Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari talk about more DOGE cuts, American manufacturing, and other missed stories from the week.

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

On today's Sunday podcast, Isaac and Ari talk tariffs (duh), there's so much more to say, whether Americans really want manufacturing to come back? And then a bunch of stories that we really have not gotten a chance to talk about; Proxy voting, Doge updates, Mahmoud Khalil, a Texas ruling from a Trump appointed judge that's pretty interesting. And a question that Isaac thinks we should all be thinking about: When was the last time you heard a story about abortion? They also discuss the latest interview with Richard Hanania. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances. By the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. All right. Coming up, we talk tariffs. Duh, there's so much more to say. Do Americans really want manufacturing to come back? And then a bunch of stories that we really have not gotten a chance to talk about. Proxy voting, Doge updates, Mahmood Khalil, a Texas ruling from a Trump appointed judge. That's pretty interesting. And a question that I think we should all be thinking about. When was the last time you heard a story about abortion? And then we talk Richard Hananya and I complain about Gmail

while Ari shares a real grievance about his throat. It's a good one. ["Tangle"] From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. ["Tangle"] Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I am here today, Thursday, April 10th, a little bit

more than a week into our great liberated nation with managing editor Ari Weisman. Ari, how are you feeling, man? Host liberation. Man, I am worn down by all this freedom and all this winning. I think our president was right that we would get tired of winning. All the news that I've been hearing for the last couple of days has just been fatiguing. I feel like it's been, we're not through the first hundred days yet. And I feel like we've been through this news cycle a couple of times already of like, tariff announcement. Nah, we're going to roll it back. Can we keep doing this?

Can we keep having this run of headlines happen? I, um, see yesterday, so we're recording this on Thursday and given how quickly the news is changing, I suppose that is going to be more, that context is going to be more and more important with this Sunday podcast that we record a few days in advance. Yesterday was a genuinely transformative day for me in terms of the degree to which I realized so many people in the MAGA movement will treat me like I'm an idiot. I literally don't know how else to say it than that. I always feel like this throat clearing is necessary. I am not some deranged Trump critic. As far as what he says, there's a

lot that he says that I really, really agree with. I don't think he does a great job following through on some of the stuff he says or reacts in ways that I think are counter to his stated goals often, but counter to his stated goals often, but whatever. My politics are all over the place. There's some things about the Trumpism ideology I find really appealing. I think he's right about a lot of really big issues, including trade actually, the border, all different kinds of stuff that are really fundamental to his campaign and to his presidency. But what happened yesterday is like, Oh, like that at least his boosters, like, like what's maybe a different way to say this, what's so interesting now is that Trump's sycophants are less truthful than he is like, it's, it's insane. He, he literally came out, he went on national television. He stood at the White

House and was like, yeah, I was watching Fox News and like, you know, Jamie Dimon, all the, like, JP Morgan people. I was getting phone calls. Everybody was getting a little yippy. They were a little afraid the bond market didn't look great. And so I figured a pause, which I don't know. I think it's just like, did you not expect this to happen? That's not great. This was very clearly going to happen. But at least he just said it. And then I'm watching him do that. And then I'm just on Twitter and it's speaker Mike Johnson being like, the art of the deal. His press secretary is just out there like, apparently you guys never read the art of the deal. Boom. And I'm just like, he literally just said everything's going to shit. And that's why he

just said it. And you're telling me. So I don't know, we're through the looking glass. I don't know what they express. I don't know how to articulate it properly, but I will never be the same after witnessing what I witnessed yesterday where I'm just like, okay, there's just a laundry list of people who I'm crossing their name off the list of ever having credibility with me again because I'm just like, you are telling me that he did something that he himself is saying he did not do very clearly. And I don't know what to do with that. And when you're saying people are telling you that you're an idiot, that's coming from before the announcement, maybe, and also after, before the pause announcement saying things.

He makes this announcement and I'm criticizing him saying, okay, so I guess there wasn't really a plan because everybody knew this was going to cause a huge market sell off and there would be really tough pressures. He was insisting literally five hours before that they would never back down and tariffs were for life and we were going to raise so much revenue from this and whatever. Yeah, tariffs for life. And then I'm like, okay, so no? So I'm criticizing that and then all these people are just like, he didn't fold, he didn't blink. He's doing this because all these countries came to the negotiating table and the whole plan was to isolate China. And I'm just like, he literally just said that he's doing this because people were getting yippy and afraid and we are in a bad way. So they're like telling me I'm an idiot

because I can't understand how brilliant he is when I'm like, I am working off of what he just told me out loud with his own mouth. So- You know, I feel like there I am working off of what he just told me out loud with his own mouth. So you know, I feel like there's the little bit of this element of Trump will do something that upends a model of expectation that we have. And if you're a neutral party or a critical party, you'll say, okay, so the thing that we're told before was wrong. But if you are kind of in the mode of, I'm going to support the president,

I'm on that team regardless, the way of interpreting something that doesn't make sense is, oh, that's brilliant, actually. I didn't expect that. I didn't see that coming. Oh, it's such a 4D chess move. But that's just putting positive spin, I think, on not being able to understand

something that doesn't make sense because it just didn't make sense. It's not like brilliant. It's just a nonsensical thing happened. And there's not like some magical hand wave we can do to say it was China all along because that doesn't square with the things that were told beforehand about this being industrial policy and being a way of raising revenue for the country and for revitalizing our industrial policy. Saying all of that stuff now makes no sense and it's not genius to say it doesn't make sense. It just didn't make sense. Also, like, he was saying that we were getting ripped off by all these countries. Vietnam, Taiwan, you know, like we were getting ripped off by them. Like we were getting ripped off by them within the very strict definition that he put out, which was, we have a trade deficit, so that's wrong.

Like again, all these people trying to tell me what Trump believes and I'm just listening to him talk, saying something that is different from what they're telling me. Without even getting into whether his belief is good or bad or smart or whatever, there's just this totally bizarre thing that happens where all these people are constantly informing me of what the president's view is. And then I listened to the president and his view is not the thing that they have said. I don't know, it's wild. So I guess maybe this is my,

this will be my opening lob. I wonder, so we're, again, things have changed and will continue to change quickly, I presume, but it is Thursday. It is 3.52 PM Eastern time on Thursday afternoon, April 10th. And as we sit here right now, the stock market is selling off again. We're like in a, in an, like this has been a bad trading period today. The treasury yield, the 10-year treasury yield is going up again, which we know the Trump administration really does not want. The other thing that they introduced into the ethers

claiming that it was part of the plan was that they were gonna refinance the debt when the treasury yield fell, which would allow the Fed to reduce interest rates. Now the yield's going up again, so that doesn't seem great. Seems like China and maybe Japan are just dumping government bonds, which is apparently a new way for them to control us, which they've now figured out because we opened the door to this and whatever. And the value of the dollar is falling. That's all happening now,

24 hours after Trump announced that he was reversing course here, pausing the tariffs. So my question, I guess, is what happens if that keeps getting, like what if the yield keeps going up and the stock market keeps selling off and the dollar keeps reducing in value with the tariffs with Canada and Mexico, the 10% broad tariffs and the 154% tariffs against China or whatever they are. By the way, I don't think anything past 100% is real. Just, I, it doesn't, whatever. It doesn't feel real.

Yeah, I was reading some really funny article from an economist just about how there is literally, like he's just like, he has added enough value to the tariffs now where there is no further north to go, but they're just pretending there is like, we'll just slap another 50%, whatever. Anyway, so what happens?

Does Trump, does he back down off this again? Like if this goes on, because we know the stock market collapsing, the treasury yield going up and the dollar falling, the bond market collapsing, all this, that is why he blinked the first time. And if what he just did doesn't change anything, is he going to pull back from the rest of this? Because he might have to if that's the case. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. details at phys.ca.

I think it's worth coming up with some predictions here. We've talked about the value of predictions as something that shows whether or not your understanding of something is accurate and then like battle testing it so you can update it. And I think one of those things is not like the other when we're talking about the like the big three trifecta there of bond market going up, stock market going down and dollar going down, which is the cost of the dollar going down. I don't know if you've read this white paper. I don't know if Trump has. I don't think he's a white paper guy. But I think there are a lot of people in the Trump orbit

who seem to be being influenced by this white paper by Stephen Myron about, quote, a user's guide to restructuring the global trading system. Seems like there's a lot of discussion about that right now and how one of the planks in that is making the price of the dollar go down and being able to do that in a way that isn't going to tank the economy, like somehow threading that needle.

The theory being that you have to try to create a new global compact that nations will sign on to that isn't about access to the US market as much as it is the US being able to invest in growing its own manufacturing center and not having the dollar be as reliant as a piece of global reserve currency, but being something that is just part of an ecosystem. There are parts of it that I haven't read yet, but my basic understanding of it, as basic as it is so far and maybe even more to add, is that devaluing the dollar is actually not a bug in this worldview, but a feature. I don't think the dollar going down is going to make the Trump administration change course.

I think prolonged stocks being down and prolonged bond yield being up will probably drive some changes in tariff policy. I think it's very easy to think about how that it'll happen. They'll just claim success and say, no, we did this. We raised revenues, some amount per day that it's going to be hard to trace or know about for months now into the future and say, like, we did it, success, countries came to the table, we got negotiations, we're moving on. But I don't think the dollar's going to be part of that. Yeah. I, okay. I guess my, yeah, there's a lot there. First of all, I think in the realm of predictions, maybe there's sort of a binary question. Does he de-escalate or continue to escalate? Trump is talking, I mean, there aren't that many cards to play, but he's talking about

delisting Chinese companies from the stock exchanges in the US now. Fox News is reporting that, that he's looking into that. So- Can he do that? Is that a thing the president can do? I don't know. Yeah, maybe that's where, like, what are we, is everyone cool with this? This is how the system works? I mean, I joked around in the newsletter today, but literally some dork with Bloomberg in his Twitter bio moved $4 trillion of stock market wealth with a fake tweet. And I was- you know, yeah.

I mean, I am in these, you know, my various bro chats where, you know, your friends are watching the market or whatever. And I actually am in a chat just mostly out of curiosity and like interest in learning with these guys who were commodity straighters and they were making moves off that tweet for like 20 minutes. And then it was like, has that, you know, and then I, I never say anything, rarely say anything in the chat. I'm just kind of watching whatever. And then I just posted like,

guys, I don't think that quote is real. Because I was doing like not the technical financial response, but just the journalism side. Like, I think this guy bungled this, nobody seems to know where it is. And then like, in the moments I'm realizing that the market realizes it and like the whole thing. And I'm just like, this, yeah, this isn't, this isn't right. This isn't how it should be. Trump should not be able to post something on truth social that makes a $500 billion business

gain $50 billion of wealth in an instant. Like that just doesn't seem right to me. To be fair, that's not him in that instance, but it is his ability to do it that allows somebody to make a wrong tweet that then moves markets in this case. The tariff pause announcement did do that and the initial announcement of the tariffs did it in the opposite direction. The fact that he has the ability to do that at all means that a guy with Bloomberg in his name can misinterpret a Fox News interview and then make a tweet and then a lot of people can jump on it and it'll take us 20 minutes to figure out what happened. And in that time, money's changed hands in mysterious ways. It does not seem right. Yeah. I guess I'm just like, does Congress, is there anybody left who cares? I guess there's

like 15 senators and a few House Republicans and a few House Democrats if we take the co-sponsorship of bills as in, what's that? In Rand Paul. Well, yeah. I mean, like, yeah. If I had a couple big takeaways from this entire, you know, the last 24 hours in the last week, it's like, one, the president should not be able to do any of this unilaterally. I mean, something against Trump, but really just more against the executive branch and the insanity of what this, just like this, yeah, Congress has to approve tariffs against all the, you know, five countries. Like any other taxation. Right. Yeah.

Let's give them the power of the purse, like we promised, like the founder said, that seems right. Two, the Trump sick offense will literally invent things that the president said or did to justify his actions that he will immediately undermine and they will pretend that he didn't just undermine it. And they are doing that to a degree that I never thought I would see now. And three, for me, is we sort of just showed our hand with some of our big trading partners and adversaries that we have this big weak point, which is we have a ton of debt, some of which they own in the form of US bonds, and they can use those bonds as leverage against us because they can even make Trump squeamish by dumping US bonds.

And that is not a great development. And it's sort of new. It's not like they didn't know that, I guess, but it's sort of new territory that is being, uh, uncovered for the first time. So, um, yeah, not great. Super not pumped about a lot of the stuff that's happening, but I guess that's kind of, uh, where we're at. I don't know that Congress is going to do anything.

There's some legislation floating around out there to pause emergency powers or put a time cap on the tariffs or whatever else, but it doesn't seem like there's quite enough momentum to really make that a thing. I think we're living a little bit in Trump's world now, at least in terms of what's going to motivate members of Congress from the right. Then from the left, I don't know, are we still living in Chuck Schumer's world where he's not going to suggest any kind of action until some approval rating dips below a level?

Are we just waiting for that? We're quietly in the Chuck Schumer abyssal zone between 40 and 50 percent presidential approval weight rating. When we dip low enough, that's when the anglerfishes of the Senate are going to come out to start feeding. Maybe that's going to happen. That's what I'm thinking Congress is going to do is wait until the approval ratings are low and low enough. Otherwise it's just going to be more, no, we're going to follow the president. We have the majority. That's what we're doing.

Stick to it. Stick to the line. So I'm not holding my breath for Congress to act. Even if we get there, even if we enter the Chuck Schumer abyssal zone, I don't think it's going gonna happen. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. With the Fizz loyalty program you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan, you know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan,

you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Maybe worth just adding here the, or talking for just a moment about one of the justifications that we've heard over and over about all of this, which is to bring American manufacturing back. This is a really interesting one, and I'll tell you why, or interesting for me, I guess.

I'm actually kind of a sucker for the nostalgia play here. When I hear Trump or people in his administration talk about the hollowed out American towns in the Midwest, our beloved Pittsburgh, actually Pittsburgh is an account, it really reinvented itself and it's changed, it's different. Thank you for that. But yeah, but like, you know, some hollowed out smaller towns in Western Pennsylvania or, you know, Ohio across? One man, one

job, 50 grand a year, three kids, two bedroom house, and college paid life, you know? And yeah, I hear that and I'm kind of in. I'm like, yeah, what did happen to that? You know? You know, there's some, yeah, you're building. Well, I was just going to say, and then like, I've sort of been challenging that, I've been going out and challenging that emotional response I have to that. I'm learning that there's just so much wrong with a lot of it. First of all, nobody ever really runs the counterfactual of like, okay, what would have happened if we never de-industrialized? Like is our, is the middle class life better now? Probably not.

We probably, we're probably like tons of stuff is way more expensive. We all have less. that environment's dirtier and a bunch of Americans are still working in backbreaking, super hard labor jobs. I mean, we have that still, but even to a much higher degree rather than in the services industry. And is that a better outcome? I don't actually think so. So that's one.

And then the second thing is just the economics of it don't really translate, which is something that I didn't totally understand. I just never really stopped to think about it. Jessica Riedel, one of the conservative economists who I'm really fond of, she had this funny response to, I think it was Howard Mutnick or one of the Trump advisors talking about this on Fox News. She was like, I can't believe we're still doing this. The 1954 house that you're talking about was a thousand square feet and it had no AC. The car you were driving was a total gas guzzler.

You had one black and white TV. You went out to eat once a month. Your kids owned eight total outfits. Vacations were to a local beach and never further than that. Forget technology, flights, long distance calls, et cetera. Like the nostalgia for this life that you're talking about is so different and so much less than what your typical middle-class American has now.

And that sort of punctured it for me in a way where I was, it just like snapped me out of the haze and I was like, oh yeah, no, duh. Like this is way better, obviously, but it took me a while to get there. I think it takes everyone a second, to be honest. Like I think it's something you always have to remember to do. Otherwise you can easily slip back into it. I had a good exchange with one of my friends who said, there's this rhetorical question of when Trump says, make America great again, what is

the again he's referring to? And you sort of conjured up ideas of post-World War II, baby boom, like moving to the suburbs and creating Levitt towns like in Newt Long Island in Pennsylvania and having houses that everyone can move into 2.1 kids etc his theory my friend was that the age that We're getting asked to remember. Here's the Gilded Age like 1900s 1890s turn of the century American Empire

that's when McKinley as a representative in Congress was pushing for tariffs as a way of controlling US manufacturing. That's before McKinley was then president, pushing for American Empire and expansionism. There are aspects of that time period that are absolutely fascinating, especially in light of, we've talked a little bit in the newsletter about how tariffs have been a classically left-wing tool as a means of protectionism, burgeoning the working class. In thinking about the current moment on the left where there isn't a ton happening, but the one headline that I think we see driving the left currently is the book, Abundance,

by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which is like this new liberalism idea of we should build more and we have to admit that Democrat-run cities and states haven't been building a lot and have been failing in lots of ways. So we needed an abundance agenda and that's sort of a new thing on the left. And when you think about the 1890s, 1900s, like by God, that was an abundant time. In a lot of ways it was, in a lot of ways we had a lot of poverty, like childhood literacy rates and birth rates or rather like childhood mortality was super high. Like those are things obviously you have to try to remember or you romanticize them away.

The thing that you think about is we were building the Empire State Building in less than a year. Brooklyn Bridge was built in less than a year. But you have to remember that 20 people died when we built the Brooklyn Bridge because we didn't understand compression sickness yet and we didn't have any Department of Labor or labor laws. There are a lot of things that we were able to build like transcontinental railroad and industry.

We're able to do all that because we didn't understand the negative adverse effects yet. Even in the 50s in that time period when like we're building the interstate system which is this amazing work of infrastructure. We've also inherited a lot of the downstream effects of that that would make us probably not want to do it again, like the ruining of the American downtowns and how it just cut right through disenfranchised neighborhoods, like things that the left wouldn't want to

repeat. But, you know, we've kind of gone full circle in this moment where we're thinking back onto these eras about what we'd want to do again, not just on the right but on the left too, and saying what are things we can add back? What are things we can do again? And I do think we have to take a second and remember, oh right, like this era of manufacturing, whether it's the 1950s or the 1900s, that existed in a time when we didn't have, like

we just barely had antibiotics in the 1900s. That existed in a time when we didn't have, like we just barely had antibiotics in the 1900s. We didn't think the literacy rate and survivorship of like infant diseases were so low in the 50s. And we've gotten so much better at those things. Household wealth has exploded. We like, I have a house that has 15 inch walls. If I had my house built in the 1950s, it would be drafty as hell and I'd have to wear five layers inside until May. We don't have to do that stuff anymore. To your point, I think, developing an industrial policy based off of assumptions from the 1900s or 1940s, post-war booms, aren't modern for a reason. It's tough to remember what those reasons are. McKinley, his tariffs set that movement back. We're seeing that same thing happen now with

a tariff movement as a means of industrial policy is going to hurt the economy in a way that's going to set those movements back. If we need a forward-looking industrial policy is going to hurt the economy in a way that's going to set those movements back. If we need a forward-looking industrial policy, it's going to have to be one in the globalism sphere, like in an interconnected global world. We have the nostalgia play on this idea that we're going to bring back US manufacturing and that will necessarily bring back these old jobs and the old way of life that's so improved or whatever. I'm just really unconvinced that Americans actually want that when push comes to shove. I am sitting here in my very white collar job as a podcast host thinking like, yeah, it would be great if we had more manufacturing plans for other people to go work in them. I don't want that job.

I'm sure Phoebe doesn't want to just stay at home all day either. Right. But I just feel like everybody's saying that. Like, everybody's, you know, like Howard Lutnick isn't like, I can't wait to get back in the steel plant. He's like, there's American workers out there somewhere who want those jobs. And then you just talk to, you know, like I have tons of working class friends. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription, or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets

you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad-free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just wanna say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. Isaac and Ari will be here for the Sunday podcast,

and I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Morehead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website

at reedtangle.com. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.