S2 Ep1017: Catherine Rampell: Trump's Tariffmageddon

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We got a doubleheader today, Congressman Jason Crowe from Colorado in segment two. But first, delighted to bring back a syndicated opinion columnist at the Washington Post.
She's joining MSNBC as co-anchor for a new weekend show. Also a special correspondent for the NewsHour.
She's busy. It's Catherine Rampell.
What's up? Doing okay. How are you? Doing okay? Personally, I'm well.
Well, I don't know. My 401k doesn't look great.
Democracy doesn't look great. But I have my health.
Yeah. That's what I'm supposed to tell myself, right? And we have a long path in front of us.
You know, the college fund, I still got 11 years to rebound the 401k after today. It's not the 401k, but the college savings account.

Well, you're assuming colleges will still be around.

That's a good point.

Which they may or may not be.

We're moving to autarky, as our friend Derek Thompson said.

So it'll be kind of a home college,

where we'll bring in someone from the Capitol

to give the approved lesson plan.

Who knows?

Could be an interesting future. I was going to start with Candy, though.
You took us dark to the dark possible future. I want to start with just a little.
The people deserve candy because there's going to be a lot of negativity, I think, on the podcast, I sense. So I want to just remind people that we did have a campaign last year in 2024.
And there was a candidate, Kamala Harris, who expressed some thoughts about the economy and what she thought might be coming and I want to play a little sizzle reel. Include the fact that Donald Trump's plans for the economy would accelerate inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year.
Increase inflation and by the middle of next year would invite a recession. Increase inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year.
A recession on by the middle of next year would invite a recession increase inflation and invite a recession by

the middle of next year a recession on by the middle of next year to a recession by the middle

of next year session by the middle of next year recession by the middle of next year a recession

by the middle of next year recession by the middle of next year a recession by the middle of next

year recession by the middle of next year she tried to by the middle of next year. She tried to warn you.
Are we going to have a recession by the middle of this year, Catherine? She's not the only one. She was actually citing a study that looked at what Donald Trump's effect on the economy would be if he put in place his full agenda.
And I also said last year, if he put in place his full agenda, yes, this would be devastating to the global economy. But we should not assume that's the base case, right? Because Donald Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't carry out.
And so, you know, there's certainly a chance of Armageddon, but who knows what he's actually going to do. And then there were obviously people on Wall Street who were even who were much more sanguine even than that, who like heard Donald Trump say again and again, I'm a tariff man.
I'm going to put 10 percent tariffs on every product around the world. But all they absorbed was, what was that? Corporate tax cuts.
And so markets were more joyful and euphoric even last year, shortly after the election, because they didn't think at all. They seemed to think that there was zero probability that he would do the thing that he said he was going to do.
And they would only get the goodies, essentially. And now we're seeing people absorb the reality.
It's pretty amazing that the Berkeley communist Kamala Harris had a better sense for what was going to happen with the economy than people who are paid to be experts on the economy or people whose livelihoods and finances are dependent on their bets on what the economy is going to do. It seems like a pretty big goof for all of the biggest finance experts to be like, you know, I'm just going to take a flyer on the guy that bankrupted a casino and keeps telling us that he has plans that will tank the economy.
I'm going to just assume that he's going to do what I want instead. That feels like a miss.
Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of schadenfreude about random Trump voters who supported him thinking he was going to bring down prices or make IVF free or one of various other ridiculous promises that he made. And now they're getting what's coming to them.
And that's not really how I feel. I feel like Trump lied a lot on the campaign, during the campaign about what he was going to do.
And normal American voters generally don't have the bandwidth to do a lot of in-depth research about, for example, what happens when you impose a tariff, right? Some of these things that he talked about were not super intuitive. Some of them were, you know, in terms of what effects they would have.
Some of them were just outright lies, like the IVF thing. But things like, oh, he's going to bring down prices and he's going to make China pay for the tariffs or whatever.
I think the fact that the falsity of all of that didn't penetrate regular Americans is not entirely their fault. I think the media didn't do a great job in covering things.
And most people are a lot, probably the marginal voter who made the difference here, at least, is somewhat disengaged from politics. So for those people, it's easy for people to spike the football.
But for those voters who thought they were getting one thing and are now enduring a bait and switch, you know, I don't entirely blame them. But for the people on Wall Street, right, they are paid to get this right.
They are paid to make accurate predictions, to read all of the white papers, such as they are, to figure out what Trump's proposals would be, or at least the range of what they could be, and then the range of outcomes. they're paid to know how tariffs work, things like that.
And for them, I have much less sympathy, because besides the fact that like, they clearly got the economics wrong, I think they also made some other Faustian bargains, like, oh, well, we're going to get tax cuts. And therefore, even if he does all of the other stuff, forget the like forget the destructive economic stuff if he you know acts on all of these openly stated plans to weaponize government against his enemies to curb civil rights etc that's a trade i'm willing to make so like on multiple levels the support from a lot of not not everyone on Wall Street, but the support of people on Wall Street, and various other executives in corporate America, I am much less sympathetic to.
The problem is they're not the only victims. Yeah, I feel like if you're a finance expert, you donated to Donald Trump, and you made a bet that he was going to help the people invested in your fund.
I feel like bringing back tar and feathering would be the appropriate thing for this crowd. Because I was just like, what? What were you thinking? Even poor Elon Musk, as I've been saying, he invested $200 million into Donald Trump's campaign so that he and Trump could run government together.
And it turns out, unfortunately, they suck at running government. And now he's like $130 billion poorer, right? Because Tesla stock has gone down.
Would a 2% tax cut have offset that? I don't know. I'm not good at math.
I don't think so. I don't think a 2% top tax bracket tax cut would have offset it.
I think he lost like a quarter of his net worth since the beginning of the year or something like that. It's much bigger than 2%, whatever it is.
My favorite meme I've seen recently was something like, it's like a reporter sent a tweet that was like, Republicans on the Hill think that they can get the capital gains rate down to 0% or the capital gains tax rate down to 0% this year. Somebody replied, no shit.
Yeah, like, yes, I'll pay zero taxes on my zero capital gains this year. I don't think that's a problem.
Let's nerd out for a second on some of what we're seeing in the markets. I'm hoping you can explain things to me because I just took macro 101 and didn't go to business school like my dad wanted me to.
Larry Summers this morning says this, long-term interest rates are gapping up even as the stock market moves sharply downwards. This highly unusual pattern suggests a generalized aversion to U.S.
assets in the global financial markets. We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market.
That seems bad. What do you think? Yeah.
To unpack that a little bit, usually when stock markets go down, it means people are selling off their stocks, right? And then they have cash, and then they dump that cash into bonds. So like treasuries.
Sure. Okay, so they put the cash into bonds.
When they buy bonds, the price of bonds goes up and their interest rate goes down. They're sorry for all the technical steps.
But this is just to explain that usually when equities fall, you see bond rates falling too. We are not seeing that now.
And Trump clearly expected it to happen. And it did happen in like very initially at the beginning of tariffmageddon.
We saw rates come down a little bit and he was like, aha, see, I'm reducing interest rates and the Fed is behind. And because, you know, Trump loves low interest rates.
But then, in fact, this weird thing happened that Larry's talking about where where long term interest rates went up. That's not usually what you would expect.
And so there's been some debate about why that might be happening. It might be that everybody's totally freaked out and they just want to hold cash.
They're like, I'm not going to take my sellings from the stock market and put it into bonds. I'm just going to hang tight and put it under my mattress or whatever.
Could be that. We're going into the woods.
We're digging a hole. We're putting our cash in the hole.
This is Eddie Murphy's advice to young actors to not waste their money. Just go into the woods, dig a hole, put the cash in the hole.
So that way there might be some Eddie Murphy-ing happening out there. Well, it could be good advice if we didn't have high inflation, which may be what's going on here.
So there's some questions about like, okay, maybe it's that people are just like holding onto the cash. Maybe it's that they're expecting higher inflation, which could happen as a result, like, you know, sort of trend inflation could happen as a result of all of these tariffs.
You know, the tariffs are going to raise prices at least one time, like when they initially go into place. The question is, will they like feed on themselves and will continue to have higher inflation going forward? And that's quite possible.
Another possibility, which is what I think Larry is raising, and there's some evidence for this, is that it's not that people are just like taking the cash and holding on to it. They're like, I do not want any money in the United States.
So it looks like they might be investing it in like Japanese or Swiss or German bonds instead, which is not a good sign. But that's what he means when he says...
So the bad guys in World War II have become the stable advanced democracies? That's great. They're good guys now.
Yeah, they're good guys now. So yeah, so it could very well be that people are like, screw that.
The US economy is too risky. I do not trust this maniac who is in charge, who is potentially screwing up not just the U.S.
economy, but the global economy. I want my money out.
I will invest it in something else. I'm not going to hold cash.
I'm just going to invest it in like something else that looks safer by comparison to U.S. treasuries, which is like a really bad sign because historically U.S.
treasuries have been considered the safest of safe assets. That's part of the reason why we have that we enjoy the dollar as the global reserve currency because like everybody trusts that the U.S.
is safe. We're going to pay off our bills and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's like the benchmark for everything else. We are we are how you determine what is safe and then everything else is like a little bit less safe.
But how much? So that's not what we're seeing right now. So, again, we don't know exactly what's happening, given some of the evidence we've seen.
Probably Larry is at least partly right. And, you know, really not a good long term sign.
Even if Donald Trump, for example, finds an off-ramp here from these tariffs, and I don't know that he will because I don't even know what that would look like. Well, him declaring victory.
Even if he does, he may have permanently damaged the reputation of the United States geopolitically and economically. I agree with you that there's no real off-r There's some potential ones and they're all fraught.
So just kind of, again, with you doing Econ 201 for me here, the other thing that's happening, the Wall Street editor of The Economist was kind of discompiling on what Larry was saying, is the dollar's down at the same time that we're seeing these yields surging and stock down.

So are all of that the same interplay that you were just discussing as far as just people moving money out of the U.S.?

Yeah, if people don't want dollars, that will make the dollar less attractive, and so the dollar value falls.

So my European vacation this summer is getting more expensive?

If they'll, well, yeah, if they'll even have us.

Okay.

That's concerning.

I'm not worried about it.

They'll have me, I think.

You know, I'm resisting with them.

Yeah, you'll be a refugee.

Can I get back into the country?

Not sure.

But if they don't let me back in, we'll probably be pretty good for the podcast.

And, you know, we have a lot of listeners around the world.

I'm sure somebody will have a guest house for me.

I don't know.

I don't let me back in, we'll probably be pretty good for the podcast. And we have a lot of listeners around the world.
I'm sure somebody will have a guest house for me. I don't know.
I don't know what your Wi-Fi signal will be like in federal detention. Well, that would be a problem, though.
Federal detention would be a problem. But we'll see.
We'll see how it goes. So far, they're focusing on lawyers and foreigners.
So, you know, podcast hosts have not come under the watchful eyes yet of ICE, but, you know, I wouldn't count it out. What about the China side of this? That's the other thing I want you to explain to me is, so A, this is retaliatory tariff happening.
China said they're raising their tariff on us to 84%, up from 34%, effective April 10th, so that's tomorrow. There's some chatter out there in nerd econ world that China might be dumping treasuries, which might possibly also be related to explaining the phenomenon that Larry Summers and The Economist were pointing out.
What do you make of the China element to this? Yeah, so that's definitely a risk. I don't know if we know yet how China's position has changed, but that's definitely a risk.
And that's part of what I was talking about. People don't want any money in the United States.
And they may not want money in the United States because they think it's too risky, like I said. they may not want money in the United States because they want to retaliate.
Right. They want to draw.
If China dumps its treasuries, it's not intuitive, but like treasury prices go down and rates go up. And so when like Larry was talking before about an emerging market, that's sort of what he meant, that it's like people don't want to buy that government's debt.
And so it becomes much more expensive for that government to borrow because they have to offer an increasingly higher interest rate to attract investors. So, yeah, so China has a lot of leverage here.
China doesn't own as much in the way of treasuries as it once did, or at least as like a share of all of the treasuries out there. But they could be deciding, you know, this will be painful for Washington and that's why we'll do it.
I don't know. Woof.
That seems not great. Sorry, this is like a much more technical discussion than I was expecting.
Oh, sorry. Fewer hot takes and more like boring Econ 101.
We're about to enter the hot take segment of the show. But when I have smart people on, I like to ask them smart people questions.
This is just what I'm trying to do. So I'm trying to get as much from you as possible.
Because I didn't, honestly, before you said that, I did not intuitively understand the relationships between the rates and the treasury sell-off. And that makes a lot of sense.
I just knew it was bad. I just knew that chart go up on interest rates and chart go down on stocks was not good.
That was the level of information that I have. That's the correct intuition.
And Trump is apparently about to find that out. Because again, he was not anticipating this.
He had been bragging, I think even as recently as yesterday or the day before, he's like, see, we're getting interest rates go down. And it's like, look at the chart, chart not match words, which is quite a common phenomenon, obviously, for Donald Trump.
But it's really hard to lie about these things. I saw this great quote the other day from an economist at JP Morgan, of all places, who was saying that like, the thing about the stock market is that it can't be bullied, intimidated, deported, primaried in the next election or otherwise censored.
Right. Like Trump has no power here to get it to to, you know, confess the outcome that he wants.
And it's it's real-time voting box, essentially. Sometimes it gets it wrong and sometimes it gets it right.
But at least in real time, Trump can't force it to do what he wants. And now we're getting real information out of the stock market, which is obviously contradictory to the happy talk we're hearing from the White House.
And it can be conned for a little while, but eventually earnings come out. So that was the one skill that Trump had, was he was able to con them for a little while.
I have one more nerd question for you, and then we'll get to the hot take segment, I promise. This talk of the Winnie the Pooh with the tuxedo, Trump supporters trying to come up with a post-h all this.
Like we have, I'm sure you've seen some of this. We have a new Bretton Woods coming.
There's a Mar-a-Lago accord. Like they're going to try to tank the economy so that interest rates go down so that they can refinance our debt and like reorder the world trading system on more favorable terms to us.
Like to me, this just all seems like epic cope. But I was just wondering if you had any insight into that, that fancy explanation for what's happening.
Yeah, I you know, I saw bits and pieces of this a few days ago, and I could I needed like a special decoder ring to figure out what the origin of the crazy was. I feel this way with a lot of Trump related talk that he'll say something that's like totally confusing.
And then I end up spending way more time trying to figure out what his logic or intention was than he spent putting thought into what like what his proposal actually was. I used have a role for myself it's like don't spend more time thinking through the the thing that trump said than he did because it's like an exercise in frustration and futility in this case yeah i think what people are proposing is again that, that if Trump tanks the stock market, then bond rates go down, right? Which is what I was saying, like, very initially happened and normally what you would expect to happen because people sell their stocks, again, they put it into bonds, and then that pushes bond rates down.
And then maybe because we're talking about government borrowing, when those interest rates go down, we can refinance the national debt, just like Donald Trump would refinance one of his properties, right? If you're a real estate investor or a homeowner, for that matter, and you're borrowed at a very high interest rate, you're excited when rates fall because you can refinance. And so that maybe he could use that as an opportunity to not like negotiate our debt down, but just like when it rolls over, roll over at lower rates or refinance otherwise.
Anyway, I think that's the theory of the case. First of all, I don't think that's like nearly plausible.
Even if markets did what you would normally expect, which is, again, having interest rates fall, I don't think that's remotely plausible. But again, we are seeing the opposite happen.
Instead, we are seeing treasury rates increase, maybe because nobody wants to invest here, maybe because people want to hold cash, maybe because they're worried about inflation, all the things that I was talking about before, you know, we don't know which of them it is, but whatever, we will soon probably, but whatever the cause is, the outcome means it becomes much more expensive for the federal government to borrow. And so, in fact, this will worsen our debt obligations in the United States.
And they're already on a totally unsustainable path. And nobody wants to do anything about it.
If anything, Republicans on the Hill are trying to increase our debt through the coming tax cuts. Yeah.
So whatever this kooky theory is, not going to happen. Virtually the opposite is likely to.
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Let's go to the hill. I do want to talk about the debt-busting budget proposal they have planned, But first, do want to talk about the debt busting budget proposal they have planned but first i want to talk about their tariff obligations you wrote recently who will tell the emperor he has no clothes i'm here to tell you it will not be congress it will not be the republicans in congress trump was at an nrcc national republican congressional committee gala of some kind yesterday.
I'm breaking my, not rule, my guideline of not making people listen to his voice. So you can fast forward 45 seconds if you want, but I want to play for Catherine Trump kind of noogieing Congress yesterday over the tariffs.
I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal please please make a deal i'll do anything i'll do anything sir and then i'll see some rebel republican you know some guy that wants to grandstand say i think that congress should take over negotiations let me tell you you don't negotiate like i don't negotiate like I negotiate, Don Bacon.
So it doesn't seem like the Republicans are about to wrest control back from him to me. Does it to you? A few thoughts on this.
The AP reported today that, yes, foreign leaders have been calling the White House and no one is answering their calls. And also that they don't even know what to offer Trump, right? They don't know what concessions he's demanding.
And I think that's the problem here. He does not know what concessions he is demanding, or even if he wants concessions, because half of the time he or his underlings say, no, no, no, this isn't for negotiation because we need the revenue, right? We need the tariff revenue to help pay for corporate tax cuts or other personal income tax cuts or what have you.
Getting rid of capital gains, as mentioned before. So they need the revenue.
They don't want to negotiate down the tariffs and or they want the tariffs to stay in place because that's the only way to encourage companies to move their manufacturing back to the U.S. Also a flawed premise for different reasons.
But in any event, so sometimes they say it's permanent. Sometimes they say it's temporary.
If it is temporary, if they are negotiable, what is the end game? What is he trying to get out of it? And how do you negotiate with someone who does not know what they want? That is the fundamental problem right here. At one point, members of the administration had said, oh, the goal is to get other countries to lower their tariff rates.
so then they'll lower them and then we will lower them as well and then we'll have freer trade that was one proposition for like how this could go but the countries the countries that have offered to have in fact zero percent tariffs i think vietnam may have been one of them they said no don't want that. So it's like, what do you even give him? And this comes back to what I was saying before, what we alluded to before, how do you find an off ramp? When Trump announced what feels like years ago, but I guess was only a couple of months ago, tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he had some like fig leaf about how

this was about immigration and fentanyl. And it is true that with Mexico, at least,

we do have a lot of people coming over the border without permission. We do have fentanyl coming

over the border. With Canada, like neither of those things appears to be true.
In fact,

we send more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us, so it seems. You're welcome.
Have you said thank you yet, Mark Carney? In any event, the solution that Canada solution, I'm using air quotes for people who are only listening to this and not watching. The solution that Canada came up with was like, we're going to have a fentanyl czar.
And also, even though there's not really a fentanyl problem. It's going to be like a mountie.
They have one mountie that has like just a little button that says fentanyl czar on it. Yes.
I don't know. So it's nice.
You can take a picture next to them. The other concession, also in scare quotes, that Canada made was we're going to invest more money in border protection, except they had already announced the same amount of money back in, I want to say, December, December or November, like before Trump took office, they had some plan to invest like a billion dollars.
I forget what the number was, but it was some large amount of money in their border and, you know, increasing the tech or something like that that and so like they just offered up these

things that were either existing plans or fake and trump was like victory and you know he's really good at repackaging the status quo as a victory although in this case the status quo before all of this was arguably much better because canada didn't hate us before but whatever they didn't actually have to do anything, but they came up with something that kind of sort of had the veneer of scratching the itch that appeased Trump, the things that he was complaining about. But now Trump has done this on imposed tariffs on virtually every country around the world.
Are they also going to create fake fentanyl czars? I don't know. Clearly, reducing tariff rates is not actually what they're looking for.
What is it that he wants from them that they can offer? And if he won't take their calls, it's very funny to me as an aside that like all he cares about is people calling him like how lonely is this guy he's like oh they're calling me all the time yeah but you know they're calling him because they want to know what the f they're supposed you know like what what is it that he's looking for so that he doesn't drag the world into another global recession or depression? And they don't know. They're not calling because they want to be his friend.
Well, send some croissants to Dural, you know, if you cut it down on the French. It's like, no, the whole thing is preposterous.
And this gets back to the Republicans in Congress because this is their safe space that they're falling back to. Sorry, I got off on a tangent.
It's okay. No, that was a good tangent.
Their safe space right now is like, well, he's negotiating. We could end up with a more free trade.
You heard Ted Christen, we could end up with more free trade after. And it's like, what is the scenario? Even in the best case scenario, the best case scenario that I can see is that shit gets bad trump decides he wants an off-ramp he cuts a couple deals with like europe and and israel and vietnam the people that have already kind of even though europe kind of wants to escalate but i'm sure you could do an eu deal uk where he cut some sort of deal declare victory but like even still like even in that situation we're in an insane trade war with china whatever you think about what chinese tariff should be it shouldn't be 104 you know we have all these other things like all the other random countries on the chart you know like have like these bizarre like tariff rates the 10 across the board probably gets kept and the economic uncertainty that he has unleashed doesn't go anywhere because people are like this dude is insane like i'm not gonna start investing you know making big investment capital investments into america who the fuck knows what if he changes his mind again in a month right it's like that to me is like the best case outcome off-ramp for this and like that and so to me that is why the whole I'm negotiating thing is just, I guess nothing like there's no hope there.
There is no hope there, whatever outcome he is trying to achieve. And again, it is unclear what that outcome is, whether it's revenue or a manufacturing Renaissance or some, you know, whatever more more fentanyls are.
It's not clear that any of this will happen. Meanwhile, Congress, according to the Constitution, is supposed to be regulating commerce with foreign nations.
Really? They are supposed to be in charge of trade. Maybe the funniest thing that has ever happened to me on the Nicole Wallace show happened yesterday because she had Doug Holtz Eakin, was this like traditional conservative economist on, and he said that exact same thing that you did.
And Nicole goes, really? Is that right? And he like did not catch that she was being sarcastic. And he was like, yes, it is true, Nicole.
And then he gives the history of what the actual power of the purse from. And I was like, oh, these cute economists, you know, very serious about it.
And Nicole said to me, and she was like, duh. I was just being sarcastic.
Anyway, yes, Congress has the power of the purse, and what are they going to do with it? Nothing. That's the problem.
Nothing. There are a few different ways that Congress could intervene here, right? There's this one piece of legislation that says, basically, the president has to give 48 hours notice before he imposes tariffs.
Whoop-de-doo. It tells you how much notice they got this time around.
And that I believe the tariffs can only last 60 days and then Congress has to renew them otherwise they lap something like that which to be honest seems like a pretty mild restraint on Trump's current you know insanity so they could do that even if they get enough Republicans to go along with it in the Senate.

It seems very unlikely that that legislation will even come for a vote on the House floor, given things that Speaker Mike Johnson has said about, like, Trump's making great deals. We have to be patient.
He knows what he's doing. OK, based on what evidence? No clue.
Yeah. And right before we get on this morning don bacon you know who is like has this resolution one you know one of those ones that you reference yeah the question the reporters then ask him are well there is a way to force something to house four via a privilege resolution you know and like 10 republican four really but he says he has 12 only two i think are on the record other ones are secret.
So I've seen how that story goes before in the past.

But all he really needs is four.

These are all girlfriends in Canada.

Yeah, exactly.

Don has a lot of girlfriends in Canada.

I had a girlfriend in Canada once.

Man, was she cute.

Four Republicans could force this to the floor.

Do it with a privilege resolution.

Reporters ask Don, are you planning to do that? And he's like, we want to see how it goes. I don't think this month, or I don't think in two months.
And it's like, okay, we're going to be in a recession by the time you do that. So that's the plan.
The plan is to wait until it's officially official that we're in a recession. And then maybe I might consider forcing Mike Johnson to do the job that the Constitution requires him to do.
That's essentially their current position from the quote-unquote good Republicans. Yeah, this is not encouraging.
There are so many ways that Congress could intervene. So they could do the thing that I was talking about before where they say any of these tariffs lapse unless we renew them.
They could just say there is not an emergency right now because the power that Trump is using to impose these global tariffs is by declaring an emergency because there's this law, IEPA, I forget what it stands for, but one of the E's must stand for emergency. And it basically says the president has some wiggle room to impose tariffs if there's an emergency.
And they could just say there isn't one. That's it.
And then we're done. And they won't even do that.
It's bizarre. It's like they are waiting for the emergency to happen before they then do anything to curb the president's emergency powers.
He is the one single-handedly causing this catastrophe. And whatever the founding fathers thought about Congress controlling power of the purse and regulating trade with foreign nations, etc they clearly thought that having Congress and the president be separate branches would be sufficient to impose checks and balances on each other and the judiciary for that matter.
And that's not what happened. It doesn't feel like we have multiple branches, we have multiple parties, and one of which is basically a cult at this point.
So they're just too afraid to go against them. They know it's bad.
They absolutely know it's bad. They will say so privately, some of them will say that publicly, but they know it is making their constituents poorer, not just by tanking stock markets, but by raising prices, right? If it's going to raise prices, that means their dollar goes less far, their constituents' dollars go less far, they get poorer.
if we have a recession and there are layoffs their constituents lose their jobs get poorer

all of these things are pointing in the same direction. Bad news.
And at some point, one would imagine those constituents, those voters are going to fight back and say, throw these bums out. They've screwed up my life.
But they just, for whatever reason, they're not willing to face that right now. Here's some evidence they know it's bad.
Let's listen to Steve Doocy this morning on Fox & Friends. There's an item in the New York Post that we all have in front of us.
It's an exclusive story. And it talks about how with these 104% tariffs that went into effect, you know, we think that China is going to have to pay for it.
But it tells a story of a special needs toy

importer. And when the tariffs went into effect at midnight, his tariff, he's been paying a tariff

because he gets stuff from China, $26,000 a year. His tariff bill went from $26,000 at midnight

to $346,000. And that's money he's going to have to come out of his pocket.
It sounds like he's going to have to go ahead and close down part of his business. Pretty good.
Tariffs 101 from Fox and Friends. Yeah.
That's one of the president's favorite shows. This is not an isolated example.
There are so many industries, business owners, employees who are dealing with this new reality, these new constraints. Trump said China was going to pay the tariff and that's wrong.
right? China will still be hurt, to be clear. China will still be hurt, as will our trading

partners, because even if, let's say, 100% of the tariff cost gets passed along to American consumers, and I don't think it's going to be quite that, but just for the sake of argument, let's say it's entirely paid by American consumers. American consumers will respond to those higher prices by buying less stuff, buying fewer of those special needs toys, fewer cars, fewer appliances, maybe fewer healthy groceries, produce, things like that that get tariffed, coffee, vanilla, whatever.
People will buy less stuff. And so that will hurt our trading partners.
That will hurt everybody else in the supply chain, the retailers and wholesalers who also depend on, you know, bringing in those imports and then ultimately selling them to consumers. So it is true that other countries will be hurt, but so will Americans, the consumers and the businesses out there, whether they're selling toys or anything else.
And Kevin Hassett, who is the National Economic Council director. A moron.
He went on TV this weekend and I was like screaming at the TV because he said, if you say that it's really only Americans who are paying the cost of the tariffs, why is our phone ringing off the hook from all of these other countries? Clearly, they must be paying the cost of the tariff and will be fine if they're the ones trying to make a deal and negotiate. And it's like, no, you idiot.
How did you get a PhD in economics and never learn about this thing called deadweight loss? It's like when the price goes up, yeah, somebody's going to absorb the price, but also the quantity of stuff sold goes down. And that's basically going to hurt everybody.
That's going to hurt the sellers, whether it's a foreign manufacturer, whatever, foreign supplier, it's going to hurt the retailers, the wholesalers, and it's going to hurt the consumers. So it's just like he knows better.
The people who annoy me most in this administration are less the people who are just like complete ignoramuses and liars and like just don't even bother learning the truth and more so the people who really know better. They don't even need a PhD to know the answer to this question they needed to have taken what you took you said you took like introductory macro or whatever like this is not hard to understand besant has it people like that i just they are the worst enablers i think because trump i'm sure surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear.
And that's bad enough. But then some of these people seem like they have some credibility because they're a PhD economist, or because they were, you know, a Wall Street titan that markets trust.
And when they go on TV and lie about the economics here, I think that is so much more destructive because it encourages Trump to keep on doing the stupid, stupid, stupid thing. And it hurts any credibility they might ultimately have with markets who can see through this clearly.
And as things get worse, we will need someone to go on TV and present a credible plan, I hope, for how to get ourselves out of this and there's just no one left to trust. Agreed with everything that you've said on this podcast so far, except for the implication that Kevin Hassett is not an ignoramus and so I just, I think, I feel like there's a long body of work pointing the other direction on this, but we can agree to disagree.
And so I'm sure Kevin appreciates you giving him the benefit of the doubt. That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores.
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Berries and stores with beverage tax. Since you mentioned it earlier, I think it's very important because you and I are one of, and a couple of our listeners are like among the 19 people left who have genuine concerns about our debt and the cost of our debt service and what it's going to mean for the country in the medium and long term.
Ostensibly, the Republicans pretend that they're caring about that. It underlines a lot of the point of what they're doing with Doge.
They have put forth a plan for what they're going to do with the budget and with taxes, et cetera, this year. And you wrote the column on this.
They did this fucking gimmick where they're basically extending the tax cuts that we passed 10 years ago don't count towards the deficit. They're just like, we're not going to count that.

So we're only going to count the new stuff that we do. And as a result, they're planning a bill that would increase the debt more than anything, more than any of the Biden spending stuff or in the Bush tax cuts, more than anything that we've ever done.
That is their current plan. Is that an accurate assessment of what the state of play is? Yes.

So the word Orwellian gets overused a lot.

Everybody and their grandmother has been called Orwellian at some point.

But there's this famous line in 1984 that actually George Orwell had used versions of elsewhere as well, where he said something like it would get to the point where if the party said two plus two equals five, you would just have to believe it was so. And that is quite close, if not exactly what Senate Republicans just did.
Historically, what has happened is they get to say, okay, our bill can lose this much money because it's always losing money. At least when we're talking about tax cuts, our bill can lose X amount of money.
And then the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the sort of neutral referees get to say, okay, does it actually meet that or not?

And then there's this person called the Senate parliamentarian. It's like all of these like trappings of whatever, Senate procedure.
Senate parliamentarian gets to say, your number equals their number or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it's much harder to pass the bill effectively, right?

Like if the things match,

then they only need a majority vote. And Democrats have no way to kill the bill.
That's why they're doing this special process so that they can now have a majority vote, can't be filibustered, etc. That is how it normally works.
What Lindsey Graham, who is the Senate budget chair, has said is, nope, none of that matters. I get to decide how the math works.
And I am deciding that tax cuts that we passed before and are set to expire, if we re-up them, they will be free. And that's it, right? Two plus two equals five.
Or in this particular arithmetic, $4 trillion equals zero. That's what's happening here.
It's a fancy way of saying Republicans get to control the law's arithmetic. They get to rewrite the math.
And the normal checks and balances, you know, just looking at like in the spreadsheet, does this thing equal this thing? None of that matters anymore. So that's like the overarching takeaway that I would have on this, that they are just, it's truly Orwellian.
They get to decide how arithmetic works. The specific thing that they're doing, which is what you were talking about with saying like, well, the old tax cuts are free to help people understand this, why it makes no sense is it's like if you had a car lease and the lease ended,

that's like saying the next lease won't cost anything because I got really used to having a car. Even though, of course, the new lease will cost you something every month.
But that's basically what they're doing with tax cuts. They're saying we got used to having the tax cuts.
If we have another round of tax cuts at the same levels, that won't cost anything. I think that the bigger long-term problem is they are now setting a precedent where they get to decide, the majority gets to decide effectively how math works.
That's alarming. There are a whole bunch of reasons why this is interesting, but including that, of course, Republicans and some Democrats were like apoplectic about the idea of ruining or ending other Senate norms, like ending the filibuster and things like that.
And these are all related. Like the norms only matter when Democrats are in charge, not when Republicans are in charge.
All right. Well, this has been uplifting.
Not really. It's been pretty negative about the state of affairs for where things are going economically.
So I want to close with some good news for everybody. They don't have a math solution.
They don't have an off-ramp. They don't really have a plan.
They don't know what they're doing. But maybe there's something else that could save us.
Trump's spiritual advisor, Paula White, tweeted this yesterday in all caps. I cancel every demonic attack against you, your mind, your body, your calling, and your finances in the name of Jesus.
So the demons are just being expelled. The bad juju, the bad economic demons that are sending the stock market down, we are expelling them in the name of God, Trump.
I mean, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God, God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God,

God, Trump. I mean, God, and everything will be okay.
So does that make you feel better? Well, it means we don't need 180 new fentanylsars. That's good news.
Yeah. I'm picturing the Swiss fentanylzar.
The economic demons are gone. He's got a little box of chocolates, you know, and just like all the French Fentanyl Czar

is like carrying a baguette as a weapon.

I just, it'll be nice.

It'll be very, very wonderful.

Catherine Rampell, thank you as always.

Always a delight.

Appreciate you very much.

Thanks for having me.

Everybody stick around for Jason Crow. All right, we are back with a Democratic congressman representing the district I grew up in, Colorado 6th, which used to, when I was a kid, be represented by Tom Tancredo, the anti-immigrant far-right firebrand that presaged our current era.
So, you know, a lot of changes in Colorado 6th. Now it's a guy named Jason Crow.
How are you doing, Congressman? I'm good, Tim. It has come a long way since the Tancredo days.
There's no doubt about it. A lot of changes in Colorado, all of them good.
You all are kind of a shining light out there for democratic governance. There's some dark spots.
But for folks who don't know you, maybe just give us just a really quick penny tour through your backstory. Sure.
Well, I'm in my fourth term, just started my fourth term as the representative for the 6th District of Colorado. This is the first time I've ever held office.
I hadn't run for or been in politics before that. I was practicing law in Colorado before that, was in the military, was an infantry officer and paratrooper, an army ranger, did three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
My military career actually started when I got out of high school. I did well in school and didn't have money to pay for college.
I was working in construction to help finance my way through school and joined the Wisconsin National Guard, actually. I was born and raised in Wisconsin and joined the Guard to help pay for college.
I was driving down the road, saw one of those billboards that said 100% tuition, one weekend a month, two weeks a year. And this was before 9-11.
So it was what we used to refer to as the weekend warrior days. And I'm like, well, that's a pretty good deal.
All my tuition paid for with one weekend a month. And obviously, after 9-11, that changed pretty drastically.
So my military career started as a private in the National Guard, and then I ultimately became an officer and went active duty into special operations. So here I am, came to Colorado after I left the military.
So it's been about 20 years now. Classic Colorado story, people leaving the Midwest for Denver.
No shortage of you guys out there. It's my parents, too.
It's true. There's so much happening with the Trump administration.
Obviously, I want to get to the tariffs. Obviously, I want to get to some of the Democratic consternation on where the party goes.
Obviously, I want to get to the nuggets firing their coach. But I do want to, since you were in the military, talk to you a little bit about the Trump foreign policy because I think that's getting overshadowed by our economic dysfunction at the moment.
But I was just curious your two cents on what we've seen. Obviously, from my vantage point, pretty horrific across the board.
But what's jumped out at you on the foreign policy side of things? Yeah, well, first of all, to say that there is a defined, cohesive Trump foreign policy, I think, would be giving them more credit than they deserve. There is no foreign policy or Trump doctrine that I've been able to really discern.
I mean, what it is, is it's a series of grievances, a series of isolationist worldviews, bullying, you know, things that Trump wants to talk about publicly. That's kind of his economic approach.
It's his domestic approach. It's his law enforcement approach, like anything else for that matter.
So, you know, spending time talking about Greenland and Panama and bullying Canada and maligning some of our closest allies, getting into shouting matches with President Zelensky. It's pretty awful stuff.
I served with our NATO allies when our NATO allies came to our aid and fought with us in Iraq and Afghanistan and died with us on many occasions. And to see the manner in which Vice President Vance and Donald Trump malign and attack these folks publicly is pretty terrible to see.
Yeah, it's crazy. I was talking with Kinzinger last week about just how much respect the Lithuanians showed following that tragic death of our soldiers there and the parade that they gave them and the honor.
And to see that in contrast with J.D. Vance, whatever, trying to make Zelensky thank him, Pete Hegs like trashing our European allies on a signal chain.
It is just kind of astonishing the way that we've treated folks that have fought with us, fought with you. My entire adult life, your entire adult life, we've grown up with America as the leader of the free world, right? And that leadership takes so many forms, economic, moral, military.

And to see, you know, decades and decades of that leadership squandered in a matter of weeks is completely astonishing, right? And the idea that you can deduce our alliances and our partnership and our leadership down to a series of business transactions, as if our relationships with the UK or the Germans or the Norwegians simply can be deduced down to a ledger sheet of deposits and withdrawals, and you can monetize that, shows just such a fundamental misunderstanding about what leadership really means and what our alliances really mean in the world. And that's not to say that we shouldn't push our partners to invest more, to up defense spending.
I mean, yeah, there's actually bipartisan consensus on that, right? Like people say, yeah, they need to step up and do more. But obviously maligning them and treating them the way that we have been is not the way to do it.
You said there's no doctrine. I guess the one through line, he is pretty nice to the bad guys as compared to our allies.
And I guess in particular, you know, with regards to Ukraine, I know you have some Republican colleagues of yours who are ostensibly pro-Ukraine who've gotten pretty silent. What do you assess for what's happening right now? Every indication to me seems like they're basically on the Russian side of this negotiation.
There's no pressure on Putin. There's no ask for major concessions.
We didn't tariff Russia. We did tariff the Ukrainians.
It's an insane situation. What do you assess particularly as it goes to the Ukraine war? Well, Donald Trump has had this long affinity for Vladimir Putin and for Russia that goes back decades, actually.
And I don't know whether it's kind of business self-interest because he's tried to build hotels in Moscow and has wanted to get into the Russian market for a long time as a businessman. There's a lot of theories about why this is, but regardless of the theory, actually, in reality, it's true.
He isn't willing to be tough on Vladimir Putin. And there's all this talk about peace through strength.
And my Republican colleagues now, just yesterday, we had had an Armed Services Committee hearing and a bunch of folks were invoking Reagan in peace through strength. And Ronald Reagan must have been rolling in his grave because showing affinity and cozying up to dictators and autocrats is not peace through strength, right? He just isn't willing to call them out, isn't willing to call out the war crimes, isn't willing to call out the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, isn't willing to say there is a right and a wrong here.
There is an aggressor and there is a victim. Russia is the aggressor and to be firm, right? And if anybody knows Vladimir Putin, which we actually do pretty well, I mean, one of the benefits of Putin is that we actually know him.
Yeah. Like he's been on the scene.
He's been around. He's been on the scene for three decades.
We've observed him for a very long time. We understand how he operates.
He respects only strength. He never keeps promises and deals.
He only does what he's forced to do. And he's not somebody you can trust.
And he also believes that his life's work is to rebuild the Russian empire. And he is actually showing us, you may have seen these videos, he holds up a map of what he thinks the Russian empire should be and what he wants to rebuild and includes a lot of European countries.
right so there's no secret as to what Putin is doing here, and of course Trump is unwilling to call it out. What about your fellow vets? Is the tune changing at all? I mean, folks you're talking to, and obviously the cuts, VA, having a weekend TV talk show host leading the military, and what's the vibe like from fellow veterans?

Yeah, well, certainly there's been a dramatic shift. I've seen this, right? In rural districts and red districts, these huge town halls, people that are standing up and saying, wow, this is not what I bargained for, whether it's the increase in prices because of the tariffs, whether it's drastic cuts to health care, whether it's huge cuts to the VA system.
You know, by the way, at the same time as he's talking about cutting the VA system, he also wants to hold some big military parade in D.C., right? Because he likes to spend money on pomp and circumstance and big parades, but he doesn't want to actually spend money to help disabled veterans. And he went golfing during a dignified transfer of remains ceremony the other week, too.
I think we call that small penis syndrome. It's kind of like a casual term for what happens when you need a big water pump and circumstance for your birthday.
I think that explains a lot. I'm no psychologist, but I play one on TV sometimes.
So, I mean, I think the through line for me is that Donald Trump doesn't believe, he cannot comprehend selfless service. The notion of serving something bigger than yourself, he literally cannot comprehend that.
Right? Everything has to be what can you get out of it? Everything has to be a business transaction. This entire notion that people would stand up and give their life and serve the country, that's why he calls veterans suckers and losers, because it just doesn't make any sense to him.
Let's just talk about the tariffs, Obviously, and the markets are still down. There's real-life impacts outside of the markets.
You've been talking about that. I see you were with the sheet metal workers, I guess, last week.
What's your sense for how bad this is, and if there's any, what is the right thing to do in your shoes to combat it at this point? Well, it's pretty damn bad. There's no doubt about that.
The markets are tanking. Retirement accounts are tanking.
We're further marginalizing and isolating ourselves in the world. I think it's really important to state that, like most things Trump, he identifies a legitimate problem.
But then his solution is all wrong and makes it right? And there are trade imbalances. There are unfair trade practices.
Everybody can agree that we need to fix those. I mean, I guess kind of though, like not really.
I mean, the U.S. has benefited pretty well from the trade on balance, right? There's certain industries, like the shrimpers have been hurt by this.
There's certain industries you can do targeted things. Like on balance, the free trade system has pretty much benefited the U.S.
I don't know if I'd agree with that. I'm from the Midwest, the upper Midwest, and I think if you go to the industrial Midwest, people would vehemently disagree with that.
That vast swaths of this country have been left behind from the 80s through the early 2000s.

The gutting of our industrial base has decimated entire communities and swaths of this country in the name of free trade. There have definitely been winners and losers.
And where I'm from, they have largely been losers. And there's an angst and anger that I see and I share.
So I think that is a problem, right?

And tariffs can be a surgical tool, right? They should be used as a scalpel and a surgical tool to address trade imbalances in a pinpointed way. This, of course, is not the way the administration is doing it.
They're doing across the board massive tariffs that aren't even tied to the reality of the situation. They say it's reciprocal tariffs, but the numbers they're using on their so-called spreadsheet aren't even in many cases tariffs, right? And economists don't even know where these numbers are coming from.
And of course, several of these locations aren't even inhabited territories or countries. So they are just sledgehammering everything.
And it's going to make it worse, far worse, right? Because you talk to businesses. I talk to businesses all the time and manufacturers all the time.
And what they say is the single biggest issues right now in rebuilding our industrial base, which I would love to do, is we don't have the workforce and we don't have the infrastructure, right? And we don't have predictability in our taxation and economic

system, right? So those are the things we need to address, which is going to take a little while.

It's going to, you know, five to 10 years to address those. You just can't snap your finger

and create a workforce and have the infrastructure. So he's decimating the system.
Yeah, the workers think it's such a good point. That's why a lot of this is just a farce.
The whole argument over Springfield was that there was a manufacturing renaissance in Springfield, but there weren't enough workers there to do it. And so that's why there were Haitians that were in town.
And then he was out there saying that they were eating the dogs and the cats in the neighborhood right so i got like there are a lot this is a very complicated thing and having peter navarro and these guys just like randomly pulling numbers out of their ass and being like we're going to tear a few 54 i mean like we're seeing the results it's going to be i think extremely tragic for for working people who are going to be hurt by this not just the bankers yeah the ad, the admin likes to say, and Trump and all the billionaires around him love to say, oh, this is going to be short-term pain for long-term gain, right? And where I'm from, I grew up in a working-class community around working-class folks, right? And these are people who I was raised with often lived paycheck to paycheck. Most of my constituents lived paycheck to paycheck.
They're trying to figure out where their rent is coming from, where their mortgage is coming from for the end of the month, how to put food on the table. And what I realized growing up, what working class people know, is that when people at the top are talking about short-term pain, they're not talking about their pain.
They're not the ones that are going to fuel the pain. They're talking about everybody else's pain, working people's pain.
And frankly, this short-term pain is going to end up with people losing homes, losing healthcare, not being able to feed their children. This is crazy and devastating stuff.
Don Bacon out today saying that he's looking at a resolution, getting some Republicans, maybe a privileged resolution to take the power of the purse back for Congress. But in the same voice or in the same quote, he's saying, we're going to see how it goes.
We'll do it maybe in a month or two. We might be in a recession in a month or two.
What is your sense for your Republican colleagues? They were getting pantsed by Trump yesterday at the NRCC thing, and they're not really standing up for themselves. Yeah, well, I mean, the Republican Party has prostrated themselves at the altar of Donald Trump.
There's no doubt about that. They're constantly getting pantsed.
And it's bad, actually. It's more than bad.
It's terrible. It's a tragedy.
I was raised in a Republican family. Most of the people I know and love are actually Republicans.
And for our system to work, we need to actually have a viable, independent Republican Party. And right now, we don't have that.
It's hard to negotiate and compromise and legislate when you don't have a viable party right now to negotiate with.

And, you know, we just this week are recognizing the 100-day mark of this administration. Are you freaking kidding me? It's only been 100 days? I don't think it has.
I don't know. I guess it's coming up.
Maybe it's at the end of this week. I don't know.
I'm losing all sense of time. Yeah, me too.
Okay, just on the working class thing with Dems, this is something you've been pushing. It's a good New York Times piece we'll put in the show notes where people want to read about your work, your recruiting candidates.
I've got two thoughts on this. Number one, the one maybe area of disagreement I had with you was you said that the Democrats have an issue with being out of touch with the vast swaths of the country, but it's less to do with policy and more to do with visceral matters.
Is that really right? Or did the Democrats get misaligned from folks in red parts of the country on certain things, be it crime or immigration, etc.? Yeah, it's not totally binary like that. I think it's largely a cultural issue, an understanding issue, because our policies really are working class policies.

The exceptions would be, you know, at the state and local level in a lot of places where Democrats govern, a lot of communities have become unaffordable. How can we be the party of the working class when you look at the cities where we govern that have crime issues, that it's too expensive to build homes and condos, and working folks are actually being priced out of those cities.
It's happening over and over again. In fact, one of the few cities in the country where it hasn't really happened has been Denver.
Denver still is not as affordable as to be. The prices are skyrocketing.
But you look at almost every other city in the country and working class people are leaving the cities and they're going to more affordable places. So how can you say if we're governing those areas that we're the party of the working class, right? We have to make housing more affordable.
We have to be able to build things quicker and cheaper. And we need policies that allow us to keep our communities safe.
So those are the policy issues that I think need to change. But I will say at the federal level, I'm a Democrat because I'm not looking for a handout.
I'm not looking for somebody to solve all my problems for me or to tell me how to live my life. I'm looking for a level playing field and a fair shake.
I want to be able to work hard, honest days work, honest days pay, and make sure that the game isn't rigged. That's why I became a Democrat, why I'm a Democrat.
That's what we're about. What about the recruiting side? This is going to be your job, partially for the DCCC.

A, are you going to go out and recruit people

in some of these R plus 12, 13 districts, expand the map?

And can you find people with Jason Crowe's background

who did construction instead of nerds like me

who did Model UN and then went to Washington, D.C.?

Because there are a lot of Model UN candidates

in the Democratic Party and not a lot of people

who know how to use a hammer. Model UN's all right, Tim.
Nothing wrong with it, but you could use a little of both in the conference. You could.
That's all I'm saying. But you went to high school in my district, so I'm not going to bang up on that.
It's great. I went to a great – nothing wrong.
I love Model UN kids. I was not the valedictorian.
Love people in the front of the classroom raising their hands. Yeah.
Could also use some people that excelled in shop class, I think, in the Democratic conference. Yeah, there's no doubt.
Can you recruit people like that is the question? Yeah, there's no doubt. Well, first off, what we're not doing is we don't – I want to dispel any myth that we're parachuting into communities and selecting the candidate and clearing the field.
That's actually not at all what happens. What I'm doing is I'm trying to demystify the process, and I'm trying to encourage people to throw their hat in the ring.
And there'll be primaries. Everyone needs to run their race, run their primary, and earn it.
Every candidate has to earn it, just like I did. I went through a primary, too.

But what we have found, what I have found,

is that the people that we most need to step up,

the small business owners, the combat veterans,

the nurses, the people running local nonprofits,

the school board presidents,

people that actually have lived experience

and are living their lives, aren't clamoring to run for Congress, right? They're not like, oh, I want to just, you know, quit my business and spend half my time away from my family to go to Washington to jump into this, this freight, because they have lives, they're doing things, right? Yeah. So they actually need encouragement.
They need people to be like, hey, it's time to step up and serve your country. We need you.
This is about service, right? Because they're doing it not to their benefit. They don't need the job.
They don't need the money. They're doing it simply out of service.
So those are the candidates. And that's how I view my role is, you know, going out, visiting with them, sitting in their living room, calling them, talking to their spouse and be like, all right, this is what it looks like.
This is the sacrifice. This is what the lifestyle looks like.
This is how you run a race. And oh, by the way, now is the time for all good men and women to step up and come to the aid of their country.
And your nation needs you. I have to pick on you about one thing.
And it's all the Democrats. You just are the one that happens to come on the spot right now, the Venezuelans.
We disappeared some people. This government took somebody off the street and put them on a plane and shackled them and sent them to a fucking concentration camp in El Salvador.
I looked at your social media feed. I haven't seen you say anything about it.
Why are the Democrats not talking about the people that we sent to this prison without knowing whether or not they're criminals or not. Well, you must have missed my statement the other day on this.
I actually put out something a couple of days ago. Joe Rogan commented on this, and he's like, this is not okay.
Sometimes I agree with him. He said, why are people not getting due process? Why are we kidnapping people off the street? This is not all right.
And I retweeted that and made a similar comment. And I've spoken up about it.
And I actually had a pretty fierce debate. I guess it was three weeks ago.
I went on Brian Kilmeade's show on Fox, because I do Fox a lot. And we debated this for a good 10 minutes.
And then he said, he said, you know, we should just be getting rid of these foreign gang members. You know, why do you have a problem with deporting these 200? Because there was this flight of 260 Venezuelans at the time.
This was last month. He's like, why do you have a problem with that? Why are you trying to protect gang members? And I said, Brian, you're misunderstanding the point, right? Nobody's debating the fact that if there are violent gang members, they should be rounded up, taken off our street, and sent back to where they came from.
The point is, in the United States of America, our Constitution weights more heavily the protection of the innocent, right? Our system is designed to protect the innocent, and we do that through due process. You have to go through that, and that is my beef the way the administration is doing it.
Fine. If you can prove someone's a gang member or has committed a crime or is violent, round them up, put them on a plane, get them out.
But you have to prove that because it's going to happen. It is happening.
You're grabbing people that are hanging out outside of a quick trip somewhere or outside of a, or outside of a grocery store, because they might look the part, or they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they, you know, happen to be someone's father, they happen to be a union member, in the case of the Maryland man, someone working on, she's a sheet metal workers, a member of the sheet metal workers union, actually, and a father and a husband.
So this is crazy stuff. It's unacceptable.
And frankly, every American should be appalled by this very un-American approach to usurping due process. And I'll continue to speak up about it.
Thank you. I will share that.
I must have missed it. I was scrolling.
I was looking for else out there. You're tweeting a lot.
You're posting. I like that.
You're posting and you're going on Fox. So, you know, it snuck by me.
I will share it though. Can I put it a different way too, Tim? Yeah, please.
Ask yourself this. I always encourage people to say, okay, you want to, you know, round up criminals and send them out.
I do too. In the name of efficiency, how many innocent people are okay getting wrapped up in that? Right? Are you okay with five? With 10, with 20, right? How many innocent people are you okay with, you know, getting rid of due process and just inadvertently ending up on a plane or a bus to some foreign mega prison? Like, I'm not okay with any innocent people being rounded up.
But, you know, there are people out there, literally there are people out there that will say, yeah, I'm okay with 10. I'm okay with 20.
That's nuts, right? And frankly, that's just not who we are. I appreciate all that.
Do you not think, though, that some of your colleagues have been not as loud on this? And we're just talking about this. This is insane.
Like, this is Stalin stuff. Maybe I'm just missing it.
Yeah, I think there are some people who are still reluctant to wade into the immigration debate generally. They're just sensitive or afraid of wading into it.
I'm certainly not. I represent a district of immigrants and refugees.
20% of my constituents are born outside of the United States. So I'm in favor of smart, lawful immigration.

I'm in favor of a pathway to citizenship for people who are here lawfully and who want

to normalize their status.

These are business owners.

These are the people that I represent.

These are families that go to school with my children.

I can attest to their positive impact on our country.

But I also believe that we haven't had a secure border. We need to have a secure border too.
That is true. And I also believe that we need to get rid of violent offenders and enforce the law.
So we can and must do both. And nobody's ever going to tell me in the United States of America that we can't accomplish something like this.
The things we have done historically, it is small thinking to think that we can't do these things and do them effectively. All right.
We're over time, so we're doing 20-second answers each. Bro talk.
Final segment. Number one, do you have any advice for Secretary Noem on how to hold a firearm? Yeah.
Listen, if you don't know how to do it, don't do commando cosplay and just don't do it. Right? Like, I see this all the time.
People holding firearms, they're not holding them right. They're pointing the muzzle at somebody.
It just looks stupid. Stop it with the commando cosplay trying to pretend you're tough.
Yeah, close to an Alec Baldwin situation with Kristi Noem. For the, we'll put up a picture.
Okay, number two, what's your, your guns are looking good? What's your workout routine? We've got an HHS secretary doing shirtless, you know, shirtless bench presses. Do you have any shirtless bench presses in your future? I don't know about shirtless.
Maybe. I mean, maybe I need to go there.
I don't know. I am training right now for the Army Physical Fitness Test.
The brand new test that was just rolled out a couple of years ago, I'm taking it in July. So I'm in a big train-up period for that.
And I'm also of the age now where I have to do variation. So I mix it up.
I'll run. I'll do calisthenics.
I'll do P90X. I'll do weightlifting.
So just as much variation as possible to kind of avoid injury and keep it real. We'll keep an eye on it.
I'll send you some of those old Paul Ryan workout routines. All right, last thing.
Michael Malone brought Denver its first NBA championship. We did him dirty.
They fired him with three games left. Do you have any hot takes on this? I can't believe it.
I don't know, man. It's weird going into the playoffs, firing Malone, the winningest coach in Nuggets history.
I understand they've been in a losing streak, lost the last four, and they wanted to shake it up. I will say this, though, that the owners of the Nuggets are engaged.
They're involved. They want a winning team, which I appreciate.
It's kind of like in the best tradition of Pat Bolin, who was a very involved owner and pushed the Broncos. And I contrast that with the owner of the Rockies.
We need Jared Polis to buy the Rockies. I was telling them that.
I will always take an ownership group who's engaged and want a winning team and want to win over something like the Rockies, where they just don't care because of revenue sharing. They can make money whether they're winning or not.

I mean, that's just crazy.

Thanks to Congressman Jason Crowe.

I had a monologue about the beauty of Nikola Jokic prepared for this podcast,

but we ran out of time.

Too much crazy shit happened in the world, so we'll do it another time.

Come back soon.

All right, thanks.

All right, everybody.

Thanks to Catherine Rampell for educating us in the economy

to Congressman Jason Crow

for the Nuggets chatter

and everything else

hopefully all the demons

are expelled from you and yours

this evening

I'm praying for you

and if not

or even if so

I'll be back tomorrow

for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast

and we'll see you all then

peace I'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast, and we'll see you all then. Peace.
Peace. I am on the bigger things I just bought a limousine You live like me in your dreams I just quit the nicotine If you throwing dick at me That shit should be big at least Nigga, I'ma bring the heat I'ma bring the cold You should bring your skis I'm a fucking queen I am expeditiously Are you off a key? I would never let you in my VIP We are enemies, we are foes Who are you and what are those? You are gross.

Percocet.

Got you playing with your nose.

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.