Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/14/25: Dems RAGE at Schumer, Markets TANK, Firings BLOCKED, Putin REACTS to Ceasefire

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Krystal, Ryan, and Emily break down Dems outrage at Chuck Schumer, Stock markets tanking, a judge blocking the firing of federal workers, and Putin's reaction to the Ceasefire. Sign up for a PREMIUM Breaking Points subscriptions for full early access to uncut shows and LIVE interaction with the hosts every week: https://breakingpoints.locals.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Nice to see you, Crystal. Emily's gonna jump on here when she is ready, but there are many things to discuss this morning. Once again, very hard to whittle down a quote-unquote mini show for today, but we've got breaking news with regard to the Democrats' cave, with regard to the Republican CR budget situation, so a lot of fallout from that one. We've got a bunch of new developments with regard to Ukraine. Yesterday, the stock market ended in correction territory, so continued chaos and tumult there. And then we had some really significant court decisions as well with regard to Doge in particular,

multiple federal judges ruling that those probationary employees have to be rehired. But Ryan, since we don't have Emily here yet, we can start with the Dem on Dem conversation. That's right. So just a little bit of backstory. And I'm sorry that this gets into like annoyingly technical inside the beltway kind of stuff. But the government is going to shut down tonight at midnight if they don't pass some sort of funding. Republicans made a bet effectively that Democrats would cave and go along with whatever funding resolution that Republicans put together. So they put together a partisan proposal

that does things like raise defense spending, lower all kinds of domestic spending priorities. Ryan is intimately familiar with the details of how they're screwing over the D.C. public school system and D.C. city government. There's a provision in there that protects Republicans from having to ever take a vote on Trump's tariff program, which is increasingly, you know, totally unpopular. It also just hands to Trump and Elon the ability to basically do whatever they want, which, let's be honest, they already are. But this sort of codifies that they would have a blank check and be able to. J.D. Vance actually told the Republican caucus that we've already got plans for how we're not even going to follow this budget plan.

We're just going to do whatever we want. So, Ryan, I'll get your reaction before I play some of the fallout here. But the other piece that's really important here is Republicans control the White House. They control the Senate. They control the House. This is one of the few times when they actually need Democrats for anything in order to keep the government open because they need to get that 60 vote threshold in the Senate. So they need seven or eight Dems. Probably Rand Paul is going to vote against this, which means they need eight Dems to vote with them to end a filibuster to be able to vote on this budget resolution. So it's one of the few moments when Democrats have leverage. Democrats in

the House all hung together. Hakeem Jeffries, to his credit, whipped against this Republican budget bill. Everybody except for one in the Democratic caucus voted against it. The Republicans had a similarly partisan. It was sort of like a lockstep party line vote, but Republicans control the House. So it passes through the House and it gets to the Senate. Chuck Schumer was making some noises like maybe he was going to fight. Maybe this would be the place where he took a stand. And ultimately, yesterday evening, as many people would have anticipated, he decides that he's going to cave. So first of all, Ryan, is there anything that you would add or clarify about that setup of where we are as of this morning?

No, that's about right. Yeah. And the Democrats met for a very long and what we were told, testy lunch. They always have their Tuesday lunches. And this one went extra long with some Democrats arguing, look, we believe that this is an unconstitutional power grab and an effort to destroy the government and hand it over to billionaires. Chris Murphy, as we'll play later, you know, said publicly said just that much. So in the meeting, a bunch of Democrats said that, like, this doesn't make sense. We have been out here saying that this is this is unconstitutional what they are doing, and it's a threat to our democracy. And now we're just going to rubber stamp it, which will then give our imprimatur to it. We'll say this is now a bipartisan effort. And there was this whole gimmick that Schumer was trying to do where let's vote for, you know, to move forward on the bill so that we're not filibustering it, but then we'll vote against it when it's on the Senate floor. And nobody's, you know, nobody's

fooled by that anymore. So yeah, that's, that's essentially it. And I don't want to be too provincial, but yeah, they're taking $1.1 billion out of the D.C. operating budget, $200 million out of the D.C. public schools budget starting immediately over the next year. That's just an absolutely extraordinary amount of money. And D.C. gets federal money because it is not a state. So the federal government insists on basically having control over the city. And I can't imagine what that's going to mean for city services broadly, but in the schools in particular, they're already facing layoffs and shortages and high class sizes and dilapidated buildings. And DC has long gotten a raw deal because it costs a lot to host the

federal government in your city. Yes. You cannot tax an embassy, you cannot tax a federal building, and you cannot tax a nonprofit. What is Washington made up of? Exactly. Embassies, nonprofits, and government buildings. And so there's very little tax base. So the deal is the federal government comes in and backstops some of that, not as much as they should, but some of it. And I think it shows how little ability Republicans have to actually do anything structural about the federal deficit. If the only way that they can achieve some savings is taking it from poor kids in Washington, DC. Right. Right. That's not a game changer for you. It might make you happy for some twisted reason

because you're sick, but it doesn't actually do anything about the federal deficit. We're talking about the analysis of this is that over 10 years, this would reduce the federal budget deficit by $7 billion. And part of that is because they cut $20 billion

from the IRS, which they estimate, and I think they underestimate, will add 40 billion because there'll be 60 billion in extra cheating that we don't collect as a result of this. I think there'll be a lot more, but let's say that that's right. So out of the 7 billion they're saving over 10 years, a billion of it is coming out of Washington, D.C.'s budget for the next year. That's cowardly. It's not impressive. And it's not a structural solution to what they think is a structural problem. Although it's hard to take them seriously that they really think that this is a structural problem when they're set to give away

trillions in tax cuts to rich people. So if you really were concerned about the debt and the deficit. It's hundreds of millions for weapons, billions for weapons. Like all these different weapons programs are singled out. A billion for this carrier, hundreds of millions for these jets, hundreds of millions for these subs. Like get out of here. You're not serious. Yeah. So there's something really interesting and unusual happening in this Democratic Party debate, inter-debate though, which is that

so Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both notably from New York, we'll come back to that, sort of led the charge to try to convince their fellow Democratic senators to cave. And Schumer, of course, is the minority leader. So he's the one that makes the announcement, guys, I'm voting for cloture. I'm voting for this CR. I am compelling enough of my Democratic colleagues to join me that we're going to give Republicans the votes that they need to be able to pass this thing through. And instantly there is absolute fury at Schumer, not just from, you know, the AOC types, but really across the board, including fury that showed up immediately on MSNBC, which, of course, is normally their role is just to rubber stamp whatever it is that the Democrats decide. So let me go ahead and pull up.

Also noteworthy, this is, you know, Aaron Ruppar that that clipped this and other like sort of centrist, like vote blue, reliable, democratic type and, you know, typical of or really emblematic of how wide and broad the fury at this cave really is within the whole of the Democratic Party. So let's go ahead and take a listen to this. The one thing they have leverages in the Senate where you need a filibuster proof majority on a cloture vote, that there is essentially an unconstitutional assault on the government right now. And I think you would agree with that. There is. Assault on the constitutional right.

These guys are the worst, and we've got to fight them every step of the way. As we say in Brooklyn, Chris, every step of the way. But look, Russ Vogue is already telling people, but he's telling people on the floor, we are not even going to listen to this CR. This is a people paper that we will impound and rip up the moment it's passed. If that's the case, how is voting for cloture not essentially an informant on the very same assault on the constitutional order? They're already, even without this CR, they're already doing it.

Right. Okay? They did it to the Department of Education. But I can tell you, I've been through shutdowns before the old, it's not that this CR is good. It's not that voting federal government employees themselves. Their union said, don't vote for this. So how can you justify, you know, caving in the situation and voting along with the Republicans and handing them even more unchecked power? And then, by the way, after his first guest is Chuck Schumer, the very next guest on Chris Hayes is Bernie Sanders, who is out there making the case for why this is a, you this is a horrific move for the Democratic Party. Right. In that clip, you guys can go back and watch it again. You have Hayes

audibly scoffing and laughing at the Senate majority leader. That's where the Democratic Party is at this point. They can't be taken't be taken seriously yeah no that's that's exactly right and you know it's not just that he made this decision in this moment by the way this vote is going to happen at some point today and yeah we expect it to go this way but they are still under a lot of pressure from their constituents to you know to go ahead and block this yeah maybe schumer fails to cave yeah yeah i mean he could fail to cave you know, to go ahead and block this. Yeah, maybe Schumer fails to cave. Yeah, I mean, he could fail to cave. You never know what's going to ultimately happen.

But I mean, this has been the thing that has been really wild. And we've been sending each other, you know, Will Stancil, who's like the prototypical moderate sort of anti-left Democrat who is posting, you have to, these people are worthless. They're the reason that the country is in the place that it is today. We need to primary all of them. It's like, whoa, who is posting, these people are worthless. They're the reason that the country is in the place that it is today. We need to primary all of them. It's like, whoa, who is this guy? You've got Neera Tanden out there retweeting Bernie Sanders clips. And then I'll show you in a moment some news articles about how even some of the swing district Democrats who went out on a limb, in their view, to vote to block this in the House, they're ready to write checks to AOC, to primary Chuck Schumer. So this is the this is, in my opinion, Ryan, you cover this more closely than I do. This is the biggest rebellion I've ever seen

within the Democratic Party, because it isn't a progressive rebellion. It truly is the base moderate Democrats, you know, standard issue, normie, Democratic base voters who are absolutely furious at the lack of fight and the lack of planning here. Because as I was going to say before, it's not just that he caved. It's also that there was no messaging. There was no demand that was made. There was no plan. And we've known for months. I mean, we've been talking about since Trump was elected that there was going to be this shutdown fight and this would be a place where Democrats could use some leverage and take a stand. And yet nothing, absolutely nothing. And that's the key point that they never articulated a

message. Therefore, they have no demand here. So if they – imagine that they did – that enough Democrats grow a spine here and they do block cloture today and we get a government shutdown. Then the media will come to Democrats and say, okay, what do you want? Like what's your demand? Right. If you don't like this budget, like what's your counteroffer? What are you demanding that Republicans do? Right now, all they kind of have is, well, this whole thing is an unconstitutional power grab. It's like, okay, well, we're going to put into law, you know, that any reductions in force, you know, done to federal, you know, federal workforces must be done through congressional, with congressional approval, like that could be the thing that they would demand.

Or any restructuring of the government must be done through Congress. And then that would require getting 60 votes in the Senate. And so there'd be, and then you could, and you could as, as Americans, like you could see the virtue in that. Like, okay, we think that the federal government is too big and it's disorganized and there's a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. Let's find it. Let's figure it out. Let's figure out how we can fund investigations into the waste and fraud.

Let's see, let's see where we can streamline things. But they don't want to, they don't, like, they're not doing that. They're just, they don't have anything. So I think that's, I think Schumer understood that they didn't have a step two there. And I also think that Schumer likes the fact.

But he's part of the reason why they didn't have a step two. He's the reason. He's the reason. Yeah, he's the guy. That was his job. Like, you were the one who was supposed to come up with that step two.

To him, he likes the get out of the way strategy. Stock market is crashing. Trump's approval rating is crashing. Get out of the way. It's like a communist revolutionary strategy. Allow things to collapse and heighten the contradictions. Is that what's going on? Yes. Well, this was the James Carville. allow things to collapse and heighten the contradictions. And then we'll get the revolution. Is that what's going on?

Yes. Well, this was the James Carville. I mean, this is what he said, basically, like, roll over and play dead and let them destroy everything. I mean, Emma Vigeland noted, and I think that there may be something to this, that the two Democrats who led the charge to cave here are the two Democratic senators from New York. Meanwhile, you know, we're going to cover later in the show, markets in chaos, certainly a government shutdown would not be good for their portfolios and their bottom line. So it's also certainly possible that Wall Street got to

them and was basically like, you can't do this. This is going to be too bad for us. And that's the core constituency, both for Kirsten Gillibrand and for Chuck Schumer. Let me go ahead and play AOC here on CNN, who was, you know, really, she really has led the charge, I would say, in terms of trying to bolster Democrats and trying to encourage them to have a spine in this situation. And she also got asked the question about whether she would challenge Chuck Sherman. I'm not sure if that's in this thought or not, but let's go ahead and take a look at what we've got here. Vote. You think that's wrong? I believe that's a tremendous mistake. Why? I think, well, first and foremost, the American people, if anyone has held a town hall or has

seen what has been happening in town halls, American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual gutting of federal agencies across the board. This continuing resolution codifies much of this chaos that Elon Musk is wreaking havoc on the federal government. It codifies many of those changes. It sacrifices and completely eliminates congressional authority in order to review these impulsive Trump tariffs that he's switching on and off. And on top of that, for folks who are concerned about effectiveness in government, this Republican extreme spending bill removes all of the guard rails and all of the accountability measures to ensure that money is being spent in the way

that Congress has directed for it to be spent. This turns the federal government into a slush fund for Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It sacrifices congressional authority and it is deeply partisan. And so to me, it is almost unthinkable why Senate Democrats would vote to hand the few pieces of leverage that we have away for free when we've been sent here to protect Social Security, protect Medicaid and protect Medicare. So he goes on to say, hey, you know, would you challenge Chuck Schumer? She, of course, dodges that. But that is apparently a live issue now, Ryan. I'm going to let you speak to that.

I'm going to put the dog out so she stops barking. I'll be right back. Yeah, and we could put it up in a minute. But there's there was some reporting from leesburg virginia which is where democrats are uh hold holding their annual kind of policy retreat these house democrats go it's a bunch of bunch of members of congress lobbyists and reporters you know go to huddle for a couple days set their set their strategy and aoc was interviewed by uh reporters out there and and that's and that's where she was also getting pressed on whether or not she was going to challenge Schumer with members of Congress who were at that retreat saying, look, I'm a centrist.

They wouldn't put their names to it, cowards that they are. They'd say, I'm a centrist, but I am ready to write a check to AOC right here at this retreat if she will jump in the race against Chuck Schumer. It's interesting because Chuck Schumer felt an enormous amount of concern about AOC primary him in 2020, right after our 2022, I guess, is that when he was up 2022? So he's, I guess he's not up until 2028. So maybe he feels like he has time to let this kind of, that this will not be a thing by then. Yeah. I think they also, like, I don't think they've fully adjusted to the reality where Neera Tanden and Will Stancil are hating them. You know, like, they're used to some level of, like, minor, quashable, ignorable rebellion from the left flank of the Democratic Party.

And I'm still seeing articles that are written that are like the left is mad. It's like, yes, the left is mad, but that's actually not what's important here. What's noteworthy is that, you know, normal resistance Dems are disgusted with Democratic leadership. And what that leads to, it's, leads to, it's an open question. But this is the most Tea Party-like that the Democratic Party has ever been in their disgust with their own leadership, their disenchantment with their own media, and their desire to challenge some of these people

and get them out of there if they're not willing to fight. And one critique of this Will Stancil approach, he comes from the kind of centrist school of fight harder Democrats. And so they always want to fight harder. And now he's ramping it up to 11 and they need to fight harder. But because he is so reluctant to embrace genuine left politics, it's like, well, fight harder for what? And he's like, well, fight harder against Democrats. So that means they should have pressed their charges against Trump faster. They should have impeached him harder. Classic.

Rather than like an actual substantive critique yeah no and that is certainly true there's no doubt about it like you know the um i was talking to saga about this yesterday the the brian tyler cohen's um the midas touch is becoming a little bit more ideological i would say uh in a progressive direction. But really, the core of their critique is just stand up, fight harder, resist Trump more effectively. And, you know, you said this was a fascist threat. The fascist threat has arrived. And now you're just like laying down and capitulating. And so that is the core of their critique. What's noteworthy, though, is that the people who are, by and large, satisfying that desire to see people who have a

strategy and are putting up a fight are people like AOC, are people like Bernie. Most of the people who are demonstrating a backbone and putting up a fight in this moment happen to be on the progressive left. So that's what's sort of interesting in this moment is like, yeah, I don't think it's particularly ideological. And yet the people who are there raising up as heroes at this point are the AOCs and the Bernies of the world. So, for example, with this, you know, centrist rebellion and them being like AOC, we challenge Schumer. It's not because they're excited about Medicare for all. It's for this reason and also for these particular House Democrats.

They feel like they were they say here feel like they walked the plank in the words of one member. They voted almost unanimously against the budget measure only to watch Senate Democrats seemingly give it the green light, complete meltdown, complete and utter meltdown on all text chains. A senior House Democrat said people are furious. Some rank and file members floated the idea of angrily marching onto the Senate floor in protest. Others are talking openly about supporting primary challenges to senators who vote for the GOP spending bill. And even, you know, for AOC herself, who came in, of course, defeating a longtime establishment member and started off with that protest outside of Nancy Pelosi's office. I mean, you literally wrote the book on her evolution. She has much more embraced the tactic of let me see what I can get on front,

you know, on the inside. So for her to come out swinging against Democratic leadership, even for her is a break from the way that she's been operating the bulk of the time that she's been in the House. Right. And, you know, if you think back, you know, throughout history, like who was in the French underground resistance, Nazi-occupied France? It was leftists. It was communists. It was socialists you had socialists so popularists like the hardcore left that went underground stuck to their principles and fought and died for their country and if you were not active in that you know you were considered a traitor for decades after after world war ii and and so the the rhetoric now is the same like obviously, obviously, we do not have Nazi occupied United States, but the rhetoric coming from Democrats is the same, and they feel like they're under siege.

And so they're turning to people who are actually willing to fight for something. Now, what happened is that because the socialists and communists fought for something, they were then given a hearing for their actual policy ideas after they came to power. So right now, all they want from AOC and Bernie is this energy. They like the fight. Will they start listening to them on a policy level next? Is that step two of this party evolution? I don't know. And there's enormous corporate and billionaire counterweight against that happening. Of course. Yeah. At least it opens up the possibility. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, given your coverage of the Democratic Party and these fights, going back years, do you see similarities with the Tea Party rebellion? Do you think we're going to see primary fights against some of these members who are deemed insufficiently strong against Trump in this moment? Tea Party members did. Tea Party kept passing repeals of Medicare

and cuts to government spending and the Senate would just immediately dispatch with it and go back to kind of business as usual. So they went down to the Senate physically and stood in the Senate chamber

and were like, they're like, what do we have to do here? And people were like, who are you guys and why are you here? And kind of ushered them out. Now those guys control the party. So there definitely are some similarities.

Seeing Hayes shift or laugh, not shift, but like laugh in Schumer's face. In Schumer's face, yeah. You needed the Tea Party without Fox News would not have existed. It needs a giant media megaphone to change what the party rank and file understands as where they're supposed to be. Yeah. So if you get a shift from MSNBC and say like the New York Times and CNN, then yeah, you could see the party shift. I mean, you also do have massive growth of these Midas touch, Brian, Tyler Cohen, Kyle's channel, like all of these liberal to,

you know, progressive left channels that are blowing up in size and are taking this posture of, you know, you, you've got a fight. So you have that as a, as a megaphone too.

But yeah, if you have, even if you're just covering this fight on a megaphone too. Um, but yeah, if you have, even if you're just covering this fight on MSNBC, that would be different than, and you genuinely have, you know, like Hayes had on Chuck Schumer and then he immediately has on Bernie Sanders. Even if you're doing that, it's profoundly different from the way MSNBC has operated as just like whatever democratic leadership says, we are backing that full stop. Other views are not even going to be like tolerated or represented here. Yeah.

And if Schumer gets what he wants, which is the bottom falling out of the Trump administration, he may not end up getting credit for it. People are going to remember that he facilitated it. And so somebody like a Chris Murphy or a Schatz or somebody like that might come in and take over the mantle from him. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are saying, hey, let's get Chris Murphy as a Senate minority leader and get this guy on here, which is interesting. And Murphy is definitely one who's sort of stepped up and understood actually new media. Also, he's always recording these straight to camera. Here's how I'm thinking about things and here's why I'm approaching it this way that I think has garnered him a lot of trust with the Democratic base.

Let's go ahead and move on to what was going on in the markets yesterday. I haven't checked. They're open now. I haven't checked to see exactly what's going on. I know futures were up this morning. Don't look. Don't look. I know futures are up this morning, but this is what things have been looking like. This is from Heather Long at The Washington Post. S&P 500 tumbled into a correction today. 10% drop from its prior high on February 19th. Trump's comments today, quote, I'm not going to bet at all on tariffs, have exacerbated fears and frustrations with his economic plans. Today's losses, S&P 500 minus 1.4, Dow minus 1.3, Nasdaq minus 2. And you can see what that looks like on the chart here since starting in November going till now. Now, the stock market has been on a sort of long and mostly unbroken upward march. But this is, I saw, I actually think I have this. This is one of the fastest drops that we've

seen in 100 years. Joe Weisenthal says there are a lot of Trump aligned voices telling people to calm down. Sell-offs happen. And it's true. People tend to regret panicking. But this is one of the fastest sell-offs of the last century while the president pursues a policy that virtually no economist will defend. And, you know, Ryan, you were raising alarms about and I saw Johns Hopkins is now laying off 2000 workers. So in addition to the tariffs get a lot of attention on Wall Street, understandable, especially because Trump is there on, they're off, they're back on. This part's on. This part's coming back on in April. I mean, it really is all over the place and hard to make a co, I mean, it's impossible for any, literally anyone to make a coherent case of exactly what he's up to or why he's up, up to it and why, you know, they're saying, oh, there's no pain, no gain is what Tommy Tuberville said. The, um, commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick said that

a recession would be quote unquote worth it. And the question remains like worth it for what, what is it that we're supposed to, you know? What is the goal that we're supposed to accept suffering on behalf of? But in addition to the tariffs, you have this mass austerity program with the federal government that is going to reverberate much outside of just D.C. and Virginia. Hey, how's it going? She's getting plugged in. I love when I pop in and you guys are in the middle. We're talking about the markets. We already got through the democratic catastrophe. So we didn't want to hear what you had to say about that.

I'm more curious what you guys think, to be honest, anyway. But I was just saying that, you know, in addition to the tariffs causing market turmoil, you also have this austerity program with the federal government, which is one example of how that will have a massively larger effect than just what Elon is doing in D.C. Johns Hopkins just announced they're laying off 2000 plus workers because of some of the funding freezes and uncertainty around research and science. So, you know, Ryan, what do you kind of make of the state of the economy and this market movement in particular? A caveat on the Hopkins layoffs, I think about 1,500 of those were overseas, directly related to USAID cuts. Oh, really? I didn't realize that.

Because Hopkins does a lot of – so USAID was funding a bunch of research, scientific research, which again, soft power stuff, and we don't know the details of exactly what they were doing. So it's about 400 or 500 here in the US that are getting laid off. But yes, hiring freezes all over the place. And what you're hearing from Wall Street is we knew there would be what Wall Street calls anti-growth policies, which would be tariffs. But we thought that they would couple them – they would temper them and couple them with pro-growth policies. And what Wall Street calls – I'm not endorsing these views, but Wall Street calls pro-growth policies basically tax cuts. Tax cuts for them, yeah. And so far they're like, hmm, we're getting

a lot more anti-growth policies than we are getting at this point, pro-growth policies. And I think they would, might even be happier if the quote unquote anti-growth policies were coherent. Like, okay, what, like what, what is your tariff policy and why are you doing it? Because then they can try to figure out how they're going to invest. Wall Street is where capital gets allocated. And some of it's absurd. Like, oh, we're putting tariffs on Canadian wood. Then they're like, oh, we can't really put capital into growing more trees in the U.S.

Like, we're growing the trees we can grow. That's it. But what they can do is they can go to Siberia and try to, you know, buy more of that crappy softer wood from Siberia made with North Korean slave labor. But at least then they can plan that out. Right. So right,

right now they're just kind of confused and waiting. And so that's going to tamp down investment and growth. And we'll just checked the talk. So we're filming this. It's 945. Yeah. And they got a bounce in the morning. I think all these traders keep wanting to time the bottom.

Like, is this the bottom yet? Let me get in. So far, everybody who has bought the dip has gotten washed out by the end of the day. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, because Trump continues, Emily, to say things like this. Here he is talking about Canada. And this, I think, is the clip, too, where he says, you know, the tariffs are definitely going on.

I'm not changing. Let's take a listen. No, I'm not. Look, we've been ripped off for years. We're not going to be ripped off anymore. No, I'm not going to bend at all. Aluminum or steel or cars. We're not going to bend. We've been ripped off as a country for many, many years. We've been subjected to costs that we shouldn't be subjected to.

In the case of Canada, we're spending 200 billion a year to subsidize Canada. I love Canada. I love the people of Canada. I love I have many friends in Canada. The great one, Wayne Gretzky, the great one. But we have many people in Canada that are good friends of mine. But, you know, the United States can't subsidize a country for 200 billion dollars a year. We don't need their cars. We don't need their energy. We don't need their lumber. We don't need anything that they get. We do it because we want to be helpful. But it comes a point when you just can't do that. You have to run your own country.

So that's kind of the, you know, the pitch he's making today, at least about why tariffs on Canada in particular makes sense. And, you know, what why tariffs on Canada in particular make sense and what really caused the market massive drop there later in the day was those comments that, no, we're not going to bend at all because they have certain tariffs already in place and then a much broader set of tariffs set to go into place on April 2nd, the reciprocal tariffs, plus supposedly going back to the 25% across the board tariffs with Canada and Mexico at that point. So that's kind of where we are. Yeah. And I continue to think the only way to make any sense in Trump's mind of what's happening is that to the point about people trying to figure out what the bottom is here. He doesn't want anybody to be able to figure that out. And I don't particularly think that's the most effective

way to bring jobs back to the United States and to prosecute these politically. So I don't think it's the most defensible approach. I think his logic is that he genuinely does not want anybody to know when he is going to stop. I think he does have plans to, I don't think he goes through for a long time with all of this. I just, I think he's way too sensitive to the market. So I think if this starts to be sustained, you'll start to see, I mean, I think we've already seen some of it, some like kind of more targeted approaches, i i think his his his strategy is genuinely leaving everybody including his own top staff yeah out of the loop on what his personal plans are to like sort of wave the wand at any given moment yeah um there was a moment there ryan i didn't quite get

to it where he um he sort of acknowledges that that borders are just arbitrary lines drawn. Screech. You know. Yeah. So based open borders, Trump. Okay. So here's a thread. Not to harp too much on this, but his point on the lumber,

he brought the lumber up again. Right. What do you mean we don't need their lumber? Like we don't need their lumber like we don't have especially at a time when construction materials have already you know they were some of the the highest ticket items in terms of how much their price increased due to inflation so we have a massive housing shortage you know it already costs too much to build and so you're just exacerbating that and you know we've been covering it. You

guys know on this show relentlessly how housing is just such a core issue, creating this sense of precarity and sense of frustration and inability to get ahead and achieve this sort of like stable life. And yeah, you're, you are actively increasing one of the main inputs and there's other construction materials at play here as well, coming from Canada too, not to mention 80% of our fertilizer from Canada. Like, yeah, actually we do kind of need that stuff. Right. That's where the fertilizer is. Like you could produce a lot of phosphorus and fertilizer out of Florida, but that would require ripping up a lot of the communities there. And also lumber is better the farther north that it grows. So we could get cheaper, better lumber from Canada, or we could get more expensive,

crappier lumber from Russia. And what he's pushing us is towards Siberian lumber. So we're going to pay 20, 30, 40% more for materials. For worse materials. Cost of housing. And maybe the American people would do that if you were like, here's why we're doing that. Yeah. That's the problem. But there is no why to it. Right. And, and I mean, hard to like really sell people on a vision of we should be like, you know, getting more into the tree growing and fertilizer making business when, you know,

I mean. all our national forests and that wood isn't as good as the wood way up in the north and then we don't have national forests anymore is that right like is that the plan right exactly exactly um i wanted to quickly go through this thread because i thought it had some interesting pieces and then we can um move on to um the the next topic you can either go to to Ukraine or we can go to the court decisions. But I was just going to say, sorry, I was going to say a super quick point is that if you have, if you telegraph a clear plan, if you want to reshore some like lumber, for example, you're helping people make that bet on certain states or certain strategies for U.S. lumber or

U.S. manufacturing or whatever. But if people don't know, maybe they're just going to bet elsewhere where it seems more stable. So anyway. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. Like, you know, if the chaos makes it impossible for anyone to actually bet on like reshoring anything because you just you just don't know. So here's here's a timeline of the trade war. They ramped up into February 1st. Market peaked on the 19th, even as more tariffs went live in early March. The real turning point was March 6th. That's when Trump said he's not watching the stock market. So that's been sort of the story of this market movement is Trump's words really causing these cycles of crashes.

Dip buyers have been crushed in this downturn. This is something you mentioned before, Ryan. S&P has not seen a back-to-back gains for 15 consecutive trading days, longest streak since April 2024. Also the fifth longest stretch since the 2020 pandemic. Market uncertainty is at its highest since 2020. Current drawdown in the magnificent seven. Now, this is something we've been talking a lot about, and it creates tremendous risk in terms of our economy and certainly our stock market. These seven stocks make up a huge percentage of our stock market, and most of the growth that we've been seeing has been tied to these stocks. Tesla has led the sell-off here 50% crazy. Nvidia down. Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple all taking significant

losses. So that's the Magnificent Seven. Hedge funds sold global stocks at their fastest pace in four years. So the hedge funds are selling off. And I think those institutional sales are part of what is leading the significant decline. He says this is the fastest drop of such magnitude since 2020. Also, this chart comparison of Trump 1.0, this green line versus Trump 2.0. That's how things are looking currently down 8% since January 20th, which exceeds any drawdown seen in Trump's 1.0 first year, clearly been a shift in Trump's approach. Furthermore, sentiment has shifted in the complete opposite direction. The survey now has a bearish reading, 59.2%. You've also got the U.S. lagging global markets. So again, an indication, as if you needed any, that this is something that's really specific to the particular policies that are being pursued here in the U.S. of A and not reflective of some larger global phenomenon. And then here's one

last thing that's interesting, too, is that there was some good inflation data this week that seemed to indicate, OK, inflation is coming down, moving in the right direction. I will say there are some caveats to that, number one being that this was a measure of inflation prior to most of the tariffs being put into place. So still a lot of question marks about what that impact will ultimately be. But they say, you know, even with those numbers coming in better than expected, they're still continued to that really didn't change the game or make people, you know, put people more at ease in terms of this, this sell off in the economic position. And, you know, I've seen all kinds of measures of, you know, possibility of recession on the rise, actually can pull up

JP Morgan had this very, like, dramatic statement. I'll find that while you guys, Emily, why don't you go ahead and reflect on some of those comments from that thread? Well, I mean, again, I think it's just the same type of thing that like I'm generally I think there's actually some real meat to how Trump has approached this when it's compared with how it was approached by Biden or how a better way to do all of this that would have managed some of the fallout. So that to me is just like a lack of, it's sort of a lack of clarity. You don't have to telegraph everything. You don't have to, you know, give, you don't have to try to game the markets one way or the other. Oh, there's that beautiful quote. The most beautiful quote. You got to read this, Crystal. Yeah. So this is a note from JP Morgan's analyst. And we can get Ryan's reaction to that.

50 days of gray. Well, that was fast. Also, the reconciliation bill and a swan song for NATO. Here's the interesting thing about the stock market. It cannot be indicted, arrested, or deported. It cannot be intimidated, threatened, or bullied. It has no gender, ethnicity, or religion. It cannot be fired, furloughed, or defundeded it cannot be primaried before the next midterm elections and it cannot

be seized nationalized or invaded it is the ultimate voting machine reflecting prospects for earnings growth stability liquidity inflation taxation and predictable rule of law so this is um the wall streeters very much in their feelings on this one for sure. Like all the unconstitutional power grab, the defunding of Medicaid, like the destruction of the CFPB, like they're all about all of that. But when you mess with the stock market, that's where we that's where we draw the line to the barricades. That's incredible stuff. You guys want to go to ukraine or the the court cases next we could do either one dealer's choice all right we'll pull up i've got the uh i've got some ukraine stuff here so um you guys know zelensky agreed to a u.s proposal for a

30-day ceasefire so we're kind kind of waiting on response from Putin as to how he would receive this. And he received it in a very Putin-like way, you know, rejecting it and asking for conditions which, you know, are totally unacceptable to Ukraine, probably unacceptable to the U.S. as well, but framing it as like, yeah, I'm open to that as long as you do everything that I want you to do. Here are his comments. Let me go ahead and pull this up. I haven't listened to this. Hopefully this is dubbed.

We'll find out. We'll find out together here in real time. We agree with the propositions to stop hostilities, but we proceed from the fact that such ceasefire should be such that would lead to permanent peace and remove the initial original causes of the crisis. We agree. So there you go. We agree. which, you know, that one is pretty obvious. We don't want any foreign soldiers like European peacekeepers or anyone else to be in Ukraine. Ukraine has to be fully demilitarized, etc. So, I mean, Ryan, how do you how are you reading this response? The Trump administration is trying to

spin it as hopeful. Zelensky is very much like I told you guys, like you can't deal with this dude, really. And so how did you read this exchange? Yeah, he also talked about the Ukrainian soldiers who were in the Kursk region. And apparently about 500 of them, that this does seem to be confirmed about 500 Ukrainian soldiers surrendered. There, there are many more Ukrainians who are occupying the Kursk region of Russia. And according to Putin, Russia has those folks surrounded. Ukraine says that that's not the case, that he's bluffing. And so what Putin is saying here is, all right, if we do a ceasefire, what about these guys?

I don't want to do a ceasefire with these Ukrainian soldiers on Russian territory, which is kind of an ironic thing for him to complain about, given that he wants a ceasefire with Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory. So he says, who decides whether or not along this 2,000 mile front, somebody has broken the ceasefire. What do we do with those soldiers? So I mean, those are actual questions that could be answered. It does seem like he's buying for time, perhaps to try to, you know, kind of push the Ukrainians completely out of Kursk, so that when there is a ceasefire, he has lost no territory, and he has only gained territory um and you know he also floated that he he's ready to do a call with donald trump yep which i thought was interesting called him donald trump not the american president oh is that what i didn't know that yeah interesting yeah um um

another thing is as we as we talked about actually um when you and i co-hosted this week you know you have to ask yourself well what what incentive does Russia have at this point for a ceasefire? And that gets to what Ryan is saying about, you know, Kursk in particular. But they feel like a 30-day ceasefire would only benefit Ukraine and allow them to sort of regroup and rearm and reassess, et cetera. And, you know, I don't think that they're probably wrong about that. Unless a 30-day ceasefire does involve significant territorial concessions on Ukraine's behalf. One of the interesting things about Kursk, I hadn't thought about it this way, but I talked to George Beebe of the Quincy Institute earlier this week, and he was saying he thinks what's happening in

Kursk right now is actually a sign of potentially Russia trying to get through or get to negotiations seriously more quickly because as soon as you sort of get Kursk out of the way for them, they'll, and so maybe it is like, I forget if it was you or Ryan who said maybe buying time, like that's actually possible that in a way it seems totally counterintuitive because it looks like they're making significant

advancements on the battlefield, but it takes Kursk off the table for them so long as they do that in a way that makes the deal work. They can take it to the Russian public and come away from the negotiations looking like they were on top. So it's, it's a reading that I hadn't thought of, actually, that I found pretty interesting. That is interesting. I wanted to play this sound. This is Andrew Napolitano, who has been, you know, he's been pushing for, he has kind of, you know, kind of the like, unorthodox view with regard to Ukraine, he's been pushing for peace, etc. He just is back from interviewing Lavrov in Moscow. And he says he doesn't think

Russia has any interest in a ceasefire. Let's take a listen to that. When this is over, he came over to me and we just chatted almost like you and I are without the cameras on us at all. And I did say to him, does President Putin have any interest in a ceasefire at this time? Now, this was a day before Secretary of State Rubio announced that Ukraine had agreed to the ceasefire. He looked at me and he said, why would we do that now? Wow. Because they believe that they're within interest of consummating their goals in the war. And that actually dovetails, maybe surprisingly. His assessment is the same as what U.S. intel agencies are telling The Washington Post right here. This is Putin still

intends Ukraine domination, U.S. intelligence reports say, while offering a cautious assessment on ceasefire chances. Spy agencies say Russian leader is determined to hold sway over Kyiv. This is, you know, a source to classified U.S. intel reports, including one earlier this month, cast doubt on Putin's willingness to end the war against Ukraine, assessing the Russian president is not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating his Western neighbor, according to people familiar with the analysis. Ryan, what did you make in particular of this, you know, leak to the strategic leak to The Washington Post? Right. Whenever whenever there's an intel leak to the Washington Post, you have to ask,

okay, why did the CIA leak this? And in this case, I think it would be to, you know, send, try to message to Trump, like the same thing that Napolitano was saying that I know that we, hey, we know you want a peace deal, but Putin really doesn't want one right now. You know, there may have been a much better deal on the table in March of 2022. The Biden administration and the UK and NATO insisted that Ukraine fight on instead. And now they're at a place where, as Trump said in the white house, you have no cards. Yeah. So you're appealing to the goodwill of Vladimir Putin.

Right. Good luck with that. I think, you know, what Putin could do, and I think understands he could do is focus his energy on getting the Ukrainians out of the Kursk region and then say okay i'm done like everything we have is ours and you keep fighting if you want and if you keep fighting we'll keep fighting but if not we're going to keep this terror we're going to keep this territory and and then they will all they will by definition kind of you know politically, you'd have a rump, like hard right Ukrainian resistance government left. Yeah. But without NATO, you know, funding, and with, you know, 20% of its, you know, country gone and with, you know, the difficulties of reconstruction, you could imagine, you know, Russia having, you imagine Russia having successfully kind of neutered the threat on their border.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think of that, Emily? I mean, in some ways, I think it's increasingly clear that the Biden administration pursued the worst possible strategy. Like I have actually become more sympathetic to the people who are like, you got to give them everything. Because what what they did instead is give them just enough to create this sort of stalemate situation. Yes. Draw this war to the last Ukrainian. You know, they obviously the greatest failure was blocking the peace deal that, you know, was on the table early on. Not that there were any guarantees there either, but there was very live possibility. And the Ukrainians were in a much better negotiating position at that point than they are now. I mean, that really was sort of the cardinal sin. And now at this point where you are, you're left with zero, zero good options to pursue

ultimately. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. And it's one of the weird things about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance's meeting with Zelensky is that Zelensky and Joe Biden were ideologically simpatico. Like they're they had the exact same ideology of how ukraine should be seen by nato countries as an essential buffer state that should essentially and i'm putting it in my words not the way they would say it be used um as you know a weapon is the wrong word but as a buffer um and ukraine should be you know treated that way by nat NATO, almost in this like colonial way. And Trump and Vance don't believe that's in America's best interests, but they're the ones now tasked with disentangling the United States from the situation and helping, at least in theory, helping Ukraine stop the slaughter. And so it's a really strange position to have an administration that disagrees with decades of the

foreign policy consensus that they're now trying to exit from. And the leader of the country that you're trying to negotiate with is actually of the opposite view. It's just like super weird to see that play out. And so I think it's very, that's where the Trump Putin conversation gets dicey, obviously, because they kind of agree about how Ukraine has been used by NATO. And so it's just like, does that mean ultimately Ukraine ends up losing territory that would have retained a couple of years back because of the hubris of the view on the right has become quite preeminent that like, you know, that we need to pull all the military aid from Ukraine. You know, I need to make a deal regardless of what that takes and how much territory Putin is allowed to acquire, like whatever it takes. And, you know, it's a view, frankly, I'm sympathetic to. But when you look at the recent polling with regard to Trump, There's still a lot of like Russia's the bad guys.

Ukraine are the good guys. This is our ally. This is our boomers vote. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, we've seen this before. It's not exactly the same as Afghanistan, obviously, because we were in there for so long and because our troops were involved.

But, you know, people wanted out of Afghanistan. But then once we got out of Afghanistan, it was the most devastating thing to Joe Biden's presidency. I mean, we talk a lot about the economy and certainly about the genocide in Gaza. But in terms of just the drop in approval rating, ending the war that people wanted to be ended was the thing that was most devastating to his approval rating, Ryan, of his entire term. Right. And I guess you could imagine now these aren't American forces, but you could imagine, you know, scenes of chaos if things completely fall apart. It's just it's an admission of American failure. And voters don't voters don't like that.

Voters don't like that. You know, it's like, OK, well, what have we been funding all these? Like, what have we it looks like American weakness? And that's in a lot of ways it is American weakness. I mean, frankly, and I think, you know, voters really don't enjoy having to reckon with that. Even if you know, I like it's really not Trump helps to create the conditions of this war. But obviously, it's the Biden administration that owns this policy. But if he's the one that brings it to the end and forces that reckoning with the reality that this was a massive American failure, voters may well punish him for that. Voters, I think in America, sort of back the blue globally. They like the United States being seen as the policeman. And it's

in right, like online right circles where I spend a lot of time. It's easy to get to lose sight of the fact that the American people are not with the, I guess, broader project of the online right. Like they're probably with the new right, the sort of Vance ideology on different things. Like, you know, you can zoom in on the question particularly of spending more money on Ukraine and not closing the border. Like that was exactly why they designed that Senate bill that way. So, you know, it's easy to mistake those things for agreement with the broader project of disentangling from being the policeman of the world. And the person who understands this interestingly enough is Donald Trump,

because that's what he's sort of doing with Greenland and Panama. And the person who understands this, interestingly enough, is Donald Trump. Yeah. Because that's what he's sort of doing with Greenland and Panama. And he knows that his voters are fine to see Greenland. People on the right, they're like, yeah, we're going to boss Greenland around because we're the United States of America. And it's just easy to mistake one for the other.

Yeah. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I do think that if he got a long-term ceasefire uh that he would be rewarded for that yes but domestically from voters like i do i do think people you know if he could if he could get out of it somewhat cleanly even if there are significant concessions made nobody can name you know the regions of ukraine that we're fighting over like nobody really cares. I think that people would like to see the money stop going over there, especially the resentment towards that heats up

when the economy is going poorly at home. Yeah. You wrap that up, I think you would be rewarded. So the more he destroys the economy here at home, the better his Ukraine policy. The more he has to wrap that up. The more he has to create a policy. Well, all right. Let's go ahead and get to these couple of court decisions before we wrap up here, because these were pretty significant ones.

Yesterday, we got from this Judge Alsup, who I'd never heard of before, but apparently is like very well respected in judicial circles. I don't know whatever that means. Anyway, he said that he issued a preliminary injunction on Trump's firing of federal workers in probationary periods, including some of the largest agencies, the Veterans Affairs, USDA, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Interior, Treasury must reinstate all fired probationary employees effective immediately. Eric Katz here from GovExec says this will impact the vast majority of those fired. Rough math, about 24,000 employees just won their jobs back. Story here with more details from what he describes as a fairly explosive hearing this morning. So including some language from this judge that these firings were sham firings. And in particular pointing to, you know, the way they did this,

which really is just, you know, you had a lot of workers who were getting perfect performance reports and may have been even up for promotions or just got promoted, you know, and that's why they were on in their probationary period. And the justification they used is they sent out these mass emails that said you're being fired for poor performance, regardless of who the employees were. And so this judge was like, we see what you're doing here. Like, obviously, these people were who, you know, some of them were performing well. And you just said poor performance. So you could get away with

firing with mass firing, Ryan, all of these employees that happen to be under this probationary status. And oh, by the way, Office of Personnel Management, like you don't get to do this. The individual agencies have control over their own HR personnel. Even in this ruling, though, which was like fairly sweeping, there is a warning, though, that like if they do go through each individual agency and do what's called a reduction in force and do it through the proper channels, like they're allowed to do that. Yeah, unfortunately for these workers, you know, what he's ultimately describing is sort of a technicality. Like he's saying,

you lied and you did this illegally. Like there are laws in place, federal laws in place that apply to the executive and your theory of the unitary executive where the president can just, you know, do whatever he wants. It does not fly. And here is how you have to you know reduce the number of employees that

you have and say the veterans affairs department uh here it's laid out very clearly follow these rules and you can do it so that's what that's what he's telling government like what what what the government did is they had opm the the Office of Personnel Management, fire every probationary employee, send them boilerplate letters saying you're fired for cause because you're doing a bad job. And his argument is A, OPM does not have the ability to fire somebody at, say, the VA, and B, you't even, you don't know if this person is doing well or not. So then the, the administration came back and said, well, it wasn't actually OPM that did the firing.

It was the agencies. OPM was just offering this kind of vague suggestion. And they even put an affidavit in from the acting director of OPM saying that that was the truth that he had nothing to do with these firings. So the judge said, all right, cool. Bring this guy in for a deposition. I want to hear him cross-examined. And then the administration withdrew his affidavit. He said, nevermind. And that's when he lost it on him. He's like, I think you're lying. He's like, you're presenting an affidavit. And then when I ask you to back it up by bringing him in for a deposition at any time of his convenience, you pull it back.

And he used the word lying. He's like, I think you're lying to me. And the other side had affidavits from the agencies saying OPM ordered us to fire these people. And we disagree that they were poorly performing. So it's an open and shut case that they lied and didn't follow the procedure. Problem for the workers is they can just do it again and follow the actual procedures, and they're going to release that process very soon. And I think it's going to be a bloodbath for federal workers. Maybe some of these will keep their jobs and they'll go after more senior people or whatever, but a lot of people are still going to lose their jobs.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think this is definitely temporary and it's really unfortunate for the tens of thousands of people caught up in it. But it's an interesting, I guess, test of how Doge was making some of these decisions, which, you know, Doge was originally conceived of as an outside advisory committee, basically, that would look at these things and then submit recommendations to the agencies rather than making these decisions on its own and coercing the agencies to comply with the decisions that they've come to. And when Doge took over USDS, there was just like a complete confusion about what its authority actually was. Probably that's a problem with Elon Musk coming in and being confused about what the authority actually was. Not confused, maybe willfully disinterested in the actual mechanism of power. for people involved in Doge because a lot of the people they've since learned who were on probationary status were the people that they would want to keep like as a category because

it was people who newly wanted to be a part of the government. So it went from being a really easy slab of fat to cut to actually, well, if you think some of these agencies should continue existing, albeit in a much smaller form, if you use the, quote, scalpel instead of what did Trump say, the axe? The hatchet. Yeah, the hatchet. Then, in fact, the people that sort of got booted first would probably be the people that you would scalpel in. I think that's going to happen at defense. I think a lot of these probationary folks at defense are probably going to end up being okay. But at the other places that, I mean, they're trying to get rid of so many people that

I agree with Ryan. You know, if you're at ag or something like that, you'll probably still get axed maybe even next week. I didn't even think about that, Emily, that like some of the people who just just joined were like Trump one, Doge coming let's go i'm gonna join the government and do my public service and yeah if you're a person who like i mean you know probationary lasts for a you know significant period of time and as ryan's point out it includes some people who just got promoted been working in the government a long time but or who have just switched agencies or moved or whatever but yeah it didn't occur to me that if you're someone who saw Donald Trump's election and then was like, now's the time when I'm going to work in government service,

you probably are someone who is more aligned with this administration than the people who are not on probationary status, not to mention, you know, veterans and veteran spouses were more likely to be on probationary status as well. Or you're just an ambitious young person. That hasn't been shaped and molded by the, quote, administrative state over the course of decades, like a lot of the non-probationaries. Yeah, true. There was one more federal judge ordered a stop to mass firings in federal agencies, except Pentagon, OPM, and NARA, saying the so-called reductions in force broke the law. Employees purportedly terminated are returned to government employ. So a similar decision here.

I think this one was this is a separate, even more sweeping order than the one issued by Judge Alsop. He says earlier today for terminated probationary employees. But it is only a two week reprieve until further litigation takes place. And, you know, this is the write up here. Federal judges order the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers across a huge swath of the federal government. The second judge to order sweeping relief today and reject the mass firings as illegal. So, you know, you have a lot of times when these cases are going to court, the challengers are winning. But number one, oftentimes they're a temporary reprieve. And number two, oftentimes,

you know, they've moved 30 steps ahead while you were fighting on this ground. And so, you know, it just feels like trying to mitigate the damage. I talked to the co-president of Public Citizen yesterday who's involved in a bunch of these lawsuits, and that was the way he described it. He's like, yeah, the court system is really not set up to handle this sort of like full on flood the zone assault. And so you are definitionally just trying to like, you know, from his perspective in mind, contain the damage and try to have something left to rebuild from once these people are ultimately done. So, you know, that's kind of the status of where things are with regards to the courts. There was one other piece that I don't know if you guys want to weigh in on, but I saw

Trump is pushing for his birthright, ending of birthright citizenship to go to SCOTUS and have them weigh in on at least part of that. So that was the other big legal decision yesterday. And that's one that's been, I think, engineered in the conservative movement. And there's significant disagreement about this in the conservative movement. But in sort of like Stephen Miller circles, that's something that was intentionally germinated and designed to be tested in the Supreme Court, the way that they ended up doing it. You know, it's sort of the reverse of the probationary employee thing. Like this is a very they they set this up very intentionally to be tested in the courts because they think they can with the Supreme Court. They think they can prevail and significantly change the way that the words are written in the Constitution, which, you know, for a lot of originalists, you would think that that would be a problem, but I'm not sure. participated in a campus protest that if they

had naturalized citizenship or if their parents were not born in the United States, but they were, so where would you deport them to? So let's say somebody's born here in the United States. One of their parents is Mexican. One of their parents is Mexican. One of their parents is Canadian. They protest against Israel, which you can't protest against Israel, United States.

They get, they get detained, flown to Louisiana, have their citizenship stripped. Now they, now they're down back down to a green cards. They have the green cards stripped. Then where do you send them? Canada, Mexico? what's the international waters yeah international water yeah peter teal's like utopian send them to one of these libertarian

crypto zones like we're like what is what's the end game here for an american citizen who protests against israel in a way, you know, Donald Trump finds offensive. Like what do they do with them? Well, I think that question applies also to people. I mean, whether or not they're protesting who are the kind of quote unquote anchor baby test case.

But at least some of those, but if they're not anchor, so quote unquote anchor baby means they were born here in the united states somebody like makhmud khalil he was born in a refugee camp in syria and he has algerian citizenship so i could imagine okay we're going to deport him to algeria because that's because he has citizenship there like if that's what they're going to do but if you're born in the united states you're in the united states citizen you have no citizenship anywhere else like who that has has the stephen miller crowd thought about this like well it also requires cooperation of other countries um right i'm curious how other other countries do don't

have birthright citizenship the way they do so i might be like like, no, we're not participating in this thing. Yeah. It's a practical question that I have zero answer to. The answer, Ryan, is they don't really care. Just not here. They're going to have to figure it out. Are they just going to keep them indefinitely in Guantanamo? They can just send them to Gitmo.

Yeah, that's the plan, right? There's like 50 beds there. Good luck. Yeah. They could be hundreds, maybe even thousands. I think George H.W. Bush had thousands there at one point. The plan is 30,000 is their goal. Whether they can accomplish that or not is another question.

Apparently, the few hundred that they had originally sent to Gitmo, they've now sent elsewhere, either deported them or brought them back actually to the U.S. to DHS facilities here. So in any case, a lot to work out there. They definitely don't see that as a successful experiment. Yeah. Well, I think it got them the headlines that they want. It got them a freak out that they want. And I think that was probably most of the goal there, to be honest with you. Well, yeah. And I think actually I shouldn't even be so glib about it because I do think that's part of I actually think that did have a deterrent effect based on some of the reporting I've seen from like Mexico and Central America, where reporters are just talking to migrants about why they're turning around. And there has been a significant number of people literally getting through the Darien gap and turning back around because the risk calculation has changed significantly. So

yeah, I probably shouldn't have been flippant about that. I think it did, to some extent, accomplish what they wanted to, which was a low effort way to deter people from coming in, obviously at the cost of... The legal questions for them were building, but it probably in the interim had some deterrent effect. Yeah. Border crossings have plummeted. Yeah. No doubt about that. No doubt about that. All right, guys. Anything else before we let you guys go and get on with your day? No, i just want to say your hair looks amazing today exceptionally good thank you you know i literally did nothing to it this morning i actually just like woke up and was just like this it was kind of a miracle i don't know what happened you woke up like this

my hair did anyway the rest of me not so much ryan put more effort into his hair than crystal ryan looks great i have to say i feel a little schlubby here i'm i got my like elizabeth theranos situation going here i was like you know and ryan's sick yeah and he's putting in all this uh all this appearance effort um ryan go rest get better take care of your kiddos emily great as always yeah people should go look this up but speaking of our speaking of makhmud khalil uh the columbia university sent out an email to a lot of people a lot of its members just now ish saying that there were dhs um thugs i would not i don't know what the term they used for them was uh in residences with warrants last night um looking for more people to to grab and

and deport uh said they failed to find anybody but they let the community know that there were warrants served for more arrests and deportations so they're they're ramping this up there's also an allegation from a student leader at columb the Columbia Board of Trustees was involved in sticking DHS on Mahmoud Khalil specifically. So, like I said, it's an allegation. It's not fully reported on or confirmed. But, you know, if you're asking yourself, why did they pick this one? Some of the trustees who would. Yeah, because the trustees are there's some of them on there who would probably have motivation to do that it would be down for that yeah i mean especially given you know i mean i know you've been searching around um murtaza has been searching around like looking okay well what did he actually say and i can

promise you like ryan and i have both said more radical things on this program than anything that's been like held there that they've been able to find that he said. Don't I know it? Yeah. So. Well, so I just want to say this is actually goes to a theory that I have, which is the administration was led down a rosier path or a path that was less rosy than they thought it was by people at Columbia who Columbia has had this incredible mobilization since these original protests and the encampment of alumni who are like terrified of what they see as rising anti-Semitism at Columbia and furious with Columbia for the way that it's handled the encampments and the protests and everything. And I think that the administration was listening to people who have been intensely emotionally invested in this for like over a year, who had cases that they thought were so strong. Like Khalil is a really good one. The administration clearly did not realize that he wasn't on some student visa.

And it seems like they were told that he was. And they acted really quickly based on this is just the theory. I don't have any reporting to back this up, but just putting the pieces together. I think they were really significantly misled by people who thought that they had clear cut-dunk cases, told the administration that, and the administration didn't necessarily do the due diligence that it should have because of the intensity of the cases that have been presented to them by people who have been working on this at Columbia. That theory makes sense because if DHS

was the one who told the administration, let's go get Mahmoud Khalil. DHS would check its system. Right. Like FYI, he's a permanent legal resident. We can use this obscure law. When we leave, we can get him out. They would know because they have the data.

If the rumor mill of the angry Columbia trustees or whoever. Well, they had been tweeting about it. They called Trump and were like, this guy's on a student visa. I saw it on Twitter. Right. According to Elon Musk, you are better off if you get your news from X than, let's say, if you're DHS, you search the actual immigration records. And so, yeah, they went in on tweets and then found out that they were wrong.

And now they might set this horrific precedent by accident. Well, but on the other hand, now that they are set to lay down this horrific precedent, they don't seem too worried about that. I mean, they're leaning into it. Sagar asked Caroline Levitt at the podium about it. She was perfectly happy to answer. Like, I think maybe they feel like, oh, it works out because we get to lay out the most maximalist case. And then all these student visa ones, like those are easy. That's nothing.

After we've been able to strip the, you know, the green card status and deport someone who was a legal permanent resident and um you know i mean even the fact that like you guys did great work looking at up this instagram post that all these right-wingers were hanging their hat on of him saying he wanted to destroy western imperialism you're like the number one that wasn't even his instagram it's some group he may not have even seen this instagram post and this is what you're like this is what you're making your case with and it's really kind of the only specific language example I've seen anyone use with regard to him and it's this Instagram post that she didn't even directly have anything to do with it's actually kind of annoying because I think there's zero to do with any of the posts

yeah yeah it's kind of annoying because I think there are genuinely, you guys disagree with me on this and Sagar and I probably do agree on this. I think there actually are cases of people who are here on student visas who like clearly viscerally hate America and probably violated some laws over the course of like civil disobedience. And there are cases

that would have made this much, much stronger than the Khalil case. And it's like, this is, I mean, I think it's indefensible. It's just completely stupid. So it's, that's, I find that very irritating. Yeah. If you're on a student visa and you commit a crime, like they have the power to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would be, you know, arguing against it morally, but I wouldn't be able to argue against it right legally and i don't think you would find anyone on the right really who objected to that very few voices would

really object to that and now you have you know some right-wing influence i don't want to overstate it but there is some schism on the right over this um over this action by the administration and it's just so clearly is a violation of first amendment rights because the only thing he's he's not charged with a crime. They've made it clear that they're not deporting him or trying to deport him based on allegations of criminal behavior. Just Marco Rubio's assessment that his speech, his political speech is, you know, this devastating blow to the U.S. foreign policy priority. National security. Yeah, exactly. So one last anecdote is so in 2002 when i was doing a bunch of anti-iraq war organizing i was at university of maryland there were a bunch of

chinese students on student visas and they wanted to help but they were like if we get in any trouble like we will be out of here tomorrow yeah so we would meet at 4 a.m. to go put the wax, you know, you like dip your posters in wax and then put them up on the flyers and to announce the rallies and stuff. So students have always understood that, and particularly ones that grew up in China would have a much more visceral understanding of what a police state looks like. So yeah, it's different than for a green card holder. Yeah. Well, could have been assumed to be different for a green card holder, but apparently not. Which if they didn't know he was a green card holder.

Yeah. We'll find out in court. All right, guys. Thank you so much as always. And to everybody out there, have a wonderful weekend. If anything crazy happens today, like for example, if Democrats fail to buckle, as Ryan put it earlier, and shock us all, maybe we'll do an update later in the day. But otherwise, Sagar and I will see you guys on Monday. Have a great day. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids,

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