Ep. 2173 - FALLOUT: Stock Market Drops, Trump Pushes On

Well, folks, it's drinking from a fire hose. Tons of news on the economy. We'll get to all of it. momentarily. Remember, Daily Wire Plus is the place you are going to get people telling you the unvarnished truth Here we are a facts-based company. We try to do things that are facts-based. If you are facts-based, if you just want the unvarnished truth, then join us here at Daily Wire Plus. Daily Wire Plus members get ad-free access to all of our shows. You can live chat with me, my producers.

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slash subscribe. So as I suggest, tons of economics news breaking. Yesterday, of course, was a horrifying day in the stock market. And people who are attempting to play this game where they say, well, you know, the stock market taking a massive dump, that's okay. I mean, that doesn't affect- 50% of Americans have stopped.

Maybe because they have 401ks. This notion that Main Street is totally disconnected from Wall Street, that it's just a few people at the top of the food chain who are playing with the money. That is not actually true in any way, shape or form. And obviously the stock market. as a sort of gauge of investor confidence makes a large-scale difference in availability of liquidity for startups and being able to raise money to, for example, hire new people. If the stock market...

tanks by half. That's a pretty good indicator, for example, that bad things are happening. And if the stock market continues to gain steadily, that's an indicator that maybe some good things are happening. And this isn't too tough. It's not too sophisticated.

It doesn't mean that every time there's a little bit of a sell-off, it's the end of the world. And it doesn't mean that every time there's a run-up, that means that amazing things are in the brewing. What it does mean is that ignoring data is not, in fact, a good form of analysis. The stock market does provide data. And in fact, we have lots of it. Investors have been shaken by President Trump's tariff regime.

They're not sure what to expect. They're not sure what comes next. There are a lot of conflicting messages coming out of the White House. So yesterday. The U.S. market suffered its steepest decline since 2020 on fears that President Trump's new tariff plans would trigger a global trade war and drag the United States economy into a recession. According to The Wall Street Journal, major stock indices dropped as much as 6%.

On Thursday, stocks lost roughly $3.1 trillion in market value. That is their largest one-day decline since March 2020. And of course, March 2020. was COVID. And this is not being inflicted by an external shock, like, for example, COVID. This is being inflicted by a deliberate choice by the Trump administration. A little while I'm going to try and steelman the Trump administration's position.

What's sort of the best case scenario for the thing that they are shooting for with these tariffs? The market this morning, again, opened down very steeply. Investors obviously are not sanguine about the situation. There was a good jobs report that came out for March.

The employment report came out at 228,000 jobs added in March, which was more than forecast. Of course, that is a backward looking report. So it didn't have a massive impact on the markets today because people are saying, well, yeah, I mean, the economy was doing fine. And then Donald Trump decided to take a.

giant stick and stick it right in the bicycle spokes. That is what the market is saying right now. Now again, that data came as a bit of a surprise because economists were expecting it to be a little bit slower. This came amid a federal jobs decline. So normally this would be like a point of giant celebration for the Trump administration. Jobs increase, federal jobs go down.

But the problem, of course, is that policy just radically changed. So looking at the jobs report based on a time when there were not these sorts of tariffs, that is not comparable to what is going to happen next. So investors are freaking out. The Wall Street Journal quotes a man named Rob Citrone, a 60-year-old hedge fund manager, watching from his Orlando, Florida home as President Trump announced his plans.

He says, I should have sold more. Across Wall Street, money managers, brokers, bankers were reeling from what many described as an unprecedented shock, fearing it marked an end to the markets post-COVID rally.

They might have lived through a bigger market swing, but this one, induced by a U.S. president, depends on establishing a new paradigm for global trade at the expense of both rivals and allies, felt incomparable because of the result of deliberate policy. And this is the part, again, that is freaking out markets.

Markets can price in external shocks pretty quickly. But if the question is, you don't know what's going to happen next from the White House, people pull out their money in fear of what's going to happen next. So one strategy is hold on for your life. And let's be clear, I'm not giving investment strategy because I'm not legally capable of doing so. However, a long-term investment strategy says leave your money where it is over the long haul.

Don't sell during a dip is a pretty good piece of advice. How long and prolonged that dip is, is another question. But if you have the ability to hold for long periods of time, then obviously that is a better investment strategy than selling as the prices decline. As far as the idea that this was going to have a salutary impact on job creation in the United States, the early indicators are at best mixed. Stellantis, for example, has now temporarily laid off 900 workers in the United States.

This, of course, led to criticism from the UAW. The UAW is very happy about the tariffs until precisely the moment the economic effects of the tariffs are felt. Now, remember, this sort of economic policy. Big trade wars. Unless there is some sort of ancillary rationale for them, they are on their face not good. Thomas Sowell, who is the best economist of our time and a man who deserves plaudits for being sort of the heir to Frederick Hayek and the entire Vienna School of Economics.

Here he was yesterday, the wisest man in America, explaining what he thought about President Trump's tariff regime. It's painful to see what a ruinous decision. from back in the 1920s being repeated. Now, insofar as he's using these terrorists, for to get very strategic uh things settled and and that and that he is satisfied with that but if you've got set off a worldwide trade war That has a devastating history.

OK, and of course, Sowell would know better than anyone else. And he happens to be correct. There's also the problem that while the Trump administration can maintain that America is not just about the cheap and plentiful products. It turns out that Americans actually do like affordable and plentiful products.

And Jimmy Carter tried this routine as well during his malaise speech. Well, Americans need to spiritually buck up, even if things are worse for them economically. It turns out this is not a popular selling point. Here is Harry Anton on CNN explaining. It's the American people who are the naysayers. Oppose new tariffs on other countries. All goods. Look at this. 56% of Americans oppose new tariffs on all goods. How about cars in particular? 56%.

of Americans oppose new tariffs on imported cars and car parts. Look, the bottom line is the American people oppose, oppose, oppose. No, no, no. They do not want new tariffs. I looked at a ton of polling. It's really hard to find any in which you find folks supporting new tariffs. And that is going to be only more true if the economy actually declines on the back of all of this, the stock market, and then more broadly, the economy, employment, investment opportunity.

problems with mortgages. One of the big problems here is that, of course, there's a lot of corporate debt in America. Companies operate. on marginal growth. And if that marginal growth goes away and that corporate tech get called in, you got a problem on your hands. And again, this is being created by the Trump administration.

As I mentioned yesterday, I mean, I know business people who import products. These are domestic American businesses with American employees, and they have to import their inputs to their product. And they're getting smashed by these tariffs. So President Trump, one of the big problems here also is the level of uncertainty. There's a huge level of uncertainty as to what exactly.

President Trump is trying to accomplish. The uncertainty is its own form of risk. Because if the markets don't know what President Trump is doing, if they don't have a perspective on how long this is going to last, what the end goal looks like, people start pulling their money.

People say, listen, I know I'm not supposed to sell into a dip, but I'd rather sell into a dip and have at least some dry powder in the back room than ride this thing out. So President Trump, the White House, they have put out.

a set of talking points to their allies that was obtained by Politico. And here are their talking points. And again, the problem with some of the talking points is that they're mutually exclusive. President Trump is revolutionizing the global trade order to put the American economy, the American worker, and our national security first.

Okay, so again, I don't know what revolutionizing the trade order looks like. What is the end goal of the trade order? If the end goal is everybody goes to zero on their tariffs and non-tariff barriers, sounds great. But totally unclear if that's the case at this point, because, again, there are countries that have extraordinarily low tariffs with the United States who just got smashed by these tariff rates.

The White House continues. Foreign trade and economic practice have created a national emergency, and President Trump's order imposes responsive tariffs to strengthen the international economic position of the United States and protect American workers.

It is not true that foreign trade has created a quote-unquote national emergency by any technical terminology with regard to a national emergency. You can say that you don't like the trade balance. You can say that you don't like that certain industries have been offshored and you want to reshore them for national security reasons or whatever.

It is not a national emergency. The United States economy remains the most powerful economic engine on planet Earth by a long shot. It is not particularly close still. China has bulk, but the United States has actual power. Bulk and power, similar, but they're cousins. They're not exactly the same.

The idea that these are reciprocal tariffs or responsive tariffs, the problem there, again, is if I thought these were responsive tariffs, and I think if the market thought that, it'd be a lot more sanguine because the question is what comes next? Is President Trump going to try to cut?

bilateral deals with various countries to lower the tariffs back down to zero? Or is he doing this because he just doesn't like trade deficits? This is the problem I was pointing out yesterday. That giant poster board that he was holding up that showed quote unquote tariff rates for various countries on our goods. It's not true. Those were not tariff rates. They had nothing to do with tariffs. Those were trade deficits divided by import.

Meaning the only way to get those numbers down to zero would be for those other countries to just buy more American products, regardless of whether they are poor or whether they even have tariffs on American products in the first place. It is the equivalent of you saying that you are running a deficit with your grocery store. You're running a trade deficit with your grocery store because you gave them money and they gave you goods. And the only way that you're going to achieve parity.

is by getting the grocery store to buy fan belts from your factory. Well, listen, all of this creates uncertainty. There's a lot, a lot of uncertainty. And in these uncertain economic times, with tariff tensions, recession worries, stubborn inflation, it's no surprise gold prices keep breaking records.

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The talking points go on. For decades, the trade status quo has allowed countries to use unfair trade practices to get ahead at the expense of hardworking Americans. And again, you want to label things that you want to get rid of. simply as a way of, quote unquote, rejiggering the global order. I don't know what you're going for and neither do the markets. And that's why they're freaking out. The distorted trading system has caused the offshoring of our manufacturing base. The reality is.

Our manufacturing productivity has gone up significantly since the beginning of NAFTA in 1997. It has risen from about $1.7 trillion to $2.4 trillion, something in that neighborhood. The manufacturing base in the United States in terms of jobs has actually been harmed, not predominantly by offshoring, but by automation. If you're talking about jobs in factories, why those are going away, the answer is robots.

The answer is machinery. That's why you don't see giant assembly lines of humans doing this stuff anymore. You see robots doing this stuff. And here's the thing. Howard Lutnick, who's a big proponent of the tariff strategy over at the Commerce Department, he is saying as much. He was asked last night on Jesse Waters. about reshoring manufacturing from places like Vietnam, which makes t-shirts. And here is Latinx answer.

Now, we're not going to have all factories come back like clothing, manufacturing. That's tough to bring back. But what kind of manufacturing are you talking about returning here? Well, you can't just give that away. See, what's going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor that we've seen all across the world. I mean, think of what our factories did. They went to the cheapest labor in the whole world, slave labor, cheap labor.

the worst environmental conditions, polluting the heck out of it. And then we bring back those cheap products here and we feel good about ourselves because we don't see the pain. But the pain is in our workers. The American workers have been given the raw deal. And what's going to happen now is we're going to build factories and we're going to train and we're going to have trade craft. We're going to do the greatest set of training ever.

And our high school educated people, they're going to train to do robotics mechanics. It's kind of like a supercharged BMW mechanic. OK, let's just be clear about this. The robotics are one of the chief reasons for the decline in employment in the manufacturing sector. So if the idea is we bring the factories back here and then robots replace the foreign workers. You might incrementally gain jobs. You're not going to massively gain jobs because most of the work is going to be done.

by the robots. Again, there are a bunch of different sort of priorities that are in argument with each other. Because if you don't do that, then the prices on all of those goods and services rise dramatically. If you just do it with American union labor, it's going to be way more expensive for American consumers.

OK, other elements of the White House press release, the undermining of critical supply chains. That one I agree with. Again, there's good and there's bad in some of the tariff policy, but it's unclear what the rationale is. If we are talking about reshoring critical supply chains. OK. Elimination of export market access, that people are eliminating our ability to export to them.

OK, well, they are likely to raise their tariffs on us right now, and we are starting to see that already, as we'll get to in a moment. They say that this is sold out. The American middle class I showed you yesterday, the American middle class has not, in fact, been sold out. Most of the American middle class turned into the upper middle class.

The decline of small towns across America. The truth, again, is that there are certain towns across America that have declined and there are other towns across America that have risen. This is a constant throughout American history.

Population movement is as old as de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville talked routinely about the idea that people would go to a place, build a town. The town would then go defunct. People would move to the next town. And that is not a wonderful thing. It's not an amazing thing. It is a reality. of an economy that does not just subsidize you in the place where you are. The White House talking points continue.

Under the Biden administration's watch, our trade deficit soared to $1.2 trillion in 2024. This status quo cannot continue. OK, well, I mean, if we are just going to look at the U.S. trade deficit by year. what you will see is that the United States trade deficit

was actually quite high during the Trump administration as well. So it wasn't as though it got solved under the Trump administration. And trade deficits are not, again, a good substitute for an explanation of why that's bad for the United States. Trade deficits finance virtually our entire debt load.

Because let's say that we are buying more from another country than they are buying from us. They take those dollars, those dollars are used as the world's reserve currency, and those dollars are very often traded for the American bonds that finance our debt. And then the talking points, again, these are the talking points distributed by the White House to allies in Congress. Again, that's nice rhetoric. I don't know what it means.

If we're talking reciprocal, fine, but it's not clear what reciprocality means at this point, other than other countries need to buy more of our goods, even if they don't have tariffs on us. So it's kind of a mishmash of various rationales. Now, to steel man, what's going on here? There is the sort of.

Scott Besson theory of the case, the Treasury Secretary, who, again, knows economics really well. Besson is an excellent Treasury Secretary. The case that he has been making is a more sophisticated case, and it's laid out well by a policy analyst named Tan V. Ratna.

Tanviratna is quoted by the investor extraordinaire Bill Ackman. Here's what she writes today. Trump's new tariffs aren't a trade tweak. They're the first move in a full spectrum reset. $9.2 trillion in debt matures in 2025. Inflation lingers. Alliances are shifting.

One announcement just set a dozen wheels in motion. Here's what really is happening. Start with the debt. $9.2 trillion must be refinanced in 2025. If rolled into 10-year bonds, every one basis point drop in rates saves approximately $1 billion a year. So a 0.5% drop would save $500 billion over a decade. Lower yields free up fiscal room. Without them, core spending gets crowded out. So the basic idea here.

is that what we need to do is drop bond yield. So scare the crap out of people in the markets. They move their money into what they think are more secure bonds. And in doing so, they decrease the bond yield. meaning that the demand for bonds goes up. When the demand for bonds goes up, it means that you can basically refinance the American debt. People are going to buy American debt at lower interest rates. And that means that when we pay off those interest rates, it will cost us less money.

So as she says, how to push yields down with sticky inflation and a cautious Fed, manufacture uncertainty. You sweep in with tariffs, you spook the markets, you trigger a risk off. Money exits stocks, floods into long-term treasuries, a deliberate detox to cool the economy and cut refinancing costs. And then you have to cut the deficit. And this is where Elon Musk and Doge are coming in.

With these savings, says Tanvi Ratna, the big economic pillar to successfully deliver on Secretary Besson's 333 plan is to get growth up. Tariffs come in as a trigger for domestic industrial revival. The thing is, by making imports expensive, you create room for U.S. producers to step in. But here is the problem. It takes a while for American factories to scale up overnight. In the meantime, they're offering near-term relief, like, for example, tax cuts or currency devaluation.

And the idea is the tariffs might bring in additional revenue. But as Ratna points out, this approach is not without risks. If domestic supply chains can't catch up or if global retaliation kicks in, inflation could start rising again. If that happens, then the Fed actually raises rates, which blows a hole in the low yield plan. That's the tightrope.

Tariffs could serve as a leverage to renegotiate terms in terms of military deals with other countries, bilateral deals. This is sort of, again, the strong case. for the tariffs is that this is the beginning of a much more sophisticated strategy designed to essentially lower yields on bonds that we don't have to pay back as much in interest on our national debt.

and set the stage for reciprocal trade deals that are going to lower tariffs on both sides. If that's the plan, somebody ought to spell it out. Again, one of the big problems here is that they're not spelling out exactly what they want to do, what President Trump's plan is.

Ratna sums this up well. She says, if it works, it's a defining success. That is more under control. Manufacturing reborn. Global leverage restored. Trump is vindicated in 2026. If it fails, you get inflation, retaliation, lost midterms and strategic drift. So that seems like a pretty good analysis of the case. Which one do you think is more likely? And the problem, of course, is that with total uncertainty, the chances of things like inflation go up.

with other countries retaliating. Other countries have a say here in how this goes. If those other countries come on bended knee to President Trump and offer him a bunch of concessions, then okay. But the administration isn't really being clear what it is looking for right now.

So the administration is sending some mixed signals. On the one hand, President Trump is now suggesting that this is all prelude to negotiations, which, OK, fine. I mean, hopefully you get some amazing negotiations out of this. There's some early indicators that maybe you will. Javier Mille is already attempting to make a deal with President Trump. Maybe Netanyahu in Israel is attempting to make a deal with President Trump, pretty obviously. Here's President Trump saying everybody's calling him.

And those tariffs have come in and many, every country's called this. That's the beauty of what we do. We put ourselves in the driver's seat. If we would have asked some of these country almost. of these countries to do us a favor, they would have said, no, now they'll do anything for us. But we have tariffs, they've been set, and it's going to make our country very rich. Are you open to deals with these countries if they're calling you?

It depends. If somebody said that we're going to give you something that's so phenomenal, as long as they're giving us something that's good. So maybe this is dealmaking, prelude to dealmaking, which is kind of what I suggested yesterday. That's the probable path that this is on. So it's not going to be quite as bad as advertised unless they just keep sticking with it. But meanwhile, again, the market does not like mixed signals. Peter Navarro, the president's trade advisor.

was saying, no negotiations. It's not a negotiation. Guys, get on message. This is not a negotiation, Jesse. This is a national emergency associated with chronic and massive trade deficits. that are brought about by higher tariffs and higher non-tariff barriers. that take our jobs, that take our factories, that lead to massive trade deficits that result in massive transfers of wealth. into foreign hands that jeopardize our manufacturing base and defense industrial base.

So it's not a negotiation, but maybe it is a negotiation. Well, how are countries to know? Because if they think that it's not a negotiation, they're immediately going to reshift their trade relationships toward, wait for it, China. In the mix, signals are part of the problem. The messaging is part of the problem. You know, President Trump is usually pretty open about what exactly he is looking for.

And so far, he has not been saying that he is looking for off-ramps with all of these countries. His negotiation is possible, but countries that have already offered an off-ramp. Again, I use Israel as the key example here because they actually did it. They literally just said zero tariffs. And then they got hit with a 17% tariff.

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They're basically saying, trust us. It's trust us. Well, markets are not in the business of trust us. Markets are in the business of trying to take in the best available information and then spit out what people think is going to happen next. President Trump, he says that he is confident the markets are going to boom. The question is when? If it's not soon, that's going to be a problem. We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country.

And we've never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom. The stock is going to boom. The country is going to boom. And the rest of the world wants to see, is there any way they can make a deal? They've taken advantage of us for many, many years. For many years, we've been at the wrong side of the ball. And I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable.

OK, well, OK, that's the case. And then that is the case that Caroline Lovett was making yesterday at the White House. She said that there was not going to be pain incurred. Again, you're getting mixed signals here. Here's Caroline Lovett saying no pain. Right. So there are two messages. You need pain in order to get long term gain. And there's the there will be no pain message. And they're kind of in conflict. This won't be painful at all for American people and consumers, Caroline.

It's going to be there's not going to be any pain for American owned companies and American workers because their jobs are going to come back home. And again, as for prices, President Trump is working on tax cuts to put more money back into the pockets of Americans.

Okay. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is saying we're not going to be able to fix things overnight. Obviously, by the way, American workers are also American consumers. They're the same. You have a job and you also consume things. Here's the vice president. What I'd ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not going to fix things overnight. Joe Biden left us. This is not an exaggeration, Lawrence.

with the largest peacetime debt and deficit in the history of the United States of America, with sky high interest rates. You don't fix that stuff overnight. We know people are struggling. We're fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us. but it's not going to happen immediately. Okay, well, this is a pretty big gamble here. I mean, not immediate. American politics works in terms of immediacy. The stock market continued to tank today.

People are looking at that and they are not sanguine about it. Is hiring going to be up this month based on these sort of expectations of what could come next or fear of what's going to come next? And politicians, by the way, work on two-year cycles. They work on 18-month cycles increasingly. A multiplicity of Republican senators have now come out and said, listen, we don't like this very much.

It has not been spelled out to us why this is necessary. The strategy has not been explained to us. What's the deal? So Senator Rand Paul, who, of course, is a free market libertarian on this sort of stuff, he said this is clearly a tax. Taxation without representation is tyranny. In the days and weeks and years leading up to the American Revolution, it was non-negotiable. This was what sparked the revolution. And yet today we are here before the Senate.

Because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. Well this is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The Constitution forbids it. OK, but you say, well, you know, Rand Paul is always taking this sort of contra position whenever it comes to government action. He's sort of out there on his own, except he's not.

So, for example, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas has been a pretty solid Trump ally. Here he was saying this is a risky thing that is happening here. The consequences are yet to be fully known but I would have thought they would have been. less dramatic, less significant and more targeted. And I think we ought to be focused on our economic adversaries. and be less damaging to our economic allies. Senator Ted Cruz, who has been a really solid Trump ally.

Ever since he lost the primaries in 2016 to President Trump, he's been on the Trump bandwagon since then, basically. Here's Ted Cruz saying, well, actually, this is a tax on consumers because it is. If the result... is our trading partners jack up their tariffs and we have high tariffs everywhere.

I think that is a bad outcome for America. Tariffs are a tax on consumers, and I'm not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers. So my hope is these tariffs are short-lived and they serve as leverage to lower tariffs across the globe.

OK, so again, I think that's everybody's hope in the Senate. What's actually going to happen in Congress? So the Senate's a different story. Senators are they can say what they want because they've already moved to basically put limitations. Chuck Grassley put forward a bill that says.

If there's no congressional renewal of this in 60 days, this stuff should just go away. But the House of Representatives would have to sign on. There's a massive misalignment of incentives in the House of Representatives. Let's say that this tariff regime does not go particularly well. And let's say that President Trump is willing because he's not up for reelect. Let's say that he's willing to do the thing.

House Republicans are going to be split. Many House Republicans are going to say, listen, I'm going to lose my seat. in the next election cycle because of this deliberately created tariff policy. So I don't like this very much. But if Speaker Johnson were to step in and try to stop the tariff policy, there would undoubtedly be a Trumpist insurrection inside the Republican caucus to overthrow him and you'd get another speaker fight.

So basically, Trump better be right is what I got to say here. Like either either they better move off of this pretty quickly. with bilateral trade deals, or he better be right. The problem here, the real problem here, is that other countries have a say. And many of those other countries not only don't like President Trump, they are not particularly fond of the United States these days. And that does not just mean China. China, of course, was going to retaliate. China has now put forward.

A 34% tariff on American products, a direct response to President Trump's 34% tariff on China. And listen, I have no problem with tariffing China. I think that a trade war with China. So long as we are broadening and opening our trade relationships with everybody else, isolating China, economically speaking, is actually not a terrible thing. But the reason that China is doing that is because China is now stepping into the breach with our allies.

This is why we should not be treating Canada the way we treat China. We should not be treating the EU the way we treat China. Some of these places are allies of the United States and some of these places are enemies of the United States. But... In a lot of these countries that are led by people who don't like President Trump very much, they are perfectly willing to make time with the Chinese.

It is of great annoyance to me that Pierre Polyev, who is a terrific candidate for the Conservative Party, is now lagging in the polls thanks to this trade war that President Trump declared on Canada. And Mark Carney, who is the definition of a global elite, he's the definition of a globalist elite.

This guy who was put in place by Justin Trudeau's party. He's out there excited as all hell about the trade war. Why? Because now he gets to reorient Canada away from the United States and toward China. So here's Mark Carney, who could not be more celebratory about this. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services.

And although their policy will hurt American families, until that pain becomes impossible to ignore. I do not believe they will change direction. So, is Canada going to change direction? Or does Mark Carney actually like the tariff war because the tariff war is keeping him in competition with Pierre Polyev? How about the UK? Do we think that Keir Starmer is going to come on bended knee to President Trump? If so, why would he?

Because again, the sort of internationalization of the populist movement means that people like Keir Starmer are going to oppose that no matter what, even if it means economic damage to his own country. Here's Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the UK. Decisions we take in coming days and weeks will be guided only by our national interest, in the interests of our economy. in the interest of businesses around this table, in the interest of putting money in the pockets of working people.

Nothing else will guide me. That is my focus. Meanwhile, by the way, Emmanuel Macron in France, he is urging everybody not to cut bilateral deals with the Trump administration. The Trump administration has taken the side of Marine Le Pen, who's his chief opposition. And so he is hoping that actually the trade war will escalate.

Other countries have a say in how the trade war goes. And so there is this idea that no one will stand up to the United States and our economic power. And that's a gamble because there are a lot of places that don't like the United States very much. Ursula von der Leyen, who's the leader of the EU.

she was saying that the global economy is going to suffer the global economy will massively suffer uncertainty will spiral and trigger the rise of further protectionism The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the globe. also for the most vulnerable countries, which are now subject to some of the highest U.S. tariffs.

So let's say that this doesn't result in other countries lowering their tariffs immediately. It results in other countries increasing their tariffs. You're likely to actually get price inflation. The interest rates that President Trump would like to drop, those interest rates presumably actually stick or go higher, which undermines the thing that he's trying to do with the national debt, presumably.

It's what's happening right now is a major gamble at best. The best way to characterize it is a major gamble by the Trump administration. Now, maybe the gamble pays off. What that's going to rely upon is President Trump making deals now. Now it's dealmaker time. Because if it just continues to be confusion or if this administration is just has a vested interest in the idea that tariffs themselves in rich countries.

And it's totally unclear what the case here is or whether there is a good feedback loop that would allow President Trump to adjust. Again, I think President Trump lives in reality. I think if the headlines are bad, he adjusts. We just don't know. And uncertainty is, again, its own form of economic risk. So again, to sort of explain the steel man theory of what President Trump is doing right here, I ask...

my friend, Perplexity AI, sponsor of the show. How much would the cost of America's debt service drop over the next year if the yields on the 10-year treasuries dropped from 4.75%, which is what they were in January or so? to 3.5%. Currently, they're just below four. And Perplexity says, based on the provided calculations, if the yields on 10-year treasuries drop from 4.75% to 3.5%, the cost of America's debt service would drop by approximately $103 billion over the next year. So, theoretically.

It could be a little bit more. You could also get revenues that are taken in by the tariffs, which effectively, as I mentioned, is in fact a tax increase. So you could talk about the reduction of the American debt servicing.

if you used all that money to pay off the debt, for example, of several hundred billion dollars. Now, the reality is that over the long term, that isn't going to solve the problem. Only serious restructuring of entitlement is going to solve the problem, particularly means-based entitlement. However, if the idea is to bend the cost curve down and then meanwhile, you're ramping up, for example, AI and productivity in order to make up for the vast expenditures. And so it's a short term.

pain in order to kind of hold steady. That's the best case that you can make for these. Maybe that's what President Trump is doing. And what that's going to require is not only that the bond yields remain fairly low, but also it's going to require a pathway to getting off. of the current tariff curve that we are on because that carries its own inflationary risk. Preborn's network of clinics are on the front lines nationwide on standby for women deciding between the life of their babies.

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Well, while Republicans are struggling over tariffs and what exactly is going to happen, Democrats have some serious struggles of their own. Ezra Klein of The New York Times has a brand new book. titled Abundance, all about how Democrats really need to abandon what he calls their everything bagel strategy regarding regulation. He sounds kind of like a Republican sometimes. Ezra, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. How are you feeling, Ben? How liberated? I mean, on a scale of one to 10. There are certain areas in which I feel liberated and certain areas in which I feel a little bit more dicey. I'll be honest with you. And I'd like to see, you know, some stability out of the markets. I'd like to see the president actually explain what he is doing and what he intends to do with the tariff. regimen here. But it does feel like we're living in a moment where

Almost everyone across all parties is engaged in a sort of chaotic game of let me not explain what I'm doing and just do things. And I think that that is something that you talk about in your book, Abundance, is sort of the stacking on of various. MOs, various regulatory rationales. on top of each other. And what you end up with is an unworkable system. That seems to be one of the main themes of abundance.

Oh, that's a good connection. I hadn't thought of that. So yeah, what you're describing there is an argument or an idea I call everything bagel liberalism, which I was trying to make a distinction between the delicious everything bagel, which has some things on it, but not too many. And then the everything bagel from everything everywhere all at once, which gets everything on and becomes a black hole. There is a tendency in the way Democrats govern to pile.

standard and goal and aim and project after project after project into the same bill. You're trying to do affordable housing, but you're also trying to achieve environmental goals and unionization goals and a bunch of other things. In a way that means your housing never actually gets built or gets built at an insane cost level. Same thing can be said for California high-speed rail. This affected a bunch of different Biden policies.

But it's actually, as you, I think, drew in a pretty smart connection there. You see this in the Trump tariff policy, too. It's by no means just a left-wing problem. The Trump tariff policy, as far as I can tell. has at least four distinctive goals. One is to raise money. Another is to insource production that has gone to other countries. Another is to create leverage against other countries. And another is to get sort of, you know.

the concessions on things like fentanyl and border policy and another somebody to reshape. global trade flows and orders. And you can't pursue all of those at once. For instance, you can't raise the money and change the manufacturing structure. You can't keep prices low, but also move the manufacturing decisions. You need a lot of stability for companies that are making five to 10 year investment decisions. So it's a good point.

So, you know, there are a few things here that there's so much in your book to talk about. focus in on sort of the regulatory side that you're talking about, the everything bagel liberalism that you're talking about. One of the things that you talk about in the book, and when you're making the case for what you call abundance liberalism, which is this idea that the government should do things, it should just do those things better.

I'm wondering how realistic you think that is, because you do see it from time to time, as you mentioned, sometimes in red states. But does that have to do with what people perceive to be the proper role of government in general? You kind of separate those two questions a little bit.

What is the proper role of government? I agree with you. In the book, you say that there's sort of a false distinction between big government and small government because there are certain areas where, of course, conservatives favor big government, say defense spending. And there are certain areas where liberals favor small government, say morals regulations. But it's really not big government versus small government. It's more of the proper role of government.

And in early on in the book, one of the things that you say is, well, you need the government to step in on justice based goods. And to me, that's you can get some messy definitions there. How do you get into an area where it's not government overreach? Because it turns out. that the government can nearly always declare that something is a justice-based good. And once it's a justice-based good,

then you do have everybody trying to kind of put their fingers in the pie. Well, you do. You air quoted justice-based goods, but that's not a term I use. What I do say is that there are certain goods that over time, the American public has made clear that they think access to them is a matter of justice, right? Healthcare and housing and education. And as such, both Republicans and Democrats alike.

have spent now collectively trillions of dollars subsidizing them. And the distinction I'm drawing there is just something like flat screen televisions or a VR headset. There are things that if we do not have enough of them or the price discrimination is such that a lot of people can't buy them, we don't consider that a matter of justice. If you can't have an Oculus headset, it's fine. You can't have an Oculus headset.

We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can have a home. We don't see it that way in terms of whether or not you can get health care if you are sick. I mean, we have a law that says. Hospitals have to treat people if you walk into that emergency room, irrespective of ability to pay. And so we've made that set of decisions already. What I'm saying in that chapter, in that section. is that when we've decided to subsidize something, which we do a lot,

We then have to ask this secondary question, which we've gotten quite bad at asking, which is, do we have enough supply of the thing that we are subsidizing? So if you subsidize housing through rental vouchers and other things, but you don't build enough housing. then what you're going to do is simply push the price up on the homes you already have.

If, for instance, you did Medicare for all, but you have not increased the supply of doctors and nurses and hospitals and so on enough, you would create different kinds of rationing. And so the thing I am trying to do in the book. is move liberals to think more about the supply of the goods that they want everyone to have. I'm not really a North Derrick in the project here.

adding a bunch of ideas of categories of goods that we should subsidize. What I'm saying is that we have a lot of things that we say we want everybody to have. We say that they're part of a flourishing life from the ability to go to higher ed to the ability to have a home. And in many, many, many cases, we have allowed government or regulation to become a huge bottleneck. And we've sort of called that progressive.

But in its ultimate account, it's not. And any liberal looking at, say, Texas building more clean energy, despite politics much more hostile to clean energy than most blue states are, needs to do some rethinking about whether or not our policy equilibrium is actually achieving our goals.

So in the book, how do you make the balance between, for example, things you need to subsidize more supply of? How do you make the distinction between doing that in a market-based way and doing that in an actual direct subsidy-based way? So, for example, you mentioned housing. Obviously, one of the big— So restrictions on housing. I used to live in Los Angeles. This is all the housing regulation, tremendous regulation in terms of.

how you build. Can you build? Can you rent your garage out to somebody? This is a big thing when I was living there. Can you actually take your garage because you're paying too much in property tax or an income tax? And now you want to rent out your garage to somebody and that was forbidden. You were not allowed to do this.

as a sort of grandma suite for a very long time in California. How do you decide what to do as far as regulations, which I think is more of a generalized Republican proposal, get rid of the regulations, make it easier to build, let the market mechanisms take over versus direct.

And then how do you distinguish ideologically between what there is liberal versus what is conservative? Because you seem to be talking, well, why wouldn't that just be called conservatism if you're removing regulations that allow for more housing to be built? It's a great question. So let me take that in a couple different pieces. So one, I am much more focused on the end of what I'm trying to create more of.

then the policy means by which I get it. So in the question you're asking, what would I subsidize? What would I have the government do directly? Let's take housing as the core example here. In my view, we should have a lot more market rate development.

and a lot more affordable housing development, some of which I'm perfectly happy to have be public housing. But in all these cases, we have, certainly in California, certainly in LA, where the housing policies are quite bad, we have regulated this. into a level of unaffordability. I happened to read on an airplane last night a new report from the Rand Corporation.

And it's a fantastic report. I'm so much more enthusiastic about this report than other people are going to be listening to this. But it's about the cost of construction of homes in California, in Texas, and in Colorado. And it's about the cost of construction of multifamily housing of two types, one market rate and the other subsidized by the public.

And one of the things the report shows, and it's something I've reported on too, is that specifically in California, when we subsidize housing, right? So the government says we want affordable housing for the poor. we layer on so many new regulations and demands and wage standards, et cetera, that we actually make that housing per square foot much more expensive than even the market rate housing.

Now, there's nothing inevitable about that. In Colorado, it doesn't work that way. And I don't think most liberals would say Colorado is a dystopic conservative hellscape. But in Los Angeles and like... What they have done to increase the cost per square foot of the housing that they are getting taxpayers to subsidize is crazy. My view on this is that.

It should be possible to have the government actually clear things out of the way to make the things it wants to have happen, happen faster. That was sort of the legacy of Operation Warp Speed, which is a policy that has been sadly, in my view, disowned by both sides. But liberals have to get pretty serious about the question. If you want government to build things, then it has to be at the very least affordable and timely for the government to do it.

If you've created rules by which government construction or things that are funded by the government for construction. from housing to high-speed rail, come in much more expensive and much over budget compared to letting the market do it or having it not happen at all, then in the end, you're not going to get the things you want. It's not going to be affordable to get the things you want. One of the stats from the RAND.

project that I found really striking. Was it if California had Colorado's housing regulations on affordable housing? then the same amount of money we are spending, because I'm a Californian like you, would have built four times as much publicly subsidized affordable housing. So to my view, whether you call that goal liberal or conservative,

goal and the right thing to be shooting for. Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, I'm no longer a Californian specifically because California became such a hellscape. I moved my entire family to Florida years ago. But you were born there, right? Of course, of course. You can't completely give it up. I'm in New York, but I'm a Californian next time. I gave it up pretty damn fast, man. Florida's great. But, you know, I think that...

But one of the things that you're saying there, when you say the goals are the same, one of the things I like about that is that it gets back to a time when actually political conversation was possible because the goals were in fact the same. It feels like that is increasingly not the case in the country in a lot of different ways. But there is a means distinction. I'll make the conservative argument here, which is that the minute you start to grow government.

Everything big of liberalism becomes almost a necessary component beyond a certain point. Maybe you can do that on individual one-off emergency projects, Operation Warp Speed. It's time for war. We need to motivate Ford to start making airplanes. And that's why I think people on the left are so fond of declaring wars on things. It's a war on poverty. It's a war on drugs. It's a war on.

housing shortages. Because if you declare it a war, that means you get to clear all the decks. And now it's an emergency. And with emergencies, you can sort of wipe everything off the bagel and just go with the bagel, right? You saw this in Los Angeles after the fires when suddenly... Everybody started talking about, hey, maybe we shouldn't actually do all these environmental reviews before we rebuild all the housing in Pacific Palisades.

and all this kind of thing. But the problem is that just as a general matter, the conservative argument would be when you have a giant grab bag of cash that becomes the government and power that becomes the government, people are going to lobby for that cash and that regulatory power and the people who are elected.

are going to be answerable to a lot of those people. If you're looking at labor regulations, for example, many of the labor regulations are being effectively indirectly written by unions that contribute to the members of Congress or to the governor or state senator to whom they're contributing. I think that the conservative argument would be the reason to minimize government. in the areas where you don't have to have it

would be because it is almost an inevitability unless you're going to declare an emergency into what you're talking about, which starts to verge on possible tyranny. Because, I mean, again, one of the things that happens here is the more public input there is, the more you get everything on the bagel, the less public input. the less you get everything on the bagel. And so you start to run into some pretty dicey questions about the singular power of government.

How do you divest the people from having a say? And by the people, I mean various lobbying groups and various industry groups. And then is the best way to do that just to deprive the government of the cash and base yourself more on market-based solutions? I think this is where it's very helpful to be grounded in both specific examples and specific policies. Because, yes, conceptually, all that is true. And then you just look around and you realize that.

The policies work very differently and the interest group constellations are very different in different places. And I mean, that is true for like, look, we build, we, they build transit. much better, much cheaper, much faster in Spain, in France, in Japan than we do. And the difference there is not that Spain, France and Japan don't have government.

It's not that they don't have unions, they have higher union density than we do. It's that they have a very different structure of how they do government. So a big thing I'm focusing on the book. is the way we have begun to restrain government in this country through process and adversarial legalism, where you can just tie it up in lawsuits again and again and again and again. That was one way of trying to avoid tyranny. But what you created is a very ineffective form of government.

One thing I think worth just saying is that we can see this working very differently in different places. As I just mentioned, Colorado and California have quite different housing outcomes. even though they are both currently governed by Democrats and they both have have governments. So I always think it's good to stay a little bit more grounded than that. But the other thing that I do think you're getting at is.

Both parties, in my view, have a sort of scarcity side and an abundance side inside of them. This cleavage that I'm trying to cut occurs on both sides. On the Democratic side, on the liberal side, I see this as between, you know. You can call it different things, but the New Deal left and the New Left left.

So the New Deal left was very growth oriented, very building oriented. It created a lot of physical infrastructure, created highways because Dwight Eisenhower was sort of part of this political order. And it did things very fast. And in doing that, it created a counter reaction, not just sort of conservatism as we think about it with Ronald Reagan, but also the new left, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson.

And, you know, this sort of raft of environmental legislation passed, by the way, under Richard Nixon. California Environmental Quality Act passed under Governor Ronald Reagan. So these things often were bipartisan in their times. But over time, they're not the right policy equilibrium for the next day. On the right, though, you have the same issue. So you have a, I don't want to call it an abundance right, but a right that is more open to markets, more open to trying to create a lot of housing.

And then you have a scarcity right, a populist right, which is currently the right in power. And you look at Donald Trump, you look at J.D. Vance, when they look at the housing problem, they don't. propose a lot of ways to make supply bigger. On the campaign trail again and again, they use it as an argument for deporting immigrants. When they look at trade, they don't make a lot of ways for us to make more things more easily and trade them with the world.

They're rapidly reducing the entire quantity of global trade using a completely insane tariff scheme. When they look at the government, you know, I think Doge is a good idea and somebody should try it. But they have. been quite indiscriminate at hacking away at state capacity. So this is not a crew in my view that looks forward and sees a sort of world of more. They look at.

scarcities we currently have, things we don't have enough of, manufacturing capacity, et cetera, and then find a way to create a scarcity of something else. So my view is that the sort of supply side of both parties has a fight on its hands. And the fight is different and it plays out in different ways. But one of the things that should make us more optimistic rather than fatalistic about the inevitable pathway of government that sort of you're suggesting there.

is that if you look around at different countries, at our own country, and at our own even federal government at different times, you realize that these are pendulums that swing back. These are man-made processes that can be unmade or reformed. And that should always give you a sense of hope. So let's talk briefly about the two parties. Obviously. a lot of your characterization of what you just discussed. I think there is a much heavier tendency in the Republican Party and has historically been.

toward supply-sideism, toward the idea that you need to increase supply. And this is true everywhere in sort of the right-wing focus on how do doctors get paid? to how do we get rid of regulation? It seems like the left, what wing is left of the Democratic Party at this point that you would say is rich in abundance liberalism? I can spot.

Abundance conservatives everywhere. Some of them are in hiding. Some of them are being pretty quiet right now. But I think that if you poll the vast majority of people who voted for Republicans, they would actually agree with. a sort of abundant supply side conservatism, because that is kind of in the bones of the Reagan. The Reagan bones are still part of the skeleton of the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left in a lot of different ways that it feels like it's going to be a while in the wilderness before Democrats realize they have to engage with the sort of arguments that you're making. I have been extraordinary. I'll say two things about this. One is that just somebody just released a book on this. I've been extraordinarily pleased.

with how much the center of the democratic establishment is engaging with this book quite seriously. So I was on Gavin Newsom's podcast, governor of California, and he said, you know, he completely agrees with the book and it's all correct. And he's been he's been working on this and it's very and it's very hard. And I take that point. But, you know, Cory Booker was shouting the book out in his twenty five hour.

speech on the Senate floor. To be fair, he shouted every book out ever written in his 25 hours. It was a lot of hours, but nevertheless, he's read it, as have a bunch of others. So one thing I think is happening here is a bit of a permission structure for Democrats who actually have been worried about some of these issues for some time.

To begin speaking about it more loudly, after parties get defeated in the way they did in 2024, it does create an openness to soul searching that would not have been there otherwise. At the same time, I don't agree with your characterization from a minute ago because much of the book is motivated by things happening that predate the book in the Democratic Party already. So the Biden administration compared to.

The first Trump administration compared to the Obama administration was quite committed. to an atypically physical legacy. What it was trying to do was build things in the real world. It's major bills, the infrastructure bill, the Chips and Science Act, which is trying to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US.

And of course, the Inflation Reduction Act are all about constructing things, not in the regulatory state or in the tax code, as was true in sort of previous administrations, but out of cement and steel and cable and fiber. Now, the problem and what motivated at least some of the inquiry of the book for me is that our laws and our processes are not set up.

to build at that scale and at that level at the speed that I think we need to do it, or frankly, that they thought we need to do it. Brian Deese, a former NEC director under Biden, the director of the National Economics Council, has a great piece in foreign affairs about how America needs to build faster and how that's central to the kinds of things Biden was trying to do but will not be achieved unless we change laws.

So in my view, you've actually had, driven by housing scarcity and the need for decarbonization, a turn in the Democratic Party over the past five or ten years towards building things, not just creating social insurance. Not that there's anything in my view wrong with social insurance. But having begun to make that turn, they have begun to confront, as I've had to begun to confront covering it, how ill-suited the architecture of procedural liberalism is to achieving those goals.

And so what's I think the really difficult confrontation now is not whether this stuff is needed, but the confrontation that liberals are having. with the overhang of their own past legislative achievements, things that might have made sense at one time, but are now not the right processes, not the right laws for the kinds of things that we are now trying to achieve and promising to achieve. And that it's in that space that a lot of the very, very difficult.

policy work, and frankly, coalitional confrontations are going to have to happen. That's the last point, and I know we have to run here, but I think that's the last point. The coalition of the Democratic Party.

is not conducive yet to the kind of change that you're talking about. The Biden administration, even if you assume what you're assuming here, which is that they wanted to build things between the environmentalist side of their coalition and the DEI side of their coalition and the sort of generalized.

you know, interest group nature of the Democratic coalition, it made it nearly impossible for them to do any of these things without stacking up the kinds of regulation, even in the Build Back Better bill, for example, that they would need to ignore in order to actually get done the things they were saying they wanted to get done. I would say the great failure of the Biden administration was to be too coalitional and have too little, at least on domestic policy, strong executive leadership.

And I think that has to do with Biden's particular issues and his age and where his focus was. And I think that has to do with the culture of the Democratic Party that had sort of evolved over a period of time. And now that's going to have to change. I think it's quite widely acknowledged that that was a problem. And look, I think if Donald Trump proves anything in American politics for all of his flaws, what he proves is that the coalitions and the cultures of the coalitions are malleable.

Donald Trump has reshaped the Republican coalition, not by kicking everybody who is in it out. In part, it's persuasion. People have come to believe things they did not believe before. You know, it's a cottage industry on X to retweet old Mike Waltz or Marco Rubio tweets that seem to have. a high level of contradiction to what they are now carrying out in the current administration. But look, Trump changed his party on immigration, on trade, on isolationism, on Europe, on Russia, right?

I am not saying that I want to see a Trump arise on the left. I don't. But it is a mistake to think that these things are too settled. Barack Obama changed the way the Democratic Party worked and functioned. And I think, frankly, a lot of the problem ended up being that. Biden was the fumes of the Obama coalition, but he didn't have the control over it. that Obama himself had. So he wasn't able to drive it and govern it in the way that one needed to.

What's going to come next is going to have to be different. It's not trying to re put together the old thing. The old thing has failed now. It's going to be putting together the new thing. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know who can do it or how they're going to do it.

But I can tell you, as somebody who covers the Democratic Party quite closely, that this is a period of rebuilding and rethinking, and that that is much more possible on both sides than people ever seem to believe it is in the moment. Well, the book is Abundance. Ezra Klein is the co-author along with Derek Thompson. Ezra, really appreciate the time. Congrats on the book. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate it.

Well, meanwhile, in other weird news from the White House, apparently President Trump had Laura Loomer in. You remember Laura Loomer. She was actually kicked off Air Force One. on 9-11 because she was flying with the president. There are a lot of his aides who were really kind of upset about it. It wasn't Air Force One. It was Trump Force One. He wasn't elected yet.

And people were upset that Loomer was traveling with the president. They were saying that she was saying kind of wild things to the president. There's a lot of speculation about the kind of advice she was giving the president. And of course, she had some tweets about 9-11 that were bad tweets.

And so the president sort of said, well, she doesn't need to be on the plane anymore. Well, she was welcomed back to the White House where she proceeded to apparently unfurl a list of people in the National Security Council that she, Laura Loomer, believed were not. loyal to President Trump, and he promptly fired a bunch of them. That seems to be the best read on this story.

There's an all-purpose term that is used by people who try to... oust people inside the trump circle and that is neocon and so she basically just apparently labeled a bunch of people neocons who are not in fact neocons neocon is a specific designation for people who are democrats in the 1960s and 70s And then they became conservative, hence neo-con. They were new conservatives. They were liberals were mugged by reality used to be the description.

of neocons. And then during the Bush administration, the neocons were associated with the sort of Wilsonian view of American foreign policy, where we needed to transform Iraq into a democracy where America was a nation building country. And that wing of the Republican Party is just gone. It does not exist anymore. No one in the Republican Party, no one believes in nation building by the United States. The United States needs 100 year occupations of places and full scale nation building.

It's a much more pragmatic Republican Party. The term neocon is just thrown around now to mean people that President Trump shouldn't like. And it's usually thrown around by people who very often don't even agree with President Trump's foreign policy because they would term it neocon because it's too peace through strength, quote unquote, interventionist. In any case.

Laura Loomer apparently labeled a bunch of people disloyal to President Trump inside the national security infrastructure, and four National Security Council aides were then fired overnight. Two other National Security Council aides were let go on Sunday, according to the Wall Street Journal. Those staffers worked on a series of portfolios, including intelligence, India, congressional affairs, and the impact of technology security.

Two people added this was the latest round of firings. There will be at least 10 people ousted from the NSC by the end of the second round. And during a Wednesday meeting in the Oval Office, Loomer told the president she had concerns about some of his staff. And President Trump then said she makes recommendations. And sometimes I listen to those recommendations.

Let's just say I hope the staffing protocols at the White House are stronger than single recommendations by Laura Loomer. I think that that is probably not the best way to staff an administration. And meanwhile, in lighter news, in cultural news.

You know, I understand. The markets are putting me in a bad mood. Also, I want President Trump's plans to succeed. As I've said a thousand times here on the show, President Trump is doing too much important work for all of it to be waylaid by bad things happening. And so I'm in a bit of a bad mood. I'll be honest with you.

But I decided to do something that put me in even a worse mood. And that was I watched the new preview for Superman that was put out by James Gunn. Now, as you all know, not a huge James Gunn fan. Finding Guardians of the Galaxy when it's all sort of like... ridiculous humor, kind of gonzo humor. his old tweets that were kind of jokey, ugly tweets in early days of Twitter. James Gunn, based on those old tweets, was actually fired by Marvel.

And I will say that I publicly supported the idea that he should be rehired because you shouldn't cancel people based on jokes that they made back when Twitter was a jokier place. And now he's directing the new Superman movie. And we can watch this preview together. It sucks. It's bad. I hate to break it to you. It's just, it's terrible. Here we go.

So for those who can't see, Superman is wounded and he is lying on the snow. The original preview, it just showed at this point, Crypto the dog arriving, but this preview is much longer. Here comes Crypto. He whistles for Crypto, the super dog. So Crypto arrives, and then Crypto proceeds to, for well over a minute, beat the living hell out of Superman. He's screaming in pain as Crypto jumps on him. And continues to nudge him, bite him. Okay, I don't see the purpose of this.

So this is not dramatic, it's just silly and ridiculous. And then finally Crypto. Figures out that he needs to take Superman back to the Fortress of Solitude. Every James Gunn joke is a Monty Python joke. Just lasts three times too long. So now Crypto is dragging Superman's prone body through the snow back towards... the Fortress of Solitude, which arises And it's a cool-looking Fortress of Solitude. I'll give you that.

But don't worry, it gets worse. Once Superman is brought inside, a team of robots, presumably of Kryptonian origin, then starts to handle him, and they have one of the most nonsensical exchanges in any James Gunn movie, which is to say pretty nonsensical. Here come the robots. They pick him up and they're carrying him. Thank you. No need to thank us, sir, as we will not appreciate it. We have no consciousness whatsoever. Merely automatons here to serve. Meet 12.

She's new. He looked at me. With a healthy dose of yellow sun, we'll have you up and at him in no time. Okay, and then they're gonna hit Superman with a magnifying glass. And now he's painfully absorbing the sun, which apparently was not available before. So the sun, which, as we all know, illuminates the Earth, which is the planet we are currently spinning on. Apparently, only the magnifying glass could make Superman better.

We will notice the obvious incongruity of one robot explaining that the robots have no feelings and then the female robot being giggly like a little girl at Superman. The entire attitude here is wrong. The entire attitude is wrong. The gold standard for Superman movies remains the original Superman in the late 70s by Richard Donner. By far the best Superman movie, not close. Better than Man of Steel, significantly better.

Because it gets right the idea that there is a solemnity to Superman, that he is supposed to be the embodiment of America. And then the second half of the movie shifts into a more comic book humorous mode. And it's very, the color palette is very rich and very bright. Man of Steel, they basically desaturate the entire film. So the entire color palette is gray scale and kind of ugly and dark, and the entire character of Superman is much darker.

Attitude here is totally wrong. It's just Guardians of the Galaxy and a Superman suit. And that ticks me off. It really does. Because as a lifelong fan of the Superman brand. Let me just say that it's not that hard to get Superman right. He's supposed to be the embodiment of everything cool and heroic about America. And, of course, he's supposed to be charming as well.

So you don't need full-scale James Gunn. He's the same character as essentially Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy, and all the jokes are the same as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It's silly and stupid and bad. Do not like. Two thumbs down. Very disappointed. Ugh. Angry. Okay. So I was going to be put in a better mood by that. And then I was just put in a worse mood by that. In other news.

Wicked for Good, which is the second part of Wicked. The footage has now been presented to attendees at CinemaCon in Las Vegas by Universal. So, as I said, I liked Wicked Part 1. I'm sure Wicked Part 2 will be good, although I assume they filmed these things at the same time. I would hope so, because unfortunately, both leading actresses seem to be starving themselves into submission. I mean, they really look rough out there. Meanwhile, Spider-Man 4 has been...

The release of it has been announced July 31st, 2026. That is one week after Christopher Nolan's new film, The Odyssey, which again, I'm up for anything Christopher Nolan. John Wick 5 has been announced. And I'm hoping that the John Wick 5 is better than John Wick 4. As you know, I was a little disappointed in John Wick 4. You can go back and see my YouTube review of it. Obviously, he wasn't dead at the end of John Wick 4. That was obviously clear.

There was a joke going around, however. He was supposed to be dead. They're at his grave. And so John Wick 5, John Wick in Hell, was, I thought, a pretty funny pitch. There's a Naked Gun reboot that is coming. Now, again, I think it's kind of sad that the Zucker brothers weren't involved in the Naked Gun reboot. They're the ones who are responsible for the first Naked Gun.

There's one funny joke in the Naked Gun reboot, and it's about O.J. Simpson. It's a pretty good joke. Hi, Daddy. It's me, Frank Jr. Love you. Hey, Dad. Boy do I miss you. And that joke put me in a better mood. It did. And then I found out that Greta Gerwig's Netflix adaptation of The Magician's Nephew, which is the first book in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series.

The person who they are thinking about casting is Aslan, who is supposed to be very obviously a metaphor for Jesus. There's no question. It's clear in the books. I mean, down to the resurrection of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The voice is now going to be Meryl Streep, which makes no sense at all on a character level. It makes no sense at all on a metaphorical level. It's one of the dumbest things you could possibly do. If you want to alienate the entire CS Lewis audience, this is the thing you should do. Meanwhile, Charlie XCX is apparently in talks for the role of the White Witch. But why? But why are you doing this? Just adapt it straight. It's not that difficult. Just it's a good book. Just adapt it straight.

This is the same as that ridiculous suggestion a while back that Cynthia Erivo was going to be cast in Jesus Christ Superstar as Jesus. Stop with this stuff. Stop it. Just stop. It's stupid and it's insulting and it's gross. And you would never do this with any other religion. You wouldn't.

It's ridiculous and annoying and just demonstrative of how Hollywood spits on people who don't believe the things they believe. And then takes classic intellectual property from those spaces and uses it against them. Well, you know, the markets were down today. It's been a rough couple of days, but I did want to leave you with a bit of a picker-upper before the weekend. I sat down with Senator...

Dave McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, the authors of a brand new book titled Who Believed in You? How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World. It is out right now in bookstores. Here's what our conversation sounded like.

Dave McCormick and Dina Powell McCormick. Dave, of course, is senator from Pennsylvania. And Dina is a senior business executive and former government official who worked in the Trump administration and serves in several leadership roles at Goldman Sachs. Guys, thanks so much for joining the show. Really appreciate it.

Thanks so much, Ben. Great to be with you. You have a brand new book out that's coming out on April 1st called Who Believed in You? How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World. So, Senator, let's start with you. Why was this book necessary? What do you think makes this book good for this time? Well, you know, we had an experience during COVID where our six daughters were with us. They were disconnected from their friends, their family, their teachers, their coaches.

And Dean and I started to talk about how at that same point in our lives, mentors. had made all the difference for us. And we started to talk. to some of our key friends many of them very successfully realized that in their case Also, a key person or two had made all the difference. For me, it was a football coach. who saw promise in me and made me the team captain. And that changed my life, helped me get into West Point.

Dina can tell her story. And so we believe that when lots of people are losing trust in their officials, the media, that by focusing on helping individuals find their best self. really grow and develop mentorship offers the opportunity to really change the direction of the country and our community.

So, Dino, you've worked a lot in the private sector, obviously, and the public sector, and you've created a lot of jobs all around the world. How much does mentorship mean with regard to entrepreneurialism? You know what? It is so critical, Ben. When you look at entrepreneurs that are successful, they always had somebody that, first of all, believed in them, oftentimes invested in them. But more importantly than anything, just gave them confidence. A lot of the work that I did.

through 10,000 women, was female entrepreneurs in the US and around the world. There's one really hysterical story about a woman in Egypt, in Cairo, Egypt, who started a company called Pink Taxis. female drivers, female passengers. Her husband was totally against it, said, you're not gonna work. She started making so much money, he became the COO. And it took one mentor to say to her, you've got this, you can do it.

I know in our trailer, which we're so honored that you are in, you say something so important that even resonated with our kids. You say, run to the fire. Whatever position you're in, go to the hardest problem. Run to the fire. Believe it or not, those words of wisdom for this generation that not only missed high school graduation or prom, they missed like two or three years of mentorship.

Think about who believed in you, Ben, and that experience of shadowing them, following them. We really think the country right now needs this generation to step up, be values-driven leaders. And the path to that is every one of us investing in them.

Senator, you know, you went to West Point, you served in the army during the first Gulf War, and the military is imbued with the sense that the mentorship has to be a part of it. Maybe you want to talk about that a little bit because you can actually see a shift in the way people are thinking about serving in the military thanks to. the sort of new recapitulation of the military's image under the Trump administration.

Yeah, leadership and mentorship are really close cousins. You know, when you're a leader, you have to stand up and help everybody find their best selves. But mentorship is very personal. It's very intimate. And we learned through our interviews and talking to a number of retired generals, in fact, that the key building blocks are, first of all, trust.

You have to trust someone that they're with you, that you can be vulnerable with them, that they have your best interest in mind. The second thing is value. What we're trying to teach people through mentorship is the values that are going to guide them. It's not just about the transaction of helping them get the next job. It's about the values by which they're going to live their lives. The third is commitment.

So it's a mutual promise to one another that you're going to engage and use that relationship for mutual benefit. And then the final thing. and this came up over and over again, is confidence. Because as you know, Ben, and we all, anybody that's been successful knows that it's not a straight line.

you're going to find adversity. You're going to have to overcome failure. I certainly did that. I lost my first Senate race and then won my second. Overcoming failure and having mentors give you the confidence. to get into the arena, to find your place. That's what great mentorship does. And at a very intimate level, it's hard to do that across a unit of 500 or 1,000.

you can do it very intimately on a one-on-one mentoring relationship. So Dina, obviously the story, the book, Who Believed in You, is filled with tremendous stories. What's your favorite story from the book? There are so many, you know, from Satya Nadella to David Chang, Brian Grazer, Condi Rice. You know, I got to say, I kind of I love her story. She talks about two big mentors in her life.

Obviously, her dad, you know, was such a big force in her life and just gave her outsized, and I mean that in a positive way, confidence and ambition. And President Trump, I mean, you know, she was really attacked in that job in a ruthless way, as you remember. And he pulled her aside one day and he said, listen, you are really good at what you do. And I believe in you. And that's all that matters. So don't let them see you sweat.

And it is at those crucial moments when you are not sure of yourself. And frankly, especially for women. that that mentor, that piece of advice makes all the difference. You know, in my case, Ben, there were so many mentors that I had from the CEOs I worked for, obviously, to... government leaders, but as an immigrant kid from a Compton Christian community in Cairo, Egypt.

moving to Dallas, Texas, not speaking English when I was five years old. I learned English pretty quickly. Texan took me a lot longer. It was a big culture shock. And I was waitressing to pay for college at the University of Texas in Austin. And I was dutifully doing what my parents said. They said, you got three options. You can be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. That's why we left Egypt. So you could pursue something like that.

I'd gotten into law school. I was heading there. And Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. found me. She started mentoring me. She said, you got to defer law school and come work for me in DC for a year as an intern. And I was like, my parents are never going to let me do that. And I can't believe you think I can. And she said, trust me, I'll get you the deferral to law school. My dad, Ben, said, I don't even know why we left Egypt. He was very upset. But that is literally the way I got to Washington.

I worked, you know, for almost eight years for Dick Army. Newt Gingrich and eventually for President Bush. And after my business career, back to working for President Trump. Just think about it without that one person in my life. I would have never had those opportunities. So Senator McCormick, and there are a lot of young people who don't know how to take the first step toward finding a mentor.

For many of us, a mentor is sort of natural. For me, my father is a mentor. My mom's a mentor. I have lots of people around me. And those of us who are lucky, we have that sort of naturally. But mentorship, you can look into it. But for people who are actively seeking a mentor, what's the best way to take a first step?

Well, I think that they often, the best mentoring relationships happen organically. You encounter someone in your life and they take an interest and you invest in them and they invest in you. But I think you have to be explicit. and ask someone, hey, would you be willing to give me advice? And you have to be committed to it and forthright about it. And you have to be respectful if you're the mentee.

that the person that you're asking support from may not have all the time. So be very disciplined. We talk in the book about how to be a good mentee. And you don't get an hour. Steve Schwartzman talks about a meeting. It was a remarkable meeting. He wrote a letter to Avril Harriman.

And Avril Harriman wrote him back and said, yeah, I'd be happy to sit down. And Steve went and sat down with Avril Harriman. And Avril Harriman gave him advice on how to think about his career in life. It wasn't like he sat down weekly with Avril Harriman, but he used that moment. in a way that really changed his life. My favorite story is about Brian Grazier, who I think you know, Ben. Brian talks about this incredible encounter.

He was sort of running as a runner on a big major motion picture studio and finally got a meeting with Deanne Barkley, who was the most prominent woman in Hollywood. And he had been writing two scripts. He got in the meeting. He was pitching his two scripts. And the bird, she had a canary behind her in the bird cage, fell off the stoop and died right in front of her. And she had this.

A hilarious reaction. She said, we're destined. And she took an interest in him and bought his two scripts, which were the movie Splash and Night Shift. But she took him on as a mentee and she would take him around Hollywood and introduce him to all the big names. But he kept getting, the meetings never followed up. Like he never got further.

And she finally pulled him aside. And this is key to mentorship. It's tough love. She pulled him aside. She said, listen, I've gotten the feedback from these meetings. I've been into myself. You exaggerate. People think you're not being truthful. They think you're lying. And so they're not following up. You got a good start, but you finish weak. And he was like, oh my god, people think?

that I'm not being truthful. And that was like a major fork in the road, which changed the way he projected himself, the way he conducted himself. And, you know, he had an ongoing relationship with Deanne Barkley, but that moment of intervention. was so critical. So sometimes mentorship is for a point in time. And then sometimes it lasts over many decades. Those of us who have been the beneficiaries of it know how valuable it is.

Well, the book, again, is Who Believes in You? How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World. Available April 1st. Senator McCormick, Dina, great to see both of you, and congrats on the book. Thank you. And if people want to buy it, they go to whobelievedinyou.com. Thank you so much, Ben.

All right, guys, coming up, we'll jump into the mailbag. Remember that you can only actually hear my answers to these questions or ask me a question yourself if you are a member at Daily Wire Plus. Do it right now. Become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months for our annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.