The Power Brokers and Palace Intrigue of Trump's Rollercoaster Week, with Stephanie Ruhle

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Donald Trump was not a super successful businessman.

What he's super successful at is politics.

Right after this ad.

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Is this Alex Rodriguez?

As a centaur, yeah.

He's a complicated guy.

He is.

One time, Alex and I, it was a charity day on a trading floor when, like, all their trade, you know, a piece of their commissions all goes to a charity.

So they invite all these people to come.

So like that morning, Alex, I guess, guess, didn't want to show up alone and he sees me on the list and he's like, oh, hey, you going?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's like, well, let's go in together.

So me, like the dope that I am, like sits in my car on a corner for like 35 minutes.

I wait for Alex.

He gets there.

I see him for a second.

Then, of course, as soon as we walk in, the whole place surrounds him.

It's Alex Rodriguez, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They have me, you know, in the corner holding a watermelon.

And I go, I do my thing.

And then it's basically over.

And I'm like, okay, Alex, so I'm leaving.

And Gary Cohn, who used to be the economic advisor to Trump, was also there.

And we're both like, hey, let's go get lunch.

So I text Alex.

I'm like, yo, I'm not going to wait for you.

We're going to go get lunch next door.

Never thinking he's going to come meet us.

So me and Gary go to this Mexican restaurant, like this dump right next door.

It's in a basement.

And of course, it's just the two of us.

And he's been living in Washington.

So we proceed to order every single thing on the menu, just like human pigs.

And Alex texts me.

He's like, oh, I'm going to meet you guys.

And I'm assuming he's alone.

And so I'm like, yeah, we're at this place next door.

And all of a sudden, I'm shoveling guacamole in my face.

Like there's burritos, there's tacos, there's everything.

And who walks in?

Alex with J-Lo.

Okay.

So it's, it's the day after the Met Gala.

She is so glowing.

She is so beautiful.

She's just radiating through the restaurant.

The restaurant is like, what in the world?

Like Jennifer.

Okay.

So she sits down.

She is so

okay.

She sits down.

Okay.

She sits down, but she is so repulsed and disgusted by us and this restaurant.

Like she didn't exactly put a napkin down before before she sat down, but she might as well have.

So the waiters all come over and they're like, oh my God,

what can we get you?

What can we get you?

And I'm just like, oh my God.

And literally she's like, I'll have hot water with lemon.

And she just sat there and drank hot water with lemon as I probably have like taco sauce like pouring down my face.

Like it was just the absolute worst.

Yeah.

She was.

beautiful and smart and interesting, but it was my notion that like, oh my gosh, if I meet some unbelievable superstar, they're going to want to make best friends with me, it didn't come true.

I feel like that

story is the best possible introductory mad lib to who you are.

Yeah, it's a sad one for me, but totally true, but totally true.

So the whole reason I am sitting here talking to my friend Stephanie Ruhl, the host of the 11th Hour on MSNBC, is not because we have a coaster in our studio with a Photoshopped image of our old friend Alex Rodriguez as a centaur.

Although we do.

Yeah, I mean, listen, when that's your coaster, you thought I was going to start with Trump?

You are incorrect.

The whole reason I called Steph is because in her former life, and this was long before she became the senior business analyst for NBC News, she decided that she wanted to work on Wall Street.

When I was a student, I was studying in Italy.

I wanted to stay living abroad.

I had no money left, and I thought, oh, I'm going to go work for a bank.

They have banks all over the world.

I ended up working for Merrill Lynch.

I'm sorry.

Your logic was there are lots of banks.

Yeah.

I should work for one of those.

Sure, right?

They have banks.

They have banks all over the world.

Oh, and the other thing I needed, money.

I didn't have any, and I needed to make a lot of it.

I grew up in New Jersey.

I wanted to live on the other side of the bridge and being a New Jersey commuter and taking that ferry boat every day, especially when you take the ferry back at 6.30 at night when you take it back and you see all the girls from New Jersey getting on the ferry to meet the guys downstairs from Merrill Lynch and the World Financial Center at Happy Hour.

I can distinctly remember feeling like,

maybe I'd like to meet a guy at a happy hour, but I definitely don't want to need to meet a guy at happy hour.

I'm going to keep working at this bank.

And she did.

She worked there until she eventually joined Credit Suisse, where she then became the highest producing credit derivatives salesperson in the entire United States.

And then Steph became a managing director at Deutsche Bank, where she worked in global markets senior relationship management for years.

All of which now basically means that Steph is the sort of extremely plugged in finance person who will get tacos with aforementioned Trump advisor Gary Cohn, who used to be the president of Coleman Sachs.

And it also means that Steph has a particularly special insight into the hidden dynamics behind one of the most insane weeks in the history of the American economy.

Good afternoon from New York.

We're coming on the air with breaking news about an exceptionally brutal day on Wall Street.

The economic fallout from President Trump's tariffs has heightened concerns of a recession and a global trade war.

The Dow Jones Industrials fell more than 2,200 points, erasing more than a year of stock market gains.

$7 trillion worth of market cap just traded in 30 minutes.

There is rampant chaos.

President Trump just truthed out saying, quote, I have authorized a 90-day pause.

The president here announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs, though it's not clear specifically which countries this pause is going to apply to.

The Dow right now shooting up over 2,000 points.

Look at that.

The president posted on Truth Social, everything is going to work out well.

And if you're listening listening to that, thinking to yourself that you still don't totally understand all of the terminology involved in this, it is incredibly complicated, of course.

What I want to assure you is that what I'm trying to find out today has as much to do with inner circles and inside information and questions of influence as it does the actual economic policy.

Which brings us back now to the Mad Lib that is Stephanie rules life.

Your network of people that you talk to is a weird one.

Is my favorite one, which is, I think, the highest compliment I can pay a person as somebody who is deeply curious always about like what's in other people's cell phones.

Like, who are they talking to?

Nothing naughty, naughtiness.

Yeah.

But just the idea of who does a person listen to is kind of the story of

this administration right now.

It's the story of tariffs and the economy.

And it's kind of the story of your life because you originated in a world

of business.

You're from Wall Street.

Well, I am.

And I can tell you how I got from there to here.

But I actually think

in terms of both careers, so I spent 14 years working in investment banking, covering hedge funds, selling them structured credit derivatives.

It doesn't get nerdier than that.

But that business to me is not that dissimilar to the business that I'm in.

It's all about relationships.

If you can build a relationship, if you can build trust either on the other side of that phone, because it's your client or the other side of that camera, which is your viewer or your listener, that's going to breed success, right?

So even in banking, was the salesperson, Stephanie Ruhl, was she the person responsible for hedge funds hitting their mark?

No, but I was a person who could help them get from point A to point B and they could trust me.

But even early on, I didn't have a finance background.

And as embarrassing as this is, sort of my early days, I figured out what do these guys need that I can provide.

And when you're a 21-year-old, for me, girl on a trading floor that did not have a lot of experience in derivatives, I'm like, these guys want to go out every night.

They need to go to hot restaurants.

They need to go to hot bars.

They need to go to hot nightclubs.

So I would study Time Out magazine.

I would meet every mate or D.

I would meet every doorman.

That's just smart.

That is smart.

No, no, no.

I was such a loser that sometimes I would pretend to have an English accent on the phone to make reservation.

Like I was as desperate as they come.

Okay, I'm not doing that now, but I'm saying I would do.

No, of course not.

I would do anything at wherever it is, Moomba, Jetline.

I mean, 100 years ago, Joe's Pub.

You can't have a table of 42-year-old guys.

You have to have a girl at the table, too.

So then there I was, 22, 23 years old, three nights a week.

out with hedge fund managers and the dudes that I worked with because I'm like, well, you're going to have to have a girl at the table.

And it's how I sort of built my business in banking.

Pathetic, but it worked.

Well, but that's just something that I hope people understand.

And I want to get, of course, to this week and the day that we're taping this and everything that's happening in the world and what it's doing to your job and our country.

But just the very basic premise that behind all of the math is actually a bunch of dudes who are scrambling around, fumbling in what feels like...

if not total blackout darkness, then certainly a dimly lit, just sort of like, I don't know if they really know what they're looking at kind of a vibe.

And it's all about

who you trust in your innermost sanctum.

A hundred percent.

And so that's, to me, that's what's been extraordinary this week.

So in the last five days, I can tell you, I have never had so many private conversations with C-suite executives, Wall Street investors who have huge amounts of money and businesses at stake all around this tariff issue, who are desperate to know who's near the president.

Okay.

And this is so crazy because we're not talking about people just betting on the ponies.

We're talking about people that move markets, people who are running major businesses.

And the fact that they're trying to figure this out, let's just talk about the palace intrigue happening because all of this has been about, well, who's near the president, right?

Is it Peter Navarro, who by Wall Street standards, they consider to be a complete out-of-the-box kook, who if you don't know,

I need you to tell this person.

Okay, if you don't know, the way Peter Navarro ended up in the first Trump administration is because Jared Kushner was desperate to find someone whose trade views aligned with President Trump because Steve Mnuchin, the first Treasury Secretaries, didn't.

Gary Cohn certainly didn't.

Jared's didn't.

And so it's so funny because right now everyone's going, man, I miss Jared and Gary Cohn.

They were blocking the president.

And so Jared said, I have to find somebody whose views align with my father-in-law's.

And it was Navarro.

He brings Navarro in.

Gary Cohen wouldn't even let Navarro be part of the National Economic Council.

He sent him over to Commerce to work with Wilbur Ross.

Yeah, Gary is not inviting him to the Mexican place with you.

Absolutely not.

So that's who Navarro was, is.

And remember, a year ago, he went to jail.

We are following breaking news.

Peter Navarro has been sentenced to four months in prison on two charges of contempt of Congress.

These charges stem from his refusal to comply with a subpoena related to his actions after the 2020 presidential election.

So he is a true

Trump loyalist, right?

He's a big Trump loyalist, and he shares his trade views.

And in Peter Navarro's mind, we should have all manufacturing in the United States.

China and all other countries are basically the enemy.

Tariffs should be sky high, and we're going to bring in a huge billions and billions of dollars because of those tariffs.

I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.

Then I was reprimanded by the fake news.

They said, what about love,

religion, and God?

I said, I agree.

Let's put God number one.

Let's put religion number two.

Love, I don't know.

We got to put that number three, I guess, right?

And then it's tariff.

Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell.

It's going to bring our country's businesses back that left us.

So put him in one corner.

Wall Street wants nothing to do with him.

And the fact that Wall Street, so many investors just this week, only woke up to who Peter Navarro was.

I just saw it last night, right?

Business people, investors whose job it is to study businesses, to study how they work, who runs them, suddenly realized, who's this guy, Peter Navarro?

Suddenly they realized in 2019, it was reported that in one or multiple of Peter Navarro's books, he referenced an expert, a finance expert whose name was Ron Vara.

Okay, Ron Vara.

Do you know who Ron Vara is?

No one.

He's an invented persona that later the publisher had to put an asterisk, like, this is not a real person.

And so suddenly this week, people are like, we have to get this kook away from the president.

You got Elon Musk arguing with Peter Navarro.

And my argument is, we told you this.

Musk calling Navarro, quote, dumber than a sack of bricks, end quote, and a, quote, moron.

And by the way, you're surprised that Donald Trump picked him?

Remember, Donald Trump is John Barron, the guy who created

a persona

to call People magazine and others and say, you know, let me tell you who the sexiest, most successful man alive is.

So why are you surprised that Donald Trump chose him?

Well, the fact also that Ron Varra is, of course, the letters of Peter Navarro basically scrambled up.

I know.

It's very, it's so on the, like this as a subplot in HBO series gets laughed out of the room because it's too on the nose.

That's the guy who's had the ear of the most powerful, if nothing else, manipulator of the stock market we have ever seen.

It's why Donald Trump calls him my Peter.

But now all blame should not fall on Peter Navarro.

Let's keep breaking it up.

Now you have the commerce secretary, Howard Luttnick, okay?

Howard Luttnick this week is quietly not getting blame.

He's trying to, he's going, look over here, Peter Navarro.

But let's be clear: Howard Luttnick, and it's just been reported this week, right?

There's some trouble in paradise.

People in the White House don't like him.

Don't think that was an accident that the White House is leaking that out.

Because in the last week, I believe the president can't be happy with many of Howard Luttnick's media appearances.

Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks

this month.

My mother-in-law, who's 94,

she wouldn't call and complain.

She just wouldn't.

She'd think something got messed up and she'll get it next month.

You're right, Howard.

She's not.

Her son-in-law is worth $2 billion.

And what's important about that isn't, if we have a hugely successful cabinet, great.

I'm not saying this as an anti-wealth or an anti-capitalism thing at all, but you have to have people in the highest levels and lowest levels of government who understand

the American people.

So Howard Luttnick's mother-in-law might not be worried about her Social Security check, but millions and millions of other Americans aren't.

Just like it's easy for Scott Besant to say, you know, don't look at your 401k right now.

Sure, Scott, you don't have to.

It's easy for Scott to say, you know, all these manufacturing jobs are coming into the country.

The fired federal workers could go get those jobs.

And that's what begs the question to both of those men, where you want to say, do you know what manufacturing looks like?

We have manufacturing in the United States.

We're the second largest manufacturer in the world.

What we don't manufacture are things that don't make sense for us.

And when they talk about bringing all this manufacturing back, like apparel, like sportswear, like electronics, you mean to tell me a fired federal worker, a climate scientist, an IRS worker is going to leave the IRS to go work in a factory screwing in screws in an iPhone that's now going to cost three grand, that now we're going to get rid of worker protection so you can leave the IRS to sew socks 15 hours a day?

Oh, by the way, until the robots come and take all of those jobs off the assembly line from humans anyway.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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Please drink responsibly.

And the thing that blows my mind this week is all of these people who, in theory, can reach out to the president, who are basically pleading with him, lobbying to him on Twitter, right?

Right?

Bill Ackman, who I know really well, right, right?

Steph, I just need to tell you that I don't think I've been madder at my phone than when I read a 10,000-word Bill Ackman tweet.

Well, don't throw that phone.

That iPhone might cost three grand in a couple years.

So don't you throw that phone.

I have read so many of them.

And just for people who don't know him, he was regarded as one of these, and you tell me if he still is, but as a genuine, and all these guys have the computing horsepower, the intellectuals are super talented and incredibly smart and savvy.

Very, very well-known short seller, right?

He goes all in

betting against a company.

But to see him tweet and grovel

and try to spin,

it's gross.

And the fact that you know him makes me so curious about your read of how he is this avatar for a type of person who threw his money and his reputation behind Donald Trump and has been since navigating this EKG chart of a stock market.

Listen, on the positive, one could say

Bill Bill was willing to swallow his pride and publicly say, Mr.

Trump, please don't do this.

You're causing a nuclear economic winter.

That's right.

So if you want to give him credit, right?

So if you want to give him credit, you could say, you know, lots of other people out there who went all in Trump would never ever speak against him.

They would never say, quote, the global economy is being taken down because of bad math.

He has definitely fallen in love with fame.

Now, short sellers are well known in their community.

but about a year and a half ago,

when all the speech issues started in the Ivy League universities, Bill Ackman went hard after Claudine Gay and Harvard, your alma mater.

And I can tell you, I actually called him on the phone on a Friday night.

I've definitely not told this story.

I called him on the phone on a Friday night.

It's when he really started to get in this Twitter war.

I don't remember all the details.

And it was his wife and plagiarism and Business Insider.

And I remember calling him and just saying, Bill, and I didn't even know the details of who was right or who was wrong.

But I said, Let me tell you, somebody who's been in the barrel, don't do this to yourself.

Like, you're this unbelievable investor and you have this great reputation.

You get in a Twitter war, like you won't win.

These are the dregs of society.

These are the worst of the worst people.

Like, don't do it.

He like took a breath, he responded, and then his wife was on the phone with him.

And all of a sudden, he's like, oh, we're good.

We're good.

And at this moment, I realized, I'm like, oh my God, he likes this.

Like, I thought, thought I'm like yo yo yo Bill me to you like I'm in the media I'm gonna tell you nothing good happens on the Twitter nada zero zippo zilch and he's like oh oh oh I'm good oh no Steph Steph he has a poster's heart he has the the uh endorphins that get released when you cross that 5,000 word Twitter

this shows how naive I am that I'm like yo yo yo let me help you out and I me not realizing he's about to cross over and is now like he, he, he, he, he's in the musk space of

let me have all these bros love and worship me.

And he thought he was going to build a huge retail platform with all those day, you know, day trading bro investors.

That did not work out for him.

Listen, he's still an extraordinary investor.

I'm not arguing that.

But watching Bill, who is, who does have this great reputation on the street, weigh in on anything and everything.

I mean, it was a couple of months ago.

It was just an hour after the horrible plane and chopper crash in D.C.

Bill's, I can't remember what, this is either an inside job or blah blah blah.

I'm like, yo, dude, I don't remember what it was that he claimed it was, but it was so far from the truth.

And it was like,

I'm not saying shut up and dribble or stay in your lane,

but you have an enormous reputation.

You have an enormous following.

Before you just let it rip,

No, make sure you've got your

T's crossed and your I's dotted.

So, on one hand, you could say, I'm going to give Bill credit this week.

I'm going to give Bill credit that he said, Mr.

President, please stop this.

This is really bad for all of us, like on behalf of all Americans.

But I think the most interesting thing about Bill's tweet or almost anybody else,

almost every person who's criticized the president for the tariffs and the math and all of it, almost all of them that come from the business world or the politics world start their criticism with, dear Mr.

President, I know

we need to get our trade,

we need to get our trade relationships in order.

Your hair looks great today.

We know you just want to do great for America, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You're so strong.

You're so smart.

Your golf game is the best.

However, this is about to cause a recession.

And the reason I bring up the first part is because it's not something to joke about.

It's something to worry about.

The fact that you got to hide the medicine in peanut butter like you're feeding a dog.

We're going to get rid of these trade deficits.

Trade deficits are a problem.

No, they're not.

We've had trade deficits in the United States for 50 years, 48 years.

Over the course of those decades, our economy has grown 255%.

Do we have a trade deficit with Madagascar?

You're right.

Because they produce vanilla.

We need vanilla.

And they don't need all of our stuff because it's Madagascar.

But to watch scores of other people actually play into this false narrative because it suits the president's incorrect belief about trade policy, that's a huge problem.

And that is when we start to lose our brand of American exceptionalism.

But it's exactly the through line, which is we're watching people, we're watching people show their ass all of the time.

And you're like, there used to be something not merely to the exceptionalism of America as the brand, but to the mystique of it.

And all we're seeing over and over again is a bunch of people debase themselves intentionally or unintentionally.

And the only real question left, which may be the most irrelevant question, is whether it's actually intentional or not.

Because we're dealing with the consequences of what happens when the world not merely laughs at us, but actually doesn't have confidence in us as a thing they want to be in business with.

Okay, so that's the whole ball game.

And first of all, if there was an ass we were going to see in this podcast, we'll go back to the beginning.

We'd like it to be J-Lo.

And that's not being offered.

We are now with the likes of Peter Navarro, Howard Luttnick, Bill Adams.

Building Vander's ass is remarkably less appealing today.

So no thank you to all of them.

But what you're talking about, this loss of trust, that's the biggest issue.

Because right now, now that the president has said we're going to have a 90-day pause except for China, we're seeing the market shoot back up.

And the markets are shooting back up because underneath the tariff problem, we have a strong economy.

And that's why everybody's been hanging on every word and they're saying, if he's going to have a pause, let me step back in and buy.

But the real problem here is the loss of trust, right?

Trust is gained in droplets and it's lost in buckets.

And when you've got the rest of the world looking at us as the United States, the superpower, a trusted partner, right?

The last trade deal that was negotiated negotiated was USMCA.

That was between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Donald Trump did it.

I think Jared Kushner is the one who focused on it.

And all that really was was NAFTA 2.0.

They tweaked it.

If you're those two countries, our closest allies, and four years later, Trump's in office, and the first thing he wants to do before deregulation, before tax cuts, before everything else is launch a trade war with you, how are you going to trust him again, right?

When you think about all these countries around the world that if you're Vietnam, if you're a U.S.

corporation who the government told you for years and years, stop producing your apparel in China, move it to Vietnam.

So now you moved it to Vietnam and now you're sitting here facing a 39% plus plus plus tariff, you're saying, I don't trust you.

So when you have the likes of a Howard Luttnick saying, all the jobs are coming back and the manufacturing here, why are you going to believe that?

Because if you own any sort of big corporation here, it's going to take you three to five years to build a factory.

Three to five years from now, Donald Trump's not going to be in office.

You have a Scott Besson and the Treasury Secretary who says, well, the tariffs are just a negotiating tactic.

And then you've got Navarro and Howard Luttnick who are potentially saying tariffs are here to stay.

So which is it?

So if you're any of these countries around the world, how do I trust the word, the reputation of this country?

Because you have a president who, as a business person,

did not have a good reputation.

No, no.

Didn't stand up to his negotiations, didn't pay his trust in the future.

Was not trusted.

Was not trusted, would enter into deals and then would say to his counterparty, listen, I know I didn't make that much money off of it, but can we BS the New York Post so I get the good headline?

And his counterparty would be like, yeah, I don't give a hoot about the headline.

You take it.

I just want the money.

Donald Trump was not a super successful businessman.

What he's super successful at is politics.

Yes.

Right?

He's a brilliant, skilled politician.

And now he's a really successful businessman in what two arenas?

Crypto

and Truth Social, a company he's taken public that's actual earnings are light years away from the multiple in which the stock trades.

So both his social media company and his crypto exchange and meme coin can be used as a vehicle for people to basically pay him because they potentially want a political favor.

So don't say he's a business guy.

Let the businessman do his thing.

What he is, is a really skilled politician taking dicey business acumen to the world order.

But even those two specific businesses, which is exactly where I wanted to go next, share something in common.

It's an enterprise where you turn your bullshit, your words into money.

That is crypto.

That is social media.

And it's no coincidence that when I'm watching the stock market effectively feel like it's being manipulated

because yes, on Wednesday, there was a 90-day pause, a truth post, a truth.

We're pausing this for 90 days.

It just feels like crypto.

It feels like the U.S.

economy is being meme stocked.

It makes you wonder who was benefiting from this on the way down and who's benefiting now on the way up.

Okay, well, on Sunday night, Bill Ackman said, I know why Lutnick is pushing this and it's crashing the stock market because his own firm is long bonds.

They're long treasuries.

They're betting against the economy.

Okay.

And he said, we should never have someone in a cabinet position that's this conflicted.

He posted that Sunday night.

Monday morning, Bill says, sorry.

So, oh my goodness, sorry I said that.

Now, who called Bill?

Why did that happen?

Unclear.

But what no one has now answered, so were they long bonds?

Were they betting against markets?

That somehow has been erased.

And so

I, for years, have railed against congressional stock trading because it is actual insider trading.

It's definitional corruption.

Correct.

On both sides of the aisle, right?

Like Nancy Pelosi is no stranger to it.

And scores of Republicans are stranger to it.

I mean, like, they all trade stocks and not all.

Many, many advocates.

And you'll find a way to not get in trouble at best.

Yes.

While knowing the incentives.

They're legally allowed to do it.

They're legally allowed to do it.

And it seems that the incentive to change the rules is tiny, tiny, tiny.

So

all of this is happening right under our eyes, right?

You've got Eric Trump who says, I have nothing to do with government.

You know, I'm in private business saying like things are going to, you know, buy the dips.

Things are going to look great in crypto.

And then Trump says, maybe we're going to do a crypto reserve.

So all of these things that are absolutely bananas are happening.

And I guess they're thinly loopholed legal.

And I will say, hey, Democrats, one of the reasons

people voted for Joe Biden is that Democrats promised, not only will we never have a Donald Trump in office again, we're going to change the rules.

So the self-dealing, none of that can ever happen again.

Because lots of the rules that Congress has to adhere to, or even cabinet members have to adhere to, the president doesn't, because they always thought the president would be above it, right?

And instead, he's like, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to throw everything at Mar-a-Lago.

If we don't do it at Mar-a-Lago, it'll be at Doral.

And I own a hotel in DC.

He did the first term.

And everybody who wants anything from me should book all your events and parties there.

And Democrats said, we are going to close these loopholes so this can never happen again.

They didn't close the loopholes.

And now they're not just open, they are ripped open and it is a frenzy yes the whole idea of who profited off of this who got rich right it's not merely a fascinating exercise in which i want to examine all of those dudes phones right which is like i want to know okay um you say you're not an oligarch but my understanding is that this is more or less what vladimir putin did in russia he took percentages of all of the deals, secretly held the money, and maybe or maybe not became the richest richest man in the world at one point.

He was once potentially a KGB agent, moved up and up and up and up to become one of the richest people in the world.

It's one of the reasons Donald Trump admires him.

And what you see happening with Doge, which is basically breaking down our government, our agencies down to its studs, what's the next move?

Privatize.

And that's what happened in Russia, which served oligarchs in them becoming the richest people in the world and crushed the Russian people and the Russian economy for decades.

And so to now connect all of the dots here, when it comes to what's worrisome about the U.S.

economy, which again has never been, as you know, as I know, as anybody knows, has never been a lily-white, pure haven of integrity, to be clear.

Of course not.

No one is.

None are.

None.

None of these people as a category are.

But when it comes to what's such a problem about that feeling like crypto, unregulated, social media driven, driven, and totally impossible to inspect.

What are you supposed to do?

Like as a normal person who's deciding, what do I put my money into?

And even more pressingly, I guess, what does that do to the economy that seems often disconnected from people who are beneath the line?

Businesses are grinding to a halt when they don't know what to plan for,

when they don't know what is ahead, they're not going to do anything.

There's not a corporate board in this country that would sign off on a multi-billion dollar investment on anything when you have a president who on Monday is all in tariffs and on Tuesday says, I'm off.

Listen, I'm not going to say I'm not grateful for this 90 days, not just for big business, but for small business, right?

Every politician out there loves to say this country was built on the back of small businesses.

Small businesses, and big businesses are reliant on the global supply chain, right?

Building out the global supply chain unleashed prosperity around the world.

We don't build cars here that go from here to Mexico, here to Mexico, China to Mexico.

We don't do that to be silly.

We don't do that because we don't want American workers to work.

We actually do it because it's the most efficient.

They improved supply chain mechanics and now you have a president who's saying, let's tear that up.

So if you run a small business, a big business, a medium business, you're simply saying, I don't know what's to come.

So I'm just going to hold on and try to get through this.

And for the everyday American who's looking at their investments, honestly, this is a moment of just hold tight because he could change on a dime.

And the person you feel the worst for is the person we always do.

It's a person who was planning on retiring this year.

It's the person who's depending on that Social Security check because we didn't even get to Doge and the IRS and what they're doing in all those places, right?

Because when everyone says, listen, there may be a short-term recession.

Well, if there is a short-term recession, what are we doing about SNAP benefits what are we doing about food stamps because when the country takes a downturn triggers are enacted to make sure the safety net gets bigger and broader and picks the people up on the bottom so we're doing something from a tariff policy perspective a monetary policy perspective that could hurt the people on the bottom and then in the left hand you've got doge just cutting, cutting, cutting these agencies and the workforce.

I mean, imagine the idea, you know what, Social Security, we don't have to have a phone number for people to call.

We don't have to have an office for people to call.

Senior citizens, and I'm not being ageist, I'm being the daughter of two senior citizens, some of them don't use the internet.

Of course not.

Okay, some of them don't know how to type into something to see their statement.

They need to call that person on the phone.

And so to make cuts that really attack our most vulnerable, that's where the disconnect is, right?

It's easy for Scott Besant to say short-term pain for long-term gain.

You and I just established it's hard for us to exactly see the long-term gain in manufacturing because nobody's building a giant plant here.

But in the short term, are they really thinking about the people who it could hurt in the short term?

All of this is now spinning, of course, towards this idea that we have just witnessed, Steph, is the art of the deal.

This has all worked out exactly as the chess master has planned.

Well, for him, it has.

Like, let's just be clear.

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States once.

He was then convicted of 34 felonies, and he was elected twice.

And now he is spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago.

What did he do this weekend?

He was at the Live Golf Tournament.

What is this?

The fifth giant live golf tournament held at one of Donald Trump's properties.

An enormous amount of money he's made, right?

Down at Mar-a-Lago on the weekends, you can pay $1 million to go to a candlelit dinner with Trump, or you can pay $5 million for a one-on-one meeting with him.

When the Trump administration was, the first one was coming to an end, people said, Jared Navanka, they can't come back to New York.

These people, you know, what he's done, what he's done with COVID, they're disgraced.

No, they're not.

Jared Kushner left the White House, and though he had never managed money before, he worked in his family business, he was able to get $2 billion.

I think it might be $4 billion now from MBS, from the Saudis to manage.

He manages that amount of money.

Just a coincidence.

Just a coincidence.

There was not a journalist that had a murder.

We're not not even going to go to Bonsock.

There was no Bolsonaro.

So he left the White House.

And no, he didn't come back to New York.

He moved to Miami.

He's in L.A.

He's made an extraordinary amount of money.

He's hugely successful.

So we do have to be careful when everybody laughs at the art of the deal and saying, oh, my goodness, it's clownish.

No,

he won.

He won the presidency a second time.

He obviously did not go to jail.

He's doing everything he wants in this administration.

He's surrounded by loyalists.

And who knows what's going to happen from here, but he's also become wealthier than he ever imagined, and so has his whole entire family.

The people who are suffering the consequences of the art of the deal is the United States of America.

I was talking to somebody in my phone who's this longtime mergers and acquisitions guy, MA guy, one of these investment bankers who've been doing it for four decades.

And the way he characterized it as looking for a way to just like explain this, he texted me, it's a bit of an economic Cuban missile crisis with China being the USSR of the day.

And I don't know what to do with that except to infer from what the Cuban missile crisis felt like that doing what you do, Steph, monitoring tariffs every day of your life now with everything feeling like it's on the brink, like we are taping this and in the hour before we started,

everything changed and we're just all we're just perpetually trying to keep up with the social media platform that so many of the men that you have been talking to, that we've been covering, are obsessed with.

When you think about all of this,

it's easier for Wall Street guys to play this game and play the game with the tariffs because many, many hedge funds have 10 employees, have five employees.

Maybe they have 50 employees if they're really big.

They don't even have holding periods of how long they have to hold a stock.

They can be in and out and in and out.

They can buy a derivative on it.

They could be hedging themselves.

If you run a giant business, if you run an actual company, if you run an apparel company,

if you run a restaurant business, how do you do that?

How do you make long-term hiring, firing, growth purchasing decisions when we're dealing with this?

It's so crazy, it just might work, right?

And the whole idea is, but I just have to have the inside track and know what the president's really doing.

And think about how unsettling that is.

And I would say this about banking because

I remember six, nine months ago talking to a CEO of a company here,

an American company, but he was Canadian.

And he was like, listen, I hear everything you're saying about Trump, blah, blah, blah, but he's a business guy.

And Kamala doesn't know anything about business.

She didn't do a great job telling her business story.

I'm not arguing that.

But this notion that like Donald Trump's a business guy, he's going to be really good for business, couple that with the exhaustion the business community all seemed to feel about wokeness.

They felt like DEI and the DEI officers officers and their companies were strangling their ability to hire more Princeton lacrosse players because that's who they really needed.

I just say that because that's my husband, but you know, this, oh my, you know, when can men be men again?

All these DEI hires we have to make are standing in the way of progress and profitability.

And it was right after, it was in January, the FT had this article with an anonymous banker.

I love how tough he is, so anonymous.

I think he was at UBS or something, who said, finally, liberation, a new dawn.

Okay.

Not strangled by DEI.

You know, no worry that we're going to get canceled if we use the P word or the R word at work.

It's a new dawn.

It's liberation.

And I wish I knew that guy because I'd love to call him on the phone and say, how's liberation feeling for you?

Right.

I get that there was an exhaustion, that they felt like they were talking about DEI all day, every day.

I actually get that.

I'm holding space for it.

Sure.

But the idea that that was crippling to your business, but this ride that we're on this week, this ride of insanity was a good idea.

That one, I need someone smarter than me to explain.

Stephanie Ruhl,

I am very grateful that you came to our studio and that you are in my phone.

I'm glad to be in your phone.

My question to you.

Yeah.

If Stephen A.

were the president, how would he handle tariffs?

Oh, God.

I know.

I need to grow.

Oh, God.

You know what?

I think

I know

that

it would be less chaotic than what we have now.

And that's saying something.

It's saying so f ⁇ ing much that it makes my head hurt.

Yes.

Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Aberoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tuminello, and Juliet Warren.

Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our sound design by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo.

We will talk to you next time.