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 Donald Trump is pulling worse on the economy than any reason.
President.
We have such a great show for you today, Think like an economist. Podcast host Justin Wolfers steps by to talk about the fuzzy math of DOGE savings for the American people. Then we'll talk to the Eurasia groups Ian Bremer about the new global alignment in Trump two point zero. But first the.
News Smiley, It's beginning to look a lot like Germany in some people's hand gestures these days. There's quite a lot of Boback. After Steve Bennon, who seems to hate Elon Musk, did a similar gesture to him.
Personally, I don't want to make any hand gesture that can be interpreted anyway that starts with an end and ends with an eye. I just think stay away from all of these hand gestures. French far right leader Jordan Bardella canceled planned remarks at Seapack after ex Trump advisor Steve Bannon made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology. That's a direct quote, according to a statement. This is the far right leader from France who's saying that it is too close to Nazi ideology for him. Let's take a
moment to think about that for a second. The far right leader from France, not the left wing leader, but the far right leader from France is saying that that's worth thinking about for a minute. It is probably the strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, but it's worth pointing out how far afield we have gotten in the United States of America that this kind of rebuke must come from someone on the far right from France. You're welcome. I can't take it.
It's so bad.
Yeah, it's really a shape if the reports that we're there's not going to be any more seapas anymore come true, because then they'll just never have an up or you to go there and do all these interesting hand motions.
It's also worth just pausing for a moment and remembering that we have this seapack and yet we don't have a democratic version of it. We don't even have a centrist version of it. We just have this one thing. You know, if you are a listener this podcast, perhaps you would like to have something that is like seapack, but not as zealatus.
Not as awful.
So this is the interesting new development is the staff at multiple government agencies have been instructed not to speak to Congress.
Yes, Congress, which is supposed to be running this whole thing, is getting less and less and less power, and we're seeing it happen in real time. Here's a Democratic congress person. She sent several letters to different federal agencies and the employees were said that they were not able to speak to her. The Committee on approbates as a long standing relationship with agency career staff, Well not anymore. Are This is the transparency that is doge.
Yeah, it's almost like, you know, there's supposed to be these checks and balances in the government and we're deciding that feels real irrelevant. The founding fathers didn't want that.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is a takeover of the United States government at the highest level, and that's what we're watching in real time. And you know, Congress has given up what little power they had and they gave it up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and now Elon Musk is cutting away at the government despite the fact that that is not how any of this is supposed to work.
With those drastic overreaches and sledgehambers to oversight trump claims power to fire administrative law judges.
That will Yeah, so again, Look, there are a couple things that Trump wor is doing with the courts.
That are bad.
One is that they are really like either they haven't quite yet done it, but they are priming themselves to a judicial rulings, which, by the way, will tip us into a constitutional crisis. I don't know that it's quite happened yet, but there's a lot of kind of voodoo math going on when it comes to unfreezing these funds. A lot of them are being unfrozen or a lot of them aren't being unfrozen as the way the federal judiciary is instructed.
So we're going to see more of this.
We're going to eventually, hopefully not, but I think there's a very likely scenario where the courts are ignored, where these members of the federal government in Trump world, under the instruction a Musk and Trump barrel through the guardrails
and continue to have their way with the federal government. Now, the one piece I think of good news here is that we're starting to see real pushback, and we're starting to see it from both the right and the left, because you're seeing these town halls of these people who are suddenly understanding just what's stake in these town halls.
And I think we're going to see more and more of that, And I think that we are absolutely one hundred percent at the beginning of a real ground level pushback that I think is going to be really important and good.
So I would say.
That, I mean, I think there's a very interesting theory of the case that a lot of people live their life not being really affected by Trump's first term and didn't see tangible changes to their life. They just didn't like what was happening. But here we're seeing it all the time, and there's even more evidence of it where that could happen right here, Which is our next subject, which is Trump fires federal workers who help fight forest fires weeks after historic LA blazes.
Yeah, I mean, and the FDA and the cuts. You know today they were talking about how they're going to cut the FAI. I mean, these are things that if they are cut, we're going to see real tangible results right away. And TSA, for example, they're going to cut the DSA that's going to mean longer lines and airs. I mean, these things are going to affect.
Every part of our lives.
And I think it's really important to remind people that this is not happening because the federal government is in trouble now. I mean, certainly we run a big deficit. This is happening because Republicans do not want to let these tax cuts for corporations and millionaires expire.
That is what's happening here.
Yeah, And they have a theory of the case that none of these people's work is necessary, that the private sector will just pick it up and then they won't have to pay for it anymore, and that theory of the case is very dumb.
Yeah.
Justin Wolfers is the host of the Think Like an Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Justin wolf You, Molly Sancy academic here to explain to us all the money that don't or some members of the United States Senate call it doggie, is saving the American people lots of money.
So explain.
Could you just stop by telling me who calls it doggie?
We had a senator call it doggy. The other day.
And actually there are some members of Congress who are calling it doggie, and you know what, for power to them, they are not wrong. Oh actually, Jesse said, everyone calls it doggie.
I love seeing Christian Conservatives becoming comfortable with themselves, their sexuality, their bodies, and what we can do with them.
All right, so let's focus on the money they're saving. It strikes me that they're not saving that much money. Discuss.
Yeah, So I'm going to start with the math, and I'm not going to apologize to your listeners because actually the math is the whole story. So there's a website Elon says he's super transparent in which he lists every one of his savings. So I went on that website last night and I mapped it up. I imported all the dater into a spreadsheet, and I added up all the savings and it adds up to seven point three billion dollars. Sounds like a low, right, Like you and I could have a terrific night hour.
It feels like a lot. I good, Yeah, summer house everything.
Now.
So here's the thing. There are three hundred and forty million Americans. So we're going to do long division seven point three billion divided by three hundred and forty million. What's that? That's about twenty dollars, isn't it.
Yeah, that doesn't seem like that much.
It's twenty one dollars and forty seven cents per American. Now the President is so excited by how much money that Doze is saving us that he's recommended that perhaps we should have a Doge dividend that he sends out dividend checks where one fifth of the Doze savings goes out to us as Doge dividends or stimulus checks, and the other four fifths, of course girded tax cuts for the rich. That one fifth then adds up to four
dollars and twenty nine cents per american. Now, it turns out a cart and of eggs costs more than that, So so far Doze will yield savings.
Of nine e nine eggs.
Nine eggs. You can have many way you want them. You have to cook them yourself.
Do they sell them in nine tacks? I thought they didn't sell them a nine facs.
Yeah, Well, what you can do is buy a six pack and then split another six pack with the neighbor. Okay, and that's your dividend check. Don't spend it all at once? Can I teach the listeners some economics?
Please? And teach me too.
Okay, so the amazing thing, right, the bottom line is the dose savings are trivial. They're tiny. You're getting four dollars and twenty nine cents, and in return, it's going to be hard to get into the national parks. The analysts who determine whether the Department of Transport invests in good stuff or bad stuff got laid off, so we might spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bad stuff. That all sorts of services are getting cut across the
federal government. So you got your four dollars twenty nine cents on the one side, and you've got a less effective government on the outher. Okay, here's the most important thing and the most difficult thing to understand about physcal policy, and it's simply this. Our minds, our human minds, are not very good at thinking about big numbers. So millions sounds like a lot of money, billions sounds like heapes,
and trillions sounds magnificent, And that's roughly right. But the thing to realize is these words sound the same, but they mean very very very very different things. And so when someone says I have generated savings of say seven billion dollars, don't get impressed. The first thing you have to do is take any number and reduce it to a human scale, a scale that your mind understands. And in this case, what I did is i'd made it
per person. Now I realize Elon is saving twenty one dollars and forty seven cents per person, and that's a scale I can understanding. All of a sudden, these impressive numbers. We realize that Elon's looking in the wrong place, is doing the wrong things.
Isn't there an eight billion dollars savings that's actually eight million dollars?
Yes? Okay, So first of all, everything I just said is taking Eilon at his word, saying I went to the website, I counted his savings as he counts them, and so on. Now it turns out there's a bunch of Salutes who've gone into the Doze data where they list Doze as savings, and they've said, hey, is this
really a saving? Now? The most prominent of these was a case where those claim to have saved eight billion dollars on a very small project that couldn't possibly be worth eight billion, right, And this again is the problem. So some idiot wrote down eight billion without realizing that was completely out of scale for the sort of project
that I think about. Since that the project was eight million, so Doze had to go back and say, well, actually we are exaggerated by seven point ninety nine to two billion, but don't worry, we staved you eight million.
I'm not an economist.
You're not an economist, mind, but it's less. That's what you're going to tell me.
Right, I'm not an economist, but I feel like there's a lot of difference between a billion and a million.
That's really, really really important to be literal. A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand billion. So let's try and create our own scale here. May Musk wants to save two trillion, and if he does, that will balance the budget, which is the deficits around about one point eight trillion. Right now, Okay, so he's after two trillion, So if he saves two billion, that's
zero point one percent of the way there. Another way of saying this is if he saves twenty billion, think about how far he's got to run as being one football field. A football field is one hundred yards. If he gets to twenty billion, then he's moved the ball forward one yard. Okay, he's moved it forward seven point three billion, so he's moved the ball from his goal line one foot. And I really want listeners to think about that. Realize that on this fiscal football field, each
yard is twenty billion. So whenever you hear a word that begins with M million, realize it's doing no work whatsoever. Right, it's moving you forward like a quarter of an inch. It's tiny, it's infinitesimal, like it matters for people in their lives, but it's not. If what you think you're going to do is fundamentally transform our government's finances, you can't even stuff that begins with a letter M from million. You've got to start with billion. And in fact, if
you want a yard, you want twenty billion. And he's not even at one yard yet.
Right, I want you to sort of top line because what Republicans have done have said like we are cutting waste and fraud, which again fraud seems to me, and according to elon things he doesn't agree with, discuss wonderful.
So here's another economic principle for the listeners, and it's one I tell my students. You're never allowed to use the word cost without the word benefit. Right. You could say I saved two thousand dollars worth of costs. Why is that? Well, I stopped paying my mortgage. Right, that's not a benefit to stop paying your mortgage. It's going
to come back and by you on the bum. So the one exception to that rule that you can use the word cost without benefits because if there's a cost cut, there's a benefit cut is if you're eliminating waste for auDA abuse. Because waste fordam abuse is all cost, no benefit. And so that's sort of the idea behind Doze or the animating politics or the animating narrative. The thing there's not that much waste fraud and abuse. More than that, Doge isn't finding it. Here's how you know something's waste,
fraud and abuse. When they discover it, people are arrested, right that onto it. So far Doze is at zero arrests. What they've done instead is they've discovered some things Elon doesn't like. Elon doesn't like it when usaid, which is basically how the US government helps other countries foreign aid. It's less than one percent of our federal budget. It gives us soft power, and it makes the world a safer place. Elon doesn't like that, so he eliminates it.
But it's not waste fraud and abuse. That's a value judgment. We had a whole circus last week where Elon discovered that there were lots of Social Security numbers for people who were not recorded as having been dead.
Yeah, as please talk about that.
He literally goes on to claim, as the White House did. Trump doubled down, as did his press secretary, that tens of millions of people are receiving Social Security who shouldn't be receiving it. That would be waste, fraud and abuse. So you can see this is like a really important thing from a retire perspective, because this is how doze becomes a technocratic apparatus rather than a political one. Now, the reality is that there were not tens of millions
of people receiving Social Security. He shouldn't. What happens is there's one data based table. God, I'm so boring right now. I'm going to bore everyone.
No, it's not boring. It's a coding error.
Right, it's actually even more boring. There's one database table at Social Security where they list all the social Security numbers that have ever been issued, and then you want to have another column in that table. Think of like a big Excel spreadsheet, which says, is this person dead? And it turns out if you just take all the people who are not recorded as being dead, there's tens of millions of people or social security numbers that were issued to people born over one hundred years ago. Now
that doesn't mean those people are receiving social Security. In fact, almost all of those records were people who died more than fifty years ago before we had electronic death records, and as a result, there was no easy way to update this table to show that they were dead. But if you go through those social scurity numbers, no one's drawing a check from them, because social Security is a
remarkably more sophisticated operation than Musk and his coders. And so it turns out that in reality, there are about eighty thousand Americans age ninety nine or older who are
receiving Social Security, not sixty million. And actually eighty thousand is about the right number because we actually do have some old people in America who are receiving Social Security, and a reasonable estimate is not that there were sixty million people receiving social Security who shouldn't be, but rather perhaps it's sixty and so the millions of people he found, and therefore the billions of dollars he saved, was literally a misinterpretation from a guy who was too busy to
be bothered to go to Google to say, why are there so many Social Security numbers that are not yet marked as dead? If he'd done that, he would have discovered there was a twenty twenty three Inspector General report that explains literally every line of this inexcruciatingly boring detail. There's no problem with the Social Security database. The only problem is when a naive person misinterprets it.
Part of the thinking behind this, I think, on the part of a lot of conservatives, was that dought sort of technology that the rest of us didn't know existed, right, that they were going to be able to look at things in ways that the rest of us couldn't, and that they were going to be able. And I think of it as like sort of the revenge of the buzzword.
Like there have been you know, for example, like two years ago, everyone was going to put everything on the blockchain, right, and then you know, the blockchain is.
Good, but the world is not running on blockchain.
And this is a sort of similar thing, right, everything's AI, the AI, this the AI that, And I do think to a certain extent, a lot of these bureaucrats thought that AI was going to be able to rip through the federal government and figure out everything, and we're seeing in fact that they're just sort of haphazardly cutting things Elon doesn't like.
Yes, So that's I think extraordinarily insightful. So if the argument is that the government should run on modern technology, I'm completely in favor. In which case I'm really very disappointed that the first thing the Republicans want to do is strip the technology modernization money out of the irs.
Yeah, that doesn't seem to square with the theory.
Right. Look, I can give listeners two answers. One, it's not going to work. You can walk away and just believe me because my first name is professor. But that's a shitty way of thinking. What I want to do is give you a really deep understanding of why it's not going to work. So many of us have in our minds the sense that government is bloated and inefficient. I know that last time I went to get my driver's license renewed, it was the most infuriating and frustrating
thing in the world. I know I've waited in the long line at the post office. I know that sometimes my kids that this local schools are not well run, and so on. The first thing to understand is that most government services a state and local government. They're not federal. The best business analogy for the federal government it's a company called ADP. ADP is a private sector company that
does payroll processing. Basically, a lot of companies send ADP their bank account detail and it's probably true for you money. It's how you get paid. They send your bank account details and an amount of money and ADP will send out the check. Many of your listeners will receive their checks yo ad So basically, what is ADP. It's a bunch of nerds with computers and basically a really big check printer. Why do I bring them up? What is
the federal government? So it's not the DMV, and it's not the local hospital, and it's not the local schools. That's the state government. Most of what the federal government does is takes in money through taxes and sends it back out. It's basically there to take money in when you're doing well and then give it back to you when you need it. That's what social security is, that's
what unemployment insurance is, and so on. So it turns out that yes, the federal government spends lots of money, but it spends a lot of money in the same way adp quote spends a lot of money. It's just writing a lot of checks. It's writing a lot of checks folks who also send them in money. So if you want to save money, it's not really going to be there's too many people manning the check printer, right, it's really are we getting enough checks in and we're
sending enough checks out. So there's this old saying the federal government's an insurance company with an army, and it's basically right. So again, remember the first lesson we said, which was I want you to think about twenty billion dollars in savings as being one yard on a football field. Total federal spending on payroll on people who work for the federal government is two hundred billion dollars, which is
to say it's ten yards. You could fire everyone who worked for the federal government and you'd move the ball ten yards. Now, no one wants to do that. Elon might end up reducing the federal workforce by ten percent, and that's going to involve a lot of very very painful cuts and a lot of very very painful services. Ten percent of ton of billion is twenty billion. So if he cuts the federal workforce by ten percent, a massive amount, he moves the football forward one yard and
he's got ninety nine to go. The point here is it's not about workforce reduction. That's not where the money is. The money is in two places. It's a rich guy is not paying enough taxes. That's the money that's not coming in.
I don't think Elon's so interested in that.
And then there's the money that's going out, which is predominantly Social Security, Medicare, and medicaid. If you're against those programs, you want to send fear of those checks before you better go to Congress first. And if you think that those programs are actually a really fair and useful thing that the federal government does, then you realize that actually, like most of what the federal government does, because that's most of where the federal dollars are going.
Yeah, and then there's also one other saying which you don't mention, which is servicing the national dat.
So that still basically makes the federal government like ADP. It's printing a lot of checks. And you're right that some amount of our revenue now is just going to pay in interest bills a large and increasingly large amount. And then this brings us all the way back full circle, which is where is our fiscal position, which is the economy is very good. May disappoint some lirls to hear that,
but I believe that's true. When the economy is very good, the government should be stocking away money to either repay past debts or for a rainy day in the future. Instead, we have a very very large budget deficit and very large interest payments, and Trump is promising about four trillion dollars worth of tax cuts back to the football field. Four trillion now is two football fields, right, So Elon's going to move the ball one yard and then Trump is going to run it back two hundred yards. So
that's how this math isn't mathing. And so there really is a quite serious fiscal situation that Republicans need to decide. Do they want to blow out the dead. Maybe that's what they want to do, which is leave it for Democrats to clean up again and they get their priorities through. That could be what's going on. At some point. You've got to wonder how long this can go on?
Right, But that's a real question.
I watched c SPAN because I have no life, and I was listening to Rand Paul, who I think of as almost always wrong about everything.
Because remember these tax cuts.
The panic here is because Republicans don't want these tax cuts to expire. If these tax cuts are allowed to expire, talk goes through where the American government is financially.
I haven't done the matter too much on this, so I'm just going to speak in broad terms. If the Trump tax cuts expired, then we will still have an ongoing budget defice at a time where it would be a good time to have a budget surplus. There will be a donor class who are furious. What's funny is there's, you know, three classes of Republicans on this. There's the old school, balanced the budget guys who haven't won an argument since they lost to Reagan in nineteen eighty. Mike
Johnson claims to be one of those guys. I don't believe him. There's the tax cuts for the rich because it'll all trickle down, and then there's the put your fingers in your ears and do whatever the dear leader says, which is currently in the ascendency, and it not only wants to extend that Trump tax cuts. Trump is still talking about tax cuts on Social Security, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime.
He's really into no taxes on tips, which, by the way, is completely unsustainable, right, because then everything can become a tip.
You know exactly what I'm going to be doing, which is, I'm going to tell the University of Michigan that I am going to be willing to work for seventeen dollars plus tips, but if the tips aren't good enough, I'm leaving, and so as a result, all of my income becomes untaxable.
Fantastic, it is, literally, right, Yeah, go on.
I'm loving it. Yeah, it's give me terrific.
Yeah.
I think that's a really good point here.
So fundamentally, this is a problem created by Republicans. I mean, if you were to say tomorrow, and again, I know you haven't run the numbers on this, but I just want to like reiterate as a socialist. I'm not really a socialist, but compared to a lot of these people,
I am. If you just let these tax cuts expired, you raise the corporate tax rate a little smidge, and you said, you know, if you make more than one hundred million dollars a year you need to pay slightly, you know, an extra two percent in taxes that you could cut the deficit quite helcily quickly.
Yes, No, his, I think the essential point I want to leave. You'll listen this with Imagine that you've been given a KPE and you're told that you're the super
deficit hole. You get to solve our physical problems. The question is, would you spend your days and nights trolling through the newspaper subscriptions at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, which we're cut and looking for fake Social Security payments and finding none, or would you go and spend all your time up the road at the irs, looking at the millionaires and billionaires who we know are paying very very low tax rates and using various sophisticated schemes and
have excessively low audit rates. Where do you think the real money's lying? And I think when you think about that question, the intuition, I think is obvious. If you're after the real money, it's the taxes that aren't getting paid, and that's the only place they're not looking. And instead, what they're doing is they're looking at what seems to be technocratic and it meets everyone's sense that government is inefficient, but there's no money there at all.
It serves a political cira, but it doesn't necessarily it's approved exactly.
So what you're seeing out of DOGE is pure political theater. It's either cutting things but calling it waste when it's not, or it's not really making important cuts at all, and it's providing political cover then to ignore the rest of the deficit issues so that they can generate text cuts for the rage.
Oh Man, so interesting and also OI, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank.
You, great joy.
Ian Bremer is the president of the Erasure Group. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Ian, Thank you, Mollie goe to be with you.
So I felt like we had to have you on because of the incredible stuff coming out of Trump World, and it's bizarre for foreign policy debacle from the Munich Security Conference on we've just seen such a high level of unprecedented. I know you're not supposed to say unprecedented, We'll just say without precedent when it comes to Trump World and formulations. So talk us through where you are are, what you see, and sort of your take on that.
What we see is a reversion of the United States to support the law of the jungle. In other words, on the global stage, might mix right. If you're powerful,
you get to set the outcomes. It's an important shift because, of course, for a long time, the United States was actively involved in promoting a very different kind of world order, still the most powerful country, but one where the US supported collective security, where the US supported the promotion of rule of law and free trade and even the promotion of democracy, not always consistently, certainly a lot of hypocrisy, but nonetheless that was the idea.
That's clearly not the idea anymore.
Ask the Ukrainians, or the Canadians, or the Germans, or the Panamanians, or the Mexicans or any of a number of other American allies right now who feel that the United States is acting in a predatory manner because the US is so much more powerful because they can't. And I mean clearly, since I've just spent time. I spent a week and a half in Europe and most of that time talking with erstwhile American allies who increasingly feel like the United States is led by an adversary to them.
And that's a really big change. So that's what's fundamental here. And how much of that is true? Is that universal? I'd answer no. There are a lot of countries that don't feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them the way the Europeans, for example, presently do.
But certainly big changes are afoot.
There are open questions about the survivability of the Transatlantic Alliance, and certainly very big questions about what happens with Ukraine, what happens with Russia.
That's NATO. You're talking about the surviv villains of NATO, right.
Yes, and more and more broadly, I mean the alignment of the US with Europe.
But sure, I mean both of those things are true.
It's interesting if you were awake at all during Trump one point zero, none of this is a huge surprise that said, the fact that this stuff still comes out as a surprise, I think is actually kind of its own surprise. Will you talk to us about for example, it definitly seems like Trump two point zero is ten times more supercharged, which they were promising. But I'm hoping you could talk to us about the predatory idea here, for example, the idea that somehow he's going to secure
some amount of mineral rights from Ukraine. That does seem like something I have never seen in my adult life.
So will you talk about that?
So a lot of things here.
First of all, on Ukraine, I have no problem at all with the idea that the United States could cut a deal exploiting Ukraine's natural resources in return for in during national security going forward and providing arms. And I have no problem with that where I think, I mean, there's a question of how the deal should be structured, what the right level of compensation is. You know, Ukraine is not a country that has great infrastructure right now, would take a long time to invest and take a
long time to get it out. I mean, you know, the US should be paid for taking that risk if they're going to make that investment. All those things Where I would have a very serious problem, and I see it as unprecedented. Is the idea that the Americans should be paid back for aid eight that the American government has already granted. That would certainly be unprecedented in modern times for.
The United States.
And it's something that I mean, the Ukrainians may end up accepting because they have no choice.
That's predatory behavior.
That's what you do as a corporate raider when you know you're facing a company that is in bankruptcy and has no choice, and you rip their faces off. And I mean, to be fair, at Trump's background is in that. In that field, he knows how to rip people's faces off when they're weak, and he's now doing it geopolitically.
Now is that new?
I think it is new, And I think it's new because Trump's in such a more powerful position now in so many ways than he was in twenty seventeen. I think, you know, some of it is that America's adversaries are weaker. China has the worst economy since the nineties, maybe the seventies. Russia is actually in decline given the war and other problems. Iran has just lost their proxy empire across the Middle East America's.
Allies are weaker.
The US economy is performing so much better coming out of the pandemic than all of the other G seven economies. US technology outstrips American allies by you know, wildly. Think about America's energy production compared to Europe's desperate need, Japan's desperate need. And then of course you have the political consolidation around Trump. He is in a strong position. He has the House and seidate, he has the GOP reporting to him in a way that so many allies are
facing very big problems against their own incumbents. And you know, you saw Canada's government just fall apart, South Korea's government fall apart, Japan just had a big loss.
And now they're in coalition.
Even India had to face coalition, France, Germany.
You know, it goes on and on.
So we're in a particular time where this Trump administration is really strong. And then Molly one more point, since we're really leaning in on this, which is that Trump personally, really, I think does feel not just vindicated, because it's the
greatest political comeback story in American history. If you think about where he was on January sixth, then with the second impeachment where he is today having won not an election without the popular vote the first time around, but with the popular vote, but also having survived an assassination
attempt where he was shot in the hit, right. I mean, this man now, and he's said this in conversations with friends, he believes that, you know, he was saved by God and that you know, it's like divine intervention and is why he's president now. So his level of confidence is just extraordinary. That wasn't true at all in twenty seventeen. He needed the Republicans to give him legitimacy. He didn't have it himself, you know. I mean, he was pretty insecure privately in terms of being the president.
He isn't now.
And so I think when you put all of those things together, you have to recognize that this is a This is a wildly different administration than twenty seventeen. That's even before we talk about the fact that they have Elon to activate them, who is so much more powerful and capable than anyone they had in the first administration.
I understand when you say powerful, I'm not entirely going to go along with capable, because what we're seeing now in week five of whatever this is is that actually Elon has had to rehire a bunch of people. The ethos has moved fast and break things. They're breaking a lot of them.
I'm talking about capacity, capacity to get things done. Does that mean capacity to do things that people are going to like or are going to work the way that he intends them to work.
That's a different story.
But there's no question that if what Trump is interested in doing is bringing about a revolution domestically and frankly in some ways internationally, Elon is uniquely positioned in his administration to help him do that. I disagree with many things that the Elon is doing in the government, of course, but I think he's incredibly capable. I think that you look at who that he is appointed in cabinet can
get things done. You look at someone like Pete Hegseth and he can talk about wanting to do a thirty four percent cut down in defense budget. I'm very skeptical, and I think the generals and admirals.
Are going to run circles around this guy. Elon.
On the other hand, I think Tulsey Gabbert got appointed because of Elon. I think he made some calls to Republican senators, and he changed those votes because they're scared of them. I think his ability to get things done is beyond that of anyone outside an individual president I have seen in my life in the United States.
Well, I'm not going to argue with you on this because you clearly know something about Elon and I don't. But I would say, certainly having unlimited funds is a huge advantage. The question is again, and I wonder about this is as someone who was a longtime fan of the incredible things that came out of Silicon Valley, it does feel to me like the what Elon is banking on is a technology that almost exists, and so I think there's a thinking here that AI can do things
that it can't quite do yet. And so and maybe I'm wrong, but it certainly seems like why they would fire like the nuclear scientists for ten hours, or why they would fire today. A friend of mine who works in that world sent me a text message to say that they had fired the and again like this is just you know, this has not been reported yet, but from Los Alamos, you have things like a plutonium facility.
I mean, he said, you know, they fire the radiation protection manager, Emergency response manager and security manager from Los Alamos. Then they tried to get them back, and that's what we're seeing at the FDA. We're seeing that at different parts of the government where and even like and they're still going. So Again, the larger problem it being unconstitutional. If you don't believe that the law applies to you, you can do whatever you want, which is the fundamental
underlying problem of Elon. But I would add that if he were such a genius, wouldn't he be able to fire people who weren't needed to be rehired right away.
I don't know as much about how effective AI is going to be for Elon using DOGE inside the US regulatory environment and the government system. I know a lot of people that I respect, with greater technological capacity than you and I that believe that this is going to be a game changer for the US over the medium term, and that the Europeans.
Are going to be left way behind and all the rest that.
No, no, no, But what I'm saying is not arguing with any of those points.
I want to make your point in an area that I know much better, which is usaid. Because here the United States provides about forty percent of all the global humanitarian aid period and the United States is now basically shutting down the principle mechanism to deliver that aid. And they are not doing this in a way to say, let's first go through all the programs. Let's see which ones are complete crap that no US taxpayers would support
if they actually knew what was happening. And there's a lot of that, and let's keep the things that really matter, like you know, preventing AIDS and stopping ebola when there's an active outbreak, and you know, dealing with like children's hunger and all that, and they are not doing that. And the fact that they have chosen to shut everything down fully aware that there are lots of really important programs that are going to be caught up in that
that is the intention. They know that the cruelty is in part the point. The thing that worries me the most, I mean, aside from the fact that I just feel bad for all of these innocent people that are being caught up in it, is the fact that the Chinese
are going to make bank here. I mean, they're the ones that are already the leading trade partners with almost every country in the global South, and those ministers and presidents and prime ministers who have just had their programs cut by the US are.
All turning to China.
And what worries me most about the Trump elon approach is that it is penny wise and pound foolish, that it will get all sorts of wins today and will deeply undermine America's power position in the world in five and ten years time. And to be fair, I don't think Trump cares that much about five and ten years time out, but I do, and you do, and a lot of sites in the United States do. And they're being sold a bill of goods here.
Yeah, for sure, And I think that is certainly an important point. So my larger question here is think about with that Munich security speech, the j de Man's speech where he said good night and good luck, what have been you know, now we're a couple weeks out from that, what have the sort of ripples been from that?
I wish we were a couple of weeks. We're not even one week out from that.
We're not even one week out from that. Okay, we're almost one week out from that.
It feels like a year. That's the funny thing, right, But we'll literally I was there. I was in the room.
I was maybe twenty feet from him. How to go over to say badly would be an understatement, but it was a shock.
Some people were in tears.
People were angry when he said specifically, I mean, look, it's a security conference, and yet he didn't talk about security.
I mean like he didn't talk about.
Ukraine or China or Gaza in the speech he made passing reference to I know, we got all these other things, but what the most important threat is the threat you know to inside the room. It's the woke virus, it's the it's lack of free speech, and it's democracy falling apart, which, of course I mean from my perspective, there are many things that the Americans can and should lecture the Europeans on, like innovation and competitiveness and entrepreneurship and lack of red
tape and all these things. JD chose the one thing to lecture the Europeans on the Americans don't actually have good standing on, right. But leaving that aside, he specifically this is the part that really mattered. He talked about the firewall, and most Americans don't know what the firewall is.
This is the Germans refusal to work with join government with make policy with the Alternatives for deutsch Land party, which right now polls it just over twenty percent and this weekend's upcoming elections in Germany and is considered by the entire German political spectrum outside of the AfD as a neo Nazi party. They are, they are under surveillance from German intelligence. It is about as raw and central to German governance and what their state means as anything
you can imagine. And this is coming from a United States which led the world in de nazifying Germany after World War Two, coming from a vice president who went to Dacow and saw the concentration camps the day before he gave that speech, and then he says, you need to end the firewall because you are not democratic if you refuse to engage with the twenty percent of your population that supports this in Germans views neo Nazi party. And then later that day he refuses to meet with
the German chancellor. He does meet with the head of the AfD, the sitting vice president. First of all, I saw all of a sudden when he made that statement I saw a man and yell out, this is unacceptable. And most people in the room had no idea who it was because it was a packed room and he was sitting in the front and they would have been looking at his back, but I could see him from the side.
It was the German defense minister.
Oh wow, and Molly, in fifteen years of going to Munich, I have never in my life seen anything remotely like that. And so you know, you have to understand that even leaving a side Ukraine, leaving aside everything else that we're talking about on national security, that statement, that reality, backed by the American President, backed by Elon who's been actively promoting and supporting AfD personally and through his Twitter and the rest, would make the United States look like an
enemy of Germany. And that is the way the Germans took it, and it's the way an awful lot of Europeans took it. This is now a serious crisis from the Europeans who understand that the leadership in the United States does not actually share a fundamental and core view of democracy.
And rule of law with the Europeans. So really it really shook them.
Correct. Thank you, thank you, Ian.
Bremer Lay.
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly Junk Fast Elon has no bounds. He's now making his way from Pennsylvania, where he did a bunch of fuckery over to Wisconsin to mess with their Supreme Court.
Yeah, this is a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. It is coming up very soon. It will decide the control of the state court. It will decide things like jerrymandering, abortion, etc. Elon Musk has put is the single largest donor to it on the Republican side.
He has put a million dollars in there.
You'll remember, a million dollars is a rounding error for Elon Musk. Great and he may put in more because of overturning of Citizens United, because of the fact that basically now our elections are just billionaire repositories. He can put as much money as he wants to in it, and it becomes this sort of proxy fight. The people who suffer will end up being the people of Wisconsin who want to get abortions or who have miscarriages and need to have mythipristone. Those are the people who are
going to suffer. 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.
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