Jon Stewart on Trump’s 3rd Term Plans & Signalgate Lack of Accountability | Oren Cass

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From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news.

This is The Daily Show with your host, Jon Stewart.

Hello, everybody.

How are you?

Nice to see everybody.

My name is John Stewart.

Welcome to the Daily Show.

We got a great show for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen.

You're going to be most pleased with this one.

Our guest tonight, economist Oren Cass,

is going to be here later to discuss tariffs.

You're going to have a conservative economist bucking laissez-faire. Just f***ing watch it.
But first, we're going to check in with our good friend Democracy. Going to give him the old turn your head and cough.
How's Democracy doing? In some of his strongest comments yet, President Trump says he's considering his options to serve a third term in office, a breach of the Constitution's two-term limit for presidents. I'm sorry, considering the option? What are you trying to order off menu from the Constitution? Oh, yeah, I see you got two terms here, you got, two terms here.
But can I get it animal style?

What are you going to do, a third term?

How does that work exactly?

In a phone call with NBC, Trump saying, quote,

there are methods which you could do it,

including possibly urging his vice president, J.D. Vance, to run

and then cede power back to Trump.

The president saying that's one method, but that there are others, too.D. Vance to run and then cede power back to Trump.
The president saying that's one method,

but that there are others too. Yes.
There are other methods.

And you tried one a few years ago.

There are other methods for staying in power beyond when you are

legally allowed to be there. Historically, some of them involve catapults.
Although maybe Trump has something more creative in mind with the Vance thing. Have you guys heard of the movie Face Off? Yeah.
So here's how it's gonna work. Trump will watch that movie as the military sees his power.
Like, what the f***? I'm sure at which point Chuck Schumer will say, I will allow it. Because in the third term, we think his popularity will go down to the 30s.
So aside from the president saying, I'm not leaving, is there any other image of the shambolic state of our democracy? Perhaps something that looks like what you might get if you fed the destruction of democracy into an AI meme generator? Oh, right. Elon Musk.
Okay.

The richest and most fertile man in the world went to Wisconsin, where he came out in a cheese hat

before giving million dollar checks to voters in an effort to influence the Supreme Court race

in Wisconsin. Hey, hey, you know what that's about? You know what that's about, Elon?

Their culture is not your costume, Musk.

Their people...

Do not appropriate their dairy chapeaus. You can really get a sense of the fraying of our democracy by tracing the arc of its symbolic headwear.
It's still a tri-corner, but it's not the same. Meanwhile, the process of streamlining our beautiful democracy continues apace.
And a couple of months into Trump's second of his, let's say, four to seven terms, he continues to live up to his vaunted apprentice catchphrase, you're fired. More than 1,300 workers now fired at the Department of Education.
The IRS beginning to lay off more than 6,000 employees. The Social Security Administration will cut 7,000 jobs.
The U.S. Postal Service will trim its workforce by 10,000.
HHS will be dropping around 20,000 workers. The Department of Veterans Affairs looking to cut 80,000 jobs.
In the administration's defense, those veterans shouldn't have been having affairs in the first that's that's on them and by the way do we need a department for that the layoffs have been harsh unpredictable and needless to say the mainstream media has been outraged. So what's the end game here? Killing American jobs? They're risking hurting those hardworking Americans.
That bothers me. You're playing with real people's money, real people's jobs, and real people's lives.
Rooting for Americans to lose jobs. I'm sorry, that's empathy for Tesla workers.
Apparently Fox. Those are the only hardworking Americans whose jobs matter.
But the question is, with hundreds of thousands of civil servants being often haphazardly fired, is there any corner, no matter how small, of our current government that is safe from Musk's chainsaw of efficiency? President Trump telling NBC News he has no plans to fire anyone following that controversial Signal group chat. Yes! Veterans Affairs, Department of Education, USAID, f*** you, f*** you, f*** you! Because all is right at the Department of Accidentally Texting War Stuff to Reporters.
But fear not, regular civil service government parasites, perhaps this incident offers an opportunity for you all to get the kind of job security that clearly doesn't come from the quality of your work, but the assiness of your kisses. So, for instance, this Friday, when you, as as a civil servant have to send in your mandatory email to Doge listing the five things you did that week, you can keep your job by following the same strategies that these careless Snapchatters employed to keep their jobs.
Number one, don't write down what did I do this week? You know, I took my federal car and went to Hooters and cried there for seven hours. No.
You want to save your job, point the same finger of blame that they did for their indiscretions. It's important to remember why this powerful action took place in the first place,

because of Joe Biden's incompetence. The complete opposite approach from the fecklessness of the Biden administration.
In contrast to Joe Biden. Did something that the Biden administration did not do.
Did the job that Joe Biden wouldn't do. We take out people that the Biden team never could.
You get it? What did you do this week at work? Number one. I repaired the damage done by f***ing Joe Biden.
How could I be f***ing up now at my job considering how bad Joe Biden f***ed up before? It's not possible. You need to be in your job to repair his damage.
You were at the Hooters because Joe Biden wouldn't.

Or couldn't rage eat that many wings.

All right.

Now, you might be thinking, these doge guys are slicker than that.

They're not just going to fall for blame, Biden.

That's why we hired you. You're sharp.

It's not your only move.

If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to bleach bit.

Hillary Clinton's...

Bit bleaching.

Who amongst us hasn't tried to bleach our own bits?

I think...

Obviously, I'm referring to anuses.

So, what are we talking about?

Biden doesn't work? Throw a slash. Oh, f***.
Alright. Number one, that's where you fill in.
Blame Biden gets you 80% home. Hillary drives you the rest of the way in the trunk of her car shouting Benghazi.
Alright. Now, I know that's a bit of a big swing for your number one thing because here's the problem.

Neither Joe Biden nor Hillary probably work in your office, which is why for the number two thing you're going to write to the doge folks, you're going to bring that finger pointing technique a little closer to home.

The Yemen text group chat understood rule number one of self-preservation.

Me? No, it was that guy.

Because remember, you don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than your slowest coworker.
So CIA Director Ratcliffe, who were you faster than? I've understood from media reports, the secretary of defense has said the information was not classified. Boom.
By the way, nothing like the director of the CIA going, I read in the paper, secretary of defense was the guy to blame. I don't get reports.
I just read the New York Times. I have no f***ing idea.
He's blaming the secretary of defense. Secretary of defense Pete Hegg.
Seth, what do you say? I'm wondering if you feel, as the leader of the Defense Department, you have any level of responsibility.

Thank you for the question.

I'm responsible for ensuring that our department is prepared and ready to deter and defeat our enemies. My biggest weakness? I'm glad you asked.
I think it's that I rule too hard. I may be too awesome.
Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, maybe you should have known if this was classified or who was on the text chain. I defer to the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council.
Oh! The National Security Council has entered the chat. That's you, Mike Waltz.
Do we have ourselves a blame census? J.D. Vance.
Members of the administration, including my dear friend Mike, have taken responsibility for it. That is the coldest my dear friend Mike I have ever heard.
Anyway, Brutus, you were saying about your dear friend Caesar. Now, President Trump, do you want to join the pylon? Mike Walsh, he said he claimed responsibility i would imagine had nothing to do with anyone else it was mike i guess i don't know i always thought it was mike why are you asking me i'm just an innocent passerby i didn't see the accident officer but i but I gotta tell you, it looks like classic Mike to make.

Well, there you have it. Looks like the bottle

stopped spitting on Mike Waltz.

Time for you to take responsibility and French

kiss that doge chainsaw.

Unless you've obviously got a more plausible explanation

for how a journalist ended up on your incredibly

sensitive text chain.

You know, Laura, I'm not a conspiracy

theorist. Normally, that's a disqualifying position for this administration.
But go on. But of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president and he's the one that somehow gets on somebody's contact and then gets sucked into this group.
It's not somebody's contact. It was your contact.
And he wasn't sucked in by unseen gravitational forces. You added him to the chat.
Which brings us to number two. Number two on your Doge list.
What did you do this week? I did a ton of stuff. All of it was right until it was tricked by the lamestream media.
Can I tell you It's very hard to write backwards.

All right. That might save your job if you're a low-level staffer.
But what if you're the department head and Doge wants to know the five things that you did? How are you going to keep your job when it's your name on the bombs? Well, it's step three. Confidently and definitively admit nothing.

Thank you all for coming.

I've heard I was characterized.

Nobody was texting war plans.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Nobody's texting war plans.

I know exactly what I'm doing, exactly what we're directing.

And that's all I have to say about that.

I noticed this morning out came something that doesn't look like war plans.

And as a matter of fact,

they even changed the title to attack plans because they know it's not war plans.

You get it? We didn't endanger

troops in a war plan.

We endangered them in an attack plan. Who's the asshole now? You know, he must be so upset that every time he lands, everywhere he goes, the reporters keep finding him at every stop.
He's probably like, shit. Did I mistakenly add you guys to my travel group chat? Number three.
What did I do? I would tell you, but you're probably too stupid to understand, but it was awesome. I'm awesome.
That's number three. So now, one, two, three.
What do we got? Two more to go, right? Four and five. 60% of your work week is done.
We're past hump day and cruising to TGIF. And that sweet government cheese continues to roll in.
Maybe by day four, it's time you stop justifying your actions to Doge and start celebrating your actions. At the end of the day, what is most important is that the mission was a remarkable success.
What we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission. The real story here is the overwhelming success of President Trump's decisive military action against Houthi terrorists.
The last place I would want to be right now is a Houthi in Yemen. Not to be that grammar guy.
But a Houthi is not a place. You can't.
But the point is, for number four on the list, if they're not buying one through three, what did you do this week at the the department of agriculture i bombed the shit out of the houthis that now obviously these strategies may lead to some of your superiors saying things like so just bombing the houthis stops the whole problem because i think we've been bombing yemen for decades do we have a follow-up plan to that? And will journalists be on that follow-up chain too? At which point, case, we turn to number five. It's a Hail Mary.
And President Trump has spoken about how important it is for this administration to own their mistakes. We're bringing honor and integrity and accountability back throughout our government.
We're going to bring transparency and accountability back to our government.

You know the old statement,

the buck stops here, right?

Famous statement.

Well, I can say the same thing.

The buck stops here.

Boom, that old Harry Truman chestnut.

This is President Trump

living those accountability values.

Here he is when he was first asked

about the Signal Chat incident. I know nothing about it.
You're saying that they had what? I'm sorry, there's a buck now what? I was just f***ing with you. Accountability.
And you people bought it. No, no, no, my friends.
Number five is...

What?

That's the get out of jail free card when all other

justifications fail.

You can never go wrong

with your last list on your

doge five things you did this week should

always be, I have no idea what the f*** you're you're talking about hold on i think i'm getting a call and trump has deployed this strategy better than anyone for instance when asked if we're actually deporting like gay hairdressers with real madrid tattoos instead of venezuelan gang members the president stood on that principle i don't know know. You have to speak to the lawyers about them.

Or how about the Justice Department's bizarre decision to pause its case against Eric Adams if he promised to cooperate on immigration?

No, nothing about it.

Well, OK, but those are just his central policies.

Surely the buck literally stops with Trump with the launch of Trump's own crypto coin. I don't know much about it other than I launched it.
I don't know much about it other than I launched it. The president of the United States.
I don't know much about it except I launched it. Crypto coin, nuclear missiles.
I don't know much about it. I just launched them.
Hey, Mr. President, could you take this? Yeah.
Yeah. What's going to do with it? You launch it.
You start to wonder, does the buck stop anywhere with this dude? I don't know when it was signed because I didn't sign it. Other people handled it.
I don't know. You'll have to ask them.
I don't know what it is. No, I don't know what it is.
I heard about it the same time. Maybe you heard about it.
I don't know anything about it. I don't know.
You'll have to ask them. I don't know what it is, no.
I don't know what it is. I heard about it at the same time.
Maybe you heard about it. I don't know anything about it.
I don't know the situation. I know nothing about WikiLeaks.
It's not my thing. I don't know her.
I never met her. I have no idea who she is.
No, I don't take responsibility at all. I had nothing to do with that.
January 6th? January 6th is like your whole brand. It'd be like the Hawk to a girl going, actually, I only do hand stuff.
I'm not sure. Now you're grossed out.

So many things that Trump seemingly has no involvement in.

Is it possible he's been severed? Is that what all the choreography and merriment is about? Now, maybe you're saying, hey, the man's pushing 80. Maybe it's not a matter of trying to shirk responsibility.
Maybe he legitimately cannot remember any of this shit. I have a good memory and all that stuff, like a great memory.
I have a great memory. One of the great memories of all time.
Oh, well, then the only other thought here is that the I don't know, I don't remember is a cynical strategy to avoid the buck stopping anywhere near you and evading accountability at all cost. If only there was one clip that answered that

question.

Definitively.

Did I say I have a great memory or one of the best in the world?

One of the best in the world.

Is what the reporter reported you to say?

I don't remember that.

When we come back, Orrin Cass, don't go away. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower

than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing

about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Welcome back to the show by us tonight.
He is

the chief economist at American Compass. It's an economic policy think tank.
He writes the

newsletter, Understanding America. He's the author of the forthcoming book, The New Conservatives.

Please welcome to the program, Orrin Cass. Sarah!

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.
I wanted to have you on. I want to tell you, I really do enjoy your writing.

I follow the, I don't know what they're called now, Substack blog. Substack.
Substack. And I read your books.
I always find them, I don't necessarily maybe agree with all of it, but I always find it really interesting in really good faith. This is this idea of the new right on the economy.
Can you explain what's the deviation from previous orthodoxy and sort of what that entails? Sure. I think the best way to understand it is that, you know, we went through a period of 30 or 40 years where conservatives just had way too much faith in markets.
Just trust that you get out of the way and you're going to get great outcomes. And markets can give you great outcomes, but they don't guarantee great outcomes.
And so conservatives have been seeing, especially over the last decade, a lot of the things we care about, things everybody cares about. Do jobs pay enough to support a family? Are we too dependent on China for everything? Can we make computer chips in this country? Markets were perfectly happy to give us really bad answers on those questions.
And so conservatives are starting to say, well, wait a minute, we actually have to care about this and we have to be prepared to do something about it. Now, when you say this at the meeting with the other conservative economists, do they go, leave us? Like, it really seems like that is fundamental heresy on, you know, I've listened for years.
The reason we can't do sort of social engineering or social policy or redistribution of wealth is the government's not in the business of picking winners and losers. That is now often, the new right is saying actually we do.
Yeah, I think that's right. The new right is saying, actually, there are some things we really want to see win.

And that's what politics is.

What would politics be if you just pretended you sort of didn't care about anything?

You'd sort of have a lot of the very uninspiring Republican politics of the last few decades, I would say. Now, you started, though, you worked with Mitt Romney, who was considered the avatar of that.
Was he open to this idea? Where did it start to find traction for you that a more activist government, this sort of idea of economic policy as kind of social engineering, when did it start to gain traction? I mean, Farid actually started working with then-Governor Romney. Like you said, he was conventional in a lot of ways.
One of the issues I was responsible for with him was trade policy. And we brought him the very typical, here's what Republicans say about trade briefing.
And he said, well, that's fine, but what are we going to do about China? And to your point about all the other conservative economists in the room, they were, what are you talking about? We don't do anything about China. If China wants to send us cheap stuff, we say thank you very much.
In the meeting, what does it sound like when the monocles fall out of the eyes? Does it clink? It just feels like one of those, like, gray poupon. The gasps can be disturbing.
Yes. To your point, there's a lot of religious fervor, frankly, on what I would call the old right about some of these ideas.
And when someone says something very common sense, like, well, wait a minute, maybe, you know, an authoritarian communist government that's trying to hollow out American manufacturing, like, maybe that's not really free market. Right.
I was like, wow, that's a really important point. And I was the one to sign to sign and go off and try to figure it out.
And what I discovered was that on the right of center, really going back to the mid-1980s, there had just been no thinking about this.

There had been an incredible...

A protecting that manufacturing base or our industrial center.

And then I think in COVID, you saw everyone kind of paused and went, oh, we don't have supply lines to make paper masks.

Like, we don't have anything. Was that where you saw it really get a foothold? I think, you know, I think on the right of center, it was the China problem was active even before COVID.
Right. Because I think, you know, one thing, and it's important to say, this is a fairly recent conservative phenomenon.
If you go back in the history of conservatism, even if you look at Ronald Reagan himself, Reagan was a trade protectionist. He basically started a trade war with Japan because he did care about these things.
This was in the days of Japanese car makers were making cars that were cheaper. People were preferring them.
They were dominating the market in America. And Reagan negotiated an outright quota that Japan, not even a tariff, Japan will not increase the number of cars it sends into America.
And that's why we now have the American auto industry in the South. Honda and Toyota make American cars, essentially, because somebody like Reagan was willing to recognize trade is good if it's fair and balanced.
But we're not going to be dogmatic. I've read, though, mixed things about whether or not, that five years later it actually gave too much leverage to these Japanese countries, and they got to drive very hard bargains for American labor in the South.
For instance, they didn't build them in Michigan. They didn't build them where union labor was.
They built them, they undercut union labor in some respects. They did choose to go to states with non-union labor.
The way that the unions were behaving at the time was one of the reasons that U.S. automakers were falling behind.
That level of inflexibility was a real challenge. And that's also something that you saw Reagan really take on and confront.
So I don't think there are a lot of people in the American South today who would say, boo, we, you know, we wish the United States would come. It was an enormous gain and the investments have led to much higher productivity over time.
So I think that's the story of what we want to see more of. And bringing that back and giving the country a resilience that losing that base actually actually cost us and this brings us to liberation day which is april 2nd april 2nd april 2nd mark it down liberation day uh the trump tariffs uh we don't know what they are but we know they'll work and that we will live on mars in what eight weeks weeks? I don't know what's going to happen.
Do you know what's going to happen on Liberation Day? I don't know what's going to happen. And I think that there has rightly been at this point a lot of criticism that the way that the Trump administration has been rolling a lot of this out is just leaving too many questions.
That if you want to do this right, you need certainty and predictability, clear communication. All core values of the Trump administration.
Fair point. One of the interesting things about the Trump administration is that the team he has around him this time on the economic side, so Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson, his chief economic advisor, the U.S.
trade representative. He's really surrounded himself, I think, with a quite strong team that thinks consistently about this.
And so, you know, that's something that... Does he ever, like, ask them? That is a fair question.
And that's what I think everybody's waiting to see is can we sort of get this moving in the right direction? Because it is important to say that the direction is important here. Right.
You know, really for 25 years, going back to when we let China into the WTO, we have pursued this model that says more free trade always, regardless of what happens to American workers, regardless of what happens to American industry, we just want the cheap stuff. And that has been really damaging.
You know, in some respects, though, we regard, I think we're putting a certain motive on China when, in fact, like these were corporations seeking the lowest water of wages and what they could pay people. And certainly labor can't travel the way that capital does.
So, you know, I guess the idea is we levy these tariffs and then these corporations that had been seeking this will all go, oh, OK, it's not worth our while anymore. And they'll reinvest in the states.
Is that kind of the broad theory of it? Yes. The idea is that corporations are going to respond to incentives.
And you go all the way back to Adam Smith and the wealth of nations and the idea of capitalism. You want people pursuing profit to do that in a way that is also good for the society, where I think a lot of economists, and this is left and right of center, got it wrong, was to think that's just always the case.
As long as they're pursuing profit, it's going to be good. And it's only going to be good if it's within certain constraints, if the things that are most profitable actually are things that are good for the country.
And the government decides sort of what those constraints are. So they put guardrails around them.
I guess the question I have is tariffs feel somewhat, I don't want to say whimsical in the sense of, oh, he, you know, dances downstairs in a tutu and says 25% on whiskey, like, but they are executive actions. And if you're a business making a, I assume their plans are five-year, 10-year, 20-year, if they could just be repealed by the next guy and it's not legislation, is that really an effective incentive for bringing back all that manufacturing? I think that's a very fair concern.
And ideally, it would be done through. I think one of the things that's very encouraging is to see that we are increasingly now seeing a new bipartisan consensus that we do want to change this.
I'm sorry, I don't know that phrase. It started when President Joe Biden essentially kept all of Trump's trade actions.
Everything that Trump did on China, Biden kept and then even extended some. But wouldn't like the CHIPS Act, right? Wouldn't that be another way of incentivizing without setting up barriers that might be more unpredictable or might be flimsier, depending on the whim of an executive? Why don't they embrace that in the same way? Doesn't that add to getting the outcome you want, incentivizing, bringing those jobs back? Why is that unpopular on the right? Well, it's only unpopular with some on the right.
And I think it goes to where we started, which is this historical concern with the idea of sort of picking winners and losers at all. Right.
And a lot of concern that, you know, what's going to happen if government actually gets involved in giving particular benefits to particular companies. That being said, the CHIPS Act was bipartisan.
I think there were maybe 17 senators. You know, J.D.
Vance has been a supporter of the CHIPS Act. Right.
And so, you know, I think, again, that's that's a step in the right direction. Would you rather see it through that kind of industrial policy or through, or is it a real balancing of all those various levers? I think you have to do both because if you only do the Chips Act kind of thing, Chips Act is great if you've got one thing that's really important.
Almost everyone agrees, you know, higher steel and, you know. So, well, so this becomes a question now, right? Do we really want Congress now going through and saying, oh, well, now we need one for steel.
Well, do we need one for aluminum? Maybe. Well, do we need one for cars? Do we need one for airplanes? That's both cumbersome and something that's very difficult to do well politically.
Whereas one of what I think actually the benefits of tariffs is that they are quite blunt. The tariff is sort of, if done well, a much broader policy that sort of shifts the baseline.
And so I think you need that if you want to shift the basic decision making that businesses are going to make generally. And if there's particular things you really care about, that's when you also want to come in and give them support.
Well, then did it surprise you? Because we talk about China as being sort of this ascendant economic power. And by the way, it's not just the manufacturing base of America that has been hurt by that.

All the countries near China can't compete. You know, all around there, Indonesia, you know,

they're struggling with a very similar thing. But then why go after Canada? Like what?

Do you know what I mean? Like it just it all seems so weirdly vindictive. And then you're like and then we're going to take over Greenland.
Like it does feel a little less like rebalancing economic inequities. And we've decided on a new world order where big does what it wants and nation states, we go back to a little bit of that colonialist model or imperialist or whatever it was.
Is that the concern, I guess? It's a fair concern. I think there's some truth to it that's not all bad when you talk about this new world order idea, which is that the United States has been sort of championing this

liberal world order, where we have essentially taken it upon ourselves to, frankly, absorb a lot of costs from other people, right? So in the trade world, it's not just China, it's also Germany and Japan and Korea. We are absorbing their production.
They get the jobs. Don't you think we're buying influence? So the Trump

view is they're abusing

us and using us.

I think the view I have is

America wants to tell them what

to do. And so

by leveraging our military might,

we have

sway. But do we? What have we

successfully told Japan or Germany to do?

I mean, in general? Yeah. In the last 30 years.
Stop wearing Lederhosen. I think they've cut down on it.
It's it's it's no, no, no, no. This is this is a serious point.
I appreciate the joke, but but but this is I guess my point is a reason you couldn't answer the question. And this is I don't know what we'd want them to do, because I feel like we don't want them to do anything.
Then what are we maintaining the leverage for? Because, well, the leverage is on when we want to go into Iraq. I guess what I'm saying is what we want them to do.
That was great. That listen, I'm not saying it was right, but you have a guy like J.D.
Vance goes to Greenland and shits on Denmark., Denmark lost as many people per capita in those wars as we did. Like, they talk about, you know, Denmark's not defending Greenland enough, like, and we'll do it.
But aren't we doing it already? Like, they're in NATO. So I guess my point is, like, that stable world order hasn't mistreated the United States.
I guess I don't see us as victims of a con game that Europe

has been running on us. And like the idea that we want Germany to be able to fend off Russia on their own places us in very tenuous position, does it not? Why? I have a book at home about Germany and their position as a global military power where we didn't have sway.

Right.

And they... about Germany and their position as a global military power

where we didn't have sway.

Right.

And they did what they wanted.

I mean, it didn't work out.

Frankly, I don't put

a lot of credence.

I don't.

And by the way,

it's also in.

No, no, no.

I want to pick up on this.

20% of the Oscar winning movies.

The fun applause line that like, oh, the Germans will just become Nazis again.

Like, that's a weird racist critique of Germans.

I don't see any reason to believe that.

Let's be honest. It is.

Let's look at the actual German state.

On what basis are you saying this is, like, something about Germany that we can't abide?

I think it's that there is an element within their society that they've deemed. This is not me saying Germans will do that.
This is Germany. This is, I didn't say they'll become that.
The leaders of Germany are fearful. I don't think they are.
I think leaders of Germany really enjoy spending virtually nothing on their military, while the United States spends roughly 4% of GDP on ours, as we have been doing for decades with other countries in NATO not even... So you think they're like freeloading on our military? There's no question they're freeloading on our military.
You can say you like that they're freeloading on our military, but I don't think there's any dispute that that's what they're doing. I guess I don't understand the idea that they're freeloading and we want each nation state to build up their military to the point because to me, that makes it more likely if you build something like that, it's more likely you'll use it.
Now, that seems to be backed by general history. When people rearm, they tend to do it and use it.

But I think the idea that Europe needs to like, i guess what i'm saying is this is a fine adjustment that's being made with a sledgehammer if that makes sense i think that's a very fair point i think where we started on i was dying i will i will concede that one to you just to yes my! My five-year-old gets one point at ping-pong every... Yes! See? I'll take that.
Look, the new world order point that we started with I think is very important here because what the Trump administration and I think this is certainly Trump's view, J.D. Vance has spoken about this, Marco Rubio has spoken about this, their view is that this world order we tried to establish in which the U.S.
does take on these burdens, and in your view, we benefit from taking on those burdens. I think it's a mixed bag.
I would not say it's purely benefit. I think what we do spend on defense is kind of insane, and to have 850 military bases to project power across the world.
I wholeheartedly agree with that. I think unleashing those forces through vindictiveness and like blaming them for victimizing us is not the methodology.
Like everything else, like Doge, it's, I always hate that straw man. Like we go, I don't like the way this is going.
Oh, you're not for efficiency. Like that same thing.
Oh, you just want Germany to keep freeloading. That's not what I'm saying.
And I think it's a misreading of that point and not being fair to the nuance of it. I understand that there can be adjustments in that and that free trade can be rebalanced and all those other things.
But they're breaking something that did serve us maybe not phenomenally, but OK. And we had a really strong hand in building it.
And now we're pretending like they did it to us. And that feels unfair.
Oh! I was doing... When I...
Let me tell you something. When I come on your studio show...
I realize that's difficult to handle. That's not...
It's not so fair. I didn't...
Yeah. You know what I mean.
I saw you prep them and everything. Yeah.
But talk about that a little bit. Yeah.
So, first of all, I think you're absolutely right that the U.S. did construct this system.

And I think if that doesn't mean that the U.S. should not learn lessons, that doesn't mean that conditions don't change.

But I do think it absolutely creates an obligation for us to be thoughtful in how we proceed.

And I think it's a fair critique if we're not being thoughtful in how we proceed.

That felt like a very different answer than Germany and Japan freeload on us. That's also true.
All right. Would you, you know, do you think, what do you think is going to happen? Or do you worry about the instability of not easing this transition? But is this a, and look, I've read the whole like Mar-a-Lago accord, and I don't know if that's a conspiracy, but is the idea that there's some master plan of we create this chaos, we cause all this thing to draw people to Mar-a-Lago where they renegotiate our nation's debt.
Is that something that you think is plausible? Or is that, is that what, what this all about? Is that why they're not doing it in a way that seems more thoughtful? So let me say two things about it. The first is, I think a lot of the critiques of how it's being done are very fair.
And I think it's important to distinguish that from the discussion of the principles. Because I think the principles are important, and we should want to have the right set of principles and not throw them out if just because they're not being pursued in the way we might like.
When it comes to something like the Mar-a-Lago Accord, I think what you see people talking about and trying to move toward is to say, if we think this sort of liberal world order system, first of all, even if it was serving the U.S. well at one point, is not serving as well anymore.
Second of all, to some extent, may just be going away anyway. China is now rising as a pure competitor.
The U.S. cannot be a unipolar hegemon like it was when the Cold War ended.
So if we accept that things are going to change, we should have a perspective on what we want to follow. And, you know, something that I've been writing about a lot is trying to interpret and decipher what that might look like.
Because again, it's a very fair critique. They have not been as clear about it as we should want them to be.
What I think we should want, and what, like I said, folks in the administration, like a Marco Rubio or a Scott Besant, who I think do write and speak thoughtfully about it, have pointed toward, is the idea that we absolutely want a strong economic and security alliance. It's not going to be the whole world because China is going to have its own sphere as well.
But what we want to have within our sphere is a few things that in the past the U.S. didn't necessarily ask for.
We're going to want balanced trade, where in the past we were happy to let the manufacturing go elsewhere. We're going to want others to essentially own their own defense burdens.
That doesn't mean we're not partnering and working together, but that everybody takes primary responsibility for their own defense. No NATO.
No alliance like that. No, no, you can absolutely have an alliance like that.
But the alliance is premised on if you are Germany, you are in on the front lines of what the concerns in Europe are. If you are Japan, you are on the front lines of the concerns with China.
It's not a matter of everyone simply turning and asking the U.S. what the U.S.
is going to do. And then the third element is keeping China out and recognizing that China, to your point, China's just been doing China, doing what's best for China, but that that is not consistent with what the U.S.
and a U.S.-led alliance would want. And so if you want to get from where we are today to that kind of system, you are asking things of allies that they haven't been asked before.
And so the question is, how do you make that a credible ask? Because I think it's fair. I don't think that those are unreasonable things to ask.
But you are going to have to be willing to back that up and say, the old world, the old version is gone. Let's talk about what the new version could look like.
Right. And I think...
Do you think they prematurely blew up the old version or you just, you really felt like it just wasn't, it wasn't functioning in that way anymore? I think the old version has, I think the old version has been gone for a while at this point. That in the economic sphere, the idea of...
That sort of era of cheap goods. The era of cheap goods, the era of the U.S.
being able to simply sort of exert its military will on the world, the era of the U.S. economies being so much stronger than others that we could afford to absorb everybody else's production.
You know, over the last 10 to 20 years, the U.S., the typical working family, has not been well served by that deal, I don't think. No question.
And this is where, so it sometimes gets, listen, people have differing viewpoints, and it can get confusing and trying to, but here's where I think there can be great agreement. Working people making living wages.
And I think that would be very surprising for someone on the center right to sort of agree with maybe the more progressive wing of the Democrats. But that is absolutely a value that we have lost.
And do you think that's something that the right will follow you along with? Because it's something I think the left has been screaming about for a very long time. Well, I think we're moving in that direction.
You know, I think it is a process of transition when a party reorients, you know, the term realignment gets used a lot. We're increasingly seeing working people coming into the Republican Party.
We're seeing Republican leaders, folks like Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, increasingly, I think, speak credibly and seriously to some of their concerns.
We're seeing more openness to the

labor movement. You have the Teamsters president partnering with someone like Senator Josh Hawley on legislation.
And so I really do think that that is happening. I think the politicians will always be the lagging indicator, right? The folks in their 70s and 80s, right? The folks in their You're talking about the junior senators.

Mitch McConnell is unlikely to, you know, suddenly adopt all of this. But if you look at...
Don't count him out. I'm going to go ahead and...
At 110, he's going to be ready. You have more faith than I do.
When you look at younger Republicans, both folks coming into the Senate, so I mentioned Rubio and Vance, folks like Jim Banks from Indiana, Bernie Moreno from Ohio, all of them are more focused on these kinds of issues. And then when you look behind that at the sorts of people I work with, the policy wonks, researchers, writers, journalists, lawyers, folks sort of 40 and under are overwhelmingly oriented in this way.
And so I have a great deal of hope that as that moves to be the center of the party, you really are going to see a different Republican Party that still loves markets and wants them to work, but has a much better understanding of their limitation, has much more concern for what is happening to typical working family, and wants to figure out how to keep their conservative principles, but apply them somehow to use public policy and make things better. So socialism.
Essentially. I appreciate it.
One final question, and then I'll let you go because I know we're busy. The final question is this.
Are you concerned if they realign the trade? Look, corporations you said they're profit seeking and that's how they go are you afraid that the globalization movement where they sought the lowest form of regulation and and workers wages will just be translated into this country so in other words in the way that china might have undercut the united states are are you worried South Carolina and Texas undercut Wisconsin and Michigan and that this revitalizing the manufacturing base will fall prey to the same dynamics that we saw it fall prey to globally?

Is that a concern?

I'm not too concerned about that because that has always been a feature of American political economy. We've always had that sort of competition.
We can handle that disagreement. We can.
And I think that's the best way to think about more protection of the American market. There's been this idea for so long that free trade and free markets are sort of synonymous.
If you like free markets, you want more free trade. But free trade with China does not advance free markets.
It takes everything authoritarian and communist in China and imports it. Now your companies have to compete with that.
And then now you need more safety net programs to support those who lose their jobs. You need more chip sacks and industrial policies.
You have to respond in all sorts of ways. So many of the people that use those subsidies are actually working people.
They're not.

This isn't one of those, like, lazy people sitting on the couch coasting on the government. I'm like working people with one, sometimes two jobs that still have to subsidize it because they're just not paid enough.
And it's very, very difficult. But this is, listen, the book, the one, the ones in future work.
This is your old book. What's the new one called? It's called The New Conservatives.
It's a summary of what we've been doing for the last five years at American Compass,

developing the conservative economy. The Once in Future Worker.
This is your old book. What's the new one called? It's called The New Conservatives.
It's a summary of what we've been doing for the last five years at American Compass,

developing the conserved economics of the new right, and it will be out at the beginning of June. And when you go back to them and you tell them how was it, you'll say, like, Stuart was right about at least one.

I'm going to tell them, because I called Jon Stewart a racist. I'm not sure that was smart.

It's all good.

We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.

That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way. PG&E asks customers about their biggest concerns so we can address them one by one.
That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.

Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.

That's our company tonight. Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Michael Kosta.
Michael, what do you got for us? John, you know, these Trump tariffs could tank the market this week, which is why you and you all need to diversify your portfolios, okay? For example, I have Bitcoin, but I also have NFTs, crypto, and meme coin. I am the pinnacle of diversity, financially speaking, John.
So, again, I think those are all digital. I think everything you mentioned was digital.
Do you have, you know, like stocks and bonds and savings? John, it's not the 90s, okay? Cash all that garbage out and put it into crypto. Your money needs to be in safe assets like Shiba Bucks, Snaggle Jazz, Loin Coin, Groin Coin, Tickle Nickels, and John, the often overlooked Logan Paul Presents, I Can't Believe It's Not Money.
Trust me. John, if your life savings aren't in jizz pump, you're gonna feel pretty silly.
Thank you, Michael Kosta. Put it all in jizz pump.
Michael Kosta, ladies and gentlemen. What's something that people wouldn't know about the president? You're pretty close to him now.
You spent a lot of time with him. What's something that people wouldn't know? I think the president is a good man.
I think he is an honest man. And I have yet to see him do anything mean or anything that is wrong, that I would say morally wrong.
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