Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and a p r.
Ipoll says fifty two percent of Americans see Trump as a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy. Where is the line? We have such a great show for you today. The Nation's cheat here stops by to talk to us about the Canadian election
and what it means for Trump's rule of America. Then we'll talk to New York Times his own Peter S. Goodman about what the empty shipping containers coming into America's ports means for it the shelves in your local grocery store. But first the news.
Somalie, there's a thing with Trump that things are always on, then they're off again. They're on, they're off again. This morning, Caroline Levitt was throwing a major major about the idea of Amazon putting the prices of tariffs on things. Now Amazon is denying they're going to do it, even though it was it a punch bowl newsletter that was sponsored by Amazon.
Amazon. I watched the press conference this morning. It actually is a smart idea on the part of Amazon to point out how much tariffs are costing the consumer. It got Carolyn Levitt really miffed, It got Donald Trump furious. Look, Jeff Bezos finds himself in a bad position, despite the fact that he has a good zillion dollars. No one wants to see their company in decline. Much of what
is available on Amazon is cheap and made in China. Ergo, there is every reason in the world why Bezos is not happy with these tariffs.
And this was I.
Think a pretty effective pushback. Made Trump fury again. I think really important to remember Jeff Bezos is now a captured billionaire. He's like these law firms. He is under capture. He has made a deal with Trump, he has sucked up to Trump, and now he serves at the pleasure of Donald Trump. So despite the fact that he has billions of dollars and is super wealthy and powerful, he is ultimately trying not to get regulated out of existence by Donald Trump. Now is this stupid? Yes? Could he
stand up to Trump? Absolutely? Would Trump be able to regulate him out of existence? It would take a lot of time and a lot of confidence to things that Donald Trump doesn't have a huge supply. So you see, it's a real example of someone who who has created the capture that they are involved in, and Bezos is
now perhaps cowering, perhaps pushing back. We'll see how this plays out, but I think it's important to remember these tariffs are bad for business, and Bezos is just one of the many, many, many, many business owners who are about to really get fucked by these one hundred and forty five percent tariffs. So you'll see more of this. And again, Bezos has created this capture for himself and now he is in a possible situation that he put himself in, and quite frankly, it's well deserved.
We saw similar behavior with Paramount this week, and when the statement on sixty minutes is that they are afraid of their.
Merger behavior to go through.
Yeah, and I think Bezos has much more power here because that could bring down Trump's approval real fast.
I mean, the reality is Trump's approval is terrible, right. His approval is now down to what it was in the first term, that sort of dregs approval. We've seen even just from the universities that Harvard is now in a much better position than Columbia is, where Columbia is trying to make these deals. They have no one to protect them. Trump World keeps going back on the deals, and at least Columbia has the courts to protect them.
You're almost better off going into a court fight with Donald Trump then rolling over and letting him do whatever he wants.
Agreed. Well, speaking of rolling over and doing whatever he wants, he's issuing executive orders, ramping up America's police state.
Yeah. So again, there is a headline here that's very scary, and it's certainly possible that something very scary will happen here. But it's also I think really important to remember that executive orders are the least legally binding thing that the president can do, and they keep you know, he's not passing a law, and in fact, he has passed the least laws of any president at this point. You know,
Executive orders are like just there vibes. Okay, there are things that he feels like, there are things he wants to do. These are things that are going to die in court, okay, Like so many of Trump's ideas. Does Trump want to be an autocrat? Yes? Does the Supreme Court want him to be? I think seven of them don't Alito and Thomas forget it. They'll go with whatever. But are his instincts scary and terrible. Yes. By the way,
he's done executive orders that have targeted Mark Elias. My man has done a ton of executive orders about everything and everyone. So I don't think that we should take them so seriously at this point. Yes, he would love to do this. Is he going to be able to do it? Absolutely not. The thing that is worth remembering is that Pam Bondy is going along with a lot of stuff that she knows is not legal, that she
knows is not going to go anywhere. And this is like another example of someone who knows better just destroying themselves for Trump because he wants them to.
Yeah. Another thing that they're trying to do to consolidate and protect powers that they hope will stay on their side is they are blocking inquiries into the Trump administration and signal scandal.
Yeah. So look again, you had Bondy trying to take away protections for journalists from being subpoena. They don't want you to know what they're doing, which is a pretty good sign they're not doing good stuff. Right If they wanted you to know what they were doing, they wouldn't be constantly trying to office scate. So signal gate is super embarrassing for Republicans. Trump did not fire heg set By the way, there's so much more coming on the heag sets stuff. Right, we have an office that is
at war with each other. There's just going to be more and more embarrassing stuff. Everyone in the world out of that office is leaking. I think trying to cover up signal gate is going to be the least of their problems. And again this is example. Trump has decided that if he fires heg set he'll look stupid, so he doesn't want to fire hegsas, so he's doing everything he can to keep the guy on. But there's just no way this doesn't continually snowball into more and more.
And last week we saw another story about a different signal chat with the wife and the brother. Then we saw a story about heg Seth having a makeup studio built that is very embarrassing. And we're just seeing trickles of embarrassing stories. And you know why, because you know, he has an organization and everyone in there hates each other and they're just leaking. Like a said, so I think you'll see more of it, and I think you'll see more Republicans trying to cover it for it. And
here's the thing. Donald Trump could end this tomorrow just by firing Pete Hegsath. But he won't. And so many of the things we've talked about today. Donald Trump could end tomorrow the trade war. He could say no more trade war, that was a mistake, Let's just go back to normal, and it would end tomorrow. They're not going to onshore manufacturing by making things more expensive. That's not
how that works. We saw Howard Lutinx today giving an interview and he said, and I think this is really important, he said, So gave an interview today and it was like very wilber Ross. He said, c NBC. Remember there has been a ton of the Trump administration trying to go out and calm the markets. You had Treasury Secretary Beson yesterday or Monday giving a talk say that he's got all these trade deals in the hopper. By the way, we were told by Peter and Navarro there would be
trade deals in ninety days. We're like two and a half weeks into this and we have yet to have a trade deal. China has said there are nowhere near a trade deal. Japan no trade deal, India no trade deal. But I want to talk about this interview Lutnik on CNBC trying to make everyone feel better. CNBC says if a company were to say we're raising prices because of tariffs,
is that a hostile act? And Lutinix says, I think if you go out of your way to try to make it seem like your price has changed, when it's nonsense. A ten percent tariff is not going to change virtually any price, and in fact, a ten percent tariff means you're going to pay ten percent more good stuff.
Speaking of Trump's authoritarian reaches, a top White House aid by the name of Stephen Miller says that JB. Pritzker calling for protests could be construed as inciting violence.
Sure, so here's an interesting thing. Pritzker has been a very strong speaker lately. He is the governor of Illinois, but he's also the scion of the Pritzker family. The Pritzker family is a wildly wealthy, deeply liberal, very philanthropic, and pretty great family filled with a lot of really smart people who give a lot of money to really good stuff. So basically the opposite of elo. You know how Elon is trying to strip the federal government. So,
and Pritzker has been really strong about criticizing Trump. Part of that is because he has political aspirations, but part of that is because he does not. He's not a coward. Now, is he not a coward because he has billions of dollars to back them up? Maybe, but it doesn't matter. I mean, Jeff Bezos seems pretty cowardly, and he has more money than Pritzker, So I'm not going to write off his bravery so quickly. I wonder if Steven Miller
understands what he's opening the door to here. Now, want you to think back to last week part of why Trump stopped this crazy tariff thing or paused it. It will come back like the gun on the wall in the play in the third act. Right, this trade war
is still very much going to happen to us. But I want to talk about this idea that Trump know, Trump does not want to become an emerging market, right, he understands, But I mean that's the real that's sort of the real red lawne here, is that he understands that the dollar is a safe haven, right, and he does not want to have capital flight because if they have capital flight, it means that our debt will become so expensive that it will be almost impossible to service it.
And we have so much debt in this country, much of which is held by the Chinese, and as the dollar gets more expensive, we will have more trouble servicing our debt. So what is happening here? So if Stephen Miller were to go after JP Pritzker, that would be real banana of public stuff, right, arresting a billionaire because you're mad that he said something. Pritzker said he wanted mass protests. Stephen Miller says it could be construed as
inciting violence. So if Stephen Miller is able to will a scenario where they start arresting the governor of the state of Illinois, who happens to be a left leaning billionaire, you're going to see some capital fucking flight, man, and you're going to see a lot of constitutional crisis, is screaming, and a lot of stuff. So do I think Stephen
Miller is crazy enough to do that? There is no I mean, I think Steven Miller is just waiting for the chance, but you are opening the door to the kind of market cratering, the kind of bond sell off that I don't think anyone is ready for. And by the way, we're already heading into very likely a stagflationary period because of the trade war. I'm not sure that Stephen Miller wants more than that to happen. Get here is a contributor to the nation and the host of
the time of Monsters. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Cheat, good to be on the program.
You are a Canadian bureau chief here Fast Politics, and as Canadian bureau chief, you are uniquely situated to speak to us about the Canadian elections, which Donald Trump played a massive, massive role in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, including on election day where he had this tweet where he was suggesting that that Canadians vote for him, and which seemed a little and odd because he was not on the ballot anywhere in Canada. But metaphorically, I think it's it's absolutely true that Trump had a massive influence. Now I have to say, like Canada, where the tenth of the size of the US in terms
of population. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who is the father of Justin Trudeau and was a Prime minister in the sixties when he met Richard Nixon, he said, well, for Canadians, living next to the United States is like living next to an elephant. However benign the elephant is if it starts twitching and grunting. We notice in this case, like imagine living next to an elephant, but it's actually on crack and it's paging through the tendle. That kind of
has an impact. So Trump is the rampaging elephant of this this election.
So, yeah, people have talked about the Canadians feel like they're living over a crack house. That's what I've heard.
Yeah, yeah, that's also the betaphor. Yeah yeah, yeah.
In any case, so explain to us just the fundamentals of how Canadian elections work. You guys have prime ministers, they are elected for charge. It's more of a coalition government. Explain.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean it's a parliamentary system. So what it basically means is that the party is like the House of Representatives, like you have like all these districts, and whichever party has the most number of seats. In American terms, it would be as if, like previously Nancy Pelosi have been Prime Minister and then Johnson, but it could easily be Keem Jeffries in twenty twenty six. Now having said that, the other big difference though, is
that it's not a two party system. There are in fact many parties. The Liberals and Conservators the two big parties, but there's also the NDP, which is a social democratic party, the New Democratic Party. There's a block Quebec QUAH, which only runs in Quebec but is a sovereigntist party, but it's also center left. And there's a Green Party which had two seats in a Hasuan. And there's a right wing party, the People's Party. Now, what happened in this election.
One of the big things that happened was that both on the left and the right, the votes consolidated. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives got more votes than they did last time because people who normally would vote for the third parties went to the main ones. So you had like a more polarized electorate.
In a way, like a real lesson to Democrats. Right, because in the twenty twenty four cycle we saw that the Green Party or Just Staying Home or RFK Junior siphoned off some amount of votes, right.
Yeah, you know. I mean, I think the analogy would be that, like in American politics, when the Democrats can consolidate the left of center vote, they win. When they when you have people who either vote third party or don't vote at all, Democrats are in a bad position often lose. So I think Trump can be credited with consolidating the liberal vote. Now, prior to like Trump's intervention, for the last two years, the Conservative Party has been
leading in the polls. The Liberals had a minority government supported by the NDP. This, as you meant a lot of very good things because the NDPS wore social democratics, So the Liberals pushed through things like extending dental care, so now our healthcare system has a dental care component.
But like a lot of governments, you know, the Liberals were suffering from post COVID inflation, cost of living, a housing crisis, and then there's a real desire for change, and the Conservatives under Pierre Polliever had a really compelling populist,
right wing populist message, which is Canada is broken. They had a massive lead in the polls of like twenty point lead over the Liberals, which basically would have meant that the Conservatives could have formed a majority government, and I have to say, like, you know, even though I don't like the Conserna party politically, I think that is a compelling message in this time this you know, like
it's a change election. We want to do things. And the Liberals were responding by saying Canada has never been broken, which to my mind right in the of Hillary Clinton saying America has always been great, Like it's not a good response to people wanting change. But in any case, and Trudeau was unpopular, but then Trump came along and started saying, like Governor Crudeo, and we want Canada to be the fifty first state and you'll be a chair state.
And so the election didn't become about, you know, do we want to change as Canada broke? And it's like should Canada survive? And for the Liberals were much stronger on this issue. They replaced Trudeau with Mark Carney, who had been a very centrist figure who had been in
the Bank of Canada. Even despite his centrism, a lot of mean I know a lot of people who were in the MDP, and I think the polls bear this out went to the Liberals because they realized that now the main issue is Canada surviving, and the Liberals put forth a very strong nationalist message, which is a Canada's a sovereign state and we will stand up for it. And this will allow the Liberals to get out of their holding disaster really and they ended up getting like
I think roughly forty four percent of the vote. Now now, right now, the Liberals are a little bit short of forming a majority. They are at one hundred and sixty eight roughly, and they need one hundred and seventy two to form a majority. But having said that, the votes are still being counted and the Liberals are picking up speed because they were very strong in the early voting. All their voters went in very early selection and those are the last votes counted, and so there's a real
chance that the Liberals could form a majority. I'll be a slim one. But if they don't form a majority, what will happen is that there's still like the NDP went down from twenty five seats to seven, but they have enough seats that they can work with the Liberals and we'll see a return to what we had before, which is a Liberal minority government with NDP support.
So I want to talk about Carnie for another minute, because I think that's a really important point. Trudeau had become pretty unpopular, and despite the fact that he had been earlier very popular, he was and he was quite handsome, which is for a politician sometimes play.
No no, I mean tu. Trudau is a very effective campaigner and he got the Liberals one of the strongest majorities that they've ever had. And Carney is not an effective campaigner, Yes.
Right, he's not. But he is, however, the man that got Britten through Brexit, and is a very good negotiator and good at negotiating trade, and good at negotiating prickly financial situations, which Canada finds itself in being the neighbors who live over the crack house, and who are the trading partners with America. Right now, there's a percentage of Canadians maybe twenty thirty percent or boycotting American goods just right, and you have a lot of Canadian goods that America
used to be a pretty a good trading partner. So I'm really curious what happened behind the scenes that got Carneie into this position, because it sounds like there was a fair amount of smart, real politics going on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I mean having the Liberal Party. First of all, it's a very successful political party overall. In the last in the twentieth century, the Liberals governed for seventy out of one hundred years, right, so seven So they're kind of like the natural governing party. And part of their successes that they pay a lot of attention to leadership and have Actually, I mean one interesting thing is they always switched from English to French because
it's a binational country. So actually like regularly for the last hundred years, First you have a French leader, Crudeo. Then you bring in an English person Carney. And Carney was sort of cultivated. He had this background. He was a central banker, governor both first and back of Canada and the Bank of England. I think when once they decided Trudeau had to go, they thought, like bringing him someone who's like, hadn't been in politics before, has been
a broad mainstream acceptance. As you said, you know those finances, knows how to deal with crisis. That seems a pretty compelling figure. And I think that they were right. I mean, he has negatives because he's not a politician he's actually I think much less charismatic than Hudo or even I have to say Polly ever, who's not my cup of tea, but has been very effective on the campaign trail, you know. But having said that, I mean, Carney, I think switching
out was a smart move. And because in Canada they were we hold our things very quickly. They were well, the leadership convention very quickly. So like I would imagine like, yeah, Biden had stepped down much earlier, and you know, they had gone through a proper convention, you know, like you could have had either hair share or someone or you would have had someone with legitimacy. I mean, the very important that they didn't just put this guy in. They
actually had a leadership convention and they picked him. I mean, I think the Liberals did a lot of very kind of smart moves, and I think there s at of national stitches that they put and actually the genuine fear that people in the cane left had a Polyevra who did kind of mix our creuppy noises about fake news
and going after the media and other things. I think that scared a lot of people on the left and that contributed to consolidating the vote, So liberals like and I think, you know, they went from being twenty points down to being ahead because they picked up a lot of mainly NDP votes, but also a lot of black quebec Qua votes Green Party votes.
So Jesse has a question, which is, there's a report that Carney said to Trump that Canada will sell its US bonds if Trump doesn't knock off the fifty first state stuff. Do you think that's real? Do you think that's true? What do you think of that?
I don't know how, I mean, it's I don't know this. I think that. I mean, there's another story which is sort of circumstantial evidence for which is when Kearney first came in, he went to the Europe and he met with the European leaders, and I believe that Japanese Prime Minister was either went there or on the call. And you know, Kearney's a guy with a banking background, and they did reportedly they talked about bonds and you won.
You know, like when Trump did Liberation Day and the tariffs, one of the big things that happened was that not just a stock market went down, but people started taking money off the bonds. Now that the American creasure bonds are held, you know, not just by private individuals, but by governments. The Canadian government, European governments, Japan have a
lot of treasury bonds. And we do know for a fact it is actually an absolute fact that the people who were take selling treasure bonds after Liberation Day was not as some people suspected the Chinese, who do you know, basically kept on holding onto them, but actually Japan, the Europeans in Canada.
Right just something.
So it's whether there was like a coordinated effort or not. I can't verify that.
And you'll remember that the bond market was the thing that finally got Trump to realize that he was running a losing game. Now that said their.
Yel because I mean the bond market is very like you know, people need to understand this. If you sell bonds then like to make for that, interest rates will go up. And also the US the amount of money that the US Treasury has to pay out ADEPT goes up like bally substantial amounts. So this is really like the kind of leverage point that could undo the American economy, oh no question, and arguably the world economy. I mean, this is serious thoughts.
Yeah, I mean that seems like a real thing. Now, I'm wondering if you can explain to us a little bit about there's still votes coming in. They are counted in a way that the early votes are counted last. So the question is what number of seats do you have to get to in order for the Liberals to win.
One hundred and seventy two?
Okay, And I'm curious, like when you look at these two candidates, what was Carneie's idea? You know, does he have plans for tariffs? I mean, I feel like he's a very smart guy and if you were getting he's like the person you would want to negotiate your tariff issue.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that the there's a couple of things that are in play. What is you know, in the Canada and US have a great agreement and it's actually a trade agreement that Trump nomin only like negotiated. I mean when he came in, he tur DAFTA. Then we have the you know, US, Canada and Mexico. Yeah,
which is you know, after with some changes. Now now that's coming up again, and I think that the way that Carnie could go forward, I think the Mexican government is on board on this is to say, like, well, let's read to go. Let's just do terrorists under this
ambed and renegotiate it. I think one thing is that this gives Trump an exit ramp, because I think Trump has gotten himself into something that he did not fully understand what's going to happen, and all the trouble that he's having to deal with now with the stock market and everything else. And I think that this gives like a way in which he can kind of say, Phace, you know, just do like rename it, like you know, this is a Trump agreement, just the big whatever non
wal tages. I mean, I think that, like, you know, the auto workers have a legitimate belief that they want wage guarantees for Mexican workers because the wages of Mexican workers has actually gone down under free trade and is now like you know, they're making three dollars an hour at auto plants, and I think one could legitimately say, you know, to raise that. Yeah. So I think that
is the way out of this. But I have to say Trump continues to talk about, you know, Canada has to be the fifty per state, and I don't know how that's going to go, except that I think that, you know, with the election out of the way, I think everyone across the political speaker in Canada will have an incentive to unite and is very noticeable that, you know, some of the leading Conservatives on a provincial level, the Premier of Ontario are very on board with working with Kearnie.
From what I understand, what really killed the Conservative Party, your Republican Party, was that they had people who supported Trump, so they couldn't distance themselves from him. So that's almost a little bit of what we could see in the midterms, right.
Yeah, No, I know absolutely, I think that that was like a kind of a major problem. I mean, I think the two pounds is that their main issues were kind of taken off the table. I mean, there's still real issues, but also there were people inside their party that you know, admired Cromp. There are people inside their party that are very close to jad events. I think
that that gives the Liberals some sort of like advantage. So, I mean, I do think that like as Trump's you know, Tariff said, other things happen, there's a kind of backlash to him, of which this election is one example. But I think what is already seeing in the United States, and you know the special elections that have already happened, including the judgeship in Wisconsin. Yeah, I think that the Democrats are a pretty good position in terms of their midterm Do.
You think Trump's threatening to make Canada a fifty first state? Do you think there's any logic? Again, I don't want to prescribe logic done either, why there isn't?
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean we've had this blog your core, like, we don't want to be saying loves right.
We don't want to say my man is playing three dimensional chess, because he never is. What do you think of thinking here?
Is well the thinking or maybe we can invest discribs unthinking is that Trump doesn't understand how trade works, or he thinks of trade literally the way people in the eighteenth century thought of trade. It's mercantilism, right, And in the eighteenth century, the various kingships that existed did not believe in free trade. In fact, that's why in terms of American history, you know, like they had the Stamp
Act and weren't allowing Americans to buy Dutch tea. The idea was that you would keep the wealth within the country or within the empire, not trade with others, because that means you'd be losing money. And the only way you could expand was through imperialism by conquering other countries. And so the British and the French and the Dutch all did this. They just like expanded and had wars and fought. And then you know, people came on and said, like, you know, like this is kind of stupid, Like we
were just trading with each other. We don't have to cut you conquer each other, right, And in the American Revolution, you know, it was really fought on this free trade issue where the Americans thought like, well, it's stupid that we can't trade with the Dutch. You know, we want to buy Dutch tea, you know, like we don't want to be forged to buy the English tea. Now the Trump thinks, but Trump thinks in this eighty such a way.
He thinks that if the United States is buying products from Canada, buying Timber, America is giving money to Canada, and Bunny is leaving the country, right. And this is like Trump's on a very primarial level. This is the way he does all his own business deals and why he's a bad businessman because he could not understand the idea of like reciprocity and you know, you're exchanging one thing for another for virtual benefit. And he thought like
someone is trying to screw someone in a trade. So he thinks like, if Canada and the US are trading, the US is losing something, whereas if Canada and the US are one, then America is bigger, and on a more even primitive level, Like I think he thinks like a child, and he's like thinking, Okay, if there's the US and Canada and land, like will be the biggest thing on the map, right, we'll be here everyone else. So I honestly think that the thinking here is this
kind of primitive tell thinking. And it's also this kind of older economic way of thinking. I says, why he praises mcimney all the time, right, like it is that sort of you know, nineteenth century imperialism of which I hope that humanity grown.
Thank you, Thank you jet here, thank you all.
It's great to be on the progo.
Peter Goodman is a reporter at The New York Times and the author of How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the global supply chain. Welcome to fast Politics, Peter.
Great to be back with you, miy.
We are at the beginning I think of a supply chain crisis, not so dissimilar from COVID. So talk us through what's happening right now.
Yes, what's happening right now is lots of companies that have depended upon supply chains that stretch across the Pacific Ocean have quite understandably said, we don't feel like paying one hundred and forty five percent extra for all the stuff we're bringing in from China. Maybe we'll just hold on with that. But it's not so obvious where else they can go, because a lot of companies have shifted production from China to places like Cambodia, Vietnam, India, other
countries to try to avoid previous tariffs. As we speak, we're in this ninety day pause on these extraordinary towers in some of those countries. But there's so much uncertainty about the rules that will apply that a lot of companies have said, let's just maybe stash our stuff in a warehouse somewhere on the other side of Pacific and wait and hope that things get better. And as a result, we've got literally zero container ships at the Port of Seattle Tacoba, which is one of the biggest ports on
the West Coast. We've got sharp traffic projected down at La Long Beach. These are the two ports in south of California that are together, they're the gateway for forty percent of all imported stuff reaching the United States by container vessels. And the head of that of the La Porta Soroka is now out there saying we really don't know what's going to happen. We got the dock workers union saying they're really worried. So you got all these factors that say less stuff coming in.
So this is all about unintended consequences here, Like the tariff story, is about this idea that there are intented consequences. Right, Trump wants to ontour manufacturing. I'm not sure how making how imposing these steep tariffs can will countries to build factories to ontour manufacturing. You know, this was the kind of thing that needed to be done with the scalpel,
not a sledgehammer. But I want you to sort of explain to us why this uncertainty is going to cause problems for the supply chain, So people are not importing to these you'res not seeing port ships because they're not importing. Just go downstream of that, right, So we're gonna have dock workers drivers like, talk to me sort of what this looks like.
Sure, So if there's less stuff crossing the Pacific headed for these giant ports or on the East coast, you know, for that matter, because stuff comes in from India and even in some cases from the East as that is, fewer containers to lift off of container ships and onto the shore by dock workers, who are some of the most highly paid and also militant workers in the American labor world. Then very unorganized truckers who are really at the mercy of swings in the global economy. Less stuff,
less work for truck drivers. You're gonna have a lot of people just sitting around waiting and hoping that cargo materializes and on it goes, you know, people working in warehouses, and eventually retailers are likely to be hit because if there's less stuff coming in, there's less stuff to move and less stuff to sell.
And but retailers are going to be hit with less stuff to sell. But ultimately consumers are going to bear the brunt. Explain to us how that goes.
I mean, if you're going off to Walmart or Target with the expectation that these operations are enormous, it's just like a magic trick. They never run out of anything. They've got seventeen different choices for whatever product is we're looking for. You could discover that things are back ordered, the shelves are empty. And the part of this that always bears discussing is there are lots of monopoly components
of these supply chains. If there's a lot of competition, then there's a chance that somebody steps in to replace whatever it is that you're looking for, and that can keep prices lower. If you're a company that's got a dominant hole on your industry, then this could be fantastic for you.
Give me an example of this.
I mean beef. You know there's four companies in the United States control eighty five percent of the beef supply. We saw this during the pandemic wild yeah, I mean that's beyond the robber barondage, right, I mean, four companies control eighty five percent of the beef supply, and there's engineered scarcity there. They're all sorts of lawsuits alleging that these four companies essentially conspire they stop their purchases when supplies are building up too high, precisely so you generate
panic buying. I mean the same thing that we saw, you know, in terms of discussing av and flu in terms of the egg supply terms out there's only a couple compries that dominate those those industries.
This sounds a lot like opek to May, where the oil companies got together to inflate the price of gasoline.
Is that a similar This is what we saw during the pandemic, right, so we saw product shortages that were caused by the chaos and disruption of the pandemic itself. It's not like there was some grand conspiracy by monopolism, No, no, disappear but once.
But it is a grand conspiracy by monopolies to keep prices inflated in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be.
I mean the shipping industry, right Like, every time there's a hit to the supply in somewhere, we hear, oh this is terrible for the global container industry. Oh my goodness, the hooties are opening fire on from Yemen, you know, on ships that are headed to the Red Sea. This is such a disaster for the shipping industry because now instead of going through the Red Sea to get from Asia to Europe, they got to go the long way
around Africa. Guess what, you know, shipping prices go four hundred percent And that's everywhere, right because there's three alliances. Why not, there's three alliances to control ninety percent of the traffic across the Pacific. So if a whole bunch of ships are suddenly deployed to go the long way around Africa instead of through the Red Sea, that's an opportunity to rip your face off in terms of pricing. And yeah, we're all paying for that in terms of
higher costs. We saw this during the pandemic, where we were told, oh, there's all this chaos, and that's why the price of moving a shipping container from China to the West coast of the United States goes up from something like twenty five hundred dollars to north of twenty five thousand dollars. We're talking tenfold increase in this space of six months. And people said, well, this is just you know, terrible for the shipping industry record profits. I mean, we're talking like record profits.
So talk to me about diapers.
Diapers are a product that, despite their sheer simplicity, are actually constructed of lots of different pieces. Can't remember the exact number. It's like dozens of parts drawn from around the world. You run out of one of them somewhere, you can't make a diaper. You know, think about the computer chip and cars during the pandemic. Right, there's thirty thousand parts in a car. If you run out of one component of a computer chip, you can make the
rest of the car. As you know, Ford at one point was making the F one fifty, its most popular pickup truck, and then parking them across the street from Henry Ford Elementary School in the shadow of Ford's corporate headquarters because they couldn't get enough chips. You know, the diaper gets affected. We saw during the pandemic that you know, we've ran out of infant formula because there's one company that has a dominant hold on that market in the
United States. And if there's any disruption anywhere, we don't know where the problems will pop up where they will, but they'll pop up somewhere.
Right. It's a really good point, and you know, you can't just skip out on diapers, right, You're gonna need diapers.
And you're gonna pay.
You're gonna pay.
Yeah, that's a pricing power moment, right because if I mean, if you've got a kid in the house who needs diapers and the word gets out that there could be a shortage, that's something you'll pay. I mean, think about the toilet paper shortage, right, I mean, those are the during the pandemic. I remember I was living in London, you know, having to go down to schmooze, the guy who talked to the truckers, you know, who could tell me like what times the toilet paper show up. You know,
it could be like that with diapers. If you need them, you'll do whatever it takes to get them. And don't think that companies don't know that in terms of pricing.
Right, like right now, there's this ninety day pause, which means that nobody knows anything. There's no stability. Trump says ninety deals in ninety days, or that was Navarro. We have yet to see a single deal. May We've heard like whispers of talks of whatever. It just seems like with the dock numbers, we are careening towards the same thing that happened during COVID, careening towards a scarcity event.
It's a similar dynamic. And one of the things that we learned during COVID is that fear of shortages create shortages, right. I mean, that's what happened toilet Peper. We didn't actually run out of stuff to make toilet paper with. We got a surplus of people saying, oh my god, I better go buy some toilet paper. And that can happen not just a household level, but at the retail level, right.
I mean, if again, your Amazon, your Target, your Walmart, you have enormous resources around the globe, You're able to charter your own container ships if you need to, and you want to get out in front of this as they're doing, we could wake up and discover that warehouses for a select handful of companies that are big enough have got all the stuff. Smaller players have got nothing. Meanwhile, households run out to buy as much stuff as they can because they're nervous, and that's how we end up
in shortages. There's a whole other scenario, by the way, that nobody talks about because we're too consumed with what's actually happening. If Trump tomorrow said, oh, I'm really worried about this. Okay, I'm lifting all the tariffs. Let's just go back to how it was now predicting this, not saying that's how it is. That would be the COVID scenario, and we would get the shortages because what happened in COVID was first factories in places like China and around
the world were disrupted and we made less stuff. Then it turned out we wildly we I say, the economists, businesses, they wildly miscalculated the impacts of this supply chain hit. So they assumed, Okay, we're locked down, can't go to work, so we don't need stuff. This is going to be a basic economic downturn where the demand for everything goes down. Well, that was wildly wrong. So we're not going to the gym, but we're now we're working out at home. We need pelotons.
Our kids aren't going to school still now we're cooking twenty seven meals for them at home, so now we need more kitchen supply. Are they're stuck in the backyard or we're buying trampolines and all this stuff comes in from China. Once factories turned back on the container shipping industry, which had actually set aside a lot of ships they were idling in warm waters places like Greece, they said, oh my goodness, there's actually more demand for stuff than ever.
And then we got what people may remember, these crazy floating traffic jams off the ports of La Long Beach, where you had seventy five ships circling around for weeks at a time waiting for a chance to dock because they all came at once. And that's what could happen here.
Whenever this ends, we're going to get a surge of orders from wherever it can produce them, and that could swamp the gears where we get the reverse, like instead of worrying about there's no ships in Seattle, there's no ships in La we can get all the ships coming at once. The dock workers can only handle so many.
We can run out of truck drivers, which is in truth, we just downgraded truck driving to such a degree at any time people have to go look for another job, and then they get one, they don't like to go back to it. That's how we got the worst of the shortages, and that could very much be ahead of us.
So let's talk this through for a second, because I remember during the COVID pandemic, we saw like lines of ships at different ports, and you know, like hundreds of ships at ports, and so you think that's sort of the scenario we're looking at.
I think for now, we're looking at the reverse of that, right, we're looking at futures.
I mean, eventually.
But if it turns it back, I think whenever. I mean, okay, if we take as a given that this policy is designed to have us wean our dependence on long supply chains and span across oceans, that I guess we'll just start making everything in the US and everything will be fun. No one believes that this can happen anytime soon. So at some point there's going to be some policy change that will prompt us to go back, maybe not China, maybe back to factors in Vietnam and Cambodia and other
parts of Southeast Asia, maybe India. And whenever there's enough certainty that the big retailers say okay, I get it now, I get where it's economical for me to source my stuff, there will be a surge of orders to replenish inventory and that is likely to lead to traffic jams somewhere.
Yes, so I wonder if we could talk about Carolyne Levitt for a minute, the White House Press secretary. Today, Amazon decided, and it is actually kind of brilliant to publish exactly what these tariffs will cost. Right, so you go on your Amazon page to buy a toothbrush, it says this toothbrush was seven dollars. It'll now be ten dollars, you know, or whatever because of a three dollars ra
or whatever. So uh, reporter, Amazon will soon display a number next to the product, the price of each product plus the amount that the Trump tariff is adding. Levitt responds as a hostile and political act by Amazon, discuss.
The whole Trump fantasy. Here is somebody else is going to pay for this, not American consumers. Now there's a lot to unpack here, right, because Amazon is reminding the customer that if you increase the costs of the stuff that we buy from far away to serve you, we will pass on those costs to you. However, we have no idea what Amazon's margins are on any particular product.
We don't know how much competition there is, we don't know to what degree Amazon is availing itself of consumer anxiety and now stoking consumer anxiety to justify price increases.
I mean, look again, think back to eggs, a thing that we've all talked about to bet we know that there's legitimate reason to think that the price of egg should go up when there's avian flu, right, know that, and when there's inflation in general, how much, Well, we don't know, because there's a couple of companies that dominate the egg business. And any time we go to the supermarket and think, boy, I better buy some more eggs.
You know, I noticed the shelves are empty. All these people are jogging around parts of the day, they are no eggs at all. I better. That is pricing power, and Amazon certainly has pricing power as a dominant retailer. So the White House is not crazy to say there's a stunt connected to this. Amazon is not crazy to say you stick one hundred and forty five percent terrify on Chinese goods. That's going to hit a lot of
stuff that you used to buying from Amazon. And you know, I think it's fair to say that Jeff Bezos's enterprise is not charitable we're going to look to take it out of you, customer.
So it is a really good point, right, which is that they don't need to raise their prices, but they are going to raise their prices, and we don't really know what their markups are. So it's not like they're saying, we buy this from China for twenty five cents and we are paying a seventy five percent of tariff. Right, We're not really seeing what the tariff is. We're seeing what the tariff number is on the final price.
This is premised on if you assume that our business is entirely about satisfying consumer interest for low prices, and our margins are tiny and fair, and we don't engage in any predatory behavior, so our prices are to imagine perfect representation of Milton Friedman's market economy, then sure you stick us with some tariff that gets passed on to the consumer pool. We know that it's a lot messier than that.
Yeah, really good point. But it is this Carolyn Levit comment. It does I find it interesting they really are offended by the idea that Amazon would transmit what they're doing, right. I mean, ultimately that seems like the cardinals in here is not up the goods to the American people.
Wait, counter programming, right like in this reality show Presidency, it's all about I'm working to bring jobs back to America.
You know, some days they say it's impossible to deal with inflation, but most of the time they say, you know, I mean, they certainly are aware that inflation seems to be how Trump came back to the White House, and they don't like the idea that one of the richest most powerful people on a guy, by the way, they thought they'd sort of muzzled with the whole fenestration of the Washington Posts ed operation is now out there swinging saying no, let me talk directly to your constituents, and
now I've got something to say, and you're jacking up their prices. Clearly that's not part of the programming that the White House would like to put out there.
Yeah. Pretty incredible, I mean, and a really good point. We will see how this plays out. Thank you, Thank you, Peter, thank you, Molly.
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Mollie, this is so just cruel, engross And I know that that's the point, but I know a lot of people whose lives have been saved by the NARCAN program in New York, and I've seen it. It's a miracle what it does for giving people a second chance when they're at a bad place in their life. And so a person who is a heroinaut for twelve years named RFK Junior, who runs HHS, decides, Eh, we can get rid of it.
This is stripping the federal government. RFK Junior is nhsass to take it apart, just like Linda McMahon is in the Department of Education, to take the Department of Education apart. This is Project twenty twenty five, dis assembling the federal government, selling it for parts, making the government so small that it doesn't do anything for people. That is the goal here. So you can expect that RFK Junior is going to
do a ton of things like this. But part of it is also he does not care about public health. This is just a stick. He cares about power. This is his last chance to get into power, and that's what we're doing here. This has nothing to do with public health. Personally, I think this is bad, but I think there's one hundred other things you could point to that are this bad or worse. That's it for this
episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.