Trump Blinks on China

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

Jessica is jet-setting across Europe this week, which I think is awfully nervy given she's a new employee.

Our vacation policy is you don't take vacation the first couple of years here at a Galloway-sponsored corporation.

But anyways, she has decided to head to Europe where I think she's in Italy or something like that.

But our loss is our gain.

On with us is literally our favorite side piece, the Bulwarks own Tim Miller.

Tim is literally our favorite three and threesome.

We have become the same person or the same podcast, Tim.

If I'm on something, you're on it before.

You're on with Jess a lot.

Anyways, it's great to have you, Tim.

How are you?

I love being a third, you know, so I really appreciate it.

You know, it spices things up.

And we are.

We are becoming the same person.

I had your sidekick Ed

on my Gen Z podcast like last week.

I love Ed.

I'm thinking about kicking my co-host Cameron Kasky off and replacing him with Ed.

So if you have any, if you have any problems with him, if he's taking too much vacation,

I might poach him.

I watched that.

How old is your young guy?

I love how we both.

He's 24.

He's 24.

Wow.

Yeah, Ed is 26.

Yeah, but you're a kid, too.

I think it's more adorable because I have the grandfather thing.

You're just like the big brother.

Yeah, little big brother vibe.

Got to keep making them behave.

There you go.

Are you in Nolans today?

Where are you?

I'm in New Orleans, yeah.

I was in New York over the weekend, back in New Orleans.

I'm here for a couple weeks.

And then we got a live show in Chicago and Nashville.

If any Raging Moderates listeners want to come, May 27th and 28th.

Look at me.

I'm just plugging, baby.

Tell me a little bit about the live shows.

How many people do you get?

What's the business model?

Do you enjoy it?

I just lied.

It's May 28th and 29th, 28th in Chicago, 29th in Nashville.

I love them.

We love them.

We are getting, I think, almost a thousand people in Chicago and like a close to like 400 in Nashville, kind of a small, you know, big market, small market thing.

And we haven't quite figured out on the business Scott brain, we haven't like really quite figured out how to monetize them in a way that is that useful to the bottom line, but I think it's still useful because it's cool for the community.

People love it.

Especially in kind of our world, you will love like, when I see people on the street, I'm sure you get this too, it's just like, I just like listening to you because I feel like I'm going insane and it makes me feel sane to listen.

And so then it makes you feel even more sane when you're around other sane people that you can kind of vent to about the craziness of the world.

And so I think it's good for the community side of things.

I like being out with the people.

I feel a little bit disconnected sometimes when I'm up here in my hole in New Orleans.

So I can't leave my little studio hole.

And so it's nice to have human contact.

One of my colleague Jonathan last doesn't like human contact, so it's not a plus for him, but it is a plus for me.

It's a lot kind of invigorating.

So I dig it.

I mean, I think that, you know, we only do maybe six a year, seven a year, so

it would become a burden if we were doing a real tour, like a rock and roll tour.

Yeah, I've always said that it's really a shame that these LLMs and AI is crawling the digital world and not crawling the real world, because I find online people not so nice, but people out in the wild couldn't be more lovely.

Totally.

Well, it's a lot because people are cowards.

And so there are some people that you see in the in public that are lovely, that are nuts online, you know?

So some of it is that.

And others of it is just like online draws in, like the people who want to be engaged for the most part, present company excluded, are like, I think it draws people in with mental illness.

I don't know.

I just like,

for example, I just think back to.

you know, something like after the Biden debate when I was super critical of him because it was just obvious.

The commenters on my social media and on the bulk were really mad at me, like the lefty commenters.

They were like, no, don't you understand the assignment?

I got a lot of that too.

Yeah.

But then out in the real world or on my email or text message in private communications, everybody was like, thank God you're saying this.

I mean, this is crazy.

Like, that was insane.

I couldn't even watch it.

It was so painful to watch.

Right.

And that's just one example.

There are a million examples of this.

So I do think that social media kind of draws in the most mentally ill people to be the most active.

Maybe, I don't know.

I maybe need to reflect on that myself, possibly.

But also, I think that just being alone makes you more mentally ill and makes you more isolated and makes you less empathetic and more angry.

And I think those are the people who have a disproportionate share or voice online because, quite frankly, they're home and they've got not a lot else to do.

I think a lot of what ails us is the social isolation and the fact that we don't recognize more mammals.

And, you know, you put an orc on a tank alone.

It literally goes crazy.

And, you know, a cave buffalo gets excommunicated from the herd.

It usually goes goes crazy or gets eaten and dies.

Totally agree with that.

I could not be more human contact, just pro-human contact.

It's just another thing that, you know, we are aligned on.

Good.

So, in today's episode, we're going to be discussing the Qataris may gift Trump a luxury jet.

Tell me, that thing probably doesn't look like an Iraqi whorehouse inside.

What do you think the decor looks like inside?

Yeah, I mean, it probably looks like the Uday and Kusse suite in the palace for sure.

And look, there's so much horrifying about the story, but the funny part of it is I guess it was parked at the West Palm Beach FBO in February, and Trump was like, I want to go check that out.

He's like immediately drawn to the opulence of the Qatari

whorehouse in the sky.

And that, I guess, is what started us down this path to this bribe coming through.

And, you know, that is just very trumpy, you know, a very trumpy origin story.

But it's really, I mean, obviously it's just bad on the corruption front.

Like the idea that our country should be taking a $400 million bribe for another country that we have a complicated geopolitical relationship with is insane.

Simultaneously to that, if the corruption of the government part isn't bad enough, Eric Trump signed a deal for like a golf course in Qatar for, I think, $5 billion.

So there's private corruption on top of the public corruption that is happening with Qatar.

And it's particularly jarring.

I think it'll be interesting to see what the kind of pro-Israel right folks say about this.

Qatar is funding Hamas and was funding the campus protests.

So in addition to just the corruption part, there's a hypocrisy of we are currently taking away the green cards and jailing people who participated in the campus protests

at the same time as we're taking an Air Force One bribe from the country that was funding the same protests.

And the whole thing is just preposterous.

I have a chat group or a text group with some of my friends from the fraternity at UCLA, and the majority of them are Jewish.

And a lot of them voted for Trump.

I think most of them voted for Trump because, quite frankly, he's seen as viewed as more resolute on Israel.

And I said, be clear.

You know, this guy likes Jews the way that hardcore evangelicals like Jews.

If you kind of go one layer deeper, their plan for us is not all that great.

You know, it's all about the rapture.

And when Jesus comes back, then they decide to kill most of us.

And the fact that essentially we have the Qataris giving the president a $400 million plane and sort of turning this into kind of, you know, the ultimate frequent flyer program.

I mean, first off, it's embarrassing that America needs to take a plane manufactured in the U.S.

from the Qatari government, that that's where we are.

But also, the notion that you have the primary sponsor of Hamas and the political mouthpiece, and you have a country that has given about $4.

I think $8 billion

of the $14 billion we have received from foreign governments to sponsor quote-unquote Middle Eastern studies departments.

I mean, just this, Jews have to get past the fact that this notion that the president is going after universities because of anti-Semitism is just fucking ridiculous.

It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

It's him attacking progressive institutions and trying to implement thought leadership.

That if he really cared about anti-Semitism, he wouldn't be taking $400 million bribes from the primary sponsor of a group that murdered 1,200 Jews.

And I'm like, you guys don't see this?

You don't see the inconsistency here in that this isn't about, I mean, we have totally become at this point pay-for-play.

The question I would put forward to you.

Do they see it?

Has the text chain fired up since last night?

What they see is they see that it's problematic.

What they see more,

Tim is one of the guys in our group.

He's this wonderful high-integrity guy, has this great small business that does specialty products.

You know, those products, you go to a conference and you see those banners and the mugs and the water bottle with logos.

He has that kind of business and he does, it's a great business, 50 million bucks, good living for 200 or 300 people.

He's put kids through college on it.

It's a family business.

And his business is basically shut down overnight.

Because of the ridiculous, sclerotic, reckless approach to negotiating where we're negotiating against ourselves and both sides are losing around China.

And my friends are very, I don't want to say economically focused.

Is that fair?

I'd say they're more focused on America as a platform for prosperity.

I think they're like most voters.

They think about who's going to put more money in my pocket.

They think that essentially Washington is feckless and useless around social issues, and they're focused on who they think is better for the economy.

And to have kind of one of us, have

one of our close friends' business basically just like turned off like it was a tap and threaten

a multi-generational business.

I think that hits hard.

I think that hits them at home.

The question I would have for you is:

I'm kind of, I want to move beyond the part of the program where we're like screaming into TikTok about the corruption here and the obvious fraud or whatever you want to call it.

I have like seven more minutes of TikTok bits, though, but it's fine.

We can move on quicker than you wanted.

It's your show.

I guess I want to move to the part of the program where, how do the Democrats become the party not fucking around?

And this is my idea, and I'm curious what you think.

That we should draft legislation, the Foreign Enemies Act, Part 2, 2.0, that says if you're operating black sites in your country, El Salvador, if you're trying to bribe our public officials, Qatar,

even if the president at that moment agrees with it, it doesn't mean you're not guilty of a crime or a violation of Emoluments Act or whatever.

And in three years and nine months, we are going to implement significant economic sanctions and rethink our geopolitical relationship with you.

And also be clear, in America, the White House and the branches of government or Congress tends to turn over.

I don't think there's any shaming the Trump administration and his acolytes.

So I'm about how do we start sending a chill down the backbone of some of these foreign governments and also some of the lower level people of these organizations that say, if you're illegally incarcerating people,

Whether the president or whether the current head of ICE says that is okay,

it doesn't mean you're not committing a crime.

I'm trying to figure out how we, quite frankly, move from the strongly worded letter to being a little bit more aggressive.

Any ideas or thoughts?

Yeah, I do.

I have a couple of thoughts on that.

I was literally just talking with Bill Crystal about just on the Qatari Plain thing.

Again, this is more of a strongly worded letter side of things, and I have additional thoughts on top of it.

But I do think just at minimum, somebody in the House among the Democrats should try to force through a privilege resolution creating a vote on the new Air Force One.

Like make the Republicans actually vote to codify this.

Like you have a majority, right?

Just say, look, if you guys want to take a $400 million bribe from the funder of Hamas, then put your money where your mouth is and then vote for it.

Because, you know, we're already seeing everybody from Ari Fleischer, who is Bush's spokesperson, who's been pro-Trump, to Laura Loomer, the insane MAGA conspiracy theorist, to the free press, which has been kind of like anti-anti-Trump, to Barry Weiss' outfit.

All of them are out this morning criticizing the Qatar Plane thing today.

So I would at least force these Republicans to actually have to codify it.

That's one.

The thing I liked about your El Salvador idea, legal is not my background, so I don't have a lot of deep thoughts on how you can scare people into feeling like they might go to jail, though I like where your head's at on that.

Economically, though, I mean, I think it would make sense for

democratic leaders, either in or out of government right now, to be talking with the EU and Carney and the guy just got re-elected in Australia about

isolating El Salvador and saying that when we come back in charge, we'll isolate El Salvador too.

Like we will turn you into Nicaragua or Venezuela if you want to.

Like, if you want to be completely isolated from the world community, I know you're very happy about this deal you've done with Donald Trump and his crime family, but they're not going to be around forever.

And if you want the El Salvador economy to look like the North Korea, Nicaragua, or Venezuela economy, then keep going down this path of having, you know, of violating the Human Rights Council and what they've already signed and agreed to.

Like they, you know, you cannot be part of the, you know, liberal, small L liberal world of nations if you are going to to put somebody in a hole in a torture camp and not give them access to a lawyer.

Like, that's just, that's a no-go.

And we'll stop doing trade with you and we'll stop doing tourism with you.

And it would be hard to actually impact the El Salvador economy in a big way without the U.S.

being involved, but you could start to lay the groundwork down for it in a way that might make Bukele start to think twice.

I think we've got to say to these folks, look, the president does not provide blanket immunity from economic sanctions or even criminality.

Just to say, look, you're right.

You're good for three years, eight months, and two weeks.

But after that, be clear, if the Democrats get control back, which there's always a good chance at some point they will, it's going to be really ugly for you.

Because I think we've got to go after the infrastructure and the enablers and the co-conspirators at this point, as opposed to because

it's just pretty clear we're not going to shame him or our current branches of government who have been weaponized and politicized.

That's just not an effective strategy.

So let's move on to the tariffs here.

All right.

So back in Washington, Fed Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Chairman Powell, warned that Trump's escalating trade war could drive the U.S.

towards stagflation.

It's probably a word you don't know because you're too young.

We haven't had it since the 70s.

I read about it in the history of the world.

You've read about it.

Well, I mean, as a Reagan fan, you know,

in high school Republicans, people talked about, you know, how

he ran against stagflation.

So I'm familiar with it in that context.

So it's this toxic mix of rising prices and rising unemployment where basically interest rates go up and the economy slows down.

And it's sort of stackflation is sort of a

step or a bridge to a depression.

But on Thursday, Trump announced a new trade framework with the U.K.

that lowers tariffs, but only on luxury cars, including Rolls-Royce and Bentley.

Well, thank God.

And plane engines, I think, got thrown in there, too.

I think Rolls-Royce has given us some plane engines, too.

Toys, including Barbie and Hot Wheels, will face 100% tariff.

Then over the weekend, there was a surprise detour.

The U.S.

and China agreed to a 90-day truce, temporarily rolling back some of the steep tariffs that had been hammering both economies.

By May 14th, the U.S.

will slash its tariff on Chinese goods from 145 to 30%, while China will lower its own tariffs on American products from 125% to just 10%.

The move helped calm global markets, but it's anyone guess if the pause will hold.

They now have 90 days to make a deal.

What do you think will come out of this?

What's your impression of what's happened as of this morning, Tim?

Well, for starters like obviously Trump linked and had very serious concerns about the economy.

I mean, if you just look at the broad contours of this, so 30% tariff now in China is 20 percentage points higher than it was under Biden, right?

Right.

So it's a, so it was at 10 and now it's up to 30.

And so we've added a 20% tax on consumers who consume Chinese goods in exchange for nothing.

I mean, the Chinese didn't even, there were some, I guess, promises around fentanyl or something.

You know, in the past, you know, like in the first Trump term, when they did the tariffs of China, there was also a deal where they were buying our soybeans and, you know, like there are other economic, and maybe that'll come over the next 90 days.

I don't know.

But as of right now, you know, we still put a 20% essentially sales tax increase on Americans

for nothing.

Just so that Donnie could like feel tough for a little bit.

So how does it go from here?

I don't, I mean, I think that I'd be interested in your take on,

like, I noticed the markets are up quite a bit today.

I just generally think, and it's maybe my pessimistic nature, that like the markets and business leaders have been like a little bit too sanguine about like kind of where we're heading.

I think that this is going to be like relatively ugly.

This move away from a total trade embargo on China has like walked us away from the brink of like a worst case scenario economically, at least temporarily.

But even still, and if you would have went to any of these people in October and said, hey, I'm from May 2025, and here's what the economic outlook is going to look like then.

We're going to have a 10% across-the-board tariff on everybody, 30% on China increased.

The tax bill that you guys were counting on is going to be floundering in Congress, and we'll see what happens with that.

But we haven't really made any meaningful progress of it yet on May.

And, you know, GDP growth will be down to zero.

I feel like everybody would think that was like, I feel like business people outside of politics would say that that's like almost a worst case imaginable scenario.

And that's where we are now, but people are kind of spinning it as a positive because it ends up being better than what the worst case scenario was that we were staring down the pike of had they kept the 145% in.

So I don't know.

What do you make of that?

Well, he's definitely so he's pulled the knife out of the back sort of halfway.

That's the good news.

The bad news is the injury is going to take, I think, decades to heal because even worse than the tariffs themselves, which obviously increase consumer prices and slow the economy.

I think the most lasting

damage here is that we have now become the land or the economy of toxic uncertainty.

And that is people don't even know how to plan their businesses.

And

the U.S.

S ⁇ P trades at a price earnings multiple of around 26, meaning for every dollar of profits that our great American companies generate, the world rewards us with $26 in value, which flows right into not only the pockets of shareholders, but employees.

It lowers interest rates.

We can borrow money at a much lower rate.

The U.S.

dollar is kind of the reserve currency because everybody wants to buy American stocks, so there's greater demand for dollars.

And the U.S.

being the reserve currency globally literally lowers on average the interest rate that you pay across your student loans, your mortgages, and your carb loans somewhere between half and 1%.

So that's just literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cost savings that the Americans enjoy because of the fact that our markets trade at a higher multiple on earnings.

Now, why do they trade at a higher multiple?

A lot of reasons.

We're more risk aggressive.

Our technology is better.

We have more

zeitgeists for a culture of entrepreneurship.

We have great universities, great intellectual property.

But we also have rule of law and consistency.

We're seen as good trading partners.

We're seen as people we can count on.

We're seen as a place where there isn't going to be a ton of corruption where you come and say, open a bunch of restaurants.

And then the government shows up one day and says, sorry, we now own them.

And that happens in other countries around the world.

Rule of law and consistency have been thrown out the window in just 110 days.

And you're starting to see a reduction in the the price earnings multiple.

And I believe over the next several years, we're going to see a re-rating down of our price earnings multiple, which effectively increases the costs on all American businesses and consumers.

Because,

and the market has sort of said this to a certain extent, the market has said, we don't really know what this guy's going to do and we don't trust him.

145% tariff.

I mean, this is what a bad negotiator is.

The first thing we need to do is dispel the myth that this guy is a good business person.

He would be wealthier if he'd taken his massive inheritance and invested it in index funds.

His business career includes a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid subcontractors.

To be fair, he's an outstanding reality talk show host, made several hundred million dollars hosting and envisioning a reality talk show.

As a business person, he's not very good.

And in terms of negotiating, he's negotiating him itself at this point.

He put on 145% tariff, and then a few days later, without any counter from the Chinese other than this is unacceptable and we're not even going to talk, he said they're unsustainable.

It's like, well, boss, you're the one that did it.

So to go to 145 and then to go down to 30, and effectively what you have is the Chinese are divesting away.

This will keep the factories sort of humming in China.

This will basically loosen up or cancel the trade embargo for the time being.

But also in negotiation, you have to understand your leverage and the amount of leverage you have.

And what is typical of America and Donald Trump is that we're under the impression we're much more powerful than we are.

People think of us as, you know, we're the only customer at the taco stand here, and that without us, they go out of business.

We're the third largest trading partner.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the EU are bigger trading partners with China.

China has been divesting away from us.

This is kind of, I think this is good for them.

They get to continue to sell not as many products, but still not the shock that this trade embargo is going to implement on them.

At the same time, they will slowly but surely continue to divest away from us.

And that is what the whole world is doing, Tim.

The whole world is rerouting their supply chain around the United States, not even because of tariffs, but because they don't know how to plan their business with us, because of this toxic uncertainty.

And I think these

that resupplying or that rerooting of the supply chain will take years, if not decades, to reheal.

And I do think the Americans have taken for granted, the American public, of just how inexpensive our goods are because of the supply chain that runs through the U.S.

of every major economy because they trust us and think there's rule of law and those things are no longer a given with us.

The scariest stat I've seen is that I think it was Pew or the Hoover, some polling organization did a poll of global citizens took a statistically significant sampling.

And for the first time in the history, more people around the world think that China is a greater force for good in the world than the U.S.,

which says to me people are much more inclined to do business with China than they are with the U.S.

And as someone who has run businesses, I've run businesses my whole life.

They've always been global businesses because they've been strategy and brand firms.

When I walk in to meet with LVMH or Samsung

or, you know, I don't know, Tata Motors, we're taken seriously.

And also, when they do business with us, they want to do business with us.

If I'd started a brand strategy firm in Pakistan, or even in Thailand, they're just less inclined to do business with you because they don't know you.

They don't trust you as much.

They don't think you're as innovative.

They probably don't think your employees are as good.

They're not as confident you're going to uphold your side of a legal contract.

The legal contracts aren't as easily agreed to because they're not as consistent with a kind of American or Western law.

All of that we have had massive benefit from.

And I don't think American consumers realize.

how much they benefited from that.

And they're going to realize it when everything just gets a little bit more difficult.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, no, I agree with most of that.

I'll just defer to your expertise on the economy side of things.

So I concur with it.

I just like putting on my former Republican hat, just on like the China hawk side of it.

I remember

we used to have kind of a Republican Party that was strong against communism and that felt like

wanted to use more of a Reaganite policy

in great power struggles.

We've seen these guys basically fold in the face of China.

And I just think broadly, more geopolitically, think about the advantages China China has gained over the past five months.

I mean, in addition to all the stuff you just laid out, the fact that we've totally gutted USAID and we've eliminated any soft power we have throughout the world and created a huge opportunity for China to fill that void.

To your point, on the economic trading partner side of things,

I think that if you are one of those Asian countries like Thailand that you just mentioned,

I mean, don't you feel like you can trust China a little bit more as a trading partner than you could have five months ago?

For sure.

Then you look at the policy side of things, look at talk about leverage and weakness.

I mean, we completely fold on the Liberation Day tariffs.

Meanwhile, we also completely fold when it comes to TikTok.

And like the U.S.

government puts into law a TikTok ban, but Donald Trump and this administration won't enforce it because they're afraid of the backlash from the American population.

So like China's been so successful in

infiltrating American culture through TikTok that, and the power of that is so great that, like, the U.S.

government is scared, let's just be honest, scared to like enforce its own laws when it comes to banning TikTok.

You know, China state TV this morning, I saw this.

Um, they put this out: the outcome of trade talks with Trump team shows China's firm countermeasures and resolute stance have been highly effective.

China gets nearly all tariffs off for doing very little other than agreeing to talk.

That's their spin this morning.

So, I just think across every metric, we have made China stronger over the past five months in ways that, as you say, are going to be hard to unravel.

And there isn't really any evidence that

we are trying to win a great power struggle with them.

And I guess I would add just the last thing I'd say on it is if you're China,

it's hard for me to get inside the head of Xi Jinping, and I don't know what their plans are with regards to Taiwan or their timing, but I just do not think they could look at America right now and think that we would put up any real resistance to their efforts to overtake Taiwan if they wanted to do it based on how we've acted with regards to Ukraine, how we've acted with regards to this trade war.

So I just think that we've weakened ourselves pretty noticeably across a variety of different metrics vis-a-vis China.

Yeah, I think the short-term winner is Europe because China wants to keep these factories humming so they'll have a lot of excess supply that they'll be willing to sell at a discounted rate.

And I think the EU is kind of about to get a massive amount kind of forced sale on a ton of products.

The medium and the long-term one, I actually think I agree with you, is China.

I know firsthand that their commerce executives and business people are roaming around Europe and Latin America saying, hey, you may not like us, but you can trust us.

We do what we say we're going to do.

And I was actually at dinner with the CEO, one of the largest companies in China.

And he said, yeah, for the first time, we're talking to European companies about providing cloud services.

And the general reaction was, oh, is we don't trust China to store our data in the Chinese cloud.

And now the question is, okay, we don't trust you, but we don't necessarily trust American companies now either.

Look at the Elon Musk Starlink.

They're like, you know, are we going to trust Elon Musk with the internet access?

Obviously, I think that there are going to be some countries, there are countries that are going to look at that both ways now.

Some will want to do that deal because they feel like it might be a way to get good favor of the Trump administration, but I think others are going to...

feel about that the way they might have felt about China a couple of years ago.

We also have to do a better job as Democrats.

I think of who has been good at pushing back on autocrats?

And I learned this, I did an interview with Ann Applebaum.

And she said, if you take Alexander Navalny as an example of someone who was able to push back on an emerging kleptocracy or an autocrat, it was because he was able to connect it to people's lives that he had this sort of motto when he was running against Putin that, okay, they're getting rich and there's still potholes in Moscow.

And Elizabeth Warren or Senator Warren kind of summarized it nicely by saying, they're getting rich and you're getting your health care taken away.

And I don't think we've done a really good job of explaining to the American people that a kleptocracy creates a small number of very rich people, whether it's the people who are tipped off to the launch of the Trump coin the Friday night before inauguration, small number of wallets, like 30 wallets, made $800 million,

things spikes, they dump the bag, and then over the course of the next several weeks, 800,000 smaller investors lost billions.

And we haven't done a good enough job connecting that, okay, when Elon Musk, as part of our negotiation with UK around tariffs, gets a Starlink deal, that means every other American tech company, every other small business, and by the way, 98% of the companies that make their living from import and export in the United States are small and medium-sized businesses who create two-thirds of the jobs in America, but don't have lobbyists, and they don't have enough money to get on Trump's lunch calendar or be part of Eric's executive, like, you know, $500,000 a year kind of fraternity, if you will.

Those are the people that get hurt the most.

And I don't think we as Democrats have done a good enough job connecting the dots there or that say, look, kleptocracy is a small tax and then a medium tax on everyone, such that we can funnel a massive amount of money to a small number of people.

All right, let's move on here.

We'll take one quick break.

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On the immigration front, a federal judge has blocked what may be one of the Trump administration's most extreme efforts yet, the planned deportation of detainees to Libya.

ISIS detained Asian nationals in Texas and allegedly pressured them to voluntarily agree to be transferred to prisons controlled by armed militia in eastern Libya, despite widespread reports of torture and human rights abuses in those facilities.

At the same time, Trump is touting a 95% drop in illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border compared to last year.

Tim, is this a fear tactic designed to intimidate future migrants into staying away or self-deporting?

What do you think is going on here?

There definitely is a desire to try to intimidate people into self-deporting, and they're actively doing this.

They're running ads calling on people to self-deport right now throughout the country.

So there is that.

I think there is a little bit of a sadism to the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump administration.

I think some of them like the idea of

doing these kind of outlandish types of deportation plans because A, it's intimidating.

B, I think they get some kind of pleasure out of it, maybe erotic pleasure.

I don't know.

But, you know, it's not, it's hard to keep track of all this stuff.

But the Libya thing is

the latest.

There's another story, I guess, a week or two ago of a guy, Omar Amin, who got deported to Rwanda.

He was from Iraq and had been pretty thinly, and I think quite clearly falsely accused of being part of ISIS when he was in Iraq.

He'd then come to America, brought his whole family here, went through the refugee vetting process, was living in Sacramento, was working, did not have any crimes in America.

But, you know, he was accused, you know, there was, there was some cable where he was on a list of people that were ISIS members.

You know, he, him and his lawyer says that's false.

Anyway, he gets jailed during the first Trump administration, has been jailed since then, and we just sent him to Rwanda, you know, where he's not from.

And, you know, we have the, there was another situation I was just reading this morning in New York with these two guys who are 19 and 20, graduated high school, were from El Salvador.

You know, their parents brought them here when they were kids.

They hadn't broken any laws, were good students, spoke English, and they went to their immigration checkup.

They ended up getting shackled, sent to Louisiana, and now are about to be sent back to El Salvador where they, you know, they don't remember or know anybody in El Salvador.

So like all of this, you know, is part of the broader effort to, yes, intimidate and to send a signal to the world that people aren't welcome here anymore.

And that's what they want, right?

I mean, like, the only people that they're going to welcome into this country are white Afrikaners from South Africa.

I mean, I don't think you've got to, you know, read between the lines too much on that.

And it's outrageous.

And I think that, you know, part of this stuff, to your point, the last thing about Democrats, I think that the more Democrats can just speak, whether it's about the economy or whether it's about this stuff, in normal language and focus on things that people understand, people really don't want kids that were brought here where they were four to be sent back to El Salvador.

Like, that is not a popular policy.

They don't want people to be grabbed off the street by masked agents and sent to a prison camp in El Salvador or a prison camp in Libya.

Like, those are not popular things.

And I think that you can talk about those things in regular language that speak to American values while also, you know, not going down crazy, lefty, open borders like territory.

And I think that it's important to be able to do both.

Yeah, I feel I'm of two minds on this.

The first is this is still his most popular policy.

And

there's just no getting around it.

I feel a lot of this was the Democrats sticking their chin out.

and just waiting to get tagged hard.

A quarter of a million people crossed the border in December of 23.

We were just sort of asking for it.

And then they see, okay, them getting Trump, you know, or Biden-Harris hats and free phone cards and hotel rooms and Americans saying, okay, there's something wrong here.

But I've never understood about this whole argument or where I feel Americans fail to see what's going on is that

immigration is obviously the secret sauce of America, but I've always thought I'm kind of where Friedman was on this, and that is the most profitable part of immigration is illegal immigration.

Because they're essentially the most flexible, inexpensive workforce in history.

When there's crops to be picked or old people to be taken care of or dishes to be washed, and we can't afford or fine domestic workers, the reason why it's fairly inexpensive to eat out is because of illegal immigration.

And in some cities, somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of fast food workers are undocumented workers.

And in addition, they generate a surplus of $100 billion in the Social Security program because most of them are younger and they don't stick around for Social Security.

They pay their taxes and then they go back.

A mass deportation effort, some estimates, put at 4% to 7% loss, a reduction in GDP.

And also there,

90% of undocumented, of the undocumented population is working age.

About a third of agricultural workers, a quarter of ground maintenance workers, and about a quarter of all food service workers are undocumented.

So, I mean, you're just, your prices are going to go up, folks.

And there's this trope, and there are some very bad people.

I do not believe in open borders.

I believe you have to have a country.

But the question I would have for you, because I don't feel as if I am very knowledgeable or have a deep domain expertise around immigration, is that we want to demonize immigrants.

But wouldn't the fastest way to solve this problem to be to go to the demand side?

And that is say to Chipotle

or lawn care companies, we're doing random audits.

And based on the percentage of people who are clearly undocumented, we're going to find you $10,000 a day.

Because they don't come here to rape.

These immigrants don't come here to commit crimes or to start gang warfare.

They come here for jobs.

And if you went on the demand side and basically hit those nice, nice American people with real fines such that they started implementing, and they could do this with biometrics or just simple documentation, verification.

If there's no jobs, if it's like, okay, I'm sorry, I can't hire you, they melt back to where they came from.

But we don't want to do that, do we?

No.

Yeah, two thoughts on this.

One is, and I think that it reveals a lot about why they're targeting who they're targeting and what the motivations are.

They don't, this administration doesn't want to go after business owners directly, right?

And if they get hurt by the tariffs, because Trump's obsessed with tariffs, that's one thing, but they're not trying to make enemies of people that they think voted for them or possibly voted for them, small business owners.

Plus, on top of that, Donald Trump is an employer of illegal immigrants who worked at

his hotels and golf courses, which he knows.

So they don't have any interest in doing that.

You're exactly right.

They could do it.

There's e-verification.

I mean, this has been something that border hawks, immigration hawks have been proposing ever since I've been in politics.

In fact, many of the candidates I worked for like supported that as

something that's on your policy agenda in the campaign, but then you don't actually put into place in government, e-verify, because you don't want to actually punish the small business owners that are likely Republican voters.

So what they're doing now is they feel like low risk, right?

Like who is sure?

There are probably some working class Hispanic voters that moved over to Trump that are starting to have a...

maybe a change of heart because they had a cousin or a friend or something who they who is not a criminal who's been deported or they they know somebody who has.

So there's going to be a little bit of a risk there.

But broadly speaking, if you take an 18 and 19 year old El Salvador

kid that was brought here, that can't vote, brought here illegally by their parents, and you send them back to El Salvador, you're not paying a political price for that in any meaningful way.

And it is immoral.

It's an affront to what the country is supposed to be about, and it's a front to the very American ethos.

of people wanting to come here and have an opportunity, but you're not paying a political price there.

So

I just think that they're doing it.

There's obviously some racial elements to it, as referenced earlier with the white African hunters, but it's also just they feel like it's much more politically palatable to go after 18 and 19-year-old kids that would have been, you know, dreamers or whatever, than it is to go after American business owners.

And just one really quick thing on the economy.

I agree.

This all takes time.

This is going to happen now.

But just adding on to what we talked about earlier with tariffs, okay, you add on to that.

We're deporting a bunch of people that are working, doing cheap work.

We're not bringing in nearly as many people as we were.

So the shutting down of the border is good in that it's shutting down some of the fentanyl traffic and some of the gang labor, but it's also shutting down people that were coming here to work.

And then on top of that, we're firing a lot of people in the federal workforce or putting them on the sidelines.

They're probably going to end up getting paid anyway.

So we're going to be paying them to do nothing.

Well, while that goes through the courts, and it's harder for recent college grads to get jobs, you know, in a lot of these areas because people don't know what's going to be happening with the government.

I just think that there are a lot of economic factors there that are pointing to a pretty bad situation once it all starts to hum through the economy.

Curious, let me put forward a thesis, and I want to get your response to it.

So, I have a 17-year-old son, and there's been reports in verification of actual people who aren't criminals, people who are brought here, grew up here, being deported, some ending up in these hellscapes, prisons, and also reports of U.S.

citizens.

And my view is, unfortunately, that a lot of Democrats who are very wealthy clutch their pearls and say at dinner parties how outraged they are, but they don't really do a fucking thing about it because there's this emerging what I'll call transnational oligarchy, Togarks.

And that's if you're in the 1%,

A, you have a disproportionate amount of power.

And without you, it's very hard to get anything done without your support.

And so it's easy to complain about it at dinner parties.

But the reality is in America that your rights have become a function of your wealth.

My kid is not going to be sequestered by ICE and sent to El Salvador.

There's just zero chance that could happen.

I will not be silenced because I have the money to lawyer up.

Anyone in my life that becomes pregnant, I don't care if I'm in deepest, reddest Mississippi, I can get access to family planning because I have money.

And if shit really gets real and on the unlikely chance we start rounding up Jews and I get on the wrong list, well before before that, I have the money to peace out to Milan or Dubai.

And what that creates is this lack of incentive or this divesting of the most powerful's interests in

America.

And that is, whereas before, I think the really wealthy thought, I'm going to stay here.

If this could happen to them, it could happen to us.

But now there's a feeling amongst me, well, I always turn this back to me, but among the really wealthy, they were insulated from some of this, that it really doesn't impact us.

So we have our own schools.

We have our own security.

We have our own health care.

We have our own legal rights.

We're protected by the law, but we're not bound by it.

And it creates this really unhealthy ecosystem where the most powerful in our nation, even who claim to have progressive values, really don't feel that same sense of vested interest.

in the maintenance and fidelity to American values.

Because at the end of the day, we're kind of global citizens and our governance is the dollar.

We're basically how much money we have.

And we can find those rights somewhere else, even if they're violated here.

Your thoughts?

I think that there's some of that.

You know, I mean, look, you're always going to paint with a broad brush in these sort of situations.

Like there are certainly rich liberals that are out there doing what they can and others that feel like how you did.

And there's, I hear from Bulwark listeners, like upper middle class people that'll come up to me and say that they're thinking of leaving.

Like you're going, I had a woman just over the weekend that was like, I'm thinking about moving to Australia.

My husband is a citizen or something.

And I was like, don't leave.

I'm not going anywhere.

You know, you're fine here.

You actually, because of what you just laid out, Scott, like if you're a citizen of this country that has enough money for a lawyer, like you're in pretty good shape right now.

We'll see how things look when Donald Trump is deteriorating at age 81 in 2027.

Maybe my assessment will change on that.

But as of right now, you're fine and you should be staying here and should be fighting.

So I do.

I think there's a little bit of that.

I also think the Democratic Party, and this is going to go against what like my policy preferences is probably, but I just, I think that from a political standpoint, this is important.

Like the Democratic Party has not done a particularly great job of recruiting people that are from the working class, that are from the non-globalist parts of America to be spokespersons for the party.

A lot of times those people are probably going to be more, they're probably going to have different views from me on social and economic issues, right?

Like I'm kind of a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, whatever cliche.

Like the Democrats should probably be recruiting people that are more, that are more fiscally left than me and have some maybe contrarian social views because that is like the most popular

combination of political views for people, for working class people.

And I think the Democrats have done a lot of recruiting of people that like are maybe from somewhere in America and then were the valedictorian and then went to a fancy school and then worked at McKinsey and then went back to where they came from or, you know, and nothing against any of those people.

But they're going to have a set of views that are closer to what you just lined out that have more of a globalist kind of mindset.

And I do think it would help the Democrats to have people that like authentically sound like they are from the communities that are going to be hurt by this.

Yeah, they kind of represent.

Yeah, it's as if they're setting to the kind of the purity test.

And we're going off script here, but I can't help it.

It shocked me a couple of days ago, there was a new poll showing that if the election were held again today, that Harris would still lose or that Trump would win.

And my sense is

I was shocked by that, especially when you see the swing among young people.

But I mean, it is what it is.

And as unpopular as Trump is, the Democratic Party is less popular.

And I think as we sit, again, crying into TikTok, the reality is we're the

analogy I used to use was that the panzer tanks come rolling into Poland and we're fighting Democrats.

As Democrats, we're fighting them on horseback.

And then someone reminded me, actually, that was a a successful military operation.

I should stop disparaging the heroes of the Polish army in World War II.

But my point is, the only thing that feels more corrupt than the Trump administration are kind of coarse and cruel right now is just how weak the Democratic Party is.

Yeah, well, it's not more corrupt, but it's sadder.

And it has

more impact.

No, no, no.

More weak.

Yeah, more weak, for sure.

Well, isn't America basically saying they'd rather have a corrupt autocrat than a weak Democratic Party?

A lot of Americans are.

Here's the front, and this goes to your screaming the TikTok thing, which I do a lot, So I'll defend it.

I'll defend the honor of it, but I do think it has its limitations, which is this.

And this way, I bet you get pushback from sometimes from people when you say this, because there is a not nothing.

There's 40% of the country, maybe 33% of the country who are super engaged in politics, are decently well off, middle class to upper middle class, went to college, read the news.

you know, listen to podcasts or watch, you know, cable or do, or read the newspaper or read magazine, whatever, engaged, know who their representative is, and are mad about what's happening, are legitimately mad about it, and are trying to figure out what to do about it.

And the good news for Democrats is those people show up in these special elections and local elections.

That's why Democrats are trying to do better in those than in the national elections.

The problem is, there's just another huge part of the country that are less informed.

And I don't really even say that as a pejorative.

It's just like they don't engage in political news.

Maybe for some of them, it's because they're working too damn hard and don't have time.

Maybe for others, it's because they'd rather play video games for eight hours a day.

But either way, like that is happening.

And the Democrats have been like to that demographic, the Democrats feel very weak and they feel very disconnected and out of touch and not fighting for them.

And it is just an absolute necessity that Democrats figure out how to find a voice that can connect with people that don't read the New York Times.

And part of that, I think, is, as I just mentioned in the last answer, is like recruiting people, you know, not who play video games eight hours a day, but who like look and sound and feel more like folks that are not part of that class of the one-third of the country that's super engaged.

Well, let me ask you that.

Right now, if you had to say who are the leaders of the Democratic Party, you would point to minority leader Jeffries and minority or Senate minority leader Schumer.

And I'm a fan of leader Jeffries.

I don't think he is the leader we need right now.

And I think Senator Schumer is a fucking disaster.

Who do you think, in your view, who are some of those emerging boys?

Everyone keeps saying we have such a strong bench.

And then they say, they point to Wesmore, and the list runs shallow.

And then everyone was getting excited about John Fetterman, and there's all these stories coming out saying that he's struggling.

Who do you see as kind of the up-and-coming draft choices in the Democratic Party?

I am on the weak bench side of this.

Me and Carville argue about this.

Carville feels very, like the bench is really good.

I don't really think so.

But

I do like Westmore.

I think that you've seen like the AOC and Bernie are actually channeling something.

I don't, obviously, Bernie's really old.

Let me just push a pause there.

My thesis is they're great.

They're inspiring.

There's no fucking way America is going to elect either of them.

Yeah.

It was funny.

I was at a panel, and this is part of like getting again outside of these pockets of Republicans are praying that Bernie or AOC are the nominee.

I was on a panel here in Louisiana and I got the same question.

I was giving the same answer I'm giving right now.

And I mentioned AOC and a guy who's I know, who's an older guy, who's a Democrat, Louisiana Democrat, came up to me and he's just like, my party is more insane than I even thought it was if they think that AOC can win this country.

It's just like people that are outside of certain worlds just don't see things differently.

That said, they've showed leadership and I just wanted to mention it.

They're inspiring.

Yeah.

But look, here's what I think, man.

Look, if this is May, we're in, it's May 12th, 2025.

If you took us to May 12th, 2013 and said Donald Trump is going to be the Republican Party leader, everybody'd say you're insane.

If you took us to May 12th, 2005 and said that Barack Hussein Obama is going to be the Democratic Party leader.

Everybody said you'd be insane.

And I think a lot of times people have limits on their imagination.

Same with Clinton.

Nobody knew who Clinton was.

Yeah.

And I think that you look at the two names that I, two examples I just come up with are that are just totally different.

Neither of these guys are going to be the leader of the Democratic Party, but Dan Osborne ran for Senate in Nebraska, way overperformed as kind of a working class, socially conservative, fiscally liberal guy.

And like Democrats should recruit guys like that to run the midterms.

Mark Cuban is like the inverse of him, but it's like a business guy.

And you could tell me that like either of those types of people could beat the Democratic nominee in three years, and I would believe you.

And so I don't know.

I like Westmore fine.

I like Josh Shapiro fine.

I mean, there are other, Pete, I hate, you know, I think that I don't, can Pete like as a seven language speaking

grad student grad who worked at McKinsey really like reach the working class people I've been talking about?

I don't know, but he did pretty damn well on that bro podcast, that Andrew Schultz podcast the other day.

So maybe he can do better than I think.

So there's, there are people out there, but it's going to take, you know, real work.

Scott Galloway, if he didn't live in London, might be an example.

Yeah,

that shows just how desperate we are.

Well, let me ask you this, just so we can fill the comment section up with people calling me names.

I think America is ready for a gay president.

I don't know if the Democratic Party is.

I think the way the Democratic primaries are held, that there's certain elements of the Democratic Party that would have an issue with Secretary Budish's, as evidenced by his poor performance.

You're talking about black voters?

Thank you.

This is just a truth.

I'm just going to say this.

I have plenty of friends at the Pete campaign and like Pete had some of his own issues with black voters in South Bend that may be totally unrelated to gay issues, but like they did focus groups with black voters and in all those focus groups there were some black voters that weren't cool with it.

And that's just like, that's just a fact.

That's just reality.

There are more white people that hate gays than black.

You know what I mean?

So I'm not trying to make it a racial thing.

That's just kind of a fact and that would be a challenge for him.

Is that going to be still the true in three years?

I don't know.

Is it something about Pete himself?

Again, like Carville's line is always like, the person that wins the Democratic primary is the one that can win the black church.

And it's like, I could maybe imagine a gay candidate that would be able to do better in a black church than Pete.

It's just like, is that like his natural space?

Like, probably not.

But maybe so, by the way.

I don't know.

Like, maybe he could really surprise and prove himself.

I didn't think he'd do that well on that.

podcast.

Pete has surprised at every turn.

So, you know, I don't know.

I think that broadly speaking, even outside of black voters, Democrats are like, what's the fucking old saying?

Twice bit, thrice bits, once, whatever.

Just about, I think that they'll probably want to go for a straight white guy, just or a straight black guy, just because like after Hillary and Kamala experienced, I think that a lot of Democrats are just going to be freaked out about nominating somebody.

And I don't know if that's true or right.

I think there are other issues there, but I do think that there will be some of that.

Yeah, I think the Democratic Party at this point is like, okay, we absolutely need a female president.

And we will have a female president.

She'll be a Republican who has a reputation for likely drone striking your entire family if you run a stop sign.

That's who's going to be the first female president.

Christy No, she'll have a whole new face, you know, and she'll have murdered a dog and have a pin-up photo shoot in front of, you know,

in front of El Salvador torture prisons.

Well, I hope and trust that she'll be out of government soon, but she's going to slipstream right into some sort of Cinemax prison film.

I mean, that picture of her where it looked like a Sephora had exploded on her face and she was in front of a bunch of half-naked dudes, it literally felt like those prison films I used to watch in the 90s after my parents had gone to sleep on Cinemax.

Okay, let's take a quick break.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Welcome back.

History is made last week as Cardinal Robert Previs became Pope Leo XIV, the first American to lead the Catholic Church.

Born in Chicago and shaped by decades of missionary work in Peru, Leo stepped onto the balcony of St.

Peter's Basilica Sunday to deliver his first blessing.

He called for peace in Ukraine and Gaza, urged leaders to reject war, and emphasized caring for young people and the vulnerable.

His message and background signal a potentially progressive path forward.

Tim, what does the new pope's background and his first public message tell you about the direction that he may take the church?

I've got to tell you, my mother couldn't be more thrilled.

I'm a little bit of a lapsed Catholic myself as we were just talking about the gay stuff, but there were some jokes on the internet that he was the bulwark pope.

And it was like right in my mom's lane because he was, you know, he voted in Republican primaries, I guess, in 2012, up until 2016, and then he stopped.

And then he had multiple tweets criticizing Trump and Vance.

It's pretty wild that we can go through the Pope's tweet history now.

We are in a different world.

He also is a graduate of Villanova, where my little brother went.

So, like, touching a lot of bases for my daily church-going mother.

Very thrilled.

That's huge.

Yeah, very thrilled.

Good for the Miller family.

Big weekend for the Miller family.

The broader thing, I don't know.

You know, I think that the College of Cardinals probably had a lot of things in their mind, not just the fact that this person was American or our domestic political concerns.

And frankly, he hasn't even been in America that much.

He went to, he was in Peru and then Italy for most of his service to the church.

And so I don't know.

I will say this, whether they intended this or not,

I do think it is nice to have an American on the world stage that is offering a counter view about what it means to be a person and a human than our president.

And, you know, I don't know that he's going to be like the woke pope of every lefty's dreams on a variety of issues.

You know, like the Catholic Church still has the Catholic Church's views on gender and sexuality and abortion and women priests and all that.

I think that he is someone that is just, it's very clear that he actually cares about his fellow humans.

He cares about humanity.

And that is in direct contrast to the president who only cares about himself.

And so I don't, you know, we'll see what exactly it means for the Catholic Church.

I think probably a continuation of Francis more than any big, massive changes based on my, the Catholics in good standing in my life, TBD a little bit on all that.

But just from a as a former PS2 PR marketing of PR people, like it's nice PR for America at a time where our PR is pretty shitty.

Yeah, my thesis is that this is the third world leader that got elected by Trump.

Anthony Albanese, Mark Carney were both supposed to lose, especially Carney overcame a 25-point deficit.

And I think there is such a gag reflex globally.

around Donald Trump that he is electing world leaders, just not the world leaders that he's hoping would be elected.

And I think this is another example when I think the papacy is really strategic and says, where can we have the most impact?

And part of that is which region is struggling and would benefit most and get the most attention around these very humanistic values and code of decency.

And when the Eastern Bloc was struggling, they picked someone from Poland.

And I don't think it's any accident that they picked an American pope.

that they said, if we are really troubled by what this lack of humanity, the call signer, I think the statement that literally identifies America right now is the following.

It was made by Bill Gates, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's thematically the same.

The world's richest man is killing the world's poorest people.

And that to me, like when Bill Gates said that, it was one of those moments where I thought it like just hit me so hard in the gut.

I thought, wow, that's what we've become?

Like, literally, that's us now.

And so I think they see an opportunity, not only for attention, but a chance to restore and have influence on Americans who obviously disproportionately carry weight and gravity and influence around the world.

For I think more Americans and more elected officials will pay closer attention to what this pope says and that a restoration, a rejuvenation,

an epipend, a Narcan to the American value system is really needed right now.

And this guy, in addition to understanding technology and referencing AI, he is unafraid.

He's called Putin's actions wicked.

Which is an upgrade from Francis worth mentioning.

There you go.

But I think, again, Trump has gotten another world leader elected.

And I think they see a big opportunity here to have an American Pope who will, again, get probably greater sort of bandwidth or airtime because of his origins.

And that America is really in need.

of sort of a values upgrade, if you will.

Thoughts?

Bad, but it's hard to argue.

Again, I don't claim to, you know, I could give you a lot better analysis of the Electoral College than the College of Cardinals.

And so it's hard for me to get inside there.

They do get branding, though, don't they?

White smoke?

Yeah, maybe it's more interpersonal.

I got, you know what I mean?

I just, I don't really know, but I think that the impact of what you're saying, whether or not the intention was there, is definitely correct.

I agree with the analysis and I'm sure that for certain members of the college, it was part of it.

And Francis, to my understanding, did put in a lot more people in his mold, you know, into that college.

college.

And so, I wouldn't be surprised if, at least among some of them, they thought that this was a nice contrast to the American president, particularly at a time of, you know, where America is struggling.

And I'm glad you mentioned that Bill Gates quote, because that also hit me like a ton of bricks.

It's just, it's terrible.

The USAID thing is so unimaginably terrible.

And it's like,

you know, you run out of reasons to talk about it on shows like this, right?

Because there's no like new news about it.

But it is truly abhorrent that that we took something that was a tenth of a penny in our federal budget that was giving HIV medicines to people in Africa and feeding the poor, and we've cut it because Elon Musk broke his brain by reading too many tweets.

It's a truly deplorable state of affairs.

Well, we've spent 80 years developing.

an expensive and worthwhile brand association that in the short term,

we make a lot of mistakes, but it's mostly out of stupidity or naivete.

This brand association is real, though.

So I worked for McCain, and I talked to Mark Salters, his ghostwriter and longtime speechwriter, and traveled the whole world with him.

And Salters said, like, the American brand, you would go with McCain to these random corners where people were fighting against autocrats or where there had been a big natural disaster.

And he would travel there.

And he's like, you know, people in random villages and the, you know, in small towns and remote corners of the world would be like, America, John McCain, John McCain.

like that brand was that strong and I do think that we've essentially just ruined it forever certainly tarnished it in a matter of five months we set it back decades but that association one of the core associations on a very basic level is I've always felt like we're the good guys that yeah do we make dumb mistakes are we gluttonous are we obnoxious yeah but we're the good guys our heart's in the right place and i think in just probably in three and a half months we're no longer the good guys And there's this notion that in regions where there's no investment, you get just such an enormous return on investment.

It's basic economic theory.

We were getting such enormous ROI on these small investments in terms of preventing kids from getting infected, having AIDS transmitted from their mothers to them with just some very inexpensive wiping out malaria, toilets

such that thousands, even millions of young boys and girls didn't die of dysentery.

And we've taken what is probably the greatest ROI investment because there's so little investment in these regions.

No other nation would make those investments.

And we decided those are the investments that we're going to pull back.

It really is depraved.

But circling back, I do think that the papacy recognized this and decided that they could have the most impact with a pope that more Americans would listen to.

So, Tim, I want to go off script for a minute.

I'm fascinated by Tim Miller.

I have found myself just so drawn to your

content and how you bring this strength and fearlessness and real emotion and real empathy.

What's your origin story?

I don't know that much about you.

Like where, how did you get, how did Tim Miller get to hear right now?

I appreciate that.

I find it, I don't know about you, but

this is not false modesty because I can be a narcissist like any other content creator, but I do find it weird to like process people consuming my stuff all the time, right?

Because when I try to just emote and be authentic and just say what I really think and not actually think about the audience like as much as possible.

And so I do, Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable when I start hearing about, you know, thinking about Scott Galloway consuming my rants.

But so I was a Republican operative.

I was just a PR flak, essentially, for Republicans, usually moderate Republicans, but I was also a hired gun.

So I have some shameful Republicans on my resume as well.

And, you know, I came out of the closet during that process.

And so I was probably like the most.

There have been a lot of prominent Republicans who like were either outed or became gay after, like when they retired, like Ken Melman or Larry Regg or or like, you know, whatever.

But as an active person in the party, like right around all the time of the gay marriage stuff, I was like the most visible.

And so I do think that gave me just kind of a relationship with all of it.

That was maybe a little bit different than other hired guns.

Like I dealt with like being separate from the party on something that was very core to me, you know, throughout this process.

And so when Trump came along, I don't know.

I just, part of that, I think it was made it easier for me just to say, no, fuck this.

And as part of my hired gun process, a bunch of rich guys hired me in 2016 to be the point, like the face of a basically Republicans against Trump effort, like anybody, like it's like whoever it is.

So I just went on cable and argued with Trumpers and pitched negative stories about Trump to people.

And then when Trump won, I went through a massive midlife crisis about what the hell to do with my life.

Pretty early midlife.

Yeah, early midlife crisis.

I had a very early midlife crisis and

an extended one.

And I started doing some of these podcast stuff on the the side literally and i was like in a i was lost i was like should i do corporate pr

uh i was we adopted a kid at that time i was like should i just be a nine to five you know guy and like do pr for clorox bleach or something and like have a regular job and coach the kids sports teams and forget all this Should I, whatever, do Paul, like figure out, like try to fight within the party against Trump.

And I was like totally lost.

And my colleague Sarah Longwell, who's an old friend of mine, started the bulwark.

And I started kind of doing bulwark stuff for fun.

And I don't know, man.

I just, I think that people were, there's something about the fact that I think that I was lost and did not have like a little birdie in the back of my head saying, hey, you know, think about your career and like what other job, you know, you might be White House press secretary in the future.

You might want, you know, who knows what will happen after Trump ends.

Like, I just didn't have that.

I was a little bit unfettered, I think.

And so we created at the bulwark with Sarah and JVL and others, like a community of people who really liked that.

And I think that was important to them, like the ROGs, because they were also kind of lost.

And so, I don't know, man, that's how I ended up doing this.

And I think there is something freeing about being a former Republican versus being somebody who comes up as a Democrat in their background because...

you know, I just don't, A, I have some of the like the Republican traits of aggressiveness.

I've not been beaten down by the Democratic traits of

community building.

So I think that has helped.

And also, I just don't, like, you know, I'm not plotting who might hire me for the 2028 primary in the way that maybe some Democratic commentators are.

So I don't know.

Is that good?

Was that a good backstory for me?

Curious if you, I have trouble.

I always say that from zero to 30, I didn't have enough stress.

I almost failed out of UCLA a couple of times.

Didn't bother me.

I was on the verge of being kicked out of UCLA, which would have been really bad for me.

And I didn't really care.

Almost lost a couple of businesses.

Was very reckless with my relationships.

Just didn't have as much anxiety, quite frankly, as I should.

I think from 30 to 40, I had the perfect amount of anxiety, worried enough to be successful, but not worried enough where I couldn't sleep.

And now I have too much anxiety.

I worry about everything.

And you have a kid.

Like if I'm not anxious about one of my kids during the day, something's wrong.

That makes me anxious.

I feel like I'm missing something.

And I've had trouble disassociating from what is going on.

with America and our government right now.

For the first time, politics is really sort of rattling me and taking a toll on me emotionally.

Do you struggle with the same thing?

Sometimes when I watch your content, I get the sense, I can hear it in your voice, like,

this shit really upsets you.

Like it really, it really rattles you.

One is, am I sensing that correctly?

And two, how do you attempt to disassociate and or keep things in perspective and get about your day and focus on your family and progress at the Bullware?

I'm pretty...

good at compartmentalizing, which got me into trouble in that past life that I talked about earlier.

Like, I probably shouldn't have compartmentalized with the fact that I was gay, with the fact that I was a spokesman for Republicans, but I was able to do it then.

It's serving me a little bit now because I do get, I get rattled and emotional and very mad.

And like probably three times during the day, I get very mad.

And when I get actually mad, I try to channel that into the content because I said this after the election.

I was like, I'm not going to do the fake mad thing.

Like, I'm not.

I'm not going to pretend to care about things I don't care about.

And like, sometimes there's Trump stuff that makes other people really mad that I just either don't talk about or we'll talk about a little bit just because I'm like, I just, I can't, I can't, I don't have any room in my body for the anger over this thing because in part because I'm so mad about the immigration stuff and some of the, and in particular, the immigration stuff, but also other, other things they're doing.

The trans military band is one that got me recently.

I try to just be, to have my honest emotions with people.

Outside of that, A, I'm drinking too much,

but I'm trying to go.

I live in New Orleans.

I knew we were brothers from another mother yeah i'm trying to go to and i live in new orleans so i'm going to show i'm going to see music and when i'm there i'm drinking too much bourbon but it is allowing me and i'm enjoying my time there and i'm being with rom i have a lot of buddies here who who don't stress me out about politics and and i appreciate all of them and that is good i have a couple hours a day where i take on the parenting and i just try to parent and i'm like i'm here we're gonna play we're gonna go to the basketball court we're gonna whatever do your homework we're gonna be silly.

And I try to do that and not think about it.

Every once in a while, bad thoughts come through when I'm parenting or drinking, but usually not.

Like I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing it.

A therapist might tell me that this

strategy is eventually going to fail and like those three parts of my brain are going to collide in a way that will create crippling anxiety.

But that hasn't happened so far.

Most importantly, what did you do for Mother's Day, Yeshua?

Nothing.

One of the great joys of being gay is that we don't have to do Mother's Day.

I I mean, I sent my mother a gift and we did a FaceTime with her.

She lives in Colorado and I have a great mother.

Yeah, I don't, it's nice.

I feel like we get a little bit freed from the conventions.

So, you know, some people trying to be nice and woke, like, will wish us a happy Mother's Day.

And I'm like, no, it's cool.

Like, no worries.

And by the way, I don't even have to do a Happy Father's Day.

It's fine.

Like, we have a little different family style.

We went and had crawfish at Klessy's, which if you find yourself in New Orleans during crawfish season, I got to shout out Klessy's.

It's the best spot.

I watched the Nuggets game.

It was a loss, unfortunately.

And, you know, I yelled at the YouTube camera, took the kid to the park.

It was great.

It was a wonderful day.

What about you?

I had a wonderful Mother's Day.

I did nothing.

I'm here in New York on my own, and I walked around Soho.

I went to Jack's wife Frida.

I went to San Vicente Bungalows for brunch.

It was, you know, just...

You weren't guilt troped by...

the mothers in your life over that?

My mom is gone.

The mother of my children is, I don't want to say it's Mother's Day every day, but

we're pretty much in awe of her and we plan a lot of stuff and do a lot of stuff, but we had some stuff planned for her to make sure that she felt loved.

And quite frankly, she said that she just wanted to be alone, that that was her Mother's Day gift.

She just wanted all,

she has three kids.

But look, one of the really wonderful things about getting older as a man is you develop these really nice kind of paternal instincts or fraternal instincts where you're happy for people, you're happy for younger men.

I have gotten real reward.

I don't know you that well, but I've gotten real reward from watching you in this moment.

I think you are so authentic and so courageous and have such great command of the medium.

I get reward from watching your success.

I'm really happy for you.

I think you're doing a great job and your voice is really important.

And I just, I hope that you take time with your husband and your kid to pause and recognize how successful you are and what a difference you're making.

And it's just fun to just observe it and watch it.

Really appreciate all that you do and very much appreciate you coming on the show today.

Thank you, Scott.

I genuinely appreciate that.

It means a lot.

I'm getting tingly.

I also, it sucks.

I don't know about you.

I do get uncomfortable with the compliments, especially when so much shit is happening.

And I'm like, I don't know.

I'm doing the best I can.

But

I do appreciate it very much.

It means a lot.

All right.

That's all for this episode.

Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Our producers are David Toledo and Chinanye Onike.

Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

You can now find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday and Friday.

That's right, its own feed.

That means exclusive interviews with sharp sharp political minds, including this one who joined us today that you won't hear anywhere else.

This week, we have another anti-Trump Republican.

Jess is talking with former Congressman Charlie Dent.

Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode.

And Tim, where can they find more, Tim?

I'm everywhere.

The Bulwark YouTube.

You're everywhere.

To resist is futile.

Yeah, you know, the Bulwark YouTube, Nicole Wallace's show sometimes, and MSNBC and some others.

And, you know, Twitter, Tim ODC, I'm still suffering through X.

I know, I think you left.

Instagram, everywhere.

I'm everywhere, baby.

Get off of X.

Get off X.

Trust me on this.

The most accretive thing you can do for your mental health is to get off of X.

That's good advice.

All right.

Thanks again, Tim.

Thanks, man.