Jon on Trump's First 100 Days: Destroying America's Reputation, Economy, and Leverage

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 You're listening to Comedy Central.

Speaker 2 From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central. It's America's only source for news.
This is the Daily Joe with your host, John Stewart.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's officially been

Speaker 2 a hundred days of Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 I'm so tired.

Speaker 2 It's aging this nation in Tom Hank's castaway years.

Speaker 2 But it is the daddy show. I'm John Stewart.
Tonight we're kicking off week-long coverage

Speaker 2 of Donald Trump's first 100.

Speaker 2 Let's call them days.

Speaker 2 Let's get into it.

Speaker 3 Will there be a little disturbance?

Speaker 3 I was kidding!

Speaker 3 Energy!

Speaker 2 Imagine me with a white beard.

Speaker 2 But yes, tomorrow is officially the 100th day of Donald Trump's second, first term. And you will be very pleased to hear it is going incredibly well.

Speaker 3 The most successful 100 days in the history of our country.

Speaker 2 Suck it, Jefferson!

Speaker 2 Suck it, Lincoln. Suck it, Roosevelt, squared.

Speaker 2 Trump's first 100 days, the most successful in American history. It would be like if America landed on the moon and killed bin Laden in the same mission.

Speaker 2 Thought you could hide on the moon, bin Laden? Get him, boys!

Speaker 2 Did you know people make that noise when they move on the moon?

Speaker 2 According to Trump, the most successful 100 days in the history of our country.

Speaker 2 Can anyone offer a counterpoint?

Speaker 2 Chaos and confusion from Wall Street to Washington.

Speaker 1 More than 6 trillion in market losses. Consumer confidence plummeting.

Speaker 5 Outrage over Musk and his Department of Government efficiency.

Speaker 4 The showdown has legal scholars afraid that this might actually be a constitutional crisis.

Speaker 5 Firestorm over the national security breach.

Speaker 3 The Russia-Ukraine war raging on.

Speaker 5 Just 39% of Americans approve of the way Trump is doing his job.

Speaker 7 Lower than any past president at the 100-day mark.

Speaker 2 He has the lowest approval rating of any president in the past 80 years. Suck it, Herbert Hoover!

Speaker 2 Donald Trump's ratings are 11 points underwater.

Speaker 2 He doesn't care. He's not afraid of being underwater because he's equipped with a flotation unit protective.

Speaker 2 A flotation unit protective accessory or FUPA.

Speaker 2 He Here's a FUPA.

Speaker 2 Look it up.

Speaker 2 Look up what a FUPA is.

Speaker 2 I had to be told what that is.

Speaker 2 But I hate to break the bad news to Donald Trump. His lowered approval rating triggers the Chuck Schumer fight instinct.

Speaker 2 You remember. We're going to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it until he goes below 40.

Speaker 2 Yes!

Speaker 2 He's below 40 now. You've got him right where you want him.
Finish him, Schumer.

Speaker 2 Trump is going after free speech and universities. How will you destroy Trump now that he's below 40%?

Speaker 9 So we sent him a very strong letter just the other day

Speaker 9 asking eight very strong questions.

Speaker 2 Question one.

Speaker 2 Why is this university different from all other universities?

Speaker 2 Wait,

Speaker 2 that's the wrong book. Hold on.

Speaker 2 So while we wait for those strongly worded questions questions to work their magic, let's take a look at why so many people might be unhappy with Trump's performance.

Speaker 2 It might have something to do with the gap between what Trump promised and what he's delivered. For instance, the economy.

Speaker 3 America is going to be very rich again, and it's going to happen very quickly. I think our economy is going to roar.
I think our stock market's going to do great.

Speaker 3 When I win the election, we will immediately begin a brand new Trump economic boom. It'll be a boom.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, I do think it's pretty clear that on the economy, Donald Trump did make a boom boom.

Speaker 2 Oh, did Trump go boom boom?

Speaker 2 Perhaps Trump feels so positive because while the economy has headed south for most people, there have been some winners.

Speaker 6 Donald Trump's net worth more than doubling President Trump's meme coin, worth about $2.5 billion.

Speaker 10 Law firms committing about a billion dollars worth of free legal work for the administration.

Speaker 11 X reached a $10 million settlement with Donald Trump. ABC having to agree to give $15 million to President Trump's library.

Speaker 2 Meta's giving $25 million.

Speaker 11 Amazon Jeff Bezos is paying $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump.

Speaker 11 Free market.

Speaker 11 Honestly, like, no,

Speaker 2 the guy's making billions and billions of dollars. But seriously, $40 million

Speaker 2 for a documentary about Melania Trump. No offense.
I'm sure she's a very interesting person. But PBS made the entirety of the Ken Burns Civil War series for $3.5 million.
Shoah, Shoah was $3 million.

Speaker 2 I think, obviously, they wanted four, but they still got a good price.

Speaker 2 The entirety of the Planet Earth series, 11 episodes, was less than that, $25 million.

Speaker 2 And I know Melania is a mysterious and private woman but I guarantee you don't have to wait outside her house for weeks at a time hoping to catch a rare nocturnal feeding on a striped South American toad

Speaker 2 40 million

Speaker 3 so Trump is personally doing great in this economy what about immigration he made a lot of promises there too we are going to start the largest mass deportation in the history of our country and we are going to start with violent criminals we're going to get people out that are criminals and horrible people the annual Lecter is coming in, lots of them.

Speaker 2 Lots of them.

Speaker 2 So many of them. It's like that Timothy Chalamet look-alike event.

Speaker 2 But for Hannibal Lectors.

Speaker 2 By the way,

Speaker 2 wouldn't massing a bunch of Hannibal Lectors around the border be a solution for immigration?

Speaker 2 There was a line here yesterday. I don't.

Speaker 2 Now it's just shoes and empty Chianti bottles. I don't.

Speaker 2 So are we taking out the lectors? The worst of the worst?

Speaker 7 Last week's deportations included three American children, all U.S. citizens.
One of them is battling cancer. Oh my f ⁇ ing God.

Speaker 7 Are you f ⁇ ing?

Speaker 7 What?

Speaker 7 That's who we're deporting?

Speaker 7 A kid with cancer?

Speaker 2 Trump really doesn't understand how the Make-A-Wish Foundation works, does he?

Speaker 2 The cancer kid is the one who gets the wish, Trump.

Speaker 2 Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 The audience will go with Jan a lot.

Speaker 2 But there are certain moments where I feel their physical pain.

Speaker 2 So that's not working out. What about religion?

Speaker 3 We ought to bring religion back into our country and let it get stronger and bigger and better, as I say.

Speaker 2 Yes, Christianity, bigger, longer, uncut.

Speaker 2 So I'm told.

Speaker 2 But fine.

Speaker 2 How's that promise going?

Speaker 12 J.D. Vance was one of the last people to see Hook Francis alive, having a meeting with him the day before he died.

Speaker 2 JD Vance, don't you understand how make a wish work?

Speaker 2 Jessica Diane Vance,

Speaker 2 what did you do to this man?

Speaker 2 This Pope had literally touched lepers.

Speaker 2 He drank sewage water in slums and survived all of it. Ten minutes.

Speaker 2 10 minutes talking with J.D. Vance.

Speaker 2 And the Pope is like, God, check, please. God,

Speaker 2 God,

Speaker 2 I can't. I can't do it.

Speaker 2 Let me out.

Speaker 2 I've been celibate 88 years.

Speaker 2 This is the longest 10 minutes of my life.

Speaker 2 Even areas that Trump promised slam-dunk progress have abjectly failed.

Speaker 3 I will settle the war in Ukraine. I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours.
I will get it settled before I even become president.

Speaker 3 If I win, when I'm president-elect, and what I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other.

Speaker 2 Walmart!

Speaker 2 Why are you giving away the secret plan?

Speaker 2 That's the kind of top-secret classified strategy. You only divulge on signal group chats.

Speaker 2 I'll talk to one, I'll talk to the other. But clearly, Wade.

Speaker 2 Clearly.

Speaker 2 24 hours has passed and no end.

Speaker 2 So what happened?

Speaker 7 President Trump now claiming he was exaggerating with his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine on day one.

Speaker 10 The president said, obviously people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.

Speaker 2 I'm going to end the war in Ukraine on day one.

Speaker 2 Is this thing on?

Speaker 2 By the way, I'm a little shocked Trump couldn't get it done given his Solomon-like peace plan. Putin would maintain control of the territory he's taken since invading more than three years ago.

Speaker 5 Crimea will stay with Russia.

Speaker 13 The president said today the U.S.

Speaker 2 will make no security guarantees to Ukraine.

Speaker 2 So let me just try and absorb the specifics of this. I'm just trying to.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Russia, who invaded a sovereign nation, gets

Speaker 2 everything that they wanted, and in return, Ukraine gets to give it to them.

Speaker 2 I'm obviously not a master negotiator, but I think I could have delivered that plan.

Speaker 2 Here's the kicker. After saying to Russia, well, what if we divide it

Speaker 2 where you get everything?

Speaker 2 Putin just kept bombing. And Trump is now reduced from the world's greatest negotiator to, oh, come on.

Speaker 14 President Trump called on Russia to stop missile strikes on Ukraine and made a rare personal rebuke of Putin, saying, Vladimir, stop.

Speaker 14 Vladdy!

Speaker 14 Stop!

Speaker 14 It's in all caps, Vladdy!

Speaker 2 The commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful army, with the nuclear briefcase on one side, the direct red phone to Moscow on the other, decided the best way to demonstrate the serious in which he took this heinous bombing was to open off-brand Twitter and all caps

Speaker 2 concerned face, concerned face, bicep party hat, eggplant, skull, skull.

Speaker 2 And you'd be surprised to know that stop didn't work because Vladimir Putin is not a golden doodle.

Speaker 2 He is apparently a furry.

Speaker 2 But maybe it's not fair to judge Trump's negotiating skills based on the Ukraine war. He didn't start that war.
We all know Ukraine did by wearing that province.

Speaker 2 You knew what you were doing, Ukraine, when you sachet your pretty little Donbass all around the Black Sea.

Speaker 2 The real measure of Trump's first 100 days is the shrewdness he showed in the war he did start.

Speaker 3 My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.

Speaker 2 Liberation Day!

Speaker 2 It was a devastating sneak attack launched from the Rose Garden.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, the country he snuck up on was ours.

Speaker 2 Tariff chaos markets in free fall.

Speaker 8 But everybody kind of caught off guard flat-footed on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Speaker 15 Major retailers like Target and Walmart have warned shelves could go empty in a matter of weeks.

Speaker 10 The bond market melting down overnight.

Speaker 3 There's now a 60% chance of a worldwide recession.

Speaker 2 There's chaos, there's uncertainty, no one knows what's going on. Yes.

Speaker 2 And apparently plunging our nation into this dark economic abyss is all part of the plan. Well, in game theory it's called strategic uncertainty.

Speaker 2 So you're not going to tell the person on the other side of the negotiation where you're going to end up. Right, right, right, right,

Speaker 2 right.

Speaker 2 But I'm pretty sure in game theory, you are supposed to tell the person on your side

Speaker 2 on your side where they're going to end up So they don't freak the f ⁇ out.

Speaker 2 Or maybe it's all bullshit. And Trump launched a trade war without any of the pre-planning and preparation that needed to be done.

Speaker 2 And Besant has to go along with it because he's in the service of an impulsive man-baby that you have to lie to so he doesn't turn his virus of vindictiveness onto you.

Speaker 2 How did you not know that other countries weren't going to fight back? Did you miss that page in the art of war? Spoiler alert. It's on page one.

Speaker 7 China's retaliation now includes suspending exports of rare earth minerals and magnets to the United States.

Speaker 7 Those materials are essential to a number of American industries, including car makers, aerospace manufacturers, and semiconductor producers.

Speaker 7 China controls the refinement, the production of about 90% of the world's rare earth metals.

Speaker 1 Elon Musk said that we're having problems with a magnet issue. The materials for the magnets for the robots come from China.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, the robots have no magnets!

Speaker 2 How will they hang up children's drawings on refrigerators? They're magnetless.

Speaker 2 And we could have stockpiled magnets and rare earth materials, like Japan did in a spat with China. But why bother preparing for a war that you yourself are launching?

Speaker 2 And really, how important are magnets anyway?

Speaker 3 Now, all I know about magnets is this. Give me a glass of water.
Let me drop it on the magnets. That's the end of the magnets.

Speaker 2 So we have the end of the magnets, the beginning of the magnets. Does it really matter?

Speaker 2 And we're in this position because we've been sold this idea of Trump as the master, the art of the deal. Only he can bring these nations to heal.
It is all bullshit.

Speaker 3 I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass.

Speaker 16 Trump told Time magazine that talks were underway and and that Chinese president Xi Jinping had called him. China has shot back repeatedly, saying, No, they are not talking.

Speaker 10 The president said, I've made 200 deals. Time, you've made 200 deals? Trump, 100%.

Speaker 2 100%?

Speaker 2 Bullshit.

Speaker 2 Here's how you know: 200 deals? There's only like 180 countries.

Speaker 2 Unless he's making a deal.

Speaker 2 It's true.

Speaker 2 You can't.

Speaker 2 Unless he's making a deal with Trinidad and Tobago separately.

Speaker 2 All right, Turks, you're settled.

Speaker 2 Keikos, not the bad.

Speaker 2 Back of the line, Keikos.

Speaker 2 Trump is not only not the best negotiator, he is maybe the worst negotiator. And it makes sense when you listen to him talking about how he thinks of our economic negotiations.

Speaker 13 The president said this, I own the store and I set the prices and I'll say if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.

Speaker 3 If you think of us as a big beautiful department store before that business was destroyed by the internet.

Speaker 2 Right!

Speaker 2 Why in God's name would you use a brick and mortar department store? for your metaphor on our economic revitalization.

Speaker 2 I think of America as a tower of records.

Speaker 2 I, the president, put the CDs on the rack and I priced them.

Speaker 2 If you want to listen to Bloodhound Gang, hey, where else are you going to go? There's nowhere else to go.

Speaker 2 Or maybe that's just how capitalism works. The American president sets the prices and decides who's allowed to come into the store.

Speaker 2 And then other nations come back in six months and the whole country is a spirit Halloween. What is he doing?

Speaker 2 But his negotiating skills aren't the real danger to this country. What's going to f us up is his obsession with the concept of the leverage that he has.

Speaker 3 We have all the leverage if you know what you're doing. We do have leverage because we're the pot of gold.
Using my leverage, and it's a tremendous leverage, and I used it before very well.

Speaker 2 You don't have the leverage!

Speaker 2 That's the key misunderstanding here. Trump is so arrogant.
He thinks the leverage is his.

Speaker 2 It's ours. We, the people.
And it took us 200. It's not more leverage.

Speaker 2 Why would you even think it is?

Speaker 2 It took the people 250 years of striving to live up to a constitutional republic and rule of law, painstaking equity that you are squandering. That is the crux of American exceptionalism.

Speaker 2 You just want to make us great. That's a downgrade.
Our brand is not strategic uncertainty. And you are not the keeper of our pot of gold.
You are a temporary leprechaun.

Speaker 2 And the more enamored...

Speaker 2 The more enamored, President Trump, you are with your authoritarian whims, the more that you turn our shining city on a hill into just another ordinary, despot-led, sea-level shithole.

Speaker 2 So if I could just put this,

Speaker 2 if I could just put this in negotiating terms you can understand,

Speaker 2 all caps, Donald,

Speaker 2 when we come back, Chris Hughes will be joining me. Don't go away.

Speaker 2 Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Daily Show. My guest tonight, an economist, an author,

Speaker 2 also,

Speaker 2 by the way, one of the co-founders of Facebook, his new book is called Market Crafters, The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy. Please welcome to the program.
Chris Hughes, sir!

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 Boy, the book is called Market Crafters. I don't even know where they're going to pull that up there, but it's fantastic.

Speaker 2 Just give us a quick off the top.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by market crafting? It's not an Etsy.

Speaker 2 What are we talking about here?

Speaker 5 So, I'm making the case that government and policymakers are often shaping markets to make them work better, so they can shape the markets to make Americans richer, their economic lives more stable, even safer, if they know what they're doing.

Speaker 5 And so, this is a hidden history that we've got to pull on and recover if we're going to rebuild after the chaos of Trump and this moment.

Speaker 2 Sir, I have to stop you right there. Are you suggesting that the American economy is not the free market capitalist

Speaker 2 nirvana that we have been told? It turns out.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 5 It's RIP, right?

Speaker 5 No, but I mean, for 40 years, people did believe that markets are self-regulating, that they would mostly take care of themselves, and they always use the I word, intervene.

Speaker 5 Government is there to intervene in markets.

Speaker 2 Only in catastrophes.

Speaker 5 Usually, like an emergency room, you know, you would come and you would fix things. But what I see in the history is that when things go well,

Speaker 5 government is structuring markets to make them work better. So, you can take semiconductors, where just a few years ago we weren't making any advanced semiconductors in the United States.

Speaker 5 Now, we're making the cutting-edge chips that are powering the iPhone. You can see it in climate, but you can also see it in financial stability and energy policy.

Speaker 5 So, there are hopeful, inspiring stories, which I think I need more. I think a lot of us need more in this moment.

Speaker 2 Well, because we're out of magnets. We've been out of magnets.

Speaker 2 That's true. But you go back, it begins in the New Deal.

Speaker 2 The story begins with a great lesson of how individuals, just this one gentleman hired by Roosevelt, created the housing market in America. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 I wrote the book to talk a lot about public policy today, but I think to do that well, you got to look at the past to see what worked and what didn't work, because we can learn from the successes.

Speaker 5 Often we can learn even more from the failures.

Speaker 5 So in the New Deal, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a national investment bank headed by this larger-than-life figure, Jesse Jones, whose story I I love telling in the book.

Speaker 2 It's fantastic.

Speaker 5 He has so many different crazy things. He's a guy who grew up in Tennessee, goes to Houston, makes a million bucks by the time he's 30 years old, which is a lot, in the 19 teens.

Speaker 5 And then he becomes the head of this investment bank, which

Speaker 5 restructures and supports American finance, but more importantly, gets us out of the depression by spurring the housing markets that you mentioned, by making direct loans to industry, and then eventually eventually birthing aviation and synthetic rubber.

Speaker 5 I mean, these industries really matter. They helped us win the war.

Speaker 2 And in some ways, won us World War II. The reason why I think this book is so timely, but also so crucial,

Speaker 2 that fiction that government doesn't pick winners and losers has always been used when government is being asked to enlist aid for people.

Speaker 2 When it's asked to intervene on the side of people,

Speaker 2 politicians, that's socialism. Medicare is all socialism.
You can't do that. That's not capitalism.
Exactly. Bullshit.
Yeah. It is capitalism.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, the story of American capitalism is one where we bring the state's power to

Speaker 5 shape and manage markets. So take financial stability as a clear example.

Speaker 5 The Federal Reserve is charged with keeping prices stable, keeping people employed, and making sure the financial system doesn't implode.

Speaker 5 It has had a checkered history, but for the most part, has done a pretty good job of delivering on that for investors and the folks who rely on it.

Speaker 5 And so I think what we need to do is learn from those success viz, but think about what we could do on housing policy with a similar kind of institution or how we could stabilize the price of groceries.

Speaker 2 People and not necessarily. And it's interesting how once they're involved in the levers of power, even

Speaker 2 the libertarian class

Speaker 2 become

Speaker 2 apostles to this new theory of this gentleman Simon. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, so Bill Simon was a Treasury Secretary 50 years ago. Libertarian's libertarian.

Speaker 5 He was honestly the hardest character to write about in the book, because the book is a collection of 12 different stories of individuals, successes, and failures.

Speaker 5 Simon, man, you go into the archives, and this guy was just a... Total asshole.

Speaker 2 He was just...

Speaker 2 You can tell that in the archives? Boy, can't you.

Speaker 5 In the letters that, I mean, he just absolutely, he absolutely had no interest in the state working to make markets better until

Speaker 5 the energy crisis in 1973 and he ends up in the Nixon administration in the chair where he has to figure out oh there's an oil embargo and we cannot import any oil from the Middle East prices are skyrocketing what are we gonna do right and he does everything from control prices to make allocation decisions to actually creating a structure to make sure that there's enough home heating oil in New England so no one freezes to death and the irony of I did all this research on this guy expecting to write a pretty critical take,

Speaker 5 he was pretty successful.

Speaker 5 So even libertarians, in fact, have a strategic oil reserve. Exactly.

Speaker 2 It's his baby.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 The strategic petroleum reserve now has hundreds of millions of barrels, and it's there to help us in case there is another kind of oil embargo event, and even, to some extent, buffer the price of stability.

Speaker 5 So, you know, there are a lot of stories of Republicans believing in the power of market craft, but using a different language to justify it. But this is not, there's no partisan claim on the term.

Speaker 2 Right. Now, so fast forward to today,

Speaker 2 certainly Trump has been incredibly impactful on the market, but

Speaker 2 you used the word planning.

Speaker 2 I thought planning was a very interesting word to use.

Speaker 2 Because there appears to be very, you know, the strategic praetorian reserve, why don't we have that for rare earth metals before we launch a trade war? Yeah.

Speaker 2 This doesn't sound like market crafting in the way that you understand it. It sounds like dart throwing.

Speaker 5 No, I mean, it's a couple of people have asked me, is Trump a market crafter? And he's the opposite. I mean, he's.

Speaker 5 Market crasher.

Speaker 2 Market crasher, exactly.

Speaker 2 Great movie, but he volumes.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Market crashers.

Speaker 5 No, but I mean, there are ways to think about the problem that critical minerals, 90% of critical minerals, come from China.

Speaker 5 And there would be a way to think about stockpiling those, making public sector investments to mine those minerals here at home. And ironically, J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance and some other folks in the party were talking about those kinds of ideas as recently as last year. Of course, now they're all loyal soldiers, just following the...

Speaker 2 Chris Brilliant, he's the most talented, most talented negotiator. Is this a situation where

Speaker 2 how do you pull out of something that has already left the station?

Speaker 2 Do you know of any instances where market crafting was done not in response to an exterior crisis, but to one of our own creation? 2008 comes to mind

Speaker 2 because,

Speaker 2 again, it was that sense of like Alan Greenspan saying, I'm sure the banks can regulate themselves. What could go wrong?

Speaker 2 And it going south. Is this an instance where

Speaker 2 an intervention could take place that could remediate or help ease the crisis that we find ourselves in now.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, the irony of Greenspan, since you mentioned him, is that he's got a rap as a deregulator and he did do all kinds of deregulation.

Speaker 5 The guy was also singularly obsessed with financial innovation.

Speaker 5 He genuinely believed that if we created these credit default swaps and the special purpose vehicles and all of these elaborate, complex machinations, the financial system would be safer.

Speaker 5 And yet, as we got obviously to 2008, turns out that wasn't the case.

Speaker 5 And when they allowed Lehman to just explode, it was part of this whole framework of like, well, what can we do?

Speaker 5 We need some company just to go bankrupt so everybody learns a lesson. Right.
When in reality,

Speaker 5 there's a long history of threading the needle. Just 10 years before, the largest hedge fund in the world had also gone bankrupt, but there was a parachute.

Speaker 5 And there was a way that wasn't creating a bomb in the financial system that allowed that institution to proceed through its bankruptcy proceedings in a way that the free market fantasy did not allow for Lehman.

Speaker 5 So there was a better way.

Speaker 2 Why do they, in those situations, though, always, even the debate over whether or not to save Lehman or do what they did with Stearns, Bear Stearns, and save those guys, or dump a shit ton of liquidity and capital into AIG, but they did it all at the corporate level.

Speaker 2 Why is there no

Speaker 2 policy wedge to do the same thing for all the homeowners who got foreclosed on, not

Speaker 2 because of the terrible doings of Lehman and Bear Stearns and AIG. Why don't they put capital into those markets?

Speaker 5 I think the simple answer is because we didn't have the institutions of MarketCraft to do that. We had an institution of financial stability, MarketCraft, go save those banks.

Speaker 5 But we had no institution in housing markets that could make it cheaper.

Speaker 5 Well, these days to make it cheaper to borrow in the housing crisis moment of 2008, 2009, it would have been about relief for people who'd already borrowed and couldn't make their or even brought their mortgages up to sea level so that there wasn't this default crisis.

Speaker 5 Right, so we've decided that finance should be stabilized, but housing shouldn't. Right.
That makes no sense.

Speaker 5 What we need is a housing construction fund to make it cheaper to build multifamily developer housing.

Speaker 5 We need an industrial policy for modular housing, the kind of homes that are built off-site and then you bring them in, and an apartment building can go up within seven days. We can do this.

Speaker 5 We have the ideas, but we have to create the institutional reality to get it done.

Speaker 2 But this to me, this is project, and I'm going to get the years wrong, I'm sure, 2029 for Democrats.

Speaker 2 There is no reason why Republicans and Democrats now agree that the state can intervene on behalf of capitalism. Now it's just a question

Speaker 2 or shape it. We're negotiating now what to do it for.

Speaker 2 The Democrat plan should be market crafting for the real needs of people through child care, elder care, education, health care. The shit that markets won't properly regulate.

Speaker 5 Yeah, bring down costs. I mean, America's been saying this for years through the...
Come on! Yeah, exactly!

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 they have the nerve to make us want to celebrate being able to negotiate the price of 10 drugs. Like, it's insane to me that we haven't created that market craft in pharmaceuticals.

Speaker 5 Absolutely. That's totally right.
But let's also not forget that the tariffs are projected of this administration are projected to raise prices anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 each year

Speaker 5 for the average American family.

Speaker 5 I was going to be like, oh, that would be very expensive. But my point is, is absolutely we should be able to get drug prices down.
We know how to do that. That's a political problem to get that done.

Speaker 5 We have made some headway in the IRA. We've got a lot more to do.
But at the same time, I think we've got to be very focused on communicating that Trump Anomics is about raising costs for Americans.

Speaker 5 That is very clear, and it's going to push us straight into a recession. The only thing that's worse than inflation, unemployment.
And that's straight around the corner.

Speaker 5 And we have to have an agenda to rebuild after that.

Speaker 2 And it also,

Speaker 2 to the utter antithesis of everything that you lay out in this book over these last hundred years, there is no infrastructure. behind this.
It is an economic policy by fiat, by whim.

Speaker 2 And it is, I'm going to raise them 130% today on the tariffs. But there's nothing, no strategy underlying it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, we could do, I mean, there is a way in some cases to do tariff policy. Oh, sure.
You know, smartly.

Speaker 5 You'd want to have it be targeted and say, hey, we don't want China to dump their EVs in our market. Something like that.

Speaker 5 You'd want to do it with Great Britain, the European Union, your allies to do it well. And then you'd also want to pair it with public investment because you don't want to just make things expensive.

Speaker 5 You want to speed up the production here at home.

Speaker 5 There's a way to do that and to think about it. And Bidenomics has gotten a bad rap in a lot of cases.

Speaker 5 But those ingredients were there with a lot of the core elements around climate policy, chips and semiconductors, and Lena Kahn's work at the FTC.

Speaker 2 She's fantastic. And you see it now even when they say, oh, Apple has decided they're going to move all of their factories.
They're going to move them out of China.

Speaker 2 And you think, oh my God, the tariffs are worked. And then they're like, to India.
They're not moving them here.

Speaker 2 So this is a shell game that corporations, they'll wait this out because there's nothing underlying it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, literally, the boats that are coming from China are at half capacity right now because the companies are waiting to ship to see what actually happens. So

Speaker 5 there's an agility in these supply chains, which I think is important to realize. And so, I mean, but again, the question is, what are we going to do on the other side of this?

Speaker 5 Like, obviously, we have to criticize what's happening right now. Sure.
But all the time that we're doing that, we're not developing this positive agenda for the future.

Speaker 5 And at least least the latter is mostly what I'm focused on.

Speaker 2 And this is kind of a really nice framework to start out there.

Speaker 2 I also have to, so you haven't obviously been to Facebook in a very long time, but I'm still sure you're probably a pretty keen observer of the technocrats and

Speaker 2 all the guys from that world. Has anything that has happened

Speaker 2 since Trump took office surprised you in terms of the

Speaker 2 sort of libertarian, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg on, what do you want? $25 million? I'll never do anything again.

Speaker 2 Has their

Speaker 2 obsequiousness surprised you in any way? Is there anything about what's happening in that world?

Speaker 5 I was a little surprised they didn't get a deal. You know, Mark visited the White House two, three times in search of a deal.

Speaker 2 What kind of deal or what did they get?

Speaker 5 Well, the FTC has sued to break up Facebook.

Speaker 5 So as you know, I talked about this in an article six years ago.

Speaker 2 Short FTC filed.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you did.

Speaker 5 That was a good one. The FTC filed, I thought so.
The FTC filed suit a year later, and it's taken forever to wind through the courts.

Speaker 5 But Mark Zuckerberg was on the stand for, not last week, but the week before, virtually every day.

Speaker 5 And the Trump FTC is prosecuting the case to separate Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook. That's the agenda.
And who knows? Google's been declared a monopoly twice in the past eight months.

Speaker 5 But he doesn't like Google.

Speaker 2 So some of this is maybe they still, they haven't proven their loyalty loyalty enough. I think he enjoys humiliating Zuckerberg.

Speaker 2 I think he thinks Google was working against him because Tim Cook and Apple got a great deal.

Speaker 5 I know, but I do think something has changed. It's not so much about Trump, but I think in the world of antitrust and anti-monopoly, there's been a big shift.

Speaker 5 Because the guy who's running the FTC now,

Speaker 5 I think it's really interesting that he kept some of the merger guidelines from the LenaCon time. They also actually filed suit against

Speaker 5 the FTC filed suit against Uber last week for misleading customers.

Speaker 5 What?

Speaker 2 Can you believe it? Uber? Uber.

Speaker 5 But my point is, is like there is there is still this sense that markets need to be competitive

Speaker 5 if they're going to work in a way that's in line with the long-term history of American capitalism. And I think that's a big shift in antitrust and anti-monopoly.

Speaker 5 It doesn't have anything to do with Trump. So, you know, I'm not giving him any credit for it, but it has a lot more to do with LinaCon and a new, more emergent

Speaker 5 set of approaches to antitrust that's more in keeping with this.

Speaker 2 And there is, listen, Lena Kahn had fans on the right. J.D.
Vance was a fan. Josh Holly was a fan of it.

Speaker 5 Over almost a dozen Republican senators voted for her confirmation.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So it's interesting.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much for being on. Mark the characters.
I got to tell you. It's available now.
Pick shoes.

Speaker 2 Good break. We'll be right back after this.
Fantastic. I thought

Speaker 2 so many.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody. I'm with you.
On Trump Show for tonight. We're going to have fill coverage all week of Trump's first 100 days.

Speaker 2 Jordan Clepper is going to handle tomorrow, Desi Elidic on Wednesday, Michael Costa on Thursday. No skips.
All bangers.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a music term I learned yesterday.

Speaker 2 Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Fairmount Plus.

Speaker 5 Paramount Podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart Podcast.