Stephanie Ruhle: Unlimited Money and No Rules

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is Wednesday. We're in the third day of Donald Trump's second presidency.
There's only like 1,300 or 1,400 or so days to go, so no big deal. I'm excited to be here.
First time we get to turn the tables. Stephanie Ruhl, host of the 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhl on MSNBC.
She's a senior business correspondent with NBC News. She was formerly an anchor for Bloomberg and a managing director at Deutsche Bank.
What's going on, Steph? Hey, just here covering the administration. Are you excited about this? Do you have four years of 11 p.m.
commentary on Donald Trump's antics in you mentally? Yes. And for everybody who's like, oh, I can't do this.
Check yourself. Every day you and I have the opportunity, whether it's on a podcast, whether it's on a television show, to talk to the American people and not be against him or for him, but just cover this, right? We are living in the age of misinformation and we can sit here and bitch and moan about how we're flooded with lies, which we are, or we could realize we have these platforms.
Let's do our part. Let's cover them.
Is this cope? Do you really feel this way? Did you say cope or cope? Yeah, are you coping? Is this you convincing yourself about this because you have to go into the salt mines every day and talk about this or is this honest or is this true? Oh my God, it's completely true. Like, listen, is it tiring? Yeah, but it's tiring to do everything.
You and I are both parents. Would it be tiring for me to be lining up at school drop-off and organizing a bake sale? Hell yeah.
Okay. We are living in an extraordinary time where I do think our democracy is at risk.
And every day we have a chance to tell the truth and cover this. And while there's huge pressure not to call our leaders out, speak truth to power, let's do it.
Yeah. Is it like, oh my God, wouldn't I love to be sitting on a beach in Bermuda? Sure.
Wouldn't everybody like to do that? But as far as jobs go, you and I have pretty great ones. You're making me feel guilty.
And if you don't want to do it and I don't want to do it, a whole lot of other people will take these jobs. Yeah, you're bucking me up right now.
I was in the green room. I was talking about how I've been weeknight drinking.
You're like, I'm not drinking. You know, I'm keeping it sober.
I'm excited. This is fun.
And I'm beaten down. Like, I need you.
I need you to, like, be my wake-up call in the morning.

Be like, you got this, Tim.

Or guess what?

Weeknight drink and realize you're weeknight drinking in an awesome town like New Orleans or New York City.

These are blessed lives.

Okay, this is my other point.

Yes, these are dark times.

But you know what?

Darkness does not beat darkness.

Love does.

So just realize this moment we're in.

Be excited about it and go for it.

God, I needed this.

I think it's on your friday night 11th hour show where you have kind of a little happy hour vibe going yeah and, and you were ranting about how you have more masculine energy than Mark Zuckerberg and talking about how all these like CEOs like put in their own DEI programs are now mad at themselves and their own employees. And they're all, I don't think you said the P word, but you know, we can say it now in Donald Trump 2.0 and you seem to maybe be implying it deep down.
And I was like, I need to talk about this stuff with Steph. First of all, Mark Zuckerberg is obviously the wrong person, the wrong messenger when it comes to masculine energy, right? Like, again, I'm not joking.
Like, I have more than he does. But beneath what Zuckerberg is saying, like, he's not just the wrong messenger.
He's using the wrong word.

And I bring it up because there is truth. And I'm not saying I support it or I don't support it.
There is truth behind what he's saying in terms of a lot of business leaders. It's not that they're saying they want masculine energy.
They're saying, and again, this is not an endorsement. This is who I Sure.
They want to be the boss again. They do not like that over the last six years, tons of companies have had their employees unionize or form different kinds of employee groups, right? They're not happy that they can't get their employees back to work.
And while they understand that employees are saying, well, I don't want to, my lifestyle has changed. CEOs are saying, come back to work.
You may have been able to complete the tasks of your job during COVID, but our productivity is down. And they're not saying I'm against DEI, but many of them feel like DEI became this thing that was involved in every single conversation they had.
And again, I'm not advocating for it, but you've heard it over and over from business leaders saying for tons of job openings, they were under a huge amount of pressure for it to be a diversity candidate. I mean, at our own company, right? At NBC, there was a period of time in the last five years when Cesar Conde took over and he put an initiative in.
He put an initiative about diversity hires. Lots of people were excited about it and lots of people under the hood weren't.
And so part of what we're hearing from Zuckerberg, right? Zuckerberg's taking it really far and Mark Andreessen is taking it really far, but lots of businesses would say, man, in the last five years, the pressure we were under to stand up and speak out and give money or take action on social justice stuff, we don't want to do it anymore. We want to focus on our customers, our shareholders, and our employees.
And while we want to be sure our mission aligns with our employees, it doesn't need to be. Like, where you work doesn't have to align with all of your politics.
And so, again, I'm certainly not defending Zuckerberg or corporate America. You're teasing him, really.
Yes. But there is a lot of space.
There are a lot of business leaders that are saying, I'm done ruling by committee. I'm the boss.
I'm going to get to decide. Okay.
But yes, Zuckerberg being the face, the voice of this is just so bananas now that he's a Dave Portnoy lookalike. I mean, I heard him on that podcast referring to food as fuel.
And this is my last Zuckerberg point for everyone going, when did he change? What happened? He didn't change. Go watch the social network.
When Facebook, Facebook wasn't the first company he started. He had another website and you remember what they did? they raided hot girls.
That super nerd at Harvard was holed up in his room, uninvited to even the dorm mixer. And he created a website to rate how hot girls were.
How did he rate it? In terms of the level of girls that will reject me? So my point is just, he didn't suddenly make an alpha male change. He's been this bro all along.
He's finally just trying to manifest it. We haven't seen Priscilla.
I noticed. Yes, we did.
Did she appear? Oh, this is the best. So we didn't see her all last week.
And I kept thinking about it. Like, this is this super smart, accomplished woman, like pretty extraordinary philanthropist.
We haven't seen her. She was at the inauguration, right? So that was kind of like the chef's kiss, right? So on one side, he's given Lauren Sanchez the once over looking down her, you know, who's.
And on the other side is his wife in a tweed jacket, buttoned up to her nose with giant pearls on. And I'm like, oh my mushkers.
Cause she was probably like, bro, you got to tighten this up. I do not want to sit next to you while you're on your, you know, I am Tarzan phase.
And then you get caught on video, you know, doing a creeper to Lauren Sanchez. I agree with everything you're saying as analysis, that this is how CEOs feel.
I mean, you talk to more CEOs than I do, even trickle down to the types of people that I talk to that work for CEOs. I'm not just saying it.
I'm just saying this is where you're at. I know you're not.
I agree with the analysis. Here's my thing, though.
When you're having these conversations, what I wonder, you mentioned, they felt like they had so much pressure to do all these initiatives, and that this is now an attempt that there can be some backlash against this. And I saw a post by my man, Tyler Austin Harper, and he wrote this.
None of the corporate overlords shrieking about liberation from wokeness want to own the fact that nobody put a gun to their head and said they needed to do insane progressive HR programming or pay Ibram X. Kendi $532 a minute for Zoom calls.
They could have simply done nothing, or they could have simply just done their little Citibank's gay pride float. Now, this isn't Tyler anymore.
This is me editorializing, and not done all the other stuff. They did it.
No, they were under a lot of pressure. From who? Not Joe Biden.
It wasn't like the Biden administration was breathing down their neck saying, you've got to do this ESG. Okay, I love you for saying this, because Joe Biden is not woke.
I mean, if there's a criticism of Joe Biden, it's, is he definitely awake? This didn't come from the Biden administration, but there are definitely parts of the Democratic Party that are super progressive and demanding about their progressive goals. And there's loads of advocacy groups, right? There are loads of groups out there that in the last five years, you know, they were making lists.
Here are the companies that are giving to this group. And here are the companies that aren't.
And they were hanging those lists and calling those CEOs out. And it was a headache.
But you bring up a good point. It was not President Biden himself.
But it was also a little bit of a headache of their own making. This is what I'm saying Can we bring some masculine energy, Mr.
CEOs? And I do notice we're worried that simultaneously saying DEI has become a problem and have gone overboard, all of the oligarchs sitting right behind Donald Trump on stage are men, are white men, except for Sundar. Yes.
So it's like, I guess we haven't fully, you know, achieved balance quite yet, but when it comes to gender, but it's like these guys that want to bring masculine energy, they could have just said, Hey, activist group writing a press release about how my company doesn't have the appropriate number of whatever, you know, since I'm gay, I can just use gays as the example, like gay employees, like pound sand, like we're trying to get money for our shareholders. We're doing the best we can.
Like, they could have had balls. Like, why did they need Donald Trump winning to give them balls, I guess is my point.
Listen, it is a cultural shift, right? There was this groundswell that we saw in the last five years, a lot more power go to the labor side, not the boss side. The boss side did pretty good the last five years, too, though.
I'm a capitalist. This is why I I'm saying I'm like, I don't get why they're so much more sensitive than me.
I'm generally on all their side. Look, if the economy was doing poorly, if their stock prices were going down, none of that was happening.
They just didn't like the hassle. I guess this is what I'm trying to get under it.
They didn't like the hassle. It wasn't really like their shareholders were being hurt by this or that their bottom line was being hurt.
They didn't like the hassle. No shareholders were being hurt.
No bottom line was being hurt. They didn't like the hassle of every time they were making a big hire in their company, somebody on their board pushing them on, well, have you met with diversity candidates? Why are you hiring another person like this? And so you've hit the nail on the head.
Show me a company that's bottom line was decimated or even hurt by this. Bud Light, I guess.
For a minute. Yes.
Yes. Bud Light made a marketing guffaw that I think that even that silly, tiny, small campaign was misguided in who their customers were.
And then it turned into this giant, cultural, devastating move. But that's finding its way back.
I mean, that was just a set of unfortunate circumstances. But you've hit the nail on the head that the wokeness wasn't crushing any company's bottom line, not that I can think of.
You're 100% right that more than anything, it's a headache and a time suck. It wasn't really hurting people's businesses, but woke has become a boogeyman.
And I think that oftentimes Democrats are so consumed and careful with being inclusive that it's to their own detriment. I'll take it from woke to economic terms.
We had so many economic wins, or there's so many times I think they could take a victory lap or dunk a basketball, but they're so concerned about offending or angering someone. It's like Democrats don't want to sing happy birthday until every kid in America has a cupcake.
And because of that, they end up losing the messaging battle. We can nitpick about the Democrats a little more in a second, but I just, you're talking to these guys and I'm not.
So I just want to pick your brain on this because this is another thing that I just think about. I also am annoyed by some of the stuff.
I had to do an HR training the other week that was like for a child and, you know, and the way that they talk to you, it's condescending. And it's like, and all the situations they put you in it's like you know what if an asian person in the office and a white person had a disagreement it's like why are we doing all so like there's some of this stuff that is stupid okay but that's also why donald trump gives them a permission structure because he's so out there in being brutal and inappropriate and lying all the, you know, it's almost like, well, if that guy can do that, at least I can get back to here.
I mean, what infuriated me about, you know, there was that FT article last week of a bunch of business people and it was specifically bankers who were like, oh my God, we can be ourselves again. Like we can use the P word and the R word at work.
It's a new dawn. And the best part about that complete P of a banker is that he was anonymous.
We can send a P word on the Bullock podcast again. That's nice.
He was anonymous. If you're so excited about the new dawn and saying all your dirty words at work again, well, why were you anonymous? And by the way, bullshit to you, the FT, that you allowed that person to be anonymous.
Okay. This is just a personal gripe I have.
No one should get to be an anonymous source in a story unless they're truly at risk, unless their job is at risk, unless their life is at risk. The new standard that we've set in journalism that you can just talk shit and be anonymous, that's called dangerous gossip.
Yeah. I said this during the first Trump term.
I was like, why are we letting Kellyanne shit talk Bannon anonymously? That's not serving anything. Like if there's a whistleblower, sure.
If there's somebody that's like leaking you something that they're not supposed to, sure. But like trash talking, you know, saying, oh yeah, I get to say retard now.
Okay, then. All right.
If you can, then let's say it. What bank are you at again? Let's hear it.
And by the way, I think you were probably saying it before if you're saying it now. Great.
You want to say retard at work? Go for it. If you think we're back to the good old days, I double dog dare you to take your clients to a strip club next week and expense it, and your ass is getting fired.
We'll see how it goes. So anyway, I wanted to set the table with that because I'm saying I concur that there are some annoying things about the post, the shift, right? There's maybe there was overstepping.
Maybe some of the stuff was silly. But if you're making a risk assessment, these CEOs are at the top of their game, right? Like, and their job every day is like risk reward.
How do I make money? How do I mitigate risk? Like, it is astonishing to me that none of them looked at Donald Trump and were like, okay, well, the reward is I won't have to do diversity interviews again, I guess, or people will come back into the office. But the risk is going to be, who knows, 25% tariff, the tanks, the economy, like who who knows what this guy could do? He's unpredictable.
He's chaotic. But Tim, remember, he did not have overwhelming support during the campaign.
They didn't back him then. But they didn't oppose him either, really.
Yeah, but that's also not their job, too. Right, right? So an overwhelming majority of Fortune 500 CEOs that did speak about politics backed Kamala Harris.
Trump won, and then the table got reset. And they know from the last administration, and I'm going to create two groups of CEOs, but they know from the last administration, if you want to get shit done, play ball with him.
You don't want to be Disney. You don't want to be in the position that Bob Iger was in and you're spending countless hours and millions of dollars battling nonsense culture war battles with the government.
So they're like, I want to play ball with Trump because I want to get stuff out of him. He's the most transactional president in modern history, maybe ever, who at this point, people keep saying he's focused on his legacy.
He's focused on enriching himself and it's working. Okay.
He's not tied to any ideology. Look what he's done in the last couple of weeks, just with crypto alone.
We used to talk about Donald Trump, the failed businessman. He ain't failed anymore.
He is finally worth billions of dollars, but there's two different kinds of businessmen. There are some that have gone so far over the top.
I'm looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg, forgetting that in many ways, Donald Trump is a lame duck president who will be out of power in

two years.

And then you've got, like, to me, the Jamie Diamonds of the world who like, yeah, of course

they're going to work with the president.

Of course they're going to work with the Treasury Department.

And if Jamie Diamond gets asked to go down to the White House now that Trump's in office,

I'm sure he will.

But the whole cartwheeling down to Mar-a-Lago, dancing the foxtrot with Trump, doing the

Thank you. White House now that Trump's in office, I'm sure he will.
But the whole cartwheeling down to Mar-a-Lago, dancing the foxtrot with Trump, doing the Macarena with him, and then giving him an unlimited amount of money is silly and sophomoric. But those CEOs that were right behind him at the inauguration, the reason it matters, right? And I'm sure people are going, do you remember all the Democrats, all the people who gave money to Biden? Remember George Soros? Sure, I do.
There's nothing like the Musk situation in the Biden administration. There's nothing like the Musk situation.
A man whose business is built on government contracts. Trump said it on Inauguration Day, among all the things he wants to do, and he's like, and maybe we're going to head to Mars and put a flag on Mars.
Look back. Elon Musk has been saying since 2016, I think I saw him in an interview in 2019.

He may have even been brought to tears.

It might have been with Kara Swisher, where his number one goal in this world is to go

to Mars.

Okay.

It's what space exploration is what Jeff Bezos wants more than anything.

And yes, on one level, you could say these are the richest men in the world, but they do not have enough money for big time space exploration. So if you see Donald Trump now put all this money in sending us to Mars, right? He just dismantled this space exploration council that Elon Musk's lobbyists have been trying to dismantle because they don't want any regulations.
They want unlimited government dollars and no regulations so these boys can go to outer space.

Now, when and if this happens, what I want you to do is go see Trump's base. You can't find me

one single voter out there who is unhappy with the economy, with education, with immigration,

with their lot in life, who are also saying, but I would love for us to spend tens of billions of dollars going to Mars. Those men who are standing behind Trump already have more money than you could ever imagine.
What they don't have is unlimited power. And Donald Trump is saying, for an algorithm that works in my favor, for controlling information to only spit out what I want on all these things and to give you no regulation, I want you guys to line my pockets and show the world that the biggest business people out there are my homeboys.
And that's why it's concerning. One more on just the CEOs, because your Jamie Dimon point is, I think, appropriate.
And it's another one of the reasons I want to talk about this, because I think that's reasonable. I mean, it might not be how I would want to act as a CEO, but it's defensible, right? Like he has this, he has a lot of contingencies, you know, he's not down there tossing Trump salad.
If he has to do it, he has to do it like, but whatever. Right.
Okay. But here's the thing with some of these guys, like, and, and, and my colleague Jonathan last wrote about this for this for his tryout the other week it's like isn't the point of having fuck you money that you can say fuck you no no no isn't that the whole that's why they call it fuck you money right because a very small percentage of people who even have fuck you money it right i'd like to think if i had fuck you money then i would actually go lead a life.
I would move to Hawaii. I'd live in the South of France in the summer, but they don't.
These type of people who are that successful are adrenaline addicts. They are trolling the earth for their next high, right? If you look at some of the biggest guys in private equity, you would think at 78 years old, they would be retired, right? Surrounded by a bevy of either hot young women.
They would either be surrounded by their wife of 50 years and their extraordinary children or 17 hot pinup girls that they met on OnlyFans. But either one of those categories, I can see, but they're not.
These guys continue to spend all of their lives on planes searching for the next deal

because they're addicts.

They're adrenaline addicts.

And they already have all the money.

And what they now want, what they desire is unlimited power.

That takes us to Elon.

It's truly astonishing.

I don't think that anybody's really wrapped their mind around it adequately, like that the largest government contractor was the largest donor to the president is now going to have an office in the White House. And according to a report from Jeff Stein out today, there's an internal fight about that office.
Initially, it was not going to be inside the White House. Musk wanted it to be.

Musk wanted technology and AI access to government data that you can only get if you're on the inside so that he can—

I remember, he didn't divest himself.

He has not gone through any conflicts of interest vetting.

He doesn't have to get confirmed because he's like, oh, I'm just volunteering.

This ain't volunteering.

This will make him exponentially wealthier and more powerful.

More than that, it also is going to allow him to go after his foes. And you're already seeing this publicly.
He does it on Twitter, trolling people. But there was an announcement, I guess, yesterday that Trump was trying to take credit for the investment that OpenAI and Sam Altman is going to do now.
It was like one of these stupid PR gambits. Tim Cook did this for Trump last time.
They're like, hey, we're going to build a new plant and you can get the credit, sir. So Altman was trying to do that.
And Musk is tweeting, Altman doesn't have the money. They don't have the money because he's got a rivalry with him.
And so it's like from him, so he's undermining Trump and, and then he's going to have access to the, to the data and information inside the white house. I mean, like it's an unprecedented situation.
Unprecedented. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been foes, have been rivals for years.
So I actually think two things. I think that Donald Trump doing this big AI announcement with Oracle, Microsoft, Sam Altman was also a way for Trump to kind of put Elon Musk on notice, but to say to everybody out there who's been saying for weeks, Trump's the real president or their co-presidents, Trump saying, no, no, no, no, no, Elon, you're not my only tech boyfriend.
There's only one boss in town and I'm the daddy. So on one hand, Trump said to Elon, you can back off.
But Elon's not wrong in saying they don't have the money because these artificial intelligence companies, these guys were working with the Biden administration, right? Biden could have done this, could have announced it, right? But what Trump did was take off all the AI regulations that Biden was putting in place with his executive order and rushing to make the announcement. So to me, it just sort of encapsulated both presidents, Democrats who are so overly careful, right? Right.
Lena Kahn style, like, you know, I'm going to stand in the way because I'm so overly careful. Or Trump, who's like, who cares if we have the money? Let's just announce it.
But I will say this. Democrats, when they do things that they believe are good, do a better job of talking about it, right? Lena Kahn did many, many things where she was trying to protect the American consumer and they got absolutely no credit for it, right? Show me one voter out there who said, they are really trying to protect me.
They're trying to make sure that we don't end up with monopolies and conglomerates that control pricing. Instead, the whole business community was like, I effing hate Lena Kahn.
She stands in the way of business. This administration is anti-business.
And the Biden administration needs to do a... Okay, ready? I'm going to ask you this question.
Ready? Joe Biden forgave billions and billions of dollars in student debt. He ended up in a legal battle to do it.
It made a lot of people that didn't have college educations, those blue collar worker, you know, the Trump voter angry saying, why are you giving this free money? Why are you forgiving the debt of college educated people with tons of opportunities? And then there was other wealthy people that are like, Biden's buying votes. My question is, to the millions of people that got their student debt forgiven, where was the Kamala Harris advertisement? Where was the campaign event of people standing there saying, I just got all of my student debt forgiven.
And because of that, I can start this business. I could buy this house.
It changed my life. So the Biden administration does these things that are good for many, many people that also get lots of criticism and they have not figured out how do you convert that into support and votes? I ask you, have you seen one person who got their student debt forgiven who said Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is getting my vote because of that? You can take the host out of the host chair, but she's still going to be hosting the show and asking me questions.
I'm asking you. No, look, they're in the sour spot on this.
I'll just give a couple of examples. We're in a Tom Friedman for a second.
I like talking to humans. And so the humans I talk to are Uber drivers, gentlemen at the gay bar, and baristas and security guards.
So over the past little bit, you mentioned the student loan thing. I said this during the summer, probably in this podcast, the guy recognized, the young guy recognized me at the bar, comes out to me and he's like, Hey, he's like, when's Joe Biden going to forgive my student loans? Right.
Because he didn't get, he didn't make the cut or whatever. Right.
Like it was like the age I didn't have, you know what I mean? I wasn't, I wasn't asking. All I heard was from people who didn't get theirs forgiven.
Like what the hell? Everybody but me. Yeah.
So he ended up in this sour spot, right? Where like a lot of kind of college educated people that were already in the Biden tent got loans forgiven and did kind of give credit. But like, you know, there wasn't a lot and not a net gain.
And then the people they were struggling with, working class folks, young folks who are pissed about Gaza, were hearing about it.

And we're like, where's my bag?

Right?

So I was just downstairs this morning.

And I was talking with a guy at the security guard at this hotel, since I'm stuck at the Hotel California, Trump's Inauguration Week.

I can never leave because I can't go home to New Orleans because of the snow.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

You're in the greatest city in America.

Maybe the world.

Boo-hoo to you.

But I've made friends with my guy downstairs.

And he starts ranting to me about the TikTok thing and the $9 congestion fee. He comes in from upstate.
He's like, I got to pay the $9 now. I'm an hourly worker.
He's like, maybe Trump's going to fix that for me, like he fixed the TikTok thing. That's what this guy says to me.
Whatever you think about the congestion fee and the student loan bailout and the TikTok ban,'m on two of those three. I'm on the democratic side of the actual policy.
But like you also have to think about like how people interact with stuff and how it engages with their lives. And they're so bad at like talking about it and doing like thinking about gimmicks that actually help people.
And I think that you've seen this on all the stuff.

Like you mentioned this AI thing.

They're doing some regulation to protect people, but they're not messaging about it, so they get no credit for it. But they do get backlash among all the rich guys that are now supporting Donald Trump because they want unregulated AI.
It's just time and again, you find yourself in a political sour spot where you're trying to do the right thing, but not finding a way to talk about it so that people realize you're helping them. And I just think that is fundamentally their biggest challenge.
In TikTok, and this isn't on Democrats, it's on all of government that voted to ban it.

In TikTok, they did not sufficiently explain to and convince the American people why TikTok is a national security risk. Because by and large, we have all basically, we're under the assumption we've given away our data.
We've sold our personal information. What's the difference, whether it's China, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg.
And we no longer trust our government or take their word for it. And so people love the TikTok.
It's one of the only platforms that I would say, I don't use it actively, but that people would say gives them joy. And Democrats failed to say, we're doing this to protect you and here's why.
So I just think for all the good that they did, my gosh, they're terrible at messaging it. And part of it is being unbelievably careful about messaging.
They become so hamstrung in making sure they cross every T and dot every I. Nobody believes a bullshit press release that's gone through seven lawyers.
It's why Donald Trump ends up with the amount of support from young people, because whether it's a lie or the truth, he lets it rip. And people connect with letting it rip much more than they do a scripted speech.
I totally agree. And it's hard to find Democrats right there who are out there who can let it rip.
And it's like, there needs to be a deprogramming class. We can host a deprogramming seminar.
We're not doing DEI seminars anymore, so we can maybe do talking, like talking like a human deprogramming seminar. But look how successful Republicans were with the whole trans youth sports thing.
Okay? All of my children go to single-sex schools. Okay? There's not even an opportunity for a trans athlete to be on one of the fields.
Yet every sporting event I would attend, parents were talking about it. Republicans found an opening, ran the table, and Democrats were so panicked about possibly offending someone.
They left that space open and let it get filled with lies and had a narrative told for them. I'm not even advocating that they change positions on any of these things.
It's like, but find things that resonate with people, right? Find gimmicks. That is politics.
Unfortunately, that's politics. It might feel crass or whatever.
And talk about it like normal people. It's hard to think about something that people can grab onto.
They're like, oh, I'm excited that the Dems are pushing this. Okay.
Here's what could happen for them though. It could work out in their favor.
Donald Trump could fuck everything up. Right.
And that could end up being what, what, what people grab onto. And I want to just want to go back to what you were talking about earlier about, about crypto.
I think that there are a lot of people, a lot of people listen to this podcast that if you're not in the crypto world, it is, it's hard to understand. And you tune it out.
You hate it. You're like, oh, I can't stand it.
Right. And so as soon as you start hearing the words, they talk about the exchanges and all this, you're like, whatever.
Okay. Blockchain.
But here's the thing. They have essentially said that crypto is going to be unregulated.
They've got rid of Gary Gensler. AI is unregulated.
And you bring in this new group, these pump and dump schemes, right? Where people create fake coins that have no actual value, like Trump did. Insiders put a bunch of money in, they try to get regular rubes to put the money in.
The stock goes up, they make a lot of money. Stock crashes.
Real people lose their money.

Womp, womp. Right? I think that that is going to be de facto legal during the next four years because they're not going to regulate it, right? Yes, it will.
And lots of folks will say, well, who cares? If those rubes want to spend their disposable income and lose all their money, not my problem. But it will be our problem if they allow crypto to become so big, which is what they are letting happen, that suddenly the government bails out all these people who lose.
Then we're going to certainly care. Yeah.
Or if it gets tied in, and this is what I wanted to ask you about, any of your old Deutsche Bank pals are thinking about it. To me, it feels like some of the banks are going to get exposed for this, right? Because one of the regulations that the Biden administration was trying to put in was like, you know, creating some rules, you know, kind of like they did in Dodd-Frank that like separates the risky investments out from, you know, whatever, the more the stable like mortgages, etc.
That feels like that's going to end now. So the banks have like kind of been on the fence.
Like in the early days, the Jamie Diamonds and the Larry Fink, that's the CEO of BlackRock of the world were like, crypto schmipto. Like I'm not up for it.
I mean, it was funny. Even Eric Trump, when he was speaking at a crypto conference a couple of months ago after Trump won, I think it was in Dubai.
He said, yes, my dad used to dog on crypto and we weren't involved. But after January 6th, when nobody would bank with us, when nobody would do business with us, we found crypto.
Okay, right there. You found crypto because it was in the dark corners of the world where bad things could happen.
But eventually, like they always do, lots of banks held off on crypto. They were like, nah, it doesn't feel so good.
But it got bigger and bigger. And there was more and more money to be made.
And then there's no rules on it. They're like, shit, I'm getting in the game, too.
Yeah. And this is broadly about Trump.
Who knows? You know? And it's like, we might have got through that first four years if it wasn't for the pandemic. You know? And like that first three years, he kind of bungled his way through, you know, like sometimes we like to, in America, we like to treat our presidents as if they're omniscient and all good things that happen in the world are their credit and all bad things that happen in the world are their fault.
But like, sometimes it's just luck. Like you're in there.
Like Bill Clinton was in there at kind of a good time for the economy. And he's also did some smart things, right? But like, sometimes it's just luck.
Sometimes you have bad luck. You're in there.
And so maybe Trump will have good luck. He is walking into a lucky position, right? He is being handed a very good economy.
He's being handed a very good economy. And now he's going to extend corporate tax cuts and take regulation off.
I mean, like businesses are extremely excited about it. Yeah.
There is also a potential crash. I mean, like the types of studies he's talking to doing, we haven't had a recession in a while, the tariffs are unpredictable, what the impact is going to be this exposure on crypto is unpredictable.
Like what you know, if like, imagine if FTX had been more tight, right? Like, at that time, FTX was pretty separate. But if FTX was like tied more broadly into the broader financial system, like that could have been a massive crisis that hurt regular people, not just people that got screwed over by Sam Franklin Freed and got in on his drift.
But at moments like this, I don't think big businesses are thinking about regular people. Yesterday marked the 15-year anniversary of Citizens United, right? Citizens United, which opened the floodgates for corporate dollars into politics.
I think over $5 billion was spent in this last election cycle. So you can connect the two of the everyday voters saying government, and this is on both sides of the aisle, government doesn't work for me anymore.
I don't believe in the government. What we need to do in the next four years, pay attention.
These risks that you're talking about are going to be devastating to the everyday person if they happen. Big companies have less and less fear because what have they learned over the last 15 years? The government does bail you out.
They do. Whether it's Silicon Valley Bank or the banks after the financial crisis and the TARP money.
It's like all these people that are going into the, Andreessen and Sachs and all these people that are going into the White House now with a mandate that like, we're going to deregulate. We're getting the government out of AI.
They all got bailed out by the government, by the Biden government. These are the same people who were begging for Silicon Valley Bank to be rescued.
The very, very same people who were like, this small business, when Silicon Valley Bank went under, all those people immediately were pushing forward all their portfolio companies. Look at this small business run by this woman in the valley.
Look at this black owned barbershop campaign that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They all use that as their front.
Just like during the pandemic, all the huge private equity firms went to Steve Mnuchin and went to Jared Kushner and said, we're not saying that we need a bailout, but a private equity firm backs lots of small and mid-sized companies, and they're saying they need a bailout. And so it's funny to me when they're like, oh my God, Joe Biden and Democrats spent so much money on so much COVID money.

That's what put us in this inflationary spiral.

They did. And I would say that last bit of whatever the, was it the American rescue plan was, you could debate whether or not they needed it, but it was Democrats and Republicans spent an enormous amount of money pulling us out of COVID.
And you could debate that it was a too much money. Did it put us in this inflationary situation? It did.
But think about how bad things were during COVID. And then we pulled out of it.
Yeah. I'll think about how bad the actual Great Recession was compared to us.
Nobody wants regulations. You're a parent.
You're a parent, right? My teenage sons, they would love no rules and unlimited money, right? Until they crash the car and they have a party at my house and everything gets broken. But nobody thinks that way when they're in the moment.
Now you're talking about 1999 in suburban Denver. All right.
I got to get on Scotty Bessette before I lose you. So he testifies.
He's going to be confirmed. He is.
Bessette. I'm mispronouncing his name.
I got to get it right. The two interesting things with the testimony for me is, one, there's a Raphael Warnock exchange where he's like, so you're going to extend the Trump tax cuts for everybody to $1 million, $50 million, $100 million, $1 billion? You know, he keeps going up, and Besant's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to extend the Trump tax cuts even for billionaires.
He talks about the Trump tax cuts for corporations like it's life or death. He talks about like it's this existential crisis.
And the thing is, no one is saying, bring it back to 39%. No, no one's suggesting that he's in this, like companies will be running to Guernsey and, and, and, and strange parts of Ireland to, to, to re domicile.
Like it's a balancing game, right? You do not want to be too high because companies are going to say, it's just too damn expensive to do business here. But there's no reason to be extraordinarily low because there's no Republican who has explained to you or me how they're going to offset this.
Right. And so this is kind of what I wanted to get to, which is he was adamant about this, right? So it seems like the Trump administration position, as we know for right now, so they're going to extend all the Trump tax cuts, even for the richest people and all the corporations, which is going to be about a four or five trillion dollar price tag.
And you have at least a handful of House Republicans that still claim to care about the budget and they have a two seat majority. And so I just think with all of the craziness happening, it's like the Elon, you know, see Kyle salute and all the things you want to talk about.
Like the real fight that's coming is like in your wheelhouse, right? Is this like the Treasury Secretary's testimony? And maybe one way they try to fake their way out of it is by actually doing the tariffs because then they can be like, well, the tariffs will pay for this. It's kind of like an updated version of the tax cuts will pay for themselves.
It's like the tariffs will pay for the tax cut extension. And that's a real financial pickle, I think, that's for some people.
It is. But the thing about the economy is it's the hardest thing to lie about, right? People could watch the news or not watch the news or say, you know, you could fill them with misinformation and they could say, oh, it was Joe Biden's fault or Kamala Harris's fault.
At the end of the day, everybody knows how much their rent costs, how much their insurance costs, and how much their grocery bill costs. You've already seen Trump back off this, right? Like, we're going to lower your grocery prices.
He's already said, oh, well, that's really hard. One of his first executive orders was to remove the executive order Joe Biden put in place, which was capping prescription drug prices.
So Donald Trump does not want the economy to fall off the rails. Neither does Scott Besant.
But what I'm going to pay close attention to is, look at when they were working on the budget. They have Elon Musk weighing in and formerly Vivek now gone.
These guys have the old school libertarian views of like, let's actually do something about entitlement reform. Let's do something about Medicare and Medicaid.
Then all these actual Republicans in the Senate are like, hell to the no, we won't. We touch entitlements and I'm going to lose my job.
Right? So when you bring all these business people in, they look at things like Social Security on paper and they're like, shit, this is killing us. We have to have entitlement reform because we're running out of money.
And they're right on paper. But none of those business people have ever needed to get elected.
None of those people have ever, they fly right over the villages and head to Palm Beach. Okay.
They don't know what it's like to actually cut programs that people need. And Scott Besson doesn't know it.
Now, Scott Besson could have done a better job. Like when Bernie Sanders was grilling him on minimum wage, it is a Republican view to not raise the minimum wage federally.
It is a Republican view to do it on a state and local basis, right? And I'm not saying I feel that way, but I can hear the argument that what it costs to live in Birmingham, Alabama is different from what it costs to live in Williamsburg. So you could argue minimum wage should be different things in different parts of the country.
But if that's the Republican view, which it is, just say it, just say it, own it and do something about it. The challenge they're going to have is Scott Besson and Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick, they want entitlement reform.
They want cuts to those programs. But you know who doesn't want that? The actual members of Congress who set these laws, who set policies, because they need to get reelected.
And the MAGA voters. Elon Musk has never run for something.
He doesn't know what it's like. And the MAGA voters who are on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
All right, final question. I want to circle this back to the initial question.
Because of all we talked about, what's been undergirding all this? You have all the billionaires sitting behind Donald Trump. You have Scott Bessent saying that they're going to extend the tax cuts on the wealthiest and on all these corporations.
We have the vibe shift when it comes to, you know, whatever, DEI and cultural issues. Are these guys ready, your CEO buddies, your CEO sources, are they ready for what's coming? Because I think what they're setting themselves up for is, I think they're going to be wishing for the annoyance of DEI when it gets replaced with the annoyance of eat the rich.
Because populist economics is what's coming next from the left. And I think these guys are going to be begging for the struggle sessions about diversity hiring when what they're getting is mass protests about economic inequality.
You are so right on this. And they have this belief that Donald Trump has a mandate.
They have this belief that it was an overwhelming sweeping win. It wasn't.
Donald Trump won fair and square. What was it? 49 point, I don't know what, 8% of the vote.
He got it. But he didn't get 75%.
He didn't get 80%. Right? They have the slimmest, slimmest majority right now.
And so, yeah, I think they're overplaying their hand. And remember, he is a Donald Duck lame president.
He's got two years before the midterms. And we'll see what's about to happen.
It's like they're forgetting that Occupy Wall Street took place. And we could see this massive Eat the Rich movement.
We'll soon find out. We will.
Steph Ruhl, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me.
We're going to have a lot of reason for you to come back. It feels like the masters of the universe are back in vogue and back in power.
And so I love much to talk about. So thanks so much.
They are. Well, who knows? Maybe I'll be in New Orleans because the Washington Commanders could make it to the Super Bowl.
We could do this podcast live. I would love that.
I keep waiting for somebody to invite me. So if Jaden makes it, I assume that you'll be giving me your plus one.
And I'll you there in New Orleans. I love, I'm going to tell you for the last four days, if somebody looks up my search engine, I think I've watched 90 videos of Jaden Daniels.
I just love him. We love it.
It's been a Trump derange and syndrome and Jaden Daniels fan boy podcast this week. Cause you know, we need some light in our life.
Steph Ruhl, thank you so much. Everybody else.
Stop it. We are the light in our

life. Stop with this.
It's so dark. It is so dark if you leave the fucking lights off.
Be the light,

Tim. People are going to stop listening to this podcast if you tell them that.
All right. Thank

you, everybody. Come on back tomorrow.
We'll see you back here then. And I'll give you the darkness

you've become accustomed to, but maybe with a little happier me in, thanks to that pep talk from Steph. We'll see right back.
The Holy Ghost and the Holy's Coast are moving to L.A. We've been dreaming of this feeling since 1988.

Mother, things have got to change.

I'm moving to L.A.

The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.