The Daily Beast Podcast - Spare Us the Crocodile Tears, Bill Ackman

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

The New Abnormal hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy say MAGA billionaires like Bill Ackman can’t act shocked by the Trump administration’s economic policies when the president ran on them. Then, The Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last discusses why he believes the American-led world order is over. Plus, Semafor finance and business editor Liz Hoffman talks about why Wall Street is suddenly panicking about Trump's economic agenda. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today.

Jonathan V. Last, editor at the bulwark and author of the newsletter at the Triad, joins us to explain why he believes the American-led world order is over and why from Canada to China the rest of the world is moving on. Then, semaphore business and finance editor Liz Hoffman is here to explain why the capital class is suddenly panicking about Trump's economic agenda and why the markets, not the media, might be the loudest of the last. voice of opposition. But first, let's have some fun. I know that we never talk about good news on this show. And so just for a brief moment, wow, as it is being reported right now, over five million people showed up for the hands-off nationwide rallies on April 5th, which was Saturday. And it was a site to be seen across the country, even in some of the reddest of places that Donald Trump won by some double digits. People were out in the streets protesting, and it was amazing, and I think it is just the beginning.

It was incredible to see all the pictures on social media and wherever of just all across the country, just people turning out in droves. And there's been a lot of reporting lately about how, oh, there's no real resistance this time around. Everyone is too beat down and too cynical. And this was a huge slap in the face to that story. And it was so, so good to see. And kudos to everyone who showed up over the weekend, to the organizers, to just people who said, yeah, I want to be out there.

Just a really nice thing to see, given everything that's going on, that we will probably now talk about. Fabulous. And so back to your regularly scheduled programming of everything that's fucking awful. Andy, it's Orange Monday. Yeah. And that is because the markets are in. I'm not an economist and, you know, I went to school for political science. I'm not necessarily

great at math. But I think that when everything is fucking red and going down, that is bad. Bad, bad, bad. What say you? Again, not a math whiz, not an economist, but I do know that lines going up usually indicate good. Green means go. Red, lines going down, means bad. I think you're right about that. I also do not have the world's greatest math skills, but I have been trained to know that on a graph when when line go down, it's bad. And that's what the line is doing. Look, in my non-professional life, I don't pay all that much attention to the stock markets. I own a tiny bit of stock that was gifted to me a long time ago. But I'm not a player or anything like that. And I'm sitting there reading stuff about how Niki future. trading has been suspended because the circuit breaker was hit. And it's like, I shouldn't know about this stuff. I should not know what any of that means. I should, if someone said that to me, I should just look at them as if they were from a different galaxy. And yet, I have to know about it. We all have to know about it because of one man and a huge number of sycophantic helpers,

but ultimately one man. And boy, he's just got a thing about tariffs, doesn't he? and he's had this, his whole life, somehow he learned something very wrong when he was young, and it just stuck with him. And it doesn't matter how many people tell him it's wrong. He's incapable of changing his mind about it. And he has decided certain things. He has decided that the answer to those things is tariffs. He is single-handedly driving the world into a recession, if not a depression by time we're done with this. It's unbelievable. And it's like, do we feel great again yet? Because these are the same people.

These MAGA folks are the same people that were complaining about Biden's economy. We're complaining that the prices were too high. And now these are the very same people getting on cable news and telling us that maybe a recession is necessary. When the fuck is a recession ever necessary? Like when? I believe that my entire life has been built around us as a country trying to avoid. a recession. Because guess what? They are bad. That means people are not spending money. That means people are losing homes. That means people are unemployed. That means the economy slows down. And so we know

that bringing down prices is part of it, but also that the president of the United States, that when they happen to speak and, God willing, you know, back in the old days, they used to do so in coherent full sentences, the markets react to that. And deciding that you're going to go and weigh a tariff war with our friends, with our former allies, and that the business journalists are referring to these as reciprocal when, in fact, Donald Trump is the one who started this tariff war, because back on the campaign trail, he said that tariffs were his favorite word, even though all of the world's economists said that his economic plan would send us spiraling. And so here we are. And now you have folks like the most racist, abhorrent, disgusting human beings who didn't care about children in cages, didn't care about Donald Trump referring to African nations as shithole countries, didn't care about the Islamophobia, the misogyny, the racism, you name it, he said it and done it.

And now all of a sudden that they're losing millions of dollars are like, ooh, Bill Ackman, can we cease fire with the trade war? because millions of people are going to get hurt. Millions of people have been hurt and hurting over the last 10 years under Trumpism. Just saying. But now it's hurting you. Leopard's eating face. So sorry to hear it. Yeah, for sure.

And Bill Ackman, who's just one of the worst out there, venture capitalist, huge, huge pro-Trump guy. He's the guy who got Claudine Gay fired from Harvard as president of Harvard. he is now having a little bit of a meltdown over the tariffs and talking about how Trump is leading us into a what he calls a self-induced economic nuclear winter. I have to read this because it's just unbelievable. Somebody said to him after he posted about how bad these tariffs are, good job speaking out, but it seems like you should have foreseen the chaos. Your anger towards Dems clouded your judgment. He wrote back, I have no anger towards Dems, just disappointment. I don't think this was foreseeable.

I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad. You didn't think this was foreseeable? Again, Trump did not hide the fact that he was going to impose steep tariffs. He explicitly ran on that. So I do not want to hear from anyone, let alone Bill Ackman, who I'm starting to think his firm, whatever, should be put in receivership, because I don't think he can be trusted because he's clearly lost his mind.

And for him to sit there and say this wasn't foreseeable. And we're seeing this from a lot of people on the right who aren't towing the line, which most of them are. But the few that aren't towing the line, a lot of them are acting like either this wasn't foreseeable or they're saying some version of, well, I guess the left was right. about this, but they're so insane there was no way to know. It's just this weird shit going on where there were a ton of people who said, hey, if we elect this guy, and I'm just speaking on the economic stuff, we're going to be in deep shit because this guy wants to impose huge tariffs.

He wants to do this. He wants to do that. He wants to get rid of immigrants who are, if not the backbone of our economy, certainly one of the discs. So no, all of this was for It was easily foreseeable. And the way we know this is it was foreseen by a lot of people. So I'm so tired of these people who bloviate and Bill Ackman in particular is known for like writing these thousands of words on Twitter, these long posts. And for him to sit here and say, my bad, you're lucky this is so bad we couldn't save this for fuck that guy, Bill. I think about these people, I think about these multi-billionaires who spend all of their time on social media platforms, just like railing against other people who have made it. You know, Bill Ackman, he's made it his war on woke.

That's him, right? War on diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's this guy. War on anything that was, that is not white, that is not male, that is not straight. He funded it. And so now all of a sudden you want to turn around and warn us or try and say, send up a flare around Donald Trump around your fucking greedy ass. And we're supposed to be like, oh, yeah.

Like, if I had billions of dollars, do you know where I wouldn't fucking be? Social media. Like, I wouldn't be on social media at all. God, no. What am I on there for? I am on my private island. I am hanging out with my family and friends. I am a philanthropist actually doing fucking good for the world and like kicking it.

What I'm not doing is like spending my time on social media complaining about the fact that like children will learn about Harriet Tubman. So fuck him. I know that it's not fuck that guy. But like, fuck this guy. Fuck all of these people who were warned, who were told over and over again. But refuse because the very thought of having a black woman and an Asian woman as president of the United States was fucking too much for them. And because of that, millions of people, if not billions around the world, are now going to suffer because of their fucking one-sided bullshit. Danielle, I can guarantee if I were a billionaire.

What do you even have to be a billionaire? If I just had like a couple hundred million, you would never, ever, ever hear from me again. Not a peep. Not a peep. These guys are unbelievable. It's bad enough that they won't shut up. And it's bad enough that they are basically confiscating the world's wealth. If you look at the disparities that are doing nothing but rising between the rich and the poor.

And now we've got Elon Musk, who, you know, I don't think he needs an introduction. He just got himself a nice multibillion dollar Pentagon contract. And it's just unbelievable that a guy who is as involved. as he is in this administration can even bid on government contracts, let alone be awarded them. He got a, I guess it's $5.92 billion for Space X in a contract from Space Systems Command, which is the U.S. Space Force. The idea of this is so wrong and so unethical and so immoral. This is one of those things where it would just be easy to shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, what do you expect, you know, look at everything that's going on. And yes, absolutely, look at everything that's going

on. But these are the kinds of things that we can't just shrug our shoulders at because the graft and the utter, this is just theft. This is just theft of money. We need to remember all of this for the trials after, is what I'm saying. We can't just sweep these little things under the rug and and act like their pocket change. All of this shit is important because it gets, again, it gets to the graft and the grift. And the entire reason that Elon Musk is doing everything that he's doing. And that is to enrich himself.

I mean, all it is thievery, right? He has had his stocks, his companies are tanking. Why? Because guess what? outside of their little like Maga right wing bubble, white nationalism, Nazism, not popular. Like, lo and behold, it is not a mainstream vibe where people are like, yeah, I kind of want to drive that Tesla and that cyber truck. They don't because they don't want to be associated with the fuckery and the racism and the hatred. That's why you have all of these people that are returning their Teslers or donating them, trying to put up signs that say, like,

Like, don't scratch me. You know, I bought this before Elon went nuts. Really? You sure about that? Because timeline, motherfucker. Time line. It's been like this for a long time. Okay?

He's not going to be making the kind of money that he was making straight on through his businesses as they continue to tank week after week after week. And so where has he set his sights on? Our money. The taxpayers of the United States. where he is now has, you know, change codes and has direct access and is funneling our money into his pockets on top of continuing to get government contracts into the billions of dollars. Now, here's the thing for me with these government contracts as well.

Andy, how many times have his vehicles been recalled? A lot. It's at least eight. How many times has his spaceships that have gone up? How many times have they blown up? I know that it's more than two. So once again, we are placing like our government expansion, the Pentagon, our FAA controls into the hands of somebody that has proven time and time again. He's not a fucking genius.

Much like Donald Trump, he got daddy's money. And then after he got daddy's money, he was able to like create smokes and screens and take over other people's ideas and businesses. And that's how he has grown his disgusting amount of wealth. Danielle, an analysis of car recalls from 2014 to 2023 by a research firm called IC Cars shows that Tesla's Model Y was the most recalled car in the U.S. And four of the five top slots in this report were Tesla's. Bravo. In non-business news, as I'm sure all our listeners know, we've sent plane loads of people to a prison in El Salvador, a hellish person. prison in El Salvador. Right now, all of that is working its way through the courts because all those

people were sent there without due process. And so now Donald Trump is saying he wants to send more people there, including American citizens. He said, if we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run over people in cars, if he would take them, he being the president of El Salvador, I would be honored to give them. Then he went on to say, I don't know what the law says on that. I do. It says you can't do that. Yes. Just look, yes, he's an authoritarian. Yes, he's a fascist, calling what you want. He's also just stupid. He is just stupid. He speaks off the cuff. He does this shit all the time, whatever. But the fact that the president of the United States is sitting there

talking about wanting to send American citizens to a prison in El Salvador. I mean, look, it's bad enough to be sending immigrants who are not American citizens to a prison in El Salvador without a trial, without due process, without anything. This guy is now talking about sending American citizens there, Daniel. Yeah, and I don't know why anyone would find themselves shocked by this, because this has always been the plan. It was going to start with who they deemed to be quote unquote illegal, who they thought was undocumented, who they said were criminals. And then lo and behold, right, because I just want to say this, 60 Minutes did a deep dive into the 238 men that were picked up and sent to the El Salvadorian

prison to the fucking gulag. Just FYI, they couldn't find criminal records on 75% of them. And 22% that had any arrests were nonviolent. But the Trump administration is still referring to them as quote unquote terrorists, terrorists that you didn't provide with due process. So who do you think is going to end up the American citizens that they are going to ship off to these places? The ones that Marco Rubio doesn't like what they say, doesn't like their social media posts, using the Aliens Enemies Act to pick up kids off of students, off of the street for wearing any support. saying anything with regard to the Palestinian people. It's sick. We've seen this before in history.

We know where it's leading. And the things that Donald Trump says off the cuff, he always manages to manifest. So not great signs. Doesn't sound great. I think people like you, Danielle, are going to need to be very careful. I'll be fine because I am. Well, no, it's not that. No, that's the easy answer.

but it's really because I am so delightful and beloved. And beloved. On social media, I don't think anyone would ever think, oh, we need to get rid of him. I enjoy his posts. That's what they'll say. But you, Danielle, oh boy. Be afraid. Be afraid.

Be afraid. Be afraid. My next guest says it took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order. Joining me now is editor at the bulwark, Jonathan V. Last, where he also writes the fantabulous newsletter, The Triad. JVL. How are you? You know, I'm great. I'm so happy I can bring my sunshine to your show, Andy. Yeah. Because that's what we need on this show. Yeah, I'm just like, you know, I just like moving around and making people happy.

Yeah, sure, sure. So the piece I quoted from in your intro is titled, The American Age is over. First of all, how dare you? Hmm. That's all I got. Okay. Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll all work out fine. I don't know.

Where do you want me to go with this? You refer to what we're going through as imperial suicide. Explain what you mean by that. Yes. America is an empire and has been since the close of the Second World War. And our age of empire has not been perfect. But net, net, it's been great for us and been pretty good for the world. not for everybody. Big chunks of the world be fucked over. But on the whole, the last 80 years have seen a dramatic increase in the standard of living for people, the majority of people across the globe, which is unprecedented in human history. And have also seen a spreading of liberal values, small, small ill liberal values, you know, like human rights, that sort of thing, in ways which are hugely a historical, right?

and the world has been red in tooth and claw for thousands of years. This has been pretty good. You know, again, by historical standards, pretty good. We have now ended that. And I don't think there's any going back within the timeframe of like our lifetimes. 50 years from now, who knows what the world looks like. But over the course of the next like 20 years, 30 years, I don't think there's a way to go back. And the reason is because the American people, it's not even really Donald Trump.

The American people have shown that they are willing to elect a guy like Donald Trump twice now. And, you know, once could be an accident doing it the second time when he's not hiding the football and he's telling everybody that he wants to blow up NATO and blow up the global economic order. And then he wins a plurality of the vote. Can't even blame the electoral college, right? He wins a plurality of the popular vote. And then he does those things. and people are acting surprised. The rest of the world will have to make plans and arrangements that no longer assume that America is basically on their side

and now have to assume that America is possibly an adversary. And so that means Europe is going to have to go in a different direction. Japan and the sort of, you know, more liberal parts of Asia will do the same. Canada's going to have to fucking get nuclear weapons, Andy. Just think about that for a minute. Canada is going to need nukes. You can't put that back together again because some French minister said the other day, we cannot have our future determined every four years by 40,000 Wisconsin voters,

which is essentially the state of affairs right now. And that just you cannot make security arrangements are necessary long term plans because security requires an assload of long term planning. It's like weapons procurement and budgeting and what you do, with your defense spending, dictates what you can do on social welfare spending. Like these things, the lead times on these are enormous. They're generational. And America has proven that our people are not reliably liberal anymore.

And the rest of the world has to just take us at our word. Yeah. And look, in addition to the French minister, you've got, as you cite in your piece, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, basically saying what you said, This is over. He called it the new reality and basically said that we, we the United States, can no longer claim the mantle of global economic leadership. And he ain't wrong. Yeah. I'm not sure. Did you watch that speech? I did not. It's kind of remarkable. It's only 40 minutes. It's worth your time. But what's really remarkable about it is that political leaders are trained to not speak so to

claratively, right? I mean, you know, everything is always hedging and keeping options open. And you say one thing, but that you qualify it. And this is what executive leadership at the nation state level is supposed to look like. Like, you're supposed to keep as much ambiguity as possible. You're just trying to make everybody happy. You are not supposed to be totally blunt and transparent. And for a head of state of our neighbor and closest trading partner, to feel as though not only must he speak that way, but he can, is just fucking wild. Like, I mean, the fact that he could do that is itself wild. And, you know, we have all read background quotes like that from our European allies over

the last couple weeks. But, you know, like this, this shit can't stay in the background, right? And you're going to see, I think, probably within the next 12 months, uh, some sort of announcement from the French and the English about a separate nuclear umbrella that they're going to have to extend to the rest of Europe because the rest of Europe can no longer really count on on NATO. They can't, they can't count on America's participation in NATO. And so you're going to need a rest of Europe is going to rearm. They're already upping their defense budgets. And what you're going to need is you need more nuclear weapons in Europe.

But to do that, a bunch of non-nuclear states are going to have to become nuclear states. And they will have to do that underneath an umbrella provided by the two existing nuclear powers over there, the French and the English. And so, you know, we're going to wind up with the Germans are going to have nuclear weapons, which I'm sure will work out great for everybody. Yeah, and the Poles are going to have to have nukes. The Poles will then find themselves sitting between a nuclear Germany and Russia. And like, you know, like these guys weren't born yesterday. They do take history in Poland. Yeah.

And like, we're going to widespread nuclear proliferation and a bunch of. security arrangements, which are being arrived at totally independent of inputs from the United States and which view the United States not just as an unreliable partner, but as a potential adversary. And that is a different world than you and I have lived in our entire lives. It really is wild. We keep hearing variations on a theme of sort of the, this is not what I voted for. Bill Ackman is very upset about these tariffs and cannot believe this is happening, even though Donald Trump promised that he was going to do exactly what he's doing now. So you say there are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for Trump.

What are they? Yeah. I mean, the first is that they didn't believe him. The second is that they didn't understand him. And the third is that they wanted it. Right. And those are the only three, right? At the end of the day, you know, look, he got 77 million votes.

So it is a pie chart of those three things, right? it's not like there's one explanation, you know, and they, who knows what the pie looks like? It probably looks roughly a third of a third of a third, right? The Bill Ackman's of the world really didn't believe him. Other people really wanted it, right? The Stephen Millers of the world wanted this stuff. Then there were a whole, you know, another third of people were just low information voters who didn't know what the fuck they were doing because they're dumb. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the reason is because whichever one of those three it is, those people have shown

themselves to be too irresponsible to represent a hyperpower. Right. And like, it's over. When, when society degenerates to this extent and you wind up where a literal attempted insurrection is only at like 53, 47 disapproval. Yeah. Like, it just doesn't work. This is something you got into your piece.

And I don't think many Americans have paid really close attention to what Brexit has done to the UK. I know I haven't. How does what is going on here now on the economic side, how does it compare to Brexit? I think it's a little bit like Brexit. So Brexit was like the Trump phenomenon. It was brought about in part by a bunch of people who were just populists who were seizing on it because they wanted power and it was a pathway to power. It wasn't like it was some sincerely held belief system or something. Also like Trumpism was funded in large part, by Russia. Russia really, really pushed money into the Brexit campaign. And the result for Great Britain has been bad. They've had a decade of stagnant economic growth. People in retrospect really wish

they hadn't done it. But ultimately, it only hurt Britain. It didn't really hurt anybody else, right? But it wasn't some global order, which was dependent upon the size of the EU nations, you know, where once the Brits walked, you know, everything blew apart. And the truth is they are still bound by security guarantees, you know, again, the French and the Brits, only two European powers with nuclear weapons. That makes them incredibly important. With us, it's different. I mean, the entire, the dollar is the world's reserve currency.

Yeah. If that stops being true a decade from now, like, we can't imagine what that looks like. The ramifications that are so enormous, right? you know, why have we been able to run budget deficits? It's because the dollar is the world's reserve currency and you can always sell T bills. And if that stops being true, all of a sudden we can't run deficits. Well, how is that going to fucking work? You know, like just the debt service plus the, you know, the non-discretionary spending we have on entitlements.

That's the entire federal budget right there. Before you even go and add anything else into it. And here's the thing. I don't think Americans have gotten their head around what a big deal it is, but I think the rest of the world largely has. Like, I think the Europeans know what the score is. The Chinese fucking understand what just happened. The Russians understand what just happened.

And here, Americans, I think, just had this view of like their place was in the sun. And that was decreed by the laws, the fundamental laws of physics and nature decreed that America would be the global leader in all things always and that we would always have the biggest best economy and we would always have democracy and this stuff was immutable. And that's like the textbook definition of decadence, right? That's how empires fall is when people just believe that they can't not fall. Here we are. Yay. Yay.

Look, the Chinese are happy and I think that's really all that matters. but I guess there's no sort of pottery barn rule for America where if you break it, you own it. You know, you write that Trump was able to do this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican Party and conservative movement. And the idea of the Republican Party even trying to fix what has been done here is pretty much unthinkable, isn't it? I think so. I think it is. I mean, I go back and forth on this. And I'd be interested in what you think about this because I'm writing a about it and maybe I'll steal something smart you say. Okay, good luck with that. My original assumption had been, well, if Trump wrecks the economy, there are some silver

linings. Like, for instance, it'll crater his popularity. It'll make it easier to oppose him and it will make it harder for him to do other dangerous stuff. So using secret police to disappear people off the streets becomes more politically risky for him at 35% approval than it does at 49%. percent approval. But on the other hand, the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure that it has to work out that way, because maybe it's the case that Trump, who is, I mean, he's very crafty. He really is a

very talented demagogue. Maybe he can turn economic adversity into it's another populist cause. Like this is, you know, you lost your job in Detroit at the manufacturing place because you were stabbed in the back by the Europeans or the wokes or the DEIs or the gypsies or like, you know, like, you know, so what do you think? Do you think that it becomes, you know, do you think economic calamity is dangerous for Trump or do you think it becomes potentially helpful to him and can serve as a way to, I don't know, assume emergency powers or demagogue some new group or increase his level support? What do you think? I think, and you can quote me on this in your piece. I think it's one of those two things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing,

really. It really does seem like it could be, or, or that nothing will change. So it could be one of those three things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look, part of this is, and I'm actually, I'm curious what you think about this. Well, that's why I had you on the show. Look, I feel like Ringling Brothers would be insanely jealous of the number of clowns who are running the country right now. But even beyond that, Pretty much, I don't know, 90, 95% of conservative media has proven itself to be just incredibly eager sycophants. And I do feel like you don't want to give too much power or credit to a place like Fox News with too much power. Because if you look at the actual viewership compared to the size of the country, it's small. But it also does have sort of an outsized influence on a segment of the American population.

and so does the rest of conservative media. And this gets to what you're saying. I think it's a question in large part of how Trump is allowed to spin whatever happens going forward. And again, maybe I'm ascribing too much power to conservative media and the conservative ecosphere, whatever you want to call it. But it does seem to me that people only react to the news that they get. And a lot of people in this country are very siloed in their sources of. of information. And if they are being told over and over again that, oh, the economy is bad,

not because of Trump's terrorists, but because of China and because of immigrants, because of woke, whatever. If that's the way conservative media goes, and I don't see any reason to believe it won't be, I do believe that sort of affects how Trump is viewed on all this. I guess what I'm trying to say is he has a very large propaganda arm. Yes. I fully agree. That is valuable. It's absolutely worth something. At the same time, and again, these things are, I try to be wary of this, because a lot of times we have these conversations, it sounds like we're saying, no, it's not X, it's Y. And the answer is always, it's both X and Y and Z and 50 other things, right? Everything is murder on the Orange Express. Yes. Right. Everything is they all did it. I think there is something

fundamentally broken about the character of the American people, where people are now disaggregating opinions and actions from reality in ways that I think are fundamentally different than they've been certainly in my lifetime. Let me give you an example. The attitudes about the economy throughout the Biden administration were absolutely fucking insane. And there's just a ton of, you know, economic research that was done on this. You look to consumer attitudes. And it's survey after survey after survey. You would say, ask to people, what is your personal economic outlook like?

Are you better off now than you were a year ago? In a year, do you think you'll be better off than you are now? And people would be like, yes, things are good. And then you'd ask them, how is the overall economy for the country? And people wouldn't just say it was bad. The levels of bad, they said, the only analog was. the 2008 financial crisis. And so people were walking around simultaneously saying, I'm great. And also, the world looks like the greatest financial crisis in living memory, which is just insane. And this isn't,

yes, there was the partisan thing that you get where, you know, the out party always says that the economy is terrible in the end party. And so you saw, for instance, like, Republican attitudes on the economy went up like the day after Trump won. But you saw this with Democratic voters too. Yeah, sure. Like it isn't, you know, it was to a more muted degree, but the same phenomenon was there. And you saw it with small business owners. There was, you know, there's a trade group that does, like, you know, small business owner attitudes. And there were surveys in which small business owners who, again, you assume are not talking about politics. They're, they're thinking about their livelihoods. I assume, maybe not. And they were saying things like, yeah.

revenues are way up. Profits are way up. But I expect next year to be terrible. Then like next year wouldn't be terrible. Right. And they did this year after year in the Biden administration. And when people become untethered to reality, I think it's because they think they can do it without there being any costs. Right.

Like if I do this crazy thing, I'm not ever going to pay. Like, it's not going to hurt me. Right. I can elect Donald Trump. It's not going to hurt. Like, things are so good that it can be fine. Like, we can. elect the game show host. Like, you know, it's going to be fine. I don't know. That didn't really go anywhere.

I'm sorry. I don't know. But I think you're right. But this is like decadence, right? This is, this is that decadent theme, right? Yes. I think you're absolutely right. And I would love to talk to you for another hour, but I am actually out of time. And probably wanting to put your head in an oven. Well, well, there is that too, but that has nothing to do with you. Yeah. Okay. Jonathan, thanks so much. As always, it's good to have you back on the new abnormal. I always enjoy talking to you. People go subscribe to the triad. It's a really, really good newsletter. Jonathan, thanks so much.

Thanks for having me, buddy. Folks, I am super happy to welcome to the new abnormal, the business and finance editor at Semaphore, Liz Hoffman, who is also the author of Crash Landing, the inside story of how the world's biggest companies survived an economy on the brink. Liz, you are also a former alum of the Wall Street Journal. I do have a question to ask you,

because over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal shocked the hell out of me. And many people who I saw reposting their cover of their weekend edition that showed, you know, the graph that is going to hell of our economy, followed by a pitcher underneath with world economy, you know, on the brink, Donald Trump golfing. This is a Murdoch run paper. This is a conservative paper. did you make anything of the cover over the weekend and what has become louder rumblings coming from the Wall Street class? I think it's important to put a couple of buckets there. One is I feel compelled as a journalist and as an alum of the journal to say that the editorial side that Rupert leans on heavily, as you noted, is very separate from the newsroom. That said, the editorial

side has been pretty critical of Trump for a while now, like a real exception in conservative media. They've been pounding him since he took office on some of his economic policies. So that's one. Look, the speed with which the capital class has soured on this administration is, is breathtaking. I should say that I think a lot of journalists were pretty skeptical of the just utter unabashed enthusiasm that they had on the way in. I remember being at the mecca of the capital class at Davos at the end of January. It was wild. Like, CEOs were tripping over themselves to get to a microphone to scream about what a bright moment this was for America. And it felt overbought at the time. And I think that enthusiasm has just evaporated incredibly quickly

over the last 10 days. I mean, I think that what is wild, and this is coming from me who is an unabashed progressive, who has been screaming into a void probably for the last nine to 10 years about Donald Trump. And his racism, his misogyny, his Islam. homophobia, his anti-Semitism, so on and so forth. And what is just remarkable to me is that the business class, the elites, did not give a damn. They didn't care about the racism in the shithole countries and the children in cages. They didn't care when Roe v. Wade was overturned and women and people with uteruses lost bodily autonomy and damn near half the states in this country. They don't care right now that legal residents of this country are being picked up on the

street and thrown into detention centers by quote unquote plainclothes officers. And all of a sudden now, now that Donald Trump has made good on all of the things that he said that he would do on the campaign trail with regard to tariffs, now all of a sudden there is shock. Can you make sense of that for us? Why everything that had been said before? about Donald Trump was just a shrug because deregulation, because tax breaks, that you can be so dismissive. They could be so dismissive about the state of our country and the world so long as what? They could buy a third or fourth home. I would push back a little on the first part of what you said. If you wind back the clock to the late 2010s, companies did care a lot about that. And in fact,

it's kind of what they've been backpedaling from in the last two years, I would say, was there was a real progressive shift among corporate America. It may not have been far enough for the progressive left, but these are institutions that have basically had one job for a thousand years, which is to make money. And they really abandoned that pretty quickly in the mid to late 2010s and embraced a ton of mostly progressive, but sort of broadly non-financial priorities.

And so I would push back a little bit on what you said, And you'll remember there was a lot of handering around the Roe v. Wade stuff when companies started sort of providing employee benefits, you know, sort of solving the problem that they could in front of them. So I think your characterization is a bit unfair. But I would also say that that sort of chapter of American corporate history ended very, very quickly. And it was already kind of ending in the end of the Biden administration where there was this sense that perhaps the pendulum had overswung and we had overcorrected. And then actually, whether you wanted companies to bring. embrace social causes or not, they were bad at it. Like, having these CEOs kind of like tap dance around this issue and that issue, they were just crappy at it. And they were bad messengers for that. And I think there was a recalibration in the business community of like, is this what we should be doing? And right at that same time, their jobs got harder. And look, I'm not a corporate apologist, but sort of by vocation, I'm skeptical of CEOs and corporate power. It's what I do all day. But for a lot of the sort of post-2008 era, far be it from me to tell CEOs their jobs weren't that hard.

but they weren't that hard. Like the backdrop was just pretty benign. Everything kind of went up. You had a couple of hard decisions to make. And that actually gave CEOs the space to kind of have these big thoughts, right, to be intellectual leaders and kind of embrace these social issues. But by 2021, 22, inflation is kicking off. Global supply chains have gotten scrambled.

Like, everything is just messy. And I think at the same time that they were taking a lot of flack for that sort of leftward lurch, which by the way felt performative at the time in the same way, that some of this does now, their day jobs got harder. And so they said, you know what, I'm just going to put my head down and try to run a business. And so I understand that those things collide in a way that can feel callous to some people. My view is slightly different. I respect that. And I think that at a time right now where nothing is running the way that it should, right? Nothing is running not the country, not the economy, not our classrooms, not our universities, our healthcare system. Nothing is

running in the way that it should, that more people are. awakening to this idea and asking questions that I think came up during COVID, which is, is capitalism actually good? Is it a mechanism in which most people can succeed? And I think that right now, as we are seeing, you know, the job numbers come in, as we're seeing Wall Street now, you know, as we're talking, just the numbers just keep going down, down, down. And Donald Trump has now levied tariffs on 180 countries, including some areas of the world that are uninhabited. Yeah, the penguins. It was a rough week for the penguins. It was a rough week for the penguins. And they're like, what did we do? We're just here. So as they're looking at this, and I'm talking

about the CEOs and the shareholders, you know, there were some rumblings coming out of, I guess, I think it was one of Tesla's first founding shareholders that were like, maybe it's time for a new CEO as their stock has been down for weeks. Amazon has been down for weeks. What do you make of their ability, I guess, to persuade this administration away from economic calamity that we actually are not going to be able to work our way out of? Does Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is there a plan there that Wall Street and the 1% don't know about and are we all going to, to be like, oh, look, they really did know what they were doing. I want to answer that. I want to engage with actually one other thing that you'd said earlier,

which is you're absolutely right that the trade that CEOs made on the way in was, yeah, there's going to be a lot of stuff we don't like, but there's going to be deregulation. They basically have gotten the norm-busting, unpredictable Donald Trump that they didn't want and none of the norm-busting, unpredictable Donald Trump that they did want, right? And I think they thought those were a package deal. And despite these are smart people, everyone told them this wasn't going to work that way. It didn't work that way. So that's one.

And I think you're absolutely right. They were willing to trade a fair amount of kind of day-to-day chaos and actually, you know, real pain for real people on lots of different fronts for some combination of lower regulation and lower taxes. They have not gotten the former, we'll have a fight, you know, on the hill about tax cuts by the end of this year and the extension of those 2017 tax cuts from Donald Trump. Look, I'm not an economist, and I think as a journalist, you try to engage with people fairly. So if I'm being the most charitable I can be on kind of the, is there some grand unified theory here, right? That's really what you're asking. Is there some 4D chess that he is playing? Despite the fact that I don't think Trump has played a lot of 4D chess in his political career.

I think that this administration has in some ways accurately read the room a bit. Even among people who are very upset about what's happening now, there is, I think, a more broadly held opinion that perhaps the U.S. has traded away too much of its hard power for soft power, right? That we have underwritten the global economy in a way that has been really good for developing nations and has perhaps those benefits have been unfairly shared and that we've been overly generous with them. That's a question for economists. And I would say most economists probably disagree. They will tell you that rising tides lift all boats and that if we are willing to let Vietnam sell things cheaply here and have them put tariffs on our stuff so that they can

build up their domestic economy and grow and be stronger. That's probably better for everyone. But that is a slightly more broadly held opinion than what we're talking about here. So I would say that they have sent a little bit correctly read the room. The strategy, I would say, is blunt at best and disastrous at worst. Economies shrink when you put tariffs in place. In some utopian version, they'll say, well, if we can't import cheap stuff from China, that's not the American dream. The American dream is building stuff here. that creates good jobs, that's a nice idea. It takes a really long time to build a factory.

It takes a really long time to retrain workforce. And to put shovels in the ground that are going to build that steel plant that somehow Donald Trump thinks is going to arrive tomorrow. So when they say some short-term pain for long-term gain, that is sort of, I think, the trade that they are hoping to make. But I think that that short-term is longer and more painful than people think. and the long-term gain is pretty fuzzy. Because I was going to say, I'm like, look, we all have a different idea of time.

My idea is short, I live in New York City, so walking 10 blocks to get someplace, if it says, if it says it's going to take 15 minutes, like, feels about right to me. But somebody who lives in a suburban place and it says, oh, my God, it's going to be a 15, 20-minute walk, is like, that's a lifetime to them. So, like, this idea of long and short and pain, my other feeling about the, the pain part is that the people that are telling us that we just need to endure are sitting on literal piles of money. Piles and pile, hundreds of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars, and are not going to feel a damn thing. And so I wonder what you think of in terms of the bet

that they're making around their constituents riding this wave with them. I mean, last week, Fox for the first time in nearly 30 years took the Dow ticker off of their airwaves because they didn't want to watch it go down while he was talking? Yeah, because they didn't want to watch it. Yeah, and you'll note that he scheduled the tariff press conference at the Rose Garden for 4 p.m. after the market closed.

My understanding is that some large investors had put in that request because he's such a chaotic force in the market when he talks. Listen, I think what you're getting at is that tariffs are a particularly regressive way to restructure an economy. And I mean that in two ways. One is that, just to say the obvious, they make things more expensive. They're a tax. They're a consumption tax. And lower income people spend more of their income than higher income people. So right there, right, just sort of the percent of your paycheck that is going to buy stuff that is now more expensive is disproportionately

shared across income levels. The other thing is that imagine sort of two, because companies have a choice here. They're going to pay more. They got a write a check to the government when they import things. They have a choice. They can eat it or they can pass it on to their customers. And so take Apple, which has, you know, on its iPhones, a profit margin 30, 40 percent on each iPhone it sells. So they could perhaps make that 25 percent and keep the prices where they are. Grocery stores have a margin for as much as we like to get on them about price gouging and eggs. Grocery stores run at margins of about one or two percent. So they can't, they can't eat that. They have to pass that on. And so sort of consumer staples, the things that we all need every day that we have to

buy regardless of how much they cost, there's a lot less flexibility for companies to absorb those costs. So the transmission between higher tariffs at the border and higher prices on the shelves is much, much tighter for things that lower income people need and much looser for more luxury goods. With just a couple of minutes that we have left, I do want you to help break something down for our listeners, which is the word that they're hearing float around. right now, which is that we're headed towards stagflation or we're in stagflation and making the difference, helping us understand the difference, Liz, between stagflation and recession. Yeah, I suspect most your readers like me were not around in the 1970s when this was a real thing. But the way to think about prices and economic growth is that they usually move together. So think about coming out of the pandemic, right? Everyone was spending again and out there again and the economy was ripping. And

stuff got more expensive. And think about the converse. If you're in the depression, people don't have money. Prices go down because there's no demand. Those are, you know, respectively good and bad, but those are pretty economic textbook situations. And they're situations that we can respond to with textbook responses, like raising and lowering interest rates, right? If the economy is slow and people aren't buying. The Fed lowers interest rates. Banks make more loans. People buy more stuff. If the economy is running too hot and people are overspending, they raise interest rates, people borrow less, they buy less, stuff goes back down. That's the sort of the kind, you can imagine it like a fireplace and a bellows. You put oxygen into the fire, you take it out.

That's fine. Stagflation is a real problem because it is a combination of stagnant economic growth or perhaps even recessionary, the economy shrinking, and high prices. And that is a real puzzle because it's very hard to get yourself out of it. It is also harder to get yourself into it, but that sort of seems like where we are right now, which is that we have, The first shock is the high prices, which are these self-imposed tariffs. You also might have seen it if perhaps supply chains or other things, right? But there's a supply problem. There isn't enough stuff or the prices on it are too high.

So you end up with high prices. But what happens is that people say, well, this is going to be more expensive tomorrow. I'm going to buy it today. And they start to pull forward their purchases, which is how you end up with this inflationary cycle that becomes really problematic. While at the same time, that demand eventually falls off a cliff because a lot of the things they're buying. or a car, a washer, these are one-time purchases. They look at the stock market going down and they feel poorer. And so they stop spending.

They stop going out. They stop doing the day-to-day things that help the economy to grow. So you end up with these high prices and a shrinking economy. And that's a really hard thing for officials to respond to. Even if the feds were to come in and cut the interest rates, right? How long essentially can we continue on this path that Donald Trump has us on before there is an inability to have a bounce back. When you ask, should the Fed cut interest rates?

And Donald Trump over the weekend, you know, he has loved low interest rates for a long time. And over the weekend, he again said he thought that they should. That will help on the growth side, right? Because if you can get a mortgage for less money, you might buy a house. If your credit card rate goes down, you might spend a little more and roll over a balance.

But all that spending then increases prices. So it's not an obvious answer. And the path that we were on before tariffs, you know, there were things that are happening in the world that are a bit inflationary anyway. You know, things like economic kind of nationalism. You started to see a bunch of defense spending in a lot of places. There are things that suggested that prices might stay higher for a little longer and thus rates might have been higher for a little longer. But there was, I think, a pretty good path towards a more normal interest rate environment, perhaps by the end of this year, end of next year. That picture has really been scrambled.

And again, what that does is that scrambles the underlying incentives for people and households and really for companies to borrow and invest and plan. So you end up in a situation where you have potentially really slower economic growth or perhaps a recession, which, by the way, the administration has kind of said they're okay with. They know they're flirting with it, may seem to be all right with it, and these high prices. And you end up in a bit of a doom loop. So one thing when you were saying earlier kind of is it time to rethink capitalism. I would actually say that the one real pushback you've seen to Donald Trump's policies has been the market. And, you know, I wrote about this a little bit a week or two ago. But Donald Trump one-on-one is very good.

Kind of undefeated so far, right, when you think about his administration. Very good in these one-on-one negotiations. But you can't bully the market. It's too diffuse. There's too many corners of it. It kind of goes where it's going to go. And we have not yet seen that be a check on some of these policies. Right?

Everyone's really waiting this week. Like, boy, if it goes down another 5% is, is Trump going to change his mind and kind of try to grab, you know, victory from the jaws of defeat and roll this stuff back? But the market has been the one real hashtag resistance here if you want to find one. I'm still pretty comfortable with kind of those forces. Companies are worth less today because they're going to make less money. This is not a panic. This is not overly complicated.

This is basic econ. Well, Liz, we will have to leave it there today. Thank you so very much for breaking down. I don't know. The breakdown that we are currently in. Really appreciate you, folks. Liz's book is Crash Landing, the inside story of how the world's biggest company

survived an economy on the brink. And you can catch her writing at Semaphore. Really appreciate you making the time for the new abnormal. Thanks for having me. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. All right. It's just another Orange Monday, Danielle.

So give us your fuck that guy. Well, here's the thing. we all know and have seen since January 20th that democracy has been, what's the word, destroyed, done, is over. But nothing says this more than what is happening down in North Carolina, where a new court decision, according to NBC, in a disputed North Carolina race could mean, guess what? That's 65,000 votes that were cast for the state Supreme Court in 2024. must be recounted and verified. And why does the Republican majority want to throw out these 65,000 votes? Oh, folks, because they were mail-in ballots, a number of them.

And we know that Republicans, for some fucking reason, believe that mail-in ballots are fraud and don't want to allow them to happen. And Donald Trump sure as hell won't allow them to happen in midterms or in a 2028. presidential election. And I giggle at that because here's the thing. They are basically trying to not basically, they are going to nullify

the voices and votes of 65,000 North Carolinians. And I cannot imagine that people should in that state or anywhere where Republicans have tried to have this happen, just sit idly by. You should not have to vote on,

like go into a poll booth, do like the voting in the way that Republicans deem the right, quote unquote, the right way to vote. We know that they have consistently on this issue have been a hammer looking for a nail. Every election, there are what, like a handful, maybe three to five, ineligible people that are able to vote and they have turned it into their raisin to entry. Like, it's bullshit. People need to take notice because this is the model that they will use in future elections. And again, I use elections in quotes. So fuck those guys. Yeah, there's an argument to be made that what's happened to our court system is the single biggest danger to democracy in America. And this is a perfect example of it. This is a Republican-dominated court that wants to

keep its domination and to do so is willing to throw out 65,000. votes because they didn't get the result, the election result they wanted, i.e. the Republican winning. And like you said, we're seeing this time and time again. And as I've said, repeatedly, all you got to do to see which party is the bad guys is look at the party that doesn't want more people to vote, that wants to make it harder for people to vote. And there's a lot of problems with the Democrats, but that ain't one of them, at least. So yeah, just absolutely. Fuck those guys. So, Andy, how are you beginning this orange week with your fuck that guy?

Oh, I'm going to go with a guy who I know we've talked about on the show before. I'm pretty sure he's been an FTG. The gentleman from Oklahoma with the really fucked up name, Mark Wayne Mullen. And he decided that he should make a little post on X and talk about how a story of something that happened in 1890, which is when a reporter shot and killed a guy named William Talby, who had been a congressman, he decided to say, there's a lot we can say about reporters of the stories they write, but I bet they would write a lot less false stories, as President Trump says, fake news, if we could still handle our differences that way. First of all, it's fewer false

stories, not less false stories. I'm sorry, that to me is the most egregious part. I don't even care about the other part. I have a big problem with the less and fewer thing. But I'm trying to be fewer obnoxious about it. What he is calling for here is violence against reporters, saying that reporters would stop lying, which is what he thinks they're doing, if they could be shot. He got criticized for this by an Oklahoma newspaper, by the way, the Oklahomaan.

He gave his, you know, his usual, oh, I was just joking. How come you can't take a joke? because you're a U.S. Senator and you're talking about people committing violence against journalists, and A, you're not joking. You'd be perfectly fine with it. And B, even if you were joking, you want to make that joke? Go down to the comedy seller. Go to the mothership in Austin where Joe Rogan's buddies hang out. You'll absolutely kill there. You don't post a video on X talking about committing violence against journalists when you are a member of the United States Senate.

And it's just that simple. But then again, so is he. So, yeah, fuck that guy. I mean, none of them are joking. Like, whether it's Donald Trump, let me look into sending American citizens commit crimes to a foreign country to be tortured and brutalized. Whether it is, like, saying that protesters should be shot in the leg and now going

after journalists for quote unquote false stories, like, they want violence. They want violence and they want harm to come against the people that they do not like and that they deem to be a quote unquote enemy of the state. That has always been their goal. That has always been their plan. And it is egregious and disgusting and should not be swept under the rug at all. Because when we get to the place where they are rolling out tanks, folks are going to be like, I thought that he was kidding.

No, they never were kidding. They are telling you the plan out loud and who they are targeting out. loud. So do not be surprised when it happens. Fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded the Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode,

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