Liberation Day (with Soumaya Keynes)

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And it's Amanda Lucci.

And this week we're still celebrating Liberation Day.

Oh, it's come at last.

Amanda, before we start, can I ask you, how did you enjoy your week?

Well, I enjoyed it very muchly, Helen.

I'll tell you what I did do this week.

I didn't go into space.

More and more people are going into space, and I watched the latest one.

And every time I see how easy it is to go into space, as long as you're, you know, an international singer or a billionaire.

For anybody who's missed it, should I say Katie Perry and Lauren Sanchez, Sanchez, fiancée of Jeff Bezos, went into.

Well, I okay, I'm going to be very pedantic and say they went space adjacent.

They went space, yes, yes.

They did a short flight into the upper atmosphere in some very tight fight suits, which they designed by one of them.

Designed by Lauren Sanchez, I believe, yes.

Anyway.

And then Katy Perry sang it's a wonderful world as she plummeted back to Earth.

And Jeff Bezos fell over.

Oh, did he?

There's a...

It's very, it would be very mean of you to watch the clip of him accidentally tripping in a hole and falling over.

Well, guess what I'm going to do in half an hour's time?

But the reason I bring it up is I've always been enthusiastic about space.

I'm a huge fan of space.

There's a lot of it to get enthusiastic about.

And I've been around SpaceX for various reasons, for research purposes on various things.

I've been around the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Virgin Galactic.

But the one thing when we got married, and this is 1990, the one thing my wife made me promise was not to go into space.

That's it.

That's our prenup.

That's our prenup.

And it was an easy one because what she didn't know is I have terrible motion sickness.

So the idea of,

if I'm not scared enough by being strapped to a bomb, the idea of then floating around my own bath

is enough to put me off ever contemplating the idea of going into space.

So that was an easy one.

That's it.

That was the Machiavellian intense pressure of our marriage cleanup arrangements.

Did you have what was your request to her?

She was not allowed to go to the bottom of the sea or something like that, right?

Don't fight monsters.

Right, okay, okay, good.

That was it.

And we've stuck to that.

That's the secret of a happy marriage.

What about you?

What have you

been doing

since we engaged last week?

I went to the Royal Court Theatre in London to watch a play called Manhunt, which is about the police chase for Ral Mot in 2010.

Oh, right.

Do you remember that new story?

Yes.

He went on the run.

He attacked his partner and her new boyfriend, and he shot and blinded a a policeman.

And then there was, when he was finally captured and killed, a statement by

David Cameron at the time where he said, It is absolutely clear that Ralmote was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.

And it, which has struck me as that's in the play, that's right there at the end on a video screen.

Because it is a classic political language, but it also just is not the full story.

Well, clearly, because someone's written a play about it

and put it on.

But there's lots of interesting things that come out of that story that I vaguely remembered.

But the fact that, you know, he tried to get therapy and then didn't turn up to the appointment.

You know, he was obsessed with having access to his kids, which is, you know, really prefigures a lot of the kind of manosphere discourse that we've had.

And there's scenes in the play where he tries to talk to his friends.

He tried to kill himself a couple of times and didn't go through with it, but he also didn't speak to his friends about what was going wrong with him.

And Robert Aiku's, the director and writer of it, staged the scene at the end, which is probably the one thing people remember about the Ramwit story, where Gaza turns up with the fishing rod and the chicken and the can and the few cans.

Yes, I thought I dreamt that, but but no.

No, it is a slightly fever dreamish quality to it.

Paul Gascoigne never got through to talk to Paul Mote, to Ralmot.

But the play asks, you know, what would they have said if they did?

These two guys who had both been kind of cast aside, who both felt they were completely useless.

And I found it really, it really made me reappraise that time when Gascoigne was a kind of national joke for his alcoholism and his crying.

And I wonder if we would treat him like that today.

But it is also part of the intense media pressure that,

and now it's become instant, isn't it?

It's like you just described Jeff Bezos tripping over.

I mean, hilarious.

I'm going to look it up.

I'm going to watch it again and again on a loop.

But there is that

ultra-immediacy we have now,

including the fact that we're now dramatizing aspects of recent history.

There's a play on about the power struggle to lead the Labour Party in 1976 coming on.

There's

what's your name?

Is it Stephen Graham?

No, not Stephen Graham.

James Graham.

James Graham has built a career.

Yeah, fantastic, fantastic writer.

But he's very much,

he takes what we would otherwise look at as obscure or forgotten aspects of history, recent history, and as you say, dramatized them and allowed us to kind of examine them again and find a lot.

of stuff that's much more interesting than we may have thought of.

I mean, he did his Brexit

TV screen, only a couple of years after.

I think before we'd actually even left the EU, in fact.

So it was found very much going on.

I do sometimes think, where does it end?

Because they did the Rebecca Vardi Colleen Rooney trial as a dramatisation.

And you think, I think it's going to have actually needed to finish at some point before someone dramatises them.

Like the kind of rush for IP is

a little alarming.

Anyway, that's enough of fun.

On to the stage.

Oh, God, yes.

No, Liberation Day.

Of the podcast.

This week we're joined in the studio by a guest.

We have Sumaya Keynes, a journalist for the Financial Times and host of their Economic Show podcast.

Hello.

Hello, thanks for having me.

Can I start by,

we had Stephen Bush also at the Financial Times on a couple of weeks ago.

We talked about his Harry Potter fanfic.

You can effortlessly gazump that Harry Potter-related story, so please go ahead and do so.

I mean, I basically am Hermione and have carried the weight since I was a child of not getting very far in the audition process to play Hermione.

And, you know, I took, you know, child acting fairly seriously.

I thought I was in with a good chance.

And anyone who knows me will know that, well, I have, or sees me, will know that I have exceptionally frizzy hair.

And so as far as I was concerned, I was the real deal and was also a massive nerd and geek and really wanted a time turner at school.

Can you tell I'm really relaxed about this?

Do you know what?

The most tragic thing about me is that I now know two people.

I also know John Ellich, who I used to work with, whose book is currently out.

But he auditioned for Young Hagrid.

So are the staff of the Financial Times all united by their connection with the Harry Potter?

Yeah, it's it's a gateway drug to writing about finance.

I don't want to freak you out, but my birthday is actually the same as Harry Potter's, 31st of July.

How do you even know that?

It was very important.

It was a very important connection, Helen.

Okay, right, onto the topic at hand, which is...

Well,

I'll go ahead and get a picture.

I'm not going to cast that kind of comparison in my head as we go through the

intricacies of how finance works.

The fact that it could be connected to magic.

Well, maybe, yes, maybe that's what we will discover from this.

Can I ask you, what did you, what presents did you get for Liberation Day?

Oh, so many, so many.

I actually think it was I was liberated in a sense, right?

Because we've had weeks or months of speculation about what Trump was going to do on tariffs.

No one knew.

And and, you know, essentially, yeah, no one knows.

People were trying to fill this void of um by, you know, reading grand plans into into what he was going to do, but there was nothing.

Did Britain get a special deal?

Yeah, you know, oh, you know, this is the logic.

Britain, Britain's got a trade deficit with the US, and so we'll be okay, or, you know, whatever.

And it was just nonsense.

There's just a lot of nonsense when you've got this gap.

And so on Liberation Day, we actually had something.

We had a big poster with numbers.

Yes.

Which I wouldn't recommend as a way of announcing a policy.

But there was something we could actually analyse.

And it was just such a relief after people just sniping at each other for analysing something that wasn't there.

Suddenly, there was something that was there.

It was very stupid, but it was there.

Can I ask you what Donald Trump thinks he was liberating himself or America from?

Because that seems to be the key question about Liberation Day from a language point of view.

Yes.

So I think he thinks that he was liberating America from decades of unfair trade, right?

And so with his dramatic liberation policies, he was going to unleash investment in the US, turn it into a manufacturing powerhouse, and everyone was going to thank him forever.

And the big argument was that might happen in time, but that takes time and in that time

you're doubling at certain prices in America.

Yeeeeeee sort of.

Yes.

So there are a few counter-arguments to his vision or

let's call it that.

Yeah, let's call it that.

So one is,

of course, there was Liberation Day and then a few days after that, he said, oh, actually, no, I did go a little bit far.

I'm going to reverse some of these things.

If you're a business thinking about whether to invest in the US,

you have no idea, right?

Because you don't know if these tariffs are going to stay in place.

You don't want to be the chump that invests in America, essentially, on the grounds that, yep, you'll get this tariff protection.

And then in a couple of years, the tariffs go away and you're getting out-competed by someone else who hasn't invested in America and who can produce it for much cheaper.

So essentially, companies are looking at this and saying, well, that's nice, Don, but we can't make long-term decisions.

So, what are you going to do next?

I mean, you mentioned it was a relief on Liberation Day because at least you had something set out, even if it was, some would argue, barking mad.

At least you could analyze it.

But then, the whole point of certainty is that it needs to remain fixed when you start kind of pulling back.

That, you know, we're going to do this apart from this.

I think I've changed my mind on that, but otherwise, we're staying firm apart from this thing, but otherwise, we're going to.

And yet, somehow, he was still being lord.

All his supporters were saying,

he's playing 3D chess with everyone.

The out of the deal.

Yeah.

But then I think this does come back to language because what Trump wants is for everyone to be hanging on his every word all the time.

Exactly.

But then he goes, well, actually, I'm going down to 10% tariffs on everybody.

But then I'm putting ones on China up.

But then I'm having a carve-out for the tech industry.

But then I'm having a carve-out for chips.

And what it means is you have to pay attention to him constantly.

He's found the one thing he wants, which is that his word is law.

And why did he make that?

Because the suggestion is he was making those changes just because of the last person who spoke to him said, no, you can't do this to us, you know, if we're the tech industry or we're the chip industry or the.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of frightening how much of economic analysis hinges on you know what what is the reaction function?

How is he making these decisions?

There was one decision that he made after watching Jamie Diamond speak on Fox Head of

JP Morgan, a big US bank.

But yeah, I mean it it it's it's

he changes his mind a lot.

It's sort

It's sort of random, and

that gives him power because others don't know.

They can't rely on him to respond to it.

He's just a king.

He's a medieval king, and he has a court around him.

And when he says, I've banished you to El Salvador, that's it.

It doesn't matter.

Phrases like due process do not need to trouble us anymore.

Right.

But

he wants and believes that the US president should have absolute power because he was elected by the people.

But it's also weaponizing the uncertainty, isn't it?

It's like you say,

you will hang on his every word because he may change his mind or he may alter his decision.

He may banish you.

He may recall you.

He may think you're a great guy.

I love this guy.

He's an asshole.

He's the worst guy I ever met.

It's so erratic.

And this campaign to make us all believe it's part of some

master ability to do the deal

is falling apart, isn't it?

Shall we talk about panicans?

Not to be confused with panicans.

So here's my thing with,

so he tweeted, you know, hold firm.

This is before he buckled, hold firm, hold firm.

We must not be panicans, which I think is meant to be an alteration of American, but it doesn't work because it's fewer syllables.

Yes, it's the joke to work.

It has the same.

If I said

what's happening now in America is amoral, it should be called...

amorilica you'd you'd i'd be drummed out of the uh comedians guild he had another phrase which is when he came out and finally did the overturning, he said people were getting out of line, they were getting yippy.

And this is, it turns out, a golfing term, the yips, which is when you suddenly lose your form and you can't, you get tremors.

Oh, right.

And it happens to a number of golfers, and they wonder if, particularly, because he's a big golfer and went off golfing in the middle of all of this stuff, if this is something that preys on his mind.

What is the general reckoning in terms of where do people think this is going to end up or will it spiral into out of control?

Oh, I mean, okay, if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be making lots of money placing bets.

But

I mean, where it seems to have settled sort of for now is

you've got the kind of 10% baseline tariff on everyone.

You've got ratcheting tensions with China.

China's really starting to turn the screws.

Tariffs are really not the worst thing that could happen between two economies.

They can block sales of things to the US that the US needs.

Well, they can have a war.

They could ride at the war.

People could die.

But China's already blocked sales of chips or

the metals.

Yeah, so there are some critical minerals that they are very important in the production of, and they've already kind of

throttled supplies of those to the US, which is not great for US manufacturing,

if that's what you care about.

So, you know,

taking a medium to long-term vision,

you know, yes, thinking about America's relationship with the rest of the world, it would make sense that it was pretty okay with Canada and less good with China, right?

And that seems to be where

his actions are kind of settling.

But also, you know, in your list of measures, Helen, you know, there are forthcoming actions, right?

There are some that haven't happened yet on chips, electronics, that kinds of things.

So we actually

from America, from Trump.

Trump's still got things that he's doing.

So there is still scope for this to ratchet up again.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So that's because the thing I've been reading, or the thing I've been gathering from what I've been reading, is what has been damaged is

belief in the certainty or security of the American economy, that the world economy is somehow attached to just knowing that the dollar is safe and the American.

But once you take that confidence away, once you undermine the American economy by suggesting that anything might happen

then that position collapses

yeah and and you know the counter to that is well this is all a relative game right so yes confidence in the US might collapse but where are people going to go right that there isn't yet a

serious rival to you know the financial system that the dollar runs through right but there are actors trying to create one they haven't managed so far please don't say crypto as the solution.

No, no, no.

That's what I check out.

I mean,

not crypto.

Can we look at the other side of that, though?

Which is, so we've had the news over the weekend about a bailout for British steel, essentially, or like more government control over British steel.

I don't, there is a fundamental point at the heart of some things that Donald Trump is saying, isn't there?

Which is that China has got a lot of economic muscle and it is flexing it and it is other countries are now feeling increasingly nervous about the extent to which they have relied upon it for their manufacturing.

That's the bit where most mainstream economists would kind of agree.

Am I right in thinking that?

Yeah, there are real

issues or problems associated with the way that China conducts itself on the international stage.

And there are, yeah, so that so

essentially there are some markets, some industries in which you've got these massive Chinese companies that even when prices fall, they will just carry on producing.

And

if you're a company in a different country trying to compete with that, that's very tough for you to take, right?

Because you're looking at your Chinese competitors and thinking, hang on, we've got to respond to price signals and they don't have to, and that's very unpleasant for us.

And so there is a theory that

If you think that is a problem though, you should probably do all of the boring, sensible things that, you know, like working with your friends that people have been saying they should do for quite a long time.

Because America is important, right?

It is a very important player.

American consumers buy a lot of stuff.

They really matter in the global economy, but they're not everything, right?

You know, and America,

you are fundamentally more powerful when you act in concert.

And Trump has just made that a lot harder.

Yeah, in doing so, also potentially losing the support of key business figures in America.

It was interesting comparing what Trump was saying and what the White House was saying simultaneously with what business leaders in America were saying.

because Trump was saying, you know, we're doing really well, moving along quickly.

The phones have been ringing off the hook.

And then there was a quote from Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, an investment giant said, I think we're very close, if not in, a recession now.

Samuel Toomes of Pantheon Macroeconomics said, consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.

And my favorite, which was a Republican senator, Tom Tillis, to a US trade rep in Senate hearings, whose throat do I get to choke if this proves wrong?

Tommy.

Yeah.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game, Day Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

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My impression is that they've been quite supine.

I mean, not we can start with the tech guys who went to the inauguration and donated to the inauguration fund, but I mean, the way that Trump has been persecuting big law or you know civil servants who have acted in ways that he doesn't like means, I think, tell me if you think I'm wrong, Samir, that actually the criticism from business has been more muted than

I would have expected.

Oh, yeah, I think for a long time it was very muted, right?

They kind of tolerated

the chat about tariffs because they thought they were going to get big corporation tax cuts, which they like.

And then I think so I think you're kind of you're both right in that for a while it was very, very muted, but then one thing there was actually a bit of a flip after you went and did it, after you went and put the tariffs on, there were some people putting their head above the parapet saying, oh,

we don't we don't like this.

I suppose it directly moves into actually their ability to make money at that point, right?

Whereas his mass deportation programme, I think, is deeply abhorrent.

But imagine if you're the head of a big bank, it's kind of neither here.

I mean, some of your cleaners might not end up coming to work in the morning, but essentially it doesn't threaten the very basis of your business.

It all boils down to money, which is like, yes, are we going to suffer financially?

Can I ask, how does China talk about this stuff?

Because that's a very controlled media environment.

I think that's a euphemism I would use about it.

Do we know a lot about how they're thinking about this?

And what's the way that Xi Jinping talks about this?

So, what we do have is various

sort of statements from press spokespeople.

So, I think the one that sticks in my mind was after Trump

introduced the exception for smartphones, right?

So, there was this big carve-out because I suspect he worked out that actually Apple or, you know, the big smartphone companies really couldn't move their production very quickly.

There was a discussion of the fact that an iPhone currently costs about $1,000 in the US.

And they were thinking that if you had had to onshore and bring all the manufacturing back to America or pay the tariffs, it was going to be $2,500 to $3,000 to $5,000.

And I think at that point, all the people I spoke to and I was speaking to Trump voters who were upset about the cost of eggs would have been really you know, you can't shout at consumer confidence and bully it and hope it go away when people can see the sticker price on stuff.

So when they were responding to that exemption about the smartphones,

they were talking about

the Americans making mistakes, right?

And so then there's no sense that they were going to sort of take it.

They are

pretty peeved, I would say.

And it was

like, no, you don't want to, it's a dangerous game.

And

the kind of lack of direct communication, I think, between the two sides is becoming increasingly apparent.

There was a story about how

I think the US wanted the Chinese to request a meeting.

Oh, I love that one.

It was like a sort of bad boyfriend.

It's like, no, I'm going to have to wait for him to call me.

I can't make the first move.

It was like, are you 14?

What's happening here?

I'm not going to go to the same room either.

We're going to go through intermediaries.

It really matters.

But yeah, I mean,

there was a point I saw made recently, though, about how you know, the Chinese are very

wary of the risks associated with meeting Trump, right?

So if you just remember the Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office, right?

There is no way that the Chinese are going to let their...

the idea that you bring Xi Jinping into the Oval Office and then he gets shouted at by J.D.

Vance and some crew of little you know yes men behind him I imagine the Chinese would regard that with absolute abhorrence.

Right, and so so they'll only

meet if there is something positive to announce, right?

And so that means that they'll probably not there's probably not going to be very much communication at the very, very high level, which given how Trump does business,

which is you know, he'll go according to whoever's spoken to him last, and, you know, everything's done verbally through these meetings,

is

it's just quite a high-risk situation.

Can I ask, as part of your job, do you have to read Trump's Truth Social posts?

Today, I went on Truth Social for the first time.

Normally, I'm lucky enough to have them kind of mediated by other people.

You read them for me and then put them in newspaper articles.

But now I actually went and looked, and I have some thoughts.

Okay, well, you can tell me your thoughts.

For people who aren't caught up, this is Trump's own social network, which he has a financial investment.

So, again, this is one of those situations in which keeping everyone hanging on his every word where he announces things on Truth Social

is directly commercial for him.

Does it affect you emotionally as well as intellectually?

I would say that

so during the first Trump term, Mexican officials had alerts set up for any time he tweeted because they knew that they could wake up and

their economy might be sort of directly threatened.

On the Truth Social Feed, there were a lot of videos of him speaking.

So that's nice.

There's a lot of caps lock and a lot of capitalization of just words that really don't need to be capitalized.

Country, he says, country takes a capital letter, which I want to ask about the style guide that's going on in this, because it's very consistent.

Country is always capitalized, but I don't know why.

It can work if you only do a couple of words, but it's too much.

It's too much.

I mean, there's this theory that he's an embedded Russian agent, and I wonder if the block caps is like a code, some messages he's trying to get out.

I also,

funnily enough, I know you love the 18th century as much as I do, Amando.

It reminds me a lot of like those Alexander Pope pamphlets where you also just find random words, capital.

There is a slightly like libelous 18th-century coffee shop pamphlet for you.

We're the regent now.

Right.

No, but he did want to.

Squaller and filth.

We bathe.

Yes.

Yeah,

exclamation marks as well.

Treble exclamation marks.

You should start doing those long wively S's, you know, that you get in old documents, which I've...

I mean, I have a question here,

and don't take it this wrong way, but

do we take economics and business too seriously?

As in,

I'm just doing this as a little thought experiment, in that

if something's going to affect business, it immediately becomes a priority, or we immediately take note if it's something said by business in a way that we don't necessarily from other groups.

You know, for example, Scanthorpe still, you know, I absolutely get the necessity of keeping it open and so on.

And you could say that's there's an emergency there.

But you could also argue, you know, there's a poverty emergency, there's a care emergency.

But there's something about the business priorities going right to the top.

There was a very good example of this over the weekend.

There's a podcast called The All-In Podcast.

One of the hosts of that is David Sachs, who is Trump's AI czar.

And there's another guy there called Chamath who said, you know, the great thing about this administration is I I can get them on the phone anytime.

The Biden administration wouldn't even pick up my phone.

And he said, I'm a business leader.

And he said, you know, and you have Democrats going, well, that sounds awfully like corruption.

I'm complaining that the Democrats don't do my bidding as a business leader.

And he said, you know, the thing is,

it reflects really well on the administration that they will listen to people like me.

And I thought, right, but they don't let someone who works in one of your businesses just pick up the phone.

So the inputs you're getting are skewed.

And are they doing like a quality check on these business people?

Like, are they any good?

The only reason I bring that up was because it was revealed this week that Peter Navarro, who is the economist behind the tariff policy in the White House,

frequently cited as part of his argument another economist called Ron Varra, who doesn't exist.

And it turns out, if you, you know, listeners might have worked out, Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro.

But he was citing this economist who didn't exist because it's good to mention other economists who agree with you.

It's that thing of, you know, if someone else in business or economy agrees with me, I must be right.

Gonstiman, defend your job.

Defend the very premise of your existence.

Not just your job, but the entire world in which you operate.

Okay, thank you, thank you.

And if you could be quick.

Yeah, thanks.

Yep.

Okay, so

in defence

of the business voices being listened to, when it comes to trade,

this stuff is really boring and really tedious, right?

And

often the average person doesn't know exactly how it works.

You know, I guess businesses,

you can argue about the distribution of the shares, but

and I guess businesses, you know, they employ people and they set prices and

people don't tend to enjoy not having a job or when prices go much higher, right?

And so I guess...

you know, thinking about what's going on in the U.S.

right now, the businesses are saying, hey, don't make us raise prices for people because the people will not like it.

I absolutely get that, but the care industry employs people and

has lots of big.

I'm not having a go.

No, I'm not.

I wouldn't do that.

I'm just noting the priority that certain politicians love the idea of dealing with business people.

And we saw that during the COVID pandemic when it was they just got the contact things out and just give contracts.

Well, it's the whole premise of Trump's presidency is that he was the guy on the apprentice who was in charge of stuff and fired people.

He knows business.

You run the country.

This is the premise of Doge is that I cut my companies to the bone.

We should do that as a federal government.

I think it's what was fascinating to me.

And tell me if you think this is a reasonable analysis, Simeo, is that the line has always been on populists, like Brexit was a very populist movement, or Trump has, you know, campaigned as a populist, was that kind of capital was kind of okay with that and okay with the social and cultural aspects of that, as long as their own interests were left alone.

And that's why I find this trade row so fascinating.

Because, as I said before, if you assume that those people who run the kind of towering heights of the economy maybe have whatever social views they ever have, and a populist leader doesn't threaten that at all.

But Trump has now moved into a different sphere where he is directly threatening the ability of some of these guys to make money in the way that they were before.

That bit is uncharted.

That's probably one of those phrases we should ban, isn't it?

Uncharted territory.

Uncharted territory.

Yeah, and you know, to be clear, I have many criticisms of the business sector.

Oh, yes, good enough.

As I said, I'm not a bit ago.

I'm just making an observation about how politicians practice.

Yeah,

there are definitely cases where, yeah, I mean,

the picking up the phone to the wrong people in the Trump administration s seems very bad.

And, you know, companies only starting to make a fuss when it affects their financial interests.

I mean,

you know, I think one of the things going on in the US right now is it is a very, very scary time to put your, to speak out on anything, right?

Because the Trump administration has shown itself to be extremely vindictive when it comes to

punishing companies.

It doesn't like, I mean, there are some law firms that were really kind of horribly targeted by the Trump administration.

These kind of chilling effects are very real.

I read them today.

In fact, I have one British law firm that's now advised its members not to speak publicly against.

the Trump administration.

Yeah.

I think that's one of the things that's interesting about, you know, you kind of create a vague miasma where everybody might have done something wrong, and that creates very strong incentives not to be critical of the administration.

Again, it comes back to, I mean, this is where we have these conversations about language, is that Trump is a president who is a master of using language and campaigning on the basis of free speech while suppressing other types of speech.

But also that thing that you picked up on earlier,

the difficulty of explaining what does go on in trading and in the economies.

And so we end up with

describing it in these slightly more homely phrases like, you know, balancing, you know, you've got to balance your books.

There is no magic money tree.

Or just like China is ripping us off, right?

I think that's the thing that Trump says.

And I think the difficulty I'm guessing you must have, Samir, is trying to actually explain what a balance of trade is and why some countries have trade deficits with the US.

And that is moving into the, you're explaining you're losing, right?

He's got a very simple narrative that he sells to people, which is they took our jobs and now they're, you know, they're taking the piss.

And the people are going to go, yes, I believe that.

I mean, yeah, there are just, there are so many internal controls.

I mean, you know, China is ripping us off when actually the problem he's complaining about is China's selling things for too cheaply, right?

I mean,

there's nothing there, but there are lots of simple catchphrases that he can kind of lay on top of it.

And then, and then as soon as you go into the, well, actually, then, again, you've lost, you've lost the things because

no one's going to go through the whole process to understand that.

Can I quickfire question you?

What is the best political speech you've ever heard?

So I don't

assume they're so bad.

Right, okay.

They're so bad.

And I think they mustn't, they can't always have been this bad.

But I really struggle, you know, on budget day.

And, you know, it's not any individual.

They're just the, the, there's something about the way that they're written of kind of half sentence pause, half sentence pause.

And there's just nothing in them.

That will, that said, okay, I will not completely be a fun sponge.

No, no, no, no.

I think that's an interesting insight.

You know, I've seen transcripts of speeches that are given to you before the speech so you're not allowed to come out but and they are laid out they look like hymns or poetry fridge poetry yes yeah and you know that every single half phrase was going to be you know poured over by some civil servant to make sure that nothing controversial is said yeah um I quite enjoyed the Trudeau

speech after Trump.

So this is Justin Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada,

found a bit of fire in the belly.

As did Mark Carney, the current

who's currently having a renaissance.

So it's being interesting.

It's so just sort of satisfying, but you do know that

it's being framed as a speech to America, but it's entirely domestic, right?

And that's what makes it more powerful.

The power comes in that he's telling the Canadian people that he is talking to the President, and actually he's totally talking to them.

Yeah, he's dunking on Trump for the home audience.

Okay, okay, well you found one, good.

Is there if you can consign any phrase to the dustbin?

Oh again, I'm gonna cheat.

Can I just consign the cap the capital letter, the cap's lock?

Can I put that into a dustbin?

Is that okay?

Then you are gonna to do like a sort of interesting indie boy circa 2014 sending you a text that says like loll you up.

Yeah.

If everyone is now banned from capital letters.

That's fine.

Okay.

That's fine.

I'll take it.

Have you done that?

Who do you think is the best political communicator?

Oshi, well, let's modify this for you, given that you report on business and trade.

In that aspect, of the people that you cover, are there any business leaders who actually do encapsulate problems, talk in an interesting way, or are they all PR'd to death?

I mean, Jamie Diamond is interesting.

It's kind of interesting that he was the one who went on Fox News and kind of communicated to Trump.

What about Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, who's the very now ancient sage of investing?

He seems to be untrammelled by

political considerations.

I think that's the joy of being in your 90s.

You're a bit like

you can't wait till Trump's in his 90s.

It's going to be his golden age, really, isn't it?

On his fifth term.

Just working out those truths.

I was hanging on no lowercase letters anymore, just all caps.

I was hanging on his every word or just hanging.

All right, well, then we'll wrap up at that point.

But Amanda, have you brought us a little

phrase?

So normally we bring a word, but I brought a phrase of the week, and it's homicide prediction project,

which was, I read, I think it was in the observer this week, but it's covered in other publications as well.

An idea that's come over from America that the justice,

the Department of Justice

is said to be looking at, using algorithms to analyze the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences, including homicide.

So it is the minority report.

It is, you know, and then once it got leaked that it was called the homicide prediction project, it's decided to change its name to the Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment Project.

Lovely, cuddly, definitely in no way resembling that Philip K.

Dick novel.

It just reminded me of all these other kind of

projects that you just think, I don't like the sound of that, which, like the Google's AI one, was always called Deep Mind.

And I always thought that that to me just didn't sound like it was going anywhere good.

They might as well call it, you know, bad hellscape.

Yeah, brain explosion.

Yes.

My one that I've brought is hard labor.

So my former boss, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, wrote a column in the Sunday Times in which he said that Morgan McSweeney came from this tradition which was called blue labour, which is very much about faith and communities and quite socially conservative.

And however, this has mutated.

McSweeney is less blue labour than what is being called hard labour.

And would you like to guess what hard labour involves and why that's a good thing not about...

When you say hard labour, I think of people in a chain gang smashing rocks.

Yes.

That's not where this is going, is it?

No, that isn't where it is going.

But I think that's what immediately I thought of.

And it kind of fits with that

kind of slightly masochist vibe that you get from the Starma project, right?

Which is everyone's miserable.

Everyone hates us.

Would you like this lump of coal?

No, you can't even have that.

Yes.

So yeah, that's that hard labour rejects progressive orthodoxies and doesn't believe that liberalism will prevail.

It believes in the centrality of the nation state.

It champions re-armament and re-industrialization.

Oh, good shot.

We've got that to come.

You'll be sentenced to another, in the next election, sentenced to another five years of hard labour.

That's the campaign slogan.

There's the poster.

It's already written.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message here.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Suns.

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