Introduction
Donald Trump’s trade war and tariffs are causing significant economic turmoil, with the markets crashing and prices for American families set to rise by an average of $4,600 per year. Despite Trump’s claims of strategic genius, the reality is that his actions have thrown the global economy into chaos, with businesses unable to make hiring and investment decisions due to the uncertainty. Democrats should hammer the message that Trump is single-handedly tanking the economy through his reckless and incompetent policies, while Republicans in Congress are complicit in enabling his destructive behavior. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking authoritarian actions, stripping security clearances from and threatening to investigate former officials who have criticized Trump, demonstrating a blatant disregard for free speech and the rule of law.
Full Text
We need people to know that this is a choice Republicans are making, that they are on board with these price increases, and they’re so feckless and so lame that they are going to go along with it. And these members are going to be under real political pressure in their states as these prices go up. Welcome to Pod Save America. I’m Jon Favreau. I’m Dan Pfeiffer. On today’s show, we’ll talk about Trump ordering investigations into two former Trump officials for the crime of telling the truth about him and the 2020 election. We’ll cover the vote in the House on Trump’s big, beautiful bill and why passing it may be a bit of an uphill climb from here. We’ve got just a little bit of good news on the fight against Doge and deportations.
Then Dan talks to legendary physician and writer Atul Gawande about RFK Jr.’s mission to destroy the agency he now runs, which has already led to him forcing out the FDA’s top vaccine regulator. But let’s start with the latest on Trump’s trade war. So I just want to quickly walk through the facts of what happened this week. No spin on the ball here, so you can all make your own judgments about the strategic genius of our president. First, Trump announced the biggest tax increase in history on everything we buy from the rest of the world. Then the markets tanked and lost more than $6 trillion in value over the course of a few days. Most economists and CEOs said that a recession was much more likely.
And Trump World responded by saying that they weren’t backing down, that rumors of a 90-day pause on the tariffs were false, and that all the economic pain would only be temporary. Then there was a big sell-off in the bond market, which happens when people believe that U.S. Treasury bonds, usually one of the safest investments in the world, are too risky, which drives up interest rates on mortgages and other loans, which could cause a global financial crisis. Then, on Wednesday, Trump suddenly announced that actually There would be a 90-day pause on some of the tariffs, but China would get hit with even higher tariffs, and there would still be a universal 10% tariff on just about every other country, though apparently he’s going to spend the next 90 days negotiating trade deals with each of these countries.
The markets recovered their losses, and this was the reaction from Trump World. We begin with the art of the deal. Told you this was going to happen. Great courage, great courage for him to stay the course until this moment. Trump created maximum leverage for himself and now his team’s sitting pretty, taking meetings and doing deals that put America first. Yeah, I know we had a massive market rebound after Trump’s 3D chess move. Tonight, you can definitively say this was not a walk back. This was not something that the bond markets were cratering and you were worried about it. No. That this is part of your plan. Many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.
A huge win for the president, a huge win for the country. His biggest accomplishment the second term and there have been many Donald Trump is the best negotiator that there is, we’re so biggest accomplishment of the second term, wow, even bigger than Gulf of America. Now some of you may be thinking isn’t it more likely that the bond market sell-off and the sudden prospect of a global financial crisis is actually what led Trump to back down? Well, if so, you are not the only one. Was it the bond markets that persuaded you to reverse course? No, I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky. I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it’s beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful.
But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy. People were jumping a little bit. Out of line, they were getting yippy, you know? They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid, unlike these champions. It’s just, it is just. So classic that he has everyone go out there and say, ‘big win’. We didn’t back down at all. This was the plan all along. It’s strategy, art of the deal. He’s a genius. What are you talking about? Fucking bond markets. That’s crazy. Mr. Trump, why’d you do it? Oh, yeah, the bond markets. Fucking clowns! They deserve everything they get. So, sure enough, the market’s tanked again on Thursday. Dan, do you think the problem is just that not enough people have read ‘The Art of the Deal’?
Like, have the markets not fully priced in the strategic genius of Donald Trump? I was just thinking that we are probably weeks away from an executive order that ties access to federal education funding to making Art of the Deal’ required for summer reading. I’m sure every world leader is going to get it. They’re going to send a copy of them before they start negotiating. Yes, it’s probably Howard Locknick. Howard Locknick is right now just licking envelopes and sticking in copies of Art of the Deal to send all over the world. I mean, look, what happened here is – And this immediate sense of relief on the first day that Trump was actually not going to drive the car completely off the cliff.
And then a lot of institutional players saw the opportunity to buy low, buy the dip, if you will, on some things. And the markets bounced back. But then everyone woke up and realized we were still fucked. That the three countries that still had large tariffs on them, Canada, Mexico, and China, make up more than 40% of US imports. That most of the things that we care a lot about. Car parts, computers, electronics, smartphones are all coming from these countries, toys. And it’s going to be massively destabilizing. And then we discovered that the Trump administration couldn’t even figure out what the exact right tariff was on China. And it wasn’t 125, as they said. It’s actually 145 because they put so many tariffs on and taken so many tariffs off, they forgot they still had the 20 percent fentanyl tariff on China.
And so it just is. We’re still in a very, very bad place. There’s a cap analysis out today which shows that actually under this tariff regime we’re currently in right now with the increased tariffs on China, American families are going to pay more on average $4,600 per family than they would under the global tariffs that Trump – reciprocal tariffs that Trump had in place on Monday morning. Also, the issues in the bond market have not been solved, and that’s going to push up the cost of borrowing. So if you want to get a mortgage, car loan, anything else, I don’t know why you’d need a car loan because it’s going to be pretty hard to buy cars. Well, that’s why you need the loan because they’re so fucking expensive.
Jesus Christ. I mean, it’s funny. It’s not funny. But yes, it was. It was the bond market that scared Trump. We know that. There’s a lot of other reporting aside from Trump just telling us. The Wall Street Journal reported that he was Trump was willing to push us into a recession, but not a depression. That was what one of one of the sources for The Wall Street Journal article said. CNN found another source that said the bond markets did spook the president. So all the reporting matches up with, again, what President Trump just told us himself. Yeah, no, I think that what happened this morning is we’re recording this Thursday. What happened this morning is even if which. We can talk about the prospect of Trump making deals with every one of these.
The White House wants us to think that all the countries now are just lining up to make deals with Donald Trump because he has all the leverage. And they’re, please, Mr. Trump, please make us a better deal on trade. Say we make a deal with every one of these countries and get rid of the reciprocal tariffs that he imposed on them and somehow get a better deal there. Kevin Hassett, his top economic advisor was out today saying, but the 10% universal tariffs, 10% on every single country, just about every single country, he’s never going to get rid of that. Kevin Hassett is a particular moron. Like, just. Like, he is just on TV all the time. He has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. He’s got a shit-eating grin the whole time he’s doing it.
I mean, he actually makes Howard Lutnick look like an effective spokesperson. And that’s saying a lot. And then you realize, like, apparently the overall effective tariff rate for the United States, when you, like, sort of average out all the different tariffs he’s imposed together, it was about 27%. With the pause, it’s down to 24%. When he took office, it was 3%. So I think everyone woke up, saw that, and was like, oh, yeah, we’re still pretty fucked. And on top of all that, there’s the uncertainty of what happens over the next 90 days and whether he gets rid of the pause after 90 days. And so businesses were thinking about hiring or making investments or opening a factory, all that kind of stuff.
They can’t do any of that because there’s no certainty here in the United States or anywhere around the world. He has just thrown the whole global economy into turmoil for nothing. And companies who have factories overseas, whether it’s in China or elsewhere, are nervous to place orders because there’s a long lag time. So if you want to decide how many iPhones or certain types of Nike sneakers or whatever else you want to have available in the holiday season, you’re making those decisions now. But you have no idea what they’re going to cost then, right? You probably wouldn’t make as many iPhones if you thought they were going to cost 145% of what they cost already. Right. Or the same thing with shoes. Like it’s just there’s no like what he has done.
And we can get into all the politics of this. But for the markets, for world leaders, for business people who have to make decisions about hiring and investment and new products is he can’t be trusted. Yeah. It’s like we have a true lunatic surrounded by morons in the White House. And you’re and now you cannot like the fundamental idea of any sort of stability in American government economic policy has been forever eroded and cannot come back without Trump as president. Even if these things don’t come back, he just puts a tariff on, takes it off. Could he add another one? Like a normal person who was – it’s hard to imagine a normal person dumb enough to have gotten themselves in the situation but who backed off at the 90-day mark, like right here and put in the place a 90-day pause. The natural assumption would be there’s no way they’re doing this again in 90 days. But could you really say that with Trump? Of course not.
Right,
and whether or not
we actually make out on these deals and it’s a good deal for the United States. They’re going to pretend it is, right? We’ve seen this with what they did with Canada and Mexico, right? Like, oh, Canada appointed a fentanyl czar. And so they’ve, you know, they’ve, art of the deal again. Trump bent them to his will, you know, all that shit. So they’re going to make any deal seem like it’s a huge win for Trump. And they’ll probably love the idea that he gets to go out and announce deals one after another. But the facts on the ground and the economic reality is only going to get worse as the automobile tariffs, the Chinese tariffs, which is huge. And I don’t think that’s going to get solved anytime soon.
And the 10 percent universal tariff, like all that’s still going to be in effect. And so that’s going to make the economic reality worse, even as Trump is going out there and touting whatever deals he may get with some of these countries. So I like I don’t know how he gets out of this one. path out other than getting rid of all the tariffs and lowering costs right like what people are going to pay attention to is not the fucking press conference with to announce the deal with madagascar to lower the price of vanilla right what they’re going to notice is when they go to the store and everything that they that was let was cheaper a month ago was more expensive now yeah like that i mean that is why don trump is president was prices went up and so it is just truly insane Like I can’t just overstate this enough that a president who was elected to strengthen the economy and lower prices has decided to crash the economy to increase prices.
Like it is the exact opposite of what he was elected to do. I joked about this in my newsletter. I said it would be like if George W. Bush after 9-11 – his first response was to give Bin Laden the Medal of Freedom. Like what are we doing? Even the stated rationale for this trade policy, this trade war, which betrays a lack of understanding even of the basics of economics or how trade works, right? Even the stated rationale, and again, they’re in conflict. One is like, oh, we’re going to bring in a whole bunch of revenue from all these tariffs. But if trade is rebalanced, the revenue goes down. And then the other is, oh, we’re going to bring back manufacturing. We’re going to bring back jobs to America.
We’re going to be boomtown. Right. If even if that worked, it wouldn’t be for years and years and years. So is the Trump administration’s bet that the American people really have a stomach for economic calamity and sacrifice because they know that years from now, manufacturing will come back here. Is that what they think? I mean, but also you have Howard Lutnick out there talking about how robots are gonna replace all the workers. Yeah, no, I know. So, like, yes, maybe you are onshoring our supply chain. Like, I guess, like which, but. You’re not the, it’s not like there’s going to be this like renaissance of blue collar jobs in a world of automation, but also some of the things are not built in factories.
Like I saw Chris Hayes posted this, but it’s like, are we going to build a banana factory here? Like the tree factory or for, because of the lumber, it’s like, it makes no fucking sense. And there are things that we just don’t grow or make in America. Like, are we going to, like, we don’t make shoes in America. We make very few shoes in America. We’re all of a sudden going to. We’re going to build an entire shoe industry here? Coffee, bananas. How long is that going to take? Avocados, lots of other fruit and vegetables. Tons of – like it’s – It’s idiocy. It’s pure idiocy. The other argument they’re trying to make is, oh, well, you know, Trump said do not retaliate and we won’t retaliate.
And because none of these countries except China retaliated, that’s why we took off the retaliatory tariffs. And now we have isolated China and the rest of the world will join us in putting pressure on China to cave. And it’s like. Why is the rest of the world going to join us? What makes you think that? After you’ve threatened to take over Greenland, invade Canada, make the Gaza Strip into some kind of a resort. You’ve pissed off all of our NATO allies. You’re beating up on Europe every chance you can get. And by the way, they’re already now talking to China about maybe doing a deal with them. But yeah, do you know why? Because China seems like the more stable superpower right now? Well, we put a 10% tariff on all of their products.
You know who did put a 10% tariff on all of them? China. So it was like we were pushing people into the arms of China. It’s the exact opposite. The rationale are all conflicting, and they don’t make a lot of sense. You can’t say, this is all about a manufacturing renaissance. We’re also going to gut the CHIPS Act. Which is entirely designed to build a manufacturing industry here in America. But then every part of it just does the opposite of what they say it’s going to do. It is truly one of the stupidest things that any person, let alone president, has ever done. It’s so disconnected from what they think it’s supposed to do. The only way I see they get out of this is, like you said, they do a couple deals.
And then when people are forgetting about what they’ve promised, in keeping some of these tariffs on permanently. They just get rid of all the tariffs. They claim victory. We did a big deal with Europe. We finally, you know, President Xi was like, ‘Thank you, Mr. Trump.’ Thank you. This was a great deal. You’re such a master negotiator. I could learn from you. That’s what he told me. And he wrote me all these letters and he loves me now. So they do this whole thing and then he’s like, ‘I’m getting rid of all the tariffs because it’s a new American century and everyone loves it.’ You know, whatever. And none of it’s true, but at least he gets rid of the tariffs. That’s the only thing I can say.
Who gives a shit what Kevin Hassett said? Do you think Trump’s like, ‘Well, we can’t undermine Kevin Hassett’s credibility. That would be wrong.’ We need this guy. So yeah, they can say they’re going to keep him on and then just take him off at some point. But Trump’s reality here is tied to prices. And as long as he is jacking up everyone’s prices, he’s going to pay a price. The medium-term consequence of this are baked in. Even if he takes them all off tomorrow. He has already done real damage to the medium-term economic growth in this country, to job creation, to investment, to GDP, all of that. I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of that back. Will the stock market bounce back maybe slowly over time? Sure.
No one’s going to people aren’t going to all these people are supposed to build these all these factories here and all that. Like, that’s not going to happen now. No, no one’s going to do that. No. Like, could we narrowly avoid a recession? Yeah, maybe. But I don’t know. You know, chances of a recession went from only only dropped a couple percentage points, at least with JP Morgan’s calculations based on the pause. So not out of the woods there at all. OK, I feel like the simplest and most effective message for Democrats here is that Donald Trump is single-handedly tanking the economy because he’s a lunatic surrounded by sycophants. Am I missing anything? Is it any more complicated than that? No, you got it exactly right.
Because looking around, it seems like it might be a little more complicated. That I mean, I would say the reality is very easy for everyone to see. Like the best messages are the true and obvious ones. And this one could not be more true and obvious. And this is a thing. The tariffs, the insanity of the tariffs, the market crash has broken through to people in a way that nothing else has broken through in, thus far, the Trump administration and Trump 2. 0. Watching your 401k disappear will do that, you know? Yeah. I mean, more than 60% of the country is invested in the market in some way, shape, or form. Almost entirely in retirement accounts, but it’s north of 60%. And so people are tracking it.
Crashes in the stock market are similar to gas prices in the sense that the stock ticker is on the TV. It blares across everywhere. Almost any news site you go to, it’s on the front page, particularly when there’s a market crash, you see it go up and down. So it’s like even if you’re not in the market, you’re getting a lot of sirens going off about the economy being in trouble. And this is before the price increases really hit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if the market was doing great, the price increases are the much bigger political problem for him. I think the macro political problem for Trump and the way that why this is important for Democrats to hammer this is the entire reason that Trump is acceptable to a certain segment of voters is his belief.
It’s a false belief, but it’s born of the fact that he’s a wealthy businessman, that he played a fake businessman on a reality TV show for a decade, and then oversaw an economy that people have very fond memories of. Now, he really did nothing to make that economy good. He just managed to not mess up Barack Obama’s economy. But because of that— People believe that he, and even some Democrats believe he is a competent manager of the economy. Is he corrupt? Yes. Is he a clown? In a lot of ways, yes. Did he spark a violent insurrection? Is he a convicted criminal? All those things, yes. But on the issue I care about most, he has his shit together. He knows what he’s doing.
And there is nothing that has happened over the last few weeks here that suggests he has any idea what he’s doing. And I think he really hasn’t. That eroded the fundamental core of his political identity to voters, the reason why they support him despite everything else. Not the MAGA hat base, but just like the rest of the country, like that last 14, 15% of people who don’t love Trump but voted for him. Those people are waking up to the idea that he is not what they thought he is. And that is tremendous. And that’s why we’ve seen his approval rating sink precipitously over the last month here. The only thing I would add about Democratic message is to make sure that we are bringing the rest of the Republican Party into this, Republicans in Congress and elected Republicans everywhere, because, you know, we just saw in Congress this week, they want to insert a provision into the budget resolution bill that we’re going to talk about soon, that basically
ties Congress’s hands so that they can’t take back the power to levy tariffs from the president, states because Republicans, they don’t they don’t want it, they want to make sure that Trump has all the power to do everything he wants, so they are all in, they are all in on the trade war, they are tying themselves to Donald Trump. I think people have to know that Republicans aren’t just like letting this happen, they are actively making it so that only Trump can, you know, levy tariffs and continue to tank the economy. I think this is a very important point: that Democrats should be, like congressional Democrats, elected Democrats, just people out in the streets should be pressuring Republicans to take back the tariff power from Trump.
And I know that that is not going to happen. Like we, you know, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl has tweeted a thousand times now that there’s no way that the House is going to do that. And even if you could get together 60 senators, you’re not going to get to a veto-proof majority. That doesn’t matter. We need people to know that this is a choice Republicans are making, that they are on board with these price increases, and they’re so feckless and so lame that they are going to go along with it. And these members are going to be under real political pressure in their states as these prices go up. Right. It’s the farmer. It’s the farm states who are going to be suffering mightily from not being able to export to China.
It’s going to be every person who is trying to buy electronics from China, just across the people buying trying to buy new cars, all of that. And we want to make sure that you’re exactly right. Donald Trump is not on the ballot in 2026, but all these Republicans are and they should pay a price for this. Yeah. And all the Republicans who might run in 2028 if he lets other Republicans run, if he lets us have a presidential election. It’s a topic for another day. Right. But like, you know, your J. D. Vance’s, your Marco Rubio’s like reporters, if they talk to them. Everyone should get on the record about how much they love Trump’s tariffs because they’re going to say it.
And we want the video of them talking about how much they love this for when they try to run in 2028 and be like, what the tariff as the economy has cratered then and be like, what were you talking about? I don’t know if I liked that at the time. I wasn’t I wasn’t saying that was great. I was quietly upset about it and trying to convince him to stop it. I mean, it really it’s just like as we think about the politics, it really is as if. It’s the equivalent of George W. Bush walking into Lehman Brothers and just collapsing the whole thing himself. And then bragging about it. And then bragging about it. Yeah, I did it. Like standing on the rubble of Lehman Brothers with his megaphone.
Too soon? I don’t know. I don’t even know. Who’s to be offended by that? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll see. So we’ve also heard some Democrats criticize Trump’s tariffs, but also offer qualified support for some tariffs. This has sort of been a running theme here that people are getting mad about online. Gretchen Whitmer, most notably, gave a big speech in D. C. this week where she, you know, she disagreed with Trump’s tariffs. She was very clear about the damage that they’re doing to Michigan right now. But she also said she understands the quote motivation behind them. And then she said, quote I’m not against tariffs outright, but it is a blunt tool. You can’t just pull out the tariff hammer to swing at every problem without a clear, defined end goal. What did you make of that and this message in general? Why do you think some Democrats like Whitmer feel like they need to offer some qualified support for the idea of tariffs? What’s going on here is
trade deals. And so she is responding to this idea that not everyone benefits from trade, right? And tariffs have been in the past a useful way to push back. I think the problem here is we’re overcomplicating the simple. And when you talk about it in this way, where you say, as you said, she criticized, she took Trump to task on it. She was not This is not a suggestion that Gretchen Whitmer was mealy mouthed about this at all. She was not. But I think when you the way a lot of Democrats have done it to say like, you know, Trump’s doing it wrong, but tariffs are a useful tool. He’s just using the tool wrong. Suggest that there is some sort of it like almost buys the premise of Trump’s argument.
Yes. And I think it’s just the better argument here is that. He is a chaotic clown stumbling about the world stage, hurting American families by raising prices for no reason. And the better, I think the way to do it is, you know, like let’s take the tariff power away from the president. Yeah. Right. And so we, I think we can be, we’re going to negotiate, you know, tough and fair trade deals. We’re going to push back against countries who try to do it, but this is not the way to do it. Right. And I think just, I just feel like you’re wedded to this old way of thinking, I think. And it just, it dilutes the message.
And I think Gretchen Whitmer, who may be president of the United States one day, can still use tariffs if she sees fit in the appropriate way a few years from now when she’s president without having, even if she doesn’t mention them now. You know what I mean? I have a policy problem with this and then a political problem. I’ll start with the policy problem. Let’s hear your policy problem because that’s why people tune in this podcast. Policy problem is that there’s not a lot of good economic data, and I’m being generous there, that suggests that tariffs work in terms of bringing back lost manufacturing, right? If you have a nascent industry that you’re just trying to grow, that’s brand new.
Maybe, you know, tariffs can help grow that industry in the United States if there are national and security implications and you want to be able to make sure that we have the capacity in the United States to produce something here and not rely on another country that may be an adversary. There’s an argument for tariffs. Trump tried a bunch of tariffs in his not as many not as many tariffs as now, but some in his first term. And Biden kept him on, too. Yeah. And you know what? And I remember headlines in 2020 and 2021 talking about how Trump’s tariffs cost Michigan auto jobs. Right. And so I do think that like some elements of labor and some folks in the Midwest who. Are you right that globalization has hollowed out manufacturing in the heartland of this country.
I get that. But the remedy, tariffs as a remedy, has not proven to work very well. And I look, I mean, we’ll see what happens with the Biden’s Biden’s industrial policy with some tariffs, but also some like the CHIPS Act. Right. Like actually investing in manufacturing in this country, giving incentives and grants and credits to companies who are going to create manufacturing jobs here and all that, right? So as part of a larger industrial policy grade. Now let’s talk about the politics of all this, which is, I get that right after Trump won, Democrats were like, well, he’s more popular than he’s ever been. And, you know, it was a definitive loss and all this. We are now at the point with Donald Trump where
If you look down the road to 20’26 and then ’28 and you think that Donald Trump is going to somehow regain the popularity he had right after this last election, then I can understand trying to tread carefully and saying like, well, here’s where I agree with Donald Trump, but here’s where I disagree. If you’re looking at everything that’s happened over the last month and you’re looking at what he’s done on his economic policy now, which, as you just said, this was his he’s elected to be the president to bring down prices. Now we’re witnessing him becoming very unpopular on the issue that he’s supposed to have had the highest approval on the economy. And that’s just going to keep going down.
And so if you look ahead, like you have to imagine a world where if the economy craters or things keep going south. Don’t you want to be a Democrat who now was saying this fucking guy is tanking the economy and I want no part of this and I want no part of the policy, it’s absolutely crazy, and just like go at him knowing that even if you know he’s still sitting at 46, 45, 44 percent, now like it could get worse, and if it does, you want to be one of the Democrats who was saying ‘Now, this is fucked up.’ Like it’s very different, but it’s almost like Barack Obama coming out against the Iraq war when the rest of the party was for it. Yeah, I mean, that’s going to be more.
It’s a more problematic analogy than your rebel Lehman Brothers. I’ll tell you that. True, true. But so I’d say a couple of things to that. One is I don’t think what the Democrats who are mentioning there. That tariffs could be useful or I don’t think what they’re trying to do is make some sort of common cause with Trump voters or understand. Like, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think what’s happening is that there remains large constituency of the Democratic Party who believe that tariffs are a useful tool. And that includes, among others, organized labor. Yeah. And that there may be times, for instance, on like steel and aluminum and other things where you can push more, where you can raise the price of imports to the point that it will push people to using domestic steel.
But my issue here is not about the policy utility of tariffs. It’s just like, let’s have a simpler, clearer message. And it’s the message that you have there. You know, Josh Morrow has a very smart op-ed in The New York Times today about this point exactly. He takes it to a policy direction, which is this is a reason the Democrats could have used. We can use the fact that Trump is acting this way and has shown the failure of protectionism to become more like developing a message that is more forward-looking on trade. I think the fear I think the fear that some people have is that we’re going to make the classic mistake of Donald Trump, is now tough on trade. So we’re going to become the biggest defenders of globalism and free trade possible.
Right? Oh, you attack The New York Times. I will subscribe to New York Times fucking twice. Right. Oh, you’re going to attack institutions. I am going to read the Declaration of Independence to my children online every day. Right. And so you’d see this world where, like, there is a nuanced position between every single thing that Donald Trump has said about trade is wrong. And he is always and everything, and that global trade is great. And I think there are people trying to find, maybe inartfully, trying to find the right place in the middle there. And I’m just saying we should have an alternative vision, even if the easier political argument is just Donald Trump’s taking the economy. But I think that trying to message the nuance of tariffs as a tool, yeah, it’s too nuanced.
And actually, Whitmer had a couple lines like this in her speech, which I thought was good. She’s like, where I agree is we need to create more jobs in America. We need to make more stuff in America. We need to have manufacturing in America. And then I think Democrats need to talk about the vision for making sure that we are building things and creating jobs and creating manufacturing and new industries of the future right in America. And a couple ways to do that are making sure that we’re investing in education, which Donald Trump is gutting. Make sure we’re investing in innovation and science and medicine and technology, which Donald Trump is gutting. And you can talk about what’s going to attract new businesses and jobs to this country instead of just leaning on discussions about tariffs and policies.
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I’m very much in agreement that we need a positive, forward-looking vision about how to create jobs in this country and lift people up and making sure that you’re not poor when you work. But just pretending that we can unwind globalization, I don’t know, it just drives me a little nuts. I understand the impulse to avoid Democrats responding to the terrorists by putting on ‘I was for NAFTA’ t-shirts. Yeah, and like, we’re going to put up trade barriers and just pretend that, you know, globalization was just a policy choice and not the fucking march of technology. I’m sorry. I’m getting a little Obama now, but that’s just my annoyance. Pod Save America is brought to you by Right Side Up.
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com to get 10% off your first month. That’s BetterHelp.com. So even as we’re all trying to figure out Trump’s next move, there are some pretty serious questions about what happened on Wednesday before he made his strategic retreat. A few hours before Trump announced the pause on reciprocal tariffs, he went on Truth Social with a simple message. This is a great time to buy. Signing it DJT. And in fact, if you did buy on that tip, you would have made a lot of money. Obviously, posting a ‘buy now’ message on social media is not in itself insider trading because it’s very outsider. It’s very public. But some folks think that that may have been a cover your ass move and are wondering if any Trump officials, family members or other Trump allies in Congress or elsewhere were tipped off about the pause before it happened.
Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego sent a letter to the White House and asking what happened. Elizabeth Warren went to the floor to call for an investigation as well. It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to believe there might be something to this, but of course we don’t know. Here’s Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon with two billionaire friends, Charles Schwab, yes, that Charles Schwab, and car racing magnate Roger Penske. This is Charles Schwab. It’s not just a company. It’s actually an individual. He made two and a half billion today, and he made 900 million. That’s not bad. He’s in finance. Being with someone named Charles Schwab is so funny. Like, was the Monopoly man not available? I mean, on the day you pause the tariffs, the markets rallied, and a bunch of rich people got rich.
I mean, it’s just, like, unbelievable. Thoughts on this? Like, is this a— you know are we heading into uh conspiracy theoryville? Is it real what do you think? I think it’s a subject worthy of inquiry by law enforcement officials, including potentially the Attorney General of New York. Well, the Attorney General of New York has some jurisdiction here because the markets are based in New York. And there is a thing called the Martin Act, which is a specific New York state law where Letitia James would have some jurisdiction here. So it’s worth looking into. It’s very believable that these people would do such things. And we should look into it. And I would also note that there was something called the STOCK ACT that passed when we were in the White House.
And so these government officials would theoretically have to disclose trades made. Now, I don’t think it would tell you the timing, but it’d be interesting to know who sold stocks on or bought stocks on this day. Certainly would. It’d be very interesting. Love to see that. I’m not sure who’s enforcing the STOCK Act in this administration, but- Law. Who’s it for these days? I don’t know. All right. Trump and the Republicans are not simply content imposing the biggest sales tax in history and crashing the economy. They’re also hard at work trying to pass a massive tax cut for the rich, some of which will be funded by massive cuts to health care and food assistance, and some of which won’t be paid for at all.
On Thursday, the House barely passed the Senate’s budget resolution by a vote of 216 to 214. This was after Mike Johnson had to delay the vote because the usual kooks in the caucus didn’t think the cuts were deep enough. What ultimately got them on board, according to Chip Roy, was a verbal commitment from Republican leadership in the Senate on three big things. At least $1. 5 trillion in spending cuts. $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and clean energy tax credits. And a dollar for dollar match between new tax cuts and spending cuts. This may be a bit challenging for Senate Republicans to achieve because they have people like Susan Collins in their caucus who already voted no the first time around the first budget resolution because of the Medicaid cuts that now haven’t gone anywhere.
And apparently at least four Republican senators have now come out and said that they would vote against the bill if it gets rid of the clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, probably because those tax credits are already being put to use, creating jobs and businesses in their states. What do you think happens here? How do they make all this math work? If you take people at their word, I know that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but if you take these people at their word. The people who say that they cannot vote for cuts to Medicaid of this size, and the people who say they cannot vote for a bill without cuts to Medicaid of this size, with those people, you can’t pass it.
Like if those people all stick by what they believe, it cannot pass. The math does not work. I mean, the politics of cutting Medicaid are – let’s look at it this way. The politics of cutting taxes for rich people, even if you just – You paid for it with nothing or you paid for it with only things people didn’t mind, right? If you paid for it all with foreign aid to whatever, right? That is still quite unpopular. Just the mere idea of giving rich people and corporations tax cuts is very unpopular. Cutting Medicaid on its own, incredibly unpopular, opposed by like 80% of people in some polls, including like more than 60% of Republicans. To pay for tax cuts for the rich with cuts to Medicaid is like an A-plus answer in a political science 101 class about how to commit political suicide.
You couldn’t find something more unpopular than that. And so will these people do that? Are they willing to do it? You’ve got a bunch of Republicans who are in purple districts. Are they really going to vote for that? And they need all those votes. You can’t pass it without that. The Senate, a lot of these people are in states where Medicaid is a part of the state’s constitution. Those states have Medicaid expansion to pay for health care. They are cutting the clean energy. Tax credits come as jobs from their state. So it seems very hard that they are. It seems hard to imagine that they will pass something that would adhere to this budget resolution. Even if you listen to what John Thune, the Senate leader, said, he really basically put a giant loophole and said, ‘we’ll try to do the best we can.’ He did not really commit.
He did not view the commitment as firm as Chip Roy did, if you will. And I can’t tell. I mean, usually it’s the moderates who blink, but that’s always the case in the House. And I do think when you get to like your Susan Collins’s and your Lisa Murkowski’s, like they give less of a shit about getting pressured from Donald Trump because they have been here before and and stood up to him before, most notably on him trying to appeal the Affordable Care Act. So I don’t know how they get this done. I mean, you can see a lot of Republicans in Congress already saying, well, we’re never going to touch the benefits for Medicaid. We’re just going to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse.
And at the levels they’re talking about with the cuts that they need, I don’t think that’s possible. Susan Collins herself said this today or yesterday. She was saying like $880 billion. I don’t know how you – there’s not enough waste, fraud and abuse to get it to $880 billion. They could probably find some. You could probably, you could probably do a bunch of Medicaid reforms and maybe even work requirements, which Democrats wouldn’t support. But we don’t support. But you could then maybe get – I don’t know, a couple hundred billion of savings. There’s no way you’re getting up to 880 billion. And so then if you’re trying to get the cuts out elsewhere, like you’ve got Medicare, you’ve got Social Security, you’ve got the defense budget – like you just don’t have a lot of other options.
And so then maybe you’re left with a bill that doesn’t make those cuts, does make sure it does the tax cuts. But then what do your Chip Roy’s do and your Freedom Caucus members? Do they just get threatened by Trump and pass the bill? Maybe. Well, ultimately, what you have to remember here is that at the end of the year, if Congress does nothing, taxes are going to go up on almost every American. And so which will really be a double whammy for Donald Trump that he raised prices and raised taxes. I was thinking about that. I was thinking about that this week. And Republicans are not going to let taxes go up on every American. They may go right up to the deadline.
But one possibility of how this could end is: They could say that given all the economic turmoil that is happening, we are going to just extend them for two years unpaid for. Or they’ll come up with some small number of cuts. They’ll cobble something together, right? Maybe they’ll gut some part of the Inflation Reduction Act. You can find some Medicaid stuff, like a smaller number that is bad but doesn’t get to the core benefits. Or like a – Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security commission that comes up with the cuts in the next two years. And they set it all up for, you know, 2026 or 2028 when, you know, yeah, I could see that. Like every part of this process from the start has been to just kick, just punt the ball down the field and then worry about the problems later.
And there is like at the end of the day, the last move, the way to do that is a short-term extension. This is what happened to the Bush tax cuts. They were extended in 2010. Now, different situation because we had a Democrat in the White House and Republicans were about to take over Congress. But the ultimate decision was just we can’t figure this out right now. And so we’re just going to – and an argument of economic uncertainty coming out of the recession. We’re not going to raise taxes at this point, so let’s just deal with this later. And Obama got a big tax cut for – payroll tax cut in exchange for that to put some juice in the economy. I just think that I find it hard to imagine that they’re going to solve this problem.
Maybe Trump can make all these people vote for it largely unpaid for. Maybe he can do that. He’s gotten them to vote for a lot of other stuff. But these people are all some of the biggest liars in the history of America if they will actually do that. Where do you think they’re going to find the money for universal basic income for every person who lives in Greenland? Because I don’t know if you saw. But there’s a New York Times story Thursday about how they are moving forward on trying to pressure Greenland to join the United States. And one idea being floated by the Trump administration is to give every Greenlander $10,000 per year per person. How many people live in Greenland? 57,000. That’s it? Yeah.
It’s actually pretty cheap. I think they get $600 million a year from Denmark. Can you imagine, though? Can you imagine the politics of that? We’re going to give the people who live in Greenland $10,000 a year, every single person, while your costs are going up, while your taxes are going up, while you’re cutting your health care. Throw that one in a fucking poll. Your cost of living is going to go up $4,600 this year, and we’re going to give $10,000 to people of Greenland. Paid for by you. You’re going to pay for it. I want this to happen so badly. I would do it. Announce it. Because you want Greenland? Because I want Greenland. Because I’m going to move there, yeah. Okay.
We got to talk about two more executive orders that Trump signed on Wednesday in the midst of all of this. He did it in front of the cameras, the press, White House staff, and for some reason, Gretchen Whitmer. The orders target two members of Trump’s first administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump not only stripped them of their security clearances, he also directed the Department of Justice to investigate them. Miles Taylor, you might remember as the Department of Homeland Security official who wrote the briefly famous and briefly anonymous op-ed in The New York Times in 2018 titled, ‘I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.’ He has since come out and he’s been a vocal critic of Donald Trump in the press.
Krebs was, Chris Krebs was head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and said in 2020 that there had been no fraud in the election, which Trump fired him for via tweet. Notably, Krebs later testified in front of the January 6th committee. Where to even begin here? Like what? That was wild. Watching it live was fucking wild. This is possibly the most authoritarian, scariest thing that Trump has done. Right. Not to just reiterate what you said, but he signed two executive orders targeting individual Americans by name and directed the government to investigate them for the crime of criticizing the regime. Yeah. And said that, oh, I think treason. It was treason. Like, just saying, throwing that around, you know. A crime punishable by death. Right. Right.
And that has – and I’m not sure why this is not a bigger deal. Obviously, there’s been a lot happening this week, so I understand that there’s limited bandwidth. But this – and maybe people are like, well, I think probably if you’re talking to reporters about this, maybe other Democrats are not talking about it. They would say, well, no one has investigated them yet. They still may. It seems – it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of – There isn’t a lot – in this version of Trump, there’s not a lot of let him talk and then we’ll just let it fade away. It’s like he talks and people do what he says. But even if they never charge him with crimes, the entire goal here is to make it – to scare the living daylights out of anyone who wants to criticize the administration, to – essentially to penalize you for free speech.
Which is fucking ironic given the free speech warriors who surround this president and what he talked about in the campaign. But individual Americans by name. He signed a piece of paper directing the Department of Justice to investigate an American for the crime of criticizing the president. Yeah, that’s it. And for telling the truth about the 2020 election. Yeah. And everyone’s just like, okay, cool. We’re just going to let that happen now. And, like, you know, if they do get investigated, hopefully they can find law firms that will take their case. Right. Because I just saw in the New York Times, too, he’s on the cusp of making a deal with more law firms. In fact, he also announced that he’s going to be forcing, and I don’t know if he is able to do this or they will accept it, but he’s going to force some of the law firms that he already made deals with to take on coal companies, to help defend coal companies.
They’re probably doing that anyway, honestly. But I mean, think about this. You’re Miles Taylor and you’re trying to get a lawyer. A firm is going to have to have a meeting to decide if they can take on Miles. Taylor or Chris Krebs as clients because if they’re not already on Trump’s hit list, they will be on Trump’s hit list for that and all of a sudden they’re not allowed in federal buildings anymore and they have to cut some terrible deal or become part of this lawsuit. I mean it is like this is really bad shit, let’s really let’s play out um the investigation they are sort of investigation investigated but you know the people either people are like I can’t really do this there’s nothing here this is ridiculous or judge is going to throw it or whatever.
Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, they both have jobs. They have livings. Are people going to do business with them? Are they going to have clients again? Are clients going to be scared off of that? They now lost their security clearances, which I know a lot of people have. But there’s a whole host of second, third, fourth order effects here. Are they going to be threatened, intimidated by fucking MAGA crazies online or at their home? It’s just, it is out-fucking-rageous. And it is pretty wild that it just hasn’t made that much noise and that there aren’t more people out there defending Miles and Chris and saying, no, this is too far. We have two problems here. Three problems, I guess. One problem is that this happened in the middle of a global financial crisis spurred on by the idiocy of a president.
So that is going to suck up a lot of oxygen. So I understand that. The second thing is that a lot of people are not going to want to get involved here because they don’t want to have their name on an executive order or their law firm banned from federal government buildings or their university have their funds impounded until they can agree to some sort of deal. And so people are afraid to speak out, which is the whole fucking point to begin with. The other thing is that Democrats have not – not enough Democrats feel emboldened enough to speak out about this stuff. And I think part of that is not that they’re afraid of speaking out about Trump. I don’t think that at all.
But I think that there is a real belief that the best way to beat Trump is to talk about the economy. And therefore, that’s what you should do. And that’s what they’re doing this week. I ultimately think that that is a mistake. I have a lot to say about that, maybe in a different forum. But I think that is part of the problem, is that no one has an incentive to speak up here. Could not agree. And when no one speaks up, more bad things happen. Right. And it’s also, it’s Trump’s strategy and every authoritarian strategy to divide people and pick them off one by one. And, you know, I’ll. Target a few law firms, and then a few will make deals with me, and so then they’ll be weaker because the others don’t, and the others will be scared, and I’ll pick off a few colleges, and I’ll pick off a few politicians, and a few former administration officials to get investigated.
And only and and everyone else is too scared, and it’s like a collective action problem. This is why like people need to. This is why the hands-off rallies were great. This is why it was good that Obama went out and said something. This is why it’s good that Cory Booker did the filibuster speech. This is why it’s good that more and more people are speaking out. There has to be some solidarity here because if his job is to pick people off and divide us against each other, then the antidote to that is for people to speak out with one voice and stand up for each other. Even if you’re worried about yourself, or you’re worried that it might happen to you, or it’s someone that you don’t think it could happen to you, people have to start coming together and not be afraid.
This is how he wins. This is how we sort of like continue our descent into authoritarianism. Do you think Gretchen Whitmer was looking around for a fire alarm to pull while this was going on? Because she was right in the Oval Office and her office, which I completely believe, her office came out with a statement afterwards that was like she had no idea that these EOs were going to be signed. She had no idea there was going to be a press avail in the Oval Office. She had met with Trump. She had criticized. She criticized him directly or she told him that the tariffs were a shitty idea before he did the pause; not
that she liked you know was the one who maybe she was, maybe she was someone, get Gretchen, we’re in those TikTok stories, you never know um, but so she gets so she ends up in the Oval Office, you can imagine Trump doing this right like he’s he’s he’s nice to her in person then he brings her in and then she has to see this and then he calls her out uh and because he wants everyone to know that she’s there; And allowing this to happen. And then like, what do you do if you’re Gretchen Whitmer? You know? Yeah. I mean, I feel like obviously never going to the Oval Office with Trump. Like that’s just a general rule. But you can just see how you’re in the White House with the president.
I’m doing this event. Come on in here. She obviously didn’t. I will go to my grave believing she obviously would not have gone if she’d known what it was about. Oh, of course. I wouldn’t even know there was a press event. He just like brought her in the Oval. Yeah. But I do think I thought about this one for a while. Like, there is a. There’s a sliding doors moment here for her. We’re like, you know, she’s taking some criticism now for the speech and everything and whatever. It’s like people will forget about it in a while. But there’s also a version of this where he signs the EOs. He says something to her and she speaks out about it like right there in the Oval while the cameras are on.
Like Janet Mills did. And suddenly she’s a fucking hero. And now, look, the risk is she was trying to get stuff done for Michigan. They talked about some invasive species of fish. And the president was going to help her with. Is it the Asian carp? It’s the Asian carp, Dan. It’s the Asian carp. Thank you. We’ve been there. We all know. Yeah, we’ve dealt with it ourselves. It’s the Asian carp. And I think I was dealing with this in the fucking Senate office. Anyway. You were, yeah. It’s a big deal. It’s an Illinois thing, too. There was a military base she was trying to help keep open or whatever. And, you know, you can make the argument if you’re her.
My job is to represent the people of Michigan and I want to help the people of Michigan. And so having a constructive relationship with the president is the best way to do that. Gavin Newsom did this around the fires. Right. Like you can see the rationale behind it. But I think Democratic politicians, particularly Democratic politicians who may want to be president or just run for high office. Have to start thinking, if this is not normal politics anymore, if this is not even the first Trump term anymore, but this is something much scarier and much more serious, then is the best way to represent my constituents just like bringing home the bacon and talking about the economy? Or do I have to use my position and the platform that I have?
To speak out and to fight this guy and to show that I’m not afraid to fight this guy so that other people won’t be afraid to fight this guy. Because that’s what like a real leader will do. And I realize that that takes like it’s a different thought process. It’s not going to come to you from your consultants or polls or anything else. There’s some risk to it. But I do feel like we’re at a moment where Democrats who take that risk will be rewarded, certainly by the voters, at least by Democratic voters. You see that in the crowds, right? The crowds that were showing up for Bernie and AOC, for instance. Yes. You’ve seen that in the crowds that showed up for Chris Murphy and Maxwell Frost when they did their town halls recently.
Or the event you guys did with Ro Khanna, right? Yep. There is a value in speaking out. I don’t know enough of the circumstances to know what was actually possible for Gretchen Whitmer. But your point about a tendency to respond to an extraordinary moment with ordinary politics, which is my main criticism of Schumer and what he did on the budget bill. Stands for the party, for much of the party right now. Yes, I agree. Stipulating that most everything is awful right now, as we’ve made clear throughout the show and most shows, there were a few rays of hope out there that we want to mention from this week. One example, after a huge public outcry, the Social Security Administration has decided not to move forward with Elon Musk and Doge’s plan to cut its phone hotline service.
This is a quote from the Washington Post story about this. Beneficiaries began lining up at field offices across the country, clutching driver’s licenses and asking if they must prove who they were in person. Phone wait times ballooned and the agency’s website started crashing almost daily under a crush of panicked. callers and visitors besieged by angry constituents lawmakers demanded that the acting commissioner and the chaos now after nearly a month of chaos and backlash the doge plans are dead how about that uh that’s exciting yeah uh what do you think was this Do you think this was a result of real pressure or was just a catastrophically bad idea destined to fall under the weight of its own stupidity? Well, there have been a lot of catastrophically bad ideas that have not yet fallen under the weight of their own stupidity in this administration.
Good point. So I think – look, people showed up. They made their voices heard. That is the only tool in our toolbox right now to push back, right? Yeah. Congress is not going to do it. Republicans in Congress certainly aren’t going to do it. Democrats don’t have the power to do it. The courts, and we’ll get to this in a minute, can do it, but there are limits to what they will do here. The business community is not going to step up. The tech companies are not going to step up. Universities are cutting deals with Trump. Law firms are cutting deals with Trump. The only way to actually push back on what Trump is doing to stop him from doing the worst things is for people to take to the streets and make their voices heard in ways big and small.
And that’s what happened last weekend. And we have to keep doing that. Like, is that the exact reason why these changes were made? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know. But the fact that people, this is a thing that Trump did that everyone yelled about and they yelled about it and they called and they showed up and they had to back down is proof that we can actually, with political pressure, make a difference here. Yeah, I totally agree. On immigration. We got two good rulings from federal judges in New York and Texas pausing Trump’s Alien Enemies Act deportations in their jurisdictions or at least requiring hearings for detainees before they can be removed. And that those rulings were directly the result of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling where the court overturned Judge Boasberg’s pause on deportations to El Salvador, but more importantly, ruled that all deportations without due process are illegal.
All nine justices agreed that every person has the right to ample notice and ample opportunity to challenge their removal. So not the huge win that Trump claimed. And literally, as we were recording, we just got the news that the Supreme Court has decided unanimously that the government must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This is the Maryland father that they wrongfully detained. Basically, no evidence decided MS-13. And then the government admitted that they sent him to El Salvador in error, where because he had legal protections not to be deported to El Salvador that a judge specifically gave him. And I haven’t read the opinion yet, but yeah, they they’ve told the government to facilitate his return. This is the case that JD Vance tweeted at me and said that I obviously hadn’t read the court document about this because he was MS-13.
Well, JD Vance, I guess you didn’t fucking read the court document because all nine Supreme Court justices, including Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, think that this guy should be returned. Fuck you too to Stephen Miller, who also asked me if I wanted to live in neighborhoods with foreign terrorists. Well, the Supreme Court does not believe this is a foreign terrorist because they are telling the government to facilitate his return. So that’s some. Pretty good news from the Supreme Court. It’s very good news. And I really hope it’s good news. I was going to say it’s good news for now. The the truly dark and horrible news will be when the administration tells all nine members of the Supreme Court to fuck off. If that happens, then we’re in really, really bad territory.
Or they or they tell Bukele in El Salvador to be which they which they could, which they could. But it is it is. I do think it is good to know that even this Supreme Court and especially all nine members do not believe, as the Trump administration seems to believe, that they can round up people in this country and send them to a fucking gulag in El Salvador with no due process just because the Trump administration tells us, based on whatever evidence they feel like they don’t even want to share and won’t share, that these people are alleged gang members. And that even if they know they sent the wrong person, they don’t have to bring that person back. Yeah, no shit. And one more good immigration story.
The other day we talked about how in a small town in upstate New York called Sackett’s Harbor, ICE raided a dairy farm and they had a warrant for one undocumented immigrant. But then once they got him, they decided to just search. the whole neighborhood, and they seized a mother and her three kids, an 11th grader, a 10th grader, and a third grader, put them in handcuffs, sent them to a detention center in Texas. One of the kids’ teachers called the principal, and together they got the whole town activated to protest and demand the kids’ return. Teachers played a huge role, made calls to state officials between classes, so did the county Democratic committee. This is all according to the Washington Post. They held a rally, like a thousand people in the town showed up, got the governor involved.
The family. They finally got the family released, and the kids are now back in class. And the best part of this story is that this is serious Trump country. Trump won Jefferson County, where Sackett’s Harbor is, by 24 points. And this borders our Tom Homan’s hometown. He owns a house in Sackett’s Harbor, and he grew up there. And one of the marchers at the rally had a sign that said, Humans up, Homan down. Which I absolutely love. Great work. And I don’t know. I just think it’s, look, it shouldn’t have happened. And it’s horrifying that these kids had to go to a detention center in Texas. And apparently, like, one of the kids was just fucking uncontrollably crying the entire time because he was, you know, a third grader. A third grader.
Imagine a third grader going to Texas and then the other third graders in his class and his teacher being like, but the whole town, even though they voted for Trump, the whole town came together and rallied and protested. And I think if the people in that town can do it, then people all over this country should do it too. I have two thoughts on this. One, what happened there should embolden so many people in this country to speak up on behalf of the people who are being treated this way. And it also just makes me so furious at the refusal of Democrats, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their campaigns, to talk about Trump’s mass deportation plans.
Because if you can talk about what it, like not just recent arrivals or criminals or all of that, but understand that there are people who are embedded in this community, children who know no country other than this one, being put in handcuffs and being sent somewhere and deported, like that you can rally the country around that. And we just, we wave the white flag on that. And that was a huge mistake. Huge mistake. And again, there is, it is a false choice. To think that we can’t have a message on immigration and a policy on immigration that emphasizes that we have laws in this country and we want people to come here legally, and some people are going to be deported. There’s no false choice between that and speaking out against.
This policy, which is rounding up people who are legal residents and and green card holders and sending them to this f***ing prison for the rest of their lives based on no due process, like it is-it is unconscionable. And if you as a Democrat can’t draw the distinction between a normal immigration policy and this, then I don’t know what you’re doing in politics. All right. Speaking of immigration, this week, Tommy sat down with Lindsay Teslowski, the co-founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. She’s the lawyer for Andri Hernandez Romero, the Venezuelan makeup artist who’s been disappeared to El Salvador for having tattoos that ICE mistook for gang symbols. The full conversation is on our YouTube page, but we wanted to play an excerpt for you all here. Let’s just start with the basics.
Andri and all of these men have been thrown in this prison in El Salvador. We can’t speak to them. We can’t hear from them. We know nothing. You know, they can’t speak for themselves. What can you tell us about him? Well, I can tell you a lot about what we learned before he went. But like you said, I can’t say anything about what has happened over the last more than three weeks now because he’s been completely incommunicado. And that means no journalists, no lawyers, no family members, and even organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and others who would normally be able to speak with people in detention have not been able to speak with him or any other detainees that we’re aware of. Andri came to the U.
S. in August of 2024. He was seeking asylum. He’s a gay man. He’s a professional makeup artist. He worked at a state-run TV station in Venezuela. He was persecuted there because they wanted him to put up pro-Maduro social media posts. He didn’t want to do it. He was actually physically beaten as a result. He was also harassed and physically assaulted because of his sexual orientation. So he fled like so many other Venezuelans and came to the U. S. to seek asylum. He initially tried to come in one time and was told that he needed to make a CBP1 appointment, which is this app that during the Biden administration they were asking people to use in order to get asylum or in order to apply. And he went to Tijuana.
He made that appointment. He waited over a month for that appointment. And then he entered the U. S. Once he was in the US, he was in ICE detention the entire time. So he’s never even been in the United States for one moment as a free person from the moment he crossed at the border until the moment they forced him and deported him on a plane to El Salvador. He was in custody. So he was unequivocally not a threat to anyone in the United States at any time. Absolutely not. And just, you know, we’ve now, in researching for his asylum case and doing his declaration and collecting evidence and speaking with his family, you know, I’ve been asked many times, is it possible that he is, you know, a gay makeup artist masquerading as that when he’s really a Tren de Aragua gang member?
The truth is, the same could be said about you or about me. It’s outside the realm of what seems to be possible. Specifically as a lawyer, I would say they’ve never presented any evidence that would indicate that that is true. All that they submitted were pictures of the crown tattoos on his wrists, which have his mom and dad’s name and the crown tattoo, along with an article from Newsweek that says that this imagery, along with many other very common types of tattoos, could mean that someone’s Tren de Aragua. What we know and what we would have presented had we had our day in court, had he been given any due process, is that experts have said there are actually no tattoos that indicate someone is a member of this gang.
There’s no singular tattoo that you could point to. Yeah, I mean, there’s a Venezuelan journalist who was talking to The New Yorker who said, quote, Trend de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification. No Venezuelan gang does. So to hear the full conversation, head to our YouTube page, youtube. com/ slash @ symbol pod, save America. And by the way, Subscribe to our YouTube channel, Pod Save America, because we are now doing a lot of YouTube only content when news breaks. We’re just like running into the studio when we don’t have a pod and we’re just going to do some YouTube. And it’s really important because right wing media is kicking our ass on YouTube. And the more subscribers that progressive. media outlets on YouTube have.
When people start searching for things, the algorithm is more likely to bring up the good content instead of just send them down the rabbit hole of crazy right-wing content. So really important to go on and please subscribe to Pod Save America and we’ll have all kinds of great content for you there. Okay, when we come back from the break, you’ll hear Dan’s conversation with Atul Gawande about all of the deeply concerning things happening in our healthcare system. But two announcements before we do that. We got a new episode of Polar Coaster out, Dan. Tell us about it. We do have an episode. Carol and I talked about how the tariffs and the reaction to the tariffs is just utterly devastating Trump’s numbers and could presage the collapse of his presidency.
The episode was so compelling that within two hours of its release, Trump paused the tariffs. I’m just saying. That’s what did it. It wasn’t the bond market. It was Polar Coaster. I mean, Polar Coaster might have affected the bond market, too. It really punches above its weight. Look, to celebrate this, for one month only, this month only, we are offering a free 30-day trial of our Friends of the Pod subscription. With your subscription, you’ll get Polar Coaster. You’ll also enjoy ad-free episodes. Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, and now we’ve added Offline and Love It or Leave It as well. You’ll also join our Discord community where you can process and discuss the news with fellow listeners all around the world. It’s a fantastic community of great people.
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Unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney. com/ slash crooked today. That’s rocketmoney. com/ slash crooked, rocketmoney. com/ slash crooked. Joining us now to discuss RFK Jr., the cuts to the country’s health agencies, and the government’s response to the measles outbreak is Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a bestselling author, and the former assistant administrator for global health at USAID in the Biden administration. Welcome to Pod Save America. Delighted to be here. I want to start with the measles outbreak in Texas, which has taken the lives of at least two children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was down in Texas recently to meet with the family of one of the children who passed away. How do you assess the government’s response to the outbreak so far?
Are they doing the right things or things that someone who was maybe not a vaccine skeptic as HHS Secretary would be doing? Just what do you think? Well, a lot of our attention has been on like, what is he saying? Is he calling for the vaccine? And that is such a low bar. Three months ago, if this happened or really in any other administration, you would have had the National Security Council pulling people together across all of the agencies, including CDC, the leadership at FDA, also USAID and others working abroad because measles is a global epidemic. We have cases coming from abroad and we have spread in the United States. They would have had all of their clinical people together. We had what we called the doctor’s group that would get together on a weekly basis to look at crisis situations.
And we don’t see any of this happening, right? You would see the HHS secretary or the head of CDC on calls every week with the states having the outbreaks and other states, public health officials, to get on top of this. Instead, we’ve had spread to where an outbreak in West Texas has gone over the border to Mexico and also is cropping up in 20 states around the country. So this is not the right steps at all. So not good is what you’re saying? Not good. And this is solvable. I mean, we eliminated measles in the United States. Our elimination status is at risk. And we have one in a thousand kids die. The fact that there are already three people who’ve died indicates that the counts that say that there might be around 500 cases are way under what the reality is.
What do you attribute the response to? Do they not take it as seriously, or is this just a government that is not set up to actually deal with a crisis and have the right people in place? I think it starts with the skepticism and then add in there are multiple layers of destruction going on. There is the attitude towards measles and the vaccine, but then there’s the fact that there has been dogged cuts across the government, including pulling $11 billion from state public health programs when they rescinded funds that were allocated during COVID for strengthening public health. That shut down vaccination clinics in West Texas that were trying to vaccinate against measles. Then you have all of the work that has undone advisory groups, any independent assessment within the government on paths forward.
And you’ve purged CDC and FDA of many of their top vaccine people. This is a systematic dismantling in a chaotic and unsystematic way. As you mentioned, RFK Jr did say that the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to prevent measles. But in an interview on CBS and in other places, it seems like he can’t help himself from raising some concerns about the safety of vaccines in general. Can you talk a little bit about what he’s getting wrong, what the science actually says about the safety of these vaccines? He’s got a million charges that he throws at vaccines. Here’s the thing to know. We have reduced child deaths in the last 50 years by 75%. 40% of that reduction in child deaths has come from vaccines.
And 60% of the vaccine death reduction has come from the measles vaccine alone. We’re now in a world where there is about 10 million children who are being infected by measles. We’re over 100,000 child deaths in the world. The United States shouldn’t be joining that list. And so it’s critical that we are all part of It’s critical that we are stopping the direction of travel here. I mean, we are undoing our global systems and our state and national systems for everything from NIH research on production of vaccines and improving uptake, people’s willingness to get vaccines. Dismantling major parts of the expertise in the FDA around approving vaccines and have actions that have, you know, one of the first actions of the FDA commissioner was to disallow approval of a Novavax COVID vaccine, even though it was recommended by the technical regulators.
And then you have CDC guidance now under political controls. The direction of travel we see here is where technical expertise is being removed, independence to make scientific judgments and recommendations is being undermined, and communications are being put into the offices of the Secretary or top officials who are political appointees. And so you’re seeing more political controls over critical decisions and less technical expertise. I mean, along those lines, you know, I think one of the biggest stories of RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS thus far has been the ouster of Dr. Peter Marks, who headed vaccine regulation. You know, in his resignation letter, Marks wrote that it became clear that truth and transparency were not desired by the Secretary and that all they wanted was confirmation of misinformation and lies.
Can you just talk a little bit about what his ouster means and like what it could mean? And you mentioned the COVID vaccine that was delayed, where approval is delayed, what it can mean for like, I assume the FDA has to approve a flu vaccine later this year, I guess, assume a COVID booster at some point. Like, what does this mean for just the day-to-day work that the FDA has to do to get vaccines out into the world? Yes, you put your finger on it. Look, moving Peter Marks out and having him go was a sign of what was to come. But changing leadership is not an abnormal thing to do. What went with him was the top regulatory capacity and many of their experts.
He oversaw a wide swath of work that ranged from vaccines to getting gene and cell therapies approved for the world. They were the ones who figured out how to look at sickle cell. We have a cure for sickle cell with a gene therapy now. And that was because of figuring out the way that you could actually safely regulate, test, and approve such new tools. That entire infrastructure has now been weakened. It’s alarmed the community, the biotechnology community, the United States has been the leader in gene therapy, cell therapy, and in vaccine development. All of those industries now are seeing their net valuation hammered. They’re seeing their confidence that they can move and be innovative by partnering with the FDA harmed. It’s hard for them to get communications the way that they used to.
So this is This is the undermining of an entire industry, and it’s a pattern we see in multiple areas. This is only one. To take another example, tobacco. The Office of Tobacco Control and the FDA and CDC have been eliminated for the large part. They still have reviewers. They can approve vapes. But the people who would— issue, do the research, do the guidance, issue regulations, and then enforce the regulations that are out there, those people are gutted. They’re gone. And, you know, that’s for one of our biggest causes of chronic illness in the country. So the claim is that they’re trying to do good work by chronic illness. This is completely the opposite. I mean, that all goes along with, you know, basically this gutting of Several of the health agents, FDA, CDC, about 10,000 people have been laid off.
Although courts have stepped in, you’ve had attempts to get funding for NIH research grants and other things. Maybe I hope you could talk a little bit about what that means broadly for the health of the country. What is being lost by gutting some of these, by losing these staff? In particular, I think people really worry about the NIH grants. You see headlines about how we-been on the cusp of breakthroughs and cancer and other therapies and other potential cures that are being delayed by these research grants. So just, I want people to kind of understand what the opportunity cost is to sort of these dog-eat-dog cuts at HHS. To see the whole picture, you have to understand that these are hitting every part of the health and science infrastructure that has made the US the leader in this space for a century.
It starts with Core research basic research at the NIH. You know the purge of 10,000 people now, but it had been 10,000 people just a couple weeks before that as well. So you’re seeing a quarter of HHS Hammered at NIH that has meant all issuance of new research grants have been stopped; research in areas around vaccine uptake, research in critical areas around disparities in maternal survival. These are being hammered for ideological reasons and that are extending to hundreds of millions and threaten to be billions of dollars of terminations of grants for universities, which are our core base of developing our future scientists across the country. If you have a child who wants to be a scientist right now out there or are a young scientist, your opportunities have been shut down in the space of weeks because graduate student programs have been frozen.
Or rescinded, actually, acceptances for programs. So that’s the NIH side. They’ve also shifted decision-making over grants from individual institutes, like the Cancer Institute or the Infectious Disease Institute, into the director’s office, which is where you have less expertise but more access to political controls. And that’s the pattern you see now. Usually they go from NIH research becomes FDA, proposed solutions coming from companies that take the work that NIH does and turn it into products. 99% of FDA drugs came from, started with contributions from the National Institutes of Health. The FDA, we talked about the ways that it’s been gutted or crippled in significant ways across the agency. There are many of their top experts and nutritionists, drug experts, lawyers who know how to manage the regulatory processes, the communicators and coordinators.
Those people are purged. Then you have guidance from the CDC also hindered, and then our effort to move it out into the world. Medicaid, we’re looking at massive cuts potentially. Medicare, unclear what is intended there. And then at USAID, where I led global health, you see it being entirely dismantled, 100% of the staff-now terminated. And programs from global HIV control to domestic elimination of HIV are significantly hindered or dismantled. During the cabinet meeting with the president today and then an interview with Fox News, RFK Jr. announced that his effort that by September he would have an announcement for the cause of what he said to be a massive increase in the number of autism diagnoses in this country. Let’s take a quick listen to what he said on Fox News so you can respond to it.
So this is an epidemic like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It dwarfs the COVID epidemic. The cause to our country, these are children. COVID was killing elderly people at the end of their lives. This is disabling children of their entire lives. None of the vaccines that are given to children during the first six months of life were ever studied. We’re going to look at vaccines, but we’re going to look at everything. Everything is on the table. Our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic. In the cabinet meeting, in an earlier interview, RFK Jr. says, ‘When he was a child, it was the 1 in 10,000 kids were diagnosed with autism.
Now he claims it’s something like 1 in 31 or something like that. People hear those numbers. That’s obviously very alarming and concerning. But given what he said here and just the long-running conspiracy theory about a connection between autism and childhood vaccines, just what’s your response to what he’s doing here? And what’s the full story he’s not telling us about the science? Yeah. So let’s unpack a couple of things. Number one is the rise in the rate of autism. We have become much more liberal about diagnosing people on the spectrum. And we have much more respect for neuro-atypical personalities and people, and recognize also that there are different kinds of supports that enable people across that spectrum. There is not an indication that the most severe forms of autism have changed in their frequency.
We don’t completely know, so I can’t rule out that there has been hidden within that some increase in autism. Second, this claim that we have not studied vaccines in children under six months or children under a year, which gets repeated, we have thousands of randomized patients in trials at those ages, for example, when the rotavirus vaccine was approved. And so we have years of evidence that not only are vaccines safe, but as I noted before, it’s driver of 40% of the last half century’s reduction in child mortality. In my work at USAID, I’ve been working in places where they are swamped with measles and have hundreds to thousands of deaths. And that is not the world we need to return to. But we’re seeing, because of poor approaches on public health, return of measles.
We’re seeing return of tuberculosis with highest rates of tuberculosis we’ve seen in a significant outbreak in Kansas. We’re seeing now loss of control in HIV and abandonment of prevention programs where we were within years, within five to 10 years of being able to stop HIV in its entirety. So what we see him doing is the classic playbook of pseudoscience. You cherry-pick the data, you fall back on conspiracy claims that people aren’t speaking the truth, and you have people who don’t have a track record of expertise, such as RFK Jr., speaking to science and making claims that you take Take the mainstream scientists who actually have done work in this area, developed vaccines, pediatricians who have overseen work in this space, and you have consistent evidence that vaccines are safe.
They’re remarkably effective. They’ve been a driver of our doubling of human life expectancy in the last century. There’s another part of it. Maybe this is pseudoscience as well. We’re talking about the vaccines. The anti-vaccine part is probably the least popular, although too many people support it, but least popular of the larger, quote-unquote, ‘Make America Healthy Again’ or MAHA agenda. Another piece of this is fluoride and water. The state of Utah just banned fluoride and water at the urging of RFK Jr. He was in Utah to celebrate that. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said he’s going to look at this. What can you tell us about fluoride in water and why these people are concerned? Well, there are some studies that at very high rates of fluoride, you can have some damage from fluoride overdose, so to speak.
We have very low rates of fluoride in the water. It’s contributed to extremely low rates of cavities, which mean that people have their teeth in the United States as they reach 60, 70, 80 years of age in a way that we didn’t used to anymore. Now, there’s lots of evidence that our Our oral hygiene has improved a great deal and questions about how effective fluoride really is at this point. But the fear-mongering that is behind the notion that it needs to be that, that it should be banned in states and not have, not allowed in this country is not. Look, it’s worth weighing out. Is it worth the expense and money at this point? And I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had on fluoride, but it is hardly a danger or a cause of major harm in the country.
It wouldn’t be on the top of your list of things to address as opposed to the other things on the Maha agenda like clean air, clean water, those sorts of things, which it seems like Lee Zeldin is less concerned about than fluoride, I guess. Yeah. I mean, there are things on the, you know, they make America healthy again agenda that you named that are super important, like keeping clean air and clean water, which we are, you know, there’s what they do. There’s what they say and then what they do. And what they’re doing is stripping out work that is vital for addressing chronic illness, whether it’s diabetes research, whether it’s clean air and now, you know, trying to open the way to repollute our cities in a way that we have not had in a long time.
Get rid of our regulatory oversight of tobacco, which is still the biggest killer in the world when it comes to cardiovascular disease. And then we have had chronic issues in the United States with lead poisoning in poorer populations and minority populations. And that’s a much bigger problem than fluoride when it comes to toxic metals, and is a major driver of chronic illness and disease around the world. So, you know, is there work we need to do on nutrition? Is there work we need to do around addressing our diabetes and obesity? Is there work to do on pollution and clean air and clean water? Yes, they are not doing that. That seems like a perfect place to end it. Dr. Wandi, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Thanks. That’s our show for today. Tommy Lovett and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday. Bye, everyone.
