The Right (And Wrong) Ways to Fight Trump

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Hey, everybody, Nate here, jumping in before the show to say that we've been having a lot of fun answering your listener questions.

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today on the show, it's going to be a Trump-heavy episode, I think, Maria.

There have been a lot of headlines lately.

Last week, week, we took a break to talk about AI,

but we're going to talk about immigration.

We're going to talk a little bit more about terrorists.

We're going to talk about

Trump versus Harvard and more generally about political strategy.

If you're a Democrat, if you're anti-Trump, if you're part of the resistance, then how should you fight back?

How should you think about Trump's strategic objectives?

And how do you know which are the right battles to pick?

Let's start with a case that has been in everyone's mind.

I'll let you start because you had an entire issue of Silver Bulletin about this.

But I go go to see a Nate.

Give us a summary.

That's Spanish.

I don't know, Maria.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm jealous, but I'm not going to try to.

I'm going to anglicize everything.

Nate, I studied abroad in Spain.

What can I say?

Okay.

One of the challenges with this case is that like there are relatively few undisputed facts, right?

But let's let's take a couple of undisputed facts, right?

Kilmar Arbito-Garcia, who is 29, is from El Salvador, entered the United States illegally, I believe, through Texas some time ago.

Father of two.

He has never been arrested or charged with the crime.

He has, however, been detained on a couple of occasions and was not convicted of those charges.

However, you know, judges at various times revealed that a preponderance of evidence was that he was a

gang member of MS-13.

His lawyer tells a different story, which is that, well, in El Salvador, you kind of get forced into picking a gang.

I think the evidence is based on some degree of hearsay and profiling.

The government is not necessarily releasing all the evidence it had, but, you know, but the judge was making, these judges were making, I suppose, a probabilistic assessment, including tattoos that he had and clothing that he was wearing, right?

However, he was not supposed to be deported specifically to El Salvador because of a status he had, which is a step short of asylum, which said that because he could be threatened by a rival gang to MS-13 if returned to El Salvador, that he his deportation process was suspended, right?

And then,

was it a few weeks ago?

He is deported.

Basically, the Trump administration is taking

busloads and plane loads of immigrants

and sending them back to their native places or other countries that may be adjacent to their native places or not, right?

Now, I've ingested a lot of information about this case.

I hope I'm remembering this right, right?

It's not quite clear why he was included in one of these deportation flights, right?

Anyway, he's sent to prison in El Salvador.

He's since been transferred to another prison, right, based on what the administration said was an administrative error.

I should say, not because I want to dignify it, but just for the sake of completeness, that the administration, Stephen Miller, has now changed this two and said, oh, yeah, this was actually what we meant to do all along.

But in court filings, the administration said we made this mistake.

A district court ruled that the U.S.

should, quote, facilitate and effectuate his return to the U.S.

for due process, right?

It gets appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court says,

facilitate, yes.

But we're not going to pull this effectuate part for now, right?

But like, the point is the administration has no interest in bringing him back.

Right.

Now, how you would bring him back if El Salvador really doesn't want him back is tricky, right?

This is why the Supreme Court, sort of my or wrote the ruling, was concerned that, okay, are you now requiring the U.S.

to go and like snatch this guy from a foreign country?

You know, you can't have the court dictating U.S.

foreign policy negotiations or invasion.

So I don't think the court ruling is as clear as some of the coverage in liberal outlets that I've seen.

I think the court, there's a good

podcast with Ross Douthett, who's a conservative, really center-right Times, New York Times columnist, interviewing Jack Goldsmith, who is a Bush-era attorney.

And Goldsmith's view is like: the court is actually trying to

prevent a constitutional crisis here and hope that the administration comes to its census somehow.

The lower court is now kind of saying, okay, you got to give us your little book report on how you're trying to facilitate his return, right?

You know, what's interesting, and this now gets into the theory, is like, and the strategy is like,

you know, Trump could take a bunch of kind of

somewhat bad faith perfunctory steps to say well but Kelly really doesn't want him returned right and and we sent an official democratic cable and request to this officially and we have a plane or a battleship whatever ready to take him back whenever el salvador commits to it instead they really kind of like thumb their nose at this process by changing their story.

The other thing, too, is the administration is also making these moves because it thinks the political battle is fine to good for it, I think, right?

You know, J.D.

Vance, I believe, a week ago Tuesday,

tweeted, why is all the liberal media making, this is not an exact quote, why is all the liberal media making such a big deal of this case?

And then proceeds to tweet about it like another nine times over the next three days.

It's clearly a better story for them than tariffs.

I think that if Abrego Garcia were just a Merrill and father with no brushes with the law, by the way, his wife also filed an order against him because of an accusation of domestic abuse that he could become violent.

She is no longer pursuing that, right?

But, you know, this is not the ideal test case.

So I've said a lot.

I have a longer summary of this in Silver Bulletin the newsletter if you want to read that.

But Maria, I spoke for five minutes.

So it's now, I owe you the floor.

It's all good.

You were setting the stage.

But I think we have a few things going on here that we should really highlight because it is a mess.

And there are a lot of gray zones here where we don't have adequate information, right?

Like we don't actually know a lot about the background.

We don't know a lot about the decision process.

Like there's just a lot of uncertainty around this on purpose, by the way.

Like there, it could be much clearer.

And I think that this ambiguity is being put out there on purpose in this kind of grayish way to allow for different interpretations and you know basically to give the administration the room that they need.

But there are certain things that are that we do know.

One is the deportation did happen

without any sort of due process, right?

So this is someone who was already in the U.S.

legally, right?

So he, yes, he originally entered illegally, but he now had protected status in the United States.

Married to a U.S.

citizen, you know, U.S.

citizen kids, and someone who has no criminal record in the U.S., which is so heavy.

Here's why I get into, I guess I have to let you talk.

But here's where I get into the spin.

part of you know i mean well i'm not trying to do spin right now i'm just trying to do like what do we know right we know that there's someone who has a protected status in the u.s we have no idea if he was a former gang member like we we don't know right like we know that there's some evidence there's some evidence to the contrary we just do not know so so that like I don't know but that doesn't that's not the thing that's relevant right now the thing that is relevant is that he had protected status in the United States and that he was just deported right without any warning without anything without any due process of law that's the scary part right even if he was a even if we knew with 100% certainty that he was a former gang member right but he was granted protected status in the United States you can't just unilaterally say you know what, even though the courts have said that we are not allowed to deport you, we're just going to go ahead and do it with no warning, no attempt to have any sort of say your lawyer isn't going to know, no one's going to know, we're just going to.

put you on a plane and get you out of there.

That's the one part of this story that is incontrovertible regardless of who this person is, what his background is.

And that is the scary element of it.

And I think that that is the one thing that should be like, it's a legal point, but it's an incredibly important legal point right because that is the constitutional crisis if that is allowed to happen and happen with no repercussions then what happens after that right what happens if we just one of the wonderful things about the united states used to be due process of law right that that you actually knew that no matter what you would have kind of the legal system and that that would that whole process would have to unravel.

And then if it decided against you, okay.

You know,

sometimes it's not that.

This includes, by the way, in actual wars where you have foreign combatants who are still

supposed to be given and usually were given due process.

And they do, yeah.

We had, um, so when I was in college, I interned at the DOJ and I was an intern at the Office of Special Investigations, which was prosecuting the remaining Nazi war criminals.

And they had a number of huge cases where these notorious Nazis still got a trial, right?

They went through the entire trial process in the United States.

And in some cases, like the Demiano case, which was an incredibly famous case multiple decades ago, these were people who weren't notorious guards who killed people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Due process, right?

You don't like it.

You know they're guilty.

And yet they still have that entire process.

appeals like there's you go through the entire thing and um in this particular case none of of it, right?

Zero.

That should be actually scary to everyone.

But as you point out strategically, why does J.D.

Vance, why is he so thrilled that this is kind of the thing that people are talking about?

Because most people aren't talking about like the

legal part of it, the due process part of it.

That's actually, you know, democracy is at stake in some senses.

They're talking about, oh, you know, innocent man, et cetera, et cetera.

And so many people are like, oh, we don't want gang members here.

This is a talking point where Trump actually resonates, where, like, we don't want immigrants.

We don't want this.

We don't want that.

So they're trying to conflate the two stories and use this as a, see, we're making the country safer.

We're making you safer.

And so they're trying to take this something very bad and actually conflate it with something that people are more sympathetic with.

The JD Vance,

I mean, he is an old school blogger.

He'll argue with people on

Twitter, not from the official VP account, but from the J.D.

Vance account, which follows me immutually.

His best version of the argument is that, look, you elected me and Donald Trump to crack down on illegal immigration, right?

And Biden and Obama had put way too much of a finger on the scale where it's very hard to remove people and we have to shift that paradigm.

And if there are a few mistakes made, well, tough shit.

These people are in the country illegally, and this guy, a particular guy, is not

a good guy anyway.

He's a gang member, right?

Like, um,

you know, that gets undermined when Stephen Miller later says, Oh, we meant to deport him, right?

That gets undermined when Trump says, What about U.S.

citizens, right?

You know, they're bad guys, why not send them down there too?

But, like, you know,

but that argument is like

understandable,

I think,

and relatable to some degree.

And, you know, immigration is Trump's least bad issue in the polls.

I would debate in some sense both kind of like the

substance and the strategy of like picking this case.

So first of all, this is not

the worst thing Trump has done.

The worst thing he did was January 6th from a standpoint of undermining legal norms or some of the different firings that he's done.

You know, even

in this term, I mean, you know, some people would say that like

what he's done with TikTok,

where Congress basically passed a law to say we're outlawing TikTok in the U.S.

and the administration is like filibustering that and delaying that and that's being litigated.

That's directly over

overturning, you know, Congress's vote.

I think, you know, arguably that's bad.

I mean, there are a whole array of deportation cases.

The Supreme Court issued a midnight order saying, stop doing this, right?

It is a genuinely difficult point of law to compel the United States administration to do something in a foreign country.

And Trump would make himself much more sympathetic if he like

gave a shit or pretended to even pretended to pretend to give a shit, right?

But like, it is like a genuinely ambiguous thing.

And I don't, I mean, look, I don't think in absolutes, right?

I mean, I think, you know,

if

zero is everything is great and 100 is a constitutional crisis, right?

You know, this takes us from 62 to 66 or something like, or something like, you know what I mean?

And you kind of get in this kind of brinksmanship situation that does get into game theory and

things like that, right?

And part of the problem with brinksmanship is that the party who's behaving inappropriately or trying to be more aggressive, right, can say, okay, well,

we're going to fortify this territory a little bit further across this line, right?

But you're not going to make such a big deal over this.

This isn't a battle worth picking.

And then that kind of like cycles back again and again and again.

By the way, I think liberals are pretty, I think the Supreme Court's going to wind up being

pretty unfriendly to Trump, right?

And I think it's very strategic.

Roberts in particular is quite strategic.

And it's going to say, okay, we know we have to be careful because we don't want to get in a position where he's openly defying us, right?

But we can make his life hard in various ways.

And we see ourselves as like maybe the only

bulwark and, I mean, it's ironic that like, you know, and Alito and Thomas are too far to the right on many issues, right?

Roberts, de facto, is a centrist, right?

So ironically, you know,

the left is relying on three, on the three Trump appointed judges, right?

Kavanaugh-Barrett and Gorsuch, who, you know, have a little idiosyncratic differences from issue to issue, right?

But those three are,

kind of democracy's best line of defense until the midterms at least, and excluding state government and public, but like there is a deep irony there, I think.

Yeah, no, there's an irony in the fact that they're our best defense actually puts my

constitutional crisis meter a little bit higher than yours, State.

I think we're a little above 66%.

But

I think that there are two things here.

One, this is just one, and you kind of hinted at this, of a litany of legal issues that are happening right now.

There are challenges all over the country.

But I think that there will probably come a moment where there is kind of a

black and white confrontation, right?

Because right now there are kind of degrees you can say, well, like he's, is he openly defying it?

But I think there will come a point where there will be like a, okay, you have to do this, or

we're in a constitutional crisis.

I think that breaking point probably,

probably will come.

And I'm interested to see how the Trump administration will respond to that because right now they've been very defiant.

And as you said, it would be much more sympathetic if they at least made an effort and was like, oh, you know, we're really trying to get him back.

And instead, Trump is like, fuck you.

Like, we don't want to get him back.

We're not going to do that.

And then they just lie also about what the Supreme Court said.

Oh, you didn't, you know, you didn't tell us to do this.

That's why why I said right now we have like these ambiguities.

There will come a point where I think there will be an unambiguous moment where there's going to be a decision point.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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I think that the other issue here, and this is something that we've been hinting at, and that I think you've written about, Nate, is that, so immigration, right?

Why is it a good issue for Trump?

Because you can make it emotional.

You can make it visceral.

Like people can be like, oh, you know, they're taking my jobs.

They're making me, you know, whether or not it's true, right?

Whether or not these things are true, you can make this emotional appeal appeal that people can immediately see, right?

It's something that they can respond to.

Constitutional crisis, democracy is at stake is something that's much more intellectual, much kind of broader.

And in the long run, obviously this is hugely important.

This is kind of what our country is founded on.

But it's not, if Democrats are going to say, okay, this is an issue that we can focus on,

that's probably not it if you want to win votes, because it's much easier to say, yeah, but immigrants, right?

As opposed to, oh, constitutional crisis, it's working its way through the courts.

It's a much more difficult, you can't make an emotional appeal here.

You can't be, and people will always say, oh, well, it doesn't affect me, right?

Until it does, they'll say it doesn't.

And so in some ways, like.

We can all agree that this is important and this is an important battle that needs to be fought.

But is this the one issue that people should be focusing on?

And you made the argument, and I actually agree with this, and we made this argument on the show that there are things that people do agree on that can win the election, that can help you with everything like the constitutional crisis, like tariffs.

I mean, Nate, why did the United States decide to go to war with England before it was the United States when it was still a colony?

Do you remember the Boston Tea Party?

What was that all about?

Oh, right.

tariffs on tea.

We went to war with England over tariffs.

That's how much we wanted to have a say.

No taxation without representation, right?

So tariffs are an issue that has been resonant with the United States for centuries and continues to be so.

So we can, you know, on a broad level, there are lots of people who can and should be fighting these battles, these constitutional battles, due process.

I'm petrified.

You know, I'm a U.S.

citizen, but I'm a naturalized citizen, right?

Like, what happens if he says, well, people who aren't naturalized citizens, like we can deport those too.

People, even if you were a natural-born citizen, but your parents were illegal, you know,

you can be deported too.

And that is actually something that's being fought in the courts too.

So there are things that are incredibly important, incredibly scary.

But then there's also, okay, how do we win elections, right?

How do we get votes?

How do we get people to actually mobilize?

And there are things like tariffs that have worked

for centuries and things that people can feel because a tariff, you can feel it viscerally.

Bottom line, it hurts, it hits, it affects.

You know, a lot of people's stock portfolio is taking a hit, but also like the University of Michigan consumer sentiment number just had its like second worst

decline or print since like the history of the index, right?

And inflation expectations are about as high as they've ever been.

Now, in the short run, what some people do is they accelerate purchases, right?

So I want to buy this car now before

tariffs go into effect, right?

So there's some acceleration of that cycle, but you already see different

local manufacturers surveys at the Federal Reserve Index.

People are already cutting back planning and hiring.

If you go to polymarket, which I consult for, there's more likely than not the U.S.

will hit a recession this year.

I think if we don't hit a recession, we'll probably

scrape just above a recession with 0.5% GDP growth and

stagnant, maybe some job losses, some stagflation, most likely, right?

And Trump's approval ratings in the economy are like now his worst numbers, except maybe on healthcare.

I think his numbers are pretty bad, right?

So it's like, it's, and by the way, we at Silver Billetson tracked Trump's approval rating.

It was declining, declined more sharply after the liberation day terrorist.

And then when the topic turns to immigration, democracy, due process, then they begin to

level out again because it is abstract, unless you are, you know, I mean, you know, a student on a foreign visa.

There are other cases like this, right?

And also, like,

I mean, like,

you know, of the many

test cases that you could pick on immigration and due process, I'm not sure why, like,

Democrats are choosing this guy who was the preponderance of evidence according to two judges was that he was more likely than not to be a gang member, right?

And I just kind of sense, whereas like on, I'll put it like this, right?

On tariffs, I was down in Miami, like, kind of briefly for like

a poker tournament a couple weeks ago, right?

And like, that's the kind of thing we can, like, man, these tariffs suck, right?

And bring it up like in a poker table where you don't know what people's politics are.

And that's like safe territory to do that, right?

Because if you look at, you know, the poll is basically 80-20 against that.

And people I know that were like, well, you know, some of this stuff Trump's doing.

I'm a liberal, but, right.

They were like, okay, these tariffs are terrible.

Why is he taking the economy?

Why is he taking the stock market?

If I run a small business, it's fucking up the small business, right?

And then, and then immigration, it's kind of back to the

partisan spin wars, at least with this particular case, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that a lot right now, a lot of the constitutional crisis stuff and the democracy stuff is unfortunately centered around immigration, right?

So those are the two, like, it's the counterpoint.

So

you can't go into one without the other.

There isn't kind of this

visceral like, oh man, tariffs, right?

Like, or inflation, like, how much do eggs cost?

Oh man, egg prices, right?

Like there, there isn't that kind of reaction that you can say right now to kind of the democratic crisis.

And because if you start talking about the court cases, you're going to have to talk about, oh, well, he's a gang member.

And even if we don't know this, like this is going to come up and people are going to respond negatively.

And no one who is pro-Trump is going to be convinced by this, which I think is the other part of this, right?

Like, what is the end goal?

Is the end goal

to try to score

a rhetorical victory, you know, and say, look, you know, we...

were right about this or is the end goal to win the 2026 midterms to win in 2028, right?

As the Democrat, and again, we're talking as a Democratic Party, you should really prioritize the shit that brings people together.

And you're absolutely right, Nate, like the poker community, lots of Republicans there, right?

Lots of Trump supporters, lots of, lots of things I don't want to bring up at the poker table.

You know, I've been accused of being a fucking liptard to my face at the

poker table.

So, you know, that happens.

And

you just kind of want to

try to keep it kind of more even keeled, but tariffs and the economic policy is something that people can really come together on.

Now, as you say, they can and should be fighting these battles elsewhere.

And there are other institutions that can be fighting other battles because we, you know, we have these

We have immigration, we have tariffs, but we also have other things that are happening that we've also talked about on the show.

You know, the huge funding cuts, right?

The kind of death of research in the United States.

And now you have Harvard University who has been threatened with, well, first of all, $2.2 billion in funding was frozen to them after they said, no, we will not be,

will not be following Trump's demands.

Columbia, by the way, its funding has never been returned to it.

It's still frozen, even though Trump got what he wanted at Columbia and they acquiesced to everything.

But this week, Harvard said, we're actually even going to file a lawsuit because it's also been threatened with an end to its tax-exempt status.

And what they're trying to say is, hey, you are not allowed to freeze our funds.

This goes back to due process, by the way.

There's a process to doing it, right?

There's, you actually have to go through a process to prove that what you're saying is true.

And only then, after the court rules, can you freeze the funds.

You can't just preemptively freeze all of them, which is exactly what Trump has done.

And so Harvard is actually now trying to fight back in the court system.

We know, we've talked about this before, Harvard is not popular among the everyman.

And so Harvard is a good target for Trump.

But Harvard's the single richest private university in the world, I'm pretty sure.

Certainly in the United States, I think in the world.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

But they actually have the money to fight Trump legally, which a lot of private institutions don't.

And so we have other actors who can very strategically try to bring this to the courts to try to get at some of the extra-legal things that Trump is doing and try to get a due process that way.

And that is also something that, you know, in the long term is incredibly harmful to the U.S., right?

The cuts to the NIH, the freezing funds, all of these things.

It's really bad.

But it's also very hard for

every man to care about that and say, well, I don't care.

Like, I don't work for the NIH.

Well, you do care if you're in a trial, clinical trial that has been

that has been suddenly halted.

These have happened in the United States.

But if you're not someone who's directly affected, it can be harder, once again, to kind of viscerally feel it.

But we do need people fighting these battles and making sure that, you know, that it remains a priority.

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia has an endowment of 20 billion, still no match, though, for Harvard.

So I believe it is like the richest university in the world.

By the way, to Harvard, have you ever sent an email, Maria, and unintentionally

copied someone who is not supposed to receive the email?

Yeah, I have.

I've definitely copied someone unintentionally because I've meant to copy someone else, right?

Like the I use Gmail, Gmail autofills, and sometimes like I'll click on the wrong one.

I now use the undo, like I have the undo feature, which I use liberally, but sometimes you can't undo.

And I've definitely had an oh shit moment.

When I worked for Baseball Prospectus back in the day, we were kind of frustrated with our book publisher, right?

And I think I said something like, this is going to be late, but they're not paying enough anyway, so screw them, right?

And they were copied on it.

But like, but yeah, so apparently the administration was negotiating with Harvard, as it's with a lot of universities, and Harvard had like hired lawyers to preempt this.

But anyway.

The Trump administration, apparently, in error, sent a list of demands to Harvard.

And now they're saying...

Do we believe this, Nate?

Do we believe that it was an error to send that letter to Harvard?

I actually don't believe that.

I think that this is one of the many after-the-fact lies.

Like, oh, yeah, we believe.

There's a pattern of, I mean, keep in mind that there are a lot of new people and experienced people.

There is a lot of sloppiness.

There is a lot of sloppiness.

Okay.

You know what?

That's the counterpoint.

All the people who knew what they were doing have been fired.

All the budgets for everything have been completely slashed.

There's no more oversight.

Incompetent people are in every department.

So yeah, okay.

That's a counterpoint.

You're absolutely right.

It might have been an error.

Please continue.

Yeah, but anyway, Harvard had been hopeful they could negotiate this.

And then, I don't know, have you looked at this?

I mean, you know, you're our Ivy League correspondent, Maria, so I'll let you, I'll let you take the rest.

Yeah, no, I mean,

I saw the list of demands.

I saw before the news broke that Harvard was suing.

We got, we being alumni, I'm assuming current students as well, got a letter from Alan Garber, the president, kind of outlining what that they were about to sue and what was going to happen and why they were doing this.

But it was, I mean, if it was sent an error, it was not a draft, right?

Like that's one of the, you can always be like, oh, that was a draft.

Like, sorry.

And I've done that too, by the way.

I was horrified

back when I was an undergrad.

I

was working on kind of a term paper for one of my classes.

And

I save multiple drafts, you know, and as I go, like, I will update the version.

And I had finished this and I, by mistake, sent the wrong one to my TA.

And it had like

placeholder paragraphs that had like three words that said what I was going to put there.

And

instead of telling me, he just graded it.

And it was just, it was very clearly a draft.

And I asked him, I was like, why didn't you say something?

Like, I clearly sent you a draft.

Hey, if the Trump administration is looking for new hierarchy, I seem very qualified.

I seem very qualified.

Yeah, I'm very good at sending drafts.

But this is just to say that the letter that they sent to Harvard with the demands was not a draft, right?

That was, it was like a, it was a full, like it was a completely, there were no placeholders there.

And so, yes, they might have sent it in error, but it was clearly something that wanted, and the demands were totally crazy.

They were crazy for Columbia, too.

And, you know, you know, when I, when we talked about Columbia, it looked like Harvard was going to cave because it was before this new letter came out.

And

I'd said that, you know, I'm ashamed to be a graduate of Columbia, which I still am even more now than I was before.

But like, I'm glad that Harvard has finally, you know, grown some balls and

I fully support that.

But it made it, this second letter made it much more clear-cut that they really could not.

accede to the demands because they had oversight.

They wanted basically oversight over hiring over all foreign students, over the research that was being done, over everything.

That would completely undermine the independence and the academic integrity of the institution.

And this is a fight for the future because we want, you know, there are lots of, and we've talked about this many times, there are lots of issues with academia.

Lots of reforms need to be made.

But academic

inquiry and scientific inquiry and all of these things are

the reason that the United States has the industry that we have, the innovation that we have,

all of the good stuff, right?

It comes from there as well.

And right now, it's just everything is being completely slashed with no, I think there's no plan.

Is there,

what's the grand plan?

Let's just destroy everything with a sledgehammer and see what happens.

Should I try to steel man it, Maria?

Let me steel man a version of risky business

in 10 years

where we feel like the U.S.

is doing relatively well, right?

The steel man is probably that, look,

you had a lot of layers of fat and sediment that built up over the course of

the expansion of the bureaucratic state over three Democratic presidencies or 12 out of 16 years and whatever else, right?

And yes, Trump and Elon did kind of shock therapy.

And what happened in the end is that the court fought back and they got about like

one-third of what they wanted.

And was it the ideal third?

Maybe not.

But then Democrats won the midterm and they won in 2028.

And then they restored some of it.

And now, and now things are normal-ish, but we trim some of the fat with some mistakes made along the way, right?

Like that, that to me is not crazy.

It does depend on the courts and eventually the Congress and the people like fighting back a little bit, right?

But I mean, this is why companies do layoffs, right?

Sometimes it's just easier.

It's also easier, by the way, from like a legal perspective, right?

But like sometimes just getting rid of everybody is

actually more rational than making case-by-case

decisions because you want to avoid

special pleading, right?

You want to avoid the transaction costs.

And because some of it will be clawed back anyways, you kind of like deliberately overshoot the target.

I just want to push back against one thing.

I think that that's plausible in some cases, but not in others.

And what we're specifically like...

when we're specifically talking about kind of the scientific funding, what's happening there, it's not as easy to say, oh, oops, two years later, we'll restore it and it will go back because so many things, like you can't disrupt some of these trials, you can't disrupt this research.

And in the meantime, people are going to go elsewhere right so that might be a permanent change that will make the US worse off for decades um that that you can't just roll back because oops I guess we shouldn't have slashed you know 80% of that budget

no and the decline and and again like the

the ambitiousness of it

and the chaos.

I mean, the New York Times had like one of these news analysis pieces today that was like, it seemed like Trump really had his shit together in the first two months and now he doesn't.

I don't quite know that I buy that frame.

I mean, I think from the start, you had

a very ambitious administration and a sloppy, chaotic one.

I think those two ingredients have been present from the start.

And or, I mean, they are somewhat sensitive to some public opinion, right?

Like rumors are that Pete Hakeseth will get fired.

Elon Musk has been backseated

a little bit, right?

They haven't picked fights on issues like abortion, whereas commercially, so let me just give you, just so we're at least staying somewhat grounded in the data 2015 gallup poll please tell me how much confidence you yourself have in higher education 2015 57 americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence only 10 have very little or no confidence right super 2024 those numbers are 36 great deal and 32 very little or no confidence

32% also say some confidence.

So basically you've gone from six to one high confidence to low confidence to even.

And you know, some of that happened during Trump's first term, but it's pretty linear and steady.

It's been, you know, so this is a case where Trump is

picking an unsympathetic target.

Now, if you go so far in an unsympathetic target, then like that target may become like more sympathetic.

You know, I

have a couple of friends who kind of worked in University Admissions.

I'd be like, if I were you, I'd be like, wow, now you can not feel selfish and greedy for donating to Harvard because you're fighting in a good fight.

would

i would love it if i worked in harvard's fundraising committee right now now you're you know because before i would say that giving money to a rich head of the university is

i'm not sure it's actually better than

setting your money on fire setting your money on fire at least at least causes some degree of deflation right um but if universities are actually tapping into their endowments then i'm much more sympathetic to that i would say

and we'll be back back right after this.

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To kind of sum up up all of this chaos and everything we've been talking about, from a strategic standpoint, it seems like these are all crucial issues and people should be fighting all of them.

But from a messaging, like let's win election standpoint, I do think trying to focus on the economics, right, on the tariffs, on the stuff that can actually

appeal to people and get them to potentially kind of change their votes, change their minds, or start voting.

I think that that should be kind of, if we're talking about democratic leadership, that should be the number one messaging.

And then all of the other stuff has to keep happening, right?

Keep fighting the court battles, delegate some stuff to Harvard, right?

Like keep fighting all of those things.

Keep those talking points going, yet have that strategic unity that will bring people to your cause and will be sympathetic and will not let Trump pull the cards of the unpopular stuff, right?

Let me bring one more final game theory example, right?

Yeah.

Even when there is some risk of cheating or rules not being followed, then

there is still an equilibrium that emerges, right?

Like, you know, if you're in a cash game, it's a very good cash game,

but you're worried about not getting paid, particularly if another player loses too much money.

I mean, that might affect your play of certain hands, right?

If you think,

you know, we probably had all the situation where you're playing poker and

you check your cards.

Both of us keep a pretty good lid on our cards, right?

But sometimes you're looking a little sloppy, you kind of, or the cards are slippery.

You lift the card a little high and you're worried that your opponent to the right saw, you know, at least the suit of the card, right?

That might make you a little bit more cautious when you're playing.

The point is, like, Trump is not completely unconstrained, right?

If he had a 20% approval rating,

So he's unpopular, even in red districts in Congress, would, I'm sure, have no trouble finding grounds to impeach him, right?

Will it come to that during the next three and a half years?

I would tend to doubt it, right?

But the point is that like, that like that is some constraint operating on some level, right?

The fact that J.D.

Vance,

I presume, would like to be president and not lose to AOC, whatever, in four years, that provides some constraint on Trump, right?

The fact that Trump likes to be well-liked by certain types of people provides some constraint.

And the court provides some constraint because you know this embrino garcia case is what i call a finders keepers case where oops he's in el salvador the default is he's still there right in other cases the default is that like okay well now now someone after you if you were in the u.s

and you say you can't deport him well now someone who acts in that chain to deport him is violating a law and then they could get in trouble and so like so you know it's not always the case and by the way if you have states saying we're not going to respect these court decisions right i mean you had this during the civil rights era not in a good way, where southern states were being, you know, disobedient and things like that.

And then, and then, you know, it gets very, it gets very messy.

But the point is that, like, Trump does face some constraints.

They're not the constraints that I might want or the constraints that the founders might have in vision, but like, but they basically all boil down to like,

can you marshal public opinion on your side?

And the kind of silver bulletin article makes a case that like, you know, this might be kind of a moral thing too.

That, oh, you know, fighting the good fight,

Well, we are a democracy, right?

And like, if you think Trump is very damaging to the health of the Republic, and I'm 80% of the way there, I think, right?

Then like, then, like, you have to be politically smart.

Yep.

I think that's a good end message.

Be politically smart because

we do not want the damage to be permanent and fatal.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

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The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

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