Trump’s Art of No Deals

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarlove.

Jess, have you missed me?

Have you missed me?

Yeah.

And I don't want to say it again, but like I texted you and you just didn't respond.

And it was interesting.

It was in response to your No Mercy, No Malice column with extra data for you to be able to use in your shows.

Oh, really?

It's okay.

I know you have a scarcity clause in our contract or whatever, or in your contract with everybody.

Yeah, I don't.

I would like a new gestalt in our society that when you don't respond to emails or texts, it means I agree.

What a great email.

Drop the mic.

I don't need to respond.

That's what the thumbs up was created for.

100%.

It's not enough for most women, I will say, but at least it means that you are alive, that you recognize that this happened, and that you aren't upset about something, because that's where the estrogen takes you.

Like, I think, oh my God, is Scott and Abiza upset about something?

But no, you were probably just drinking and hanging.

Oh, see, I think women are more secure.

I think guys are actually

more insecure and women because women have so much practice ghosting men.

I think they respect the slow fade.

I think they respect the like the polite, I'm winding down this dialogue.

Whereas men, especially powerful men, are used to everyone responding back and, you know, licking them up and down.

And I'm, I find, and I'm virtue signaling, but it's true, the more important the person, the less likely I am to respond because I have spent my entire career just responding to powerful people, whether it's writing their speeches, doing their presentations for boards, or telling them what decisions to make or whatever it is.

And now I am done.

I am done renting my brain to rich white dudes.

I'm done.

Oh.

Anyways, probably weren't even bargaining for.

A little bit.

Back to you.

How are your children?

Oh, so nice of you to ask.

They are great.

I got some cute photos from last week.

I won't send them to you because it won't matter probably, but

don't care.

They're really good.

We're getting very comfortable in the pool, which is important, the water safety skills.

Oh, God.

It's so scary when you're around water, which I'm a city kid and we don't have a pool, obviously, here, but it's the scariest thing in the world to think that they could just fall in when you turn your head or you're not, you know, they get out of the house somehow.

So, oh, you're your instincts there are correct and common sense.

I have personal experience with this.

I saw my job as a father of young children to do two things: bring home the bacon and two, keep the kids away from any body of water.

And when we first moved to Florida, I was out and back, and my son, who who was, he was like three or four, and we were out in the back.

He was playing in the pool.

And he went to the deep end and jumped in and started flailing around.

And I was there so I could jump in and fish him out.

And I thought, if I had just gone in for some water, if I had just taken a call and wandered around the side of the house.

Anyways, you're right to be paranoid about that.

And then one summer, I forget where we were, we even got bought those devices that you put on their shirts.

And when the device senses water, an alarm goes off.

And the alarm went off on a Sunday, and we're all like running around the house looking for a kid in a body of water.

And someone put the shirt in the laundry.

I don't know how I got here, Jess.

Did I tell you I'm in a Biza?

You did, but now you're telling everybody it looks nice or looks fine.

I'm in a Biza where there are a ton of young men who have not earned their wealth and are spending their father's money and have some intricate story about the real job they supposedly have.

And it's obvious within about 10 seconds, they're just, they've got a rich dad.

And they bring a bunch of women, you know, looking to be sponsored by the son.

There's so many sexist, classist things I just made in that statement, but I'm holding by it.

But I do love it here.

They're also all true about it there.

I went once, I was 30, and I was the only person who wasn't on Molly when we went out.

And it's something to behold watching people on Molly dancing for five hours straight.

Like we had just started getting step counters, you know, like people were paying attention to the number of steps.

And then you see that someone did like 40,000 steps overnight.

Yeah.

And you know, they had a good night.

Yeah, I'm not going to say whether or not I take Molly, but a couple of nights ago at the Black Coffee, DJ said, I found I really like me.

I really felt good about me all of a sudden.

All right, Jess, today.

We're talking about the new phase of Trump's trade war.

That was a segue.

The GOP trying to sell their new bill and Elon Musk's new third party.

Jesus Christ, you fucking attention monster.

Could you be more addicted to ketamine or attention, you fucking weirdo?

All right, let's get into it.

Now that the White House has pushed its big legislative package across the finish line, it's turning its attention back to the global trade war with a fresh dose of confusion, deadlines, and diplomatic drama.

After a 90-day tariff pause that produced only a few shaky deals, that is generous to describe what has happened with the UK.

By the way, let's just talk about this UK deal.

A reduction in tariffs on Austin Martin engines and Rolls-Royce engines.

Wow, that's going to change the economy.

After a 90-day tariff pause that produced only a few of these deals with the UK, Vietnam, and China, although I wouldn't even call them deals, I'm still pretty angry about this.

They're agreements or structures to talk about a deal.

Trump says the U.S.

is ready to turn up the pressure.

Oh, God.

Hold my beer, bitch.

That is literally what the world is saying to the sky right now.

Starting August 1st, steep import duties, some as high as 70%, are set to kick in.

Yeah, sure they are.

Sure they are.

Mr.

Trump always chickens out.

That process began in earnest Monday when President Trump fired off tariff letters to the leaders of 14 countries, including Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and South Africa.

These letters spell out new country-specific tariffs, I guess, from some intern that has a chat GPT account, ranging from 25% to 40%,

and warned that rates could even go higher if those countries retaliate.

At the same time, Trump signed an executive action pushing back the deadline for most reciprocal tariffs with, oh, pushed back the deadline.

My red red lines are kind of a beige, invisible line, said Trump over and over.

With the exception of China to August 1st, the move buys more time for negotiations.

In other words, I'm folding yet again, said Donald Trump to the world, but not by much.

Now businesses are bracing for impact, markets are jittery, and major questions remain.

Will Canada's July 21st deadline hold?

What happens when the China truce expires August 12th?

And is this strategy or just more bullshit, jazz hands, false, empty threats?

Jess, what do you make of this new phase of, let's call it, the tariff limbo?

It's the same as usual in that it just feels deeply unserious.

And this has an exclamation point after unserious or a crescendo because these letters that he sent to foreign leaders were just like true social posts on Letterhead.

It was like written by a 14-year-old boy.

He's capitalizing random words.

His grammar makes no sense.

He's misgendering certain leaders.

They fixed that, though.

Her Excellency became a dear Mr.

President within a few hours.

But there's always been an opportunity for the Trump administration to take the layup on this trade war because when they buy themselves more time, they could just back out and no one would really say anything because they'd just be quietly relieved.

Like everyone over at CNBC would be like, oh, thank God, right?

We can just get back to being normal.

And you could talk about tariffs on China, which everyone broadly agrees with.

And the Biden administration did as well.

They even jacked up Trump's tariffs on China threefold and just focus on people that are actually at war with us in some way or another.

But these blanket tariffs, these violations of, by the way, free trade agreements, which creates larger questions around what Donald Trump thinks Congress actually does or if he values it at all, which I mean, he doesn't, as we've seen time and time again.

But like on South Korea, we have a free trade agreement.

It's not up to you what you do with them.

I just, I don't want to see Scott Besson anymore.

Like this guy who was supposed to be the adult in the room making the rounds on the Sunday shows, then he's all over CNBC on Monday.

And he's so smug.

And he's telling us to not believe our lion eyes about what's going on.

You know, we had 90 deals in 90 days.

That's over.

Peter Navarro says, oh, I'm very happy with where we are.

I don't know how that's physically possible.

If you said we were getting 90 deals in 90 days.

And And then we had Trump in April.

I'm telling you, these countries are calling up.

They're kissing my ass.

They're dying to make a deal.

Please, please, sir, make a deal.

I'll do anything, sir.

And when he talks like that, you know that it's hyperbole.

But now Besson has admitted as much that a lot of those countries didn't even call us.

And people understand that you just kind of sit back and wait to see what happens.

Because even if you were to make a plan that goes along with what they want for you to be doing, right?

That they want you to build a factory or whatever, they're not giving you enough time to do it to any execution whatsoever, because in 10 days it just changes.

So if I were these other countries, I would just sit back and kind of wait and see what happens and hope that he gets distracted by something and you just keep buying yourself more and more time.

What do you think?

Yeah.

So the entity, which has become sort of a better predictor engine than political pundits

or CNN or Fox is the markets.

And basically the markets don't believe the tariffs are going to change that much.

I mean, to be clear, and I'm a bit of a catastrophe.

I thought this is really going to hurt the markets.

And the markets have basically said the tariffs are going to look remarkably similar to the way they did before.

They're just, the markets aren't worried about this nonsense.

And I did some analysis because I was very excited about coming back to raging moderates.

And I'm fairly certain that by dollar volume, there have been more deals struck since the president announced his new tariff policy or what I'll call threats between countries that are non-U.S.

And that is the threats of tariffs have actually inspired a great deal of dealmaking, just not between the U.S.

and the people we've threatened.

What it's done is it's sent a message to non-U.S.

countries that they can't count on this incredible trade relationship they used to have with the United States, which has inspired them to begin speaking to each other and rerooting their supply chain, including dialogue and agreements around the U.S.

So So a few of those, Vietnam and South Korea have announced a $150 billion more balanced and sustainable trade relationship as they swear cooperation following Trump's tariffs.

EU has struck more deals with China, with Canada, with India.

The EU and Mercosur, a bunch of the Southeast Asian nations are talking for the first time, Japan, South Korea, and China.

We tend to, as Americans, you know, we're fairly narcissistic.

We just go, oh, Asia, and we think they're all the same.

Japan, South Korea, and China are not in love with each other.

They do not like each other.

And they are talking for the first time about closer ties.

Why?

Because their attitude is: these people, we can't count on this great trading or preexisting trading relationship.

So let's start discussing.

So, in sum, Trump did inspire a great deal of deal making, just not among us, between nations he's threatened, between them and each other.

Sounds like what goes on on foreign policy as well.

You know, he did admittedly have a good NATO summit, and maybe it's going to get the 5% commitment in terms of defense spending from some nations.

But we know with the position that the U.S.

has taken on Ukraine, for instance, that the EU...

gets together with Ukraine without us on a pretty regular basis.

You know, it's a go-it-alone strategy that that we've taken and we're seeing the repercussions of it.

The question will be, what happens at home in terms of how the American public feels about this?

And we know that Trump's disapproval on trade has skyrocketed from January.

It was 40%.

Now it's up to 54%.

I saw one survey that actually had a 65% disapproval.

The American public knows that tariffs are a tax on them because They're people that go out and buy things, a lot of them small business owners who have no idea how to make a plan for their future or that they think that they can even stay in business for the next six months.

What I saw that feels like a bit of a watershed moment, and I didn't realize that this transition hadn't happened yet, but in the last month, Trump voters have started saying that this is Trump's economy.

So essentially, this feels like a reset moment for the administration.

So he's been in for six months, but if you consider that it's only like in the last few weeks, actually, that people who went out and voted for him in November are saying that he owns this economy.

It's a bit of a blank slate.

And so this new set of tariffs and whatever is to come going forward in terms of the economy is actually going to be what Democrats need to be paying attention to and what we're going to have to work for for the midterm.

So that's like 18 months versus 24 months of actual runway there.

And I was surprised to see it.

I know that everyone, you know, you have your horses and because you like this guy, you say, oh, it's not his fault.

And all presidents do that, right?

They say, you know, I'm cleaning up the mess of the last guy.

It's not true all the time when they say it, but they certainly do.

But I think that's a very different perspective that we're going into this now, where people are saying, Donald Trump is fully in control of the United States of America now.

And what does that look like?

It looks like the one beautiful bill, which we're going to talk about.

And it looks like perhaps a series of trade wars that are really going to hurt the American economy.

I do think it's interesting about the market.

I, you know, the ticker is always running on Fox.

And I, well, I'm in hair and makeup for an an hour, because it takes a long time to attach those fake eyelashes and bring my hair closer to God, you know, I'm always watching the direction of things.

And there were certainly a lot of very positive green days.

But yesterday, as these letters were trickling in, you see it go into the red.

And I'm watching Liz Klayman, who we both love on Fox Business, and talking to her guests about what's going on in their companies and how they're planning.

And they're saying something very similar to what you said, which is they're making plans for it, but they're not thinking that it's the be-all and end-all.

And I really wish that more CEOs of companies, like the CEO of Ford, sat down with Lara Trump and actually told her why you need to get some of these parts from other countries and how unfeasible.

Is it unfeasible or infeasible?

Yes.

How it is not feasible to totally produce these cars on American soil is what you have to do.

You have to do it with the kid clubs.

You have to do it as nicely as possible, but you have to show up and you have to look these people in the eye and just say it's not possible.

Yeah, if they were really serious, well, okay.

So the F-150, I think, goes across the Canadian or Mexican border back and forth or components of it like 12 times.

It's not even clear how you would even force these tariffs.

And two, if we were really interested in more domestic manufacturing around the automobile industry, we wouldn't have cut those subsidies to EVs because the most vertical automobile manufacturer is Tesla because it has dramatically fewer parts that can be manufactured and milled domestically.

And while I'm loath to give any credit to Elon Musk companies, EVs, if you were really interested about having more domestic production and dramatically simplifying the supply chain, you wouldn't be halting the EV tax credits.

What I did find interesting recently was that Chairman Powell at an economic conference basically came out and said, if it wasn't for the tariffs and the insecurity that the tariffs are creating around the possibility of inflation, if he actually follows through on his threats, which looks less and less likely every day as he continues to threaten, fold, threaten, fold, threaten, see above, fold,

that he said, we would have lowered interest rates already.

And so effectively the entire economy is paying a tax of somewhere between, call it 25 and 100 basis points on your credit cards, your student loan payments, your mortgage payments, because we would be in a rate-cutting cycle right now, had it not been for someone who is a lot smarter than anyone on the administration's current economic team, had he not said, we have to wait and see if these tariffs go through and the inflationary impact they have before we start cutting interest rates.

Because if all of a sudden everything gets more expensive and we cut interest rates and people get horny about borrowing money and buying more shit and there's more money chasing fewer things and we start this upward doom loop of price where people start panic buying because they think things are going to get more and more expensive.

You know, upward inflationary cycles, unless they are cauterized early, can spin out of control.

And that's how nations fail.

Be clear, inflation is how nations go out of business.

And so the adult in the room, Chairman Powell, said, he just came right out and said it and said, the threat of the tariffs is why I have not already cut rates and why we are kind of sitting and waiting.

So be clear.

These tariffs have yet to take hold in terms of consumer prices or inflation because no one is taking them seriously because of the track record of the president folding.

But it's already costing us a great deal of incremental capital because interest rates are probably 25 to 100 bips higher than they would be had we had a responsible economic policy such that the chairman, having beaten back COVID, having beaten back inflation from the supply chain shocks of COVID and of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we'd be in a rate-cutting cycle.

And we're not because Chairman Powell correctly is waiting to see if these head-up-your-ass economic policies actually

get traction and register an impact on the economy, there's also a mental health and paralysis impact of this as well.

I understand it's not as easy to quantify that, but you have millions of Americans that essentially are stuck wondering what tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now are going to look like.

And that's everyone who just needs to buy food for dinner to someone who has to run a business.

Plan your business.

Yeah.

Businesses big and small.

Walmart has said that they can't even do Q3, Q4 planning because they don't know what it's going to look like.

And bringing your country, the engine of the most powerful country in the world to a halt because you want to send strange letters to heads of state or you have a bee in your bonnet about something that most economists worth their salt is telling you is not the way to be running your country and certainly not the way to get the kinds of results that you are after is an incredible amount of ego or hubris.

I don't even know what the right term for it is, but you know, he was elected by all of these people that were laser focused on lowering prices.

That was it, right?

They showed up.

Obviously, immigration voters was about an eighth of his voters.

So that was the number one reason.

But in general, people wanted lower prices.

After a Biden term, he brought down inflation, but it was a hugely inflationary period for us and for the rest of the world.

And you look at all of the actions that he's taken and they're diametrically opposed to the goal of lowering prices.

And Chairman Powell, just man of steel, right?

This guy

just gets up there and he says exactly what he wants to say.

He doesn't sugarcoat any of it.

There's the predictable response that Trump gets on social media and interview, whatever it is, and says, Powell's got to go, you know, he's bad for America, et cetera.

But I really admire someone who is so fearless in saying what's true.

There are a lot of people who I feel like are trying to play some sort sort of game about how they treat Trump, right?

They're either nicer to him for this or they want to get this kind of reaction.

So they do, you know, zigzagging around with it.

And Powell's just such a straight shooter about it.

You know, he says, if you do this one thing differently, then I'm going to be able to give you the thing that you want.

And there's so little directness, I feel like, in society right now that I really I really love it when I see it.

And it's easy for someone as an analyst to be able to glom onto that because you say this is a serious person who knows what they're saying and is not treating Trump special.

Like he's not playing the game with him.

He's just saying what's true.

Yeah, it's he's this guy will be one of the most deserving Medal of Freedom recipients in history.

And that'll absolutely happen as soon as there's a Democratic administration in place.

He really did.

He pulled us back from COVID.

He basically stuck up the middle finger and said, hold my beer to senators on the far left who were, you know, crying for people whose credit card, but that he needed to lower interest rates.

And also on the far right, he just didn't care.

He was very steadfast.

The largest acceleration in interest rates over a 15-month period in history.

And it was a medicine we needed to take.

A zero interest rate environment created some real externalities, and he immediately course corrected.

And our inflation under the Biden administration was the lowest of the G7 while our growth was the strongest.

The affordability thing is really interesting.

And even if if you look at Mom Dani's win in New York of the Democratic primary, it was arguably very similar to Trump.

It was a focus on affordability and weaponizing new mediums.

I mean, coming at it from a much different lens, but basically Trump ran on affordability, and so did Mom Dani.

But if you were really serious about affordability, you would have a sane immigration policy that said, okay, if you're going to church and picking crops and part of our health care system and lowering the bills at grocery stores and in our health services community.

All right, we'll figure out a path to citizenship.

We want to bring in the most talented immigrants to start new companies.

We want to ensure there's a ton of competition amongst we're going to break up monopolies.

We would never have tariffs.

We would get together with some of our partners and figure out a way to lower tariffs.

I mean, literally everything, we would figure out a tax policy that doesn't borrow massive amounts of money such that interest rates go down because of the money or the premium that we have to offer people on T-bills doesn't continue to increase as our own balance sheet looks increasingly risky.

It's what you said is exactly right.

I mean, this isn't the big, beautiful bill is the big inflation bill.

I mean, you could assign a lot of words to this: inflation, depraved, you know, the anti-Robin Hood bill, whatever you would want to call it.

But it does appear that he is dead set

on illuminating or incenting or detonating inflation again.

All right.

With that, let's take a quick break.

Stay with us.

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Welcome back.

Republicans finally muscled their big, beautiful bill through Congress, a sweeping legislative victory for Trump that slashes $1.7 trillion in federal spending, extends his signature tax cuts, and enacts major changes to safety net programs, including Medicaid.

But now comes the harder part, selling it.

Polls show most Americans either dislike the bill or don't know what's in it.

And with midterms looming, GOP lawmakers are sprinting to define the law before Democrats do it for them.

Jess, Republicans are touting the bill's populist pieces like eliminating taxes on tips.

But how are they planning to explain the projected 12 million Americans who are likely going to lose their Medicaid coverage?

Well, they're going to have an election before you lose your Medicaid coverage.

So that's how they're going to do it.

You know, they were very specific about the timing of everything.

Like no tax on tips actually expires in 2028.

Tax cuts for the wealthiest, that lives forever.

But if you're going to get no tax on tips, which by the way, only goes up to the first $25,000 that you make in tips.

So that's a very low cap anyway.

That'll be around for the midterms, but you won't know if your Medicaid is going away until after you cast your vote.

I still expect that the Democrats will do well in the midterms because historically that's what happens.

But they were very, very crafty in the timing about all of this.

They also told this monster lie about what would happen if we didn't pass the one big beautiful bill.

They would say your tax cuts would expire from the 2017 Trump plan.

But that's not true.

It's not like you would wake up the next day and suddenly you wouldn't have a tax cut anymore.

Congress would actually have six months.

to deal with this and they could work out something in a bipartisan fashion.

And they've done this before.

So that was the pressure that people felt.

And they thought the average American that you were going, again, to wake up on July 5th or whatever day we were going to say it is, and that suddenly you were going to have an enormous income tax bill or a huge bill for your small business.

So that was one pervasive lie.

And then you have the stuff about the work requirements for Medicaid.

Scott Besson, again, very smug, talking about able-bodied Americans that just don't want to work.

They always go back to quote-unquote welfare queens about all of this.

We know that only 8% of people who receive Medicaid would even fall into that category.

You're not going to pay for the trillions that you're putting into the deficit with those 8%.

And they just don't want to tell you the truth about what's going on in these kinds of bills.

They don't want to tell you about who's getting the kickbacks.

Steve Ratner created a beautiful chart of all of the evaluations and all the nonpartisan ones, all the partisan ones, and even right-wing partisan organizations have talked about this ballooning the deficit and that people will lose their health care.

Tax Foundation, Cato, and the only group of economic advisors or economic panel that says that it's going to be a boon for the American economy overall comes right out of the White House.

And they obviously have a vested interest in saying that.

But I...

It just feels very much like beating a dead horse.

The American public hates this bill.

Net favorables range from negative 19 to negative 29.

49% say the bill is going to hurt their family.

23% only say that it's going to help.

So you start out with a baseline that the American public knows that this is a bad thing.

But then you get into the issue of like, well, what are you going to do about it?

How are you going to talk about a thing that may not affect people tomorrow?

Like, I, and I know that people have made this case, but I don't think it's been made strongly enough.

And I want to hear it all the time that a tax and spend bill, more so than probably anything else that the government does, is a moral document.

It is a statement of your values and your priorities.

100%.

And the GOP is very clearly saying our priorities are the rich.

Our priorities are deporting millions of people who are here.

I mean, the ICE funding, and I want to get your take on that,

more than the IDF now, that's how much we're funding these guys wearing masks that are driving around in unmarked vans, picking people up.

And this, not anti-law enforcement.

I'm thrilled that we have zero border crossings now.

I think that that's a very good thing and something that the country needed and desperately wanted, which is why a lot of people held their nose and voted for Donald Trump because they didn't think the Democrats were serious about immigration.

But when you look at these priorities, and I'm sure, you know, there are bits in there cutting red tape for small businesses.

Some seniors will get a 6K deduction.

Those are good things.

You know, I'm not saying that there's nothing in the bill that's decent, but overall, It's a signal that this is a morally bankrupt party.

And they all said as much on the record and then just went ahead and voted for it anyway.

Yeah, a lot there.

So let's go from the small to the profound.

First off, this populist bullshit around no taxes on tips, what percentage of the working population would you guess get tips?

I'm going to make a bad guess.

It's 2%.

What?

Yeah, 2% of Americans make money on tips.

Oh.

And it just never made any sense to me.

I was a waiter.

I was growing up, I was both a dishwasher and a waiter.

So when I was a dishwasher, I wouldn't get a tax cut.

But when I was a a waiter, I got a tax cut.

And then, first off, anyone who's getting tips, especially with a $25,000 limit on it, it means they're not paying a lot of federal income tax to begin with.

This is populist bullshit that has no impact on people or the economy.

And what I find more upsetting, I'm all down for blaming the Republicans on this.

I think this is both cruel and stupid, which adds up to depraved.

And I think you can lay the majority of the blame at the feet of the administration and the Republicans who are scared of being primaried and pretend to give a good goddamn and say, I would never cut Medicaid and then grab their ankles when push comes to shove or decide to sell out the lower 48 to protect their folks, Senator Murkowski.

You know, this is absolutely, the majority of the blame lies with them.

But what's more frightening, Jess, is to your point, this isn't fiscal policy.

It's a reflection on our values.

And I think in America, there's a dangerous trend that my dad used to say America is a terrible place to be stupid.

And that was sort of an unkind way of saying it's a terrible place to be vulnerable.

And essentially, I think America, not just Republicans, but America has decided that we believe in a hunger games like economy, that the bottom 90% are effectively nutrition for the top 10%

because people are willing to put up with that depravity because they're hoping at some point they'll be in that top 10%.

And they're also conflating some of these really ugly ICE raids and knees on heads and 14-year-olds crying as their mother is carted away and hearing about a kid who is a paraplegic not being able to afford his medication or his physical therapy.

They sort of begrudgingly say, well, thoughts and prayers, but they see that as leadership.

They see that as in a weird way, masculinity and toughness.

I think this goes beyond something much deeper and more upsetting about America.

To your point, let's be hopeful.

It's that Americans haven't been or Democrats haven't done a good job connecting this to people because the majority of people who will probably be thrown off Medicaid, maybe a lot of us don't come in contact with, or we don't know that our neighbor's on Medicaid.

So

I never like to miss an opportunity to talk about myself.

I'll go through just how these cuts would literally pull up the ladder behind me.

I'm sitting here in this like out-of-control, over-the-top explosion in wealth in Ibiza.

And, you know, the bad thing about getting older, and you'll realize this, I think you're further along in sort of self-awareness than I was at your age.

But up until the point when I was your age, I credited my grit and my character for all my success.

It was about me being a baller and me being talented and me taking risks and

overcoming some hardship.

And then as you get older, you realize a lot of your success is not your fault.

And what I've come to recognize, and I can attach many of these things to what's under under attack right now, starting when I was nine years old, I got assisted lunch.

My mom made $800 a month as a secretary.

And so we qualified for assisted lunch.

And one of the things I remember about that, and I didn't find out, I was nine, so I didn't know what was going on.

One of the things I found out a few years later, and it just shows so much dignity and so much grace on the part of California taxpayers and our government, was they purposely sent the coupons to my house.

And every kid had the same coupon, so no one would know that I was on assisted lunch because they wanted to avoid the stigma.

And I thought that was the most graceful thing and one of the like the most American things.

When I was in high school, when I was 17, and I've talked openly about this, my mom who passed 20 years ago, I don't think would have a problem with this.

My mom became pregnant at 47 and was able to access safe, affordable family planning.

Had we lived in this era in a red state, you know, we weren't very sophisticated.

We didn't have a lot of money.

If my mom had been forced to carry a child in unwanted pregnancy to term, I was installing shelving, making decent money at the time.

I would have not gone to UCLA.

I would not have had the opportunity to start this upward spiral, courtesy of the Regency University of California, that quite frankly, and I'm bragging now, has produced tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue and thousands of jobs.

I just would have, I would have never had the opportunity to go to college had it been my mom and a newborn.

And then when I got to UCLA, I got Pell Grants.

That's the only way I could afford to be at UCLA.

And a third of Pell Grant recipients under this big, beautiful bill are either going to have their grants reduced or eliminated.

When I got out of college, I was able to raise a shit ton of money.

Why?

Because foreign investors loved investing in U.S.

startups because they saw rule of law, because they saw all types of technology that had been funded by the U.S.

government, which didn't have to pay a trillion dollars in interest payments so they could invest in these crazy things called GPS and the internet.

All of my companies were built on the backbone of technologies financed with these extraordinary, irrational investments from the U.S.

government because they had the capital to make these forward-leaning investments.

Literally, my company has been built on the back of immigrants and in America that said, if you are really fucking talented and want to work hard, come here and we will put you to work.

I mean, all of these things that have built this life and this prosperity and these millions in tax revenue, every one of them is under attack.

And it is so disappointing that more people with my blessings of my generation can't do the math and reverse engineer this to one thing, and that is we are torching, we are burning the ships behind us, we are pulling up the ladders.

It's so disappointing beyond the moral argument.

It's like you don't want your kids to have the same opportunity as we had.

And I'll even go more meta than this and be more dramatic and more hysterical.

Oh, good.

My mom was a four-year-old Jew sleeping in the tube stations at night because her house had been bombed during the blitzkrieg.

And America was so alarmed, they decided to convert factories from producing Buicks to producing tanks.

And they decided that 400,000 households should have a gold star in the window and lose their sons because it was worth it to push back on fascism.

They were not pushing back on anti-Semitism.

They were pushing back on fascism.

And what's fascism?

Demonization of immigrants, a refusal to condemn violence against your political enemies, and extreme nationalism.

Sounds familiar?

And had America not had a gag reflex on emerging fascism in Europe, my mom's life would have ended with a train ride.

I wouldn't even be here.

So all of these things,

a gag reflex on fascism, providing opportunities for young people, safe, affordable family planning and rights for women, deep pools of capital such that people could start business, a culture that invites the best and brightest to help people build businesses and leverage that capital.

All that shit is under attack.

It's literally under attack.

I find it so deeply rattling and disturbing, and I'm pissed off that Democrats just scream and get angry and talk about Medicare.

I get it.

Medicare, that's one part of the story.

But show me anybody of my generation who has made their wealth, not inherited, but made their wealth.

In about two fucking minutes, I can show you why this bill is attacking the reason that you are in a Biza or in the Hamptons or in Aspen and that you have decided, no, no one else gets to come here except my kids.

Speech over.

I'm overwhelmed by it and moved.

It's a great American story, and it's not often that people are telling it in such honest terms.

The details are what matter and what create connective tissue amongst Americans.

And right now, we talk about this a lot, that Americans feel completely disconnected from one another.

You live in your bubbles.

And I wish more people would speak up like that and would be telling those kinds of stories.

And I know that it is difficult if you also have a business to protect.

And there are a lot of people, even immigrants that are heads of these big companies that feel like they can't do it, that they have to show up at inauguration and they have to kiss the rain because they have to make sure that they continue to make their bottom line.

But it does feel like the very fabric of America is being torn apart.

And

I think that's important to emphasize.

But I also, you know, put on a strategist cap and I think about how much we talked about January 6th or the death of democracy.

And

fascism is coming and people didn't want to vote for that.

They wanted to vote for better grocery prices, right?

Or they wanted to vote for a closed border.

And so you have to be really strategic and smart about how you do this.

You know, the reality is that nearly half of Americans haven't heard anything about the Big Beautiful bill.

So those who have heard about it have a very negative view of it.

Only 8% have said that the Medicaid cuts are a detail of a bill that they know about.

That's going to come for a lot of these people after the midterms, like I said.

So it's emotional to think about this and to think about the impact on the young people, like you said, of pulling up the ladder.

You know, what's going to happen with your student loans, for instance.

I mean, people just are not going to be able to go to graduate school or college for that matter.

It's just not going to be happening anymore.

We're going to become less educated.

We're also going to be able to import less educated people because why would you want to come here?

I don't know what America looks like when this is over, but I do know that millions of Americans were not happy with the way that it's going.

And Democrats have got to thread that needle better.

And I don't want to, I don't want to turn every session into like a shitting on Democrat session.

Like there's not a lot that you can do when you don't have the numbers.

But people don't feel inspired and they don't feel like they have a good alternative to this.

A friend of mine who's a great Democratic strategist was talking about it.

And he said, essentially, we're on trend for 2017 when they tried to do the ACA repeal.

And we had a very good midterms there in 2018.

But it's going to take a a lot of work over the next 18 months to impress upon people just exactly what has happened to the country.

And we know that it's not that effective to be telling people, like, well, this is what your lived reality is, right?

This is what your experience is.

People know what their experiences are.

And if we don't seem like a decent alternative, then maybe they sit at home.

Maybe they don't care.

But more so, maybe they just become completely or even further disenchanted with the American project.

What Democrats do you think are doing a decent job of attaching this bill to real life?

Who do you think that is actually showing some of that fire and ability to connect this to everyday Americans who other Democrats can model?

Aaron Powell I mean, all of the swing Democrats, I think, do a great job of this because sometimes they're not as good on social or whatever.

We don't pay a lot of attention to it.

But like the Jared Goldens of the world, Pat Ryan, you know, when you win races like that, you know something about how to talk to people and how to make those connections.

If you look at Mallory McMorrow, who we're going to have on the podcast running for Senate in Michigan, outraised her primary opponent who has a lot more institutional support because she's talking about this like a normal person.

And she's also saying to the mom Donnie question, like business as usual is not working for us.

Yeah, it's over i mean people they want change if they're not going to get and we're going to talk about the third party thing with elon if these are going to be your options you have to find a way to turn into an outsider party while still being on the inside and one of my colleagues at fox i think it was kelly ann said that Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party from within.

He essentially created a third party from within the Republican infrastructure.

And Democrats need some of that.

They need an internal revolution at this point to inspire people and to make you think that the status quo is not good enough for any of us.

And I wanted to ask you this because it's been weighing on me.

Like, I love my job, but I don't love my job.

And I can't imagine loving a job enough that I would vote for something that I admitted would strip healthcare from hundreds of thousands of people that I represent.

What is the point of staying in office if you can't help the people that you allegedly signed up to improve the lives of?

It's such a profound question.

And I ask myself the same question all the time that at what point, if, I mean, literally, if the president said we have to stop all funding for

premature birth wards, would they do it?

At this point, like, where would they draw the line?

Where would they say we won't do it?

Because the only people who didn't vote for this thing were people who basically said, I'm not running again, especially in the Senate.

So, I don't, I struggle with this too.

And I don't have a good answer other than they're too fucking old and they literally think if I leave here, I'm just going to go home and start to die.

And I lose all relevance and all importance.

Do you have any additional thoughts on why these folks just refuse to be the kind of the leaders we ask them to be?

Power corrupts.

Yeah.

These are very important jobs, and we treat them like many kings and queens to some degree, right?

Especially with the way the media apparatus works now.

But I can't,

I can't come up with what the line would be except for the very few that actually did find their line, whether it was the deficit or Medicaid cuts for Tom Tillis.

But, you know, The ball is rolling.

There's already a rural hospital in Nebraska that's closed.

And they said that this is because of the bill, that they're not going to be able to stay in business moving forward as a result.

And you're going to see a lot of that and people getting asked tough questions.

And I think the answer is going to be, you know, what caliber of candidate on the Democratic side is going to show up to run races against these vulnerable Republicans?

Because the map, there are already a lot of them on it and they just put even bigger targets on their back.

You know, there are going to be some very interesting races, hard-fought races in all of this.

And

we got to find the way to be inspirational and different

and revolutionary within the system that we're working in because people look at Washington and they just say, I don't see anything for me.

Yeah.

And one of the bright spots about Mom Domi's win is,

And I want to be clear, I would not have voted for the guy.

A lot of his positions are very troubling to me.

And a lot of his current, his public policy ideas make no fucking sense to me, like sponsored breadlines in the form of state-sponsored or state-controlled grocery stores.

But having said that, along the lines of what you're saying, we need a revolution within the Democratic Party to remake the party.

And it's got to start with young people who understand these new technologies, these new mediums, are unafraid, new ideas, and are willing to just sort of step up and say, all right, it is time to shed a new layer of skin.

Any ideas?

Who do you think, if looking at the positive side of Donald Trump, who was sort of the,

you know, the William Wallace of that revolution, if you had to bet on one or two or three people who you think could be that, that William Wallace of reshaping the Democratic Party, do you see any likely candidates?

Or is it still kind of TBD?

I mean, it's a little TBD, but I think on the more centrist, you know, moderate Dem side of things, I think Elisa Slotkin is offering people a lot.

And she was the one who came out there and said, you know, this is my plan, right?

This is what I think the future of the Democratic Party looks like.

You know, she does the cursing in the right places.

She has the resume to back all of it up.

I just think that there's so much that we can learn from people that have won these difficult races and that oftentimes we just go back to the folks who have the loudest voices or who give the best interviews, et cetera.

But they obviously don't know the same things as the folks that went out there and connected with people that have supported Republicans their whole life or who split ticket for Donald Trump and for them.

You know, it's happening all over the country.

And there are people out there that are worth your time, even if their politics aren't exactly aligned with ours.

Like we had Greg Kassar from Texas on the podcast.

He's way to the left of where I am.

But, you know, you have a lot of people in the middle who are saying that.

They like AOC the best because AOC seems like she's got the fight in her and that she's on the right side of history.

Unafraid.

You know.

Agreed.

Yeah.

The problem I have with the far left, and I think they're as guilty or more guilty of this than the far right, and I've been subject to it, is if you're a moderate and occasionally see merit in Republican ideas, you're treated like an apostate.

Yeah.

Like, you know, the right calls me a libtar, they just write me off, but they'll bring me on Fox and they're actually quite polite to me, as I think they're mostly polite to you and appreciate you.

On the far left, I can't tell you how many mean, angry emails I got from people I know and like and consider me a friend and I consider them a friend when I started saying Biden's too fucking old.

It's like you either sign up for the cult and the narrative or you are the enemy.

And the far left is as guilty of it as anybody.

And the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of embracing imperfect allies.

And when I'm at conferences and I see people, Democrats playing identity politics and talking about the patriarchy.

And if you don't sign up for every right word for the orthodoxy, you're the problem.

And it's like, just as the settlers figured out a way to get Native Americans fighting amongst each other, kill each other first, and then we'll come in for cleanup.

The Democrats are just

the level of intracene warfare is so unproductive.

It's like, I absolutely think AOC's policies, many of them don't make any fucking sense.

I will give money to her.

I think she's wonderful.

I retweet her shit.

I think she's fantastic.

But what I find on the left is if you don't sign up for the right narrative, basically people attack you and say, okay, maybe we're allies, but you're holding the gun wrong.

This is the narrative.

This demand for ideological consistency is so ridiculous.

Security tests.

No actual human being is totally in lockstep with a party platform.

And that's what Trump did for the right.

It works and it connects.

Yeah, and I mean,

we're going to need a bigger boat, but I also think the identity politics of the left has gotten out of control.

It doesn't do us any good to begin assigning values and identifying or immediately prescribing validity or a lack thereof based on who's saying it as opposed to what they're saying.

And I feel like the Democrats don't even recognize how biased they are against statements solely based on who's saying it.

And I feel that the Democrats are actually probably more guilty of this than Republicans.

That, okay,

if you're an old white dude, I have to take everything you say with a grain of salt, and I am ready to weigh in and get my guardians of gotcha pin.

I am going so far off script here.

Jess, let's bring it home.

Our producer is trying to rein me in.

Let's take a quick break.

Stay with us.

We're going to talk about this guy who's in technology who's actually from South Africa.

His name is Elon Musk.

Oh, haven't heard of him?

Yeah.

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Welcome back.

Before we go, Elon Musk says he's launching a third political party.

Oh, God, Jess, save me.

Literally, save me.

Called the America Party.

Okay, yeah.

A South African immigrant who went to school in Canada, who disowns his daughter on Joe Rogan's podcast and is being sued concurrently by two women for sole custody of their child because he spends no time with them.

Yeah, that's the guy to start a third party.

He says it's meant to challenge what he calls a one-party system that's driving the country into debt.

And he timed the announcement just days after Trump signed his massive domestic policy bill into law, a bill Musk once backed, then blasted, and now calls the final straw.

He's had it, Jess.

He's had it.

Anyways, Musk insists the new party will focus on a handful of swing districts in the midterms, but Trump allies warn it could fracture the right at a time when margins are razor thin.

That's fair.

And then there's the Epstein factor.

After months of teasing bombshell revelations, the Justice Department just announced there isn't a client list, isn't a cover-up, and no more new documents are coming.

Well, that's 180.

That hasn't stopped Musk from fanning the flames or from accusing Trump of being part of some kind of cover-up.

Jess, what's going on here?

What's he trying to accomplish?

A third party isn't exactly, I don't know, we've been to this movie before.

How much trouble do you think he can actually cause for Trump and the GOP?

Not very much.

Like on the fringes, it's possible to have an effect with a third party candidate.

Like actually in an Ohio district, Marcy Kaptur, who's the Democrat there, I think this is her 22nd term.

She's been there a long time.

The Democrats funneled money into a Libertarian candidate's campaign, I think about 400K to shave off support from the Republican candidate that was challenging her, and she ended up winning her race.

So those are ways that you can use third parties to play around and make a difference.

But in terms of what's going to happen at the presidential level, it makes no difference.

And if you want to have a government that's more representative to the public, then you need to have proportional representation.

And we can't have winner-take-all anymore.

And there are a lot of people that would get on board with that, but would obviously never be able to pass and get through.

So, you know, Musk is throwing his toys out of the proverbial stroller.

He's pissed off.

This happened before.

And he essentially came back groveling to Trump.

And I imagine that that's what's going to happen because, you know, money matters, of course, and being the richest man on the planet is a very big deal.

But Donald Trump has shown himself to be more powerful.

than Musk.

And I think even the way that he's treating him on social media about this, you know, talking down to him, it's very paternalistic, actually, how he's dealing with him.

Like, baby Elon is mad.

Give him his space.

And, you know, they toss around stuff like, I'm going to look into your immigration status or whatever.

But in general, I feel like he's going to get over it and he has to get back to Tesla and

try managing that.

And I think, you know, he's mad about the debt, but he's mostly mad about the EV credits.

Right.

That's what this is.

Everyone is always just actually concerned with themselves and their personal personal bottom line.

So I think it's going to end up being a big nothing burger.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a few things here.

There's the motivation for doing it and the effectiveness.

The motivation is all of a sudden he's decided the president is a pedophile and that this bill is fiscally irresponsible.

There is no new information from when he loved the president.

Correct.

There are no new revelations about Trump and Epstein.

The end of the EV subsidies, the massive increase in the deficit were all present when he was showing up to the White House House in a hot topic uniform high on ketamine.

This is about Elon Musk being angry he's no longer the first friend.

So that is not the basis or the substance to the heft to start a third political party.

And then the question is, will a third political party, does it have any viability?

And it doesn't in America.

We have a two-party system because of gerrymandering, because of a winner-take-all environment.

When we have proportional representation in places like Sweden and Germany, a third, a fourth, and a fifth party can have a lot of influence because they get proportionate representative based on if they get 18% of the vote, they get 18% of the representatives.

What a third party ends up being is spoilers, right?

So Ross Perot got 18%.

Ross Perot is the reason Bill Clinton won presidency.

George Herbert Walker Bush was the first incumbent to lose an election when there wasn't a recession because Perot took 18%, about 11%

was drawn from Bush's voter base, seven from Clinton, so a swing of 4%, which swung it from being a landslide for Bush to a decided victory for Clinton.

The same thing happened to Gore

because of Nader.

Jill Stein played a role.

So these third parties are not viable.

The last time a third party won a state was Wallace, I think in 68, but they can be spoilers.

I think this is over before it starts.

I think it's going to get no traction.

What he can have is enormous influence because there's a decent argument that he's the guy that got Trump elected.

With a quarter of a billion dollars and a huge platform in seven swing states and a small number of counties in those seven swing states, you can make an argument that in, you know, two or three of those states, Musk may have swun the election for Trump.

If he is able to focus on four or six senatorial and 12 or 15 House races, he could have a huge impact because those people are very loyal to whoever puts them in office.

One thing that Peter Thiel will never hear from J.D.

Vance is the word no because Peter Thiel put J.D.

Vance in office.

So he could have enormous influence, but this third-party nonsense is over before it begins.

And be clear, folks, Elon Musk isn't worried about the deficit.

He isn't worried about America's future.

He's just, quite frankly, he's really butthurt and he's angry and he's looking for revenge.

Your thoughts?

I agree.

And you saw also how quickly Elon Musk faded from favor of the Republican Party.

Once he started opposing the bill, he was persona non grata.

I understand that this coincided with him also leaving the White House, but he's not walking around with Trump and Dana White anymore.

So no one really cares that much.

You're right about the money, like the example I was giving in Ohio, but he is on to something that's really important.

You know, we have the highest number of Americans that identify as a political independent.

That doesn't mean that they don't have right or left leanings, but it means that they don't want to be part of this two-party system that pushes you into boxes where you don't feel like you belong.

And there was a massive study of almost 20,000 people that looked at how independents feel about the major parties.

64% have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party and 71% have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.

We need to do better.

We need parties that look more like America, that are more responsive to America and their concerns.

It's a huge branding challenge, you know, something that you're great at assessing.

But when Musk says we need another option, we we need an alternative, almost everybody says that's objectively true.

We just need to find a way to make that feasible or possible for folks, or to at least give them some inkling that we understand how badly they want things to change.

So just before we wrap up here, Jess, I need you to get under the president's skin again.

We popped to the fourth biggest news podcast in the world last week solely because you didn't text me about that.

I don't know.

solely because the president is pissed off at you and name-checked you so i need you to continue to get under his skin because daddy wants to come back to a biza he wants to come back to a bit the people are so young it'll be my great pleasure so hot here and it is so expensive it all reverse engineers to the president getting angry at you can you do that for me i will do my best i i i'll say it again i can't say it enough i am so proud of you i think that is so impressive you literally want to tell your grandkids, you want to be like, yeah, remember that fascist back at the beginning of the 21st century that we literally vomited out?

Yeah, he went after me publicly.

I think that is going to be, I think you're going to have that on your tombstone as a point of pride.

It's a long truth social for a tombstone.

All right, Jess, that's all for this episode.

Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Our producers are David Toledo.

and Eric Jennikus.

Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

Going forward, you'll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday.

That's right.

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Subscribe to Raging Moderates on its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political minds.

This week, Jess is speaking with Congressman Seth Moulton.

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Jess, have a great rest of the week.

It's so good to see you.

Great to see you.