The Keith Edwards Show - Trump Blindsided as MAGA Billionaire Unleashed His Fury

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Keith Edwards discusses billionaire Bill Ackman and conservative commentator Dave Portnoy’s outrage over new tariffs, which they argue are tanking the stock market and fueling what’s being called “Orange Monday.” Their frustration highlights growing bipartisan concern over the economic fallout and instability caused by recent policy decisions.

This is Bill Ackman. He famously went MAGA this past election cycle. He's a really influential business leader, and he is now attacking Donald Trump online over Donald Trump's terrible tariff decision. Of course, he's not the only billionaire that is going after Donald Trump right now. Elon Musk, his essentially, his boyfriend, has been attacking him and the administration over the tariff nonsense. Peter Navarro just this morning called Elon Musk. Well, actually, let's just let's just, I'll let you here. Peter, let me ask you this. Elon Musk, who the president has described as a genius repeatedly,

basically came out over the weekend and said that he at least implied two things. One that he's not in favor of these tariff program, the way it's structured currently, suggesting he wants it, you know, he wants zero zero across the board. But he also took a shot at you and took a shot at you personally. Have you spoken to him? No, but we'll speak. I'll probably see him today in the Oval. It's no big deal.

Here's the thing. It's like Elon Musk. Why is he, if Elon's against him, he's so smart. Andrew, again, let me finish. Let me finish here. I'm just about to tell you. Look, Elon Musk and his Doge team is making a contribution to America in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse. And that's a very good thing for this country and the American people.

But he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler in many cases. If you go to his Texas plan, A good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case, is the batteries come from Japan and come from China. The electronics come from Taiwan. The tires come. What we want, and the difference is in our thinking, and Elon's on this, is that we want the tires made in Akron. So that is a really big deal that he basically boiled down Elon Musk saying he's not a car manufacturer.

he's a car assembler. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is not going to be a big fan of that definition of what he does and doesn't do. And Dave Portnoy, who we've also had on the channel previously, not, I mean, he hasn't been on the channel, but who we've covered previously is on round two of being pissed about these tariffs. Listen to what he says. It's like they're kind of starting to wake up. They're just waking up just a little bit right now. Let's listen. And all these business people like Bill Ackman, when he was getting elected and he's saying tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. Where were these people? Like, no, I never dreamed that the stock market tariffs were going to smash the stock market like this.

People are saying that on the right, but people always have trashed the other, on the left. Excuse me, Kamala was like this tariff things, a hideous idea. A lot of people who are like tariffs stink. But not these pro-business people. I didn't hear any of that. You would have thought if they. They were, like, worried about it. They would have said it in the real time, but they were all behind it.

Now, obviously what they're saying is the way he rolled it out is Kukamonga. Like, yes, tariffs is one thing, but penalizing your allies in this formula and this spreadsheet, which doesn't make a lot of sense to anybody, it's the way he rolled it out is what their issue is. But, I mean, whatever, he said he was going to do it the whole time. And now here's where I see the issue. So Trump rolls out the tariffs, right? And it destroys the stock market. And people are comparing it to all these other crashes.

This one's the only one that I can think of that's like manmade. Like the stock market crashes in 9-11. Yes. Stock market crashed COVID. Yes. But this is like a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market. That's why we're calling an Orange Monday, not Black Monday. Orange Monday.

We're calling today Orange Monday, by the way, not Black Monday. It's Orange Monday because it was brought on by one person, Donald Trump. And what do I want to get to first? Let's get to this. And then we're going to go to Bill Ackman's statements who Dave references there saying that Bill was so pro-Trump before the election. And now he's like, oh, shit. Well, you break it, you bought it. Dave did mention there that Trump's formula for making these tariffs is insane.

and you know what people have discovered is that the formula Trump is using is more likely than not created by chatGBT. Here's the verge saying Trump's new math, Trump's new tariff math looks a lot like chatGBT as they say, where did they get all these numbers from? Apparently an oversimplified calculation that several major AI chatbots happen to recommend. And here's the important bit. Here is the evidence of it. But a number of X used. have realized if you ask chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok, those are all AI assistants, for an easy way to solve trade deficits and put the U.S. on a, quote, even plain field, they'll give you a version of this deficit divided by exports formula with remarkable consistency.

That's this formula. This is the exact same formula that Trump team are using to determine who gets a tariff and buy how much. The Verge tested this with the phrasing, used in those post as well as a question based on more closely on the government's language asking chatbots for an easy way for the U.S. to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of its trading partners with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero. All four platforms gave us the same fundamental suggestion. So the Trump team literally just typed in a question to a AI chatbot. in order to cause all of this chaos.

Here is Bill Ackman attacking Howard. What do we call him in the show? Howard Nutlick, is that what you all like to call him? Howard Nutlick, he just goes, I just figured out why Howard Nutlick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes.

It's a bad idea to pick a secretary of commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income. It's in a reconcilable conflict of interest. And then Matt Griswold here says, any Manhattan bartender knows that bond people and equity people celebrate on different days. And Bill goes true. He goes on to say, this is just earlier this morning,

the formula used by the administration that AI formula to calculate terrorists made the other nations tariff appear four times larger than they actually are. President Donald Trump is not an economist and therefore relies on his advisors to do these calculations so he can determine policy. The global economy is being taken down because of bad math. This short piece by AEI explains it succinctly a must read. Well, we've already explained what actually happened. And when Howard Nutlick was asked about the AI, look at what he said. Because when we saw the president stand in the Rose Garden holding up that chart that you helped make,

That wasn't actually tariffs. That was actually confusing to investors because it was some kind of other formula. And the countries themselves seemed kind of random. Like, why are the herd and McDonald Islands, which don't export to the United States and are quite literally inhabited by penguins? Why do they face a 10% tariffs? Did you use AI to generate this? No.

No, the idea, look, the idea is. Why are they on the list? off. Because we are living through this stupidest period in American history. And it's a pleasure to be able to experience it with all of you. If we're going to be going down, at least we're going down together, laughing at the insanity. Donald Trump now said that China is going to get even more tariffs because of the retaliatory tariffs that they put on us.

So this is far from over. It's only going to get worse. We have a mad king in the castle and we are in this together.