Chapo Trap House - 923 - The Banks Are Out of Money feat. Dave Weigel (4/7/25)

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Semafor reporter Dave Weigel returns to the show to look at the political angles to Trump’s tariff regime and the global economic shocks. We discuss the various attempts to backfill justifications, responses from GOP and Democrats, and how this is all somehow about wokeness and masculinity or something. We also discuss last week’s special election in Wisconsin, and what it can tell us about Trump (and Elon)’s strength going forward. Find Dave’s work on Semafor here: https://www.semafor.com/author/david-weigel

All I wanna do is hit the drum. The Elon thing really pissed them off. It was such a limp fantasy that it was true. They were just like, how dare this guy do this? Well, Elon knows many things, but he doesn't know Wisconsin. He doesn't know the sort of pleasant fatalism of the people of Wisconsin and also their massive inferiority complex to anyone outside of the state of Wisconsin. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to certain people in my life. All right, let's start the show. Okay, got it. OK. Greetings, everybody. Hello. It's Black Monday, April 7th to twenty twenty five.

This you're listening to the Menacher Moneyline podcast. All the money heads out there. We're talking deals, stocks and global economic meltdown. Couldn't be happier because we're joined today by our old pal Dave Weigel. Dave, welcome back to the show. Yo, good to be here. Look, obviously, I'm not, you know, as I've said many times on the show before, I'm not a money file.

So the thought of touching money holds no appeal to me. But I would like to talk about some of the like political reaction and sort of like the political scenario involved in Trump's tariffs and the stock market crash taking place today. Dave, I think like probably the best indication of where things are at occurred around, I don't know, 930 or 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today when a man named, who goes by Walter Bloomberg on Twitter, caused a four trillion dollar market correction? By posting that Trump was considering rescinding the tariffs for 90 days

And then the market saw a huge jump after that only to crash down again because when people realize he doesn't actually work for Bloomberg he's just his name is Walter Bloomberg But I guess I want to start is like in in DC in politics right now, like is a consensus beginning to form over how serious Donald Trump is about these tariffs? Like are there people still kind of like bargaining with the reality that like maybe these are temporary or that they're a negotiating stance? Or is it beginning to harden into like a reality that's going to have to be dealt with in Washington. I think people caught on faster that this was real.

It's really everywhere else. It's it's everywhere that money managers live and everywhere that CNBC live, which I guess is New Jersey, where they just said, yeah, this is this is a dealmaker. This is not going to be real. We're going to cover this. And then he's going to make cut a deal with somebody. They're going to move the jobs back. And this was the week or so that you saw people in that zone say wait a minute

He might mean this thing. He said it literally literally every single rally since he got into politics ten years ago He might actually want to do that. He might Have having replaced Steve Mnuchin with a bunch of factotums who just do whatever he says he might actually Want to use that power and have the guys who do whatever he says implement this stuff and defend it that that's what happened The last the last weekend It's just really annoying to anyone who covered Trump at all for ten years that they're so surprised But the whole the Walter Bloomer thing, which is really funny By far the funniest market crash correction thing I've ever seen

it's even dumber because it started with Fox News which contains some of those people who like this is fun and all but but surely You should negotiate and then and not do tariffs, right? They use their interviews often to get these guys off the ledge and they had Scott Kevin Hassett on saying hey could the president maybe pause this for 90 days which came out of nowhere there is no one discussing a day because foxes try to get in talk about it. Any given non answer and then someone wrote this up on the bloomberg terminal like the news which i used to work for you a quick headline that could move money. I used to work for, you know, a quick headline that could move money. Somebody said that he was considering 90 pause, which is wrong.

Walter Bloomberg, who is not just a guy, but a guy with a weird Russian actor as his avatar. Like no one knows who Walter Bloomberg really is. He's just one of those guys who bought a blue check so he can post. Uh, he's been around for a very long time. Oh yeah. He's like, if Kyle Becker was not a Democratic Jedi. He's like one of those news aggregator accounts, but for financial news.

And as far as I could tell, he's slightly more respectable than Zero Hedge, but not by much. Yeah, he doesn't do the weird essay posts that Zero Hedge would do sometimes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like if he has any opinions about like, what frequency classical music should be at, he's kept them to himself.

But, you know, he's, uh, this is his most high profile bung up, but you know, it just, it shows the import of aggregator accounts like that, who oftentimes are literally just some fucking guy in this case, speaking of the guys who, who were trying to rationalize this as a negotiating tactic, the money guys, I think I saw the last instance of anyone trying to convince themselves of that at 2 a.m. last night. I saw Bill Ackman say, well, you know,

it's a negotiating tactic for people to think you're crazy sometimes. You know, he's getting like 50 preemptive margin calls. I'm getting tactic for people to think you're crazy sometimes. You know, he's getting like 50 preemptive margin calls. All his creditors are calling him. Jamie diamond is about to do the raid on his, on his condo. And he's like, I mean, there's a chance this might not happen. Oh yeah.

And even the whole Walter Bloomberg panic was it was just like people are starving on the snowpiercer train. There's a rumor of showed up. They said, oh, I heard this is a sandwich over there and they all ran to get it. Like CNBC would have said, can we go with this headline? They couldn't. It was a fake headline. They all went with it because they all are like there has to be some method. We can't have consigned the country for four years to a guy who's just gonna keep doing tariffs randomly, right?

There has to be something smart at right, right? There has to be something They're just trying to talk themselves into this the thing that has particularly driven me crazy about all that before like and it was happening The week in the week in the lead-up to this especially and it was sort of a conversation between finance guys and Pundits who are more on the pro-terror side. And it was basically debating the merits of, you know, the dignity of being like a fucking barista versus working in a factory. And I've already pointed this out how much I fucking love this when it's, you know, a bunch of guys who have blogs and like someone who, who wrote a novel 15 years ago that was well received being like, you don't want to be a fucking gay guy and working in an office, right?

But in the, as, as things have heated up and especially since liberation day, there's been this, you know, incredibly incessant debate about the merits of There's been this incredibly incessant debate about the merits of offshoring, the import of having some production capacity and having some supply lines that are at least in North America. But you might as well be debating whether there's more dignity in being a waiter or a fucking sorcerer. Because they're not going to. Yeah, they're going to reach it.

We're going to create 10 million fucking new middle class manufacturing jobs with a government that says they will not deficit spend on anything except like, I don't know, defense and with no central planning and private industry is I mean, they're just going to be stockpiling cash for the next like fucking 18 to 36 months. How is that going to fucking happen? Like it's, it's driven me fucking insane. Well, I think just like now people are maybe going to realize the

those are not coming back, but there's what a real shit coding on the concept of reshoring. Like, Jesus Christ. I mean, like I was going to say, like, it seems to be there's like two sort of contradictory stances about what these terrorists are and what they're intended to do. And they're like, a lot of times they come from, you know, sort of Republican intelligentsia and media figures,

but also sometimes in the White House itself. And then like the first one, I think we easily dispense with like, I don't think there is much indication that this is a negotiating tactic, that they're a madman strategy to play hardball. The more serious one is one advanced by Lutnick, among others, this idea that these tariffs are going to like remake the global economy, remake the American economy, and that they're going to compel companies essentially to reshore manufacturing in this country. Now, Dave, you make a great point about how Fox News and CNBC anchors attempt to cajole them back into a broader economic consensus. The follow-up question is to Letnik.

We'll ask him about labor costs associated with building iPhones in America. And he said, not to worry about that as robots and automation will be doing most of the work. So I mean, this is another country. This is another like country thing about like, well, okay, so the fact where the factories are coming back to America, but the jobs aren't like, what, what, like, what is what is your sense about, like, of the kind of the idea that this will strengthen the hand of like the American worker like what is the White House and sort of Republican

line on that currently at the moment? Oh, the White House Republican line is all unified is just Trump is right. Mike Johnson is just an appendage of Trump says he's right about this. He's right about everything. We need to follow him down that hole. But you're right. Every time there's pushback in these interviews and it's it's it's kind of a powerless feeling you get in not in DC but if

you're in Congress you have no power to influence this it is just whether CNBC hose asked the right question or whether Andrew Ross or can ask the right thing a deal book like did you get him to say this thing that will move the market and yeah they can't explain it because what was the allergy comes out what 2015 2016 one of the premises of that is that you can't save what happened to the hollowed out middle America because it's too late and because of because of automation it's not just offshoring nobody could could say jobs come back now please with with more terrorists and now the policy is so you could, maybe you could do terrorists and maybe maybe the factories come back. But they've not said here's what they've done is a little bit what Biden was doing, which didn't work of saying we just had a big announcement.

Tim Cook and a bunch of people said they're going to invest a bunch of money into factories. So if you live in North Northeast Michigan, and you want to work in a factory, good news, it's coming. You live in Wisconsin. Good news, there's Fox, this this Foxconn company is going to come in and they're going to have jobs and we're going to do the 1950s again, except without unions. And they didn't they don't deliver on it. You were just saying you were just saying what, what the reality is, is yeah, they're

talking about automation and AI. While all this is happening, they're also fantasizing about how to get every service worker that can be automated out of that industry and also say, and the jobs will come back. So if you've been doing crutching numbers for the VA or Department of Education, don't worry. At some point, there's going to be an Apple factory and at some point you could apply for a job there for much less money installing pins in iPhones. Yeah. When we won't tell you how TBD.

Dave, Dave, that is something I wanted to bring up, not just specifically with the terrorists, but with seemingly, um, I guess you could charitably call it a grand strategy of the second Trump administration. It is your metum, Josh has also pointed this out, but the sheer brandedness of it all. Not only is he insistent on the idea that everyone is into this idea of achieving achieving a 1950s production economy without, you know, um, Chinese levels of central planning and, you know, expenditures that don't really go past the tens of billions. There's also this idea of like, well, that idea is part of a prestige. So whether it fully works out in the next 10, you know, two years or not, which it won't, it will take 10 years.

People appreciate it because it's part of this grand strategy that hinges on my foreign policy accomplishments with, with, with, with Brandon, that was things like August, he expected people to give him goodwill on the, you know, in 10 years, it's going to be 1957 again. But in the meantime, I will enjoy waiting for that because of the, your incredible accomplishments in, you know, getting New Zealand to host a nuclear summary, that's a huge deal for me with Trump it's, um, well, I tried to end the war in Ukraine, but not really.

It's he, he took the whole Brandon act and said, what if I can deliver less? Yeah. The branded version was just here's some tax credits. If you, if you build your chip factory in Tulsa, which may he got enough buy-in on that and that's not insane. Like is the company going to take a huge, a huge tax benefit, tax benefit and free money to build some stuff here and not Taiwan. Yeah, not all of it, but some. But it was more the threat of what if China just takes over Taiwan, then you're fucked.

And they said, good idea. If you give us some incentives, we'll build that kind of everyone agreed with that. But even Republicans agreed with that. Trump will occasionally talk about refilling chips. He doesn't really mean it. He just hates Biden, like he hates Obama. But this is that kind of neo-imperial version of that, right? We won't need to do it because we'll take over real earth minerals in Ukraine and in Greenland, and we'll have a bunch of money coming in. And once we rebalance the world economy,

so we're making stuff and trading less, we're gonna have real prosperity. And not to repeat myself, but also AI is gonna replace all the jobs. That's the part of it. I but also AI is going to replace all the jobs. That's the part of it. I still don't know how to put all this together, but they're like, we're going to do it, but we're also going to have five robots doing it. Dave, I've tried to look into that because it's so contradictory and it's just sort of

like uppers mania thinking at that point. But the most coherent sketching out of that plan is basically that like the middle-class jobs that will only require at most like an associate's degree will be basically the year you, you know, the way that Fred Flintstone will look at a brontosaurus crushing, uh, you know, crushing steel beams for a construction job, you would do that, but for a robot. And that can staff 75 million middle class jobs that all pay $98,000 a year. Well, it's a living, ain't it?

Felix, I saw something like like an exchange of someone who was like, No, this is gonna be great. It's gonna bring all the factories back. And then someone asked them like, okay, like, what are they gonna pay? Are you going to be working in this factory? And he said, No, I'm going to be great. It's going to bring all the factories back. And then someone asked them like, OK, like, what are they going to pay? Are you going to be working in this factory? And he said, no, I'm going to own the factory. Yeah. Yeah. You remember those conversations of like, what will your job be after the revolution?

Yeah. Well, I'll come back. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I feel like you posted the other day. This reminded you of the thread where an anarchist tried to explain how they would produce pharmaceuticals after the revolution. And the answer was befriend someone who's good at chemistry. I saw, well, like someone found that, that was a great one I'd forgotten about, but it was, that was taken from Trump saying, why do what? What are supply lines?

Who needs those? We don't need supply lines to do manufacturing. And there was a specific Chas era discussion where someone was asking, OK, how like how are you going to make pharmaceuticals without specialization? And the person said, that sounds stupid. It's something like I'd have more fun destroying. That seems to be that seems to be the Trump policy with supply lines. Well, Dave, among the Republican intelligentsia, there is a number of different strategies

for trying to get out ahead of bad economic news, metabolize this new shift in the economy, and sort of explain it to people. And I think the most detailed one was done by Orrin Cass, but I noticed it was a long post and it like, in his attempt to try to like make the terrorist policy, like make sense or seem well considered or something. It seemed to me that it was just like a really long, like Rube Goldberg device of assumptions about what he thinks Trump is going to do or not do.

And like, to me, like this just like all the people trying to figure out, like what's the logic behind this? It just recalls to me the famous line from Duck Soup off-coded by Slavoj Zizek, where Groucho is defending Chico in a court and he says, Your Honor, my client looks like an idiot. He talks like an idiot. But don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

And like when I think about like what's what's the logic here? I mean, I think Chris, I think you got it really right on the nose over the weekend in that, like throughout his entire career, I truly understands paying for anything is being robbed and like his understanding of a trade deficit, i.e. the United States buys more from the rest of the world than we sell, is like the rest of the world's stealing from us. And he thinks that we're being ripped off. It's kind of beautiful in its simplicity. It's like, well, we've sent the money to Canada, and they send us lumber. But then they have our money. Where'd the money go? All we have

is this fucking lumber. If you look at the chart that he brought out, so many of those countries are just it's they clearly you know, people pointed out that they probably did this with Chad GPT or something. And they, for most of it, it seems like they pick countries where the trade deficit ratio is the most out of whack as opposed to like, who do we have the most like volumetrically skewed trade deficit? volumetrically skewed trade deficit. That's of course in there, China, obviously. But with a lot of those countries where it's like, it's 99% us buying something and 1% us selling something to us.

It's one of these- Like Cambodia for instance. Right, it'll be these countries that sell us textiles or in the case of stuff that is aggravating Elon and causing him to inch away, you know, these countries in Africa that export like, you know, one rare earth metal that you need to make like a type of steel alloy if you are a defense contractor or perhaps you manufacture electric cards. And it's all these situations where we're getting like the textiles or whatever materials for like a fucking song.

And they they're literally too poor to buy anything from us because what would they buy a fucking F 35? But they look at they look at it and they go we're being fucked here. The most instructive thing the most instructive political debate the two most destructive political thinkers one demonious acts the most instructive conservative, the most instructive political debate, the two most instructive political thinkers, one, Demonious X, the most instructive conservative thinker of our time. Second, the great Grubhub debates where they say someone is trying to screw you by making you walk an extra 150 feet to pick up your order. When someone sells you something and you pay them, the fact that they have your money means

that they have gotten one over on you and you have to kill them. Yes, while you live your life trying to get as much free time as possible, you're allowed to do that. The point of your life is buy Fartcoin early so that you can make money off it, record a podcast, nothing wrong with podcasts, you know what I mean, do your Rumble show, but everybody else

should be working to the bone nonstop, just pouring sweat, like drinking, sweating faster than they can replenish it with Gatorade. If they're not doing that, they're bad Americans. But you need to you need to be able to chill. This is this is what a prosperity is for. Someone else is going to be going to do the pins in the iPhones. But they did the wrong thing. You you got in really early on, which is, which is the last one, the

Trump one, that's not right anymore. I'm going to stick with fart coin. Parkway definitely went up. Just because you brought up fart coin and, uh, doing podcasts on rumble. I have to share an image I saw yesterday with you guys that is going to stick me with me for a while, which is, uh, I drove to the Ralph's to, uh, buy $20 worth of eggs or whatever. And I was in the parking lot and observing a guy in a Wall Street Bets t-shirt, you know, like the cartoon of, yeah, sunglasses, Wall Street Bets t-shirt, having a very heated conversation on his cell phone that he then hung up and

just sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands. Oh man. Oh man. Is this about the tariffs? I don't know, but it seemed, you know, it's the AP stock photographers when you need them. I mean, that is, that is the wife phone call if I've ever heard one. Oh man, like there's so many guys who are going through the John Fenderman,

Mr. Show sketch where he sues because he doesn't realize money goes away when you spend it There's only one thing I can blame and that's the money itself I Didn't know how to spend this money. It didn't come with instructions or a Manual I didn't realize that if you exchanged it for property or services, that they would take it away for good. And that's just what they did. Speaking of retail investors, I saw the best post Friday.

So this was the greatest amount of equities ever purchased in one day by retail investors. And this Trump guy said, this was the greatest transfer of wealth between the 1% and the working class ever in history. And it's all because of Trump, which is, you know, saying that before Black Monday too, is like, well, this is the most money the three card Monty dealer has ever put up. This is the most he could ever stand to lose.

Look, going back to what I said, I'm no economic expert. So I can't tell how this is all gonna shake out. Like if this, if they hold, look, things will change. Of that, I'm certain. But like, as just an observer of politics and people who talk about politics, I think it's an interesting sign, like again, among sort of right-wing intellectuals and media figures, the line that they've adopted over the last couple of days, and I don't mean like the CNBC set, I mean the more esoteric of the sort of right-wing thinkers. The acclaimed man, the face of the alligator, all our guys.

Yeah, and like, it's a sign not so much about like, about what they think is gonna turn, out how this is all going to turn out. And my feeling is that they don't have a lot of confidence that this is going to end well for Trump. Because the line that a lot of them are taking now is basically, what is money? What is prosperity? Like, you know, like, yeah, you can lose all your money, but you're still alive. You still have love and family members. And it's just like they've adopted a strangely philosophical and sort of like, let's take the long view of history and will this all turn out OK? I don't know. Ask me in 100 years. It is funny. And like, look, I think it is counterintuitive to your own happiness to just remember every slight, you know, every slight against you.

But pretty much everyone that like yelled at us over treats is now going, they're now posting the Fight Club thing. You're not your fucking TV. We're all dancing crap at the world. I mean, just that, that type of thing is so funny with this policy, you know, there's more to life than cheap goods. Which, yeah, I think for our ideology, if you want something that is beyond just a prematurely born Medicare for all that is just an idealized public option, you do need to do some type

of reshoring. There does need to be some national production reshoring there does need to be some national production capacity and there does need to be something that's the stains a middle class right. What for this you're not it's just like the guy who said it's the greatest wealth transfer you're not redistributing anything you're just blowing it up well you're not trading your cheap goods for anything. You're just taking a shit on them and going, well, how do you like that? You didn't get anything. Well, Felix, I think about that, like in terms of like some of the reaction I've been seeing, I guess more on the sort of contrarian left with this idea that Trump is ending neoliberalism. And like, that's interesting to me because like, they did in Russia in the 90s.

Well, yeah, because like, global free trade regimes are an important facet of neoliberalism. And it's one that the left has criticized. But in addition to global free trade, there's also extreme austerity, privatization, deregulation, and like, I'm the president police surveillance state, which they're tripling down on all four of those things at the same time that they're getting rid of the global free trade aspect of neoliberalism. That that is the yeah, that is the specific thing. That is also driving me nuts.

This like I'm a vulgar, you know, class. I just look at the just look at the economics of it. Don't care about this pronoun stuff. What austerity government? No, this is the thing you at the economics of it. Don't care about this pronoun stuff. What austerity government? No, this is the thing you're supposed to be against. It had Dave, though I wanted to ask, like, what what has been the reaction from Congress from Democrats and Republicans? Because, like, there's got to be some like a lot of old school Republicans or a lot

of Republicans in maybe like a swing district that I'm sure are secretly quite upset about what the stock market is doing and what it looks like to their reelection. But I think the interesting thing that's like maybe like not talked about enough with this is that like all of these tariffs are being done under the aegis of a like national security emergency measure which allows the White House to impose tariffs on every country in the world. But like specifically, what is the national security emergency that they're referring to?

And is there any appetite in Congress for clawing back a power that is explicitly given to them by the Constitution? I know that's quite the emergency with with Canada, I think, is that they they're sending us fentanyl and we need to tariff them. We need to tariff fentanyl and we need to tariff them. We need to tariff a fentanyl, I guess, so that we can make some money off it. We get, but the, this one is just, is just a national economic emergency. This is like, it turns out you can just do this. You remember the 2019 democratic primary there is maybe a week where.

People were asking candidates. I think I did too. Hey, could the president just declare a climate emergency and use his new powers to do a bunch of stuff? And I think Jay Inslee said yes, and Bernie said yes, and no one else did anything. But you kinda can, you kinda can just do this and you can only be stopped as president

if Congress says no, we're going to override this emergency. So there is, it's every Democrat in the Senate, including Bernie, and Bernie's explained he he does he was against trade relations with China. He's for tariffs in some cases. But he's not Sean Fain. He's not cheering this on. He's like, this is stupid.

And also the other part of it, Bernie says is, and this is authoritarianism, like the president should not have the power to do this. Congress should have the power to sign up on these tariffs. Congress gave it over to the president, not have the power to do this. Congress should have the power to sign up on these tariffs. Congress gave it over to the president, not knowing that he would do this kind of crap. It's sort of the Bernie position. And that is shared by every Democrat plus Bernie. And at the Senate, I think seven Republicans now. What would happen in the House for them to say, actually, we're not doing this

emergency would be a majority of the House voting for what the Senate voted for last week and saying, yeah, we actually we in Congress say this is not a real emergency. So it's over right now. The president needs to come back and ask us to do the tariffs. They totally can. Right now, the only thing stopping that is basically basically Mike Johnson. If Mike Johnson said there's a free vote on this, Democrats would vote with a couple of Republicans and probably

pass that in the house. So they could, and with the, with the whole Trump national emergency, they also could do that. It's just that Republicans don't want to because they trust him or they say they try, I think when they say they trust him, I, I believe them. I generally think that the secret stuff they say off the record to reporters is bullshit and the stuff they say in public when they're afraid their constituents is real. I think Johnson believes this. Johnson thinks Trump Trump is a world

historical genius who's been saying this by terrorists for generations. Let's just let him try. No one's ever tried this true, true mega art of the deal has never been tried. We're going to do it. But you could put the votes together to end this if it was such a disaster that it's clearly like price are going up, the iPhone five thousand dollars and everyone's sick of this, Congress could act. But after months and months of saying, no, we trust them.

They have the power. It's like one of the many powers they're just not driving on to. I mean, but like this has been this has been the trend in NASA and like in foreign policy for like as long as I've been alive. And I just think it's interesting that the imperial presidency and the war-making powers, that's long gone. But now when it comes to things like tariffs and economic policy, it's telling to me that Congress is willing to just give that up too. This is like the Yeltsinification of America. It seems like we're doing to our own country what we did after the Soviet

Union collapsed. Dave, the dynamic with Johnson and like Republican legislators in general, it does seem to be sort of like an extension of that 2016 thing we saw right, right up until the midterms with Trump. That's just been amplified this time because they finally won the popular vote of like, okay, this guy was able to do all these things that were previously like impossible in the post like W or even during W era of Republican politics.

Therefore, anything he says that people say is stupid, especially if it is, you know, just generally the media or everyone is calling it stupid. Therefore all of that is going to work out to you and yeah no i mean i that were secretly furious with them where have i heard that before oh yeah i, I don't take that seriously. And people say they're secretly curious. What I think talking to Republicans, they, some of them look at a Javier Millet in Argentina and that's the model. They say this guy cracked it. Uh, Bukele cracked it. These guys who come in and the media hates them.

They say they're terrible. Uh, actually you need to break things real fast and the, the neoliberals are going to be angry. The socialists can be angry just need to do it but then the point to other stuff Trump did that there wasn't a huge backlash for and I want to when I'm heard bring up which is not that relevant but I see what they bring it up is when he moved the US Embassy to from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem all these experts said it was gonna lead to disaster and actually it was fine People say you can't do this and he doesn't know work. So this one just like those it's gonna work I've heard that for more than one Republican the media you guys always get Hyperventilating and you always get crazy and then he went and then he's right all along

You can start listing but but sir actually they don't care. They remember the one that he was right about. Yeah. I mean, like it is again, the branniness of it all. Any victory, no matter how slim or whatever, no matter the circumstances of it, is always a total vindication for us doing things the exact way we want to do them. Whether that is, you know, Biden is completely fine. No, he doesn't have a PhD in foreign affairs. He's just that fucking good. Or just whatever the fuck

this is. Yeah, like, to your point about like, oh, the hysteria, the panicking, the media freak out. There was a Trump post this morning that states, the United States has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago. Don't be weak. There was a Trump post this morning that states, the United States has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago. Don't be weak. Don't be stupid. Don't be a panicking new party based on weak and stupid people.

Be strong, courageous, and patient, and greatness will be the result. Now, look, whether the stock market, because you know, like you'll often hear, like, you know, less than 50% of Americans are invested in the stock market, whether the stock market is, you know, the perfect indicator of how healthy or well off the country is, or whether people are suffering or not, is open for debate. But like, what puzzles me is this idea about like, oh, there goes the media and politicians panicking again about a 10 point drop in the stock market.

I mean, like, you like, this doesn't seem out of the wheelhouse of things that politicians in the media might be concerned about or might be somewhat concerned with. Right. Like the idea, the thought of like a massive economic contraction. No, they and they do care about financial news. They don't care about other news. So and the media panics about about deportations. They don't care about that. Like they're going to be at some bad headlines in the air time. Whatever. That't care about that. Like they're they're they're going to be at some bad headlines the year time. Whatever. That's a good example.

Like people will get angry about it. But like something like, you know, an economic collapse is like, yeah, that is the thing that within politicians sort of like the the sphere of things that they care about or feel empathetic for. Yeah, well, it's almost like they have flattened just like everything into articles. And so like an article that's like, you know, the doubt the the S&P 500

has dropped 15 percent over the weekend is the same thing as an article. That's like Sidney Sweeney's uncle voted for Trump. And it's like, that's just gay article shit no one cares about. It's like, no, those are two different things. Oh yeah, completely. And you knew things were getting bad when people started to post charts. The same people we're talking about,

they're like, actually over the last 50 years, if you invest your money in this now, it's going fine. And the media wants you to freak out, but the media told you to freak out about global warming, remember that? There's an inexhaustible treasure chest of stuff to go into and say the media is wrong and yeah, it was wrong about some stuff. It's just the, in the moment right now, every time they do that, it's like, but how are you going to bring the factory back and employ the former department

education workers? That's like, yeah, well, the media was wrong about Trump in the past. Like they're very bad explaining how this is supposed to work. Tell it like moving the embassy to Jerusalem. There's going to be an embassy in Jerusalem. I get that. And there's a building there and ask Trump's name on it and you're done. This one, I don't understand.

And they really are kind of buffaloing their past every question by saying, well, he was right before because everyone who's who's fair is like, yeah, he said something that was not going to work and it worked point taken. What about what about the current the current thing that you're trying to do? They then they divert again. Yeah. No one remembers anything that was more than like 18 months ago, obviously. But I mean, the whole thing during Trump won. And actually the pitch for Trump to this time

during the summer was remember how good the stock market was. That's true. Yeah. Which, you know, now I guess just like everyone who has any money in equities or bonds is the fucking monopoly guy. Let's kill them. But yeah, no, I, they have boxed themselves into this position though, where the only way they can point to this in the future and go the media was wrong about that is two outcomes.

One is if the entire world is like, okay, negative 58% tariffs on American goods. We will pay you to buy our stuff. You'll get cash back for purchases from the EU. The other way is if in most generously 14 months, we have a manufacturing sector that someone could work in a manufacturing job with an associate's degree, buy a house in a major American city, and it employs 75 million Americans, and we build it all in 11 months.

It's operation warp speed for like Mao's five-year plans. We're doing it in a fraction at that time. I just saw a YouTube about how to make pig iron in your yard. I'm really excited to do that. I know. I mean, Dave, like, we've talked a lot about the difference between Trump, the Trump one and Trump to administration. And I think like a big difference is the fact I think psychologically he has been changed

a little bit by being prosecuted in the years in which that he was not president. And I think he has like revenge on his mind. And I think he is I think he's become the damn joker. I think that he he wants to extract as much pain as possible from an American ruling class that he feels abandoned, betrayed and unjustly prosecuted him. And I think if there is a legible motive behind this trade scheme, it's to basically set up a giant global protection racket to extract concessions from foreign countries and American businesses who want carve-outs for these tariffs. Yeah, the Russian comparison

I'm so traumatized by terrible Russia comparisons for Trump term But that one actually works is it's if you just separate what Trump's doing from any historical context You might say, yeah, well, why does the strongest country just demand more and more and job on people and get the best deal possible? How come he doesn't just bring people to the White House and say, what are you going to do for me? And then they do it. It's like, well, because then you just have the law of the jungle at all times instead

of the system that's like slow and creaky. But generally people are not fretting if they, if they've kissed the wrong ring, that they're not going to be able to just trade in the country anymore to come to the country. They write an op-ed, they can get deported, they get like, there's all sorts of things you can do to scare people into acting. And the, it's now the lib take to say that's maybe less good than just having some system of laws where you don't worry about it all the time. But the Trump offer really is, this is our Caesar and he gets to do this and everyone is afraid of him. So we'll blow up a deal one day and bring it back the next one and you better be nice to him in the interim. That's why I think all the people on the left I cover are very happy saying,

look, if President Sanders was doing this, there'd be a capital strike and he'd be stopped immediately. But the same people on CNBC would have some understanding. Oh, that's right. Somebody is assuming absolute power of themselves and demanding you cut individual deals. That's bad. You should have some sort of predictable regimen where like, you can make your planning out a couple years in advance and not worry that the president will get revenge on you. Having the president get revenge on you whenever he feels like it. Everyone who cover the last iterations of Republican policies like we need predictable tax policies people know invest this is the least predictable thing he ever see. He just he just decided with several law firms like

you were mean to me but you met with me in the office and cried therefore I'm going to give you a deal. What I guess I can try that with every company that you don't you don't want to you can hire a lobbyist, I guess you can hire lobbyists to like the schools have done law firms have done to kind of negotiate, but not everyone can. This is way worse if you if you're if you're the kind of person who is never going to have that level of power and never have an erection You don't know how to and you're also aware like times things change and in three and a half years It would suck if a Democratic president start doing revenge like much better as much as everyone hates the Uniparty Like just having a system of laws that is kind of the same between administrations And a system of terrorists kind of predictable. That's what everyone built their businesses based on right? That's like getting rid of that for a few years for Trump. That's that's what's starting to scare people

Oh what comes after that? Yeah, well like like 1997 Moscow comes after that Yeah, and how could you ever really make a deal with America ever again if it's not gonna last more than like two years I mean like I think that's an important point. The idea that like people are afraid of him. People have tried to intellectualize all of this, but really, you know, I think about that response to the article about that poor German guy, that green card holder that just got randomly fucking brutalized in the federal detention center. And how I saw that reply from a leathery Maga crone that was like, good, now it's our turn.

Like she's just hated this German guy for her entire fucking life. Um, but, but you know, it is, I think a lot of them like this because it's like, yeah, they are afraid of him, but it's kind of, there's a difference between being afraid of John Wick and being afraid of like, a guy whose dick is out and his sweatpants have shit stains on them but he has a gun in the supermarket. Both are pretty frightening. Both are frightening but like with John Wick it's like okay he wants something. Yeah, don't kill his dog.

Yeah, with the guy with his dick out in the shotgun it It's like, what could I even do here? What's the point of this? Well, one of the last justifications for the tariffs that definitely get into like, just the world of spite really more than anything else is I really like the sort of the griper reaction to the tariffs, which is like, well, I don't have anything or a future to begin with.

So I don't care if anyone else does, but crucially, the point of the tariffs is to get rid of all female jobs. I've seen I've seen I've seen that video of the Australian marketing team dancing in their office more times in the like as this as the economy like crashes. I've seen that video probably a dozen times in the last couple days. And it's like, I guess this is what they're offering.

Like, I think there's a belief that like that women in the workplace only have fake jobs and that like the jobs are fake, but I should have them personally. Yeah. The guys who post that video and like, you know, are like, this is why work sucks now. It's always a guy who like sells an e-book about how to do jumping jacks. No, but one of the guys literally hosted a nutrition podcast. That is the most female coded job you could possibly have. I am so fucking sick of seeing that goddamn fucking video. It's been three years.

They work at an Australian skincare company. How would any of these people find themselves in that position? Their mom has been asking them to apply to the cafe near their house and they're gonna they're gonna go to another continent didn't we used to be able to get these in America because the thing that pissed people off before these guys pissed up before Was like this is my life at Lockheed Martin And they get on a zoom at 9 a.m. and it's really easy, then they go to the mental health brunch. But we used to make those in America.

Now we have to get these in Australia, what happened? There used to be like 20 bullshit companies where you could make these videos where a woman had a job, strike one, and two, did a bunch of nonsense work, strike two. Meanwhile, some guy with a Herbal Life stock was at home getting angry. But they used to get angry Americans.

Why? Why was like half half the US workforce are women. So the idea here is that like at a time of like economic contraction, let's get rid of half of the workforce. And then like the other half will who previously were doing bullshit jobs will just go back to the mines and they'll love doing it. They'll be happy doing it. And it's just like, I don't know, like, this is like the more the philosophical tenor to like, what does this portend for the future? I guess I'm like a little surprised and a little impressed

by the number of people who are just like, no, like, yeah, like we're going back to the 19th century and we'll all be happier for it. Like measles is back too, sure. But like, you know, what meaning does life really hold anyway? If you value your own life, you die a dog's death. Hard times create strong men. Absolutely. You're proving that yourself until you feel strong. It just like Dave's point about the those hilarious videos during it was like the first like year or two years of Brandon where you saw those hilarious TikTok videos where someone's like, I'm on McKinsey's, you know, public school closure team. This is what my day is like.

Like half it to half the time they're doing like Zumba or whatever the fuck that class is called. I always thought that was so funny because there's this like, there's this fetishization of like the mad men thing where you go to your finance or advertising or whatever the fuck job and You do one meeting where you don't you you're like Don Draper You knock it out of the park and then you're just drinking and fucking the rest of the day And it's the same amount of work as these videos. Yes It's like not cool enough though

So it's eat socks and we have to kill the economy. It's like, Felix, one of my favorite details of the film, American Psycho is that it never portrays a single person doing work of any kind. Yes. Yes. That thing in the book too, there isn't even a second. It's not like Bonfire of the Vanities where there's like some bond deal going on in the background.

They're just, it's like how Tony Soprano always talks about how hard he works. And you just cut to him in the forest or bullshitting. But you know, like anything, bullshitting at your job and never doing any actual work, it can be male coded or female coded. All these guys, like the all in guys that are this long-term Psyop to get to get people finally ready to accept voting for

a socialist because all of them, they made their money on something. They got very lucky at some point in the free money era. None of the products they they're involved in are useful in any way. What's the, didn't David Sacks do like a worse version of, of like Twitter spaces? Yeah. Clubhouse. But none of these, if you describe them to like a World War II veteran,

hey buddy, do you want your son you're eating a video chat at? You'd be like, get out of here, homo or whatever they would say. It was 1945, they talked differently. But none of these are real jobs and they're the ones lecturing you. Like you're gonna look, you're gonna live in the pod,

you're gonna eat the bugs. I'm gonna the pod. You're going to eat the bugs. I'm going to just be on a seven hour podcast talking, talking about wine and maybe one day if you eat enough bugs, you can be on the podcast. Like, I don't know what their offer is to people apart from they got rich and. You have to, you have to suffer to build character. Yeah. Like the all in podcast is, I mean, I hope that should be in the Library of Congress. It is one of the most important cultural products of this five-year stretch. All these guys who have so much free time, they could create a podcast where they call

each other the best eats. So the least charismatic men ever. No one should be telling these guys to do more media. And it's a podcast about like poker and fucking work. And yeah, the core message is like this group of five, five SPAC scammers and Epstein associates is calling you a fucking weak loser because you haven't like popped four discs at your job. Uh, just before we move on from the gen Z boss in the mini video, a conservative on my feed pointed out that those five women are running a firm engaged in domestic materials manufacturing.

That's a real thing. Right. Like they are, they are like a hand cream or like thing, but all their products are made domestically, presumably at some kind of factory in Australia. Is that not what we are trying to build here? That's much better than another crypto exchange or something. That is what that looks like. Those are the people who are running those firms.

So it's just like the Simpsons episode with the gay steel mill that Homer goes to. And that's a lesson I took from that episode of The Simpsons. That's real work. My son doesn't stand a chance. The whole world's gone gay. Oh my god, what's happening now? We work hard. We play hard.

Steve, I just want to get to the Democratic side of this equation because you were just in Wisconsin reporting on the Supreme Court election and Elon's sort of parachuting into that race and the effects it may have had on the outcome. But I want to talk more broadly about Democrats are looking forward to the midterm and to 2028 obviously But it seems like there was just a big like the hands-off protests over the weekend It seems like there's a lot of you know anger and what the Trump administration is doing but like I have a strong feeling that like if you were a a Democrat prior to the tariffs and the stock market dip a Democrat prior to the tariffs and the stock market dip.

Your inclination, I think, among Democratic leadership was just basically to sit back and let Trump hang himself and whatever he does to the economy, the Democrats want to keep their hands as far away from it. And they want to come back with the kind of I told you so message. Given the results of Wisconsin, do you think that that strategy for the Democrats, it seems to be the perfect opportunity if you were inclined to that, like sort of leadership that like this would be the perfect time to just basically just be like, just let him do what he wants. And they like, it's going to destroy the economy and people are going to get pissed off and we're going to be back into pack and power in a couple of years.

Oh, yeah. What they did in Wisconsin was a little bit different. It definitely went harder than what Schumer is talking about, because we're not getting too into the weeds. But Wisconsin has this campaign finance system where people can give infinite money to the state party. And Ben Wickler has used that for Reid Hoffman to give money to the party. So part of this is Democrats need to be willing to accept billionaires money. But the argument in Wisconsin was basically pitch for popular stuff

that Elon Musk has no right to be here telling us what to do. He's spending all this money for his own personal benefit because he wants to test the dealerships in Wisconsin. This judge that he's campaigning for is his puppet and they're going to do whatever he says. It was much more what pick a target and polarize it and beat up this guy for being rich and thinking he's better than us then like Chuck Schumer would advise and it was very successful. I was there when Democrats were they were optimistic but they were thinking that there's gonna be a slog maybe it's a single digit race and they and they blew it out everywhere just because that that I was surprised at how powerful that was. You'd think after enough elections with Trump in it, people would compartmentalize and say, well, maybe rich people can do something for us. But that pissed off Wisconsin so much, the idea that Elon showed up with no knowledge

of what the state was focused on, just kept saying activist judges, activist judges, didn't know what cases he was talking about. And his rally there, where he had, what what's the say Sean Duffy, the guy who replaced people to judge transportation secretary. Yeah. Yeah. Catherine's former neighbor actually. Oh, he was.

Oh, no kidding. Yeah. He was, he was saying at this rally, like we're Wisconsin is going to show the world, you don't mess with Doge. Like you have Wisconsin saying, is that no, why would we, I don't care about that. Like, I'd like there to be a judge who rules on, like, the five or six cases that are relevant to me in the Supreme Court.

Where'd this come from? It really was offensive to people. Yeah, I think that people expected sort of like, it to be sort of like Scott Walker, the Scott Walker recall thing, right? Where there was people, you know, maybe they thought of it as a wash. Well, everyone's coming with out of state stuff, but really it's just, no one seems like more of an outsider than this fucking guy.

What I thought was maybe even more interesting than the blowout in the race that Elon was most intimately involved with was, I mean, you alluded to it. It's not like it was closer in races he wasn't personally involved in. It was kind of a really shitty night for the Republicans in Wisconsin. None of the key races seemed close at all. I mean, it was, the Supreme Court race

had ended up being, yeah, like 10 points at last count. But the other big race, the GOP lost it by like seven or eight. Last time I checked. I mean, I would say that augers worse because it does seem like Elon is sort of inching away now. He came out against the man who taught me economics, Peter Navarro. And it just you can get rid of him or more likely he will initiate the breakaway because you just made the most important parts of his actual revenue

producing businesses 50 to 400 percent more expensive but people still fucking hate this entire deal it seems. Yeah it was an easy thing to explain to people. And that race, it was the education superintendent race where Republicans were supporting a more pro voucher candidate. But she was taking advantage of how there are problems. The Milwaukee School District and the incumbent Democrat wasn't very popular. It didn't matter just because all these Democrats came out and were furious about Eli because each of these rates for the next until the next presidential every

race is some fraction of people who voted in the presidential election. And what Republicans were their theory was if we just get a big fraction of those mega voters from last time the guy Scott Pressler founded registered if we get them out like a third of them come out we can win everything and they got them out and they and they lost because democrats found even more people without without their own six foot seven uh guy in cowboy boots going around every county and personally asking to vote like they had it all because Elon got the credit but uh or blame at the end but yeah turning point action was there and I talked to them during the race and their whole thing was turn the key.

We're not leaving the state. You just want it for Trump. We're gonna go back there. We're gonna find every Trump voter and get him pissed off. And they just weren't as pissed off about things as Democrats were, or just independents who vote Democrats were. They were supposed to be pissed off that,

because as they were, Don Jr. was campaigning for this judicial candidate. He was linking it to these these elitist judges in the middle of nowhere think that they can stop the president from deporting people. And we're going to show them they can. And there were some Republicans who cared about that. The reform or Democrats are really, oh, my God, everything I care about is melting down and I have one chance to stop you on from doing it.

I'm going to take that chance is much more powerful. Yeah, I think with like the democratic success in like getting not like people who maybe wouldn't vote in just your control group midterm, if that concept even exists. Yeah. You see the most dramatic outcome here with like, you know, Elon, Elon's proximity, obviously. But even without him, I think like the galvanizing sentiment here with like, you know, Elon's proximity, obviously. But even without him, I think like the galvanizing sentiment isn't necessarily like they're coming into our home

and throwing money around and telling us what to do. It's kind of this ethos that it is an Elon thing, but it goes beyond him, which is a lot of fucking people work for the federal government. It is one of the largest middle class employers in the entire fucking country. And when people are like, people who voted for them are like, well, I'm scared. Like, am I going to be fired? Am I going to lose their am I going to lose my house? The response of Elon, but also just like Vance and like the administration in general, it's like, you're a fucking idiot for even thinking that. And it really like said the other day that 40% of the people who call the social

security administration are for our committing fraud. Yeah. Trying to defraud social security. It doesn't help to directly call your potential or even most recent voters a bunch of fucking idiots and fraudsters and liars? No, that was actually, it was the all in guys who got Lutnick to say that because they were doing their interviews in DC and that was the first time Lutnick flew that balloon. Actually if my grandmother doesn't get their security check.

Yeah no shit, your grandmother probably has a ton of money. She's going to get a ton of money. She's gonna get a ton of money. Did you think I would cry if she misses a check every other month? Yeah, I think she'd be all right, Howard. The first I've heard this data point, like you know who actually loves to call the government to do fraud? Or fraudsters. They're the ones who, first they tip the fake check, and then they call,

and I guess they do like an old lady voice and say, yes, I need more money. So I, the ISO security number is like, I didn't know this is a problem. I knew are there some people who rip off the government? Yeah, I've seen movies. Um, the way I saw Superman three, I know there's ways to rip off people, but they, they, they all turned to this storyline immediately. They've actually most of the money be or 40% Yeah of the money being spent is on fraud is fraudulent checks

Going out to people all of this I just I go back to the election promise from Trump was not you will have to sacrifice anything at all It was gonna be that everything was gonna be back to 2019 levels You were gonna have more money in every capacity. You're gonna to have more jobs. We're going to have cheaper oil. I think cheaper oil might happen because of, uh, because of lack of demand. But none of it was, and we'll have to sacrifice you people, uh, for this in the short term to make things better. So that's whenever I think even as, as popular as Trump kind of is now that

voter who was excited to vote for him in 2020, four and never voted again, why would they come back? You told them they would have a golden age right now. You told them at that piece with Ukraine right now for day one. If you cared about Israel, there was member there was a goth sea fire, but not really. There's all these Trump promises that are not coming true. So they're kind of blaming people for not being happy enough. And if you're if you're skeptical or even asking questions going, where's the jobs? Where's my money?

Where's the global peace and prosperity? The response is you're a fucking piece of shit who's trying to steal from us. Yeah, you're doing fraud Probably we have to look into you. Maybe you were an op-ed we don't like yeah I think there's an emerging political formulation in the type of voter that you're describing here That I think could be summed up the bar stool republican because like that was kind of a thing when they were for trump You know dave portnoy's going on streams now and he's like he's saying the president shouldn't even be golfing when they're the stock market crashes and he's saying they shouldn't be on a signal chat. So like there's an emerging political formation of

They shouldn't be on a signal chat. So like it was, there's an emerging political formation of, uh, young men who voted for Trump because they wanted the money, but now the money has been touched and nobody's getting the money. That is a real constituency, not, but when you think about these young men who were pivotal for Trump, uh, this has probably been over-covered, overrated them. The member of men who grew up, uh, in the nineties and they, they were promised different offer and now they've had to watch all the, all the commercials have too many women in of men who grew up in the nineties and they were promised different offer. And now they've had to watch all the all the commercials have too many women in them,

too many interracial. There's this whole there's a storyline about the young men being left out of this prosperity. And I think that's not crazy. And I know people who at various points invested in GameStop or invested in Bitcoin or or something thinking, look, there's going to be some way out of this rat race. I'm going to find my 1849 gold rush moment. You're not going to take it from me.

I get that. That's pretty powerful. But those people who are not getting it right now in any way, there's nothing that there's nothing those people hoped would happen that was that Trump said on Joe Rogan or what have you that he's pulled off. I'm trying to think of something Trump said this is going to be better. If you really, really hated DEI programs, you didn't want your office to have a which I understand because they're like an hour and they're annoying. There's some stuff that he took away, but nothing that got added.

The idea of the total prosperity did not did not come back. And if you're a port note, you're like, make the culture war stuff go away so I can make more money. Well, he made the culture war stuff go away. It's sort of. But you're not. He's is that the port? I think he's lost like 10 million dollars from his port.

Yeah, it's like 20 million dollars of the money. I mean, if you are, if you are a bit on Duke, I don't know if you're if you're a z-lenial who yeah feels like there is no equivalent to like the real estate Bounty or the wage growth at boomers saw The thing you can point to is that now white shoe law firms have to take on anti-semitism cases Yeah, so if you have one of though if you want to sue Columbia, you can do it for free. Yeah, you can make other people hurt, but then what do you get out of it? Paul Weiss took this deal with Trump,

but it was just him in the Oval Office for three hours talking about golf and then cutting a deal. You didn't get anything from that. Even the Bitcoin Reserve is something that I think that sort of guy heard about during the, not the election, but in the in the interregnum. Oh, this is going to be great. I've had this crypto, I've been sitting on it. It's going up a little bit, but he's going to break down the walls and we're going to buy crypto and that's my ticket. It was like the Iraq dinar all over again. And what was the Bitcoin reserve? It was just, well, we are the government took a bunch of crypto from like crimes. The FBI

has and we're going to put it in one place now. And that's it. We're not going to give restitution. That's not what you wanted. You wanted the government to get by your bags. You'd have a bigger you'd have more stuff. And they didn't get that. I totally agree with you, by the way, that the concept of like the overwhelming use support for Trump is like, to say the very least, like overblown. I think it is, it was an attractive story for people to write articles and do TV segments about, but I really don't think it's like quite the phenomenon

people thought it was. I mean, it does all kind of go back to the way this election was characterized, which was as like a 2008 style blowout, which I really do not think it was. But if there is any Trump constituency that is kind of like that, it is people who, young men in professional positions who begrudgingly had to participate like in the liberal world. We talked about this on Panic World, but it is someone who like they make a pretty good living as like a consultant or a lawyer or whatever the fuck. But their company posted a black square and they have this like stinging humiliation that they had to like match the background radiation of the dominant liberal culture but there's like okay once you get rid of that there's nothing there's like nothing to

be against there's nothing to fight against and now like you cannot get a switch or an iPhone so like what now I don't think the Democrats pick those guys up. Those guys just go back to not voting, which I'm not even sure they were that statistically significant of a group to begin with. Yeah, this came up in some other stuff I did last week where Democrats were, they're all cooperating with the campaign tell-alls and they were saying,

we heard a little bit in 2024. And giving 12 anonymous sources to tell a journalist. Yeah, I think maybe Biden was a little too old to run for president. Oh, yeah. Glad you're protected by anonymity for the for that gem. That's the that's the first thing. And it's they're kind of splitting between we never could have won or we could have won had Biden dropped out earlier. But one thing that came up in a fight, which is the Amy Parnes on Alan book,

is they do they do focus groups for Harris and they talk to young men, especially young black men, about Trump's economic record. And they're like, well, he gave the stimulus check and his name was on it. And he might do that again. And Democrats would try to say, yeah, but we in the House, we funded that. They'd say, I don't know, his Trump's name was on the check. And I'm obsessed with this idea of the Doge dividend check, which I wrote about like a month ago. Another Trump fan said, one with with there's enough money,

savings from Doge, everyone should get a check. And that would be that was already in the bloodstream of Fox. And I don't know about all these podcasts. But I've heard that anecdotally out in the real world, too, of people thinking there's gonna be a doge check. This actually, at Elon's rally in Green Bay, one of the questions is a woman saying, when can we expect the doge check? So there were people just literally thinking Trump is going to paper over their problems with free money.

He's gonna make their investments go up and he's gonna give them free money. And yeah, that's the kind of person like, like Bill had said, why would they come back? Why would they, why would they vote in the midterm for someone else? Well, I mean, like, I wonder if the Democrats will learn a lesson from this, because, you know, one thing that does help paper over a lot of personal and certainly financial problems is getting free money.

It's getting a nice check for doing nothing. And I guess like this is where I was going the question about like the hands off movement and like what the Democrats like, is there a political formation or agenda in the Democratic Party right now that's going to Become a container for the anger and fear that people have about losing their job getting laid off or you know just the the cuts and assaults on civil liberties that the Trump administration is doing because like You know the one hand you have like the sort of Bernie AOC Fight back against the oligarchy then you have the like the Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, the abundance

agenda, the sort of like yin-bin, liberal technocratic agenda. And then you have the House leader, like the, you know, like Jeffries and Schumer, whose, as I was trying to say, like their attitude just seems to be like, let him destroy as much as the country as he can. And like people will get fed up and we'll just, we wouldn't really even have to run for re-election but like would Dave like is there is there a political agenda or like I said container that the Democrats are going to offer that will like speak to the anger and frustration that people feel and like are being manifested now and like I said these

these these protests that we saw over the weekend. They're not totally there yet the whole wait for him to screw up attitude that is the Schumer attitude, but other Democrats, they saw the reaction to Schumer Schumer's crazy on popular now or I talked to candidates for Senate and they often say they can't support him. He can do that, but that's sort of the job of leader to just eat dirt when everyone else is coming up with something. The Sanders AOC pitch at their rallies, those are the ones in Denver, but it was kind of the same speech everywhere. It's actually, I wouldn't say it's not to the right of Bernie 2020, 2016.

It just boiled it down a lot more. So it's not saying here is all the stuff that specifically I'm going to do. And we get the parliamentarian to rule this in order. It's more, these guys are showing that they want, if you lift to their own devices, they would redirect all of our resources for tax cuts for themselves. Instead of those tax cuts,

we suspend trillions of dollars on healthcare, on childcare, on all of your basic needs, so you don't need to worry all the time. And it is repackaging populism as a we've seen what they what they would do with power. What if we took the power, grabbed it with the same ferocity and just started shoveling money back to you and money you earn? That's also part of it.

The rhetoric is that you paid for social security and they're going to try to screw you over so they can give these guys tax cuts. And that Democrats are pretty comfortable with that messaging. I've not seen even the real kind of yours, like the Fed are not saying that sucks. He will complain that they're talking too much about resistance, but he's not, he's not saying stop talking about opposing tax cuts. They're all very happy to do that. But the fight is really not there yet. It's just compared to 2019 or even 17 at this point in 17, Bernie was getting Democrats on board with this Medicare for all bill, like we know how it ended. A lot of them didn't mean it.

They just got on, but the conversation was moving in his direction and he, he, AOC, et cetera, all trying to get it back. Just like, look, we now have a vision. Like every time you want people to think of the opposite of, of social democracy, it's the Trump inauguration with the richest, most unlikable people in the world, all standing behind Trump. Um, that's the opposite of what we're going to do. So they like, we are now the antithesis of that.

And that's, that's something that makes, it makes sense as a campaign, a campaign message, doesn't have much meat on it yet. Yeah. It makes it makes sense as a campaign campaign message doesn't have much meat on it yet Yeah, it does seem like they are doing What the Democratic Party would do? if it were a full-time opposition party Which is trying to create a permanent set of enemies out of these policies

Which is I mean you you would do that if you wanted to keep the party going, you know But I heard a lot from Federman or even. Who's that short one? Jared something. Jared Polis. No, no, no. He's in or Josh Gottheimer. That's all that guy. New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey.

He's running for governor in New Jersey. Yeah. But he's he's running for governor as like as the tax cut candidate, but as the democratic tax and candidate whose ads are all Republicans suck and they're trying to rip you off and I want to give you your money back, even him in a tight race or I guess a primary he's not running as let's go back to moderation. That's he's running on Elon. So they all agree on Elon sucking. That is, that is actually kind of unifying.

It's their version of the Australian dance. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I guess I kind of understand the guys who get mad at the Australian office workers because when I see when I saw Elon Musk put that cheese head on and when I see him jump around like, you know, jump spaz out on stage, like I have a visceral visceral nausea as well.

I mean, it really does show how strong negative polarization has gotten, because like if this was a public figure during the Bush administration, he would be broadly everyone would hate him. Like Bush would be like, I don't want that guy around. He would it would be a famous press conference moment. But now, like if you make fun of him, the cruelest people that are posting videos of moms crying in deportation centers,

if you post a video of him making the X with his body and his fucking gut poking out, these people will go, he has autism and white blooders. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. He's done so much for the world and faces so much cruelty. And then everything else on their feet is like, check out this awesome video of Yemenis getting annihilated by our military. Yeah, the account like single moms dying.

I can't believe how mean people are to this man with a brain problem. By the way, it is it is funny at the moment where I've seen the news reports that like all of the renewed airstrikes on Yemen are like basically having no effect whatsoever. Keep in mind that the cover story for why they're doing this is to preserve the sanctity of global free trade. They're like, we have to protect free trade from the Houthis. Yeah. No, they have committed some pretty horrific crimes. They hit a wedding, which

is a pretty popular US move in Yemen throughout the years and across administrations. But I have seen a report that they're actually running out of munitions. During the first few phases of Operation Amazon Prime, Prosperity Guardian under Biden, one of the most insane things I ever saw was, you know how like in the past fighters or bombers they'll put like the targets they've hit on the side of their planes? Yeah, yeah. Like an ace will have like some planes. The red baron, yeah.

Yeah. Well, for the guys who were deployed for Prosperity Guardian, they would put a marker on their hornets for every time they just fired a missile and didn't hit anything. They would fire a fucking $10 million cruise missile, don't know where it went, don't know what they fired it at,

didn't hit anything anything didn't accomplish anything And they're like put it on the plane. That's another one for me. This is this is great inflation This is this is everyone gets a trophy shit in the US Navy Yeah, there's never gonna be an American ace again, or even maybe an American who hits a target. I don't know All right, should we leave it there for today? Yeah, I am just one more thing about Yemen. I did see that they are planning on or at least alluding to the fact that there are plans for a ground invasion, which is fucking they're really speedrunning

Bush to like, holy shit. And another election promise delivered on. Yeah, I'm going to commit ground troops to a war with Yemen for unspecified reasons Yeah, oh my god. Can you imagine the jelly roll concert? They're gonna have for the guys Yeah, oh is that who that music is for the jelly roll music? I could never figure that out Every time I every time I hear it. I'm I'm perplexed jelly is kind of like, I mean, it will be for victims of the next, American victims of the next US-led war, but currently it's for guys who get addicted to something you can buy at a gas station

and are like, I'm nine hours sober, can I get a retweet Jelly Roll? I'm here to raise money from creative awareness. Yeah, okay. I get it now. All right. Well, good luck with everyone's economic futures. That does it for today's show. Thanks again to Dave Weigel for joining us.

You can follow Dave's reporting at Semaphore. That's right. And X. I'm Dave Bloomberg on X. Please follow me there. All for all breaking financial news. I just want to say that we are announcing season three of Movie Mindset, which will be coming back on April 23rd in just a little over two weeks. So keep an eye out for the schedule of what we will be showing for that season and also where to stream or find or otherwise watch or rent all of the film.

So that information should be up on the Patreon, I don't know, tomorrow whenever I get a chance. Yeah, well, we've already recorded episode one. Felix has a nice guest. And you are not going to want to miss the season premiere of Movie Mindset because we tackle a film that unlike pretty much every other movie we've done on Movie Mindset is probably the most referenced film in the Chapo canon. Easily. I was so happy we got to talk about this one and I really feel like we did it justice. Oh absolutely. I was really happy with it. Yeah I'm really excited for people to see it. I remember when I first started editing this show one of my friends who listened when I told them said that I should engage in a project of recreating this entire

film just by references on the show because I thought it would be possible. Alright well everyone keep an eye, keep your eyes built for movie mindset season three That does it for today's show till next time everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye Oh, oh!