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Donald Trump, the former president, defending his economic proposals, including more direct control of the Federal Reserve.
I think it's the greatest job in government.
You show up to the office once a month and you say, let's see Flip.
A coo, and everybody talks about you like your god, Oh, what will he do?
I think that if you're a very good president with good sense, you should be able to at least talk to him.
I don't say make the decision.
At all, Trump sidestepping whether he would replace Fetchair J. Powell before his term expires in twenty twenty six.
We get lucky this morning.
Joining us now is the Canifis Chard CEO Howard Lutnik, also serving as co chair of Trump's transition team. How it's going to see us, so welcome to see. This is a big job. And I don't think people outside the United States realize how big this job actually is. So let's start there, walk us through how big this position is for you and how busy you might be in the next few months.
All right, So the President of the United States gets to put four thousand, nine hundred and fifty political appointees into the government, So thirty seven hundred can take the field on January twentieth, and twelve hundred go through the Senate confirmation process, which takes a long time.
So you've got to start thinking about people like yesterday, So let's talk about that. The last time the president was in the White House, he attracted a lot of talent, and we can think of several names. Ambassador Lightheiser came up in a conversation with Blimberg yesterday. That's one, Gary
Cones another. Some of the nominations to the Federal Reserve, too, including Governor Waller to go to the board, came with a lot of churn though at the time, in the first term, how do we get one attract the talent but avoid all the churn at the same time. How's the approach going to differ this time around?
Well, remember last time he was a freshman. You know, it comes in the first time, it's not really sure exactly how it goes, and so he acts a certain way.
Now, complete experience, complete.
Knowledge, knows exactly what he wants, what he wants and how he wants to do it. So what will happen is you're going to see the greatest set of talent ever.
Walk on the field on January twentieth. You've never seen anything like it. I talked to. So what I've done is I've talked to probably the.
Top one hundred and fifty business people across the United States America and probably the top fifty political people. And they've analyzed everybody. And what they do is they do I call it genealogy. You go to these people, so that's two hundred people. They then recommend and vouch for everybody. You have to vouch for them and say I know them, I've worked with them, and.
Then they vouch for it. And it goes down like that.
And so we have five thousand people already that we know who have been vouched for by the greatest people. They got Ross Perrot and Energy and Chuck Schwab doing finance and everybody.
Everybody.
They are helping, they're building, and they're creating. For Donald Trump, the greatest group of people who will ever walk on the field for an administration. Got one term. I mean I spent Sunday two hours with Elon Musk.
I mean that's pretty cool. I mean I put out a tweet talking about what we did right. I mean, you know, I'm a social media star of course, right, you guys, no, forty three million views.
Talking about how we're going to pay for everything that.
Donald Trump talks about.
Right, He's going to take a trillion dollars out of the budget deficit a year because we waste We have a six and a half trillion dollar budget deficit. We have six and a half trillion dollar budget, two trillion dollar budget deficit.
Howard, Can we get back to the experts though? Do they have to agree with everything the former president says?
I think it's like if you think of it like a CEO of the company. He's the CEO of the United States of America. Let's call it the United States Incorporated. Okay, he's the CEO. You can argue all you want and discuss it. But when the boss says this is what we're going to do, do you have a problem to what the boss says they're going to do. You always have two choices. You can quit or you can execute the plan. This concept of doing what you want to do.
Because I don't think he's right, throw him banana pels. You get fired in America. You get fired at every company, and the fact that all these people who fired in the first term say, oh, I don't like him anymore.
This is the famous disgruntled employee. Duh.
Let's call all the disgruntled employees and what are you going to get from them?
Oh, I don't like that guy.
Anymore because she said the Financial Times, We're going to give people the role based on their capacity.
What you're saying here, and their fidelity and.
Loyalty to the policy as well to the man.
Is that how you run your company.
People have to be loyal to you.
Absolutely.
Imagine working at Cana Fitzgerald and saying, I'm.
Disloyal to Howard love all of you.
Let's get how about all of you look at the screen and say to heck with Mike Blumberg.
Let's see how that goes. You'll be like Tata can they disagree with you?
You must disagree. But that's called challenge and conversation. That's what the Oval Office is all about. You bring in five people, I mean Donald Trump loves conversation. He loves to get all sides of the idea. But then you make your choice and you go where the elected president of the United States of America goes. You go where Mike Bloomberg goes. If you're working Cannabitzgerald, you go, or Howard wants you to go. And anybody who says otherwise,
I don't even know what they're talking about. This is like make believe politics. Right, you follow the man, and you follow after the conversation, but you have to have fidelity to him.
None of this to your opportunity to talk about it. So let's talk about it just a little bit more. You told about how many people you've had discussions with to fill some of these spaces, how much of them will come from private industry.
It's not going to be a big emphasis for you, and the same it is.
And so my idea is that we talked about with the president.
Obviously, everything I do, I'm just sort of the mission for the man, right is, let's go get the people who understand business, understand the math of six point five trillion dollars, couple them with have them partners with people who deeply understand government.
Then get really really.
Good deep insiders of government, and together create.
A team right to go take the field together.
So imagine you spend six point five trillion dollars and we have a trillion of waste. So elon Musk and I we discussed a trillion of waste and billions, tens of billions, and then hundreds of billions of money we could make. You heard Donald Trump talk about tariffs. Five hundred billion dollars of revenue will.
Come from tarif's.
I want to just dig into what you just said. A trillion dollars of waste? What will be cut?
What will be cut?
You have monopoly providers for fifty years. We buy the same product from the same company for fifty years in a row.
Just imagine NASA for a second, shall we right? Eight billion dollar human budget? Right? Just like paying people? You know?
Do you know that space spa second?
Space ten twelve billion dollars?
Eight business follow up? I would We can keep doing this. I'll just keep going.
So that's fun.
The elviest follow up that I would have is the same one that i'd have for anyone who came from the Harris campaign at AUST than the following you had four years. Why didn't you do it then? Why is there that much more to cut?
Now?
Why didn't this happen in the first four years?
Oh?
I don't think he understood the scale and scope of the rot he started calling it the swamp, Like we all call it the swamp, right now, Why why do we.
Call it the swamp? Because he called it the swamp. The problem is it's not really that.
It's just these employees of the government are part of the business of spending.
Right.
It's like, if I spend an I assistly, I mean the most you can make it. The government's one hundred and eighty three thousand dollars, all right, So I'm making one hundred and eighty three thousand dollars, and I participated.
In giving this project of.
Twenty billion ten billion to these three companies, right, and it worked here for five years.
Where am I getting my job?
Next?
I go to one of those three companies and then I make a lot of money. So they all become lobbyists. The General's become lobbyists. All these Defense Department spends a trillion dollars and they don't.
Make this stuff, they buy it.
Some other people said that it's important to have a lot of people who are in business come into the administration. A lot of people in business think that the plans is laid out are going to increase the deficit.
Dramatically.
They don't see how this actually decreases expenses, especially with tariffsic could potentially slow international trade. But also with the prospect of a lot of tax cuts, what are they all getting wrong?
So the tax cuts are already in the current world, right, He's just going to make permanent to twenty seventeen tax cuts and then so that's number one.
Number two, he's going to encourage people to build here and pay taxes. Let's go over what Apple.
Does right now, here's a simple example. They make the parts in China. Yeah, they put the parts together in Taiwan. Then they wave their magic wand and it floats over Ireland.
Of course, it floats over.
Ireland because that's where Apple does it's products. And then it comes to America and they make i don't know, something like three percent profit in America that they corporate tax on three percent profit in America, and Ireland announces a massive budget surplus for their five million people.
Ha ha.
It's just not true. So the concept is have them pay their taxes in America, and that is how you fix America.
You make it fair, you make it right, and you build.
This is no exceptions for Apple, No comps out for Apple.
This shouldn't be carbacks for Apple.
I spoke to Elon Musk and I said, if we do this correctly, Tesla's gonna have to pay more tax.
You know what. He said.
If everybody's the same, that sounds great. He goes, I can't do it differently at Tesla if other companies are doing it. But if we're all this and we're all paying the fair tax that I am all for it, and I think everybody's all for it as long as it's you got to get rid of the arbitrage. Why is Ireland announcing a surplus?
Oh give me a break, it's all our business.
Percent is the corporate tax rate if you build president, if you build here, if you build it.
Here, one hundred any inputs from other countries, what is the nu.
Once I spoke to a manufacturer, he says, he does fifty percent here, twenty.
Five percent in China. How how do we do it? If you tariff me in China?
The Chinese backed companies that will cover the tariff, So we'll get the money, but he'll be at a disadvantage. And we came up with this idea. If you build it here within two years. You can have a tax credit for any tariff you pay. As long as you move your plant within two years to America, you can have your money back.
But build it here.
See, American workers just haven't gotten a fair shake.
I know.
American workers' life expectancy is seven years less if you don't have a college degree than if you have a college degree.
How is that possible?
Because if you've got their factories and you take their jobs away, right, you know what it is.
It's despair. It's despair. It's not the air, it's not the food. It's despair.
Finally, Donald Trump is saying I'm going to take care of the American worker. And anybody comes up with this nonsense of that it doesn't work is just not actually studying it.
One thing that a lot of business leaders who I speak to are concerned about is they need stability. They need to have a sense of what the policy is. They need to have a sense of what the legal system is going to be for them to operate their business. One of their biggest fears right now with Donald Trump is that they're not going to have that certainty with things being used as potential carrots or sticks to try to induce certain policies and a lack of understanding of what the structure is.
How do you counter that?
I counter it with basically straightforward, let's protect the American workers.
Okay, build in America. Let's make it fair.
So the arbitrage where Apple doesn't run all their profits through Ireland, pay America their money. I think America could increase its revenues two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year by paying attention to the nonsense that corporate world does on global production. It's nonsense that Ireland makes money. It's nonsense that you build cars in Mexico. It's nonsense. How nonsense ends. You will be shocked by how great America is. You take a trillion of waste out.
And then you focus on the country fairly.
You're going to have the possibility of balancing the budget of the United States of America at the end of his term.
No nonsense.
I'm not making up all Bologne elon Musk And if you don't, if you don't respect the two of us, good luck to you. Okay, it can happen because he's focused on not wasting the vast waste.
That is our budget and the way we run.
That would be a big hole to fill in, quite an accomplishment given the tax cuts they're on the table in this campaign. So we could talk about this all morning, we're out of time. It's good to see you. A spirited conversation as always with Howard Lutnik of Canna Fitzgerald