The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Raging Moderates: Trump’s Art of No Deals
Episode Date: July 9, 2025What will America look like in the (very) near future? Scott and Jessica talk through what to expect, with the White House announcing a new round of tariff threats and the GOP budget bill now signed i...nto law. Plus — unraveling the moral priorities of Congressional Republicans, why the Democratic Party needs a “revolution,” and an enterprising South African immigrant has an idea to bust up the two-party system. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Follow Raging Moderates, @RagingModeratesPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Welcome to Raging Moderates.
I'm Scott Galloway.
And I'm Jessica Tarlov.
Jess, have you missed me?
Have you missed me?
Yeah.
And I don't want to say it again, but like I texted you and you just didn't respond.
And it was interesting.
It was in response to your No Mercy, No Malice column
with extra data for you to be able to use in your shows.
Oh, really?
It's okay.
I know you have a scarcity clause in our contract
or whatever, or in your contract with everybody.
Yeah, I don't.
I would like a new gestalt in our society
that when you don't respond to emails or texts,
it means I agree, what a great email,
drop the mic, I don't need to respond.
That's what the thumbs up was created for.
100%.
It's not enough for most women, I will say,
but at least it means that you are alive,
that you recognize that this happened
and that you aren't upset about something
because that's where the estrogen takes you.
Like I think, oh my God, is Scott in Ibiza
upset about something?
But no, you were probably just drinking and hanging.
Oh, see, I think women are more secure.
I think guys are actually-
Have you met women?
More insecure in women
because women have so much practice ghosting men.
I think they respect the slow fade.
I think they respect the like the polite,
I'm winding down this dialogue,
whereas men, especially powerful men,
are used to everyone responding back
and licking them up and down.
And I find, and I'm virtually signaling, but it's true,
the more important the person,
the less likely I am to respond
because I have spent my entire career
just responding to powerful people,
whether it's writing their speeches,
doing their presentations for boards,
or telling them what decisions to make, or whatever it is.
And now I am done.
I am done renting my brain to rich white dudes.
I'm done.
Anyways, probably more than you were bargaining for.
Back to you.
How are your children?
Oh, so nice of you to ask.
They are great.
I got some cute photos from last week.
I won't send them to you
because it won't matter probably,
but they're really good.
We're getting very comfortable in the pool, which is important, the water safety skills. won't send them to you because it won't matter probably. But they're really good.
We're getting very comfortable in the pool,
which is important, the water safety skills.
Oh God.
It's so scary when you're around water,
which I'm a city kid and we don't have a pool obviously here,
but it's the scariest thing in the world
to think that they could just fall in
when you turn your head or you're not,
they get out of the house somehow.
Oh, your instincts there are correct and common sense.
I have personal experience with this.
I saw my job as a father of young children
to do two things, bring home the bacon
and to keep the kids away from any body of water.
And when we first moved to Florida, I was out in back
and my son, he was like three or four,
we were out in the back, he was playing in the pool and he went to the deep end and jumped in and started
flailing around and I was there so I could jump in and fish them out.
And I thought, if I had just gone in for some water, if I had just taken a call
and wandered around the side of the house, anyways, you're right to be paranoid
about that.
And then one summer, I forget where we were,
we even got bought those devices
that you put on their shirts.
And when the device senses water and alarm goes off,
and the alarm went off on a Sunday,
and we're all like running around the house
looking for a kid in a body of water,
and someone put the shirt in the laundry.
I don't know how I got here, Jess.
Did I tell you I'm in Ibiza?
You did, but now you're telling everybody it looks nice, or looks fine.
I'm in Ibiza where there are a ton of young men who have not earned their wealth and are
spending their father's money and have some intricate story about the real job they supposedly
have. And it's obvious within about 10 seconds, they've got a rich dad and they bring a bunch of
women looking to be sponsored by the Sun
There's so many sexist classes things I just made in that statement, but I'm holding by it, but I do love it here
They're also all true about it there
I went once I was 30 and I was the only person who wasn't on Molly when we went out and it's
Something to behold watching people on people dancing for five hours straight.
Like we had just started getting step counters, you know, like people were paying attention to the number of steps.
And then you see that someone did like 40,000 steps overnight.
And you know, they had a good night.
Yeah, I'm not going to say whether or not I take Molly, but a couple nights ago, the Black Coffee DJ said,
I found I really like me. I really felt good about me all of a sudden.
All right, Jess, today we're talking about the new phase
of Trump's trade war.
That was a segue.
The GOP trying to sell their new bill
and Elon Musk's new third party.
Jesus Christ, you fucking attention monster.
Could you be more addicted to ketamine or attention,
you fucking weirdo?
All right, let's get into it.
Now that the White House has pushed
its big legislative package
across the finish line, it's turning its attention back
to the global trade war with a fresh dose of confusion,
deadlines, and diplomatic drama after a 90-day tariff pause
that produced only a few shaky deals.
That is generous to describe what has happened with the UK.
By the way, let's just talk about this UK deal.
A reduction in tariffs on Austin Martin engines and Rolls Royce engines Wow
That's gonna change the economy
After 90 day tariff pause that produced only a few of these deals
With the UK Vietnam and China although I wouldn't even call them deals. I'm still pretty angry about this
They're they're agreements or structures to talk about a deal Trump says the US is ready to turn up the pressure
Oh god, hold my beer bitch this, their agreements or structures to talk about a deal. Trump says the U.S. is ready to turn up the pressure.
Oh God, hold my beer, bitch.
That is literally what the world is saying to this guy right now.
Starting August 1st, steep import duties, some as high as 70% are set to kick in.
Yeah, sure they are.
Sure they are.
Mr.
Trump always chickens out.
That process began on earnest Monday when President Trump fired off tariff
letters to the leaders of 14
countries, including Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and
South Africa. These letters spell out new country
specific tariffs, I guess from some intern that has a
chat GPT account, ranging from 25% to 40% and warn
that rates could even go higher if those countries
retaliate. At the same time, Trump signed an executive action pushing back the deadline for most
reciprocal tariffs with, oh, pushed back the deadline.
My red lines are kind of a beige, invisible line, said Trump over and over, with the exception
of China to August 1st.
The move buys more time for negotiations.
In other words, I'm folding yet again, said Donald Trump to
the world, but not by much. Now businesses are bracing for impact, markets are jittery,
and major questions remain. Will Canada's July 21st deadline hold? What happens when
the China truce expires August 12th? And is this strategy or just more bullshit jazz hands,
false, empty threats? Jess, what do you make of this new phase of,
let's call it the tariff limbo?
It's the same as usual in that it just feels
deeply unserious and this has an exclamation point
after unserious or a crescendo because these letters
that he sent to foreign leaders were just like
true social posts on letterhead.
It was like written by a 14-year-old boy.
He's capitalizing random words.
His grammar makes no sense.
He's misgendering certain leaders.
They fixed that though.
Her Excellency became a dear Mr. President within a few hours.
But there's always been an opportunity for the Trump administration to take the layup
on this trade war because when they buy themselves more time, they could just back out.
And no one would really say anything because they just be quietly relieved. Like everyone over at
CNBC would be like, thank God, right, we can just get back to being normal. And you could talk about
tariffs on China, which everyone broadly agrees with and the Biden administration did as well. They even jacked up Trump's tariffs on China threefold and just focus on people that are
actually at war with us in some way or another. But these blanket tariffs, these violations of,
by the way, free trade agreements, which creates larger questions around what Donald Trump thinks
Congress actually does or if he values it at all,
which I mean, he doesn't as we've seen time and time again, but like on South Korea, we have a free trade agreement.
It's not up to you what you do with them.
I just I don't want to see Scott Besson anymore.
Like this guy who was supposed to be the adult in the room making the rounds on the Sunday shows,
then he's all over CNBC on Monday. And he's so smug.
And he's telling us to not believe our lion eyes
about what's going on.
We had 90 deals in 90 days.
That's over.
Peter Navarro says, oh, I'm very happy with where we are.
I don't know how that's physically possible if you
said we were getting 90 deals in 90 days.
And then we had Trump in April.
I'm telling you, these countries are calling up.
They're kissing my ass.
They're dying to make a deal.
Please, please, sir, make a deal.
I'll do anything, sir.
And when he talks like that, you know that it's hyperbole.
But now, Besant has admitted as much that a lot of those countries didn't even call
us.
And people understand that you just kind of sit back and wait to see what happens.
Because even if you were to make a plan that goes along with what they want for you to be doing, right?
That they want you to build a factory or whatever.
They're not giving you enough time to do it to any execution whatsoever because in 10 days it just changes.
So if I were these other countries, I would just sit back and kind of wait and see what happens and hope that he gets distracted by something.
And just keep buying yourself more and more time.
What do you think?
Yeah.
So the entity which has become sort of a better predictor engine than political pundits or
CNN or Fox is the markets.
And basically the markets don't believe the tariffs are going to change that much.
I mean, to be clear, and I'm a bit of a catastrophist, I thought this is really gonna hurt the markets,
and the markets have basically said
the tariffs are gonna look remarkably similar
to the way they did before.
The markets aren't worried about this nonsense.
And I did some analysis,
because I was very excited about coming back
to Raging Moderates.
And I'm fairly certain that by dollar volume,
there have been more deals struck since the president
announced his new tariff policy or what I'll call threats between countries that are non-U.S.
And that is the threats of tariffs have actually inspired a great deal of dealmaking,
just not between the U.S. and the people we've threatened. What it's done is it's sent a message to non-US countries
that they can't count on this incredible trade relationship
they used to have with the United States,
which has inspired them to begin speaking to each other
and rerouting their supply chain,
including dialogue and agreements around the US.
So a few of those, Vietnam and South Korea,
have announced $150 billion more balanced
and sustainable trade relationship as they swear cooperation following Trump's tariffs. EU has
struck more deals with China, with Canada, with India, the EU and Mercosur, a bunch of the Southeast Asian nations are talking for the first time,
Japan, South Korea and China. We tend to, as Americans, we're fairly narcissistic. We just go,
oh, Asia. And we think they're all the same. Japan, South Korea and China are not in love with each
other. They do not like each other. And they are talking for the first time about closer ties.
Why? Because their attitude is,
these people, we can't count on this great trading
or preexisting trading relationship,
so let's start discussing.
So in sum, Trump did inspire a great deal of deal-making,
just not among us between nations he's threatened between them and each
other.
Sounds like what goes on on foreign policy as well.
You know, he did admittedly have a good NATO summit and maybe he's going to get the 5%
commitment in terms of defense spending from some nations.
But we know with the position that the US has taken on Ukraine, for instance, that the EU gets
together with Ukraine without us on a pretty regular basis.
It's a go-it-alone strategy that we've taken and we're seeing the repercussions of it.
The question will be what happens at home in terms of how the American public feels
about this.
And we know that Trump's disapproval on trade has skyrocketed from January. It was 40%. Now it's up to 54%. I saw one survey that
actually had a 65% disapproval. The American public knows that tariffs are a
tax on them because they're people that go out and buy things, a lot of them
small business owners who have no idea how to make a plan for their future or
that they think that they can even stay
in business for the next six months. What I saw that feels like a bit of a watershed moment,
and I didn't realize that this transition hadn't happened yet, but in the last month,
Trump voters have started saying that this is Trump's economy. So essentially, this feels like
a reset moment for the administration. So he's been in for six months.
But if you consider that it's only like in the last few weeks, actually, that people
who went out and voted for him in November are saying that he owns this economy, it's
a bit of a blank slate.
And so this new set of tariffs and whatever is to come going forward in terms of the economy
is actually going to be what Democrats need to be paying attention to and what we're gonna have to work for for the midterm. So
that's like 18 months versus 24 months of actual runway there. And I was
surprised to see it. I know that everyone, you know, you have your horses and because
you like this guy you say, oh it's not his fault. And all presidents do that,
right? They say, you know, I'm cleaning up the mess of the last guy. It's not true
all the time when they say it, but they do but I think that's a very different perspective that
we're going into this now where people are saying Donald Trump is fully in control of the United
States of America now and what does that look like it looks like the one beautiful bill which
we're going to talk about and it looks like perhaps a series of trade wars that are really
going to hurt the American economy.
I do think it's interesting about the market.
The ticker is always running on Fox,
and while I'm in hair and makeup for an hour
because it takes a long time to attach those fake eyelashes
and bring my hair closer to God,
I'm always watching the direction of things,
and there were certainly a lot of very positive green days.
But yesterday, as these letters were trickling in,
you see it go into the red,
and I'm watching Liz Klayman,
who we both love on Fox Business,
and talking to her guests about what's going on
in their companies and how they're planning.
And they're saying something very similar to what you said,
which is they're making plans for it,
but they're not thinking that it's the be-all and end-all.
And I really wish that more CEOs of companies,
like the CEO of Ford sat down with Lara Trump
and actually told her why you need to get some
of these parts from other countries and how unfeasible,
is it unfeasible or infeasible?
Yes.
How it is not feasible to totally produce these cars
on American soil is what you have to do.
You have to do it with the kid gloves.
You have to do it as nicely as possible,
but you have to show up and you have to look these people
in the eye and just say it's not possible.
Yeah, if they were really serious, well, okay.
So the F-150, I think, goes across the Canadian
or Mexican border back and forth,
or components of it like 12 times.
It's not even clear how you would even force these tariffs.
And two, if we were really interested in more domestic manufacturing around
the automobile industry, we wouldn't have cut those subsidies to EVs because
the most vertical automobile manufacturer is Tesla because it has dramatically
fewer parts that can be manufactured and milled domestically.
And while I'm loathe to give any credit to Elon Musk companies, EVs, if you were really interested about having more domestic production and dramatically
simplifying the supply chain, you wouldn't be halting the EV tax credits. What I did
find interesting recently was the chairman pal at an economic conference basically came
out and said, if it wasn't for the tariffs and the insecurity that the tariffs are creating around the possibility of inflation, if he actually follows through
on his threats, which looks less and less likely every day as he continues to threaten,
fold, threaten, fold, threaten, see above, fold, that he said we would have lowered interest
rates already.
And so effectively, the entire economy is paying a tax
of somewhere between call it 25 and 100 basis points
on your credit cards, your student loan payments,
your mortgage payments,
because we would be in a rate cutting cycle right now
had it not been for someone who is a lot smarter
than anyone on the administration's current economic team,
had he not said, we have to wait and see
if these tariffs go through and the inflationary impact
they have before we start cutting interest rates,
because if all of a sudden everything gets more expensive
and we cut interest rates and people get horny
about borrowing money and buying more shit
and there's more money chasing fewer things,
and we start this upward doom loop of price
where people start
panicked by them because they think things are gonna get more and more
expensive. You know upward inflationary cycles, unless they are cauterized early,
can spin out of control and that's how nations fail. Be clear, inflation is how
nations go out of business. And so the adult in the room, Chairman Palas, said
he just came right on the set and and said, the threat of the tariffs is
why I have not already cut rates and why we are kind of sitting and waiting.
So be clear, these tariffs have yet to take hold in terms of consumer prices or inflation
because no one is taking them seriously because of the track record of the president folding,
but it's already costing us a great deal of incremental capital because
interest rates are probably 25 to 100 bips higher than they would be had we had a responsible
economic policy such that the chairman having beaten back COVID, having beaten back inflation
from the supply chain shocks of COVID and of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we'd be in a rate
cutting cycle. And we're not because Chairman Powell correctly is waiting to see if these
head up your ass economic policies actually get traction and register an
impact on the economy.
There's also a mental health and paralysis impact of this as well.
I understand it's not as easy to quantify that, but you have millions of
Americans that essentially are stuck wondering
what tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now are going to look like.
And that's everyone who just needs to buy food for dinner to someone who has to run
a business.
Plan your business.
Yeah.
Business is big and small.
Walmart has said that they can't even do Q3, Q4 planning because they don't know what it's going to look like.
And bringing your country, the engine of the most powerful country in the world to a halt
because you want to send strange letters to heads of state or you have a bee in your bonnet
about something that most economists worth their salt is telling you is not the way to be running our country and certainly not the way to get
the kinds of results that you are after is an incredible amount of ego or hubris.
I don't even know what the right term for it is, but he was elected by all of these
people that were laser focused on lowering prices.
That was it, right?
They showed up.
There are obviously immigration voters, about an eighth of his voters, so that was the number
one reason.
But in general, people wanted lower prices.
After a Biden term, you brought down inflation, but it was a hugely inflationary period for
us and for the rest of the world.
And you look at all of the actions that he's taken and they're diametrically opposed to
the goal of lowering prices.
And Chairman Powell, just man of steel, right?
This guy just gets up there and he says exactly
what he wants to say.
He doesn't sugarcoat any of it.
There's the predictable response that Trump gets
on social media and interview, whatever it is,
and says, Powell's gotta go.
You know, he's bad for America, et cetera.
But I really admire someone who is so fearless in saying what's true.
There are a lot of people who I feel like are trying to play some sort of game about
how they treat Trump, right? They're either nicer to him for this or they want to get
this kind of reaction. So they do, you know, zigzagging around with it. And Powell is just
such a straight shooter about it. You know,. He says if you do this one thing differently,
then I'm going to be able to give you the thing that you want.
And there's so little directness, I feel like, in society right now that I really
love it when I see it and it's easy for someone as an analyst to be able to
glom onto that because you say this is a serious person who knows what they're
saying and is not
treating Trump special. Like he's not playing the game with him. He's just saying what's true.
Yeah, this guy will be one of the most deserving Medal of Freedom recipients in history and that
will absolutely happen as soon as there's a Democratic administration in place. He really
did. He pulled us back from COVID. He basically stuck up the middle finger and said, hold my beer to senators on the
far left who were, you know, crying for people whose credit card, but that he
needed the lower interest rates and also on the far right, he just didn't care.
He was very steadfast.
The largest acceleration in interest rates over a 15th month period in history.
And it was a medicine we needed to take.
A zero interest rate environment
created some real externalities
and he immediately course corrected.
And our inflation under the Biden administration
was the lowest of the G7
while our growth was the strongest.
The affordability thing is really interesting.
And even if you look at Mom Donnie's win in New York
of the Democratic
primary, it was arguably very similar to Trump.
It was a focus on affordability and weaponizing
new mediums. I mean, coming at it from a much
different lens. But basically Trump ran on
affordability and so did Mamdani. But if you
were really serious about affordability, you
would have a sane immigration policy that
said, okay,
if you're going to church and picking crops and part of our healthcare system and lowering
the bills at grocery stores and in our health services community, all right, we'll figure
out a path to citizenship.
We want to bring in the most talented immigrants to start new companies.
We want to ensure there's a ton of competition amongst we're going to break up monopolies.
We would never have tariffs. We would get together with some of our partners and figure out a way to lower tariffs. I mean, literally everything. We would figure out a tax policy that doesn't borrow
massive amounts of money such that interest rates go down because of the money or the premium that
we have to offer people on T-bills doesn't continue to increase as our own balance sheet looks increasingly risky. What you said is exactly right. I mean,
the big beautiful bill is the big inflation bill. I mean, you could assign a lot of words to this,
inflation, depraved, the anti-Robin Hood bill, whatever you would want to call it,
but it does appear that he is dead set on illuminating or inciting or detonating
inflation again.
All right.
With that, let's take a quick break.
Stay with us.
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Welcome back.
Republicans finally muscled their big,
beautiful bill through Congress,
a sweeping legislative victory for Trump
that slashes 1.7 trillion in federal spending, extends
his signature tax cuts, and enacts major changes to safety net programs, including Medicaid.
But now comes the harder part, selling it.
Polls show most Americans either dislike the bill or don't know what's in it.
And with midterms looming, GOP lawmakers are sprinting to define the law before Democrats
do it for them. Jess, Republicans are touting the bill's populous pieces
like eliminating taxes on tips,
but how are they planning to explain
the projected 12 million Americans
who are likely gonna lose their Medicaid coverage?
Well, they're gonna have an election
before you lose your Medicaid coverage.
So that's how they're gonna do it.
They were very specific about the timing of everything.
No tax on tips actually expires in 2028.
Tax cuts for the wealthiest, that lives forever.
But if you're gonna get no tax on tips,
which by the way only goes up to the first $25,000
that you make in tips.
So that's a very low cap anyway.
That'll be around for the midterms,
but you won't know if your Medicaid is going away
until after you cast your vote.
I still expect that the Democrats will do well
in the midterms because historically that's
what happens.
But they were very, very crafty in the timing about all of this.
They also told this monster lie about what
would happen if we didn't pass the one big, beautiful bill.
They would say your tax cuts would expire from the 2017 Trump plan.
But that's not true.
It's not like you would wake up the next day and suddenly you wouldn't have a tax cut anymore.
Congress would actually have six months to deal with this and they could work out something
in a bipartisan fashion and they've done this before. So that was the pressure that
people felt and they thought the average American that you were going again to wake up on July 5th
or whatever day we were going to say it is and that suddenly you're going to have an enormous
income tax bill or a huge bill for your small business. So that was one pervasive lie. And
then you have the stuff about the work requirements for Medicaid.
Scott Besson, again, very smug talking about able-bodied Americans that just don't want
to work.
They always go back to quote unquote welfare queens about all of this.
We know that only 8% of people who receive Medicaid would even fall into that category.
You're not going to pay for the trillions that you're putting into the deficit with those
8%. And they just don't want to tell you the truth about what's going on in
these kinds of bills. They don't want to tell you about who's getting the kickbacks. Steve
Ratner created a beautiful chart of all of the evaluations and all the nonpartisan ones,
all the partisan ones, and even right-wing partisan organizations
have talked about this ballooning the deficit
and that people will lose their healthcare.
Tax Foundation, Cato, and the only group of economic advisors
or economic panel that says that it's going to be a boon
for the American economy overall
comes right out of the White House.
And they obviously
have a vested interest in saying that. But it just feels very much like beating a dead horse.
The American public hates this bill. Net favorable rules range from negative 19 to negative 29.
49% say the bill is going to hurt their family. 23% only say that it's going to help. So you start
out with a baseline that the American public knows that this is a bad thing.
But then you get into the issue of like,
well, what are you gonna do about it?
How are you gonna talk about a thing
that may not affect people tomorrow?
Like I, and I know that people have made this case,
but I don't think it's been made strongly enough.
And I wanna hear it all the time,
that a tax and spend bill more so
than probably anything else that the government does is a moral document.
It is a statement of your values and your priorities.
And the GOP is very clearly saying,
our priorities are the rich,
our priorities are deporting millions of people
who are here, I mean, the ICE funding,
and I wanna get your take on that,
more than the IDF.
Now, that's how much we're funding these guys wearing masks that are driving around in unmarked
vans picking people up. And this, not anti-law enforcement. I'm thrilled that we have zero
border crossings now. I think that that's a very good thing and something that the country
needed and desperately wanted, which is why a lot of people held their nose and voted for Donald Trump because they didn't think the Democrats
were serious about immigration.
But when you look at these priorities, and I'm sure, you know, there are bits in there
cutting red tape for small businesses, some seniors will get a 6K deduction.
Those are good things.
You know, I'm not saying that there's nothing in the bill that's decent, but overall, it's a signal
that this is a morally bankrupt party and they all set as much on the record and then
just went ahead and voted for it anyway.
Yeah, a lot there.
So let's go from the small to the profound.
First off, this populist bullshit around no taxes on tips, what percentage of the working
population would you guess get tips?
I'm gonna make a bad guess.
It's 2%.
What?
Yeah, 2% of Americans make money on tips.
Oh.
And it just never made any sense to me.
I was a waiter.
I was growing up, I was both a dishwasher and a waiter.
So when I was a dishwasher, I wouldn't get a tax cut,
but when I was a waiter, I got a tax cut.
And then first off, anyone who's getting tips, especially with a $25,000 limit on it,
it means they're not paying a lot of federal income tax to begin with.
This is populist bullshit that has no impact on people or the economy.
And what I find more upsetting, I'm all down for blaming the Republicans on this.
I think this is both cruel and stupid, which adds up to depraved.
And I think you can lay the majority of the blame I think this is both cruel and stupid, which adds up to depraved.
And I think you can lay the majority of the blame at the feet of the administration and the Republicans who are scared of being primaried and pretend to give a good goddamn and say,
I would never cut Medicaid and then grab their ankles when push comes to shove,
or decide to sell out the lower 48 to protect their folks, Senator Murkowski. I mean, this is absolutely the majority of the blame lies with them.
But what's more frightening Jess is to your point, this isn't fiscal policy.
It's a reflection on our values.
And I think in America, there's a dangerous trend that my dad used to say
America is a terrible place to be stupid.
And that was sort of an unkind way of saying it's a terrible place to be vulnerable.
And essentially I think America, not just Republicans, but America has decided that
we believe in a hunger games like economy, that the bottom 90% are effectively
nutrition for the top 10% because people are willing to put up with that depravity
because they're hoping at some
point they'll be in that top 10%.
And they're also conflating some of these really ugly ice raids and knees on heads and
14 year olds crying as their mother is carted away and hearing about a kid who is a paraplegic
not being able to afford his medication or his physical therapy.
They sort of begrudgingly say, well, thoughts and prayers,
but they see that as leadership.
They see that as in a weird way, masculinity and toughness.
I think this goes beyond something much deeper and more upsetting about America.
And to your point, let's be hopeful.
It's that Americans haven't been, or Democrats haven't done a good job
connecting this to
people because the majority of people who will probably be thrown off Medicaid, maybe
a lot of us don't come in contact with, or we don't know that our neighbor's on Medicaid.
So I never like to miss an opportunity to talk about myself.
I'll go through just how these cuts would literally pull up the ladder behind me.
I'm sitting here in this out of control, over the top, explosion and wealth in a Betha. And the bad thing about getting older, and you'll realize this, I think you're further along in
sort of self-awareness and I was at your age. But up until the point when I was your age,
I credited my grit and my character for all my success.
It was about me being a baller and me being talented and me taking risks and overcoming some hardship.
And then as you get older, you realize a lot of your success is not your fault.
And what I've come to recognize, and I can attach many of these things to what's under attack right now.
Starting when I was nine years old, I got assisted lunch. My mom made $800 a month
as a secretary, and so we qualified for assisted lunch. And one of the things I
remember about that, and I didn't find out, I was nine so I didn't know what was
going on, one of the things I found out a few years later, and it just shows so
much dignity and so much grace on the part of California taxpayers and our government,
was they purposely sent the coupons to my house,
and every kid had the same coupon,
so no one would know that I was on assisted lunch,
because they wanted to avoid the stigma.
And I thought that was the most graceful thing,
one of the most American things.
When I was in high school, when I was 17,
and I've talked openly about this,
my mom who passed 20 years ago,
I don't think would have a problem with this. My mom became pregnant at 47 and was able to access safe, affordable family planning.
Had we lived in this era in a red state, you know, we weren't very sophisticated. We didn't have a lot of money.
If my mom had been forced to carry a child in unwanted pregnancy to term, I was installing shelving, making decent money at the time.
I would have not gone to UCLA. I would not have had the opportunity to start this upward spiral
courtesy of the Regency University of California. They had, quite frankly, and I'm bragging now,
has produced tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue and thousands of jobs. I just would have, I would have never had
the opportunity to go to college had it been my mom and a newborn. And then when I got to UCLA,
I got Pell Grants. That's the only way I could afford to be at UCLA. And a third of Pell Grant
recipients under this big beautiful bill are either going to have their grants reduced
or eliminated. When I got out of college, I was able to raise a shit ton of money.
Why?
Because foreign investors loved investing in US startups because they saw rule of law,
because they saw all types of technology that had been funded by the US government, which
didn't have to pay a trillion dollars in interest payments so they could invest in these crazy
things called GPS and the internet.
All of my companies were built on the backbone of technologies financed with these extraordinary
irrational investments from the US government because they had the capital to make these
forward leaning investments.
Literally my company has been built on the back of immigrants and an America that said,
if you are really fucking talented and want to work hard, come here and we will put you
to work hard, come here and we will put you to work. I mean, all of these things that have built this life and this prosperity and these millions
in tax revenue, every one of them is under attack.
And it is so disappointing the more people with my blessings of my generation can't do
the math and reverse engineer this to one thing
and that is we are torching,
we are burning the ships behind us,
we are pulling up the ladders.
It's so disappointing beyond the moral argument.
It's like, you don't want your kids
to have the same opportunities we had.
And I'll even go more meta than this
and be more dramatic and more hysterical.
Oh, good.
My mom was a four year old Jew sleeping in the tube stations at night because her house had been bombed during the Blitzkrieg.
And America was so alarmed, they decided to convert factories from producing Buick's to producing tanks.
And they decided that 400,000 households should have a gold
star in the window and lose their sons because it was worth it to push back on fascism.
They were not pushing back on anti-Semitism.
They were pushing back on fascism.
And what's fascism?
Demonization of immigrants, a refusal to condemn violence against your political enemies, and
extreme nationalism.
Sounds familiar?
And had America not had a gag reflex
on emerging fascism in Europe,
my mom's life would have ended with a train ride.
I wouldn't even be here.
So all of these things, a gag reflex on fascism,
providing opportunities for young people,
safe, affordable family planning and rights for women,
deep pools of capital such that people could start business.
A culture that invites the best and brightest
to help people build businesses and leverage that capital.
All that shit is under attack.
It's literally under attack.
I find it so deeply rattling and disturbing,
and I'm pissed off that Democrats just scream
and get angry and talk about Medicare.
I get it, Medicare, that's one part of the story.
But show me anybody of my generation
who has made their wealth,
not inherited, but made their wealth,
in about two fucking minutes,
I can show you why this bill is attacking the reason
that you are in Ibiza or in the Hamptons or in Aspen,
and that you have decided no,
no one else gets to come here except my kids.
Speech over.
I'm overwhelmed by it and moved.
It's a great American story.
And it's not often that people are telling it
in such honest terms.
The details are what matter
and what create connective tissue amongst Americans.
And right now, and we talk about this a lot,
that Americans feel completely disconnected
from one another.
You live in your bubbles.
And I wish more people would speak up like that
and would be telling those kinds of stories.
And I know that it is difficult
if you also have a business to protect.
And there are a lot of people, even immigrants, that are heads of these big companies that feel like they can't do
it, that they have to show up at inauguration and they have to kiss the ring because they have to
make sure that they continue to make their bottom line. But it does feel like the very fabric of
America is being torn apart and I think that's important to emphasize, but I also put on a strategist cap and I think
about how much we talked about January 6th or the death of democracy and fascism is coming
and people didn't want to vote for that.
They wanted to vote for better grocery prices, right?
Or they wanted to vote for a closed border. And so you have to be
really strategic and smart about how you do this. You know, the reality is that nearly half of
Americans haven't heard anything about the big, beautiful bill. So those who have heard about it
have a very negative view of it. Only 8% have said that the Medicaid cuts are a detail of a bill that
they know about. That's going to come for a lot of these people after the midterms, like I said.
So it's emotional to think about this and to think about the impact on the young people,
like you said, of pulling up the ladder.
You know what's going to happen with your student loans, for instance.
I mean, people just are not going to be able to go to
graduate school or college for that matter.
It's just not going to be happening anymore.
We're going to become less educated.
We're also going to be able to import less educated
people because why would you want to come here?
I don't know what America looks like when this is over, but I do know that millions
of Americans were not happy with the way that it's going and Democrats have got
to thread that needle better.
And I don't want to, I don't want to turn every
session into like a shitting on Democrat session.
Like there's not a lot that you can do when you
don't have the numbers, but people don't feel
inspired and they don't feel like they have a
good alternative to this.
A friend of mine who's a great democratic
strategist was talking about it and he said,
essentially we're on trend for 2017 when they tried to do the ACA
repeal and we had a very good midterms there in 2018, but it's gonna take a lot of work over the
next 18 months to impress upon people just exactly what has happened to the country and we know that
it's not that effective to be telling people like, well,
this is what your lived reality is, right?
This is what your experience is.
People know what their experiences are.
And if we don't seem like a decent alternative,
then maybe they sit at home, maybe they don't care,
but more so maybe they just become completely
or even further disenchanted with the American project.
What Democrats do you think are doing a decent job
of attaching this bill to real life,
who you think that is actually showing some of that fire
and ability to connect this to everyday Americans
who other Democrats can model?
I mean, all of the swing Democrats,
I think, do a great job of this,
because sometimes they're not as good on social
or whatever.
We don't pay a lot of attention to it, but like the Jared Goldins of the world, Pat Ryan,
when you win races like that, you know something about how to talk to people and how to make
those connections.
If you look at Mallory McMorrow, who we're gonna have on the podcast, Running for Senate in Michigan,
out-raised her primary opponent who has a lot more institutional support,
because she's talking about this like a normal person.
And she's also saying to the Mom Donnie question,
like business as usual is not working for us.
Yeah, it's over.
I mean, people, they want change,
if they're not gonna get them,
we're gonna talk about the third party thing with Elon.
If these are going to be your options,
you have to find a way to turn into an outsider party
while still being on the inside.
And one of my colleagues at Fox,
I think it was Kellyanne,
said that Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party
from within.
He essentially created a third party from within
the Republican infrastructure and Democrats
need some of that.
They need an internal revolution at this point to
inspire people and to make you think that the
status quo is not good enough for any of us.
And I wanted to ask you this because it's been weighing on me.
Like, I love my job, but I don't love my job.
And I can't imagine loving a job enough
that I would vote for something that I admitted
would strip healthcare from hundreds of thousands
of people that I represent.
What is the point of staying in office if you can't help the people that you
allegedly signed up to improve the lives of? It's such a profound question and I ask myself
the same question all the time that at what point if I mean literally if if the president said we
have to stop all funding for premature birth wards birth wards. Would they do it at this point?
Like where would they draw the line?
Where would they say we won't do it because the only people who didn't vote for
this thing were people who basically said I'm not running again,
especially in the Senate. So I don't, I,
I struggle with this too and I don't have a good answer other than they're too
fucking old,
and they literally think if I leave here,
I'm just gonna go home and start to die,
and I lose all relevance and all importance.
Do you have any additional thoughts on why these folks
just refuse to be the kind of the leaders we ask them to be?
Power corrupts.
Yeah.
These are very important jobs,
and we treat them like many kings and queens to some
degree, right? Especially with the way the media apparatus works now. But I can't come up with what
the line would be except for the very few that actually did find their line, whether it was the
deficit or Medicaid cuts for Tom Tillis. But, you know, the ball is rolling.
There's already a rural hospital in Nebraska that's closed. And they said that this is because of the
bill, that they're not going to be able to stay in business moving forward as a result. And you're
going to see a lot of that and people getting asked tough questions. And I think the answer is going to be, you know, what caliber
of candidate on the Democratic side is going to show up to run races against these vulnerable
Republicans. Because the map, there are already a lot of them on it, and they just put even bigger
targets on their back. You know, there are going to be some very interesting races, hard fought races in all of this.
And we gotta find the way to be inspirational
and different and revolutionary within the system
that we're working in because people look at Washington
and they just say, I don't see anything for me.
Yeah, and one of the bright spots about Mamdami's win is, and I want to be clear, I would not
have voted for the guy.
A lot of his positions are very troubling to me and a lot of his current, his policy ideas
make no fucking sense to me, like sponsored bread lines in the form of state sponsored
or state controlled grocery stores.
But having said that, along the lines of what you're saying, we need a revolution within
the Democratic Party to remake the party
And it's got to start with young people who understand these new technologies. These new mediums are unafraid
new ideas and
Are willing to just sort of step up and say alright it is time to shed a new layer of skin any ideas
who do you think if looking at the positive side of Donald Trump who was sort of the
who do you think, if looking at the positive side of Donald Trump, who was sort of the William Wallace
of that revolution, if you had to bet on one or two
or three people who you think could be that William Wallace
of reshaping the Democratic Party,
do you see any likely candidates or is it still kind of TBD?
It's a little TBD, but I think on the more centrist, moderate, Dem side of things,
I think Elisa Slotkin is offering people a lot.
And she was the one who came out there and said, you know, this is my plan, right?
This is what I think the future of the Democratic Party looks like.
She does the cursing in the right places.
She has the resume to back all of it up.
I just think that there's so much that we can learn from people that have won
these difficult races and that oftentimes we just go back to the folks who have
the loudest voices or who give the best interviews, et cetera.
But they, they obviously don't know the same things as the folks that went out
there and connected with people that have supported Republicans their whole life or
who split ticket for Donald Trump and for them.
You know, it's happening all over the country and there are people out there that are worth
your time, even if their politics aren't exactly aligned with ours.
Like we had Greg Kassar from Texas on the podcast.
He's way to the left of where I am.
But you know, you have a lot of people in the middle who are saying that they like AOC the best
because AOC seems like she's got the fight in her
and that she's on the right side of history.
I'm afraid.
You know?
Agreed.
Yeah.
The problem I have with the far left,
and I think they're as guilty or more guilty of this
than the far right, and I've been subject to it,
is if you're a moderate
and occasionally see merit in Republican ideas, you're treated like an apostate.
Yeah.
Like, you know, the right calls me a libtard, they just write me off, but they'll bring
me on Fox and they're actually quite polite to me, as I think they're mostly polite to
you and appreciate you.
On the far left, I can't tell you how many mean, angry emails I got from people I know
and like and consider me a friend, and I consider them a friend. far left, I can't tell you how many mean, angry emails I got from people I know and
like and consider me a friend and I consider them a friend when I started saying Biden's
too fucking old.
Yeah.
It's like you either sign up for the cult and the narrative or you are the enemy.
And the far left is as guilty of it as anybody.
And the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of embracing imperfect allies. And when I'm at conferences and I see people, Democrats playing identity politics and talking
about the patriarchy and if you don't sign up for every right word for the orthodoxy,
you're the problem. And it's like, just as the settlers figured out a way to get Native Americans
fighting amongst each other, kill each other first,
and then will come in for cleanup. The Democrats are just, the level of interest in warfare is so unproductive. It's like, I absolutely think AOC's policies, many of them don't make
any fucking sense. I will give money to her. I think she's wonderful. I retweet her shit.
fucking sense, I will give money to her.
I think she's wonderful.
I retweet her shit.
I think she's fantastic.
But what I find on the left is if you don't sign up for the right narrative,
basically people attack you and say, okay, maybe we're allies, but you're holding the gun wrong.
This is, this is the narrative.
This demand for ideological consistency is so ridiculous.
No actual human being is totally in lockstep
with a party platform.
And that's what Trump did for the right.
It works and it connects.
Yeah, I mean, we're gonna need a bigger boat,
but I also think the identity politics
to the left has gotten out of control.
It doesn't do us any good to begin assigning values
and identifying or immediately prescribing
validity or a lack thereof based on who's saying it
as opposed to what they're saying.
And I feel like the Democrats don't even recognize
how biased they are against statements
solely based on who's saying it.
And I feel that the Democrats are actually
probably more guilty of this than Republicans.
They said, okay, if you're an old white dude, I have to take everything you say with a
grain of salt and I am ready to weigh in and get my Guardians of Gatchapin.
I am going so far off script here.
Jess, let's bring it home.
Our producer is trying to rein me in.
Let's take a quick break.
Stay with us.
We're going to talk about this guy who's in technology,
who's actually from South Africa, his name is Elon Musk.
Oh, haven't heard of him.
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Welcome back, before we go, Elon Musk says he's launching a third political party.
Oh God, Jess, save me.
Literally save me.
Called the America Party.
Okay, yeah.
A South African immigrant who went to school in Canada,
who disowns his daughter on Joe Rogan's podcast
and is being sued concurrently by two women
for soul-custody of their child
because he spends no time with them.
Yeah, that's the guy to start a third party.
He says it's meant to challenge what he calls
a one-party system that's driving the country into debt.
And he timed the announcement just days after Trump
signed his massive domestic policy bill into law,
a bill Musk once backed and blasted
and now calls the final straw.
He's had it, Jess.
He's had it.
Anyways, Musk insists the new party will focus
on a handful of swing districts in the midterms,
but Trump allies warn it could fracture the right
at a time when margins are razor thin.
That's fair.
And then there's the Epstein factor.
After months of teasing bombshell revelations,
the Justice Department just announced
there isn't a client list, isn't a cover-up, and no more new documents are coming. Well, that's a 180.
That hasn't stopped Musk from fanning the flames or from accusing Trump of being part of some kind
of cover-up. Jess, what's going on here? What's he trying to accomplish? A third party isn't exactly,
I don't know, we've been to this movie before. How much trouble do you think he can actually cause
for Trump and the GOP?
Not very much.
Like on the fringes, it's possible to have an effect
with a third party candidate.
Like actually in an Ohio district, Marcy Capter,
who's the Democrat there, I think this is her 22nd term,
been there a long time.
The Democrats funneled money
into a libertarian candidates
campaign, I think about $400,000,
to shave off support from the Republican candidate that
was challenging her.
And she ended up winning her race.
So those are ways that you can use third parties to play
around and make a difference.
But in terms of what's going to happen
at the presidential level, it makes no difference.
And if you want to have a government that's
more representative to the public,
then you need to have proportional representation.
And we can't have winner take all anymore.
And there are a lot of people that
would get on board with that, but would obviously
never be able to pass and get through.
So Musk is throwing his toys out of the proverbial stroller.
He's pissed off. This happened before. And he essentially came back groveling to Trump.
And I imagine that that's what's going to happen. Because, you know, money matters, of course,
and being the richest man on the planet is a very big deal. But Donald Trump has shown himself to be
more powerful than Musk.
And I think even the way that he's treating him on social media about this,
you know, talking down to him,
it's very paternalistic actually how he's dealing with him.
Like baby Elon is mad.
Give him his space and, you know,
they toss around stuff like I'm going to look into
your immigration status or whatever.
But in general, I feel like he's going to get over it.
And he has gonna get over it
and he has to get back to Tesla and try managing that.
And I think he's mad about the debt,
but he's mostly mad about the EV credits.
Right, that's what this is.
Everyone is always just actually concerned with themselves
and their personal bottom line.
So I think it's gonna end up being a big nothing burger.
Yeah, I mean, there's a few things here.
There's the motivation for doing it and the effectiveness.
The motivation is all of a sudden he's decided the president is a pedophile
and that this bill is fiscally irresponsible.
There is no new information from when he loved the president.
Correct.
There are no new revelations about Trump and Epstein.
The end of the EV subsidies, the massive increase in the deficit were all present when he was
showing up to the White House in a hot topic uniform, high on ketamine.
This is about Elon Musk being angry he's no longer the first friend.
So that is not the basis or the substance or the heft to start a third political party.
And then the question is, will a third political party, does it have any
viability and it doesn't in America.
We have a two party system because of gerrymandering, because of a
winner take all environment.
When we have proportional representation in places like Sweden and Germany, a
third, a fourth, and a fifth party can have a lot of influence because they get
proportionate representative based on if they get 18% of the vote, they get 18% of the representatives.
What a third party ends up being is spoilers, right?
So Ross Perot got 18%.
Ross Perot is the reason Bill Clinton won presidency.
George Herbert Walker Bush was the first incumbent to lose an election when there
wasn't a recession because Perot took 18%, about 11% was drawn from Bush's voter base, seven from
Clinton, so a swing of 4%, which swung it from being a landslide for Bush to a decided
victory for Clinton.
The same thing happened to Gore because of Nader.
Jill Stein played a role.
So these third parties are not viable.
The last time a third party won a state was Wallace, I think in 68,
but they can be spoilers.
I think this is over before it starts.
I think it's going to get no traction.
What he can have is enormous influence because there's a decent argument that
he's the guy that got Trump elected with a quarter of a billion dollars in a huge
platform in seven swing states and a small number of counties in those seven swing states
You can make an argument that in you know, two or three of those states
Musk may have swung the election for Trump if he is able to focus on four or six senatorial and 12 or 15
house races
He could have a huge impact because those people are very loyal to whoever puts them in office one thing that
have a huge impact because those people are very loyal to whoever puts them in office. One thing that Peter Thiel will never hear from JD Vance is the word no because Peter
Thiel put JD Vance in office. So he could have enormous influence, but this third party
nonsense is over before it begins. And be clear folks, Elon Musk isn't worried about
the deficit. He isn't worried about America's future. He's just quite frankly, he's really butthurt and he's angry and he's looking for revenge. Your thoughts?
I agree. And you saw also how quickly Elon Musk faded from favor of the Republican Party.
Once he started opposing the bill, he was persona non grata. I understand that this
coincided with him also leaving the White House, but he's not walking around with Trump and
Dana White anymore. So no one really cares that much. You're right about the money, like
the example I was giving in Ohio, but he is on to something that's really important. You
know, we have the highest number of Americans that identify as a political independent.
That doesn't mean that they don't have right or left leanings, but it means that they don't
want to be part of this two party system that pushes you into boxes where you don't feel
like you belong. And there was a massive study of almost 20,000 people that looked at how
independents feel about the major parties. 64% have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party,
and 71% have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party. We need to do better.
We need parties that look more like America,
that are more responsive to America and their concerns.
It's a huge branding challenge,
something that you're great at assessing.
But when Musk says we need another option,
we need an alternative,
almost everybody says that's objectively true.
We just need to find a way to make that feasible
or possible for folks, or to at least give them some
inkling that we understand how badly they want
things to change.
So just before we wrap up here, Jess, I need you to get
under the president's skin again.
We popped to the fourth biggest news podcast
in the world last week solely because-
You didn't text me about that?
I didn't know that.
Solely because the president is pissed off at you
and name checked you.
So I need you to continue to get under his skin
because daddy wants to come back to Ibiza.
He wants to come back to Ibiza.
The people are so young-
It'll be my great pleasure.
And so hot here and it is so expensive.
It all reverse engineers to the president
getting angry at you.
Can you do that for me?
On it, I will do my best.
I'll say it again.
I can't say it enough.
I am so proud of you.
I think that is so impressive.
You literally wanna tell your grandkids,
you wanna be like, yeah,
remember that fascist back at the beginning
of the 21st century that we literally vomited out? Yeah, he he went after me publicly. I think
that is going to be I think you're going to have that on your tombstone as a point of
pride.
A long truth social for a tombstone.
All right, Jess, that's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.
Our producers are David Toledo and Eric Genekis, our technical director as Jew Burroughs.
Going forward, you'll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday.
That's right, every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to Raging Moderates on its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political
minds this week.
Jess is speaking with Congressman Seth Moulton.
Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode.
Jess have a great rest of the week.
It's so good to see you.
Great to see you.