Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: Awful Jobs Report; 23,000 Jobs Lost; May & June Numbers Revised Down | Receipts Live

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

Catherine Rampell and Sam Stein went live to cover the terrible jobs report this month, the White House's attempt to spin the economy as booming, the bill in the Senate that could give Trump more tariff power, and a federal appeals court blocking construction on Trump's ballroom. This episode is sponsored by The New York Times.Read more from Catherine's newsletter: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/senate-voting-to-give-trump-a-tariff

Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the bulwark, sitting in for JVL, along with Catherine Rampel. We are doing another receipts live, and this one is, this is a bad one. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The numbers for the jobs came out this morning, and they sucked. Let's just be real. They really sucked, Catherine. Yeah, I want to clarify when you say this is a bad one. It's not that this episode is a bad one.

Well, that's TBD. Let's see how we handle each other here. There might be too much friction. Yeah, the jobs numbers were not good. They were expected to be modestly positive, you know, that employers added a few jobs. In fact, we lost jobs in July. We lost jobs in July. And the previous couple of months, which had looked pretty strong, stronger than people had thought, like initially,

turns out once the revisions came in, we actually had 100,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. So it's like been very anemic job growth, which maybe matches. Look at that chart. Look at that chart. Oof. Well, there's a lot of red in that chart. More red than I expect that those are negative job growth months. And that is pretty brutal. Let me give you the top line. Commonly lost 23,000 jobs in July while May and June's reports were revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs. Unemployment rate actually tick down to 4.1% as, and this is the, This is the thing. The White House has been like, yeah, we got the unemployment rate lower, but this is why 260,000 people left the labor force. In other words, employers aren't hiring

workers and workers are starting to notice that can't get jobs. So they're just leaving the labor force altogether. Prior to getting on here, I said, what are your three big takeaway or data points from this report? What are they? So a few things. One would be the revisions from the previous couple of months, which I just mentioned, because it means that we should be like revisiting how strong we thought the economy was before. And what we thought was like a really, really resilient job market, despite all of the crap that's been thrown at it in terms of war and tariffs and all the other erratic policy measures and shocks and all that. Like it looked like it was pretty resilient, maybe a little less resilient than we thought. That would be data point

Number one, data point number two would be the fact that the share of people who are unemployed, who have been unemployed long term, six months or more, is now at like a quarter of that group. So like, that's normally, you know, unemployment is a regular feature of an economy. People cycle into jobs. People cycle out of jobs. It sucks when you lose your job. but as long as you can find new ones, like it's a temporary pain. The problem here is that this is a persistent, long-term pain for a lot of workers. There just aren't that many opportunities. So that would be my second thing that I would harp on.

And then, sorry, my cat has strong opinions about the job market too. Live TV, folks. There you go. The third thing that I think I would emphasize is what's going out with manufacturing, which Donald Trump loves to talk about the manufacturing industry in the abstract, you know, when he was coming into office about how he's going to have this major renaissance and this comeback. And in fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we did when Donald Trump took office. I thought there was manufacturing job gains in this report, but they were kind of minimal, right? They were minimal. And, you know, I try to focus, like, on the longer term because any one month can be very noisy.

So there's like a minimal, basically not that different from zero in this past month. But from the time that Donald Trump took office, we have had a net loss. So that's not great, particularly given the things that Donald Trump ran on. And that volatility that we've seen there. but the general downward trend, that's a reflection, you know, partly of structural problems like manufacturing is just not as important a part of the U.S. economy today as it was 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 100 years ago. But also the things that Donald Trump has actually been doing with regard to manufacturing have been very damaging. You know, like having tariffs on inputs

like steel and aluminum, very bad for industries that depend on steel and aluminum as inputs. like the auto industry or, yeah, or appliances or whatever. So long and short of it, good market for house cats, bad market for anyone else. Look at the, I just want to, that data set at the end. We have this chart up. If you just look at that number, the months, the five months listed right there. So March, 214,000 jobs created. April, 148,000, May, 63, June 20, July, negative 23. I mean, that's, that's an obvious trend, a negative trend. Now, you said we got to look at the big picture, and I don't know, it's five months, six

months a big enough window for you to draw or extrapolate anything from a trend line like that, which seems pretty bleak? I think the big takeaway is, again, the economy and the job market are not as resilient as once thought. I don't think we're in recession yet. That's where I was getting. I was kind of tiptoe in there, but I didn't want to say it. I don't think we're in recession yet.

You know, most numbers are still positive, like weekly positives, things like GDP growth, for example. You know, it's not in negative territory yet. When you say weekly positive, you don't mean week by week. You mean they are not. No, no, no, week. W, B, A, K. Yes, yes, yes.

So it's like still above zero, but maybe it doesn't feel that much better than being at zero or slightly below zero. So it's like, you know, things are fragile, I guess, is what I would say. but they're not in free fall. And a lot of this makes the Federal Reserve's job harder. Wait, pause on that, because I want to do a whole segment on what happens with Warsh. But before we do that, I want to talk about your boy, Kevin Hassett. My boy.

JVL's boy, Kevin Hassett. I think JVL deserves ownership more than I do. Kevin gets ownership of Kevin gets the job of putting a good spin on a big turd. And this is his job, and he plays it. very well. I'm going to give him credit for that. I don't think he does the best spin, but he goes out there and he just takes bullets and he has a smile on his face. And today was a day where he really brought his, I don't want to call it A game because it really wasn't that great, but he did bring it. So let's play Kevin Hassett. Being asked about these jobs numbers, and I want

you to decipher the spin here. The weakness in this number were really just two things, government workers and a sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World Cup because the World Cup was ending. And so if you throw out the World Cup and the government workers, we actually had a number that was about plus 100,000, which is about what we expected, given that the unemployment rate went down. And there's so many other factors like manufacturing booming, capital spending booming, real wages growing for the typical manufacturing worker, almost $4,000 since President Trump took office after adjusting for inflation. So there's all these strong numbers out there.

There's so much misdirection and outright untruth there, but do we want to go through them all? I don't know. I mean, this is the prototypical other than that. How was the play? Mrs. Lincoln, my response, right? Like, it's like, well, if you strip out all the sectors that are doing badly, we're actually doing really well.

And just, like, if you want to, like, dig down into the weeds here on some of the specific claims that he's made. Yes. So he's like, oh, it's all government. government jobs, it is true that there were losses in government jobs, but that was mostly about losses in local government education. This is not like an artifact of jobs. A job. A job is a job. A job is a job. Also true. Also true. But I think the spin he was trying to put on it was like, you know, this is about drowning government in a bathtub or whatever. Yeah, I get it. That's what they always say. It's like,

look, these are jobs we don't care about. These aren't real jobs. This is taxpayer jobs. And so, you should be grateful. I don't know, jobs a job. People need to be going to get the salary. Yeah. And look, like, given that it was local education jobs, just to be fair, there could have been some weird seasonal adjustment things going on there because it's like summer. Going back to school or something like that? I don't know. Yeah. So it could be, so I don't want to make too much of that. But I would not write it off as being about like this is just clearing out the deadwood of government. I don't think that's the case. And as you say, a job is a job. So he said that. that he talked about the World Cup.

First of all, I don't think that's right based on the timing for like when the World Cup was. Yeah, let's think about this. So this is the July jobs numbers. Okay, let's, I'm going to do this old go. When did the World Cup end? July 19th. So there were. Yeah.

So like the way that they, the way that they survey companies, that doesn't make any sense. Like people still would have been shown. showing as employed because it's about like, did you work at all during that pay period? Anyway, so I think that's bullshit. There were fewer games as the tournament got tighter and people were looking at whatever. I'm just trying. I don't think that's it.

And besides the sectors that lost jobs besides local education, so that would be like public schools, were largely retail. So I don't really know maybe that's connected to the World Cup. maybe it's like people were shopping less at Walmart because they weren't like dick's sporting goods or something I don't know um hey the cat's back cat is cat is back sorry about that everyone no no she she has real thoughts about the World Cup she was not happy not happy with Spain prevailing there um all right but what about I just think it's I think that's bullshit um and besides what about his wage growth claim because that one that felt factually not true to me he was like well wage

wages have really grown relative to inflation. No, they haven't. I mean, especially not in the last whatever, what is, it's, excuse me, it's August and the war began in late February. Like, no, in that period of time, inflation has been eating up basically all of wage gain. I mean, like, if you look, you know, one month over another month, if gas prices fell a little bit and what, like overall, no, your people's paychecks are not going as far as they used to. because specifically of actions that this administration has taken, related to the war,

related to tariffs, and other, like, own goals to extend, sorry, this is very distracting, to extend the world's coming home. She just does not want to do the live show. I'm going to riff her a little bit more. She, like, knows when I'm on a live scene or something or a show, yeah. The other thing that hasn't mentioned, and I want to take a little riff on this, Let's play what he said about immigration, and I'm going to pick up on this one. Now the break-even point for unemployment is about $40,000 because labor force participation

is declining. And, of course, the other thing is our tight border policy, so we don't have all these foreign illegal workers, you know, stampeding into the economy, and that used to also show up as inflated jobs. So the idea here, I'm just trying to make sure I understand this, is that we used to have more job growth because we had so many people crossing the border getting jobs and employers were registering them as new employees. That's what he's saying, right? And now because we don't have that, it means employers are not registering new employees. Now, this makes no sense to me,

because if you're an employer and you need to hire someone to do a job, you go and you find them, whether or not they cross the border or not. You don't just hire someone because they knocked on your door and said, hey, I'm from Honduras. I've been traveling through Mexico and I need to work. You hire someone because you need someone to fulfill a job. So also, let me just add this. The big case from J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller around this deportation regime,

the big economic case, and they've said it many times, we can probably find video in a second. is that if you get rid of all these illegal immigrants who are here, you're going to open up jobs for a lot of people. Yes. And you're just going to, there's going to be a hiring bonanza of native-born Americans. It's a zero-sum game is basically how they frame it, right? That every job that goes to an immigrant is a job that would have gone to a native-born American. And now Kevin's, but now Kevin's not saying that.

No, he's saying the opposite. He's saying that like, they're not hiring. Yeah, we've cleared out those workers and also we've cleared out those jobs. That is effectively what he's saying. And to be clear, there is no evidence, in fact, for the initial zero sum argument that suddenly if you got rid of all of the immigrants that there were going to be, you know, a gazillion new job opportunities, great job opportunities for Native-born Americans who but for the immigrants taking their jobs would have been rich, would have been gainfully.

employed would have been doing just better on all fronts in the world. There was no evidence for that. You know, there's maybe some evidence that like immigrants compete with each other for jobs or they, you know, newer immigrants compete with older. Like I'm not saying that there's no competition for jobs, but the idea that immigrants were the reason why, they were keeping Americans from getting ahead and keeping American, Native-born Americans from getting jobs, it just does not exist. That evidence does not exist. That was the argument that they were making. Now they are pivoting, as you point out, to saying, actually, we don't want those jobs anyway. Like, whatever those jobs were, they shouldn't be done. I don't know. Maybe they'll be done by AI. Maybe

they'll be done by robots. Probably they won't be done at all, particularly since immigrants are disproportionately employed in industries that already had labor shortages. So agriculture, other kinds of food services, construction, as well as healthcare. So those are some of the industries, where now jobs are probably going begging. Our colleague Jonathan Cohn has written expertly about, for example, the health aides, nursing home aides who have been, who are being displaced, people who were on temporary protected status, people from Haiti, who were taking jobs working in nursing homes and things like that. Those nursing homes are not going to easily find a lot of Americans, Native-born Americans,

who want those jobs. So what's going to happen? We're going to have shortages. We're going to have less available care for. Native-born Americans who rely on their friends and neighbors and workers to help take those jobs and fill those jobs and contribute to their communities. So I guess we're supposed to celebrate that now, that we're not going to have, you know, the same hardworking labor force working in fields and food services.

Yes. I just want to stress though because this was so central. The idea here was that, okay, we'll get rid of TPS status for Haitians in Miami, and that might be disruptive immediately. But there are so many Native-born Americans who will come and gladly fill those rules. And yes, we'll get rid of these agricultural workers. And that might be a little problematic for our food supplies in the interim. But there's plenty of people out there looking for jobs who are willing to do that hard,

backbreaking work in the fields. and that's going to be great for Native Board of Americans. It was so central that we, Matt Marshall, I should say, are fearless producer, as we were talking, found this clip from Donald Trump at the 224 R&C Convention. Today our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. By the way, you know who's taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? 1007% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.

And you know who's being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country? The black population and the Hispanic population, because they're taking the jobs from our black population, our Hispanic population, and they're also taking them from unions. The unions are suffering because of it. The blacks for Trump scream at the end. All right, we've had a 1.5 year experiment now on this because we've been doing mass deportations for about that long.

And it just seems empirically disproven at this juncture. Yeah, I think that is correct. Again, we were sold a zero-sum game that if you stripped out the hordes of immigrants, the illegals who are taking our tax dollars and taking our jobs and, you know, murdering our, eating our cats and teeth. dogs or whatever, all the bad things. If you took them out of this country, it would be ponies and rainbows for everyone and all of these good paying jobs that were being wrongfully withheld from native-born Americans, whether

they're black or Hispanic or white or whatever. That was the bill of goods that we were sold. Today, we have ramped up the deportation machine. the D-Documentation machine. And you do have a lot fewer immigrants in the labor force. And you can see that in the data that has been released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are many fewer immigrants today. But there's no evidence of any sort of gains that have been felt by Native-born Americans,

whether we're talking about additional job opportunities. And again, like there may be some jobs going begging, but they're not ones that Native-born Americans necessarily want to fill, you know, picking crops or whatever or doing the back-breaking work of, you know, caring for your grandmother. There are not a lot of new job opportunities. In fact, the number of people who are employed today is below what it was a month ago. In manufacturing, it's below what it was when Donald Trump took office, all of the things. And in addition to the other ways in which, again, plucking these members out of these, you know, immigrants out of people's communities has other ramifications on kids' social development, you know, mysteriously losing

classmates or kids losing their parents who are being deported. Like, there's lots of other stuff, obviously, that matters besides the economic effect. But even if you only care about the economic effect, we have gotten none of the benefits that Donald Trump had promised when he ran for office. I don't know if you saw that video of the Texas businessman whose Ecuadorian wife was detained at the airport. That's what I care about. It's the guy who voted for Trump who feels betrayed. I noticed that you kind of were having a little bit of difficulty choosing between whether to say he called for murdering or eating the cats and dogs. I mean, I guess both.

They're not usually exclusive. Yeah, you're not eating. Even if you do eat a live cat and dog, you end up murdering them. I don't want to get too graphic. I think you would have gone fine. On that note, let's take a point. My cat has strong opinions on this as well. Yeah, get the cat out of there.

All right. On that note, we're going to take a quick commercial break. And on the tail right in the eye, look at that. That cat just loves you. The cat is just pre-en-fueling. She just wants her 15 minutes of fame. Clearly, she's getting more than that. We're going to take a quick commercial break.

And then on the flip side, we're going to be talking about what this means for this is your boy, Kevin Warsh. This message is sponsored by the New York Times. On MAGA Mondays this week, I talked to Andrew Eger and Will Summer about the declining audience share across the board amongst MAGA media figures. But it was the New York Times, Stuart Thompson, who actually tracked all of those viewership figures and analyzed years of audience data to report out that development. Our commentary and analysis is as only good as the fact-based reporting that it's build time. Every day I'm reading a range of fact-based sources to understand what's actually happening before I ever sit down and hit that record button.

That includes the New York Times, as well as the Wall Street Journal notice, and some of my favorite reporters on substack, including our own substack, who have deep expertise on their beats. Stewart's piece in the Times is the kind of reporting that takes time, takes sourcing, takes real journalistic work to uncover. That's just one example of the result of fact-based reporting. And now you get to decide what to think. Without fact-based reporting like this, the rest of us are just guessing. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting. A couple things on that ad, Catherine.

No one ever tells me that my picture is a little crooked and I got to get it. Oh, I can't see it in the frame. It's okay. Don't worry. The other thing is I'm so glad I did not wear this hat while I recording you because I wore it in the ad and it would have looked silly. All right. Look, after the jobs numbers came out, the stock market went, boom, right up, okay, which is like, people are like, wait, wait, the jobs numbers look terrible. Why would that happen? As we speak now, S&P 500 is up 0.5. NASDAQ composite up 1.1. Russell 2000, up 1. Dow Jones up 0.16. So it's up green, green, green, across the board.

I know why, but can you explain why? Sure. Yeah, it's not intuitive, right? You'd think you'd get bad data. And so markets would be like, oh, man, this sucks. But what's actually happening here is because the job numbers were not great, the expectation is that the Fed is maybe not going to raise rates, or at least not raise rates as soon as it would otherwise, right?

Because if the Fed is now more worried about the job market, then they can't be like, oh, damn, we got. This is very distracting. I'm sorry. I apologize to the viewers out there. I thought you might have taken the opportunity of the commercial break to say, all right, can I get out of this room? I know. I should have. I'm sorry.

No, we're going to do the whole show with the cut there. Anyway, so what I was saying was that the Fed has been widely expected to raise rates pretty soon, because they're worried about inflation. But if the job market sucks or it's fragile at the very least, then that might give them a little pause. And they'll be like, man, we don't want to raise rates right away because we don't want to cause a recession. And raising a rate, it's a very blunt instrument.

On the one hand, it'll help you with inflation. On the other hand, it'll hurt the job market. And if you're worried about both sides, you know, both sides of the equation, then it's not really obvious what they should do. And so I don't know what they're going to do, but certainly markets, if you look at expectations for rates, the chances of a rate hike, which the typical market participant thought were going to happen

at their next meeting in September, they've gone down. They've gone way down. Now most people don't think that they're going to raise rates, which I guess is good news for Donald Trump, because he wants them to cut rates basically whatever economic conditions are. But again, the reason why they've become less likely to, you know, to drop the hammer here, raise rates is not a good one. It's because they're worried about a recession or at least they're worried about, you know, a stagnant job market. They're worried that if they were to raise rates, that people would stop spending money.

Yes. They would stall the economy. They would stop spending money. They might, you know, businesses might stop investing. If you raise rates, it makes money. Yeah, it makes borrowing more expensive. What do people in businesses borrow to do? They borrow to spend.

You know, if you're a consumer, you have credit card or whatever, you have a mortgage. They also borrow to invest in, like, expanding a company or hiring more workers or whatever, you know, like buying more goods. All of those things become a lot harder to do, a lot more painful to do when interest rates are higher. So you don't want to like. But they can't cut rates. even though the economy seems to be sputtering along, because if you cut, then you're going to risk getting inflation. Supercharging inflation. That's really the risk. Donald Trump has been demanding, of course, that they cut rates. There's a reason why they haven't, and it's not because they're political and trying to thwart Donald Trump and hurt the Republicans,

which is the argument that Donald Trump makes, no, it has nothing to do with that. They are laser-focused on their dual mandate, which is stable prices and maximum employment. and they're worried that if they cut rates, which, you know, again, Donald Trump is calling for them to do, then that would make it more likely people spend money. And if they spend more money while prices are already going up, that's just going to like encourage demand and bid up prices even higher. So they don't want to do that. They're stuck in this bind. You know, like I said, the conventional wisdom among Fed Watchers and investors, market participants is like the Fed is going to have to raise rates pretty soon because inflation

has gotten more out. When do we get our next, when do we get our next big inflation read? Our next big inflation reading, it's probably next week. Let me look at the calendar. You look at the calendar. Meanwhile, I'll tell people that I am monitoring the comment section. Your cat's a big hit. Oh, yeah. Everyone's just sort of wondering when the cat will disrupt you next. They seem to love it. And then someone seems to be taking shot at your head. Yeah. When Gwynie Baker says this in comments, Sam seems like he keeps hermit crabs. I don't even know what that means, Gwynny.

I don't know that it's a compliment, but... It's not a compliment. I think it's an insult. But, you know, mostly this is just cat content in the comments right now for what it's worth. Okay? Anyway, to answer your question, the Consumer Price Index number, which is one measure of inflation, comes out next Wednesday. day. And then I think the measure that the Fed actually pays a little more attention to, or a lot more attention to comes up the following week. You know what's going to happen, right? It's obvious. It's going to be status quo because they're never going to have consensus. And it's just impot. I mean, how else? What else would you do here? There's no good options. There are no good options. The Fed is in a crappy situation because, again, whatever they do

will make things worse in some dimension. So don't do anything. Yeah, that's probably, I mean, that's what markets think that they're going to do, at least for the near term. But if inflation continues to be above target, it's been above their target for over five years now. Yeah, but their target's kind of bullshit. Let's be real. 2%. They wouldn't say so. Of course they wouldn't say so, but it's an artificial target, right? I mean, like, who decided 2% was the gold standard? You probably know this, and I'm just riffing. It goes back decades, but. Oh, I find out.

But to be fair, it is a little bit arbitrary. I'm not going to get into that. It's totally arbitrary. It's totally arbitrary. Someone from my pie said, ah, 2%'s perfect. Anyway, yeah, they're in a difficult situation. I mean, the Fed always has a hard job. But again, Donald Trump has made that job harder because the reason why prices were going

up and among the reasons why the job market sucks is the same thing, which is the tariffs. right? So like there is one magic bullet for making the economy better, for making the Fed's job easier, for both reducing inflation and improving job growth, and that is getting rid of the tariffs, getting rid of all of the trade war uncertainty. And instead, obviously, he's done the opposite. He has had like round after round after round of trade wars, including after the Supreme Court struck down one set of tariffs, Day tariffs earlier this year. They immediately swooped in with a different set of tariffs, and those expired, and then they've done another set of tariffs. And now, as I wrote about in the most recent receipts newsletter, they are, the Congress is about to, like, give Donald Trump

the nuclear weapon of tariffs as well. Let me just, let me just remark. That was an incredible segue. You just did. You're like a pro. How did you do that? I was just going to ask you about your newsletter. I saw them giving speeches on this bill this morning. So just to back up for a second, they got this bill. I'm going to tee it up for Catherine. Lindsay Graham dies unexpectedly, but he'd been working on this Russia sanctions bill. And it's kind of a misnomer. It's not really a Russia sanctions bill totally. I mean, it obviously is about that, but it's more sweeping. And it becomes sort of, you know, legend that Lindsey Graham's dying wish was that this tariff bill, the sanctions bill get passed. And so they begin to push it fairly heavily, and it's gaining a lot

of steam in the Senate. And then someone, or you just figured out, someone tips you off to the fact that there's like a nuclear bomb of terrorists inside this bill. Can you explain just how problematic this is? Yeah. So this bill is called the Lindsay O. Graham sanctioning Russia Act, something along those lines, except like it, and it is supposed to, honor Lindsey Graham, the late Lindsey Graham, and it is supposed to sanction Russia. And really, it does neither. Basically, it doesn't actually give the president any new sanctioning authorities. All of the sanctioning authorities that are in this bill, he already has. He has just chosen not to deploy, presumably because he doesn't want to hurt Russia and his buddy Vladimir Putin. So it's

really more of like an exhortation to please, please put these sanctions in place. Like it says you have, he says the president has to, but then it has to within 30 days. But there's also very broad waiver authority where he can decide not to impose any of the sanctions if he, if he determines it's in the national interests and like, oh, that totally doesn't seem like something this president would abuse. So he has to take a proactive step to take off the sanctions as opposed to just never apply them. That's the difference. I mean, he could just wave them. I'm just trying to, I'm trying to push a little bit, but I think you're right. Yes. No, no, it doesn't. I think it is a signaling bill that lawmakers want to demonstrate publicly

in some respect that they support Zelensky, they support Ukraine, and they oppose Russia, but it doesn't actually have any teeth to it in mandating that there is any additional punishment on Russia. Like, it kind of, it says there is, but then it gives Donald Trump this hole that he can drive a Mack truck through, which basically allows him to not put any sanctions on anyone. Meanwhile, the reason why Donald Trump wants this bill to pass is the fact that it grants him enormous new tariff powers. That basically it requires him in the same way that it, you know, is supposed to require sanctions on Russia and other entities, it requires him to place tariffs of up to 100% on 15 countries.

And the 15 countries are determined by these three different buckets. One is the top purchasers of Russian oil, the top purchasers of Russian natural gas, and the top five sanctions evaders. Now, that maybe sounds pretty straightforward. It's not, in part because it doesn't explain, like, what data you use for any of this. It seems like we should know who's buying Russian natural gas, Russian oil. We don't really because there are these shadow fleets and it's like a very murky supply chain. There's a list of countries going around Capitol Hill that suggests it's going to be like, you know, some combination of China, India, France, Belgium, Hungary, Azerbaijan.

Not one of the stands? I would assume a country would stand and it would be in there. Azerbaijan, I'm pretty sure it's on there. I don't know if there's a, maybe there's a Kazakhstan. Yeah, yeah. I'm aware. Thank you. Central Asia.

Anyway. Well, the best part about your piece was that, not the best part, I chuckled a little bit, like, what happens if one of, one country's on both of the lists? Like, do they substitute? Do you substitute in the six countries? I mean, this is what trade and sanctions experts said that they're concerned about. Like, China is on ostensibly all three lists.

At least two of the three lists. So if you're Donald Trump and there's any ambiguity in this law, do you think that you're going to say, okay, we're only going to just have fewer countries that we tariff because one of them checks all of our buckets, checks all of our lists? No, there's enough ambiguity that they could maybe put in another country and another country and another country. And the way that the law is written, the tariffs can go in perpetuity. and if a new country gets added to the top five purchasers or whatever list, that that can get tariff in addition.

So it's additive. So it's just like very, very broad tariff powers. And like I said, there's enough ambiguity about the first two lists, about who's buying Russian oil and Russian natural gas, which includes a bunch of our friends in the EU, by the way, not because they want to be patronizing Russia, but because they don't have any other option. that third list of the biggest sanctions evaders, it's not even clear what that means. Like, we know sort of what it means to evade sanctions, but what does it mean to be the biggest evader of sanctions? The top five. Like, how do you quantify that? There's clearly ambiguity

here, but I thought the, well, the big thing, though, is his ability to sort of say, not going to tear off this or, yeah, I'm going to tariff that. It seems like he's just going to get carte launch, but he'll just get a lot more powers to go at countries. Yeah, he will have enormous discretion to place 100% permanent tariffs on almost any country he wants, because the law is so vague about what qualifies and doesn't require even the government to explain what data or criteria they are using to determine, like, who is evading sanctions the most. So even though this law is ostensibly designed to help Ukraine and punish Russia,

there is a universe in which Donald Trump can use the authorities granted to him by Congress in this bill to place 100% tariffs on Ukraine and 0% tariffs on Russia. And maybe that sounds crazy, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility given how pissed off Donald Trump is and silence or whatever and how much we've already seen he wants to suck up to Vladimir Putin. So it's just like I don't understand. how you can look at the last year and a half of this administration and think that it is a good idea to give this president more trade authority and more bulletproof, legally bulletproof trade authority. Like the stuff that is in this law, it would be much harder to challenge at court. It's much more likely. But there's like only two Democrats that I can, that I know of who are sounding the alarm on this, maybe three. I know Warnock was on the floor this morning. He was like

trying to get amended language passed in there. I don't know. I wasn't paying close enough attention to know if it happened. I doubt it. And Wyden has been, like, freaking out over this. And I think also, too. And also, yeah. So there are a handful of them.

There's one Republican that I'm aware of, Rand Paul, who has been trying to get this language stripped out. But it's fewer, pardon? Randhouse? You said Randall? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. But it is fewer Democrats than you would expect. In fact, this bill has, again, I don't know what's happened while we're, while we've been doing the live thing. Maybe there has been some development, but at least last week, as this bill was being advanced, it had massive bipartisan support. It passed, you know, not past it, advanced with like 86 votes or something in the Senate. And it has Democratic co-sponsors, like of 21 or 22. I forget what the numbers are. So it has a lot of Democratic support.

And again, I think it is well intended. It is about trying to signal to Russia and Ukraine, which side the United States is on, except that, you know, the intentions are not going to nullify the really damaging powers that the bill, as written, would give to Donald Trump. Now, as you point out, like, they're Wyden and Paul actually have co-sponsored in an amendment to try to get the tariff stuff stripped out. I don't know where that stands as yet. You know, I'll look as soon as we're off the live stream.

But it's just like, it's very disappointing that. Well, it's sort of classically Congress, right? It's like something very monumental and emotional happened. They lost a colleague. And like all this sort of lethargy just goes away and they're like, yeah, we've got to get this done. And they don't, and they kind of rush it through. Yeah.

And they don't really think about the details or the sort of nuances of it. And that's how, I mean, it's a sad commentary on our legislative day, but that's honestly how things often get past. It's just like a moment arises you move. And to Wyden's credit, I spoke with him yesterday. Actually, we have a bulwark take of my interview with him. He has been trying to get his colleagues on board to strip this language, trying to impress upon them, the real risks here.

but I think that there is some sentimental attachment to doing the thing that Lindsay Graham wanted. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure Lindsay Graham fully understood what this bill does and does not do, given, like I said, it doesn't actually require really sanctions. And it does allow the president to have a lot more authorities that I think even Lindsey Graham might be uncomfortable with if he really understood the implications, but he's dead so I can consult him. So, as you know, some of it I think is about wanting to pay tribute to their colleagues. Some of it is about wanting to signal support to Ukraine. But who cares if the net effect is handing Donald Trump this weapon that, again, allows him to alienate

more of our friends and drive up prices much higher exactly at the time that Democrats, of course, have been campaigning on the idea that they are going to rein in Donald Trump and tackle the affordability agenda. So it would be very, very bad if they were complicit in undermining both of those goals by empowering Donald Trump, giving him these unprecedented sweeping tariff authorities specifically to raise people's prices. So I'm hopeful that Wyden will be successful, and he'll convince his colleagues to strip this out, or at some point when this makes its way over to the house, people see the light of day,

but it feels like this is a runaway train right now. We'll see. We shall say, look, I have a little time left. I want to get to a fun one before I go. By the way, for the folks out there, I've been texting my wife who's in the house with me to let my dog come in so that we can have a little situation here. Well, I just felt like your cat's getting a lot of airtime, and rightfully so it's a great cat, but my dog's pretty cute too. And I wanted to introduce her to the masses, but I don't think my wife's responding to my text. So not going to happen. All right before we came on, a federal appeals court issued a ruling that blocked the

construction of the new White House ballroom. They said the president has no constitutional authority over the property, quote, owned by the American people and stewarded by the National Park Service. It was a two-to-one decision that upheld a federal judge's ruling in April that demanded construction stop until the administration received approval from Congress. So, yeah, there is now a state. for a little bit, but this thing, if it does go into implementation, let me just read the, we're going to have just like this eyesore. Look at that. Look at that. Unreal. That's the

East Wing. It's just an absolute construction zone. And it's just going to basically be like that. I guess the Supreme Court's going to have to weigh in on this thing. Or Congress is going to have to approve it, but I don't see that happening. I don't know. I mean, this Congress will give Donald Trump whatever he wants. You think they would get, yeah, you're probably right, but you think they would give him, what, taxpayer money? I guess that seems insane to me. He'd said a million times when it was going to be taxpayer funded.

Yeah, he said that, but then you look at the actual budget proposals and everything else that he's put out. And he says one thing and does the opposite all the time. Not Donald Trump. Not Donald Trump. That's unheard of. Look at that picture. I don't know. I mean, I think, I guess I don't even know what the right outcome is at the, what the desirable outcome is at this point.

Because like you don't want this pit in the ground indefinitely. I also don't think it's a great idea to let him go ahead and build the monstrosity, the monument to himself that he was planning to build. You can't go back in time and undestroy the East Wing. So I don't really know what the desirable outcome is. I guess you could hope that once he leaves office, a Democrat comes in and builds the E. Gene Carroll Ballroom, Memorial Ballroom or whatever. The honorary ballroom. That would be a fitting tribute.

Maybe that would be the best ending to this very, very sorry story and misuse of taxpayer dollars. But I don't know. Like, what are you hoping will happen? Well, I'm with you. Like, it can't just stay like that. that's insane. This continues to be, I've said this on one of these broadcasts before that we do, of all the sort of insane acts.

I'm not saying like the most consequential act. I'm just talking about like, he did what acts? Like this to me is like top of list. He literally bulldozed a third of the white house complex without getting any permission whatsoever. And in fact, lying about the scope of it and the cost of it throughout. and just did it. And it's unfathomable that it's not even his house. Like to go in and just do it is totally insane to me, almost like I just can't compute the thought process to go and do

something like that. It's so egotomaniacal. Yeah, and no one's ever going to be held accountable for it. Like so many other things from this administration. And it is not the most consequential. It is maybe the most symbolic one in some ways. Yeah, it's very symbolic, obviously. But it's not like, you know, reflecting pool obviously is ridiculous and dumb. But like at least with the reflecting pool, it's still there. It's still there. But I was going to say, at least he was known to have problems, right? Like there was like a clear need for a repair. And he was just like, I'm just going to do it. With the east wing, I don't think anyone was like, this thing needs to be just torn to pieces. No, it was. He just was like, I want a ballroom.

Yeah. And no one will be held accountable, not him, not all of the undering accomplices who made this happen, who gave those orders. I'm like, I'm not suggesting that the construction workers who, whatever, like, operated the crane or something. You want to jail the construction workers. No, I'm not going to jail the construction workers. I'm not going to jail the construction workers. But there are people who signed off on this, very clearly illegal activity. very clearly irresponsible activity and irreversible damage. And they're not going to be held accountable either. And that's the story of our times. Pretty much. All right. I'm going to leave it there.

I'm so sad that my dog didn't get to come in. You know, she's a very cute dog. Just a little pop, Martha. All right. Next time I'm bringing Martha, if you're going to bring your cat, okay? Sure. It's a deal. We'll do it.

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subscribe to our YouTube feed. We have great stuff here too as well, like this conversation that we have weekly. It's great. Catherine, thanks so much for doing this. Appreciate it. To those who have been commenting on the cat and the dog, thank you so much as well.

We'll see you next week, okay? Bye.