Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and California will negotiate trade with other countries to bypass Trump's tariffs. That's incredible stuff. We have such a great show for you today. The Center for American Progress is near a Tanbin stops by to talk about how Trump just can't stop winning and by winning we mean we are all losing. Of course I'm joking.
Then we'll talk to New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich about being a voice in the darkness for people who are worried and how Democrats can do more of that. Then we have a special bonus from our fabulous YouTube channel with economist and friend of mine Justin Wolfers, who will explain to us why tariffs have devastated the public markets.
But first the news, Molly, almost ten trillion dollars of stock value has been wiped out since inauguration day. Yes, we're requit this right before the closing bill. We may get to the ten trillion. We're winning. We're fucking winning.
Yeah, we are winning.
So all of you people who voted for Trump because you thought he'd be good for the economy. Ha ha ha ha ha. We're all laughing all the way to the poorhouse. US stock market has wiped out nine point six trillion dollars since inauguration day. Stocks have had a rough go of it since Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second term. You know why that is because his policies suck. He's bad at this. He's not very smart. He's obsessed with tariffs, and he's ruining the economy.
We're about to go into a trade war. Everything is so stupid. Major equity indexes have seen their losses deep in.
So Donald Trump goes to the Rose Garden.
He makes an insane speech which includes the word boom four times. Okay, the economy will go boom, and fyi, it went boom.
It just didn't go boom.
Quite the way he wanted to. The SMP down thousands of points. Everything is down, down, down down, and fyi, there is no plan here right like this is tariffs, which will be met by other countries putting in more tariffs, which will be met by a trade war, which will make everything more expensive.
You're welcome.
Donald Trump doesn't know how tariffs were so here we are good news. If you live in California, you may not be subjected to the terror because everything is insane and he's retruthing things that say he's purposefully crushing the market, which does not inspire confidence in the market.
Molly, Yeah.
I mean, look, there were already people in Trump's administration muse about whether or not they were going to go into a recession.
This is something presidents never do.
Members of administration never do this, you know why, because they don't want a recession, so they usually don't sort of sit around and go like, maybe we might have a recession, but who knows. So look, this is stupid, pointless, bad for the country, bad for everyone. I do not think Donald Trump is intentionally crashing the markets because he loves carnage. But I do think that he's incompetent and kind of delusional.
And there are no grown ups in the room.
So listen, Gary Cohen, if you're listening to this, come back, come back, Gary Cohen. We need you to talk some sense into Donald Trump before we all are living under a bridge.
Yeah. And I think the other word that you could have added in there is Trump is also careless, which is why he retweets things like that, because what he sees is the thing that says Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers. Anyway, to go along with that ten trillion dollars of wealth wiped out, the new projected cost of his tax cuts for the rich are seven trillion dollars.
Yeah, I mean, good luck getting them passed, right Like so, last time Trump did tax cuts and then some tariffs. This time Trump is doing tariffs with the hopes that it will drive Republicans to do tax cuts.
I think it's going to be tough.
Right now, all of a sudden, we have senators freaking out about the tariffs. We have real staunch Republicans. They weren't freaked out by RFK putting an anti vaxxer in charge of HSS.
They weren't freaked out.
By all of the fucked up things that Trump did, right like putting cash battel and in char to the FBI, or putting Pam Bondy as head of the DOJ. These things they were fine with, right putting I mean Tulsei Gabbarn in the nowtional Security Organization. No, the thing that got them upset was crashing the markets. Look, whatever it is, we'll take it. But I think Donald Trump's about to have real problems passing these tax cuts because this is
the only leverage that sane people have. So I think, I actually think this may end up being You'll be shocked to hear this, but yet another unforced error in a administration filled with unforced errors.
Yeah, agreed. So my Twitter was ablaze this morning with a poll, which is not normally a thing that you see happening around the first week of April after a new administration comes in. But the poll said that AOC leads Chuck Schumer in the primary by almost twenty points. What are you seeing here? Because I think there's some things we should discuss.
So this is a poll from Data for Progress, and I like to think of Data for Progress's things.
Jesse and I like, yes, that they tend to be quote syst the lines to our worldview as far as polsters go, right.
They are sort of the rest mutant of the left. Yes, there's a fair amount of wish casting, and for that reason they are actually ranked as a C.
Yeah, we should say they had some very questionable practices around with their pollingue for Elizabeth Ward's presidential CAMPI and they were called out for that did not look very good upon.
Review and polls. Pollsters are ranked from ABC. So C is really as bad. I mean, I don't know if you can get worse than C.
It just doesn't happen much if you can.
Yeah, So it's seven hundred and sixty seven likely voters. That's another thing, likely voters versus registered voters. So you know I would do with this what you will. The point I think is that voters are mad. We hear this again and again. They're mad. They feel that Democrats are not represented them the way they want to be represented.
There was a lot of anger towards Schumer. Whether or not he could have done anything by the time the CR got around to him is an open question, but there certainly is a lot of feeling that he should have done something. And so I think there are real things to take away from this poll, even if this poll is not a straight line between this and what actually will happen.
Agreed, this was an interesting thing that your husband shared with us.
Yes, we got a text from Macreenfield. Yes, go on.
How many lives does US foreign aid save?
It saves a lot of lives in fact.
When I was on the phone talking to Macreenfield this afternoon, he was musing about whether or not Donald Trump will have indirectly led to the deaths with the secession of foreign aid.
More deaths than Paul pot So three million.
Three million people will die because the Trump administration.
Is ending for an aid.
Yeah, not good.
If killing people is bad, then they don't want to be good. And it's people in East and Southern Africa, Nigeria. They'll die of preventable diseases, They'll die of malnutrition, they'll die of hunger. It's a pretty dark way to go. And it's all happening because very wealthy people want to pay fewer taxes. You're at Tandon as the president of the Center for American Progress. Welcome to Fast Politics near A Tandon.
Great to be with you.
We're at the I Told you so moment in Trump's second term, where he's doing all the stuff that we all knew he was going to do, and people are like, oh new, I'm making hand gestures to express my displeasure.
I don't actually get a lot.
Of pleasure out of being right. I would have rather been happy discuss.
Yeah, I guess I'm in the space of like, I think it's totally fine for us to be individually outraged that our fellow Americans decided to vote for someone who advertised again again, I mean, who advertises going to basically do these tariffs that if you had thought about it for a second, you might think, oh, that could like take our economy and like headed into a gigantic like wall. Right, So I understand the anger, but I also think, look, there are a bunch of people who don't play that
pay that much attention. There are a bunch of people who don't pay that much attention to politics who also thought, oh, you know, his first term, he said all this shit and nothing really bad happened, and they didn't really like process that he was going to systematically get rid of every single guardrail. Understand how like we're all angry. I'm definitely angry that, like, I'm in a country where people
voted to kind of do all this damage. But I think, honestly, you know, politics's addition, not subtraction, and we have to welcome converts.
Even if you want.
To basically say why were you such an asshole, it's actually better to say I'm glad you've come over now I totally get like, it's not it's not like the just the tariffs. It's like the dehumanization of people, the picking people up off the streets. It's enraging. So, I mean, it is a lot to ask of the people who were right.
To say, just let's be welcoming.
But I still think we kind of have to be welcoming because the most important thing is to build like a gigantic majority against this monstrosity.
No, And I think that's a good point.
I would also add though, that I mean, we're not even one hundred days into this thing already. You know, the federal government is in tatters, right, The markets are cratering around us. The chance of a recession has gone from thirty to forty to sixty percent, is according to JP Morgan Chase, to those woke liberals over at JP Morgan Chase. And I think, what is the thing that I, as a person who gives a shit about policy, which makes me in the point, oh.
Right, I'm going to say one percent? Like you know, I don't know, you live to be so negative, it's.
Like a right.
And so in my constant quest to relitigate what went wrong, so Biden, I am a big fan of all of the legislation, chips and science. Basically, Biden tried to bring manufacturing back to the United States, which is what Trump is trying to do with these tariffs, right.
Yeah, but we just did it in a way that was smart and not totally moronic.
Yes, there are certainly people who want to crash the economy and live in the road, right. I don't think Trump is playing three dimensional chests here. I don't think he's trying to crash the economy to enact a tech oligarchy. I don't think he thinks he's doing that. I mean, maybe he is, but I think he thinks he's bringing manufacturing back. I think he thinks that the original sin of American life, which we all know to be slavery, was actually manufacturing and globalism.
Right yeah.
I mean if he thinks that much, but which do not.
But the point is I think that because when he talks about, you know, how he's going to be, he thinks he's going to bring manufacturing back. So one of the problems was the Biden administration was that they were not able to communicate.
Yeah, that's a big challenge. Yeah, I hear you.
Yeah, And a lot of those incredible policy accomplishments were were not transmitted. Talk to me about sort of the policy that you guys put in place with Chips and Science and some of these stuff to bring back manufacturing where it is now and what it looks like, how it's different than what I'm doing right now.
Yeah.
So, I mean, look, President Biden had a vision which was that we should actually have policies that made America a place where manufacturing could thrive. So we had Chips and Science Act, you had elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, like the big investments in climate and renewables and investments in electric batteries and solar panels and all these things.
And the idea of this was that we could basically have an industrial policy which tried to make the United States a place where people want to do business and come in to create things here. And we had huge successes with gigantic plants being built in Upstate New York, Micron and Arizona and Georgia.
And I think we should all think.
Really seriously about why that didn't translate at the time. And I guess I say, you know, I think this is a little bit of a warning to the Trump administration because the President used you know, smart tariffs where he needed to, particularly with China, because they do have a series of policies where they are kind of preferencing Chinese goods. But you know, had an industrial policy where we're really investing in the United States and we create a lot of jobs. But we also learned that people
were very price sensitive. And I know this is like news in the world, like people really care about jobs in the United States. But also, you know, when you know an average family, when people are kind of trying to think about how they make ends meet, they're really thinking about how much things cost, and then what their wages are, and when costs go up through the roof and they outpace their wages, like, it's not crazy that
people are angry about that. So what I think is so kind of insane about the moment we're in is Donald Trump said, I have this gigantic criticism of Joe Biden, which is that all the costs up and I'm going to bring a costs down immediately, And then he decided to do this gigantic, insane tariff policy, which you know, okay, let's have criticism of China, but like what do we have against Canada or like most of these Africrican counturies or the island with the penguins, Like the whole thing
is kind of nuts.
Penguin Island's going and.
Then you know, I mean it's like I find it on some levels so hysterical. But honestly, what's happening here is I think honestly President Trump just like bought his own bullshit. I don't think he thinks like the original
sin is manufacturing. I think he thinks the original sin is that we like left the eighteen eighties right be essentially measles, but like, you know, his weird expansionist thing to Greenland, and it's like fundamentally, I think he like lives in a world where he just thinks you can use the market power of the United States to just induce everyone to produce here and with this they'll just go to other places, like there are other people who will buy goods and these states, Like I guess to me,
the weirdest thing about the whole moment we're in, honestly, which goes back to the first issue of like how do we get here? Is the President's policies are a gigantic sucking sound on like the money that working class people have and are driving it to the wealthiest people in America because ess visually, he just has this tariff policy where we all pay basically a sales tack. It's on everything, like a variable sales stacks on all goods.
And he has a massive through reconciliation through this budget gimmick system, he's doing gigantic tax cuts for the super rich. And I know there's a lot of kind of shit going on all the time, but like, if we just actually focus on the giant wealth transfer between working class people and the richest Americans, it is. It is the biggest drive towards massive inequality in my leftime.
One of the things that we saw with Trump, and I'm going to talk about the weave. Now, Trump communicated so much he had weave, and he would say one word bacon, and bacon would get his people to know that he was talking about the price of eggs, so right, that things were too expensive. They're upset about inflation. So a lot of these people sad. Again you can argue whether or not it was true, but they said they were voting for him because of the price of eggs.
What he's doing now will make everything more expensive discuss.
I know, we went through a liberal panic earlier this week that he's going to go for a third term, And I personally think all this third term talk is just his strategy not to be lame ducked. He's a lame duck, honestly, and he doesn't want anyone to think he's a lame duck.
So he did says kind of crazy stuff all the time.
But like, the biggest evidence that he's not going to run for reelection is the fact that he is like happily tanking the economy for a vision that no normal person in America thinks is like actually achievable. And I don't think his own people think, like are they super hyper focused on I'll do bringing back clothing manufactory or clothing protection go into the United States.
You know, people are.
Really focused on the cost of things, and so I mean, it's like a gigantic bait and switch. But my experience with people is like when you bit and switch them, they do tend to get angrier. The presence disapproval on the economy has been the highest of any issue. It's the inverse of where he was in his first term, and the first term his economic numbers were the highest of all of his numbers, and people kind of personally disapproved of him.
Here.
You know, his job approval is dropping and I imagine will drop more next week, but his economic numbers are the worst, and honestly, I think he just doesn't care like I guess. My take on this is he does not think normal politics of plastin.
Now.
You could say that means he's going to throw out the elections, or my own take is more likely he's not going to run for reelection. But either way, the really really dangerous moment we're in, which you know, does scare me.
The things that keep me up at night are are the fact that we have a.
President of the United States who is not limited by anything, and that just means it calls on all of us to stand up a lot more.
So that I think gets me to Harris.
Yesterday, Harris came out and basically said, you know, I'm seeing a lot of cowardice here, which I think she's pretty careful. She's not a person who acts out of emotion, at least not what I've seen.
So the fact that she came.
Out at a Bloomberg event and said I'm not seeing people stand up here.
I think was meaningful discuss.
The thing that is so much worse now than Trump's first term is the pre obeying. And I worry that fear is contagious. So the fact that we have media institutions that are supposed to be the guardians of free information and guardians of democracy, and you know, people who in a democratic administration will lect dress about the right
to rights to information. You know, the fact that they're cowering that you know he's basically threatening a news agency, the AP and you don't seem like a walkout from the reporters is just honestly pathetic.
Okay.
And I have been on my own personal just campaign around Paul Weiss. I was a summer associate at Paul Weiss obviously many many years ago, was a summer associated at Paul White.
I wouldn't have said it, but I mean, when the wealthiest lawyers in the world, not like in America, the wealthiest lawyers in the world are cowering and paying off basically mob money to a president who they know is just full of it.
And they they're lawyers, so they know these executive actions are illegal, and we can kind of guess they're illegal because every law record it.
Tells us that every judge from every administration, five administrations have ruled against them.
Yes, judges from five different administrations. I mean the fact that they don't seek the tierro and they just go slobber in front of him.
And every time.
They do this, we know this from authoritarian regimes all throughout history. Every institution that cowers just makes it worse for the next one. And that's why Paul Ways had to give forty and then Scatton gave a hundred. And I honestly think, and I know there are good people at these law firms, but I just think history asks you in moments to stand up for your principles, and it's like it's an accident. Who has to stand up. It's not really clear ever until you're in that moment.
And honestly, I just don't know how people of goodwill are. You know, partners who have power in these law firms are still there. I mean, I just I was like, and I had this conversation real say once with the Pobwoys partner, and I just said, you know your grandkids are going to ask you what you did in this.
Moment and what are you going to say? You were going to say?
And what did he say?
It was?
You know, he was like I'm really struggling with that, and I was like, well, not enough. You're not struggling enough, right, Are you struggling enough? Because honestly, like I think there's only one answer to this question, which is if you think democracy is at stake, then you have to like, I'm so sorry, like it will mean you make less money, right.
I understand that.
Yeah, it's very sad, but you eli, will you make like twelve million instead of fifteen million dollars?
I mean, it's ridiculous, it's very very sad. Sorry, no, I agree. I could just go on and on on this.
It's like so enraging to me, Like we're all out here, how do we ask veterans?
I mean, it's not time.
Like we're asking veterans who've been fired to stand up and tell their stories. We're asking like doctors and nurses who used to get funding from HHS to stand up and tell their stories. We're asking people to stand up and try to oppose the insanity of this administration, which definitely feels like a receip to me that like you as a big Paul Wise attorney, your skin attorney can't stand up.
I don't know, it's ridiculous.
It's also these people were never going to be the ones to be brave. I mean, that's the thing with the billionaires, right, we have these billionaires who are the first in line to give up. Right, they're just like, I want to make a millenia movie that seems like something the American people are desperate for.
Let's pay her.
Millions of dollars. The idea that capitalism was ever going to be the sort of protector of democracy, right, that these billionaires were ever going to act in their own good. Well, so let me ask you as we find ourselves in this moment. Like, one of the places where I feel that Democrat Republicans members of Congress really failed was regulation tech regulation that they never even fucking tried to regulate technology one hundred.
I think the biggest problem in America, honestly, Like, the reason why we have Donald Trump is because this is my view, is because we have social media companies who run amok and basically make a shit ton of money by driving us to hate each other. You know, that's like their whole profit system is to keep eyeballs, And
why do they keep eyeballs by making us angry? So they feed us content about like some random person on a free in a subway somewhere and what they did, and you see polarization throughout the globe, and there's like, is it just an accident that this all happened in the last like fifteen years of social media like platforms took up and people spend more and more of their time, and their whole goal is to get us to watch
what they're doing and get angry. And so I do think a fundamental mistake was that we haven't regulated, we haven't gotten rid of Section two thirty, we haven't changed Section two thirty. There's like no liability for just telling lies online, and it's just like the whole system drives all of us to hate each other. I think it
is like one of the core threats to democracy. I do not think dland Trump would have even surfaced if we didn't have a system where we're all like he can live on the height of Americans.
And one of the other failures, it feels to me, was that there were not strong anti corruption laws passed the way they were after Watergate, and so in my mind, this is a failure of a number of people. But I would love to put Merek Garland in this category. Why do you think that there was so much inability to learn from the errors of Trump won? Like, why was there not more legislation? Why was there not more executions earlier?
Yeah? Why do you think?
Well, I kind of think maybe the lesson isn't to put a judge into a cabinet agency. And you know, I really honestly believe, I mean, and I think this is like a really important lesson for everybody. One of the reasons why we have these institutions where people are pre obey is because they fundamentally believe that Democrats will be like Merrit Garland and Republicans will be like Donald Trump.
And I just have to say, I do not think we will ever get a Merrit Garland like figure in as Attorney General in the I don't think any Democrat will ever think that the proper response to this kind of lawlessness is just to take forever to make a decision about anything. I mean, so, I you know, I mean, I don't know what form that will take, you know, I think it's important for people to remember that if you do not act to stop corruption early, you are advancing corruption.
I think people kind of lose sight of that.
I mean, I think we had a total arm's length from these kinds of decisions at the Department of Justice. Just as an observer really felt to me he was he so had the voices of Republicans in his head that he could not act. And my takeaway of all of this is, if you have Donald Trump's voice in your head or Republican right wing people in your head, You're not going to fight and fight strong enough. And I think that's a huge lesson for us going forward.
Thank you, Ne're a tandem.
Okay, great, Martin Heinrich is the senior Senator from the great state of New Mexico.
Welcome back to a fast politics Senator.
Great to be here.
So we are.
As we're speaking, the Corey Booker filibuster is still going, right, It.
Is still going He is remarkable.
Is it longer than Ted Cruz?
Now?
I think it's longer than Ted Cruz now? But I think, you know, I think he's shooting for the longest. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying to think if that was Strom Thurman.
Yes, Strom Thurman was the longest, and Sad Corcoran maybe before.
I've got to tell you, like, Corey and I are really good friends. But as someone who's like an introvert and very detail oriented, I gave probably the longest speech in my life this year, and it was a little over half an hour. To watch him do this for so long and be so on it and to capture, you know, what so many people are feeling, it's it's remarkable. I'm grateful to have him here.
So let's talk about what so many people are feeling. Because I've been all day in reviewing experts and authoritarianism and a bunch of other people like that, and what they keep saying is that the most important thing is to push back, and to push back forcefully and to
push back right away. And basically I think the real lesson is that what democrats did during Trump one point oh worked, and what democrats are doing during Trump two point zero needs to look more like what they did the first time.
I mean is that your sense, I think whenever you're dealing with authoritarianism, and that's what this is, and that's what this president. He doesn't have boundaries. And one of the key things is to never give up your voice and your power without a fight. So the ability for all of us to say this is not okay, this is not normal. I don't believe in this. I'm going
to stand up against this. That's the central principle that defines whether democracy slide into something very different or are able to recover as we did in twenty twenty.
So one of the things, again I am no Frank Lutz fan, really I am not. But he says something which I think is worth talking about for a second, which is he says, I'm hosting a focus group of Democratic voters who are angry with them leadership in DC. What Corey Booker is doing right now on the set of Floor is exactly what they want to hear. Democrats would be smart to get a transcript and copy it word for word.
I think we have to play on two playing fields, which one is we have to express and as I said before, just forcefully say that when a bully punches you in the nose, you punch back, and you're not going to give up your power. You're not going to
accede to what they want to do. You're not going to make it easy for them to do what they want to do, and at the same time, we have to play a long term strategic game and understand that there are lots of Americans right now who are laser focused on the fact that this is an administration who would be comfortable taking our democracy away from us, and
that we can't let that happen. At the same time, we were focused in twenty eighteen, and twenty eighteen was really critical to what happened in twenty twenty, and we
need to be focused again. In twenty eighteen, it was healthcare, health care, healthcare, and that was the message because that was what it took to win over struggling families who have fifty different things going on and don't always have time to get into the weeds about history and democracy, and especially in a media environment that is as fractured
as ours is now. And I think for us right now going into next year's election, even dealing with the special elections that we're talking about literally as we speak today, we need to be talking about prices and the economy because the reckless, irresponsible policies of this president could easily push us into a recession, and even a recession where inflation continues to go out of control, where we have literally a contracting economy but spiraling prices more and more
out of the reach of average Americans. And so you know, it's a hard job, but we need to be able to walk and chew gun.
That's called stagflation.
It is called stagflation. I don't use that word because most of my constituents don't know what stagflation is. They don't remember the last time we had stagflation, and so I tried to explain it a little bit because it sounds pretty bad to have a recession where prices continue to go out of control.
Yeah, and in fact, I was not alive for that period, or at least I was very young at the end of the seventy so.
It, yeah, exactly.
It's all I have is the fact that I was not an adult in but it was very, very, very dark moment in American life. So talk to me about you guys have gotten a lot of pushback about the cr and they are about to be about few fifteen books coming out about by the mistakes that Biden made, and they are going to I think they're going to really poison the well a lot towards establishment democrats, and I think we're going to have even more of a
tea party movement. Do you think that there's a world in which leadership might get shaken up by this.
Well, I think we're at a moment where we're in a generational change in the Democratic Party. There's just no question about that. And you know, look, I'm fifty three years old and I'm in the only legislative job I can imagine where that still makes you one of the young folks. And we need new voices that inspire the people who are going to replace us. I don't think any of us deserve these jobs forever. That said, we also need leaders who are strategic, and so this is
not going to be an easy time. I came down on one side of the cr battle. People I fully
respect came down on the other side of it. And the truth was we were choosing between two choices that both really sucked, and you know, the argument from both sides was know this one sucks more, and so really smart people came out down on different sides of that, and my feeling was it was so important in that moment, especially when the administration was trying to take congressional power away from away from the congress to push back forcefully
and the punishable and then right back in the nose. And so that's that was my choice. But I've got to say there were no easy choices in that battle.
Agreed, it was a terrible situation, and for sure Trump World was from what I know from Schumer's office, they were planning on making hr essential personnel and just spending the shutdown firing everyone they could. But do you think there should have been deliverables? Do you think that Democrats would have been in a strong position with deliverables?
I think we should have seen this coming a month earlier so that we could could have settled on what is the best possible scenario, what does a win look like, and then focused all of our energy and all of our efforts in all of our messaging towards that goal. And at the end of the day, would it come out different? I can't answer that. But we've got to get better at seeing what's coming around the corner and being ready for it and being having our shit together.
Once it came through the House, it was on Democrats and what was not unreasonable to assume that Johnson was not going to be able to get it together to pass it. Because as we saw just now with this remote voting bill, Johnson is not like a genius mathematician.
Absolutely, but we can't count on it. This is a personality cult at this point. This is not the Republican party that I grew up many of my family friends being part of, and you know it's it's not party of Reagan. So people tend to fall in line for Trump in a way that I have not seen other Republican leaders or presidents be able to deliver on. So we have to be prepared for those times when that's
exactly what happens. As as bad as Johnson is at counting votes, I mean, my god, I served four years in the House and I couldn't tell you when Nancy Pelosi ever got it wrong in terms of knowing where her votes were. But we can't count on that. We have to be ready for when the president swoops in and is able to deliver the goods.
Right and to whip the votes.
So now from world still needs to pass two really big pieces of legislation.
Right.
They want these tax cuts for very wealthy people. It's really just the tax cuts, right.
The CR everything's about the tax cuts. So the CR was about getting to what was important to them.
Right.
So normally, you know, the spending bill that we would do would not be a CR. Most people don't even know what a CR is. We would do multiple different appropriations bills to fund every different part of the government. The people who tend to be on the appropriations committees, even the Republicans, like that work. They don't want government
on autopilot most of the time. But what the Trump White House and President Trump and that whole group of rologarchs that he has elevated, what's important to them is defunding all of these things in government so that they can pay for a giant tax cut for the hyper rich, right, And so they were willing to accept a CR to get it out of the way so that they could get to what they really care about, which is eviscerating Medicaid to pay for their tax cut.
Yes, it's true, And in fact, we had a pretty incredible moment where Casey was on television saying we need to cut Medicaid and then he said reform right.
Yeah, missed the talking points there for a minute and had a moment of honesty, because that's what it is. It's like if you drill down on any of the stuff that they're calling medicare fraud, and medicare fraud is real, but it's small and it's prosecutable, and it's something that people who deal with real crime can root out. But when you deal with the kind of numbers that they're throwing out there, what they're talking about is like s forms not filled out the right way and somebody forgetting
to put their zip code on an application. They're lumping all of that into fraud so that they can get to a crazy number big enough to pay for their tax cut.
Also, Doge has Doge has a sort of.
Grift going that it is going to be able to cut enormous sums from the federal budget. But it seems through technology or some kind of right like these tech pros, these one guy is called Big Right. There are these very right leaning tech pros. We are young that they are going to somehow find things that are going to save millions of dollars in the federal government. So that is something that's sort of i think, not really happening, but sort of a bait and switch.
Oh, it's a complete bait and switch. It's about creating chaos, it's about breaking down the people who care the most about their jobs. I mean that's why when Doge fired so many people, they fired the easy ones to fire, not the people who were problematic in their work history. But for example, they fired National Park rangers who had just gotten promoted because they were the most high functioning, but because they were within twelve months of that promotion,
those were the first folks to go. So the whole Doge premise, we can find efficiencies, but you have to actually understand what each of these government agencies is supposed to do to be able to find those efficiencies. So you don't shut down, you know, your ability to fight fires in the Western United States to save a few nickels, And these guys are like rummaging around in the couch
cushions looking for nichols. And meanwhile they're just completely eviscerating the things we need the government to actually do.
So signal gate.
And by the way, now we just saw this reporting that members of President Trump's National Security Council may have been using Gmail. So that's a Gmail Gate speak to us about the large implications of this scandal.
Well, that kind of begs the question if they're choosing to use Gmail and not their government emails, and they're using signal and not their high side secure communications platforms. You know, there's a real question here where they just trying to avoid the regular checks and balances of things like the Federal Records Act because it's not safe to
do that. We all know, like those of us who are on the intelligens committees, we know better than to be lulled into thinking that just because you were using an end to end encrypted platform that you're safe because your device could still be compromised. Right, and we don't know were these personal phones. They won't tell us that.
There are a lot of outstanding questions here. Were these phones ever swept to see if there was malware on them where the phones actually compromises, we would know that potentially if they were swept. So this is an administration and a group of people who are doing everything they can to manage the damage rather than just admit that they screwed up. And that real leadership is about, especially in the military, it's about admitting you did something wrong
and dealing with the downstream effects of that. And there has been no willingness by anyone in this administration to take responsibility for this mess.
It does seem as if there is no absolutely no accountability. But also, do you think that Trump is making a mistake if he keeps on walls, which I guess he is for now, do you think that actually sort of hurts him? Because I get that the goal here is to never admit that you are wrong. But doesn't the incompetence sort of rub off on everyone else? I mean, obviously they're all incompetent.
But it projects in competence, and of course it projects hubris, which shouldn't surprise any of us. But if you look at some of the numbers coming out just today around how people view this, people view it as reckless. You know, there are a lot of Republicans out there who served in the military who know that the DoD guidance is that operational details never never get communicated on your low side communications because that puts real service members' lives at risk.
You have access to a bunch of emojis that maybe you don't have access to him the high side.
I don't know.
That's like, this is ridiculous. Sources and methods should never ever ever be in these kinds of communications. And there were details in these communications that I can just tell you do not belong. You may have the Secretary of Defense saying like this is not classified because I get to define what's classified and what's not. But these are precisely the kind of details that should never be included in unsecured communications.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Senator.
No, it's a pleasure to get a chance to chat with you again.
Yeah, I really appreciate it. And it's really good.
I mean, the more you guys can elevate you and people who are younger and more clear.
Well to be continued, we're not backing down from this fight.
Okaye, good because the stakes are really high, as you.
Know, one hundred percent.
And now we have an excerpt from our YouTube channel.
Justin Wolfer's is the host of the Think Like an Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan. Welcome to Fast Politics, Justin Wolfers.
Things are going great.
Good.
I didn't even ask.
Yeah, it's going real well in case you're wondering, So let's talk about tariffs and how.
We're going I have a challenge for you, Emily. Yours is the only show I ever go on and swear yes excellent, and I my challenge is, let's not do that. Let's not do liberal rage. I feel it, you listeners, whe.
The hairless dog feels it.
No one likes to see the equality of life destroyed. Yes, but I my challenge for you is the issues are too big and too important, and I think there's nothing more important we can do today than explain it in the nerdiest possible ways so that our listeners know what's happening to their world.
So no swearing.
Let's walk out, all right.
I can't believe no swearing. You know, I'm the least swearing of many people I'm on with. I'm like the grown up, and now you are becoming the grown up in the room, which is you know, all.
Right, we need some grown ups in.
Speaking of a room with no grown ups. The White House discuss so.
Obviously there was the big tariff announcement. The big news for everyone is very very large tariffs from the United States, bigger than the smooth holy tariffs that Benstein joked about in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
They crashed the economy last time.
It was called the Great Depression.
Yes, I wasn't alive.
Then if you compare our tariff rates to those of other industrialized countries. They are now ten to twenty times larger. So we are getting cut off from the rest of the world to a degree that no one else at our level of economic development or in the modern era and US. So that's the big news, and I don't want to lose sight of that. But actually you were asking about the White House, and so what's even crazier
is it's completely clear that they did no homework. So what we now have is very different tariffs for very different countries. Trump calls these retaliatory or reciprocal. Sorry, he calls them reciprocal. Texts, Yeah, they're hurting us, will hurt them. Right, It is impossible to have tariffs that are ten or twenty times larger than other people and for that to be reciprocity. Like the mathematics of that. I hope we're obvious.
There is still, you know, a well spread talking point among the fox is set where people believe that we're getting ripped off by other countries. Look, here's the trick. Economy is a big pie. There are small slices and small slivers where there are active interest groups and national traditions and so on, which are indulging protectionism enough that it gives Trump's folks talking points, But don't lose sight of the reality that in a modern economy, tariff rates
average one or two percent, not twenty percent. So this is not reciprocal tariffs. This is American tariffs. This is big walls around the country. If you want to think about it in metaphorical terms, what Trump has done has thrown rocks in the harbors of all of our ports, made it harder for anyone else to enter, and the retaliatory tariffs make it harder for ships to leave. We're now less integrated with the rest of the world.
Where do you think they came up with these numbers?
Sorry, it is hard to explain the degree of incompetence behind this, but let's nerd out for.
A little bit.
Okay, I don't think you should worry, but you could worry about something called our trade deficit. Our trade deficit is that we buy more stuff from abroad than they buy from.
Us, right, because it's cheaper to manufacture in places like the Vietnam than it is in places like Michigan.
You don't even need an economist. I buy stuff from abroad because I want to I buy Australian one because it tastes better. Yeah, well, I buy my kids toys from China because they're cheaper. There's no economy out there. There's you and I and your listeners making decisions, and it turns out the decisions that I make. Or I buy Vietnamese made T shirts because they're cheap, and I'm cheap, and that's okay, that's my business, right.
So we had a very American here go ones.
I believe in freedom, my friend. My T shirts that I buy from Vietnam have eagles on them and fireworks. So we have a trade deficit. Now, there are two ways of describingess whenever we trade. When I buy a T shirt, I send pieces of paper over to Vietnam, those pieces of paper called US dollars, and they send me pieces of cloth back. If what you thought the most important thing in life was was pieces of paper, you would be very upset that America has more pieces
of paper leaving that it has coming back. I've tried to wear pieces of paper. They don't keep you warm. My T shirt with the eagle and the fireworks and the freedom does keep me warm. So as much as we run a trade deficit in dollars. We run a trade surplus and stuff. So that's why I'm not so worried about that. But President Trump is okay, fair enough, he probably had a very bad teacher at the Warden School many years ago. But then what he worries about
is something different. He worries about our trade deficit with each individual country. What's our trade deficit with Australia, with Canada, with Mexico and so on. Right, economists call these bilateral trade deficits. Worrying about this is insane. Let me give you an example. I run a bilateral trade deficit with Traded Joe's. Every time I go there, I give them money and they give me stuff. And I also say to them while I'm there, I say, you know, I'm
a pretty good economist. Would you like me to deliver an economics lecture while I'm in the store. I will accept your money. And they always say no. So I run that trade deficit. That's literally a trade deficit between Justin Wolfers and Traded Joe's. I kind of think that's okay that Traded Joe's doesn't buy a lot of educational
services from the University of Michigan. And I kind of think it's okay that they're not buying meals from me either, but Trump is worried about that, and so the tariffs are set proportional to America's trade deficit with each country. So if Traded Joe's were another country, the United States would have a one hundred percent tariff on Trader Joe's. Is my life going to be better if I can't get moderately good frozen meals from Trader to Joe's. No, I'd have to eat the crap that I cook instead.
And so that's what's driven each of these individual tariffs, and it leads to some profound absurdities. There's the country of Lesotho. Every poor country which is lucky enough to live on top of some dirt that has diamonds underneath it. Americans like diamonds, so they buy diamonds from Lesotho. People Innesotho are very very poor. They don't buy much stuff from America. We make very expensive, high end stuff. So therefore the United States runs a trade deficit with Lesotho.
Trump thinks that's evidence that they're ripping us off and they must have very high tariffs on us, so he has just put very very high tariffs on Losertha. This makes no sense. It's literally crazy. So what we have is an old man who misunderstands economics, who has surrounded himself with people who refuse to explain to him, literally refuse to explain to him that his ideas might know since that's the problem. So with Saint Markets full dramatically on the news of these terraffs.
To hear more, please head over to our YouTube channel by searching Fast Politics with Molly Chong Fast.
And a moment.
Jesse Cannon Molly Jung Fast.
So imagine, for some reason you wanted to buy a cyber truck. I can't conceive of why.
No, don't worry.
Apparently Tesla is not accepting them as trade ins and taking them to return when people don't like driving it around and having swastikas written on it and people laughing at them on the street.
I am shocked.
You'll remember that cyber trucks have actually been recalled because of the glue that Elon Mush uses to glue the metal to the bottom of the car is coming unglued.
You'll remember that.
Well, you can maybe get them recalled, but you certainly cannot trade them in for Tesla's cyber truck owners say Tesla will not accept its own vehicle as a trade in. With Tesla having issues selling new cyber trucks, the automakers reportedly not taking any trade ins. Many cyber truck owners report trying to trade in their truck for a new vehicle, and they were told that the automaker currently doesn't accept its own.
Vehicle as a trade in.
I am not at all surprised.
So real buyers remorse in a real life situation.
That's it for.
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