Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #7

and myself. Robert, do you want to like briefly summarize the situation and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers.

did when they entered the house. My understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife that they did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything. He's still not charged with any crime, No he's not been charged with any and they just took him and like turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct, So it's like none of this is the way this should have gone. Like if this was an arrest.

The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his descent unacceptable or contrary to US foreign policy, he can be deported. As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented, save for ugly historical precedents, including the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

here is not that he was breaking the law. So we have this official like openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like?

A lot of people would give anti war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would get fucking deported for it. So yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like two hundred miles back from here, but if isn't drawn here, this is going to continue. This is going to continue to get worse.

He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian unquote, which is just an unbelievably anti Semitic and anti Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in.

So they're in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right just wandering around trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out like what they should do next.

Free Trade Agreement. But then everyone remembered that the twenty five percent steel in a Lune of tariff was still going into effect, and so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to fifty percent. He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like twenty five percent increase in electricity prices. However, coma,

the trade war is one hundred percent still on. Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other US goods. I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press, because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the US, Canada, China, and to some extp Mexico.

For Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs. But this week the EU officially joined the phrase. So here's from the AP quote across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise terrace on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycles. Bourbon again.

on twenty eight billion dollars of US goods. Also on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural terrifts that we talked about last week. And notably I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with coren to sort of like preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now in effect.

It's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this has I think in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me. This has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in, but there's stuff that I did not predict, which is so okay. Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection

for us GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're gonna get stagflation again, which is sort of While ceclation was the thing in the seventies that was, you know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time, this is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed to write take power in the first place.

They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity So this is basically like this doesn't have like a technical official effect, but this is like this is basically their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase right And this is also sort of applies to bonds, So.

And they're they're secifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing because again one of one of the one of the countries again who's whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with like their

fucking housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer based economy for years and years and years and years, and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually like fuel an economy consumer spending. Like they're you know, they're they're about

to take giant damage from the trade war. And also they like you know, like it was only like three years ago the CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tianneman, right, and these guys like and again these are these these are the financial analysts of City Bank and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the US.

This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC literally go on air and call what Trump is doing quote insane and start talking about how and this is and this is I think what these people are worried about is they're you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now, and it's starting with these sort of these downgrades views equities is capital flight, which is straight up a butt like international capital taking their money from the US and fucking literally moving out of the country

and moving it somewhere else because the US is so unstable. This is like, I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the US would do, because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on right and part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking, and they did Monday, is that, like the inflation data

came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now, and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's gonna take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these terrorists to set in, right Like these are these are things that like you know, it's going to take it's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impact of that. But and when we do, it is going to fucking

law ismoking creator into the economy. And the worst part of it this about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all

of this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been Downwright collaborationists, that they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs, because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular, and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the

capital owning class, who you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency, and the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force the vote in the tariffs. I'm just going to read this

in the New York Times. The National Emergency Law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency, requiring committee consideration within fifteen calendar days after one is introduced, and a floor vote

within three days after that. But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declare that quote each day for the remainder of the one hundred and nineteenth Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February first. So the point we are at right now is is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy, Congress

has declared that days don't pass. This is fucking this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like caligulous horse in the Senate shit like they again, they are literally they have literally declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days, so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat like the Israelites.

It's this real, like sort of admission by the Republican Congress that like they're seating authority over policy like to Trump completely right, Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fear and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not you know, working enormously. Well, yeah, we'll see and and you know, and this this, this is starting to have effects on like investor confidence like in the in like the US as a political entity in the US is

an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elin Must Donald Trump the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession and then after the recession things are going to get better, and the financial pressures hasn't believed them.

And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this, and I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be, because these are people who actually matter in the political system, and I think we'll see the rammications of this play out and then this sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit, and we're now like Wiley Coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down.

AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed, and further details will be worked out back in the district court. And it's still unclear if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court

regarding Trump's actions the past few months. This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over one thousand and three hundred employees. Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went onto Fox News to say that this reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department, saying, quote,

this was the president's mandate. His directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is a bureaucratic bloat unquote.

The Education Department is threatening that these other fifty nine universities may lose their funding if they do not quote enforce Title six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared a Jewish ancestry Unquote. I don't know how to say here.

of unclear to me, I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into lockscept with Republicans on back of the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the US's like political, economic, and social institutions.

genocide in Gaza. Right, this is this is the you know, the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil, Like this is this is the same exact purpose, and now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in like the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights regardless of whether they're a citizen, a Green card holder, or on a student visa. So

this is this is all deeply, deeply worrying. Robert, you have a you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out.

of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier given kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against US citizens, And I just wanted to chat about this book because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.

My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer, is that there is mass protests in DC and the Insurrection Act gets used and the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see

DC as the place they want to do that. So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where like I've been able to verify this guy. Yet there's a couple of points that make me that is probably is a National guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right, Like, this is not like a National guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.

For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the Guard about. There's one little bit where he advises people on like stop the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says, only buy from NAAR and North American Rescue. It's the

same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive thirteen forty four to ten, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this, And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on US citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right.

That's the gist of it is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class, who are you A significant chuck of them are very much down for Trump. But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would

fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like a assuming this is accurate, and I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that, like, when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. Like if I have to have armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general.

But that situation can change very very rapidly if the situation becomes an active firefight. And I do think like that's a thing we have to consider right now. What was the possibility that we have US soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. Like that's in the cards as early as this summer, and it's not a fun the thing to

think about. But I'm seeing more and more, not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the

immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these

are things you should be thinking about. If you're listening and you are in the military, these are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protest tests, and the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not not fringe you're crazy.

there's certainly other other ways to cause grievous harm. Yes, in these sorts of like protest environments, and.

I still has a really bad name. On Monday, a Central judge ruled that Musk's DOGE should be the subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget and was ordered to quote begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable unquote now.

Despite Musk's claims of quote unquote maximum transparency. Last month, the Trump administration tried to shield DOGE from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as quote unquote presidential records, which carries special protections. This specific case is super interesting.

The judge of federal judge by the name of Cooper also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from political quote, the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that DOGE qualifies as an agency under

some sections of law but not others when it suits it. Thus, DOGE becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocke's entity, Cooper wrote, not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient unquote. And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how DOGE is very selectively an agency only when it causes you know, benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out. This episode admits Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships,

and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White

House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, Wow, everything is computer So this was a very very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism where Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models and Trump got to quote unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy, as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his you know, company is losing a shocking amount of money in the in the stock market.

its own form of unhinged. But on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror unquote, So that.

erg Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where I president is using his office to boost like the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors who's also like running government agencies essentially and doing massive massive cuts to prohibit their ability to like investigate his own businesses, while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses

like Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days, and now Tesla shares have risen four percent after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla.