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Have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal, Indeed.
We do a lot going on.
We're taking a look at the markets, fed chair at Jaypal speaking yesterday and Marcus not too happy about what he had to say. President Trump not too happy about what he had to say, so we'll get into that.
We also have the very latest.
On China's moves and taking a look which is appropriate giving given a Sager being the expectant father over here at the way this is all going to impact New parents. Those strollers are about to become wildly more expensive than they already are.
We've got Richard Hanania on the show. We're going to talk to.
Him about the very latest with Kilmar Abrago Garcia, we had more movement on the judicial front. We also want to talk to him about why he has turned on Trump, voted for Trump. He has come out publicly and said he regrets that, so we want to get into the way that he is thinking about all of that. We've also got myriad of Elon updates for you, Big Wall Street Journal expose into his like breeding legion cult, whatever you want to call it. It's very strange, So we'll
break that down for you. I might actually ask Richard about that because I'm kind of curious his take on.
All of that.
But in addition, we've been wanting to cover the fact.
Look, DOGE has been very successful at a lot of destruction. Social Security is completely hobbled, all sorts of agencies unable to do their work. Even like the collecting of the tariffs. Guys were DOGE and so they couldn't figure out the customs duties as things were coming in. So they've been successful at destroying things in terms of the advertised supposed goal of cutting government spending, total and complete failure. It's
like blatantly obvious. Now there are no real public successes they can point to, So we wanted to take a look at DOGE and what they've been up to. We also got some very significant and important breaking news yesterday New York Times exposing that the Israelis were really pushing the Trump administration to help them with a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.
And at the urging of A JD.
Vance, Tulci Gabbard and few others within the administration Susie Wows in particular as well, the Trump administration decided not to help them with that in favor of, at least for the time being, negotiations. So what does that mean? What's the broader picture? This also comes on the heels of a purge of some senior staff over the Pentagon.
So there's a lot to put together there, and I'm taking a look at how we may be entering an even more dangerous face of Trump is in two point zero, as his back is increasingly against the wall and his popularity.
So I'll be looking at those pieces today.
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as support the channel. So with that though, let's get to the tariffs, and as you said, the market reaction, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell making a number of comments that he will not bail out the stock market even though he believes that inflation and tariff impact on the economy remains very precarious.
Let's take a lesson.
The level of tariff increases announced so far is significantly larger than anticipated, and the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth. Despite heightened uncertainty and downside risks, the US economy is still in a solid position. The labor market is at or near maximum employment. Inflation has come down a great deal, but is still running a bit above our two percent objective. Some people believe the Fed
will intervene at the stock market plumits. These are very fundamental changes in long held in some cases policies in the United States, and there's not any real experience. I mean, the smooth Holly tariffs were actually not this large, and they were ninety five years ago, so there isn't a modern experience of how to think about.
This, not a lot of experience on how to think about this.
But the most important answer was him saying, no, I'm not going to bail out the stock market. Those comments were taken quite literally by the stock market s and P five hundred dropped about two percent yesterday. Futures as of this morning look relatively flat, so we can continue to see that. More importantly, though, is that Trump, it seems, has been betting heavily on the Federal Reserve actually cutting rates, and that is just not what the Federal Reserve chairman
is saying as of this morning. As of this morning, as we also know, Donald Trump actually attacked the Federal Reserve, saying the Federal Reserve Chairman Derrone pallet quote, termination cannot come soon enough. But because of the way that terms and appointments and all of that work, there's still a significant amount of period before any movement on that is even possible, as well as almost certainly some court challenges.
As they try to do there's complicated legal stuff going on, but they're trying to set the ground to be able to remove a Ftal Reserve chairman if they want by challenging some long held scrutiny on that law, which could be interesting under itself.
Yeah, I think it relates to some of these you know, they fired like you know, an l RB chair, some of the in the CFPB, some of these agencies that are supposed to have independence some distance from the executive's wins that's being challenged in court. So that could relate to what is going on here as well. But you know, I mean from the perspective of the FED chair, right, you are being put in a total bind here because on the one hand, yeah, the terrafts are very likely to slow growth.
In fact, I think we.
Already know the terriffs have slowed growth. You can see it in real time, what's happening. So that would lend its sword itself towards Okay, well, let's cut interest rates to try to get the economy moving. On the other hand, the terrats are inflationary, so cutting the interest rates might help further fuel inflation. And so you know, this potential stagflation bind really leaves the FED in a very difficult place.
And what you're our own Paul is saying is Hey, for now, we're just holding where we are.
Yeah, exactly, And so let's go ahead and put a two up on the screen, because there's been major movement here in the United States in terms of how this trade war with China is positioning. We're going to talk next about China and about some of the consumer environment where we're all likely to experience quite a bit of price hikes. But it is becoming clear now that Nvidia is the quote biggest US China bargaining chip. I previously had flagged the story in this so I wanted to come I see.
I want to come back.
To this is that previously jensng Wog, the CEO of Nvidia, had paid about a million dollars to attend a mar A Lago dinner. At that dinner, he apparently convinced either Trump or somebody around Trump not to put export licenses on those H twenty chips that Nvidia had developed specifically to be liable with these export controls be able to ship to China approxim me five point five billion dollar
market segment for Nvideo. Well, it came out overnight that as a result of the tariffs and despite some of the previous promises that they had made to Nvidia, the United States would be slapping export controls on those H twenty chips now immediately. I just woke up to the news this morning, Crystal that jensaying not here in the United States.
He's in China.
He actually has just met with the Chinese vice premiere and with the CEO of Deep Seek, trying to assure them that they all still want to do business. But it does tell us where, you know, to the extent that we have any real leverage over China. It's not really about consumer imports and stuff that they necessarily need. We're going to talk a little bit about their consumer like the injections that they're putting in in terms of
their support. A lot of this high tech manufacturing and design specifically is really where things are landing for what we are trying to do with them. The question is of course about buckling, about technology transfer and more. But the reason why it's important also for the pressure here in America is that sent en VideA shares sliding with the overall pressure right now and the consumer the retail environment.
So it really does show us that while we've had almost sixty percent reduction in overall US imports just in the last two weeks extraordinary, genuinely extraordinary. Who nobody has any idea how that will even show up in the price environment. With the Federal Reserve chairman, the nvidious strategy, the chaos and everything moving back and forth, you can just see that markets are very they're very uncertain right now, which is part of what you see so much of the wild volatility happening right.
So, just to give a little bit of background here, you guys may know some of this. So under the Biden administration, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, she said quite directly that the point of the export controls that the Biden administration put on the sort of like top shelf chips was to slow China's development technological development, and.
Perhaps it had some impact.
But deep part of what the deep Seek innovation really proved is that they were in a lot of ways able to either directly circumvent or innovate around that particular export control. And again that was for sort of the top shelf like top of the line most advanced chips in Nvidia produced this H twenty chip which was meant, as I mentioned, to get specifically around those export controls to be sort of like a lower grade like Okay, well this is in the top shelf stuff. We can
still sell this thing. And so that's why they were doing big business in China with regard to this particular chip. Now, China does have their own chip capacity, especially when you're talking about this level, not the highest of the highest level chips are. It's largely through Huawei. And are they exactly as good as the Age twenty You know, there's some indicators that they aren't quite as advanced as at Age twenty chips, but they do have some of their
own domestic chip capacity. And also what we learned under the Biden administration is that this did not hobble them nearly as much as the Biden folks were hoping that it was ultimately going to hobble them. So in any case, you know, this was a big hit to in Vidia stock. In Vidia one of those Magnificent seven, huge impact in terms of our overall stock market. So that was part in addition to the j. Powell comments, that was part of what has been going on in the markets.
Yeah, exactly. So let's go ahead and then put the next one up on the screen. So people can take a look. You could see the quote the US and China trade fighters quote slamming stocks, sending gold to record high. The gold market has been absolutely insane. It's like I've seeing a price target there of almost four thousand dollars,
which is absolutely extraordinary. But the reason why that we're returning or starting off on this is just to show people that Nvidia, because remember it makes up so much of the S and P five hundred that if it's going to be a major bargaining chip in the Trump administration strategy, that if we're going to see stock sync there on top of the overall global strategy that they're
putting into place, retail pressure. Just this morning, much of the pharmaceutical tariffs are shaking out in the markets, as well as some other regulatory action. United Healthcare stock down by like eleven percent. Yes, I know, funny, like meme wise, but it's actually a huge segment of the overall markets. We have sector bisector decline in everything, which just makes it so that there is huge pressure on the US economy.
If we do start to see mass layoffs in the next ninety days or so, as Ryan Peterson predicted, that will put a tremendous amount of pressure on all of these different in terms of the regulators, on the government and more. And the Chinese are absolutely buckling up. So we just want to lay the groundwork for how things look over here in America. That's the end vidia front. There's also the dollar. This has been a major story as well. Let's put this up there on the screen.
Quote what the weak dollar means for the global economy? We have and this was not actually expected to see such a dramatic decline in the dollar relative to every other global currency. But what they point off here is that the quote unexpected weakening of the dollar is suddenly becoming the rest of the world's problem too, because for foreign sellers all of these goods, cars, kognaks, Gottish tweed, the dollar steep slide is a double whammy. It's compounding
losses caused by President Trump's import levees. So the central banks around the world they either need to stop the rapid strengthening of their currency, cut interest rates more aggressedly to try and lower their overall target versus a dollar, but that will have major macroeconomic effects in their own countries. Also, of course, the dollar decline now means that currently has slipped eight percent per year, which is the worst start to the year in the indexes four decade trading history.
Just to put into a perspective how insane that is there has been. It's not just lack of faith in the dollar. It's really about US government and trade. And then when imports are also being reduced, that will of course mean that when there's a weeker dollar, it's going to drive up the price of how much we're able to buy and exchange globally. So this stuff has major ramifications for reserve currency purposes for whoever is still able
to do business, you know, with importers. But then more importantly, it can cause a global shock effect on interest rates, where you could potentially see lower interest rates in other countries while our stage in the federal reserve is like, oh, I'm going to abide my time, which also has askating effects for our comment. None of this is good, is really what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, and it's emblematic of a broader trend.
Just the ECB just cut rates. There you go. It's from the European Central Bank area literally.
Part of a broader shift away from the US. I mean that's what when you see this, when you see the unusual market in terms of US treasuries. You know, the US and the dollar and treasuries have always been the safe haven no longer, and so now these sorts of market responses with regard to you know, our currency in particular, this is more like what you would expect from an emerging market, like these sorts of dynamics playing out, So you know, you don't want.
To oversell it. Right. The US is still, you.
Know, a global power, maybe not the global power, but a global power. And you know, the dollar is going to continue to be central. We're not dedollarizing like today. But this shift away is probably the most significant thing that we have seen to happen. And that also plays into your mentioning the price of gold skyrocketing. So the implication is instead of the flight to safety being like US treasury bonds as it has traditionally been, instead maybe it's things like gold.
There you go.
All of this is important, and let's get to the next part here. This is a five please just to show people about some things that are happening right now. Quote, nearly nine hundred thousand fewer people went to the United States in March, as the cross border travel continues to go down, one of the worst year over year drops
recorded outside of the COVID nineteen crisis. A lot of this is basically fear from a lot of incoming US visitors, but a lot of it is Canada actually and specifically over the trade war as retaliation for the initial trade
comments by the Trump administration. The irony, of course is that you know, the vast majority of goods remain at the overall zero terriff rate under the USMCA, but the initial like shaking from the Trump administration and the fifty first state language has made it so there's been a
precipitous decline. We are entering into summer territory, traditionally a time where there's a lot of Canadian snowbirds who apparently like to come down to America, and yeah, not good if you if you run a business in northern New York or Orlando, any of these other places. I remember looking at some of the top Canadian destinations in America.
I think Seattle is also up there. There's a lot of jobs and economic activity that generally rely on this, and this just gets to my overall problem with the Trump administration is that they both force people to experience
the consequences with none of the upside. So if you're going to have a terrace on the Canadians and say that ripping us off, then we should of course see a major stimulus to the businesses which are supposedly getting ripped off, as well as to make sure that there's no pain for the people who do rely on it and the after effects.
None of that is happening now.
Of course it's happening in China, which I'll get to in a little bit, but we haven't seen that almost you know, we're going to talk about strollers, We're going to talk about groceries and all of these other things. There's no like relief or PPP program that's currently being even floated by the administration and or by the Republican Congress, which in six months will soon pass a bill. At that point, you could have mass layoffs and bankruptcies at
that point. You know, if we're thinking about a September passage, good luck to a lot of summer tour operators or others. Sure, are they the most critical part of the economy. No, there's a lot of people pour their whole livelihood and
all their business money into this. And so that's my major problem is even though we have the same tariff rate as we did the day that Donald Trump basically went into office effectively for most of the goods that move across the Canadian border, he still has just invited this thing with Canada and now all of these businesses are going to stuffer the consequences and not get any bailout or anything.
That's right, Yeah, And I mean tourism is a significant part of the economy, especially if you're talking about Center gd Florida, you know, California.
These are areas that rely heavily on tourism as a really important industry for their economies. And that nine hundred thousand number, that's just with regard to Canadian border crossings. If you look at the number of flight bookings coming out of Europe, I mean across the border, it's all dropped. And it certainly has to do significantly with the terrorists
in the trade war. It also has to do with immigration policy because you have stories like there was a Canadian actress, Jasmine Mooney, who was held by Ice for twelve days while she was just trying to like renew her work visa, and there are other stories like that of people who were trying to come and just like visit as tourists or go speak at a lecture coming
over from Europe who are being searched and detained. And people see those stories and like, I think I'll go somewhere else on my vacation.
I'm good. I don't really want to risk.
All of that.
The EU has told their diplomats, you know, to bring a burner phone instead of their normal smartphone. These are the sorts of things that are going on, and so it's also not good for the tourism industry, and that's going to have another negative effect on the economy and
impact businesses certainly significantly. And we talked yesterday Emily and I I think it was United Airlines that's already they've put on two separate guidance, like you know, earnings guidance based on like we don't really know what's going to go on, and they are already cutting back flights for the summer. Yeah, they're already cutting back flights for the summer based on what we already know about the economic acountlook so not good.
That is not good. It also softening economic demand. He actually went back and was reading a little bit about the airline industry.
Oh nine was brutal.
Nine in twenty ten were horrible years the airline industry because of the overall fallout. They were thrown as many incentives as they possibly could, and especially if there's a major pullback the top ten percent of Americans, so the people who spend the fifteen fifty percent on consumer spending. So even if they reduced their amount of spend there, the airlines are going to take a massive haircut because they were making all their money. They're not making money
on economy. They were mostly making their money on this premium economy and business class seas, which we're selling out. So if those people stop booking or even if they fly economy, oh my god, they're going to be devastated in terms of their their earnings. Last thing on this rount before we moved to China. Let's go to A six please. This is on Albertson's. This is very very
interesting from our friend David Dan. Albertsons sent a letter to all of its suppliers saying, quote, it is not accepting cost increases due to teriffs, which means that the suppliers are going to have to raise prices on Albertson's competitors that have less market power of David Dan says, quote, this is one way that Trump's tariffs and trench monopolizations.
Interesting point. Actually, I hadn't thought about it that way.
But what it does show you, again is if you have a general policy, let's say here about alleviating cost increases due to tariffs and making sure that there are government incentive programs and others to make sure that grocery prices across the board don't get propped up and that these suppliers don't necessarily have to go out of business, then you don't have to have Albertsons and all these
other people gaming the system. It's actually a good example too, what we've talked about Walmart and all these peop Yeah, they're going to survive, Okay, those Unfrankly, those are the people who are most responsible for pushing for a lot of this free trade nonsense with China, PNTR with China, and a lot of these cheap consumer goods. But their
market power is such that they'll make it. It's really, you know, as they're pointing out here, the suppliers will well, they have the leverage over let's say smaller grocery chains or other places, and that's probably rural, you know, other areas which are not able to bargain, and so then you'll see a cost increase overall.
And then what happens. They're going to go bankrupt and Alberts is going to buy them.
Right, Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And the overall structure, especially with it being just directed by the singular person of Donald Trump, of course, makes it so the big guys are in a position to get their benefits, get their car bounce, pay a million dollars to go to their marra a lago dinner or whatever,
so that they can ride out the storm. You know, I talked the other day about this woman who has her baby, her busy baby mats, and so she just Walmart just picked up her product for a retail for someone who's you know, a producer making something to get it into Walmart, Like that's like the holy Grail. But Walmart accepts, Okay, we will take them at this price, and that's it. She can't negotiate with them any for
that's done. So when you talk about now the tariff is I don't know, it's like two hundred percent, and he just keeps increasing it. But at a certain point, at this point, it's like it doesn't matter what the tariff is. It's high enough that for someone like the busy baby lady, it's it's over. She can't bring in her products. But let's say that she was able to figure out the cash to get the tarraff and you know, to pay the tariff and get her product over here.
She's the one one hundred percent eating the cost, so earning a huge loss on this product that you know, Walmart has agreed to buy it, I don't know, twenty five dollars or something like that, and now she's having to pay let's say, fifty dollars just to get this thing over here. Like it's she is the one who's going to get screwed. Walmart has all the power in the relationship, and they don't care whether they have this matt in their store or not. They don't care if
she goes under her. And that's so the small business, the media business sized businesses, they are going to be totally and completely screwed if this is not lifted, like immediately, I mean we're talking they have months to be able to runway, to be able to make it through and ride out this storm, and not much longer than that, just by the nature of these businesses.
Unfortunately, that's very true. Okay, let's move on to China. We're gonna break some of this down. Have some fascinating stuff happening geopolitically.
We'll start with Jijingping.
As I mentioned in our last show, visiting Hanoi and Vietnam. We have some video showing this, keep in mind, is released by Chinese state propaganda, but.
You know, it's still important. It's still a real video.
So let's take a look and we can put it up there on the screen. You could see Ji being you know, all the communist flags waving as he is visiting the streets of Hanoi. This is important because Vietnam is our number eight trading partner. A key part of the pivot to Asia of the Obama administration and actually subsequent even with the Trump tariffs, was a basically finger wagging at Nike and numerous other retailers saying listen, no
China anymore, you have to manufacture elsewhere. They said, Okay, we'll go to Vietnam. We gave him a lot of money to go to Vietnam. They built upply chains. Now, I will be the first to admit that China absolutely took advantage of transshipping via Vietnam, and they of course, you know, we're trying to gain the advantage, etc. But Vietnam was a critical US trading partner. Like I said,
number eight, very very little behind Taiwan. That's how much I'm talking about their overall effect on the US economy. On top of that, Vietnam, despite the fact that we destroyed half of their country, has very favorable attitudes to the United States. They have remembered they have beef with China over the South China Sea and a few of the island chains. These are not necessarily countries with super close relations in the last twelve years or so, so to see that it's a bit of a problem. And
actually even Trump has paid attention to this. Put the next one, please up on the screen. Quote Trump grumbles about China's lovely meeting with Vietnam, saying they are discussing how to screw the United States of America. That's true, That's actually true, because there's a reason that Jee went to Vietnam and Cambodia and is going to Malaysia next. These are all areas and you know, with critical US trade relationships, a lot of US textiles moved through that area.
We are not seeing. You know, it's not even just about good relations, don't you know. Forget crystal Vietnam was one of the first countries to say okay, fine, no tariffs zero and then they got nothing. They still got to take Yeah, post they're good. Obviously that's been a ninety day off, but you know.
They're not stupid. They need to make money.
And so in the interim period they're like, are we really going to have a ninety day agreement?
I mean, look at Japan.
Japan, they're Economic minister flew here yesterday, they met with Scott Besen, they met with the Donald Trump and Trump was like, yeah, there's been a great, great movement.
There's nothing that's been you know announced. That's Japan.
By the way, we have a very well architecture trade deal with Japan negotiated in twenty nineteen with Shinzo Abe. If you want to update that, it's really not difficult. So it's going to take this long just to do Japan. We have seventy other countries that were supposed to do way more complex trading relationships than we do with anybody else. This is a g SEP nations very easy actually to hammer that out. They have good statistics, etc. Rules we
can trust currency. These are all simple actually to hammer out in an agreement. What are you going to do with all these other countries which you slapped all these huge tariffs on the the interim ninety days, where do you think they're going to go?
They're going to China, same as the European Union.
They've just negotiated all that tariff exclusion with some of the cars pumping away for BYD and Showman to have more market entrants over there.
So there's big problems that we have right now.
Yeah, that's right.
And I even saw Fox News grumbling about like, hey, we thought we were going to get ninety deals in ninety days.
We don't have one.
We don't have one obvious, right, But I mean that Fox News is even saying that is incredible. And with regard to this it she didn't come away empty handed from this trip to Vietnam. They apparently signed forty five different agreements on issues like supply chains and railways, and it just underscores like for them, they have one big problem our like trade war with US and the loss of our very large and wealthy market. Right, our consumers are very powerful. We spend a lot of money, There's
no doubt about that. That's a significant problem. They have the entire world that they can go to, They can use their own, you know, government programs to help subsidize and support their own industry. They of course have their own massive and burgeoning market. In fact, their exports as a percent of their GDP has been going down as their own domestic market has been increasingly powerful and they've been turning towards that, and our percent of you know,
the of their exports has also been going down. So yes, of course, we are incredibly important to China's economy. China is incredibly important to our economy. Decoupling this relationship is going to involve severe pain on both sides. But their
problems are number one, I think more straightforward. They have fewer problems to solve because they didn't launch a trade war against the entire world like we did, and they are smarter, like they have been more strategic over long periods of time than we have, and so I think our you know, even the Financial times are saying they're set up to in a much better position than we are at this point.
This is I mean, what did I just talk about in our a block about oh we got to wait on Jerome Powell. There's no Jerome Powell in China. The CCPs like drop rates like, okay, got it? You know, same with the raising rates done. Now I'll show you guys for example, already you know we're seeing major price increases hit here in the US. Go to B three please, this is this is actually rocketing around new parent group chats just like somebody.
Like me new upp a baby price.
Now keep in mind, look, this is an expensive stroller, so let's let's keep that in mind. That said, the price increase from expensive to ultra expensive is still not great. And this company has been done millions and millions of dollars in sales. Well, their flagship strollers are all increasing by hundreds of dollars as a result of these tariffs. And these are actually the first I would say, like beloved product that I have seen on social media where
organic consumers are sharing it and are really complaining. So you can see they're multip one hundred dollar increases that were there. They also sent out up a baby an email to all of their users saying, listen, we are absorbing as much of this tariff price as we possibly can, but there is just no way for us to be able to do business without raising a lot of these prices, and they're going to go into effect very very soon.
Our own friend Derek Thompson flagged this as well, about how much of the child accessories are manufactured in China. It's like something like ninety cents.
I go, hold up, yeah, so he says.
The business PRES's been good at reporting on China's global leader in smartphone and electronics manufacturing. Consider also, as a share of all US imports, China accounts for ninety nine percent of child safety seats, ninety six percent of toys for pets, ninety five percent of cooking appliances, ninety three percent of coloring books for children, eighty eight percent of microwave ovens, seventy plus percent of toys intended for children
under twelve. Yes, American AI, electronic, smartphone and clean energy companies are not set up to thrive in a protected, protracted trade war.
Mary.
Parents of young kids will be among the hardest hit. So many of the things that new parents buy for their kids and have to buy, you know, your crib, your stroller, like the car seat, all of these things. These are you know, must haves because they're not like luxuries. So much of that, not to mention the you know, toys and things you get for their Easter baskets and things that go under the Christmas tree. So much of that comes from China. And it's already extremely expensive to
be a new parent and all that that entails. So new parents with young families are going to be very hard hit.
Yeah.
I actually, by the way, did do some research and there's really no made in America stroller, Like there's like one off ones. But you know, stuff breaks, crystal. I'm sure you can tell us about that, and you need new parts. It's like, so where are going to come from? Well, oh, choker over ninety three percent same with it. Luckily I bought all this stuff before these tariffs come into place.
But if you're not so lucky, what are you going to do?
The other thing is, as I have discovered, is there's a thriving secondhand market for a lot of these things like that strollers, car seats, et cetera. Well, this is just going to do the same thing that it's done to the cars. Is that while yes, you could still buy used you know, pre tariffed goods. Well, what do
you think supply and demand is going to show. You're going to see an increase in the US stuff, So you're actually gonna have to pay more, no matter if you're buying new and or if you're buying used, And it'll probably restrict the supply because of the overall number of imports, which will only further skyrocket the amount of the prices here. And you know, all of this is allegedly, you know, for the benefit of the country.
I would say, you know, my own bias.
Otherwise, you probably want to make it easier for parents to be able to have children.
The law, you know, I don't know if people know this.
There's literally a law you have to have a car seat to be able to leave the hospital.
That's right, it has to be installed. And do you you don't have.
A choice like and don't get a used car seat?
Yeah, right, that's an obi Yes.
Getting a stroller?
Do you all don't get used car seat? You need to get a new car seat. Ninety seven percent of baby strollers, by the way, I just looked it up, come from China.
Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. I actually tried to find one. I was like, hey, let's see if there's anything made in America. Stroll, made in America, car seat. I mean, the best you can get are some of these that are designed in America. But that's not the same thing, you know, like up a baby douna or any of these other ones. But there's there's some Swedish Swedish companies as well as some German companies. But guess what, we also had tariffs on those countries, right, so, and
a lot of them are already more expensive. So you know that, you know what it's like, don't screw with moms. That's that's one of those where there's a lot of moms out there, a lot of Facebook groups, Instagram and more, where I actually guarantee that that will probably reach more and have more political impact than a lot of.
The other stuff that is happening. Yeah, it's important for people to understand.
Back in the George W. Bush era, they called them like security moms. Now they're going to be like tariff moms, anti tariff moms, free trade moms.
Yeah, I mean think about Facebook, Marketplace or any a lot of these other places people are already skating by, and now there's going to cost even more money. One hundred dollars, three four hundred dollars, that's a lot of money. That's a significant portion of the average Americans paycheck. And you know, then we have the rise of this buy now,
pay later debt, which we're already seeing. Credit card minimum payments actually have skyrocketed just in the last two months, so we can see that there's significant pressure on consumer households, all right. And then last thing I wanted to flag here is from the Chinese market and how they are helping out their own customers. Show up this on please
on the screen. So visitors to Tauboo, which is one of the largest online shopping platforms in China, are now being offered steep discounts on products which are normally exported to the United States. For example, rice cooker from forty two dollars to twenty five eighty five inch TV from five to twelve to six thirty five hundred dollars instead of six hundred and thirty nine dollars. Offers are popping up all across online apps.
Quote.
The first thing buyers are seeing is a section of goods that's quote subsidized by the nation, basically the Chinese government bailing out their own domestic online sellers to protect their manufacturers, move goods, move into poory, and keep all of the supply chains and everybody else still employed. Make sure that we don't see the freeze that's happening here in America. So that's what a functioning state actually looks like. They have a bailout. They have the ability to put
pressure on all of their companies. They can drop their interest rates, they can manipulate their currency, they can do all of these different things. They're prepared for hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic capital injection into their economy, and meanwhile, over here, we've got basically none of that.
Yeah, and it looks like they're painting it as like a patriotic project to like upgrade your washing machine or you're.
Like, no, they are, and guess what people probably will do that. You know, they of course they will. They're under like they feel as if they're under attack. We are just we're literally the people who instigate it, right, So of course they're going to be able to suffer if they want to. Also, let's compare the uh, you know the history of both of those nations. Who has more and longer and capacity of suffering. I wouldn't put my money on the most consumer obsessed country in the also world.
What are we suffering for?
That's what I'm shy.
We're not nobody, Like people don't want this. It's not popular. It's not like we're behind this project. So there's no unified like Americans are ready to you know, pay double at Walmart or whatever.
No, we're like, why are you doing this? To a stop it?
So, yeah, they're also in a in a much stronger position viz a VI their population and their support of the Chinese government's direction.
Here go, all right, let's get to Richard Hanania standing by.
So we had a fairly significant court development yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is that immigrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, and specifically to Bukelli's torture dungeon in El Salvador. There of course, was a question very early on with regard to how all of this went down in the Alien Enemies Act where the planes were in the air in a judge Judge Bosburg said you have to turn them around. You cannot do this, and the administration went ahead and flew those
planes anyway. So yesterday, let's put this up on the screen. Judge Bosburg found probable cause to hold the administration in contempt of court for defying his order to turn around those planes. One of those planes had a Brigo Garcia on it. Some I think two hundred and eighty three is the number of migrants that were on those three planes total. And he is demanding new details in order for officials to purge their contempt, meaning basically to rectify
the situation. So this is different. They haven't been found in contempt yet, but this appears to be building in this direction if the administration continues to fail to comply. So joining us to talk about this development and this entire situation with Il Salvador and the Kelly and the Trump administration denying these migrants any.
Sort of due process, We've got.
Richard Hannania He is a political commentator. He is the author of a number of books, including the Origins of Woke.
And also has his own substack. Good to see Richard.
Good to see Richard.
Glad to be here.
Yeah, of course. So just give us your top line, like what you have thought about this whole situation, and especially the way the administration is insisting that even after they admitted that they made an error with regard to kill mar Abrego Garcia, now they are absolutely refusing to do anything to correct that error, and Stephen has gone so far to even deny that it was an error at all in the first place.
Yeah, So there are these two cases proceeding on parallel tracks. There's the Abrago Garcia case, which is getting a lot of attention. There's also don't forget the Venezuelan case where they shipped off those hundreds of venezuelanstal Salvador, the country that they weren't from, and that's where that's the case where they are there's probable cost to find them in contempt. So we're going to have a couple of weeks here where the administration is going to come back.
Either they're going to be able.
To say we've answered your question satisfactory, satisfactorily, or there could be a kind of going forward with a criminal contempt charge. Yeah, the Abrego Garcia case, this one is even more frightening. I mean, both of them involved disobeying a court order. But this was the Supreme Court, and they went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said,
you have to facilitate his return. Now, the lower court had said you have to effectuate his return, and the Trump administration has gone and tried to read that very very narrowly. Now the so facilitate maybe is not as extreme as effectuate. There's a reason the Supreme Court preferred one phrasing in that nine oh decision over the other. But I think everyone agrees that they have to do something.
They can't just sit there and do nothing. And the and the administration argues that they've tried to argue at the lower court level that basically, if he shows up at a port of entry by himself, they'll let him in. Now, what's ridiculous about all this is they are kind of teasing the court system. I mean, somebody, uh uh, there's a there's a tweet that this, uh, the plane of Venezuelan's left after the judge's order, and then uh Bukele
tweets oopsie. And I think Rubio retweets it, and then after the right as this is going on, Bukele comes to the White House and they're sitting there and you know whatever our facilitate means. He's sitting next to you, you can ask him in a serious way, you can try to do something. And they don't decided to sit there. They giggle about it. Buke says, what am I supposed to do? Smuggle him into? The UN say it's like, no, this is part of an agreement the US paid you.
And now Senator Van Holland from Maryland goes down to Al Salvador and he says that the Vice president of the country tells him that basically, you know, what are we supposed to do?
Smuggle him in? And he says no.
Pam Bondi said that if you guys released him, you can go back. So they're playing this game. They're trying to interpret it very very narrowly. What's frightening about this is they go back and now they just deny what the Supreme Court says. Now Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, when they're talking to the press, we'll say we won nine to oh. I mean, it's just there's kind of not a connection to reality. So a lot of things
are at stake here. There's the principle that the president cannot just take someone off the streets and send them to a third world labor camp. They're floating the idea now that they do it to US citizens. We've seen people who are long term permanent residents being picked off those streets because they've runten the wrong op ed or had the wrong ideas about US policy towards Israel.
And so you know what's kind of what's next.
We have an administration that doesn't tell the truth, that will lie about basic things. They'll say a guy he's a convicted MS thirteen member, when he's not. They'll say they want at the Supreme Court while they lost. They don't see citizenship as a bride line. They don't see
any free speech respect for permanent residents. And so yeah, I think this is probably the most important thing going on in politics right now because the question is what are the limits here and what is going to be the pushback that stops them?
Richard, How does this fit? So let's put let's say C two up there on the screen. This was a tweet from jd Vance that I saw you reacting to this was somebody who was criticizing his initial defense of the Abrego Garcia deportation. Who was Jesse Single saying, I'd hate the smug, self asshirted bullshit. I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.
It's easy to go through life because when you think you've never had to seriously about why your worldview is justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands. Now, I know you've criticized some of this type of rhetoric in the past, but break down some of the your analytical frameworks about the Trump administration low human capital and how this all fits into that.
So JD is obviously not low human capital. He wrote a very well regarded book on his life. He went to a law school, a very selective institution. He's kind of a tragic figure at this point. He's obviously very smart, but he's part of a movement and he has ambitions, and he became vice president because he's part of a movement that has the characteristics of a cult of personality. At this point, and so JD, it's kind of fascinating
to watch him. He usually doesn't just straight up lie, but he always begins his statements with a criticism of the media, somebody like Jesse Single or the Biden administration, and a praise of Trump and then kind of goes off in this direction where he's not directly answering the point. And I think that that's what makes him a tragic figure. I think he's a smart person who wants to be respected by kind of the intelligency of people like us, but he's working for a man who I mean, we've
all seen it. We've seen kind of what Trump is at this point. It's been reported, and I've heard this from people firsthand that when you go in to apply for a job of the administration, one of the first things they ask you is do you think Trump won the twenty twenty election. And I've heard that's been reported in the media, but I've heard it's actually worse than that, because they go and they say how big do you think the victory? And there's really no answer you give
other that can give other than all fifty states. Because Trump is now saying he would have won all fifty states if it wasn't for vote fraud.
And I've always been encouraging the media.
When you have these people on these Sunday programs, Bestn't and these people like this, ask them if Trump won California. They will not contradict him. There is no way they'll contradict him. Stephen Miller might say he won California. Jd Vance might deflect and start blaming the media for asking a gotcha question. But these are the dynamics that we're dealing with, and it touches on everything. So this morning,
Trump says Powell can't be fired quickly enough. And the people who know anything about the economy say, you think tariffs are bad for the stock market, wait until we go after fed independence.
And from everything.
We've seen, there is just nobody in the room who will say anything other than yes, sir, yes, or yester. The movement has been purging everyone who has a spine or has a kind of personal integrity, or who will stand up to this man. And so this is why kind of the possibility space of the things that could happen. Sorry to be so dark, but I think the last month or two have really been clarifying about what's at stake.
I agree, I agree, you know you tweeted something this.
So you wrote a great piece that I thought was really insightful called The Based Ritual, about the social dynamics within this movement. And these are not like random fringe people on the internet anymore. These are people that, as you point out, are staffing jd Vance, They're staffing Josh Holly.
They're increasingly in important, significant positions throughout the administration. And you know about that based ritual direction and the way that everybody's just sort of competing to be increasingly counter signaling how how bad they are and how racist they are and how sexist they are, and no one wants to outdo or be outdone by the other people in
the group. You tweeted, it's funny that Trump isn't doing mass deportations, but he's got all of the magas passionately defending the idea of having a few hundred people in a labor camp. It's all about vice signaling for them. Give them one or two random guys to torture and MAGA is happy. Now, I would say I fully expect
them to move on to mass deportations. The acting ICE director is talking about setting up Amazon Prime for human beings, and the New Republican budget would make ICE the I think best funded law enforcement agency in the history of
the country, maybe of the world. So I'm not putting off the table that they're going in that direction next, but help us understand what are these internal dynamics that lead to a situation where these people are cheering random we don't even know who these guys are, but random people with no criminal record being locked up in a prison that is worse than what we reserve for serial killers here in the US.
Yeah.
I mean, we thought that virtue signaling was bad when everyone tried to show how anti racist and unseexist and nice they I don't think we really adequately considered kind of you can go in the opposite direction. And so there's this kind of thing where you talk to young conservatives or you're you're around them, and there is this.
Yeah, I call it the based ritual.
So basically they're trying to show that they are not politically correct, and this goes in the direction of kind of performative cruelty towards outsiders. I think we have our regime that kind of operates on that principle. It's loyalty to Trump, it's kind of performative cruelty. They you know, they would spit it as try to look out for the American worker, or look back, look out for the forgotten men and women and so forth. You know, they
have these justifications in their heads. But you know there's a there's a kind of disturbing and clear uh tendency to downplay the rottenness of the Hitler regime or kind of fascist states, or to defend literally anything Trump does, or be completely indifferent to whether we're sending, like you said, people who are innocent, not convicted of anything to these labor camps potentially indefinitely. We talk about Abrigo Garcia. The administration has been trying to find, you know, dig up stuff.
He had some kind of a domestic violence dispute, But we forgot about the Venezuelans, including the gay makeup artist, who I have not seen anyone say anything, as far as he's ever heard anybody he has any gang ties, he has any criminal work, nothing, just not even a single allegation. And I think that the understanding of why this happens, I think the movement it rots from the head.
It really is Donald Trump. If you have somebody who lies this much, if you have somebody who just demands loyalty above all else, who's not civil in public life, who kind of delights it in cruelty to I think that that attracts a certain kind of person, it repulses a different kind of person. And I think that these two dynamics, the base rituals so to speak, and the loyalty to Trump, I think together their freighting combination.
One of the things, Richard, that you were initially optimistic about was the quote tech right right and some of the more moderating influences. Let's say that you were praiseworthy of and the first administration you did write an interesting piece. Can we put d one please up there on the screen, which I actually quite enjoyed, and it's called the cat
turd to Silicon Valley billionaire pipeline must be broken. Can you break down kind of this phenomenon where you observe that in your framework, elite human capital and or people with skill sets and others who know better enter the Trump orbit and find themselves actually being brought down to the center of the gravity of the movement as opposed to raising the collective capacity of the entire movement.
So a few years ago, I wrote an article called Understanding the Tech Right, and I was the first person that I've seen use the phrase tech right. And this was at the beginning when people like Mark Andresid and Elon Musk were really starting to take a public role as kind of more Republican leaning figures. And I was optimistic at the time because, look, these were obviously smart, accomplished people. They've done a lot of things in their lives. I thought there was a human capital.
On the right.
There's been a fleeing from the Republican Party in the Trump era of people who are college educated and people who are informed and connected to reality, frankly, and I thought that would they would make things better. It was kind of the infusion of human capital that the right needed. Unfortunately,
it hasn't really worked out that way. And just from watching these people and how they use Twitter, Musk particularly, but a lot of the other ones, you realize that as intelligent as they might be and as accomplished they might as they might be in the business world, they really have absorbed what's kind of swimming They've they've they've imbued whatever is in the air in the conservative movement, and talking to these people, they often you know, they're
so radicalized. I think by what happened with COVID and what happened with wokeness and some of the personal coverage they received from people like Kara Swisher and the mainstream press that they they took a reaction that's understandable but was not the right way to go, which is that they shut out credible sources of information and they started just listening to Twitter and ons and so Elon Musk is sitting there all day, and I think he believes the stuff.
I think he believes the stuff about.
Massive voter fraud, putting the election, about voter without voter. I d our civilization is destroyed, and they're shipping it legalsh to win elections because this is what everyone arounds them, and everyone who they trust at this point believes. The problem is the right as a whole. As smart as any individual is, none of us are that smart as
an individual were. We only have intelligence because we're part of a community, because we know what sources of trust, because we have conversations like this, because we read newspapers and talk to scientists and people in politics and people with sensible views on these things.
So once you shut yourself out.
It doesn't matter how high your IQ is going to you can follow into social media radicalization and you could have the worldview that.
Just doesn't make sense.
And I think we see that most clearly in what's happened with goage. Look, there's sympathetic to the idea of smaller government, sympathetic to the idea that government can.
Be more efficient.
There's people at places like AI and Cato Institute, and if those are your goals, there are smart people you could find who will put you on the right path. And they've been thinking about this for a really long time. Elon Musk has not done this at all. He basically came in and said it's going to be me and a few of my engineering buddies and basically what the priorities and government should be. I'm just going to listen
to kind of whatever is going viral on Twitter. And in the end, he didn't save He's not going to save a fraction of the money that he saved. A lot of the stuff that they cut was ended up being very valuable, things like basic scientific research, things like.
Statistics, getting statistics to make.
Sure government does run more efficiently, stuff that doesn't cost that much and probably is some of the most cost effective stuff in government you could do.
But because the fact that he just has a.
Simple idea, I'm going to cut government and not think about how or why or I don't need to think about that, it's kind of been it's been a debacle, and I think we see that across the board with these guys when they're when they're they're being part of politics, but also like they're swimming in the waters of the Trump movement.
Yeah.
I mean, on the one hand, yes, in terms of their stated goals, it's been a disaster. Like he's he was a result, well I'm going to cut two trillion dollars. Now he's like meekly in the cabinet meeting, like I'm going to cut one hundred and fifty billion, and even.
That's a freaking lie.
Right.
On the other hand, you know, he hates government, and government function doesn't function now, like social Security. Try to go to the Social Security Office and see how that goes. The agencies that were regulating his businesses, they've been defenestrated, Like they will not be able to regulate his business, nor would they because of you know, the corruption, conflicts of interest that are involved so I think from his perspective,
in certain ways it was also a success. But which I do want to ask you a little bit about your views. Is the first time having you on since you were you know, revealed your anonymous writings back in the day, which were you know, white nationalists, which you've disavowed. But I still do have some questions about your ideology that I wanted to, you know, to hear from you on. Especially when I hear you making the distinction between low
human capital and elite human capital. It raises the question for me whether this is just some sort of eugenics ideology in another form, like you're no longer drawing the lines around.
Like strictly IQ.
You'd previously supported for sterilization for people with low IQs. You know, previously you had an idea of different racial hierarchies in your head. Perhaps that's in the past, but is this just a new way to separate down which humans are worthy and which humans are unworthy?
So I will say that I did write some things that were very bad and straightforwardly advocating sterilizing people with LOIQ.
I said, here's an argument for it.
Now at what I won't litigate it because it was all that and I just want to forget that stuff ever happened.
Okay, sterilization of the unfit is the only way to stop the decline of the word.
No, but it was a longer thing, like if you believe X, Y Z. Anyways, whatever, it was terrible stuff. Everything I believed in twenty eleven is bad regardless. But yeah, as far as the human capital stuff, look, there is you know what I write about these things like the base Ritual, and I write about where the right has gone.
I see myself.
From twelve years ago, when I was an anonymous basement dweller writing these racist creeds. I've seen that person become the Republican Party, and I've kind of if I had stayed that person, maybe I would be in the administration at this point. But I changed, and I think it's horrifying, and I think I have some kind of insights into kind of what's going on here. And so the idea that human capital is kind of a variation of that.
I'm not going to say that there's I'm not going to go in the other direction to say there's no such thing as intelligence.
There is no such thing, or just to clarify sure, there are human beings to have differences, right, It's fine to note those differences, like, I have no problem with that. Where I have a problem is when you interpret those differences as meaning that different human beings get different rights.
And that's really my question to you, and to me, that's sort of the foundation of like eugenesis type ideology is like, well, we're going to decide these people are better than those people, and that means that those people that we decided are not as good. They're not going to get the same rights, They're not going to get to have the same to say, they're not going to get to have children or whatever it is. The program
is that we decide for them. And you know, I think that type of ideology is very much how you end up, for example, cheering the you know, deportation to a slave labor camp of people that you've decided are unworthy of basic human rights.
So that's my question for.
You, is do you still have that view that some people are less worthy of the same rights as other people.
I'm glad you asked the question in that way, Crystal, because yeah, I think you're right. I think that's the right thing to be concerned about. Do you go to a place where, look, there's one thing to analyze things and say, why does the right accept anti VAX's arguments while the left does? And human capital is I think a way to understand that the right is now less educated. They have all kinds of crazy ideas and all kinds
of things, and you kind of need that analysis. You don't understand how anti vax goes from a left wing cause to something that's embraced by Republicans without understanding this and RFK and his general crankery. Now, the question is does that mean that low human capital?
As we say, it's.
Kind of it's kind of a harsh term, and it's something that was built on Twitter. But let's say people with less cognitive capabilities or less education, do they deserve less rights?
And no, I've stood against that.
I mean, when I talk about Abrego Garcia, I know nothing about him personally.
He may be a gang member for all I know.
He's not a noble prize winning physicist or whatever. But his rights matter, and the rule of law matters, and the idea that we're all citizens equal before the government. I mean, he's not a citizen, but still there are some rules in how you treat people. Those are important principles to me. So I think that we have to
create a space. I saw people on the Blue Sky trying to cancel Mattic Galacias the other day because he said some things where, oh, I don't like to look into the origins of group differences, but you know, I want to treat everyone equal, and we still should be concerned about racism and we should have to have booze against racism.
All that stuff I agree with now.
But they still wanted to cancel him because he kind of cryptically according to Will Stancil, and these people on Blue Sky expressed a belief in group differences, according to them, And I think what we have to do is, yes, hold on to this idea that everyone has value, hold on to the idea of fair treatment and individual rights. And that's the important thing. That's how we don't go down the path of kind of where Maga is going.
Got it, so, Richard, to push you a little bit here, then I would say, it was pretty evident if you're run in many of the same circles I do. I knew a lot of these folks, and I knew that they were going to get into power. You were pretty well informed as well, and you still voted for Trump. So what's with the about face in this expectation, you know, despite the education, your own analysis and all this, in what way was this not all that expected.
In your vote and for the administration?
So I over indexed, I think on the first term. The first term was basically a normy Republican administration.
I liked a lot of the policies.
I thought they were going to do the things I advocated for on de dei issues. And then they appointed the Supreme Court justices that Trump appointed. That's really some of the only pushback that he's getting in a second administration.
And the and so I was expecting something of a repeat.
I knew that MAGA had changed, I knew that the Trump movement had become something different, but basically I thought that we would get that. And then on the night of the election, I was on Destiny's live stream and he was we had we share a negative view of RFK for his vaccine stance and basically everything else that he believes. And he said something along the line of RFK will be HHS Secretary, and I said, no, RFK will not be HHS secretary.
I actually put some money on it.
I put my money where my mouth was, and I said, if he does, I might have said something as explicit as I will have made a mistake. And RFK does get appointed as HHS secretary. People around me are telling me these things, and we talk about some kind of social circles, and everyone I talked to it's kind of.
Things like I do. And so they're telling me, don't worry about RFK.
They're going to put people around him, Peter Teal, you know, these bioaccelerationists. They're going to be his deputies, and they're going to box him in. Now he's he's going after vaccines. He's doing everything that we thought. And I eventually stopped listening to these people, and you know, and then you had the tariff thing. Now, look, I'm in good company as far as the market goes. I mean, I believe in the wisdom of the of the market. All else equal,
it's a good way to go. And people did not think the tariffs would be this bad. Trump was promising ten percent across the board. People say, WHOA, Okay, that's the that's the extreme end of what he might do. Instead, he comes out with this chart, with this, with this formula that makes no sense and has like thirty forty percent on different countries and one hundred something percent on China. And so, you know, I was expecting Republicans to push back a little. There was a little talk that they
might not confirm RFK. There was talk that Bill Cassidy would vote against him, but they all kind of folded in line.
And so, look, I misjudged this.
I underestimated just kind of how much of a cult of personality it had become, and how kind of unrestrained he is to indulge in his instincts. And you know, a lot of these mistakes were understandable at the time, but they were mistakes.
I saw this wrong.
What about the authoritarianism, because I mean, we all lived through January sixth. You were talking earlier about how now it's a litmus test to get in the administration, you have to say not a lead to Trump win in twenty twenty one, all fifty states this time around, all of those sorts of things, like, it's just hard for me to imagine how that could be a surprise. Like we've known this man even before or the president. We've
known him for years. He lies about everything. This you know, deep like racial and IQ view of the world has always been embedded in him when he was up, you know, when he was backed into a corner after he did lose in twenty twenty, then his most authoritarian instincts come out.
We knew in the interim, and.
You were a contributor to Project twenty twenty five, so you were directly involved in some of the planning that was done.
To make sure that all of the guardrails.
That were in place last time were completely stripped away. We knew the Supreme Court had also given him this sort of like blanket immunity.
So what about on that piece, like, did.
You have any concerns going in about the likely suppression of free speech and authoritarian tactics and authoritarian tendencies that you know, even I have to admit have gone even beyond what I expected, and I was pretty alarmist. I think the record will show going into this administration.
Yeah, I've always taken January sixth seriously, and I've always taken the idea seriously that Trump did try to over turned the election in twenty twenty And I said, I said, he should have been in jail for it. I mean, I basically was the only person who probably endorsed Trump and thought he should have been and thought he should have been in jail. At the same time, I can look back and say, well, it was a one time thing.
He can't run again. I was actually afraid he loses.
He's going to be the Republican nominee every year for the rest of our rest of our lives. And well he's still you know, Steve Bannon is going out there saying he's got to run for a third term. So maybe that maybe that didn't even take care of it. But yeah, you're absolutely you know, you're absolutely right. I mean I think that, Look, there's a lot of things that were totalitarian about the left, a lot of the
speech restrictions, a lot of the COVID stuff. I think we still haven't had a full reckoning for what they were doing at the state level, and here in California they were masking students, high school students outside for three years into twenty twenty two. I mean, it was really kind of there was a kind of leftist authoritarianism too, that's worth worrying about.
But I agree with.
You that Trump is kind of just in his personal just his personal sort of disregard for any kind of concern with truth or constitutional horms.
Uh.
And so yeah, it's something that's concerning. Look, like you said, we didn't think it was this bad. I don't think anyone said before the election that they're gonna they're going to kick out forward students for writing op bets criticizing Israel.
Uh. You know, it's.
It's like he said, he's just saying.
That they were going to foreign students he did.
I mean, that's where I like that piece Actually doesn't surprise me at all, because he did advertise that he was ultimately going to do that.
And I agree. You know, I was a critic from the.
Left of like the excesses of wokeism and authoritarian tendencies with regard to that. And you know, I think mistakes were made in COVID as well, even though I think especially the beginning, many of those mistakes.
Were well meaning and we didn't know what the.
Deal was going to be with kids in schools and whatever, and the school closures were probably the biggest.
Mistake that were made.
People are being kidnapped off the street by masked officers of the state for writing op bets like there's just no equivalent under a Democrat administration, in my opinion, to what we're seeing unfold under Trump is in two point zero.
Yeah, and I don't disagree with you at all.
I think that you know, my thinking, I'm trying to get back into my.
Mind before the election. I appreciate that.
Yeah, But at this point, I think you're right. I think I can say that I'm not on the fence anymore. Like that stuff we complained about the left the other you know, last year or two years ago, that happened, it was bad, we can criticize them for it. But this is completely on a different level. And I think the thing we learned here is like character matters a lot.
Like what I talked about the Trump movement and it becoming a cult and the base ritual and kind of what I saw personally with these people who were in kind of Trump's orbit and who are going to probably be taking over the government. I should have taken that more seriously. I was just thinking kind of at a level of Okay, there's the Republican Coalition, there's voters, there's the market checking him, there is you know, there is kind of the Republican establishment.
There are courts and so forth.
I should have been thinking, like what kind of people are going to be staffing the government.
And it's not just Trump. It's the fact that.
They're all trump Ists and true believing Trump is at this point. And that was the mistake. I think these ideas that like, it's funny because conservatives they have this thing about you know, virtue and leaders and how we've had a decline in morality. And it's not just Chris Ruffo was treating this the other day and I got in exchange with him. It's not just about IQ. You might say there's lead human capital, but there's wisdom and there's.
All the like.
But Donald Trump. It's just like, but Donald Trump. That's like the only thing you could say to that, And it's kind of insane. There are arguments about character and like you know, civility and the need to pay attention to our inheritance and norms. All that stuff was right, they just became part of a cult of like the man who is the antithesis of all of that. So it's it's a kind of remarkable dynamic.
Yeah, so let's return to Elon. We're both very curious about your take on this, Richard. Let's put D three up there on the screen. This is some revelations about Elon and the way that he manages kind of his harem of a young women, some of them when he's met on Twitter, often buying them off and encouraging them to have his children. Apparently there's a non number of what is it fourteen children, but could be as high as fifty. We were just curious, how does this fit
into your elite human capital model here? Is is this an example of elite human capital over? Well, yeah, you're a pro natalist and this is a high IQ individual and he's very really spreading his seed, just like Jenghis Khan or any other person with absolute power.
So what do you make this look?
Yeah, you're right on the surface.
You might say, well, if you're a natalist and you leave at IQ God, and you know, I don't judge these things. If people want to have a lot of children, I generally think that's a great thing. I think that what we've seen is the kind of person who thinks like this, I'm just going to set spread my seed to the greatest extent possible. There there's somebody like Genghis Khan proNT to violence, or there's someone like Elon Muss who just kind of doesn't really have a moral sense.
So I think this is the problem with you know, a lot of ideas might sound good in theory, but in practice you have to kind of look at the kinds of people who are attracted to them and look at how these things work out in practice. And I think it's probably not a coincidence that the West had a Christianity and a norm of monogamy and didn't think like this and ended up creating the modern world.
Yeah.
I think it's a lesson here about taking starting with IQ natalism and not kind of thinking about character and what happens when you try to apply these ideas in a person's life.
Yeah. Well, and it's not only that.
I mean he explicitly, according to the article, has told people that he's worried about the high birth rates in developing countries and so he wants to combat that with his legion of you know, his high IQ whatever.
Before the apocalypse.
So I mean there's also these like directly, I would again say, like eugenics inspired ideas that come out here. So I don't know that it's he doesn't have an eye ideology or I think you said moral compass or moral I'm not sure the language that you use. But no, I think he does have an ideology, and it's a really evil one.
Yeah, I think he does have an ideology. I think he has kind of instincts and ideas about the world. Now, to be fair to him, I've never seen him say we've got to limit the birth rate in developing countries or anything like that. But yeah, I think that his entire idea of you know, it's weird because like you would think, well, somebody who's kind of an IQ snob, you might be like me, you might look down on
kind of the conservative influencer space. But no, I mean he will denounce the entire class of educated people and people who know anything about the world, but then love these people who are less intelligent, less honest because they all worship him. Right, So there's this ideology, but at the same time, it's just kind of a classic kind of selfishness, big man behavior, and that's not socially conducive.
To anything good.
So how would you describe your political ideology now, Richard? Like, where do you kind of fit? How can people make sense of you.
I you know, the funny thing is, for you know, for all the things I've written and all the little bit of trolling I do online, I'm a pretty pretty normy guy. I mean, the people I talk to these days are like, you know, scholars at AI or you know, Cato, just like normal kind of libertarians who are concerned about norms and think the American experiment has been a good thing and we should try to preserve it, and caring about the well functioning institutions.
So I'm a libertarianish classical liberal.
For all the kind of you know, kind of eccentricities that you see and the things I've written and the things I still write today, my politics underneath it all are actually sort of normal.
All right, Well, I will I will say just you know, I also have changed my mind on certain things because of this Trump administration. And one of them is something that you touched on, which is just how much character does matter? And you know, I think the liberals were right on certain aspects of that. I previously would have been like, ah, who cares about the norms and they're so obsessed with like these different things about his personality or whatever.
No, I think you're right.
I think those things mattered a lot more than I gave them credit for mattering. And now that his personality traits have not only taken over the government, but I mean, these are it's the fish does rot from the head down, and that has to do not just with this administration, but with the whole country. And when you see the most powerful person in the country, in the world who is narcissistic, utterly.
Shameless, lies, is cruel, etc.
Of course you're going to have people think that that's the way to succeed, that those are traits that are worthy of emulation. And so I also, you know, just you know, since you're talking about your evolution and your thought, I also have evolved in the way that I think about these things and have changed my mind about how
important those things. In certain way, It's like it's made me sort of more conservative in that way of like, oh, you know what, actually the character of our leaders, like these squishy traits and these norms, they actually did kind of matter and I want them back.
See it's interesting. I would almost do a reverse.
I think, Richard, what you've convinced me most of all is that competence and elite human capital matters more than anything, and that, as you pointed out, let's say with the JD Van's tweet, right, you and I both know that that is a straw man argument about deportation. That's not about Abrago, Garcia and El Salvador in prison and defying
a social Supreme Court order. But that is one where somebody who has been through this process cannot debase themselves to actually argue at the level of drump for lack of a better word, to be like, no, this is good and we're also sending American citizens. And so I mean, Richard, you've been through many things. But I'll say this, man, I've been reading you for probably five straight years. When's the first time we talked twenty twenty, I want to say, when you put out your CSPI study.
Yeah, probably the report on the right.
You were one of the first people who ever truly caused me to change my mind, and you have caused me to change my mind many of the time since. So we'll have a link down the description to yourself stack and I will always read you.
You're a fascinating man.
Well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate that, appreciate the discussion Richard, thank you, thank you. So guys, in terms of Doge's supposed aspirations as a cost cutting exercise, we can officially now.
Say it has failed.
Elon has gone from claiming he was going to cut two trillion dollars out of the federal debt budget to now meekly at a cabinet meeting massively downgrading that estimate. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Elon himself.
How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted six point five trillion dollar harvest Biden budget?
Well, I think we can do at least two trillion.
Yeah.
Well, thanks to your fantastic leadership, this amazing cabinet, and the very talented dog team, I'm excited to announce that we anticipate savings in FY twenty six from reduction of waste and brought by one hundred and fifty billion dollars. And I mean, and some of it is just absurd, like people getting unemployment insurance.
You haven't been born yet.
I mean, I think anyone can appreciate whether, I mean, come on, that's just crazy.
So from two trillion to one hundred and fifty billion, and even that is just not even true. To put this up on the screen from the New York Times, they dug in to what they're even actually claiming.
The headline is DOGE.
Is far short of its goal and still overstating its progress. Elon Musk now says this group will produce only fifteen percent of the savings it promised, but even that estimate is inflated with errors. And in particular, they went and looked at some of the top cost savings here that they had claimed and it still was inaccurate, or they were double counting, or it's just you know, it's just preposterous. And not to mention that some of the things that
they're cutting are actually going to make the government more expensive. So, for example, the massive cuts at the IRS are going to make the IRS less able to do his job of collecting tax revenue, which means that the budget deficit is going to get even larger. So layer on top of that saga the political failure in Wisconsin. He seems to have diminished power and sway within the Trump administration.
But on the other hand, you know.
I while those aspects have failed, DOG has been very successful at making the federal government, destroying certain key elements of the federal government.
And I've always said that that.
Was really more of the actual goal than any sort of budget deficit, fiscal hawk type of stuff, and that's pretty clear from the beginning of what they were actually trying to accomplish.
I'm not so sure I think that it was.
The initial goal was to actually do allegedly what they wanted to do, and then it became eventually convenient and acknowledged internally that that was impossible, and the longer that the chaos and all of that began to happen, then yes, it became like destruction in and of the end for itself,
as in I wouldn't underestimate like genuine stupidity. This comes off of our discussion with Richard, and one of the things that I as well, you know, talking about Richard, is what the hypocrisy on all of this is what actually drives me the craziest, because look, even if you believe as you do, it was a cynical effort from the beginning, there are many people who actually do believe in reducing government.
Right.
As I said initially before the election, one of the most popular bro elements that I would often hear about from Trump was does. It was one of the things people were most excited about. Do not underestimate this. People hate the government. Yes, you know, they may like Noah or whatever, but like broadly people's interaction. I mean, who all just paid their taxes right, it's a pain in the ass or the E file service or whatever, which by the way, does took away to talk about them
in a second. My point broadly is that the animus and behind that was popular. I still think it's actually quite popular, although maybe less so now that it's happened
with Doge. But the problem is is that for you exploit that in then not only reduction non permanence stupidly chaotically, and then even if you take their initial numbers now at face value, put the next one please up on the screen, is that Trump and Hegseth are promising a one trillion dollar Pentagon budget, which would mean that you would actually take all of your new alleged savings and you would then just give it to the Pentagon.
And so what have we actually accomplished?
Noah has reduced capacity, social security phone lines are there. The entire team responsible for green lighting nuclear energy permits have been fired or are trying to be brought back right now, My friends in the nuclear regulatory space are freaking out about dos.
Can we all didn't we all vote for that?
I think so about abundant energy. And then so meanwhile, we're also doing a trillion dollar Pentagon budget. And then let's zoom out to the Congress. The US Congress, Republican led Congress, wants to cut a trillion dollars in spending and they want to increase the budget for the Pentagon. That's not possible, not possible without cutting massive social services. You could even do discretionary what you could wipe out the entire thing. You couldn't wipe out a trillion dollars.
Its basic math.
If you don't believe me, go play with chet, GPT or any of these AI thinks. Say cut one trillion dollars from the budget, don't touch any social services or the Pentagon. See how easy it is to get there.
It's not.
Look this is simple balance sheet arithmetic. And so when you look at all of that, the Republican Congress has decided not to increase taxes.
On anyone making over one million dollars per year.
They've decided to extend the vast majority of the TCGAA tax cuts, they want to attack manufacturing tax credits. Not a single thing is in line with each other. And I think that is what is that is what is now being coming clear to the American people over time. I think they genuinely did give Doze and all that a lot of runway. Like I said, do not underestimate how much.
People hate the government. You really cannot underestimate that.
But it has been what is it now, how many days of the Trump administration? Eighty something. We're coming up on the end of the one hundred days, the story of the worst hundred this is going to be a crazy book. And then Oxford History from one hundred years from now, the story of the first hundred days from the Trump administration will be Doge, tariffs and El.
Salvador, which is nuts.
That is not what you would want if you want a successful administration, you are effectively hanging yourself for the duration of your presidency. You had a left which has never been more moralized in modern history or unpopular, and then you reinvigorated it for no reason or discernible impact in the future.
I mean, look, I am famously wrong and could be. He could be massively popular.
And JD could be cruising to twenty twenty eight, but a lot of shit would have happened in the interim.
Yeah, let's look, let's be honest too. Three years is a long time, all right, Nobody would have predicted that we're here today, right.
Vive shifted to quote unquote a lot more than people would have thought, so it can shift back, it easily, could.
I don't particularly see it. But I didn't see this either.
Well, and here's the thing with Doge and with the tariffs, the real negative impacts of those things have not yet even hit.
Well, they will, they have not.
Yet even hit.
And so I mean, this is why I I just don't believe Doge was ever really about cost cutting because it is just basically, I mean, we were saying from the very beginning, right, even if you cut every single federal government worker, you're not saving a significant percent of the federal budget. And a lot of not all of, but a lot of the playbook from Doge has also followed from Project twenty twenty five. So it's not like
there wasn't some level of a concerted plan here. And with Elon himself, like obviously he's this huge federal government contractor, and he hates that these government agencies were daring to regulate his businesses. They're not going to be doing that anytime soon. The level the amount that they have cut
enforcement of what white collar crime is truly insane. And that comes from the you know, the National Labor Relations Board, which governs obviously labor relations, so that's gutted and cannot function.
You had the cpp B, which is like the anti scam Bureau that helps consumers who've been scammed by you know, big business or small business or any business that's been completely gutted, and they were the ones who were set up to regulate x if X moves into as they're planning they have to deal with visa into payment processing.
You know.
He went after the particular board within the National Transportation Agency that was regulating automated vehicles, something that he was hating and you know, was bothering him with regard to his tesla's. So in those ways he got what he wanted. Now, I do think that the probably more maximalist original goals of effectively and this actually this came out in the
article about him and his Harem too. He said, well, I can't be president but I can make Trump be precedent, with the implication being like, oh, but I'll basically be the one running the show.
Like the more maximust goals of I'm just.
Going to be able to effectively take all of the government's money for my SpaceX Mars boondoggle dream project. I think that is not going to come to fruition. And I do think that the fact that he has now been politically hobbled by going so hard in Wisconsin, going all in in Wisconsin and then getting you know, smacked down with a double digit loss, I think that has
probably significantly diminished his political power within Trump's fear. As you know, all of the these guys are optics, branding people.
So even that image I showed you of.
Him like seated at the table at the cabinet meeting he wasn't even invited to, He just like showed up for as one of many around the table, is so different compared that image to the image of him standing hovering over Trump, who was at the resolute desk with his kid running around and web these bars on the desk.
And what askrit is still there?
By the way, I'll never understand that kid well, So you've got fourteen kids.
Why that one?
I mean, not to be mean, but like's not kind of favoritism for real though, for sure, yeah.
For sure, But putting the kid the dynamics with the kids aside, there's a whole other conversation like that. The imagery of him sort of standing lording over Trump and doing things and then asking permission later and Trump giving him all sorts of runway is a is a massive contrast from him sitting one of many around the cabinet, around that table and you know, having to meekly submit his You know, oh, mister King, you're amazing and thanks to your wonderful leadership, dear, we were able to cut
one hundred and fifty billion dollars from the federal budget deficits, So.
You know, I think we are.
I do think DOSE is sort of like petering out as a project. But again that doesn't mean they haven't done tremendous damage that will take many, many years to recover from and that services won't be damaged. Social Security IRS. We actually have the chart we can show you here. This is E five. Put this up on the screen. In terms of the IRS staffing levels just fell off a Cliff.
Now, in fairness, they were.
The number of staffers of the IRS were significantly increased under the Biden administration with the idea of like, we need more people to be able to go after rich tax cheats in particular, and not just be going after like waitresses for their tips. Well, but now it has plummeted down to fifty thousand. We haven't seen this level in years, I don't know when was the last time. So that's going to have a huge impact, Like which people are going to be able to get away with
not paying their taxes. It's going to be much easier for them if you can hire lawyers and you've got the money to be able to fight and have set up tax shelters and all this sort of stuff. The IRS is going to be very hard pressed to be able to go after those people. So while DOGE as a project has in some ways failed, it doesn't mean that it hasn't done long term damage.
Yeah.
Sure on the IRS front. I'll just say this to blue in the face. They made themselves unpopular. They're the ones who got their new money and then did their little Venmo rules and turn the entire small business in poor community against them. From years of automated like those what is it, automated automated investigations into people making less
than twenty two thousand dollars per year. They blame resource allocation, etc. But you know their own practice is not exactly one where people are going to be shedding a lot of tears maybe a decade from now if there's less in our deficit. But I would say broadly on the Doze project, you could view it two ways. Yes, there is quote
like damage done. I also am like I've been saying, I really think that the legacy of the stupidity currently of much of the Trump administration will be to negatively polarize the American public in the same way that people were. I mean, if you think back to the nineteen seventies and the chaos of the nineteen seventies, people were negatively polarized on trusting government.
That's why they'd like to Jimmy Carter.
They were negatively polarized on inflation, part of the reason that they were so broadly accepting of the Reagan administration. They were negatively polarized around what they saw as a failure of the prolonged New Deal period. Same thing why neoliberalism was really ushered in. So in a similar way,
we are seeing failures in DOGE. We're seeing failures on tariffs, we're seeing failures on immigration, and in all three of those you will find then that the sea saw nature of politics will swing back in a much more different direction. So if look, I mean Trump was elected, I would say, with a broad enough mandate on all three of those issues, if you actually wanted to stop him, this is a pretty good outcome for you, because you're going to win a east An argument. They're in the future and be
on pretty strong ground. Especially I think whenever it comes to government capacity, prices and tariffs and those other things.
I do not want this to happen.
And as part of why I think it's really bad the way that this is all basically shaken out in the first hundred days. And I know enough looking in the past to say it's pretty hard to crawl out of a hole like this once you've actually done it. That's what I was saying about the first one hundred days. While it's certainly possible vibes etc. Could swing back, I don't see that path right now. I think they have dug themselves deep, deep, into a hole that.
Crawling out of.
You know, even politically, for them not to mention policy wise is just going to be I just don't see the way there's possible.
Yeah, you're crippling the economy, potentially sending it into a recession.
You're cutting taxes for the rich.
Yeah soon, you're cutting social services for everybody else. You know, you've made it so that the some of the things that people actually appreciate and about the federal government being able to get their Social Security checks has been completely broken. So yeah, of course there's going to be reaction against that.
And you know, we've been tracking, especially this week, the approval rating for Trump really across the board has fallen off significantly, not just with regard to his overall approval, but specifically is handling of the economy completely reversed. He has the worst numbers with independence of any president, including himself ever at this point in their presidency, and the pain of tariffs has not yet hit. Whatever dos just been doing in the government, which we have very little
transparency into. By the way, whatever they've been doing in the government is going to hobble these agencies and incapacitate them for years and potentially cause the kind of crises that we've been concerned about over time. Those things haven't even hit yet, so it's hard to imagine how they on this current path. You know, Trump's not going to
do a one ed that's not who he is. Right Instead, and this is just a quick preview of my monologue, like, instead, he's going to lean more into the authoritarian, like let
me suppress the descent. As there's more of a sort of like grassroots and institutional backlash to him and resistance to him, You're going to see more authoritarian tactics in the same way that after he lost the election in twenty twenty, you know, a referendum on his popularity and you know, the threat to obviously the greatest threat to his power, that was when he was at his most unhinged and most authoritarian in the first term. And I fully expect us to be heading into that.
Yeah maybe, well, you know the other possibility of that is that when you lose your grip on the government and you began explicitly challenging the court. I mean I saw a Supreme Court watcher be like, if you're Justice Roberts, Now, that whole what we remember, we talked about the facilitate language. You're just not going to do that in the future. You're going to be like, no, I think that's what it's not happening.
I think that's right because they have to be watching the way that the admitted station is just lying about their order and be like, oh, we cannot give them an inch at You know.
You can crack down all you want if you're Trump, but any Republican, good luck to you who is in power right now, because when the Dems take the House, you are Elon alone. It will probably have to spend one hundred million in legal fees just in terms of what the House committees are going to investigate on SpaceX and on Twitter and Tesla alone. So that's just Elon for everybody else in the administration.
Oh my god.
I hope you people have lawyers upon lawyers on retainer because it's going to be not going to be fun for all those you know, the contempt challenges. Remember Bannon went to prison for contempt, so did Peter Lamarro.
Yeah.
I mean these people they can literally lock your ass up. And then in the future, let's say, you know, if this continues and you have a Democratic president, who's in charge. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't want to be a Christian charity right now when we're talking about Harvard University and tax exempt status and all that. So still I still see a major backfire. That's I'm in there for Donald Trump.
Last thing, I do want to put this last alum eight e four guys up on the screen just so you know what we're not like cooking the books here or lying. This is cumulative federal spending by day, and where we are in twenty twenty five is.
Above where we were in twenty twenty four.
So you know, all of those purported savings not showing up here whatsoever. And as I mentioned before, you know, even their one hundred and fifty billion dollar claim is total bullshit. That New York Times report they found that one of their largest claims involves canceling a contract that did not even exist.
So those are the sorts of things that we're talking about here.
There you go.
But there is one good thing sort of maybe maybe I'll get to that caveats, but maybe encouraging news coming out of the Trump administration.
Let's get to that.
Let's get to that, Onie Ron, Let's put this up there on the screen. There's so many things that I want to say about this. First of all, it's the headline Trump waved off Israeli strike after divisions emerged in his administration. Let's break down this extraordinary report clearly leaked from the administration kind of has a screw you to Israel and showing their plans for what they presented in the Oval Office.
Quote.
Israeli officials recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May next month. They were preparing to carry them out and at the time were optimistic the United States would sign off. The goal of the proposal was to set back Tehran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more.
Quote.
Almost all plans would have required United States help, not just to defend Israel, but also to ensure that the Israeli attack was successful, making the United States a central part of the attack itself. For now, Trump has chosen diplomacy over military action. However, in his second term he is eager to avoid being sucked into another war in the Middle East, and his open negotiations with Tehran, giving it a deadline of just a few months to negotiate a deal over its program.
Earlier this month.
Trump informed Israel of his decision the United States would not support an attack, discussed it with Netan Yahoo when he visited Washington just last week, and told him in the Oval Office that that was not going to happen.
Quote.
Israel has long planned to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, rehearsing bombing runs and calculating how much damage you could do, but support within the government has grown after Iran suffered a string of setbacks just last year. They think that they're weak and that they can strike now now. According to them, there were plans on the table not just to facilitate the bombing, but then to require and push the United States to bring more military assets to the region.
Remember how we were covering here on the show about all new military assets that are headed that way. It was specifically after a push by the Israeli government on this now, thank god for now.
Exactly Ye, we're exactly right.
And so looking inside, it's very interesting. There were quote a range of officials who spoke out against any of these attacks. Tulsea Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, said that the build up of American weaponry would potentially spark wider conflict with Iran. The United States does not want jd Vance, Pete Hegseth, and apparently also Susie.
Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff.
However, the idiot dunce Mike Waltz was also in the room quote frequently one of the most hawkish voices on Iran, and while he was skeptical about our Israel's plan to succeed without US assistance, back to the plan anyway, And there are several people who are inside the administration who are openly supporting this, people like Marco Rubio, many other outside voices that are in the admin. So I do not want to downplay this is good news and it's bad.
So the good news is that they have opted for a deal quote on a timeline of a few months for now before any sort of strike is on the table. The bad news is, I happen to remember the Iran deal, it took years to get the JCPOA to be negotiated. Second to that, as you guys cover yesterday on Counterpoints, there is a full scale purge happening right now in the Pentagon. There have been three top officials who have been kicked out of the building in some sort of
crazy power struggle. I haven't fully gotten all the detail. Nobody really seems to know. All I happen to know is that the people who are most on Pete Hegsett's side and are the most America first just happened to be frog marched out of the building. Okay, that's not good, right. These are the very people who I would want right around Pete Hegsett, who would be quashing some of the
stuff that's happening. Mike Walltz meanwhile, even though he literally put Jeffrey Goldberg on a signal chain, Oh, he gets to stay right. But these people who they're accusing of leaking, they're getting frog marched.
Interesting, got it.
The point is that personnel around Trump is pure chaos. In some days, Marco Rubio's in charge. Mike Wallace is still around there. Some days he's listening to JD and he's listening to Tulca Gabbard, but there is no guarantee that he doesn't just turn his head and listen to the other guy. We have Steve Wikoff, all those guys. They're in control for right now, but as we saw with the ceasefire deal, they can be out of power momentarily.
Nothing is guaranteed and or certain right now. I don't think the stakes could literally be higher because Israel, you have to admire their hutzpa. They don't even develop war plans without US backing. They they don't even pretend to have operation. That doesn't mean, hey, big daddy, you have to come in here and actually do something about it. So let's all be very clear about what this strike and all that means. It's also the thing about BB
is he's not even creative. This is the exact same plan that he came up with in nine that Jeffrey Goldberg, by the way, is the one who revealed about and tried to push President Obama to support Bebe to do.
This is fifteen years ago.
It's the exact same plan, almost to the letter, about what the US is going to do and how Israel is going to be the tip of the spear, but the US would be the overall security umbrella there. So that's where we're at right now. The deal is currently being negotiated. The timeline is not good. Trump could change his mind at any time, and the fate of the world is hanging in the balance.
And what Emily was saying is that the people who want him to go with BB bomb Iran plan. They're saying, like, oh, you're just negotiating a deal just like Obama.
You know, they are get under his skin.
And I mean, unfortunately, there is some truth to the fact that any deal that he would get would probably bear some similarities to what Obama did. But that is I mean, first of all, I think the original deal was actually a good deal. It was one of the signature achievements of the Obama administration. It's really unfortunate Trump back down. It's also unfortunate Biden didn't get back in something covered extensively at the time.
But I have.
Doctor Tree DEPARSI you evaluated and analyzed this New York Times article. I just wanted to share his insights because he's such an expert.
Here, he says.
Number One, last week, Trump told Israel that the US would not support an Israeli attack in Iran while talks were being conducted. That's the headline from the PC saying, these are the key pieces to take away from it. Number Two, in the Israeli plan of attack, the US would have to play a central role. Israel itself has no military option. So that's what Zager was saying keep that in mind. Number three. Still, the Israeli plan would only push back the Iranian program one year. More attacks
would be needed after that. That means Israel wants to bring the US into a forever war with Iran.
Yes, that's what we're talking about here.
Number four, he says, More importantly, the twenty fifteen nuclear deal pushed back the program much more than a year, so that was way more successful. And then he says Trump appears to understand negotiated solution better.
Achieves his goal. Well, we'll see. We'll see on that front.
I hope so, I hope he can be persuaded of that, and I hope they're able to negotiate a deal, because this is This would be insanity, This would be utter insanity.
Not good.
I did want to put some positive news. Let's go to the next one.
Please.
Trump has reappointed Adam Bowhler. He'll all remember Adam. I remain a Bowler.
Stand.
He's the guy who said that we're not a client state of Israel, and who was relentlessly attacked by the Israel lobby for daring to want to negotiate with Hamas directly, and who said we're not a client State of Israel, and who knows, maybe they're good guys. Remember this guy is friends with Jared Kushner and they still were able to sideline him. Seems to be back is appointed to quote expanded hostage envoy roll. We're not yet sure how
that is all going to work out. I'm told the Israeli ambassad directly intervened to try and to screw over Adam Bowler.
So that's what we're dealing with.
Let's go to the next one here again, just more a little bit insight. This is from Barack Revid. He's mostly getting leased, it seems, from the Israeli side. But what he's saying is basically that the President kind of needled bb Net and Yahu in the Oval office when saying he would not green light the Iranian attack and kind of tried to force him to accept the fact
that the US was going to pursue a deal. But they have several senators and others Mike Wallace, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Lindsea Gram people who have their ear of the president, and then the Israel lobby specifically behind the scenes, is whipping harder than they have ever done since I have seen since two thousand and fifteen. They have the entire infrastructure in place. They're the beats are being sent, the calls are being made. I mean, these people never
underestimate their abilities. As I said, as I watch people who I know, America first year is getting frog marched out of the Pentagon. So I don't remember Mike Walt's getting frog bars out of the White House even though it obviously deserved to and they went to bat for him.
So don't forget that.
Well, Laura Lummer did claim some scoffs.
Yeah, some low level guys. Okay, I don't care about some guy who's staffing Mike Walts. Mike Walts is in the Oval pushing war. That's what matters more than anything, you know, that is actually the only thing that matters at the end of the day, because this is all up to Donald Trump in the situation room. Right now, we have relative parody with between Tulsea Gabbard, Pete and JD. Versus Rubio and Mike Walls and a few of the other neo cons that would be on the National Security Council.
But I mean, you can see how quickly like things can turn just like that with Donald Trump's so I have no idea, and I do not underestimate the Israel lobby. Their ability to get on Fox News is to pump all this bullshit straightened into Trump's brain, and so things could be he had it in a bad direction.
All right, Christal, what are you taking a little at that?
Senator Chuck Grassley was recently confronted by angry Iowa constituents who are demanding the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Take a listen, you gotta bring that ship from El Salvador.
Why not, Well, because that's not that's how power of Congress.
Yeah, Comdia.
Trump don't care a freeform order taking for twelve hundred dollars.
And I just say no, Does that stand up?
Because he's gotten order from the Supreme Court and he just said no.
Yeah, the president of that country is not subject for US Supreme.
Now.
The reason that this administration has decided to fight so hard on this one particular case to keep this one man locked in the dungeon for life is pretty simple and obvious, because if they can stonewall even in a case where they admit that they screwed up, then there is nothing to stop them from sending whoever they want to the torture dungeon for a life. All they have to do is get the planes in the air before
a court can weigh in. As one reaganarppointed judge wrote of Trump's plot, quote, it takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness. What I want you to understand, though, is that this is only the beginning of Trump's authoritarian crackdown. And in fact, if history of other authoritarians and Trump himself are any guide, as Trump's popularity falls, he will only become more dangerous as he reaches for more and more tools of suppression
and control. This is in fact the exact spiral that led to the January sixth riots and Trump's attempted election subversion. But if there's one thing we know about Trump two point zero, the man himself is more unhinged, and any prior guardrails have either been demolished or are being bulldozed right through now. In many ways, the early days of Trump's administration have been a complete failure. We're just discussing dosee. It's floundering, no public achievements, even as it destroys key
government functions. Elon himself has seen his status EBB after a political dropping in Wisconsin, it seems on his way to limping out of town. The Ukraine War and Israel's genocide and Gaza they grind on with no apparent end in sight, and perhaps most devastating politically, Trump's Grand Trade War has been a catastrophic mess, which somehow managed to unite Wall.
Street with Main Street in their revulsion for.
The chaos and the damage that is being inflicted for no good reason. Polls increasingly reflect the public's consensus on these failures. A Liberation Day has accelerated a downward trend in Trump's overall approval rating. He's gone from plus one with independence to minus twenty two. That is the worst any president has ever fared with this group at this point in their presidency. His economic approval has fallen even more precipitously, with terrorists dominating when people are asked what
negative things they've seen recently about the Trump administration. Even on the strongest issue immigration, even that is starting to slip away from him.
In a Quinnipiac poll that.
Was taken before the Abrego Garcia case blew up to.
A full national scandal.
Trump was already underwater on immigration by five points, and on deportations, he was under water by eleven points. Now, at the same time, resistance is swelling, both at the grassroots and the institutional level. Hundreds of thousands of people have turned out to Bernie and AOC's Fight Oligarchy Tour, including large crowds in red states like Idaho. Millions turned out coast to coast as part of the hands off protests. Members of Congress cannot hold the town hall without being
flooded by outraged constituents. Universities are beginning to fight back rather than get rolled. Law firms are starting to think twice about their capitulation bribery deals. Democrats have moved from Corey Booker's show speech to Chris Van Hollins's genuinely courageous flight to tangle with Bikelli in El Salvador. The courts are becoming increasingly assertive, and bond traders are apparently the actual deep state. Now, how will Trump respond to this
rapid political shift and mounting backlash. It won't be by backing down or changing course. It will be by cracking down. Some of this project, of course, is already well in motion. He's used supposed national emergencies and national security threats already to claim extraordinary powers by his terrorist program and by invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
But there's more.
On April twentieth, pursuit to an executive order that Trump signed on day one of his presidency, he is going to receive a report from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and fascist Barbie Christinoum about whether or not he should invoke the Insurrection.
Act of eighteen oh seven.
Now, such an invocation would open up extraordinary powers for this president to use our military in our streets against our citizens. Of course, there are any number of ways which he might deploy that power. Perhaps he deployed the military to the border part of an expanded militarized immigration response. Acting head of ICE has mused about ramping up mass deportation on an industrial scale, even fantasizing about fleets of trucks scooping up immigrants the way that Amazon efficiently delivers
packages on a mass scale. Quote, we need to get better at treating this like a business. Acting ICE director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process.
Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.
Trump and the Republicans are pushing for a much larger budget for ICE and for private prison contractors to run detention centers. But if you really want to go for industrial scale, it'd be hard to beat the military. Now, even if you are hawkish on immigration, think of the genuinely evil way this administration has already conducted itself. Do you feel comfortable handing them the tools for a militarized, industrial scale human removal and incarceration system.
Do you really think the.
Horror is going to be just reserved to the criminals, the gang members, when we already know that ninety percent of the men that they send to a slave labor torture dungeon were innocent, Like Amazon Prime, but for fascism, I guess a notorious Blackwater war profiteer, Eric Prince, he's been pushing his own plans for mass expansion of the
Bekelly torture dungeon operation. According to Politico, he wants to send thousands of migrants to Seacott and avoid legal scrutiny by designating a portion of the prison as American territory. That way, they could hold people indefinitely in Bekelly's gulag as easily as they can scoop up and detain immigrants right here in the US. But that is just one
of a myriad of disturbing authoritarian possibilities. The Trump administration has also been cracking down on protesters, specifically targeting pro Palestine activists and those involved in the anti Tesla movement.
Describing both groups as terrorists.
What's more, Ken Klippenstein is reporting that Trump's law enforcement apparatus is increasingly targeting all protesters against this government, including those who participated in the recent hands off protests. This effort is being spearheaded by Trump's counter terrorism Zar Sebastian Gorka, who Ken writes frequently compares all his political opponents to terrorists and is in a significant position of power in this administration.
Now.
Gorka is also looking at considering those who oppose deportations as providing material support for terrorism.
That would be a felony.
It is not hard to imagine Trump using the Insurrection Act against any mass protest movement, giving they are already laying the administrative and rhetorical groundwork of painting these protesters as terrorists, as criminals, and as paid operatives. Another dark possibility is that Trump moves from using wartime powers to
start to starting an actual war. We've been covering and covered in this show for a while the seeming build up towards war with a run now on the hopeful Trump has enlisted Steve Whitcoff in direct talks in an attempt to achieve a deal reportedly rejected, and Israeli planned to directly strike Iranian nuclear facilities, at least for now. On the ominous side, Trump's Pentagon has already drawn up
war plans for Iran, including a nuclear option. Key anti war voices, including Dan Caldwell, were just purged from the Pentagon. Signal Gate also revealed just how hawkish the internal chat really is, and Trump himself has long seemed to believe that war makes for good politics and the Obama era, Trump theorized multiple times that Obama would start a war with Iran in order.
To bolster his popularity.
Take a listen, Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate.
He's weak and he's ineffective. So the only.
Way he figures that he's going to get re elected and as sure as you're sitting there is to start.
A war with a Ran.
Now, if he still thinks war with Iran is good politics, he is a complete and utter fool that possibility to put off the table. By the way, but he also may not really care about his approval ratings as much as he cares about the power he can grab. And everyone who lived through the post nine to eleven power grab knows that a president can grab a hell of
a lot of power during times of war. Now, these are just a few possible directions Trump could take as his poll number slide, and he must resort to ever more extraordinary means to stifle dissent. Obviously, they're already trying
to coerce universities, law firms, media courts, and business. I would pay, though, very close attention to what happens on April April twentieth, since the Insurrection Act seems like the easiest cheat code for this administration to expand their lawlessness on immigration to lawlessness with regard to.
The entire population.
After all, Trump sends out right, they want to be able to disappear Americans, just like they did kill Abrego Garcia.
Yeah, yeah, that was in Why do you think there's special category of person.
They're as bad as anybody that comes in.
Now, the Insurrection Act to me seems like the most likely path to effectuating that outcome. Trump considered it, of course, invoking the Insurrection Act twice in his first term, once against Black Lives Matter protesters again leading up to January sixth. In both instances, he was held back by some more establishment figures within his administration. But this administration none of
those types of voices remain this time around. You should take him seriously and literally and assume that whatever your worst case scenario is, the reality is likely to be worse. And Sagur, I do think you know, we both talked about after that meeting with Kelly in his office, where number one, they're completely flouting the Nino Supreme Court ruling. They are refusing to do anything to bring a Brego Garcia back, and they are completely lying about all of that,
and he announces we want the homegrowns next. I wasn't able to add it into this monologue, but I saw that the Kelly has said he wants to double the size of Seacott and said specifically it will be up to the Americans to fill it. So that's the landscape that we're facing as his popularity slides, and he's going to face more and more descent and more and more resistance.
I think it's possible, but it's like I said, I would not I would further not underestimate he both trying to quote save face. But even more importantly, we're already watching a we are already watching here in the Supreme Court and other era. They know in some ways that they're in a difficult position. I think there's a reason that there hasn't been another Alien Enemies Act deportation since the It's been a month right now since that has happened.
I mean it presumably if they thought that they were on good standing, that's something they would continue to do. They've been blocked in right now, They've been blocked in multiple jurisdictions under Tros. I guess for now they have decided not to participate in that in some ways. Like with Dose, what we watched is they start extreme and then they pair back over time. So I don't I'm
not going to dismiss that. I also would not count out the possibility that as they continue to get backed and backed and back into a corner that they are also become frankly a little bit more of what they were like in the twenty twenties, not or sorry, in the late twenty tens whenever they were first in office, where largely like Trump, did not really do anything after the TCJA outside of foreign policy.
Well he's January sixth.
Yeah, it was at the end. I mean it's a little different.
Yeah, but that is. It is analogous though, because that's when his you know, he loses the election. Whether he believed that in his mind or not, I don't think he. I think he did know that he lost, and that's when his most extreme authoritarian instincts came out, is when he actually had suffered his most severe political blow. And you know, I mean, if you look at other authoritarian regimes, you see a similar thing. When the public rises up,
then what do they do. They crack down, right, Because to your point about hi quote unquote saving face, his version of saving face is making sure there aren't mass protests in the street, making sure that he can do what he wants and not have to listen to the courts, et cetera.
So listen, I could be wrong, but.
I'm not just missing it out of hand. I know you alleing it.
I know you aren't.
I think I think three months ago I would have scoffed. I would have been like, that's a joke. I'm I'm not going to say that, Okay, Like I'm being honest.
Yeah, well, I do think I'm just putting the pieces together of we know this direction with them designating pro Palestine activists, hands off protesters, anti Tesla protesters, now people who oppose deportations as terrorists, right or giving material support to terrorists.
So you have that in place.
You have this executive orders signed on day one that says he's supposed to get this report about whether or not he should invoke the Insurrection Act. So you have that piece in place, and you have him saying we want to send the homegrowns to this El Salvador dungeon. So when I look at that landscape, I am very concerned about what's going to be happening in the next weeks. And you know, I think everybody should be paying very close attention to what happens in the comings.
In particular, I don't disagree at all.
I also think, you know, let's calibrate and say Insurrection Act on the border is like categorically different than insurrection Act on to whatever hands off protests. Like you said, yeah right, that is just completely different. I mean, you could be against it if you want to. Yeah, I think the former is probably pretty popular. The difference, I think is that on the court cases and on the precedent, it's become clear to me that it's not even about because I'm not so sure. I know there's a lot,
there's a leftist straight of thought. They believe that they intentionally grabbed up Garcia.
I don't think so.
I think it was complete incompetence and stupidous.
I agree with that. I don't think that they intentionally grabbed him up.
But I do think the fact that they've leaned into this so aggressively. I mean, look at Jade Vance posting all over Twitter all day long, Pam Bondi coming out and releasing, you know again, the Field report that supposedly claim from this like dirty who got fired weeks later that he was a gang member because of the Chicago bulls at you know, Caroline Levitt lying and saying he's a human trafficker. No one has ever said that. There
is no evidence that has ever been the case. So I think it was an accident, just like I think with Machmukulio, I don't think that they knew that he was a legal permanent resident.
Agree.
But I do think once they find those things down and they insist on saying the course and taking this maximal's position, I think that's what ultimately matters. And with Abrego Arcia, the reason they don't want him to come back is because if you open up the possibility of some sort of legal process of course to retrieve these people, these plans are done. You can't send American citizens there. You can't send these you know, ninety percent of these
people had nothing, no criminal record whatsoever. And so that plan and that avenue towards the lawlessness that is over. And so that's why they're fighting so hard on this, because if they can get away with this one, they can get away with anyone with anyone right.
Which is of course why they're doing it. I don't I will.
We'll have to check back in a couple of weeks, like you said, because I think it could vary.
I'm not downplaying at all.
I absolutely think it could go in that direction. I also would not count out the same petering out that we've seen with Doge. I mean they've effectively surrendered. No, like we just did a whole block about that.
Now.
I'm not saying the damage wasn't done, and I don't think it's good. But you know, Trump and all of that. He is in the past was relatively nimble in moving away from certain things. But you know, with the people around him and others, he may decide not to do that. But he did back away from several unpopular things in his first term. But he also views doing that and getting into media pressure as one of the great mistakes.
Was closed to see, which is definitely one of the differences that we see here around.
So that's a good point.
We'll see, Okay, we will see you all. I guess no Friday show tomorrow.
I'll forget