The Bulwark Podcast - Catherine Rampell: Who Are the Socialists Now?

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

It’s hard to find a better example of seizing the means of production than our government seizing an equity stake in a company—which Trump keeps doing over and over again. And what do the diehard Republican capitalists have to say about all this socializing of the private sector? Nothing, of course. But they definitely were up in arms over Bill Kristol saying he’d probably vote for Mamdani if he still lived in NYC, and that voting for Cuomo was ridiculous. Plus, the crypto-based bribery of Trump and his family is flourishing, SNAP cuts and Head Start closures will have a big impact on rural areas, businesses have been trying to find ways to lower their tariff burden since Trump won last November, and the potential ties between recent layoffs and the AI arms race. The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell joins Tim Miller for the Halloween weekend pod.  show notes Tim's playlist Tim's Halloween playlist

Happy Halloween alone, welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Couldn't be more excited to welcome a former syndicated opinion columnist at the Washington Post. But she'll be joining us at the Bullwark next week as an economics editor and writing a weekly newsletter called Receipt. She's also a co-host of Eminem. NBC's The Weekend Prime Time and a new mom. Lots happening for Catherine Rampel.

Welcome aboard, Catherine. Great to be here. We're former Republicans, so we are, we're working you before you're getting paid. You start November 1. I was like, I want, I'm sorry, it's a Saturday, so I'm making her work a day early. Off of maternity leave, the whole thing. I'm very excited to start, so it's all right. I'll do some pro bono work for you.

We're pumped to have you. For the people who don't know, Catherine Rampel. Impel. Can you give us a little, you know, just first date, penny tour of your life? Of my life. Yeah, sure. Just had a couple highlights. I don't know. How did you become an economics editor? So I knew I wanted to be a journalist from a very, very wee age, which turns out to be an advantage in a shrinking industry. So I did the journalism thing, internships and whatnot, like starting in high school. I ended up in economics.

journalism because I worked for an economist in college, Alan Kruger, who passed away a few years ago. And when there was an opening at the New York Times in 2008 for someone to like start an economics blog, there were not that many people in journalism who knew about econ. I was about a year out of school. I had done a, you know, a couple of different jobs in various internships prior to that. but somebody at the times got my name from this guy I used to work for and said, you might want to check out my former R.A. She knows something about econ, which turned out to be really advantageous given that the sky was falling 2008, for those who may not remember, was the middle of the financial crisis.

So, yeah, good time to know about economics. That's always the story with journalism, right? that it's like when the world is going to hell on your beat, it's really good for your career. So it creates some perverse incentives, probably, if you had any control over the world. And Alan Kruger, I take it, was a neoliberal shill. I'm sure some people would refer to him that way. He worked for the Obama administration and the Clinton administration in various capacities. And he was a well-known labor economist who studied the minimum wage, among other things.

So against or four? He did this landmark study. I want to say it was in the early 90s or late 80s with David Card, finding that raising the minimum wage actually did not reduce employment. Yeah. If you raised it by a little bit, it could actually result in basically more efficient allocation of workers. Well, hot damn.

Yeah, if you... So much it would send that study to Jeff Landry, probably, my governor. Basically, it is taught in every introductory econ class. Although he was not working on that when I was working for him. He was like working on the economics of rock and roll and the economics of terrorism. So pretty different stuff. But he was a fun guy to work for. The other kind of element of this, I mean, look, the Bork is a great place to work.

You come in, you're starting. It's Halloween. I'm in a red beans hat, you know. It's a little silly. We need to talk about that, by the way. Yeah, no, I just got to have. I wanted to be, you know, in spirit. My costume, actually.

Do you have a costume for tonight? Do you have a plan? I am guest hosting a show on MSNBC. Are you going to be in costume? I don't know. I kind of want to get into the spirit, but I also don't want to look ridiculous on air. I think you should just get some cat ears or devil ears or something. That's what I was thinking.

Just get some little ears. That's what I was thinking. But if you have other suggestions for me, let me know. I'm geese for Halloween. I'm multiple geese. There's a hot band right now called geese. And so I have a two-two and make. any geese on my body and also a guitar.

It's an inside joke. My daughter's a pirate. So we're thrilled. I had a couple of theme ideas for Halloween that she rejected. It sucks. I mean, just enjoy it while it lasts when they're a baby and they do whatever you want, you know? Yeah, I was going to say, my daughter is three months old and cannot voice an objection. So she's going to be a chicken, whether she wants to be on and not.

Yeah, I love that. I think Toulouse's first one, she was a fox. But we are three Britannies one year, three different Britannies. Spears costumes, and it was the best, and I'm never going to be able to recreate it until she just accepts that my theme ideas are better. Anywho, we got off track. You don't have that kind of conversation, the Washington Post. Leaving the post for the bulwark, you understand the benefits of here, but I think it does say something about the state of our affairs that you have, like across the board, and we're going to get into this in other areas, like these,

like the richest people in the world that you would think would have the most FU money have decided in a lot of areas to, like, at least publicly facing, suck up to Trump and do things to get a pat on the head from the aspiring autocrat. And, like, to me, like, that is as much of the story about what happened as opposed to anything. Like, Jeff Bezos could have just turned it into a money sink and it could have been something focused on investigations, et cetera. And he is, like, not alone here. Like, he's just one of a lot of these guys that have decided, like, sidling up to Trump is the answer. I wonder what you make of that. Look, I don't know anything more about what Bezos has in mind for the Post than what he said publicly. He says he thinks he's going to win back

the trust of audiences by having more conservative voices or whatever they are on the op-ed page. If that is his genuine plan, I don't think it's going to work, particularly since I don't think that they're not really conservative voices a lot of the time. Some of them are, you know, like Trump administration officials. But I wish them well. So there are, you know, more charitable and more cynical ways to interpret what's going on over there. I still have colleagues who I really respect both on the opinion side and on the news side. So it was not the right choice for me to stay for a host of reasons. But, you know, the Post has been a great institution for many, many years. and still does great investigative reporting.

They've lost a lot of talent, but they're still getting scoops these days. So, you know, for the sake of the people who work there, for the sake of the legacy of that institution, and for the sake of democracy, frankly, I hope that the Post continues to do great journalism. I hope that as well. My optimism is maybe waning, but, you know, it's nice that it's our gain,

you know, is the way I'm going to look at it. So let's do like what we're going to do with you periodically from time to time here. Talk about what's happening in the economy and how that's affecting our politics. Just at the biggest level, what is your take on kind of the macro state of where we're at economically? Because I do think there's some mixed kind of signals out there. Yeah. So I would say the economy is chugging along. We haven't gone into, as far as we can tell, like the dreaded recession that may have come from a lot of the Trump actions, you know,

sort of own goals so far this year. But it is fragile. And I'll give you a few examples of what I mean by that. I was talking with a guy who has run a business for about 20 years. It's like probably a $100 million, $200 million revenue business. He imports a lot of goods from China. And he has basically spent the entirety of this year figuring out how to reduce his tariff burden. Like last year, he paid about $1 million in tariffs. This year, he's expecting to pay about $15 million in tariffs. And he has spent... Now, that's a big jump. I'm not a math major. Yeah. Well, it gets worse. He said that he's basically spent all of his time trying to make sure they didn't have a $115 million dollar tariff bill, which they very well could have if they had timed things wrong, right?

Because tariffs have gone up and down and up and down. And it's been really hard to know, like, if you relocate from one place to or not, you go out of China to India or to Colombia or any other country, will it actually help you or not? And for the products that he makes, he makes, he sells artificial Christmas trees. This is not a business that can exist in the United States because it's very, labor intensive because they're pre-lit and they have like little light strings that go through them.

Anyway, the company is called Balsam. I don't know. Howard Nettlux has said when he's dreaming of America where there's generations of people screwing in little screws on iPhone. You could screw in the little bulbs on the tree on the fake trees. Threading little lights on the trees. Now, I'm not, again, this is more your area of expertise than mine, but generally speaking as a government, you don't want to set policy where like business owners spend all of their time trying to avoid the various bills that you're charging them.

Yes. This is one business, obviously, but I've talked with others that have kind of voiced similar concerns, that companies should be spending their time thinking about new products or new customers, how do they get efficiencies, where can they invest, things like that, and not make the guy who's in charge of, like, tariff reduction, the main profit center of the company, which is sort of how it works at a lot of places right now because there's so much uncertainty and because it's just, it's really, it's really hard to plan. And I go back to thinking about if Trump had just come into office and done nothing, if he had just gone out and

played golf every day rather than, you know, rage tweeting or truth posting or whatever, true social posting every three minutes about a new thing he was offended by and therefore it was a national emergency requiring tariffs. The economy would probably be doing a lot better by now. And that's not just me speaking. Economists have said this. Essentially, the Federal Reserve has said this. But the tariff stuff alone has been really damaging. It's not only tariffs. It's also immigration policies, which are creating uncertainty and potentially soon labor shortages in a fair a number of industries. Again, not only me saying this, Trump's own Department of Agriculture has said that the fact that they've been going after immigrants and agricultural sites

is likely to be raising food prices, produce prices. So we're like tariffing the tomatoes when they come over from Mexico and then we're rounding up the immigrants who are out in the fields or whatever getting tomatoes or processing chicken or what have you. And And all of that's going to contribute to higher prices. And one thing that I always like to emphasize when I'm talking about the consequences of these changing immigration policies is that it's not only people who are undocumented who are getting swept up in this dragnet. It's lots of people who have documents who are being effectively deducmented in some cases, like they're people who have various kinds of legal status. Now, TPS or they're asylum seekers or they're on parole, like all

of these things that Americans shouldn't have to care about because it's a really technical opaque system. But the upshot is these are people who have legal ability to work, legal permits to work, and Trump is taking them away. And there have been a bunch of things even just this week that will probably make it harder for, like, doctors to continue working legally in this country. Like, besides the humanitarian effects of all of this, there are a lot of disruptions to the economy. And I think some of the cracks are showing up from all of that. Yeah. One of the areas there was cracks that's kind of related to all those things you just talked about, the labor shortages and tariffs, etc. There's a Times article earlier this week that said during the first quarter of 2025, Iowa's GDP contracted at a 1.2% annual rate. I know it was kind of before like a lot of this stuff was happening. There are definitely some signs that particularly in rurals and red parts of the country, like things are worse on balance than it is in other places that are being kind of propped up by AI investment and data science. centers, et cetera. Like, what is your sense for that? Like, are people feeling the pain more at this

point in certain pockets of the country? Yeah, there are a bunch of things that are affecting people in more rural areas. I mean, and to be fair, rural areas have struggled well before Trump came into office. But he also came into office promising to help them in particular. Yes, exactly. They were more likely to be his people because they were more likely to vote Republican. So immigration, snap benefits lapsing. There's a school nutrition program that was basically defunded that involved lots of food that came from farmers that would be going to schools. The shutdown has resulted in problems for people trying to get farm loans. Then if you look at things like other shutdown consequences, head starts are today. We're talking on October 31st.

Halloween. Tomorrow is November 1st. A bunch of headstarts around the country are going to have a lapse in funding. This is like a pre-K program for low-income families. A lot of, like I was talking with the head start director for the state of Washington. And he said that several of the headstarts that were going to have a lapse in funding starting tomorrow are in rural areas where there are no other child care options. So you'll have the kids who are enrolled in those programs. And not have care, and then their parents won't have the care so that they can work. So they're all of these cascading effects. And like I said, some of these affect people in non-rural areas, too.

But it will be especially felt by those in rural areas. And then you have like, you know, I was talking about tariffs. It's not only that we have tariffs on the stuff that farmers buy, like equipment and fertilizer. For example, there are retaliatory actions like China has stopped buying American soybeans, basically entirely, whereas China was, I think, still the biggest customer for American soybean farmers. Trump met with President Xi this week and said, oh, they're going to start buying soybeans again, big victory because Trump is great at, like, repackaging the prior status quo as victory.

But the whole reason that they stopped buying was because of his trade wars. So it's, you know, it's, again, like the arsonist demanding... They're buying less, I saw, actually. We've gone from 27 million to 25 million metric tons. That's the art of the deal. Yeah, yeah, again, it's the arsonist demanding praise for his firefighting skills. That's the whole Trump M.O. I want to talk about the snap stuff more.

It's like, I was just closing a loop on the tariffs. I was reading a Wall Street Journal article that just kind of is an overview of where we're at because there's some new tariffs that come in in November. Like, it's hard to keep track. It's all really such a whirlwind. It is. But there's a new round of tariffs that come in November 1st, in addition to some of the shutdown stuff we've been talking about.

The tariffs on Canada is going to rise, tariffs on China. It's going to come down a little bit, still really high. You know, it's kind of funny. It's like if you would have told people, I think, November of last year after he won, that the tariffs on China were going to be, whatever, 47%. I think people would have thought that was a catastrophic. Right? And, like, now it's kind of pitched as, well, like, he's easing his trade war on China. I know. It's a real overton window shifting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the average rate

is pretty high. So anyway, like, what is your assessment of like where we're at just like on the tariffs, like where things are getting worse or or not? Well, certainly the numbers are not good. And to your point, last year when Trump was still running for president, I believe he, I'm sure, it's been so long. It feels so long. Anyway, what did he say he was going to have like a 10% global tariff? Yeah, I think so. And somebody said to me yesterday, can you believe it was one year ago that we were in New York for the election?

And I was like, that was only one year ago. I know. Every day is a year. But anyway, it was like 10% markets did not believe was going to happen because it would be too crazy. And now we are way worse than that all around the world. So not good. Again, this comes back to this question of like, why is the.

economy, not in this dire recession that a lot of people had feared or forecast. And I think it's partly that companies planned for it to the extent that they could. So like Christmas tree guy that I mentioned, he, as soon as the election was determined last year, he placed an order for Christmas trees from China. So this is November of last year. He got the Christmas trees in hopes of getting a bunch of inventory in before Trump took office. And a lot of other companies, did the same thing, cars, auto companies, for example. Basically, companies that sell durable goods, things that are not going to perish. So a lot of companies had inventory that they've been working through, and now they're having to replace it. And they're having to spend all this

time figuring out, okay, can we move this production from this country to this country? Do we have to have the boats, like, circle the port for a while? Do we have to have the things go into the warehouse. Like all of this stuff, again, that is just like a complete waste of time, effort and money when they could be planning on doing more productive things. So some firms were able to like tread water for a while. And I think you're going to see some of that inventory run out. And so they're going to have to deal with a new tariff environment. And then other places like other companies, if you sell tomatoes, for example, again, we have like a new tariff on Mexican tomatoes, completely separate from all of these other tariffs that we're talking about

for some reason. You can't really stock up on those so easily because they go bad. So I think we are starting to see some of the price consequences, and you can see it in the data, although I should say, like, data is hard to come by right now because there's a shutdown. They did have one inflation report that they decided to do during the shutdown. But like, who knows how long the shutdown will go on? And coincidentally, it may continue. while the numbers start would have gotten a lot worse. And it's not just in prices. It's also in other parts of the economy where you're seeing issues.

So like data centers, you mentioned, are doing really well. This is like for AI, big investment in data centers to support the AI industry. That is largely keeping the economy afloat, but other kinds of investment, not doing so well. Jobs are, we're not like seeing net losses yet. And, you know, hopefully we won't. But there are some big companies that have announced layoffs, Target, Amazon, I'm trying to remember who else announced just this week, but a bunch of them. Paramount.

Paramount. Paramount. Yeah. It's fired a lot of people. UPS. Yeah. And so some of this is like it may just be like one-off things that are completely unrelated to the overall kind of, maybe they're related to AI, maybe they're related

to it like a company rearranging its business. Who knows? But the more of those you see, that's more concerning. And I don't think, at the very least, that the trade wars are helping the job market. So if the AI data sensors are holding this rickety deal up, did you have any hot takes in the AI bubble talk? I guess I would say what we're seeing right now is this huge arms race, right? Because like a lot of companies, I think, assume maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly, that it's going to be a winner take all. situation that like they have to get the best possible AI because like a slight advantage

in your software or whatever will confer like huge benefits you're just going to take overtake the market kind of in the same way that like Google had a slightly better algorithm for search and just blew everyone else away like being second place didn't do you any good and so you're seeing this huge arms race because everybody feels like being did pretty good okay it took me that long to come up with the joke I was like what was Microsoft search called Bing I don't know where it came from in my brain yeah speaks very highly of its customer loyalty right there

so anyway so what might happen now like maybe there'll be a winner take all and everybody else is just going to like pull out and say screw it cut our losses like we're done investing and we give up and we're going to pursue other things, in which case you would see potentially a big implosion in the economy, or at least in that sector of the economy, which could have knock-on effects. Because, like, not only is this AI investment keeping up propping up hard investment in the economy, but also, like, the stock market. So that would be bad.

The question is we don't really know. Like, maybe it's not a winner-take-all kind of market. And maybe it just continues. Like, it's definitely the case that. AI will transform large parts of the economy, including the labor market. And there are potentially a lot of gains to be had. A lot of people will get displaced, too. And again, like, that might be part of the reason we're seeing some of these white collar jobs getting cut recently. So there'll be some creative destruction, which is a callous way to say people are going to

lose their jobs. But it will be pretty transformative. And you'll, you know, potentially see big productivity gains in the economy. We'll see. So the question is just like, is the amount of gain that would be expected from whatever this arms race results in bigger or smaller than the amount of money that's being invested into it now? Yeah. And right now, it seems like there's a lot of money chasing after maybe not as much gain, but it's, I don't know, this is not really a hot take.

This is like a, it's like a lukewarm take. It's like a lukewarm take. I think it's really hard to know, but yeah, I think it's not great that this sector is like the only thing, or one of the few things growing in this economy. Yeah, I don't think that chat GPT would be rolling out the sex bots if they thought that there were like gains, like productivity gains coming immediately. It doesn't seem like the activity of a company that thinks that it's going to totally disrupt the whole economy when they feel like we've got a, we need to roll out a couple new products, including AI. sex friends, you know? Well, you know, there's maybe some big money there, too. Who knows?

There's money to be made there, no doubt. But I just, you know, I mean, I think that that's also already kind of baked into the market. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of competitors in the space, et cetera. Back to the snap stuff. So tomorrow is when the, it's not actually legally, but like where essentially the Trump administration has said, we're going to stop paying SNAP benefits, even though there is a reserve in place. They're interpreting that law incorrectly, purposely, I guess, to try to put

pressure on the Democrats, I think, to come to the table. It seems like something that's backfiring to me. There's a lawsuit out there, so this might get stopped. But in the meantime, you know, there are going to certainly be some people that are losing access to the EBT cards that they use or, you know, it's going to hurt food banks. Like, there's going to be big issues related to snap. Trump is now out this morning saying that he thinks that the Congress should just break the filibuster and just go through, which I think has some interesting potential implications. So I'm just wondering your view on the whole state of life. Again, a lot of people are going to be hurt by this, including a lot of Trump voters in rural areas, among other places. And I would love if they were not pawns in all of these machinations, as you point out,

It certainly looks like the administration has a way to help people without resorting to either breaking the filibuster or other laws being passed. Like there have been bills that have been proposed, including I think at least one sponsored by a Republican, by a Republican, to like basically allow SNAP funding to go out as the rest of the government is shut down. but you don't need to pass a law. Right. Trump can do it on his own and he's electing not to. So it feels like this is all a little bit of a fig leaf to do other kinds of institutional damage and maybe use hungry people as a low-income hungry people as a political football in all of this, which, again, is unfortunate.

To me, it seems like a huge political mistake. You know, a lot of times I understand what they're doing. I think that, like, they're doing a lot of stuff on immigration. and tariffs that are also politically harmful, but they're Trump hobby horses. So I can make sense why they're doing that. In this case, it's like,

in addition to a lot of red states using the SNAP program and MAGA voters, which is something people have discussed, like, I think at nauseam, like on top of that, though, a lot of people that just don't pay attention to the news

and aren't like engaged that much, like low income folks who are like just trying to live their life and like parent and how it's like, it's hard. Like if you're, if you're like in a situation, where you're living paycheck to paycheck are less than that and like you're needing assistance Trump did well with those that like type of voter like the one of the things that got

missed I think from the that deciding to win study that was out there this week about how the Democrats can do better was something I don't think is really sunk in with a lot of Democrats yet because it's changed from how things used to be it's like depending on whose data you look at like if everybody if there'd been forcible voting Trump would have won by potentially a lot more, again, depending on his data. But like somewhere between four and like 15 points or something. Trump would have won't about a lot more because the types of folks who are, you know, displaced, not trusting the system, like, you know, not engaging in a lot of news.

Like they smooth from being if they voted likely Democratic voters to if they voted likely Trump voters. So there are a lot of people who like have like decently positive feelings of Trump, who aren't following the news and are going to go to their grocery. store and not be able to get the food that they need. And they're going to be fucking pissed. Yeah. And they're probably not aware of why because most people who are not like you and me

paid to follow the news are not paying attention to all of this. And it is. And they're not going to be like, oh, it's the Schumer shutdown because they only have 53 votes and not 60 and there's a filibuster. Exactly. That's not how those, that's not how folks are going to interpret. Understandably, right? Like most people don't have the bandwidth for all of this.

And I think what's going to happen is they're going to show up at the grocery store. They're going to try to swipe your EBT card and it's not going to have any money on it. And they're not going to understand why. And the question is, how do they interpret that outcome? Like, to whom do they attribute blame? And I don't know what the answer to that is. It might just be like general ire at the system, at the government. And Trump is in is the head of all of it.

that, but he's also, like, running it, you know, he's always characterized as, like, he's not, he's not a politician. Like, he's, he's, he's, he's anti-establishment. Like, he is the establishment now, but whatever. So I don't exactly know how that'll be mediated. I think this is definitely an opportunity for Democrats to try to message what's going on. But they have a difficult message to explain, too. Not really on the snap thing, though, it's the other benefit. Like, it's a little bit more challenging on the other stuff than it is on the snap. Well, they'll say, I mean, they are the ones effectively preventing the, who have the additional votes that could get a CR passed, right? And they are saying we are not going to give those votes unless we get some other things in exchange, including an extension of the enhanced premium tax credits for people who are on Obamacare plans and also some other language that would basically make it harder for Russell vote to the OMB director to continue.

unilaterally impounding funds and, like, not spending money that Congress, that's even more complicated for them to message. And there's a reason why they're not running on it. They're running on health care. You know, they're messaging on health care. Which is why, like, to me, the point is the snap thing, it's like, they could be paying you, but they're not. Yes. That seems like it should be a clear message, but how it'll be heard, I don't know, because Republicans are saying, like, oh, it's Democrats who are keeping the government shut down. And then you have to explain, well, there are a contingency fund. Like, I don't know. One of my most deeply held beliefs is that complexity rewards demagogues.

And it's true. I mean, it's why I have a job that there's a lot of complexity in the system and like plenty of things for me to try to translate and explain. But it also means that the people who like have ill will who want to exploit opacity in the system and complexity in the system and just give you their own narrative, like they have advantage. So the question is, like, again, how do normal people interpret all of this? Do they hear the Trump version of things, which is like Democrats just won't open the government? Do they hear the democratic narrative, which I think is closer to the truth, which is Trump doesn't need to,

you know, we don't need to open the government in order for these payments to go out. And I don't know. Or do they hear none of it? Or they hear none of it. And just blame an answer like, well, Trump is in charge. Yeah. And this is potentially. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of things like this where predicting where attribution is going to fall is hard. It's like not just with these short-term crises, but longer-term things like if there's an investment in a new battery plant that was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill or whatever, but it doesn't happen for a few years and it happens when Trump is president, like who gets credit for the ribbon cutting?

Oh, that's the easy one. Trump gets credit for that one. Yeah, that's just our terrible life. Imagine how happy, like, the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party will be if Trump breaks the filibuster over this. Like, the activist left will be like, this has been the most effective shutdown in history if they end up getting the filibuster scalp out of it.

I guess. Well, this is always the reason why Republicans, the last reason why Republicans haven't killed it, right? Because it's like they don't want the filibuster to be gone when Democrats, are in charge and have a vote to make abortion legal or whatever. TBD, okay. I want to ask you about some other stuff. Like, who are the socialists now?

Socialism is in the news with your potential new mayors, Zoran Mondani, being a Democratic socialist. But there's a news item here that Trump officials unveiled a strategic partnership with Westinghouse and nuclear fuel provider, Kainko? Kinko, is that how do you say it? An investment giant? anyway, to spur new nuclear plants, which I support. But I was interesting to note that the deal gives the U.S. government a participation interest

entitling it to 20 percent and including a provision for potential future equity. They've done this several times, Intel, Navidia, we have golden share now in U.S. Steel. I could go on and on. It all seems kind of China-ish to me. Yeah. Well, that's because it is. I think of what's going on right now as Trump is. is basically privatizing the state and socializing the private sector, and the common link

between those things is like he has a lot more control of money going into and out of the government and also into and out of private companies. It is hard to imagine how apoplectic Republicans would be right now if, like, a President Sanders or President AOC or somebody like that did these things. Presumably they would... Reverse Zucati Park at the Wall Street Journal offices. A reverse Occupy Wall Street. There'd be men in suits living in a park outside the White House, I think.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It's hard for me to know if this is just like Republicans have decided that they actually don't care about this stuff anymore. They only care about interventions in the private sector, you know, command and control style economic policies when they're coming from Democrats and Trump just gets a free pass on everything. Or if there actually is, I think, some growing support on the right for the, like, actual support independent of the Trump branding for some of these things. I think there is kind of a horseshoe theory happening here where you see the far right and the far left more interesting. did in, like, a robust state power, but just used for presumably different ends. It's, like, hard to find a better example of seizing the means of production than what we're

talking about here, which is, like, seizing a share of a company and equity state. It's going to produce energy for the country. And the Trumpism of it is a big part, like, these folks don't want to fight it. But I do agree. I think that there's now a wing within the Republican Party that decides. it's the way to compete with China and the Democrats are going to be socialist anyway. So we might as well do this in a way that like we can sell as of what I don't know. Who the hell knows?

Yeah. And again, like there are going to be some unintended consequences from all of this, including, well, some of which could be more opportunities for corruption. There's always more opportunities. There's plenty of those already. Those are not in short supply. There are plenty of opportunities for corruption, you know, for members of Trump's family or close friends to, uh, to like get in on these deals. If you're a competitor with

one of these companies that is now partly owned and directed, uh, by the government slash Trump, then you're at a huge disadvantage and potentially, you know, you're going to have all sorts of distortions and markets and may end up with worse products, uh, and less competitive products as a result. Like, I don't know that it's going to be good for the steel industry that the government has this golden share in U.S. steel. All we can do to judge what's happening on the supposed free market right is, like, look at what their public behavior is. And I follow a lot of those folks, a lot of my old friends. I kind of laugh, thinking back to, you were around us, our big fights in like the 2010, early 2010s over the XM bank and how the export import bank was crony

capitalism. I know. It's great. There were so many articles written about this on Breitbart and National Review, just like railing against us. I haven't seen a ton of railing against the government, like actually owning companies instead of backstapping investment. But I have seen yesterday the capitalists, we're mad about something, the traditional capitalist Republicans. They were very upset at my colleague Bill Crystal because he said that voting for Cuomo is ridiculous, which to me seems to be, you know, kind of like dog bites man take it is ridiculous to vote for somebody that was run out of office did a horrible job as a governor and was a Democrat if you're a supposed Republican. But anyway, he said that and he said, you know, I wouldn't have been for some, I wouldn't have ranked

Zoron even in the primary, but we are where we are and I just, I probably would be for Zoron. It was what Bill Crystal said. Woke Bill Crystal. There you go. Woke Bill Crystal. The cons are very upset about that. They're not upset about the government taking stake in private businesses, but they are upset about the hypothetical social grocery store that might come in Queens. And so I'm just, I'm wondering what you make of socialism in your city. Are you bought, Zoron, meanwhile, is kind of trying to steal some abundancy stuff.

You ran a Fox News ad, talking about cutting red tape. I was like, okay, buddy. So I don't know. Are you buying abundancy, Zoron? What is your socialism threat in New York? I think it's really hard to predict how he's actually going to govern because he's kind of taken all sides on, well, not all sides on all issues. But he's, depending on which audience he's speaking to,

you get a very different tenor of what his governing philosophy will be and what his priorities will be. Which is what we call good politics, by the way. Exactly. So it's not exactly that he's like contradicting himself and he's flip-flopping. It's like he's very adept at reflecting back to people what they want to hear in a way. He came on the bulwark and he had a whole list of things he was ready to pitch about, about how to streamline things in the mayor's office.

Yeah, and that would be great. That would be great. And not at all sort of the tear-it-all-down tenor that you've heard from other people in DSA, for example. Yeah, sure. So is he going to be a more traditional mayor? Is he going to be like a crazy extreme socialist mayor? I don't know. I'm hopeful, like based on the fact that he has said he will reappoint, for example,

the NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who seems like she's done a pretty good job. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The president says it's a zombie apocalypse in New York right now and that he's going to have to send in the troops soon. Is that not right? Well, he's going to send in the troops no matter what, I fear. But look, I am not a fan of a lot of Zormandani's policy proposals, not just the grocery store thing, but I think a lot of his other ideas are, well, first of all, there are things that he can't control. Like, the mayor of New York City does not actually control the revenue base of New York City. And a lot of of his plans are contingent on his being able to raise taxes, you know, corporate taxes and

personal income taxes and things like that. And it's actually Albany that controls all of that for complicated historical reasons, including that. Kathy's going to throw him some bones, I think. Maybe. She has said she's not going to raise taxes. She doesn't want everybody to move to Palm Beach. I think she has a quote almost exactly along those lines. So we'll see. I don't know. There was like a mob when she spoke at the Zoron rally the day. That was like everybody shouting tax. the rich at her and then she pretended like she couldn't hear them in the press conference after. I don't know. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure to give them to give them a little bit of a little bit of rope. Yeah. The question is the people

who are chanting tax the rich. My guess is some of them are objectively rich. Yeah. So maybe they were happy. Tax me, Daddy. I don't think, I think this is the problem with the Democratic Party that they, you know, historically keep promising a, a sort of Scandinavian style welfare state, without a Scandinavian-style tax base and that people always think they're happy to tax the rich when they think rich people are people richer than they are. But then you actually look at the math and that's not how it's going to work out.

I mean, that's more of a national democratic critique, but it does apply to New York City probably too. In any event, look, I have not been a fan of Mom Donnie's policies in my most hopeful interpretation of how he might govern or that he may abandon those policies. And maybe he's like, he's incredibly charismatic and charming, and maybe he's charismatic enough that people won't care if he doesn't deliver on

free buses or whatever. I don't know. You know, the main jobs of a mayor are not necessarily those big, like, transformative things. It's making sure the trash gets picked up and the streets get plowed and, like, the schools are running okay. And people will start to notice lapses in those services well before they'll notice if, like, a government-run grocery store, appears somewhere in one of the outer boroughs. So I don't know. Again, not my first choice, but like... So you're a Slewa voter, is what you're telling me, on your first podcast?

I mean, I do have two cats, so... He likes cats. Maybe you should be in a beret on MSNBC tonight. Yes. Maybe. Maybe I'll dress up as Slewa. It's bizarre to me that, like, in a city of what, eight million people, these are our choices. But such is life.

So I think the writing is on the wall that Mom Donnie is going to win. And I am hoping for the sake of New York that he is a sort of more moderate, effective mayor. And that he, what will matter is who he appoints to a lot of these important jobs, right? Does he appoint like diehard DSA people who have no experience governing? Or does he appoint people who kind of like know how to work, New York machinery. And we don't know yet. Again, encouraging that Jessica Tish is going to stick around, it looks like.

But, yeah. I think what will help him is that Trump, as soon as he wins, is going to start trying to bully him. And, again, maybe troops coming in and other side. And I think federal interventions, like will, in a way, help him because it will rally people against, you know, to his side and partisanship. I mean, Ted Cruz was calling him, no negative. comments to Ted Cruz about our China-style socialist federal government, but he did say that Bill Crystal was supporting a jihadist yesterday on Twitter. So I don't know. I think all that stuff

helps him, calling him a jihadist. Yeah, well, the Islamophobia stuff, obviously bad. And maybe it makes him, makes more people rally to his cause. But the idea that, like, having federal troops invade your city makes the city easier to run. Not easier to run. It's politically, in polarizing times, I think it will maybe align some people who are hesitant towards him. I think rhetoric directed against him will help him. But actually deploying troops to the city would be a challenge for any mayor, right? No matter how experienced and adept at working the levers of power, I think that will be really hard. And the immigration stuff will be tougher. The truth thing is a little easier. Like what happens when they really try to, and that is what's coming. I mean, they're really going to try to turn up the ice raids, and that is going to yield.

I think a lot of really intense showdowns. In some ways, again, might rallies feel to his side, but I think it's going to also give a sense of chaos. And I mean, I think that their plans for immigration are pretty scary. Just really quick at immigration while we have it. A former Trump golf club worker, 10 years he worked there, he's 39. U.S. immigration officials shackled him, put him in restraints and sent it to Mexico. Yeah, I mean, the real question is how many stories like this are there? And this was a story in the New York Times, right?

How many stories are not getting caught by intrepid journalists? There are, as I mentioned before, like, there are deliberate attempts to deducament people who have their papers, essentially, but taking the paper. papers away. There is a lot of sloppiness to use the most charitable explanation about ensuring that the people who are being rounded up are in fact undocumented. Not that like the way that they're treating people would be appropriate if in fact those who are being rounded up are undocumented, just to be clear. He was undocumented. He has family that isn't. His kid was a Marine actually. And he was wrongly deported to Mexico because he did not have a deportation order.

So he was sent to Mexico by mistake. By accident, yeah. Should bear mentioning that, again, there was Donald Trump that was employing him while he was undocumented for 10 years. And I haven't noticed Tom Homan or Greg Bovino, you know, heading down to the Trump organization to bring anybody away in shackles because they were also breaking the law, as best I could tell. Yeah, well, there are lots of things that Trump himself has done that are at odds with his policies, including complaining about so-called chain migration. Right, the idea that one immigrant comes here and then brings... Exactly. His current wife, there are lots of questions about whether she was working illegally when she was first in the United States as a model.

Second of your first receipts newsletter for us? Going back to the immigration filings of Melania, because I'm curious. You've piqued my interest. I'm very curious, too. Well, I remember there were stories about this back in probably 2015 or 2016, and Trump said, don't worry, we'll have a press conference about it in two weeks. I haven't had it. And then nothing ever came of it.

It's, you know, it's obviously hard to get that kind of documentation. But it certainly looks like it's possible that she was violating the terms of her visa by working. And nobody ever cares because I think this is a common issue. She's white. Well, and it's like she's a good immigrant. Like people separate in their mind. I mean, she's the wife of a criminal. So in some ways, she's a quote, unquote, good immigrant.

But we have some other immigrants. that came, you know, across the Rio Grande that aren't married, that don't have any other crimes besides the border crossing, whereas Trump family has several. On that front, I want to mention to bring up the crypto pardons to you, if you don't mind. Sure. Chang Peng Zhao. CZ, as they call him. He was running a crypto platform that had a lot of crimes on it. We have very few rules, actually, the governing crypto, but even the few rules that we have. He was not following a lot allowing a lot of illicit activity to come. There was fraud that he was engaged in.

He was in jail. I should mention one more time, Chang Peng Zhao, CZ is a Chinese national. And he was in prison and his company, Binance, what, put a couple of Billy into the Trump stable coin, a great investment. All of the investments you can make out there in the world, you had to grab the Trump stable coin. It's just a coincidence. Yeah. And again, the Chinese national that's in business with the Trump family got part. A lot of articles on that this week.

Yeah, he pled guilty. Yeah, to emphasize, he pled guilty. And look, it's not like he was laundering money for Hamas. Oh, wait, he was. Oh, really? It's like, yeah, yeah, this is what Binan's got in trouble for, was that they were basically allowing, like, Hamas and maybe ISIS and a bunch of other terrorist groups to use their platform to launder money.

Have we heard about Ted Cruz who's concerned about supposedly jihadist Mamdani weighing in on this, actual, the pardon of somebody that was actually funding real jihadists? I haven't seen anything. I am not aware of it. I have not done a deep dive to be fair. We can chat about that if you want. Yeah, I'll do a little LexisNexis search after this to see if he's expressed any reservations about this pardon.

I'm not aware of any. I don't even know what to say about this. Again, the guy pled guilty. He was doing really, really bad things. like this, all of the, the worst case scenario stuff that crypto can be used for his company was enabling. And I think that there are even, like, messages from inside the company, like, LOL, I guess we're not going to follow the know your customer regs. And, you know, but yeah, they did bad stuff. They did bad stuff. And it's just, it's the most blatant corruption in

presidential history. And it's insane. That's not like, you know, somebody who's paying the kid for this ugly art or, you know what I mean? Like Spiro Agnew, it's like a paper bag with money. It's a billion. They invested a billion. Yeah, it's a lot of money. And it paid off. It definitely paid off.

Did pay off. Do you have a global crypto view? I'm just curious what your level of crypto hostility is if you're going to join my Barry band of bullworkers. I am not involved in either drug dealing or kidnapping, so I don't really have much of a use for crypto personally. Yeah, that's sort of my hot take. You don't think that it's adding a lot of value, the fart coin and stuff. You don't think that those things are valued at your doge coin. You don't feel like that's valued in accordance with what it's bringing to the economy?

There is no underlying value. The value is just what other greater fools will pay for it. And you can make money off of that in the near term. As long as there is somebody else willing to look at it, look at the speculative asset and buy it from you. You can make money, but I don't think that there's like any inherent functional value to it. At one point, the argument was like, oh, this will displace other forms of transactions and it'll be so much more convenient and you don't have to carry cash or whatever or you don't have to worry about inflation risks. And in practice, what we see is that these are speculative assets and if they are used, it's for like trying to keep illegal activity less traceable.

Have you seen this stories that Barron Trump has made like a hundred million on insider crypto deals? I have not seen this, but I'm not surprised. I think people should check this out. Like Baron Trump is cashing in on crypto. I try my best. I have friends that invest in crypto. My brother's really into it.

I've got friends who work in crypto and they've called me. And I'm like, I try to listen to the bull case. And I think that there are some values to actual Bitcoin itself. And like there are a couple of these stable. coins that have some actual value or use cases that I've heard. But like, I get, you know, you go into one of these things, it's like, well, Coinbase or whatever, one of the big platforms, it's like, well, you know, you can't judge us by the worst product.

And I'm like, that's not really how things work. Like, if you walked into Walmart and like Walmart had like one aisle where it was very useful products that are not scams, that you purchased something and got something of value back, and you walked down the next aisle and it was like a cutout. out for human traffickers and then he watched it on the next aisle and it was somebody just like stealing your money and then like you walk on the next thing and they tell you it's one thing and it ends up being another like that store would be would be shut down like we would investigate the store right like you just because there are some products

that are not scams doesn't mean it's not a scam site right or you would have some kind of oversight and regulation to like make sure that to make sure that there's human trafficking doesn't happen, for example. And this is a newish industry, and it's hard for regulations, smart regulations to catch up with a rapidly evolving sector. And the people who work in the private sector are always going to get paid more than the people who are paid to oversee them. So it's going to, you know, like they're always going to be outgunned.

So I think it is like a genuinely hard problem to solve. However, I think there is no interest in solving it right now. Because they're bribing the government. Well, yes. It's not even like that they're trying to get the answer right, but they're just like they don't have a level of competence. But yeah, it's like they want to just let it rip. And again, more opportunities for corruption. And it's like a lot of these other cases where you talk about special interests, it's like, yeah.

Like there are ways that special interests, like whatever your hobby horse is, is NRA or APEC or whatever. Like, there are ways that they impact, like, the legislature, sure. Like, none of those cases are the industries, like, literally bribing the president. Like, the president and his family are being bribed. Not like, oh, we're going to put money in a super pack. Like, we're going to give you money and make you extremely, extremely wealthy. And you're selling us and you give us nothing and you're giving us the Melania coin.

Well, part of the challenge is you don't even know who's giving the money, right? We don't know who's buying Trump coin or Melania coin or any of these other opportunities. Yeah, they don't have to file with the federal election committee like the other PACs do. It's truly insane. Okay, we're going to close with some happiness. I hear a dog back there? No, there's a cat. That's a cat?

Your cat has a bell on it? Yes. It's a cat bell? You've never seen a bell on a cat? What's the cat's name? I have two. I don't have as many as Curtis Lewa who has like, 16 or something, but I have two. It's Ernie and Doddy. And they were really interested in getting

their 15 minutes of fame before. Bernie's a good cat name. Okay, that's good. People can now just keep an eye out for Ernie in the background of the future. We do have positive. Viewers give positive feedback to the animals they see. Listeners give negative feedback to Michael Weiss's birds, the chirp the whole episode. But I kind of like it. I kind of like doing a podcast in an aviary. All right, the last thing for joy for everybody is we don't call him Howard Nutlick for nothing. The Commerce Secretary was on Fox last night and we're just going to listen. And did he let you sleep on the ride home on Air Force One? I slept for an hour. I did. I slept for one hour. He is the strongest, he is the

strongest human being that I know. I mean, you know, he can wear me at it. Yeah. Fuck. Yucky. Yeah. I haven't even started my job yet, so I am going to refrain from expressing what's going through my head. No, this is the perfect time to express. You're not HR. There's no HR oversight right now.

You don't actually work for the company. Let it loose. We can talk about Howard Nuttlicks gross fantasizing about the brawny president. They're all kind of like this, though, right? Like whenever they have these cabinet meetings, they go around and try to outgrabble themselves and compete for who can say the grossest, most suck-upy thing. So in a way, like this is not so outside the pale, beyond the pale of what we've heard before, but it's... I mean, we haven't heard any... We've heard from a lot of women that say Trump sexually assaulted them.

We have not heard from any that said that he wore them out, though. I guess I would say. So that would be new. I guess that would be a new item. Catherine, that's your hazing. That's a hazing finish to the podcast. Everybody,

happy Halloween. I'm going to put in the show notes, the show playlist of songs, but I also have a great Halloween playlist. You can put on while kids are coming by and trick or treating tonight. So that's my gift to all of you. Catherine,

I'm so excited to have you on board. You never explained the bean hat. Oh, I didn't. No. Well, red beans are very popular. are here in Louisiana. And there is a parade that's like a red bean theme parade that happens during Mardi Gras season.

So my husband made this. I don't do arts and crafts. So he made this bean hat. And I was looking for just kind of masks or something to wear for Halloween on the pod because my geese costume, the goose is too tall. It would go out of frame. Like the goose head is going to go up to the ceiling. And so that wouldn't work.

And I was like, well, we have the bean poster. and so I thought I would do a bean theme. Okay. Halloween beans. It also rhymes. Thank you. There you go. I look forward to what you're wearing on TV tonight.

Yeah, we'll see. Everybody else, we'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Crystal. Have a great weekend. Peace. When I look out my window, many sights to see. And when I look in my window, so many times. different people to be. They're strange, so strange.

It's very strange to me. You got to pick up every stitch. You got to pick up every stitch. You got to pick up every stitch. Must be the season of the witch Must be the season of the witch Must be the season of the witch When I look over my shoulder

What happens, love? What do you think I see? Some other cat looking over over a shoulder. And you're strange. So strange. It's very strange to me. You've got to pick up every stitch. You've got to pick up every stage.

pick up every stage beat necks are out to make it rich oh no must be the season of the witch must be the season of the witch must be the seasons of the witch The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.