course House Republicans and some Democrats
Speaker 3: passed a bill that said recently anti Semitism, anti Zionism
Speaker 3: is anti Semitism. So there's that overly broad question as well.
Speaker 3: But the other two flyers are legitimately they look very
Speaker 3: very bad. That if you have someone who is on
Speaker 3: a student visa who is handing out these types of flyers,
Speaker 3: you asked, well, how is somebody on a student visa
Speaker 3: this opposed to the like I think one of the
Speaker 3: things said that the charter of the group that Khalil
Speaker 3: is a part of says something like they want to
Speaker 3: crash Western imperialisms.
Speaker 11: And it was like, well, okay, that appeared to be
Speaker 11: like an instagram, like it's a quote from somebody else,
Speaker 11: like some author said this, and somebody who handles their
Speaker 11: social media page made it one of their like little
Speaker 11: Instagram things.
Speaker 14: So I don't know if the organization like actually endorses that.
Speaker 11: I said, we we advocate for the apple abolition of
Speaker 11: Western civilization. But if they did, that's a that's a
Speaker 11: pretty far left kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to say it is, it is, and it's I mean,
Speaker 3: it's age. Yeah, it's protective speech. But there's I actually
Speaker 3: do think in principle, there's a legitimate American interest in
Speaker 3: like bringing people or giving visas to people who actually are,
Speaker 3: you know, displaying an interest in improving the United States
Speaker 3: and contributing to the United States and all of that.
Speaker 3: But but I say that with a caveat that this
Speaker 3: is not a student visa. They think they I think
Speaker 3: they thought they had a layup test case here with
Speaker 3: a student visa where they can make this argument. And
Speaker 3: we still don't have any pictures, video that I'm aware of,
Speaker 3: at least of Khalil himself distributing this information and saying,
Speaker 3: for example, support Hamas, you know, he was the one flyer,
Speaker 3: is like a explanation. It's like Hamas's explanation of why
Speaker 3: they executed as they say all Oxa flood in October seventh,
Speaker 3: and there's all kinds of context hypothetically whether or not,
Speaker 3: you know, you think whether or not it looks like
Speaker 3: Khalil was engaged in this hypothetical scenario. But there's all
Speaker 3: types of context where you would say, we should study
Speaker 3: Hamas's explanation for what they did for the terror that
Speaker 3: they reaked. There's one that says something like, sometimes you
Speaker 3: need a flood. That was one of the other flyers,
Speaker 3: which is actually I think that is pretty disgusting. But
Speaker 3: you know, we don't actually know. The administration hasn't connected
Speaker 3: the dots as to whether or not he was endorsing
Speaker 3: these views and handing out these flyers. We just see
Speaker 3: the flyers. It's they're not really prosecuting this case very.
Speaker 11: Well, right because they're they're doing they're doing it backwards.
Speaker 11: And there's a lot of speculation also that they are
Speaker 11: ginting up this controversy in order to satisfy the pro
Speaker 11: Israel universe here in the United States, to soften them
Speaker 11: up to then ram through a long term truce and
Speaker 11: prisoner exchange that Israel will heavily object to, and that
Speaker 11: that that is a fairly standard kind of trumpy and
Speaker 11: move to do something like outrageous and bellicos in a
Speaker 11: symbolic way to to draw out a lot of anger
Speaker 11: and then cut and then cut the other way. You've
Speaker 11: seen it with Ukraine Russia dynamic, you know, repeatedly. So
Speaker 11: you know, we'll see because which would which would suggest
Speaker 11: that they don't really take anything they're saying seriously, that
Speaker 11: it's that it's just kind of anti Palestinian hostility just
Speaker 11: manifest for the purpose of just throwing red meat to
Speaker 11: the pro Israel lobby in order to them screw them
Speaker 11: over a couple of weeks from now.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think that's possible. I think also there's
Speaker 2: some rumblings in the base that like, the mass deportation
Speaker 2: hasn't been as mass deportation et as the you know,
Speaker 2: as was promised.
Speaker 11: So this is, you know, is a good example that
Speaker 11: you don't you don't they don't get the mass deportation,
Speaker 11: so they get the spectacle of low Look we're sending
Speaker 11: people to Guantanamo and.
Speaker 2: The military planes and all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Then you also have i mean, you know, Trump just
Speaker 2: is I think has authoritarian and stincs and is likes
Speaker 2: the sense of power of just being able to do
Speaker 2: what he wants, with who he wants, whenever he wants.
Speaker 2: He sees these pro Palestine groups as being lefties, that
Speaker 2: lifty activists that he hates anyway, so he gets to
Speaker 2: crush an enemy, and he sees universities writ large as like,
Speaker 2: you know, training breeding grounds for lefties, Marxists and socialists
Speaker 2: and you know, and liberals and people who vote against him,
Speaker 2: and so, you know, as part and parcel of this.
Speaker 2: This comes at the same time that they just summarily
Speaker 2: stripped four hundred million dollars in funding from Columbia. Sixty
Speaker 2: universities have gotten letters nationwide, you know, including University of
Speaker 2: Virginia where I went, public schools, you know, private universities
Speaker 2: in red states and blue states, et cetera, saying basically,
Speaker 2: you're next if unless you can prove that you did
Speaker 2: everything we want on anti SEMSU, which if you read
Speaker 2: the letter, like, there's no way anyone could ever actually
Speaker 2: prove that they satisfied whatever it is that the administration
Speaker 2: is looking for. So yeah, and I also think that
Speaker 2: they feel like, and I've seen a lot of conservatives
Speaker 2: say this, like, oh, here's Democrats fighting again on an
Speaker 2: eighty twenty issue, which I'm not sure that they're right
Speaker 2: about that polling, because I do think that people have
Speaker 2: a reaction against, you know, assaults on free speech, et cetera.
Speaker 4: It depends on how you frame it.
Speaker 2: But I think that they also see it as a
Speaker 2: political winner because they can say, oh, this guy's pro Homas,
Speaker 2: Why are you supporting people who are pro terrorists, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So I think there's a whole bunch of reasons that
Speaker 2: cut toward in the direction of why the Trump administration
Speaker 2: would would you know, take this course. And none of
Speaker 2: that is to excuse it, though, because ultimately the impact
Speaker 2: of this, you know, authoritarian crushing of speech, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, comparable to things that we saw with like
Speaker 2: McCarthy's red Scare type of tactics, if not even more aggressive.
Speaker 2: That impact is very, very real and can't just be
Speaker 2: sort of waved away as like, oh, well, Trump's just
Speaker 2: using this as like a negotiating tactic.
Speaker 14: Is more likely to see more of it.
Speaker 11: Nary emission, which you know kind of organizes you know
Speaker 11: against you know, uh, students who you know, protest on
Speaker 11: behalf of Palstein has put out another list of people
Speaker 11: and some and some of the offenses that those people
Speaker 11: are listed as having effected as like going going to
Speaker 11: the encampment, like visiting it like that, Like that's it.
Speaker 11: They're not they're not trying to claim anything more beyond that,
Speaker 11: and it's already having a chilling effect. Like we there
Speaker 11: was a story that came into us just maybe a
Speaker 11: week ago. Uh, there's some employees from a company that
Speaker 11: wanted to speak out about what was going on in
Speaker 11: there after this happened. They're saying, you know what, actually,
Speaker 11: let's let's wait on this. I don't think we can
Speaker 11: speak out right now. And that is that's the goal here,
Speaker 11: to chill the ability of people to expose, you know,
Speaker 11: wrongdoing and to speak out.
Speaker 3: I want to get your both of your take on
Speaker 3: how Democrats are handling this, because you guys were both
Speaker 3: sort of just talking about what type of maybe trap
Speaker 3: Republicans think they're Democrats in. So let's put six up
Speaker 3: on the screen. This is a response from Chucks Senator
Speaker 3: Chuck Schumer, who said, I abhorror many of the opinions
Speaker 3: and policies that macmu Khalil holds and supports and have
Speaker 3: made my criticism of the anti Semitic actions at Columbia
Speaker 3: loudly known. Mister Khalil is also legal permanent resident here
Speaker 3: and his wife, who's eight months pregnant, is an American citizen.
Speaker 3: But he said, this is a matter for the university
Speaker 3: to pursue, and I have encouraged them to be much
Speaker 3: more robust and how they combat anti Semitism and remain
Speaker 3: a and maintain a harassment free campus that protects the
Speaker 3: safety and security of Jewish and other students. That is
Speaker 3: really lukewarm. He calls on DHS to articulate the case
Speaker 3: against Khalil basically, so both of you, maybe just starting
Speaker 3: with Ryan, what is your reaction to the way Schumer
Speaker 3: handled this.
Speaker 11: He got a lot of criticism for leading with you know,
Speaker 11: I abhor his speech, rather than free speech must be protected,
Speaker 11: particularly for speech that you abhoor, because that's the whole point, right, we're.
Speaker 14: Not here out We're not out here.
Speaker 11: To defend the speech of people we agree with, like
Speaker 11: and who are saying very civil milk toast things like that.
Speaker 11: Nobody needs to defend that. You can say that in
Speaker 11: some Saddam Hussein's a wreck. What you have to defend
Speaker 11: is the stuff that makes you tug at your collar
Speaker 11: a little bit and say, oh, wow, you can really
Speaker 11: say that.
Speaker 14: I guess you can guess. I guess we have free
Speaker 14: speech here.
Speaker 11: Meanwhile, the Republicans are happy to elevate the Senate Judiciary
Speaker 11: Committee that just straight up said freemonk mu Khalil. So
Speaker 11: like the Democrats, you know, just lose everywhere, you know,
Speaker 11: because from the Republican perspective, they see Democrats as unapologetically,
Speaker 11: unconditionally standing up for a Hama supporter from the left.
Speaker 11: They see Schumer equivocating and like denouncing him before he
Speaker 11: gets around to defending him. So, you know, you can
Speaker 11: kind of see from the Republican prospect why they think
Speaker 11: that they have a winning political moment here, even if
Speaker 11: what they're doing is unraveling what generations of Americans have
Speaker 11: fought for for two hundred and fifty years to uphold. Yeah,
Speaker 11: they might have a couple of good weeks here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think it remains to be seen
Speaker 2: because it also does play into the accurate image of
Speaker 2: Trump as this just like authoritarian who throws his weight
Speaker 2: around and criminalizes speech, and you know, it's total hypocrite
Speaker 2: and they ran on like, Oh, we're going to be
Speaker 2: the free speech people, and then immediately like, and we're
Speaker 2: going to jail you for saying things that we didn't
Speaker 2: like at a rally.
Speaker 4: But you know, Chris.
Speaker 2: Murphy, who has been pretty good in Trump two point zero,
Speaker 2: put out a good statement that led Ryan, like you said,
Speaker 2: with the you know, bottom line, it doesn't really matter
Speaker 2: what he said and how you feel about it, that's
Speaker 2: not the point. The point is that we have free speech.
Speaker 2: And I don't think it's that hard to message that.
Speaker 2: You know, the problem with Schumer and Hinkeem Jeffries, both
Speaker 2: of whom are the most are the weakest, most pathetic
Speaker 2: leaders I have ever seen in my life, and both
Speaker 2: need to resign in my personal, humble opinion, is the
Speaker 2: first thing you do is validate their frame. What's the
Speaker 2: Republican frame. He's an anti semi and a terrorist supporter,
Speaker 2: And the first words out of your mouth are to
Speaker 2: basically be like they're right about him, Like this is
Speaker 2: the idiot, Like this is the idiocy of the Democratic
Speaker 2: Party in general. I mean, they did the same thing
Speaker 2: with immigration in the last election cycle, and I get
Speaker 2: immigration tough issue, et cetera, et cetera. But they thought
Speaker 2: they really had Republicans when they passed their own like
Speaker 2: hawkish border build like look, were the real border hawks. No,
Speaker 2: you just gave credence to their framing of the world.
Speaker 2: You just helped to bolster the way that they view
Speaker 2: and they pitch immigration as the number one problem and
Speaker 2: a you know, anarchy at the border and a flood
Speaker 2: and an invasion of blah blah blah, like that's what
Speaker 2: you're leading with. So no, I think it's foolish. I
Speaker 2: don't think it helps them political politically. I think that
Speaker 2: the base of the Democratic Party, like talk about misreading
Speaker 2: the moment between those two dudes and then Gavin Newsom
Speaker 2: running around, you know, giving massages to Charlie Kirk and
Speaker 2: Michael Savage.
Speaker 4: And next Steve Vannen, etc.
Speaker 2: The base wants you to fight and be adversarial and
Speaker 2: push like a different frame of the world, not just
Speaker 2: constantly validate right wing frames. And that's what Chuck Schumer,
Speaker 2: in addition to just being like weak and lame and
Speaker 2: taking eighty million years even get to the freaking point,
Speaker 2: which is part of the problem too. You lead with
Speaker 2: validating their frame. You capitulate in the first paragraphs and
Speaker 2: then you're done.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and Schumer knows full well that a huge number
Speaker 11: of the protesters in that encampment were Jewish students themselves.
Speaker 11: That's right, so many, so they'd have savors every weekend.
Speaker 3: Well, we can roll e seven actually, as Ryan makes
Speaker 3: this point.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and of course it's true that there are a
Speaker 11: you know, non trivial number of Jewish students at Columbia
Speaker 11: University who feel like criticism of Israel or calling the
Speaker 11: attack on Gaza a genisi is anti Semitic and makes
Speaker 11: them feel unsafe and is unpleasant, and and all those
Speaker 11: things like those are those are genuine feelings. That doesn't
Speaker 11: change the fact that there are so many, you know,
Speaker 11: Jewish students who disagree with them and are right there
Speaker 11: in the in campus. One of the few people who
Speaker 11: has acknowledged that in our politics is Donald Trump. He
Speaker 11: was on a did an interview with Hugh Hewett, and
Speaker 11: I think at the moment, Trump was particularly mad at
Speaker 11: Jewish voters because he was seeing polls that were showing
Speaker 11: that they were still voting for Democrats, even as he says,
Speaker 11: I gave them Jerusalem, I gave them the goal on
Speaker 11: heights and they're still voting for Democrats. And Hugh was
Speaker 11: complaining about the campus protests and he says, Hugh, you know,
Speaker 11: like a lot of those kids out there are Jewish kids.
Speaker 11: You do realize that right here? And he was like, yes, yes,
Speaker 11: there's you know, there are a few outliers. He's like, no, no,
Speaker 11: there's a lot of them out there. You know, Trump
Speaker 11: meant it as an insult, but Trump like understands that,
Speaker 11: and so does Schumer, and and everybody who has looked
Speaker 11: at this understands it. And yet here we get this
Speaker 11: claim that it is anti Semitic despite a few If
Speaker 11: you listen to what Mukalia would say on CNN and elsewhere,
Speaker 11: he would always say, the liberation of the Jewish people,
Speaker 11: in the liberation of the Palestinian people are entwined, like
Speaker 11: we can only go forward in peace together to a
Speaker 11: place of equality and dignity, which is not Hamas rhetoric
Speaker 11: at all. Right, by the way, right, yeah, that was
Speaker 11: what he was saying.
Speaker 2: And the last point I'll make on this is, if
Speaker 2: it is the foreign policy priority of the US to
Speaker 2: stop the spread of anti Semitism, we are doing an
Speaker 2: absolutely dreadful job of it because.
Speaker 14: Should be deported if that's.
Speaker 2: Absolutely the case, because that's the other thing is, like,
Speaker 2: you know, the left is very careful. I think you
Speaker 2: may have made this point that somebody who made this
Speaker 2: point recently. The little left tends to be very careful
Speaker 2: to separate Israel from the Jewish people. And you know,
Speaker 2: symbolic gatherings such as the one that we just showed
Speaker 2: of Jewish students who are anti Zionist helps to prove
Speaker 2: that point. And that's part of why Jewish organizations who
Speaker 2: are anti Zionists have been at the forefront of the
Speaker 2: pro Palestine movement to make that point. The right, constantly,
Speaker 2: led by bb Nan, Yahoo conflates the two, and Biden
Speaker 2: conflated the two, and Trump conflates the job.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's you know, if.
Speaker 2: You are if you support Israel, you support Jews, and
Speaker 2: if you don't support Israel.
Speaker 4: You hate Jews.
Speaker 2: Well, guess what when Israel is out there cutting off
Speaker 2: electricity to attrapped population, trying to starve them and dehydrate them,
Speaker 2: you don't think that that is going to contribute to
Speaker 2: a spread of anti Semitism here and around the world.
Speaker 2: When you're the most conflating, Yeah, conflating Israel and the.
Speaker 11: Right also, and the right also refuses to make any
Speaker 11: distinction between Hamas civilians and Gaza and campus protesters, like
Speaker 11: anybody who is critical of Israel's conduct in the war
Speaker 11: is just proomus, flat flat out, no effort whatsoever to
Speaker 11: make any distinction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a significant problem. Khalil is scheduled
Speaker 3: to appear in court today. We should add the battle
Speaker 3: is raging over where his case will be heard, whether
Speaker 3: in Louisiana or council.
Speaker 14: Schedule to appear.
Speaker 11: We've been trying to track flights out of that Louisiana prison.
Speaker 11: I don't think he's going to be there, but we'll see.
Speaker 3: ABC News says he's scheduled to appear in court as
Speaker 3: of this morning.
Speaker 14: But well, I hope you I very much hope he's there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will see. So that's the story to watch today. Ryan,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for taking a slice of your
Speaker 3: very busy morning to help explain this to us.
Speaker 14: You've got it.
Speaker 2: Good luck to you and see your kiddos, and certainly
Speaker 2: to your wife.
Speaker 14: Appreciate it. Thank you for filling in. Much appreciated.
Speaker 4: Oh anytime.
Speaker 3: Continuing today's theme, of every block being in a block
Speaker 3: once again, Crystal. We got news late in the day
Speaker 3: yesterday after Secretary Saint Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor
Speaker 3: Michael Waltz left the meeting with Ukrainian negotiators that actually
Speaker 3: they had reached an agreement to send a ceasefire proposal
Speaker 3: over to Moscow. Let's take a listen to Rubio after
Speaker 3: he got out of that meetings meeting in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 15: Today, We've made an offer that the Ukrainians have accepted,
Speaker 15: which is to enter into a ceasefire, into immediate negotiations
Speaker 15: to end this conflict in a way that's enduring and
Speaker 15: sustainable and accounts for their interests, their security, their ability
Speaker 15: to prosper as a nation. I want to personally think
Speaker 15: we both want to thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's
Speaker 15: majesty for hosting us, for making this possible. They've been
Speaker 15: instrumental in this process and we're very grateful to them
Speaker 15: for hosting us here today. And hopefully we'll take this
Speaker 15: offer and out of the Russians, and we hope that
Speaker 15: they'll say yes. They'll say yes to peace. The ball
Speaker 15: is now in their court. But again the President's objective
Speaker 15: here is number one above everything else.
Speaker 13: He wants the war to end.
Speaker 15: And I think today Ukraine has taken a concrete step
Speaker 15: in that regard. We hope the Russians will reciprocate.
Speaker 3: So let's dig in a little bit more to this deal.
Speaker 3: But first start with F two, which is Steve Whitkoff,
Speaker 3: who is actually going to Russia once again this week,
Speaker 3: saying that Zelenski did apologize to Donald Trump in a
Speaker 3: letter after that explosive argument during an Oval Office meeting.
Speaker 3: That's how the Hill put it, and Whitcoff said Monday
Speaker 3: on Fox News that Zelensky sent a letter to the president.
Speaker 3: He apologized for that whole incident that happened in the
Speaker 3: Oval Office. So there you see, Trump got his much
Speaker 3: desired apology out of Zolensky, apparently that letter. But if
Speaker 3: we put F three on the screen, the Associated Press
Speaker 3: would have broke down a bit about what is in
Speaker 3: the agreement. A couple of things worth paying attention to
Speaker 3: the mineral deal, or at least what did Trump say
Speaker 3: the concept of a plan. There's a concept of a
Speaker 3: plan for the mineral deal as part of the Yes,
Speaker 3: the raw earth, but the rare earth minerals of the
Speaker 3: US getting basically a fifty percent stake in the raw
Speaker 3: of Ukraine. It would be a thirty day cease fire.
Speaker 3: As Matthew Lee writes here, that is pending. Obviously the
Speaker 3: Kremlins agreement to this, pending, Putin's agreement to this, but
Speaker 3: that's basically what they were able to come up with. Now,
Speaker 3: the territory and the borders is a massive open question
Speaker 3: that we don't have answered based on what happened yesterday,
Speaker 3: but very significant that after that Oval Office blow up,
Speaker 3: you know, Trump came out with the threat of sanctions
Speaker 3: towards Russia, he got his apology from Zelenski, and now
Speaker 3: you have this agreement. Actually, they put out a joint statement.
Speaker 3: Rubio in his Ukrainian counter parts put out a joint
Speaker 3: statement together, which is it sounds like a silly like
Speaker 3: Beltway thing, but it's sort of remarkable. Again, after the
Speaker 3: Oval Office blow up and the fallout throughout Europe and
Speaker 3: the ripple effect that had throughout the world that Ukraine,
Speaker 3: the United States put out that statement together saying they
Speaker 3: had come up with this thirty day CIEs fire plan.
Speaker 3: Now Witkof is expected to actually meet with Putin this week.
Speaker 3: Wit Koff obviously also was able to secure the release
Speaker 3: of Mark Foegel to negotiations with Russia and was part
Speaker 3: of the initial ceasefire agreement in Gaza Crystal. What do
Speaker 3: you think is going to happen in the next couple
Speaker 3: of days.
Speaker 4: I mean, I have no idea.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure, Like I'm not sure what's in it
Speaker 2: for Russia to accept this deal at this point. And
Speaker 2: you know, this is one of the things that they
Speaker 2: have to figure out, is like, you know, not to
Speaker 2: validate like Putin's thinking, or his grievances, or like his
Speaker 2: justification for what is, at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: like a completely illegal and outrageous invasion that's been fun,
Speaker 2: incredibly deep stabilizing for the entire globe and certainly for Europe.
Speaker 2: But you do have to understand if you're going to
Speaker 2: strike some sort of a deal that is going to
Speaker 2: be in any way lasting what he sees as having
Speaker 2: been the provocations that led to this, so that you
Speaker 2: do avoid a situation. This was kind of what Zelenski
Speaker 2: was trying to say in the Oval office of like
Speaker 2: you can't just trust this dude, Like if he could
Speaker 2: go back on his word at any time, so you
Speaker 2: actually have to do something to secure some measure of
Speaker 2: what he sees as his interests. And you know, it's
Speaker 2: very likely that that whatever that is continues to be
Speaker 2: unacceptable to the US even under a Trump administration. So
Speaker 2: I think it's still very unclear. You know, I predicted
Speaker 2: after the Oval Office blow up that it was more
Speaker 2: theater than would result in like true fallout or shift
Speaker 2: in the Trump administration's approach, and I think that that
Speaker 2: has proved to be correct.
Speaker 4: Ultimately.
Speaker 2: You know, they've restarted the intelligence sharing, their shipping weapons again,
Speaker 2: they're working on their raw minerals deal. Like the plan
Speaker 2: moves forward according to Pace, but I wanted to share
Speaker 2: with you because it seems sort of a student some
Speaker 2: pieces of it already seemed to be coming true. A
Speaker 2: prediction that from a Russian analyst that Michael Tracy had
Speaker 2: put out on his Twitter feed. He said that US
Speaker 2: President Donald Trump's bid to secure a ceasefire along Ukraine's
Speaker 2: battle lines is going to fail. The American plan to
Speaker 2: stop the where ignores Russia's security concerns, disregards the root causes. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Moscow's conditions for peace, outlined by Putin in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four remain unacceptable to Washington, as they would effectively mean
Speaker 2: Kiev's capitulation and the West strategic defeat.
Speaker 4: He predicts that.
Speaker 2: The fighting will basically sort of like continue indefinitely. Trump
Speaker 2: will levy additional sanctions, as you said, he's already moving
Speaker 2: in that direction. They'll probably ramp down the amount of
Speaker 2: aid that flows to Ukraine, and the Europeans will try
Speaker 2: to step up and see if they can sort of
Speaker 2: fill that gap. On the battlefield, he predicts the tide
Speaker 2: will continue to shift in Russia's favor. Russian forces or
Speaker 2: expected to push Ukraine out of key regions. Ukraine will
Speaker 2: mobilize younger and experience recruits to try to slow Russia's advances.
Speaker 2: There will be border incursions or symbelic strikes deep into
Speaker 2: Russian territory and attempted demoralize the Russian population, but ultimately
Speaker 2: the battlefield dynamics will shift towards Russia. And then they
Speaker 2: say domestically, the US and its allies may push for
Speaker 2: elections in Ukraine, hope and replace Lenski, whose term expired already.
Speaker 2: That political reash might temporarily strengthen Keith's leadership will not
Speaker 2: address the underlying challenges of economic collapse and deteriorating living
Speaker 2: conditions for ordinary Ukrainians, and so listen, who knows what's
Speaker 2: going to happen. But I thought that was a fairly
Speaker 2: prescient analysis of how things may well play out. Where
Speaker 2: there's this attempt to strike a deal. There are conditions
Speaker 2: on Putin's side that continue to be you know, unacceptable
Speaker 2: even to the Trump administration, where you know, Putin doesn't
Speaker 2: have a lot of incentive to do a deal right
Speaker 2: now because he can read the writing on the wall
Speaker 2: at that war of attrition increasingly you know, benefits him,
Speaker 2: and you know, the Russian position will continue to strengthen
Speaker 2: Viza VI the war, and so things just kind of
Speaker 2: continue to grind on indefinitely.
Speaker 4: I think continues to.
Speaker 2: Be a very plausible possibility of where this thing ultimately heads.
Speaker 3: And they've obviously been trading missiles and drones over the
Speaker 3: course of the last couple of days, and significantly so
Speaker 3: Ukraine into Russia. But the other thing to remember, obviously
Speaker 3: is Kursk is going to be a huge piece of
Speaker 3: leverage from Ukraine as they talk about what territory belongs
Speaker 3: to whom in the ceasefire negotiation. These things are so
Speaker 3: unpredictable from the Trump administration. Obviously we know that. I
Speaker 3: don't even need to say it aloud, basically, but you
Speaker 3: just really never know what Trump and Steve Witcoff end
Speaker 3: up walking out of a negotiation with because they're not
Speaker 3: they don't see themselves as being restricted by sort of
Speaker 3: the usual orthodoxies and conventions of these types of conversations,
Speaker 3: and certainly not with Russia. They're willing to talk to
Speaker 3: Russia in ways that most conventional politicians, whether they're Republican
Speaker 3: or Democrat, are not interested in doing so. Man, this
Speaker 3: will be an interesting one to watch over the next
Speaker 3: couple of days as witcough heads to Moscow.
Speaker 4: Crystal, Yes, indeed, all right, Well, it was.
Speaker 3: A pleasure to have you here, and we got we
Speaker 3: got it Crystal and a little bit of Ryan, so
Speaker 3: it was really the best of both worlds, and we're
Speaker 3: basically joined. We were joined in spirit by Sager because
Speaker 3: we played like three clips of him, so it was
Speaker 3: sort of like the whole gang was.
Speaker 4: Here by Sargar and Nettie. I think as much this.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, it was great to see the White House
Speaker 3: put him in the new Media seed. Obviously, Sagar is
Speaker 3: an experienced season White House reporter, so to have him
Speaker 3: back in that routine was fantastic and.
Speaker 2: Well and he brought some He brought some honor to
Speaker 2: the new Media chair, which has been not the most
Speaker 2: honorable seat since it's ad then. So it's glad to see,
Speaker 2: you know, him asking some some real questions there, and
Speaker 2: you know, getting three questions too at the very top
Speaker 2: is it's incredibly influential those positions and being able to
Speaker 2: get the administration on the record on those things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people don't realize when you get the first questions
Speaker 3: that means you're beating the networks to the punch. And
Speaker 3: the networks like to ask questions that are perfectly calibrated
Speaker 3: for TV clips. You know, it's one of those things
Speaker 3: you can't unsee once you figure out that's what they're doing.
Speaker 3: So to have the early questions that the network's absolutely
Speaker 3: despise it because they were used to being at in
Speaker 3: that position and it sends them down the list. You know,
Speaker 3: they have to go to their like tenth question that
Speaker 3: they came into the briefing with instead of the first
Speaker 3: and second ones. Gets them the really juicy clips. So
Speaker 3: Soccer definitely did us proud, and you know, did proud
Speaker 3: to the theory, at least the theory of having the
Speaker 3: new media seats. So we were glad to be able
Speaker 3: to react to some of his questions today. Andy Chrystal,
Speaker 3: thank you just for being here. It's always a delight
Speaker 3: to do the show with you, and it was a
Speaker 3: lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Yes, my pleasure always fun. I always enjoyed and I'll
Speaker 2: be back in again. So guys, sorry if you're sick
Speaker 2: of me, but I'll be back again for a normal
Speaker 2: show with Soccer tomorrow.
Speaker 4: So we will see you guys then see.
Speaker 3: Then Breakypoints dot com for premier membership. We will be
Speaker 3: back with more tomorrow.