Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump appeared before a joint session of Congress for the first time since the start of his second term. He used the speech to deliver a message, we.
Have accomplished more in forty three days, and most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years, and we are just getting started.
It felt like an indoor Maga rally, with tons of cheering and pandering and boasting from Donald Trump and a lot of angry protesting from Democrats.
Josh Green is a senior correspondent for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
No music and no dancing, but plenty of fireworks, you know, security scuffle, Democrats getting dragged out. Mister Green, take your seat, Take your seat, sir, take your seat, Remove this gentleman from the chamber. I mean, it really did remind me of a Trump rally, but it was a partisan speech, sneering and making fun of his opponents and basically dancing on their electoral grave as he boasted about all the things that he's done in his first few weeks in office.
We just talked about the spectacle was their substance last night.
I didn't feel like there's a whole lot of new substance. Trump definitely ticked through the things that he's done in the early days, whether it's closing down the borders or blowing up a lot of DEI programs, shutting agencies like USAID. But I didn't hear a lot that was new, and that surprised me a little bit. I also didn't hear a lot about the economy, which I expected would be more of a focal point of the speech.
And it was not from Bloomberg's Washington bureau. This is the Big Take DC podcast. I'm Salia Molsen today on the show Trump's fifth Joint Address to Congress, Josh Green and I explore what the president's speech reveals about how he's approaching his second from his vision for trade in the US economy to America's role in geopolitics. So you and I covered the first term really closely, so we know that in an instant Trump can undo something that
he's planned. Based on what we heard last night, what do you think were some of the top foreign policy points that he is trying to focus on for his second term.
Well, it didn't sound to me like he was wavering or about to change his mind on ending the war in Ukraine. I mean, he campaigned on bringing what he called peace to Ukraine. Had a big blow up with Zelenski in the Oval office.
Earlier today, I received an important letter from President Zelenski of Ukraine. The letter raids Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace Closer.
To me, he just sort of continued the themes that he talked about in the campaign. If I'm going to bring peace quickly, We're not going to waste American treasure abroad. European allies are going to have to step up.
It's hard to believe that they wouldn't have stopped it and said at some point, come on, let's equalize. You got to be equal to us.
That's pretty much par for the course, I think, with what people were expecting. So no curveballs there.
So let's move on to something that Trump does tout as a unique policy in as administration, tariffs. Josh, should we get any substance or did we hear more? Just managing a narrative.
The whole speech to me felt like a public messaging campaign, but definitely the lines about tariffs, like I'm hearing competing messages from the Trump administration about what it is they intend to do. I mean, Trump has been very straightforward about, you know, he's imposing these new tariffs he did yesterday, but other figures in administration like Howard Lutnik are making noises about, well, you know, maybe we're going to roll
those back, maybe we're going to reduce them. And I think trying to quell some of the market panic that we've seen over the last week, it's mixed messages, is not clear who is setting the tone here or who investors should listen to, And I think that element of chaos is going to help defeed a lot of the market swings that we've seen literally day to day s and p is up one and a half percent one day, down one and a half percent the next, up on.
You know, it's just sort of a roller coaster ride that doesn't show any signs to me off slowing down anytime soon. What stood out the most to me, though, was that Trump did concede just a tiny bit that there's gonna be economic.
Pain, there'll be a little disturbance, But.
Then he followed up with the very Trumpian line, Oh but we're not bothered by that, or we don't care about that.
But we're okay with that. It won't be much well.
I think that remains to be seen whether Americans care or not, because there's a lot of indications in the polls already the consumers are unhappy with inflation. They don't think Trump is focused on the economy and a new regiment of tariffs that royals the economy and increase his prices. I think is not going to go down politically as well as Trump and some of his allies seed to
assume it will. I mean thematically. Trump has always been consistent in telling the story about tariffs the most economists
would say is wrong. Trump believes they're a way to generate ex geral revenue for the US government, that they might replace income taxes, that they're a way that he can kind of exert strength and power over global markets, whereas most economists would say, well, all that's going to do is create cost increases that are going to be passed on the US consumers, which is the opposite of what voters, especially voters who voted for Trump in November,
are looking for him to achieve. So I think one of the reasons that markets have been royal too much, that the entire Trump rally that we saw in the weeks and months after his victory in November has all been disappeared, is that there isn't any kind of clarity on these issues, and Trump didn't provide a lot of it last night.
So was there anything that surprised you about Trump's speech?
Yeah, that really was. I think the thing that jumped out to me most of all was how much he focused right from the get go on culture war issues and not the economic issues that, to me are the biggest questions of the creatoring stock market. The new tariff regimes he instituted just hours before the speech or sure on the back burner for Trump, And as I thought about it, it seems to me that's because the stuff that Trump is able to do unilaterally and successfully, things like saying,
according to government, there are only two genders. You know, we're going to wipe out DEI, We're going to win this war on woke. There are fights that he can draw and fight and win on his own terms that Democrats can't stop, and that the public, at least accordion polls, is largely supportive of, whereas if the discussion were about inflation or grocery prices or the price of eggs, which
have doubled since last year. Trump doesn't really have that much good news to point to, and instead what he did was for fallback on blaming Biden and the Biden administration over and over and over again for a lot of the economic problems that he and his administration have not yet been able to solve.
We'll dig into economic issues, and what we learned about is proposed solutions. After the break, I've been talking to Bloomberg Senior correspondent Josh Green about the policy substance that came through and Trump's joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. I asked Josh about the issues facing the US economy, inflation, the expiration of Trump's twenty seventeen tax cuts, and the deficit.
We heard a lot yesterday where Trump was blaming former President Joe Biden for inflation problems and any other cracks in the current state of the economy.
Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control.
Which is interesting because it was actually pretty strong. Yes, there were problems, but we're not in a recession. Growth has been strong inflation is the biggest problem. At what point is it no longer Biden's economy. It is Trump's economy and he can't really blame the last guy.
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean my kind of like got sense just having been a creature of Washington for so many years and lived through so many presidential administrations that you get about six months and after that, memories fade. People aren't thinking about the last guy, and they start to get grumpy and unhappy, and talking to some Trump advisors and people around him, that's the rough
timeline I think that they're looking at. I had these discussions less in terms of like tariffs and economic policy and more in terms of foreign policy. A number of Trump's advisors were pushing him to move forward on a peace deal over Ukraine sooner rather than later. Originally, I think the timeline had been to do something in Saudi Arabia and May, and a lot of Trump advisors I
spoke to at the Times that that's too late. By that point, Ukraine will be Trump's problem, not Biden's problem, and we want to do something sooner, and we saw
that begin to happen. I think the same timeline basically holds in economic issues too, that if we don't see inflation and grocery prices come down, and certainly if we see them begin to rise as a reaction to tariffs, then I think Trump is going to have a really difficult political problem because at the end of the day, he's a powerful president with a Republican Congress, but his margin in the House is three seats, and midterm elections are looming, and it's one.
Of those rare moments where Americans are paying attention to what the government's doing because it's directly hitting their wallets. The other one is it is tax filing season. The minute there is any kind of snapfoo in Americans getting their tax refunds, that could cost some problems and unhappiness too that could emerge in polls and in economic data. So let's talk about DOGE, which Trump talked about a lot. All the so called waste that DOGE has apparently found.
We don't know how much of what Trump said of how many millions or maybe billions have been cut is accurate. That's what DOGE is saying. Bloomberg's reported that, for example, dough sometimes double or triple accounts contracts that it cuts. They're claiming to cut fifty five billion dollars in governments spending. Our reporting found that their cuts actually total less than nine billion dollars. What is all this cutting supposed to add up to.
If you looked at the speech last night, especially it's on Doge, I think a lot of it is performative. The bottom line budgetary numbers, the size of the cuts are quite small in comparison both to the size of this federal budget and to the two trillion dollars that Elon Musk originally said he would be able to cut from the budget. If we're talking about nine billion dollars or even fifty five billion dollars, which seems to have been an inflated Doze figure, this is a drop in
the ocean when it comes to the federal budget. And yet doge in Elon's actions and his cuts and his assaults on various agencies have really been the main story of the second Trump administration over the last six or eight weeks. From a kind of public messaging the standpoint, it's interesting because again, if you look at polls, people are generally pretty happy with the idea that there's a
doze out there, that's attacking government waste. But if it begins to cut things like the IRS and it slows down Taxtra funds, or his Democrats have been suggesting, it breaks the Social Security payment system and suddenly old ladies don't get their Social Security checks, then I think there's
going to be a backlash, a serious political packlash. But that hasn't happened yet, and so in the meantime, I think those serves for Trump as a kind of illustration of all the things that he is doing and cutting. And I thought one of the most effective passages in his speech was when he ticked through descriptions of some of the programs that Elon Musk had zeroed out.
Just listen to some of the appalling waste. We have already identified twenty two billion dollars from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens.
DEI initiatives, and obscure African countries that Trump claimed he'd never heard.
Of, eight million dollars to promote LGBTQI plus in the African nation of Lesuto, which nobody has ever heard of.
It was an effective bit of theater, I think, to sort of illustrate to an ordinary viewer who isn't following this stuff at any kind of a clinical level, that the government is full of expensive, wasteful programs and that Donald Trump and on Musk are going in there and slashing them in a way that will ultimately benefit the
US economy and help with their pocketbook issues. I think connecting those actual dots and seeing an effect on the economy, on unemployment, on inflation, on people's kind of day to day earning power isn't going to be easy to do because I'm not sure there is going to be much of one.
When he was taking through the list of cuts, it was millions. The national deficit is thirty six trillion dollars, so, like you're saying, it is a drop in the ocean. He's talked about extending some of the twenty seventeen tax cuts, but he's also said I want to bring down the deficit. Is that math going to add up? Can Doge fine enough save inches to make up for all of the budget ads, you know, taxes and other programs that he wants to bring in.
Yeah, I really don't see how it can, especially given what we've seen from Doge in these early weeks and months, where we're talking about, you know, ten billion dollars or twenty billion dollars, that's not enough to kind of create budgetary savings that would pay for any kind of a tax cut. Trump is an administration have a lot of balls in the air in terms of claims. They've made, promises they made about what they're going to deliver, including
last night, But they haven't passed a budget deal. They haven't ironed out what's going to be in the tax cut, they haven't ironed out how they're going to pay for the tax cut, and at the end of the day, those numbers have to pencil out.
So let's wrap up what we learned from last night. What's your biggest takeaway of what the next almost four years will look like.
The biggest takeaway from me is that Trump isn't backing down at all from any of his campaign promises. That he is charging ahead, even as there are clear signs in the economy, in the stock market, and public polls that people are beginning to have a lot of trepidation about how he's proceeding in what it is that he's doing. So the big question for me, I would say, over the next six months to a year is is something important going to break our Social Security payments suddenly going
to disappear? Is you know the a BULLA team that Elon Musk cuts a doge suddenly going to have a catastrophic effect if there's some kind of new pandemic. Does a government shutdown, if one were to occur two weeks from now, cause a kind of blowback that changes the political standing that Trump and Republicans have right now. To me, it sort of feels like that moment when Wiley Coyote shoots off the cliff and you can see that he's about the fall, but it hasn't happened yet, and maybe
it won't. Maybe Trump can pull it off and do something magical. But the takeaway I had from last night really was that he hasn't changed his views, his plans, or his intentions at all over the first two months of his presidency and wants to kind of keep plowing ahead and exactly the direction that he said he would.
All right, thanks so much for joining all's pleasure. This is the big take DC from Bloomberg News. I'm sale Emosion. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Justin sink. It was fact checked by Audriana Tapia and mixed and designed by Alex Suguira. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven and our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster Bower.
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take DC Wherever you listen to podcasts, it helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.