923 - The Banks Are Out of Money feat. Dave Weigel (4/7/25)

All I wanna be is a jumbo.

All I wanna be is a jumbo.

We're basiles.

All I wanna

The Elon thing really pissed them off.

It was such a limb fantasy that it was true.

And they were just like, how dare this guy do this?

Well, Elon knows many, he knows many things, but he doesn't know Wisconsin.

He doesn't know the sort of pleasant fatalism of the people of Wisconsin and also their massive inferiority complex to anyone outside of the state of Wisconsin.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

To certain people in my life.

All right.

Let's start the show.

Okay, got it.

Okay.

Greetings, everybody.

Hello.

It's Black Monday, April 7th, 2025.

This, you're listening to the Menaker Money Line podcast.

All the money heads out there, we're talking deals, stocks, and global economic meltdown.

Couldn't be happier because we're joined today by our old pal, Dave Weigel.

Dave, welcome back to the show.

Yo, good to be here.

Look, obviously, I'm not, you know, as I've said many times on the show before, I'm not a money file.

So the thought of touching money holds no appeal to me.

But I would like to talk about some of the political reaction and sort of like the political scenario involved in Trump's tariffs and the stock market crash taking place today.

Dave, I think like probably the best indication of where things are at occurred around, I don't know, 9.30 or 10 a.m.

Eastern Standard Time today when a man named who goes by Walter Bloomberg on Twitter caused a $4 trillion market correction by posting that Trump was considering rescinding the tariffs for 90 days, and then the market saw a huge jump after that, only to crash down again because when people realized he doesn't actually work for Bloomberg, he's just his name is Walter Bloomberg.

But I guess I want to start is like in DC, in politics right now, like is a consensus beginning to form over how serious Donald Trump is about these tariffs?

Like, are there people still kind of like bargaining with the reality that maybe these are temporary or that they're a negotiating stance?

Or is it beginning to harden into like a reality that's going to have to be dealt with?

In Washington,

I think people caught on faster that this was real.

It's really everywhere else.

It's everywhere that money managers live and everywhere that CNBC lived, which I guess is New Jersey, where they just said, yeah, this is a deal maker.

This is not going to be real.

We're going to cover this, and then he's going to cut a deal with somebody, and they're going to move the jobs back.

And this was the week or so that you saw people in that zone say, Wait a minute, he might mean this thing he said at literally every single rally since he got into politics 10 years ago.

He might actually want to do that.

He might have having replaced Steve Mnuchin with a bunch of factotums who just do whatever he says, he might actually

want to use that power and have the guys who do whatever he says implement this stuff and defend it.

That's what happened the last week.

And it's just really annoying to anyone who covered Trump at all for 10 years that they're so surprised.

But the whole Walter Bloomer thing, which is really funny,

by far the funniest market crash correction thing I've ever seen.

It's even dumber because it started with

Fox News, which contains some of those people who said like, this is fun and all, but surely he should negotiate and not do tariffs, right?

They use their interviews often to get these guys off the ledge, and they had Scott Kevin Hassett on saying, hey, could the president maybe pause this for 90 days, which came out of nowhere.

There is no one discussing a 90-day pause.

Fox just tried to get in to talk about it, and he gave a non-answer.

And then someone wrote this up on the Bloomberg terminal, like the news, which I used to work for, a quick headline that could move money.

Somebody said that he was considering a 90-day pause, which is wrong.

Walter Bloomberg, who is not just a guy, but a guy with a weird Russian actor as his avatar.

Like, no one knows who Walter Bloomberg really is.

He's just one of those guys who bought a blue check so he could post.

He's been around for a very long time.

Oh, yeah.

He's like if Kyle Becker was not a Democratic Jedi.

He's like one of those news aggregator accounts, but for financial news, and as far as I can tell, he's slightly more respectable than Zero Hedge, but not by much.

Yeah, he doesn't do like the weird essay posts that Zero Hedge will do sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like if he has any opinions about like, you know, what frequency classical music should be at, he's kept them to himself.

But,

you know, he, he's, uh, this is his most high-profile bung up.

But, you know, it just, it shows the import of aggregator accounts like that, who oftentimes are literally just some fucking guy in this case.

Speaking of the guys who were trying to rationalize this as a negotiating tactic, the money guys, I think I saw the last instance of anyone trying to convince themselves of that at 2 a.m.

last night.

I saw Bill Ackman say, Well, you know, it's a negotiating tactic for people to think you're crazy sometimes.

You know, he's getting like 50 preemptive margin calls.

All his creditors are calling him.

Jamie Diamond is about to do the raid on his condo.

And he's like, I mean, there's a chance this might not happen

oh yeah and even the whole walter bloomberg panic was it it was just like people are starving on the snow piercer train there's a rumor that showed up they said oh i heard there's a sandwich over there and they all ran to get it like cnbc would have said can we go with this headline they couldn't it was a fake headline they all went with it because they all are they're like there has to be some method We can't have consigned the country for four years to a guy who's just going to keep doing tariffs randomly, right?

There has to be something smart, right?

Right.

There has to be something.

They're just trying to talk themselves into this.

The thing that has particularly driven me crazy about all that before, like, and it was happening the week, in the week in the lead up to this, especially.

And it was sort of a conversation between finance guys and pundits who were more on the pro-terror side.

And it was basically debating the merits of, you know, the dignity of being like a fucking barista versus working in a factory.

And I've already pointed this out, how much I fucking love this when it's, you know, a bunch of guys who have blogs and like someone who wrote a novel 15 years ago that was well received, being like,

you don't want to be a fucking gay guy and work in an office, right?

But

as things have heated up, and especially since Liberation Day, there's been this

incredibly incessant debate about the merits of offshoring the import of a, you know, having some production production capacity and

having some supply lines that are at least in North America.

But you might as well be debating whether there's more dignity in being a waiter or a fucking sorcerer.

Because they're not going to, they're good.

Yeah, they're going to reshow.

We're going to create 10 million fucking new middle-class manufacturing jobs.

with a government that says they will not deficit spend on anything except like, I don't know, defense

and with no central planning and private industry, is, I mean, they're just going to be stockpiling cash for the next like fucking 18 to 36 months.

How is that going to fucking happen?

Like, it's, it's driven me fucking insane.

Well, I know, just now people are maybe going to realize that those are not coming back, but what a real shit coding on the concept of reshoring.

Like, Jesus Christ.

I mean, like, I was going to say, like,

it seems to me there's like two sort of contradictory stances about what these tariffs are and what they're intended to do.

And, like, a lot of times they come from, you know, sort of Republican intelligentsia and media figures, but also sometimes from the White House itself.

And then, like, the first one, I think we easily dispense with.

Like, I don't think there is much indication that this is a negotiating tactic, that they're a madman strategy to play hardball.

The more serious one is one advanced by Luttnick, among others, this idea that

these tariffs are going to remake the global economy, remake the American economy, and that they're going to compel companies essentially to reshore manufacturing in this country.

Now, Dave, you make a great point about how Fox News and CNBC anchors attempt to kind of cajole them back into a kind of broader economic consensus.

And the follow-up questions to Ludnick will ask him about labor costs associated with building iPhones in America.

And he said, not to worry about that as robots and automation will be doing most of the work.

So, I mean, this is another contradictory, this is another like contradictory thing about, like, well, okay, so the fact where the factories are coming back to America, but the jobs aren't.

Like,

what is your sense about like of the kind of

the idea that this will strengthen the hand of like the American worker?

Like, what is the White House and sort of Republican line on that currently at the moment?

Oh, the White House Republican line is all unified.

It's just Trump is right.

Mike Johnson is just an appendage of Trump.

He says he's right about this.

He's right about everything.

We need to follow him down that hole.

But you're right.

Every time there's pushback in these interviews, and

it's kind of a powerless feeling you get in, not in D.C., but if you're in Congress, you have no power to influence this.

It is just whether CNBCOs asked the right question or whether Andrew Ross Sorkin asked the right thing at Deal Book.

Like, did you get him to say this thing

that will move the markets?

And yeah, they can't explain it because what was Hillbill Elegy comes out, what, 2015, 2016.

one of the premises of that is that you can't save what happened to the hollowed out middle america because it's too late and because of because of automation it's not just offshoring nobody could could say jobs come back now please with with more tariffs and now the policy is well maybe you could maybe you could do tariffs and maybe maybe the factories come back but they've not said here's what they've done is a little bit what biden was doing which didn't work of saying we just had a big announcement uh tim cook and a bunch of other people said they're going to invest a bunch of money into factories.

So if you live in

Northeast Michigan and you want to work in a factory, good news, it's coming.

You live in Wisconsin, good news,

this Foxconn company is going to come in and they're going to have jobs and we're going to do the 1950s again, except without unions.

And

then they don't deliver on it.

You were just saying what

the reality is.

Yeah, they're talking about automation and AI.

While all this is happening, they're also fantasizing about how to get every service worker that can be automated out of that industry and also say, and the jobs will come back.

So if you've been doing crutching numbers for the VA or Department of Education, don't worry.

At some point, there's going to be an Apple factory.

And at some point, you could apply for a job there for much less money installing pins in iPhones.

Yeah.

When?

We won't tell you how.

TBD.

Dave, Dave, that is something I wanted to bring up, not just specifically with the tariffs, but with seemingly,

I guess you could charitably call it a grand strategy of the second Trump administration.

Edit your bedtime, Josh, has also pointed this out, but the sheer brandedness of it all.

Yeah.

Not only is he insistent on the idea that everyone is into this idea of

achieving a 1950s production economy without

Chinese levels of central planning and expenditures that don't really go past the tens of billions, there's also this idea of like, well, that idea is part of a prestige.

So whether it fully works out in the next 10 years, two years or not, which it won't, it will take 10 years, people will appreciate it because it's part of this grand strategy that hinges on my foreign policy accomplishments.

With Brandon, that was things like AUKUS.

He expected people to give him goodwill on the, you know, in 10 years, it's going to be 1957 again.

But in the meantime, I will enjoy waiting for that because of your incredible accomplishments in, you know, getting New Zealand to host a nuclear summary.

That's a huge deal for me.

With Trump, it's,

well, I tried to end the war in Ukraine, but not really.

It's he, he took.

the whole Brandon act and said, what if I can deliver less?

Yeah, the branded version was just, here's some tax credits if you build your chip factory in Tulsa, which made he got enough buy-in on that.

And that's not insane.

Like, is the company going to take a huge, a huge benefit, tax benefit, and free money to build some stuff here and not Taiwan?

Yeah, not all of it, but some.

It was more the threat of, what if China just takes over Taiwan, then you're fucked.

And they said, yeah, good idea.

If you give us some incentives, we'll build.

That kind of, everyone agreed with that.

Even Republicans agreed with that.

Trump will occasionally talk about about repealing chips but he doesn't really mean it he just hates he hates biden like he hated obama um but this is that kind of neo imperial version of that right we won't need to do it because we'll take over rail earth minerals in ukraine and in greenland and we'll have a bunch of money coming in and once we rebalance the world economy so we're making stuff and trading less we're going to have real prosperity and not to repeat myself but but also ai is going to replace all the jobs i that's the part of it i still i still don't know how to put all this together but they're like we're going to do it but we're also going to have five robots doing it.

Dave, I have tried to look into that because, yeah, it's so contradictory.

And it's just so

like

it is.

It is just sort of like upper's mania thinking at that point.

But the most coherent sketching out of that plan is basically that, like, the middle-class jobs that will only require at most like an associate's degree will be basically that you're, you, you know, the way that Fred Flintstone will look at a Brontosaurus crushing, uh you know crushing steel beams for a construction job yeah you would do that but for a robot and that can staff 75 million middle-class jobs and only $98,000 a year well it's a living ain't it

Felix I saw someone like like an exchange of someone who was like no this is gonna be great it's gonna bring all the factories back and then someone asked them like okay like what are they gonna pay are you gonna be working in this factory and he said no i'm going to own the factory yeah Yeah.

Yeah.

You remember those conversations of like, what will your job be after the revolution?

Yeah.

Well,

I'm going to teach you poetry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, Felix, I, you, you posted the other day that this reminded you of the thread where an anarchist tried to explain how they would produce pharmaceuticals after the revolution.

And the answer was, befriend someone who's good at chemistry.

I, I saw, well, like, someone found that.

That was a great one I'd forgotten about, but it was, that was taken from Trump saying, why do what what are supply lines?

Who needs those?

We don't need supply lines to do manufacturing.

And there was a specific Chaz-era discussion where someone was asking, okay,

how are you going to make pharmaceuticals without specialization?

And the person said, that sounds stupid.

It's something like I'd have more fun destroying.

That seems to be, that seems to be the Trump policy with supply lines.

Well, Dave, among the Republican intelligentsia, there is a number of different strategies for trying to get out ahead of bad economic news, metabolize this new shift in the economy, and sort of explain it to people.

And I think the most detailed one was done by Oren Cass, but I noticed it was a long post.

In his attempt to try to make the tariffs policy make sense or seem well considered or something, it seemed to me that it was just like a really long Rube Goldberg device of assumptions about what he thinks Trump is going to do or not do.

And like, to me, like, this just like, all the people trying to figure out, like, what's the logic behind this?

It just recalls to me the famous line from Duck Soup, off-quoted by Slavo Žižek, where Groucho is defending Chico in a court, and he says, Your Honor, my client looks like an idiot.

He talks like an idiot.

But don't let that fool you.

He really is an idiot.

And like,

and like, when I think about like, what's the logic here?

I mean, I think, Chris, I think you got it really right on the nose over the weekend in that, like, throughout his entire career, Trump truly understands paying for anything is being robbed.

And like his understanding of a trade deficit, i.e.

that the United States buys more from the rest of the world than we sell, is like the rest of the world's stealing from us.

And he thinks that we're being ripped off.

It's kind of beautiful in its simplicity.

It's like, well, we've sent the money to Canada and they send us lumber, but then they have our money.

Where'd the money go?

All we have is this fucking lumber.

If you look at the chart that he brought out, so many of those countries are just, it's they clearly, you know, people have pointed out that they probably did this with Chat GPT or something.

And they, for most of it, it seems like they pick countries where the trade deficit ratio is the most out of whack, as opposed to like, who do we have the most like volumetrically skewed trade deficit?

That's, of course, in there, China, obviously.

But with a lot of those countries where it's like, it's 99% us buying something and 1% us selling something to us.

Like Cambodia, for instance.

Right.

It'll be these countries that sell us textiles or in the case of stuff that is aggravating Elon and causing him to inch away.

You know, these countries in Africa that export like, you know, one rare earth metal that you need to make like a type of steel alloy if you are a defense contractor or perhaps you manufacture electric cards.

And it's all these situations where we're getting like the textiles or whatever materials for like a fucking song and they they are literally too poor to buy anything from us because what would they buy a fucking f-35

but they look at it they look at it and they go we're being here the most instructive thing uh the most instructive political debate The two most instructive political thinkers.

One, Demonius X, the most instructive conservative thinker of our time.

Second, the great grubhub debates where they say someone is trying to screw you by making you walk an extra 150 feet to pick up your order.

When someone sells you something and you pay them, the fact that they have your money means that they have gotten one over on you and you have to kill them.

Yes.

While you live your life trying to get as much free time as possible, you're allowed to do that.

The point of your life is buy fart coin early so that you can make money off it.

Record a podcast.

nothing wrong with podcasts you know what i mean uh do your rumble show but everybody else should be working to the bone non-stop just pouring sweat like drinking sweating faster than they can replenish it with gator raid if they're not doing that they're bad americans but you need to you need to be able to chill like this is this is what a prosperity is for someone else is going to do the pins and the iphones uh but they they they did the wrong thing you you got in really early on which is which is the last one the trump one that's not right anymore i'm going to stick with Fartcoin.

Fartcoin definitely went up a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dan, just because you brought up Fartcoin and doing podcasts on Rumble, I have to share an image I saw yesterday with you guys that is going to stick with me for a while, which is, I drove to the Ralphs to buy $20 worth of eggs or whatever, and I was in the parking lot and observing a guy in a Wall Street Bets t-shirt, you know, like the cartoon of one

sunglasses, Wall Street's bets t-shirt, having a very heated conversation on his cell phone that he then hung up and just sat down on the curb and put his head head in his hands.

Oh man.

Oh man.

That is.

Is this about the tariffs?

I don't know, but it seemed like the AP stock photographers when you need them.

I mean, that is, that is a wife phone call, if I've ever heard one.

Oh, man.

Like, there are so many guys who are going through the...

the John Fenderman Mr.

Show sketch where he sues because he doesn't realize money goes away when you spend it.

Like that's happening to millions of people this week.

There's only one thing I can blame, and that's the money itself.

I didn't know how to spend this money.

It didn't come with instructions or a manual.

I didn't realize that if you exchanged it for property or services, that they would take it away for good.

And that's just what they did.

Speaking of

retail investors, I saw the best post-Friday, and it was, so this was the greatest amount of equities ever purchased in one day by retail investors.

And this Trump guy said, This was the greatest transfer of wealth between the 1%

and the working class ever in history.

And it's all because of Trump, which is, you know, saying that before Black Monday 2 is like, well, this is the most money the three-card Monty dealer has ever put up.

This is the most he could ever stand to lose.

Look,

going back to what I said, I'm no economic expert, so I can't tell how this is all going to shake out.

Like, if this, if they hold, look, things will change of that, I'm certain.

But, like, as just an observer of politics and people who talk about politics, I think it's an interesting sign, like, again, among sort of right-wing intellectuals and media figures, the line that they've adopted over the last couple of days, and I don't mean like the CNBC set, I mean the more esoteric of the sort of right-wing thinkers.

The acclaimed man,

Chase Galligator, all all our guys.

Yeah, and like, it's a, it's a sign not so much about like, uh, about what, what they think is going to turn out how this is all going to turn out.

And my, my feeling is that they don't have a lot of confidence that this is going to end well for Trump, because the line that a lot of them are taking now is basically, what is money?

What is prosperity?

Like, you know, like, oh yeah, you can lose all your money, but you're still alive.

You still.

You still have love and family members.

And it's just like, they've adopted a strangely philosophical and sort of like, let's take the long view of history and will this all turn out okay i don't know ask me in a hundred years it is funny and like look i think it is counterintuitive to your own happiness to just remember every slight you know every slight against you but pretty much everyone that like yelled at us over treats is now going they're now posting the fight club thing you're not your fucking td

i mean just that, that type of thing is so funny with this policy.

You know, there's more to life than cheap goods, which, like, yeah, I think, you know, for our ideology, like, if you want something that is beyond just like a prematurely born Medicare for all, that is just a sort of idealized public option, you do need to do some type of reshoring.

There does need to be some

national production capacity and there does need to be something that sustains a middle class, right?

But for this, you're not, it's just like the guy who said it's the greatest wealth transfer.

No, you're not redistributing anything.

You're just blowing it up.

Well, Felix, like,

you're not trading your cheap goods for anything.

You're just taking a shit on them and going, well, how do you like that?

You didn't get anything.

Well, Felix, I think about that like in terms of like some of the reaction I've been seeing, I guess, more on the sort of contrarian left with this idea that Trump is ending neoliberalism and like that's interesting to me because like what they did in russia in the 90s well yeah because like global global free trade regimes are an important uh facet of neoliberalism and it's one that the left has criticized but in addition to global free trade there's also

extreme austerity, privatization, deregulation, and like a omnipresent police surveillance state, which they're tripling down on all four of those things at the same time that they're getting rid of the global free trade aspect of neoliberalism.

Yeah, that is the specific thing that is also driving me nuts.

This like, I'm a vulgar, you know, class.

I just look at the, just look at the economics of it.

Don't care about this pronoun stuff.

What austerity government.

No, this is the thing you're supposed to be against, shithead.

Dave, though, I wanted to ask, like, what has been the reaction from Congress, from Democrats and Republicans?

Because, look, there's got to be some like a lot of old school Republicans or a lot of Republicans in maybe like a swing district that I'm sure are secretly quite upset about what the stock market is doing and what it looks like to their re-election.

But I think the interesting thing that's like maybe like not talked about enough with this is that like all of these tariffs are being done under the aegis of a like national security emergency measure, which allows the White House to impose tariffs on every country in the world.

But like, specifically, what is the national security emergency that they're referring to?

And is there any appetite in Congress for clawing back a power that is explicitly given to them by the Constitution?

I know that's quiet.

The emergency with Canada, I think, is that they're sending us fentanyl, and we need to tariff them.

We need to tariff a fentanyl, I guess, so that we can at least make some money off it.

But this one is just a national economic emergency.

It turns out you can just do this.

You remember the 2019 Democratic primary there was maybe a week where people were asking candidates, I think I did too, hey, could the president just declare a climate emergency and use his new powers to do a bunch of stuff?

And I think Jay Inslee said yes, and Bernie said yes, and no one else did anything.

But you kind of can.

You kind of can just do this, and you can only be stopped as president if Congress says, no, we're going to override this emergency.

So there is, it's every Democrat in the Senate, including

Bernie.

And Bernie's explained,

he does,

he was against

trade relations with China.

He's for tariffs in some cases.

But he's not Sean Fein.

He's not cheering this on.

He's like, this is stupid.

And also, the other part of it Bernie says is, and this is authoritarianism.

Like, the president should not have the power to do this.

Congress should have the power

to sign up on these tariffs.

Congress gave it over to the president, not knowing that he would do this kind of crap with it.

It's sort of the Bernie position.

And that is shared by, it's every Democrat plus Bernie.

And at the Senate, I think seven Republicans now, what would happen in the House for them to say, actually, we're not doing this emergency?

It would be a majority of the House voting for what the Senate voted for last week and saying, yeah, we actually, we in Congress say this is not a real emergency, so it's over right now.

The president needs to come back and ask us to do the tariffs.

They totally can.

Right now, the only thing stopping that is basically,

basically Mike Johnson.

If Mike Johnson said there's a free vote on this,

Democrats would vote with a couple of Republicans and probably pass that in the House.

So they could.

And with the whole Trump national emergency, emergency, they also could do that.

It's just that Republicans don't want to because they trust him.

Or they say they trust.

I think when they say they trust him, I believe them.

I generally think that the secret stuff they say off the record to reporters is bullshit and the stuff they say in public when they're afraid their constituents is real.

I think Johnson believes this.

Johnson thinks

Trump is a world historical genius who's been saying this about Terrace for generations.

Let's just let him try.

No one's ever tried this.

True, true MAGA art of the deal has never been tried.

We're going to do it.

But you could put the votes together to end this.

If it was such a disaster that it's clearly like prices are going up, and the iPhone's $5,000, and everyone's sick of this, Congress could act.

But after months and months of saying, no, we trust him.

They have the power.

It's like one of the many powers they're just not driving onto.

I mean, but like, this has been the trend in national

foreign policy for as long as I've been alive.

And I just think it's interesting that

the imperial presidency and like the war-making powers, I mean, that's long gone.

But now when it comes to things like tariffs and economic policy,

it's just, it's telling to me that Congress is willing to just give that up too.

And like, you know, this is like the Yeltsinification of America.

I mean, like, it seems like we're doing to our own country what we did

after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Dave, the dynamic with Johnson and like Republican legislators in general, it does seem to be sort of like an extension of that 2016 thing we saw right up up until the midterms with Trump that's just been amplified this time because they finally won the popular vote of like, okay, this guy was able to do all these things that were previously like impossible in the post like W or even during W era of Republican politics.

Therefore,

anything he says that people say is stupid, especially if it is, you know, just generally the media or everyone is calling it stupid, therefore, all of that is going to work out too.

Yeah, and yeah, no, I mean, I

that we're secretly furious with him.

Where have I heard that before?

Oh, yeah.

I don't take again, I don't take that seriously.

And people say they're secretly furious.

I think talking to Republicans, they some of them look at uh Javier Millet in Argentina, and that's the model.

They say this guy cracked it, uh, Bukele cracked it.

These guys who come in and the media hates them, they say they're terrible.

Uh, actually, you need to break things real fast.

And the neoliberals are going to be angry.

The socialists are going to be angry.

You just need to do it.

But then the point to other stuff Trump did that there wasn't a huge backlash for.

And what I've heard bring up, which is not that relevant, but I see why they bring it up, is when he moved the U.S.

Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, all these experts said it was going to lead to disaster.

And actually, it was fine.

And those are his instincts.

People say you can't do this.

And he doesn't, and it works.

So this one, just just like those, it's going to work.

I've heard that from more than one Republican.

The media, you guys always get hyperventilating and you always get crazy.

And then he and then he's right all along.

You can start listening, but, sir, actually, they don't care.

They remember the ones that he was right about.

Yeah, I mean, like, it is, again, the brandedness of it all.

Any victory, no matter how slim or whatever, no matter the circumstances of it, is always a total vindication for us doing things the exact way we want to do them.

Whether that is, you know, Biden is completely fine.

No, he doesn't have a PhD in foreign affairs.

He's just that fucking good.

Or just whatever the fuck this is.

Dave, like, to your point about like, oh, the hysteria, the panicking, the media freak out, there was a Trump post this morning that states, the United States has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago.

Don't be weak.

Don't be stupid.

Don't be a panicking.

New party based on weak and stupid people.

Be strong, courageous, and

patient, and greatness will be the result.

Now, look, whether the stock market, because, you know, like you'll often hear like, you know, less than 50% of Americans are invested in the stock market, whether the stock market is, you know, the perfect indicator of how healthy or well-off the country is or whether people are suffering or not is open for debate.

But like, what puzzles me is this idea about like, oh, there goes the media and politicians panicking again again about a 10-point drop in the stock market.

I mean, like,

this doesn't seem out of the wheelhouse of things that politicians and the media might be concerned about or might be somewhat concerned with, right?

Like the idea, the thought of like a massive economic contraction.

No, they, and they do care about financial news.

They don't care about other news.

So, and the media panics about deportations.

They don't care about that.

Like,

they're going to be at some bad headlines, the New York Times, whatever.

You know, that's a good example.

Like, people will get angry about it, but like something like, you know, an economic collapse is like, yeah,

that is the thing that within politicians sort of like the sphere of things that they care about or feel empathetic for.

Yeah.

Will, it's almost like they have flattened just like everything into articles.

And so like an article that's like, you know, the data, the, the S ⁇ P 500 has dropped 15% over the weekend is the same thing as an article that's like, Sidney Sweeney's uncle voted for Trump.

And it's like, that's just gay article shit no one cares about.

It's like, no, those are two different things.

Oh, yeah,

completely.

And you knew things were getting

bad when people started to post charts, the same people we're talking about.

They're like, actually, over the last 50 years, you invested your money in the town.

It's going fine.

And the media wants you to freak out, but the media told you to freak out about global warming cooling.

Remember that?

There's an inexhaustible treasure chest of stuff to go into and say the media was wrong.

And yeah, it was wrong about some stuff.

It just in the moment right now, every time they do that, it's just like, but how are you going to bring the factory back and employ the former Department of Education workers?

It's like, yeah, well, the media was wrong about Trump in the past.

Like, they're very bad at explaining how this is supposed to work.

Tell it, like, moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

There's going to be an embassy in Jerusalem.

I get that.

Then there's a building there and it has Trump's name on it and you're done.

This one, I don't understand.

And they really are kind of buffaloing their past every question by saying, well, he was right before.

Because everyone who's fair is like, like, yeah, he said something that we said was not going to work and it worked.

Point taken.

What about the current, the current thing that you're trying to do?

Then they divert again.

No one remembers anything that was more than like 18 months ago, obviously.

But I mean, the whole thing during Trump 1, and actually the pitch for Trump 2 this time.

During the summer was remember how good the stock market was.

That's true.

Yeah.

Which, you know, now I guess just like everyone who has any money in equities or bonds is the fucking monopoly guy.

Let's kill them.

But

yeah, no, I

they have boxed themselves into this position, though, where the only way they can point to this in the future and go, the media was wrong about that, are is two outcomes.

One is if the entire world is like, okay, negative 58% tariffs on American goods.

We We will pay you to buy our stuff.

You'll get cash back for purchases from the EU.

The other way is if, in

most generously 14 months, we have a manufacturing sector that someone could work in a manufacturing job with an associate's degree, buy a house in a major American city.

and it employs 75 million Americans and we build it all in 11 months.

It's Operation Warp Speed for like Mao's five-year plans.

We're doing it in a fraction of that time.

I just saw a YouTube about how to make pig iron in your yard.

I'm really excited to do that right now.

I mean,

Dave, like we've talked a lot about the difference between Trump, the Trump one and Trump two administration.

And I think like a big difference is the fact I think psychologically he has been changed a little bit by being prosecuted in the years in which he was not president.

And I think he has like revenge on his mind.

And I think he is, I think he's become the damn joker.

I think that he wants to extract as much pain as possible from an American ruling class that he feels abandoned, betrayed, and

unjustly prosecuted him.

And I think if there is a legible motive behind this trade scheme, it's to basically set up a giant global protection racket to extract concessions from foreign countries and American businesses who want carve-outs for these tariffs.

Yeah, the Russia comparison.

I'm so traumatized by terrible Russia comparisons for the first Trump term.

But that one actually works.

If you just separate what Trump's doing from any historical context, you might say, yeah, well, why does the strongest country just demand more and more and job on people and get the best deal possible?

How come he doesn't just bring people to the White House and say, what are you going to do for me?

And then they do it.

It's like, well, because then you just have the law of the jungle at all times instead of a the system that's like slow and creaky, but generally people are not fretting if they have kissed the wrong ring, that they're not going to be able to trade in the country anymore, to come to the country.

They write an op-ed, they could get deported, they get like, there's all sorts of things you can do to scare people into acting.

And

it's now the lib take to say that's maybe less good than just having some system of laws where you don't worry about it all the time.

But the Trump offer really is, this is our Caesar and he gets to do this, and everyone is afraid of him.

So we'll blow up a deal one day and bring it back the next one.

And you better be nice to him in the interim.

That's why I think all the people on the left I cover are very happy saying, look, if President Sanders was doing this, there'd be a capital strike and he'd be stopped immediately.

But the same people

on CNBC would have some understanding.

Oh, that's right.

If somebody is assuming absolute power for themselves and demanding you cut individual deals, that's bad.

You should have some sort of predictable regimen where you can make your planning out a couple of years in advance and not worry that the president will get revenge on you.

Having the president get revenge on you whenever he feels like it, everyone who covered the last iterations of Republican policies, like we need predictable tax policies, people know and invest.

This is the least predictable thing in the universe.

He just

to side with several law firms.

Like, you were mean to me, but you met with me in the office and cried, therefore, I'm going to give you a deal.

Well, I guess I can try that with every company.

You know, you don't want to, you can hire hire a lobbyist, I guess.

You can hire lobbyists to, like the schools have done, law firms have done, to kind of negotiate, but not everyone can.

It's just way worse.

If you, if you're, if you're the kind of person who is never going to have that level of power and never have that interaction, you don't know how to.

And you're also aware, like times, things change.

And in three and a half years, it would suck if a Democratic president started doing revenge.

Like much better.

As much as everyone hates the Uniparty, like just having a system of laws that is kind of the same between administrations

and a system of tariffs that's kind of predictable.

That's what everyone built their businesses based on, right?

That's like getting rid of that for a few years for Trump.

That's what's starting to scare people.

Oh, what comes after that?

Yeah, well, like 1997, Moscow comes after that.

Yeah.

And how can you ever really make a deal with America ever again if it's not going to last more than like two years?

I mean, and like, I think that's an important point.

The idea that like people are afraid of him.

People have tried to intellectualize all of this, but really, you know, I think about that response to the article about that poor German guy, that green card holder that just got randomly fucking brutalized in a federal detention center and how I saw that reply from a leathery MAGA crone that was like, good, now it's our turn.

Like she's just hated this German guy for her entire fucking life.

But, you know, it is, I think a lot of them like this because it's like, yeah, they are afraid of him, but it's kind of, there's a difference between being afraid of John Wick and being afraid of like a guy whose dick is out and his sweatpants have shit stains on him, but he has a gun in the supermarket.

Yeah, you don't know what he's going to do.

Both are pretty frightening.

Both are frightening, but like with John Wick, it's like, okay, he wants something.

Yeah.

He's trying to survive.

Yeah.

With

the guy with his dick out and the shotgun, it's like, what could I even do here?

What's the point of this?

Well, one of the last justifications for the tariffs

that definitely get into just the world of spite, really, more than anything else, is I really like the sort of the griper reaction to the tariffs, which is like, well, I don't have anything or a future to begin with, so I don't care if anyone else does.

But crucially, the point of the tariffs is to get rid of all female jobs.

Like,

I've seen that video of the Australian marketing team dancing in their office more times in the, like, as the economy like crashes, i've seen that video probably a dozen times in the last couple days and it's like i guess this is what they're offering like there's i think there's a belief that like that women in the workplace only have fake jobs and that like the jobs are fake but i should have them personally yeah the guys who post that video and like you know are like this is why work socks now it's always a guy who like sells an e-book about how to do jumping jabs

no but one of the guys literally hosted a nutrition podcast that is the most female coded job you could possibly have.

I am so fucking sick of seeing that goddamn fucking video.

It's been three years.

They work at an Australian skincare company.

How would any of these people find themselves in that position?

Their mom has been asking them to like apply to the cafe near their house and they're going to go to another continent?

Didn't we used to be able to get these in America?

Because the thing that pissed people off before, these guys pissed before, was like, this is my life at Lockheed Martin, where they they go to go to the office and they get on a Zoom at 9 a.m.

and it's really easy.

Then they go to the mental health brunch.

But we used to make those in America.

Now we have to get these in Australia.

What happened?

There used to be like 20 bullshit companies where you can make these videos where a woman had a job, strike one, and two

did a bunch of nonsense work, strike two.

Meanwhile, some guy with

herbalifest was at home getting angry.

But they used to get angry at Americans.

Why was Australia now?

Half the U.S.

workforce are women.

So the idea here is that at a time of economic contraction, let's get rid of half of the workforce.

And then the other half who previously were doing bullshit jobs will just go back to the mines.

And they'll love doing it.

They'll be happy doing it.

And it's just like, I don't know, like, this is like the more of the philosophical tenor to like, what does this portend for the future?

Because I'm like a little surprised and a little impressed by the number of people who are just like, no, like, yeah, like, we're going back to the 19th 19th century and we'll all be happier for it.

Like, measles is back too, sure.

But, like, you know, what, what meaning does life really hold anyway?

If you value your own life, you die a dog's death.

Hard times create strong men.

Just keep repeating that.

Absolutely.

Keep repeating that yourself until you feel strong.

And just like Dave's point about the

those hilarious videos during, it was like the first like year or two years of Brandon.

where you saw those hilarious TikTok videos where someone's like, I'm on McKinsey's, you know, public school closure team.

This is what my day is like.

And like half it to half the time they're doing like Zumba or whatever the fuck that class is called.

I always thought that was so funny because there's this, like, there's this fetishization of like the madmen thing where you go to your finance or advertising or whatever the fuck job.

and you do one meeting where you don't you you're like don draper you knock it out of the park and then you're just drinking and the rest of the day and it's the same amount of work as these videos yes absolutely it's not it's like not cool enough though

so it sucks and we have to kill the economy it's like uh felix one of my favorite details of the film american psycho is that it never portrays a single person doing work of any kind yes yes that the thing in the book too there isn't even a second it's not like bonfire the vanities where there's like some bond deal going on in the background they're just but it's like tony how tony soprano always talks about how hard he works and you just cut to him in the pork store bullshitting.

But, you know, like anything, bullshitting at your job and never doing any actual work.

It can be male-coded or female-coded.

All these guys, like the all-in guys, are this long-term psyop to get to get people finally ready to accept voting for a socialist because all of them, they made their money on something.

They got very lucky at some point in the free money era.

None of the products they're involved in are useful in any way.

Didn't David Sachs do like a worse version of

like like Twitter spaces?

Wasn't he?

Yeah, yeah.

Clubhouse.

But none of these, if you describe them to like a World War II veteran, hey, buddy, do you want your son creating a video chat app?

He'd be like, yeah, get out of here, homo, or whatever they would say.

It was 1945.

They talked differently.

But none of these are real jobs, and they're the ones lecturing you.

Like, you, you're going to look, you're going to live in the pod.

You're going to eat the bugs.

I'm going to just be on a seven-hour podcast talking about wine.

And maybe one day, if you eat enough bugs, you can be on the podcast.

I don't know what their offer is to people, apart from they got rich and

you have to suffer to build character.

Yeah, like the all-in podcast is, I mean, I hope that should be in the Library of Congress.

It is one of the most important cultural products of this five-year stretch.

All these guys who have so much free time, they could create a podcast where they call each other the besties.

Some of the least charismatic men ever.

No one should be telling these guys to do more media.

And it's a podcast about like poker and fucking work.

And yeah, the core message is like

this group of five, five

SPAC scammers and Epstein associates is calling you a fucking weak loser because you haven't like popped four discs at your job.

Just before we move on from the Gen Z boss in the mini video, a conservative on my feed pointed out that those five women are running a firm engaged in domestic materials manufacturing.

That's a real thing.

Right?

Like that they are like a hand cream or like thing, but all their products are made domestically, presumably at some kind of factory in Australia.

Like, is that not what we are trying to build here?

That's much better than another football game or something.

That is what that looks like.

Those are the people people who are running those firms.

So it's just like The Simpsons episode with the gay steel mill that Bummer goes to.

And that's a lesson I took from that episode of The Simpsons.

It's like that's real work.

Oh, my son doesn't stand a chance.

The whole world's gone gay.

Oh my God, what's happening now?

We work hard, we play hard.

Everybody

now.

Dave, I just say I want to get to like the Democratic side of this equation because you were just in Wisconsin reporting on the Supreme Court election and Elon's sort of parachuting into that race and

the effects it may have had on the outcome.

But I just like, I want to talk more broadly about like Democrats are looking forward to the midterm and to 2028, obviously.

But it seems like there was just a big like the hands-off protests over the weekend.

It seems like there's a lot of you know, anger at what the Trump administration is doing.

But like, I have a strong feeling that like if you were a Democrat prior to the tariffs and the stock market dip, like your inclination, I think among Democratic leadership was just basically to like sit back and let Trump hang himself.

And whatever he does to the economy, the Democrats want to keep their hands as far away from it and they want to come back with like the kind of I told you so message.

Given the results of Wisconsin,

do you think that that strategy for the Democrats, it seems to me like the perfect opportunity if you were inclined to that like sort of leadership, that like this would be the perfect time to just basically just be like, just let him do what he wants.

And it's going to destroy the economy and people are going to get pissed off.

And we're going to be back into packing power in a couple of years.

Oh, what they did in Wisconsin is a little bit different.

It definitely went harder than what Schumer is talking about because not getting too into the weeds, but Wisconsin has this campaign finance system where people can give infinite money to the state party.

And Ben Wickler has used that for Reid Hoffman to give money to the party.

So part of this is Democrats need to be willing to accept billionaires' money.

But the argument in Wisconsin was basically pitchfork populist stuff that Elon Musk has no right to be here telling us what to do.

He's spending all this money for his own personal benefit because he wants to test the dealerships in Wisconsin.

This judge that he's campaigning for is his puppet and they're going to do whatever he says.

It was much more

pick a target and polarize it and beat up this guy for being rich and thinking he's better than us than like Chuck Schumer would advise.

And it was very successful.

I was there when Democrats were

optimistic, but they were thinking this is going to be a slog.

Maybe it's a single-digit race.

And they blew it out everywhere just because

I was surprised at how powerful that was.

You'd think after enough elections with Trump in it, people would compartmentalize and say, well, maybe rich people can do something for us.

But that pissed off Wisconsin so much, the idea that

Elon showed up with no knowledge of what the state was focused on, just kept saying activist judges, activist judges, didn't know what cases he was talking about and his rally there where he had um what's his face sean duffy the guy who replaced people with a judge transportation transportation secretary yeah yeah catherine's former neighbor actually oh he was oh no kidding yeah

he was he was saying at this rally like we're wisconsin's gonna show the world you don't mess with doge like you had wisconside saying is that no why would we I don't care about that.

Like, I'd like there to be a judge who rules on like the five or six cases that are relevant to me in the Supreme Court.

Where did this come from?

It really was offensive to people.

Yeah, I think that people expected sort of like

it to be sort of like Scott Walker, the Scott Walker recall thing, right?

Where there was people,

you know, maybe they thought of it as a wash.

Well, everyone's coming with out-of-state stuff, but really, it's just no one seems like more of an outsider than this fucking guy.

What I thought was maybe even more interesting than the blowout in the race that Elon was most intimately involved with was,

I mean, you alluded to it.

It's not like it was closer in races he wasn't personally involved in.

It was kind of a really shitty night for the Republicans in Wisconsin.

None of the key races seemed close at all.

I mean, it was the Supreme Court race, it ended up being, yeah, like 10 points at last count.

But the other big race, the GOP lost it by like seven or eight last time I checked.

I mean, I would say that augers worse because it does seem like Elon is sort of inching away now.

He came out against the man who taught me economics, Peter Navarro.

And

it just, you can get rid of him, or more likely, he will initiate the breakaway because you just made

the most important parts of his actual revenue-producing businesses 50 to 400% more expensive.

But

people still fucking hate this entire deal, it seems.

Yeah, it was an easy thing to explain to people.

And that race, it was the education superintendent race where Republicans were supporting a more pro-voucher candidate, but she was taking advantage of how there are problems in the Milwaukee School District and the incumbent Democrat wasn't very popular.

It didn't matter just because all these Democrats came out and were furious about Elon, because each of these race, for the next, until the next presidential, every race is some fraction of people who voted in the presidential election.

And what Republicans were, their theory was if we just get a big fraction of those MAGA voters from last time, the guy Scott Kressler found and registered, if we get them out, like a third of them come out, we can win everything.

And they got them out and they lost because Democrats found even more people

without their own six foot seven guy in cowboy boots going around to every county and personally asking to vote.

Like they had it all because Elon got the credit, but, uh, or blame at the end.

But, yeah, turning point action was there.

And I talked to them during the race, and their whole thing was, turn the key.

We're not leaving the state.

We just want it for Trump.

We're going to go back there.

We're going to find every Trump voter and get him pissed off.

And they just weren't as pissed off

about things as Democrats were, or just independents who vote Democrats were.

They were supposed to be pissed off that.

Because I was there when Don Jr.

was campaigning for this judicial candidate.

He was linking it to these elitist judges in the middle of nowhere think that they can stop the president from deporting people.

And we're going to show them they can.

And there were some Republicans who cared about that, but there were far more Democrats who were like, oh my God, everything I care about is melting down.

And I have one chance to stop Elon from doing it.

I'm going to take that chance.

It was much more powerful.

Yeah, I think with like

the Democratic success in getting not like people who maybe wouldn't vote in just your control group midterm, if that concept even exists,

you see the most dramatic outcome here with like, you know, Elon, Elon's proximity, obviously.

But even without him, I think like the galvanizing sentiment isn't necessarily like they're coming into our home and, you know, throwing money around and telling us what to do.

It's kind of this ethos that it is an Elon thing, but it goes beyond him, which is a lot of fucking people work for the federal government.

It is one of the largest middle-class employers in the entire fucking country.

And when people are like, people who voted for them are like, well, I'm scared.

Like, am I going to be fired?

Am I going to lose their, am I going to lose my house?

The response of Elon, but also just like Vance and like the administration in general, is like, you're a fucking idiot for even thinking that.

I said the other day that 40% of the people who call the Social Security Administration are committing fraud.

Yeah.

They're trying to defraud Social Security.

It doesn't help to directly call your potential or even most recent voters a bunch of fucking idiots and fraudsters and liars.

No, that was actually, it was the all-in guys who got Luttnick to say that because they were doing their

interviews in DC, and that was the first time Luttnick flew that balloon.

Actually, if my grandmother doesn't get a social security check, yeah, no, shit, your grandmother probably has a ton of money.

She's sitting on a ton of money.

Is she not going to cry if she misses a check a month, every month, every other month?

Yeah, I think she'd be all right, Howard.

The first I've heard this data point, like, you know, who actually loves to call the government to do fraud or fraudsters?

They're the ones who, the first they did the fake check, and then they call, and I guess they do like an old lady voice

and say, yes, I need more money.

So

the Isocial Security number is like.

I didn't know this is a problem.

I knew, are there some people who rip off the government?

Yeah, I've seen movies.

I saw Superman 3.

I know there's ways to

rip off people, but

they all turned to this storyline immediately that actually most of the money or 40%

of the money being spent is on fraudulent checks going out to people.

All of this, I just, I go back to the election promise from Trump was not you will have to sacrifice anything at all.

It was going to be that everything was going to be back to 2019 levels.

You were going to have more money in every capacity.

You're going to have more jobs.

We're going to have cheaper oil.

I think cheaper oil might happen because of because of lacking demand.

But none of it was, and we'll have to sacrifice you people for this in the short term to make things better.

So that's whenever, I think even as popular as Trump kind of is now, that voter who was excited to vote for him in 2024 and never voted again, why would they come back?

You told them they would have a golden age right now.

You told them to have peace with Ukraine right now for day one.

If you cared about Israel,

remember there was a Gaza ceasefire, but not really.

Like there's all these Trump promises that are not coming true.

So they're kind of blaming people for not being happy enough.

And

if you're skeptical or even to asking questions, going, where's the jobs?

Where's my money?

Where's the global peace and prosperity?

The response is, you're a fucking piece of shit who's trying to steal from us.

Yeah, you're doing fraud, probably.

We have to look into you.

Maybe you wrote an op-ed we don't like.

Yeah.

Dave, I think there's an emerging political formulation in the type of voter that you're describing here that I think could be summed up the bar stool Republican.

because like that was kind of a thing when they were for trump but you know dave port and i spoke on streams now and he's like he's saying the president shouldn't even be golfing when the the stock market crashes and he's saying they shouldn't they shouldn't be on a signal chat so like

there's an emerging political formation of uh young men who voted for trump because they wanted the money but now the money has been touched and nobody's getting the money that is a real constituency not but when you think about these young men who were pivotal for trump uh this has probably been overcovered overrated the number of men who grew up in the 90s and they were promised a different offer.

And now they've had to watch all the commercials have too many women in them, too many interracial.

There's this whole narrative, there's a storyline about the young men being left out of this prosperity.

And I think that's not crazy.

I mean, I know people who, at various points, invested in GameStop or invested in Bitcoin

or

something thinking, look, there's going to be some way out of this rat race.

I'm going to find my

1849

gold rush moment.

You're not going to take it from me.

I get that.

That's pretty powerful.

But those are the people who are not getting it right now in any way.

There's nothing those people hoped would happen that was that Trump said on Joe Rogan or what have you that he's pulled off.

I'm trying to think of something Trump said, this is going to be better.

If you really, really hated

DEI programs, you didn't want your office to have a,

which I understand because they're like an hour and they're annoying.

There's some stuff that he took away, but nothing that got added.

The idea of the total prosperity did not, did not come back.

And if you're porting, you're like, make the culture war stuff go away so I can make more money.

Well, he made the culture war stuff go away,

sort of, but you're not, he's, isn't that the portnier thing?

He's lost like $10 million from his portfolio.

Yeah, he's lost like $20 million over the last 20 million days.

I mean, if you are, if you are a little bit.

Maybe you bet on Duke.

I don't know.

If you're a Zelennial who, yeah, feels like there is no equivalent to like the real estate bounty or the wage growth that boomers saw, the thing you can point to is that now white shoe law firms have to take on anti-Semitism cases pro bono.

So if you have one of the, if you want to sue Columbia, you can do it for free.

Yeah, you can make other people hurt, but then what do you get out of it?

Like you didn't, like Paul Weiss took this deal with Trump, but it was just him in the Oval Office for three hours talking about golf and then cutting a deal.

You didn't get anything from that.

You were even, even the Bitcoin Reserve is something that I think that sort of guy heard about during the, not the election, but in the interregnum.

Oh, this is going to be great.

I've had this crypto.

I've been sitting on it.

It's going up a little bit, but he's going to break down the walls and we're going to buy crypto.

And that's my ticket.

It was like Iraq dinar all over again.

And what was the Bitcoin Reserve?

It was just, well, we heard the government took a bunch of crypto from like crimes.

The FBI has, and we're going to put it in one place now, and that's it.

We're not going to get restitution.

That's not what you wanted.

You wanted the government to

buy your bag so you'd have a bigger, you'd have more stuff.

And they didn't get that.

I totally agree with you, by the way, that the concept of like the overwhelming youth support for Trump is like, to say the very least, like overblown.

I think it is, it was an attractive story for people to write articles and do TV segments about, but I really don't think it's like quite the phenomenon people thought it was.

I mean, it does all kind of go back to the way this election was characterized, which was as like a 2008 style blowout, which I really do not think it was.

But if there is any Trump constituency that is kind of like that, it is people who young men in professional positions who begrudgingly had to participate like in the liberal world.

We talked about this on Panic World, but it is someone who like they make a pretty good living as like a consultant or a lawyer or whatever the fuck, but their company posted a black square and they have this like stinging humiliation that they had to like match the background radiation of the dominant liberal culture.

But there's like, okay, once you get rid of that, there's nothing, there's like nothing to be against.

There's nothing to fight against.

And now, like,

you cannot get a switch or an iPhone so like what now I don't think the Democrats pick those guys up those guys just go back to not voting which I'm not even sure they were that statistically significant of a group to begin with yeah this came up in some other stuff I did last week where Democrats were they're all cooperating with the campaign tell-alls and they they were saying we heard a little in 25 and giving 12 anonymous sources to tell a journalist yeah I think maybe Biden was a little too old to run for president oh yeah glad you're protected by anonymity for the

for that gem.

I mean, that's the first thing.

And they're kind of splitting between we never could have won or we could have won had Biden dropped out earlier.

But one thing that came up in FIGHT, which is the Amy Parnes on Allen book, is they do focus groups for Harris and they talk to young men, especially young black men, about Trump's economic record.

And they're like, well, he gave the stimulus check and his name was on it.

And he might do that again.

And Democrats would try to say, yeah, but we in the House, we funded that.

They'd say, I don't know.

Trump's name is on the check.

And

I'm obsessed with this idea of the Doge dividend check, which I wrote about like a month ago.

Another Trump fan said,

with there's enough money saving some Doge, everyone should get a check.

And that would be

that was already in the bloodstream of Fox.

And I don't know about all of these podcasts, but I've heard that anecdotally out in the real world too, of people thinking.

There's going to be a Doge check.

This actually, at Elon's rally in Green Bay, one of the questions is a woman saying, when can we we expect the Doge check?

So there were people just literally thinking Trump is going to paper over their problems with free money.

He's going to make their investments go up and he's going to give them free money.

And yeah, that's the kind of person, like Bill's saying, why would they come back?

Why would they vote in a midterm for someone else when that didn't work?

I mean, like, I wonder if the Democrats will learn a lesson from this because, you know, one thing that does help paper over a lot of personal and certainly financial problems, it's getting free money.

It's getting a nice check for doing nothing.

And I guess, like, this is where where I was going to question about like the hands-off movement and like what the Democrats, like, is there a political formation or agenda in the Democratic Party right now that's going to become a container for the anger and fear that people have about losing their job, getting laid off, or, you know, just the cuts and assaults on civil liberties that the Trump administration is doing?

Because like, you know, on the one hand, you have like the sort of Bernie AOC.

fight back against the oligarchy.

Then you have the like the Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, the abundance agenda, the sort of like YIMBY, NIMBY, NIMBY,

liberal, technocratic agenda.

And then you have the House leader, like the, you know, like Jeffries and Schumer, who's, as I was trying to say, like, their attitude just seems to be like, let him destroy as much as the country as he can and like people will get fed up and we'll just we won't really even have to run for re-election.

But like

Dave, like is the is there is there a political agenda or like I said, container that the Democrats are going to offer that will like speak to the anger and frustration that people feel and like are being manifested now and like I said, these these these protests that we saw over the weekend yeah they're not totally there yet uh the whole wait for him to to screw up attitude that is the schumer attitude but other democrats they saw the reaction to schumer schumer is crazy unpopular now or i i i i talk to candidates for senate and they they they often say they can't support him

he can do that but that's sort of the job of the leader to to just just just eat dirt when everyone else is coming up with something the the sanders aoc pitch at their rallies those are the ones in in denver but it was kind of the same speech everywhere.

It's actually, I wouldn't say it's not to the right of Bernie 2020, 2016.

It's just boiled it down a lot more.

So it's not saying, here is all the stuff that specifically I'm going to do, and we get the parliamentarian to rule this in order.

It's more,

these guys are showing that they want, if left to their own devices, they would redirect all of our resources for tax cuts for themselves.

Instead of those tax cuts, we suspend trillions of dollars on health care,

on childcare, on all of your basic needs.

So you don't need to worry all the time.

And

it is repackaging populism as a, we've seen what they would do with power.

What if we took the power and grabbed it with the same ferocity and just started shoveling money back to you?

And money you earned.

That's also part of it.

The rhetoric is you paid for Social Security and they're going to try to screw you over so they can give these guys tax cuts.

And that Democrats are pretty comfortable with that messaging.

I've not seen even the real kind of Eeyores like the Fettermans are not saying that sucks.

He will complain that they're talking too much about resistance, but

he's not saying stop talking about opposing tax cuts.

They're all very happy to do that.

But the fight is really not there yet.

It's just compared to 2019 or even 17.

At this point in 17, Bernie was getting Democrats on board with this Medicare for all bill.

Like, we know how it ended.

A lot of them didn't mean it.

They just got on.

But the conversation was moving in his direction.

And

he, AOC, et cetera, are all trying to get it back.

Just like, look, we now have a vision.

Like, every time you want people to think of the opposite of social democracy, it's the Trump inauguration with the richest, most unlikable people in the world all standing behind Trump.

That's the opposite of what we're going to do.

So, they're like, we are now the antithesis of that.

And that's something that makes it makes sense as a

campaign message.

It doesn't have much meat on it yet.

Yeah, it does seem like they are doing what the Democratic Party would do uh if it were a full-time opposition party which is trying to create a permanent set of enemies out of these policies which is i mean you you would do that if you wanted to keep the party going you know but i haven't heard a lot from federman or even um

who's that short one jared something jared polis no no no he's in or Josh Gottheimer.

That's who I am.

Oh, that guy.

New Jersey.

Yeah, New Jersey.

Yeah, New Jersey.

He's running for governor of New Jersey.

Yeah.

But he's running for governor as like as the tax cut candidate, but as the Democratic Texas candidate whose ads are all Republicans suck and they're trying to rip you off, and I want to give you your money back.

Even him

in a tight race for, I guess, a primary, he's not running as let's go back to moderation.

He's running on Elon suck.

They all agree on Elon sucking.

That is actually kind of unifying.

It's their version of the.

Australian, um, Australian dance hit.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, I guess I kind of understand the guys who get mad at the Australian office workers.

Because when I see, when I saw Elon Musk put that cheese head on and when I see him jump around, like, you know, jump spaz out on stage, like I have a visceral, visceral nausea as well.

I mean, it really does show how strong negative polarization has gotten.

Because, like, if this was a public figure during the Bush administration, he would be broadly, everyone would hate him.

Like, Bush would be like, I don't want that guy around.

It would be a famous press conference moment.

But now, like, if you make fun of him, like, the cruelest people that are like posting videos of like moms crying in deportation centers, like, if you post, if you post a video of him, like, making the X with his body and his fucking gut poking out, these people will go, he has autism.

He likes letters.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Like, he's done so much for the world and faces so much cruelty.

And then everything else on their feet is like, check out this awesome video of Yemenis getting annihilated by our military.

Yeah, the account like single moms dying is like, I can't believe how mean people are to this man with a brain problem.

By the way, it is.

It is funny at the moment where,

have you seen the news reports that like all of the renewed airstrikes on Yemen are like basically having no effect whatsoever?

Keep in mind that the cover story for why they're doing this is to preserve the sanctity of global free trade.

They're like, we have to protect free trade

from the Houthis.

Yeah, no.

They have committed some pretty horrific crimes.

They hit a wedding, which is a pretty popular U.S.

move in Yemen throughout the years and across administrations.

But I have seen a report that they're actually running out of munitions.

During the first few phases of Operation Amazon Prime, Prosperity Guardian, under Biden, one of the most insane things I ever saw was, you know how like in the past, fighters or bombers, they'll put like the targets they've hit on the side of their planes.

Yeah, yeah.

Like an ace will have like some planes.

A red baron.

Yeah.

Well, for the guys who were deployed for Prosperity Guardian, they would put a marker on their hornets.

For every time they just fired a missile and didn't hit anything.

They would fire a fucking $10 million million cruise missile, don't know where it went, don't know what they fired it at, didn't hit anything, didn't accomplish anything, and they're like, put it on the plane.

That's another one for me.

This is great inflation.

This is everyone gets a trophy shit in the U.S.

Navy.

Yeah,

there's never going to be an American ace again, or even maybe an American who hits a target.

I don't know.

All right.

Should we leave it there for today?

Yeah,

just one more thing about Yemen.

I did see that they are planning on, or at least alluding to the fact that there are plans for a ground invasion, which is fucking they're really speedrunning Bush, too.

Like, holy shit.

Another election promise delivered on.

Yeah.

I'm going to commit ground troops to a war with Yemen

for unspecified reasons.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Can you imagine the jelly roll concert they're going to have for the guys that dying?

Oh, is that who that music is for?

The jelly roll music?

I can never figure that out.

Every time I hear it, I'm perplexed.

Jellyroll is kind of like, I mean, it will be for victims of the next, American victims of the next U.S.-led war, but currently it's for guys who get addicted

to something you can buy at a gas station and are like, I'm nine hours sober.

Can I get a retweet jelly roll?

I'm here to raise money from creative awareness.

Yeah, okay, I get it now.

All right.

Well, good, good luck with everyone's economic futures.

That does it for today's show.

Thanks again to Dave Weigel for joining us.

You can follow Dave's reporting at Semaphore.

That's right.

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Please follow me there.

Follow Dave

Financial News.

I just want to say that we are announcing season three of Movie Mindset, which will be coming back on April 23rd in just a little over two weeks.

So keep an eye out for the schedule schedule of what we will be showing for that season and also where to stream or find or otherwise watch or rent all of the films.

So that information should be up on the Patreon, I don't know, tomorrow, whenever I get a chance.

Yeah.

Well, we've already recorded episode one.

Felix was Hasanai's guest, and you are not going to want to miss the season premiere of Movie Mindset because

we tackle a film that, unlike pretty much every other movie we've done on Movie Mindset, is probably the most referenced film in the chapo canon easily i was so happy we got to talk about this one and i really feel like we did it justice oh absolutely i was yeah i was really i was really happy with it yeah i i'm really excited for people to see it uh i remember when i first started editing this show one of my friends who listened when I told them said that I should engage in a project of recreating this entire film just by references on the show because I thought it would be possible.

All right.

Well, everyone, keep an eye, keep your eyes peeled for Movie Mindset Season 3.

That does it for today's show.

Till next time, everybody.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Lord,

I am so tired.

How long can this go on?

I'm going down down.

Working in a poor mind, whoop, about to slip down.

Working in a poor, mine, going down, down.

I'm up there for the sun

when my workday is over.