89. Tariffs Slammed & Musk Out: Trump's Worst Week

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katie Kay, and back by very popular demand.

Well, Anthony is literally in Versailles.

I kid you not.

Okay, last time there was a little bit of a stretch of the imagination saying that he was on a yacht in the Caribbean, but this time he actually is in Versailles.

So we can say that he is in the Hall of Mirrors.

We have with us replacing Anthony, the wonderful former Republican chairman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the host of MSNBC's The Weeknight.

It is Michael Steele.

Mr.

Steele, you came back.

I'm back in the neighborhood, baby.

Here we go.

Let's saddle up.

Because there's nothing happening in the world.

Nothing.

It's all Versailles, right?

Do you want to know that yesterday I texted Fiona, our producer, and said, God, this is weird.

This is like the first week we've had in the Trump administration where there hasn't been an obvious news story for us.

And bam.

I shouldn't have said that clearly.

Oh, please don't speak it.

Make it so.

Yeah, exactly.

You think if we just keep quiet, the news will keep quiet.

I don't know if that's how you do it.

You keep your head down and the stupid just somehow stops.

You know, that's just how it works.

That's, I think, that might be what Harvard's thinking about at the moment.

We're going to get to them after the break.

When I lived in Japan, they had this expression: the nail that sticks up must be hammered down.

And I think that is how Harvard is feeling right now.

So, we're going to get to Harvard after the break.

But the big news that broke, of course, in the last, we are recording this on Thursday.

It's afternoon, my time.

I'm, yes, in the south of France.

Somebody has to be.

Hey, folks, she's in the south of France.

I'm in Maryland.

All right.

Just so y'all put that in perspective, okay?

South of France, Maryland.

I did say if you want to join me down here, you're very welcome.

I think the Provence Bureau is in our future.

Anyway, it is very nice in the south of France, but guess what they're talking about?

They are talking about Donald Trump everywhere I go.

We cannot escape him.

And the big news, of course, this week, tariffs.

Donald Trump's tariffs just got blown out of the water by a federal court.

Judges overruled that he stepped his authority in claiming that there was an emergency around the fentanyl crisis in the United States and that the tariffs could be imposed because of this other emergency.

A court of the International Trade Court.

I'd never even heard of this court.

Had you heard of this court, by the way?

I have heard of it, yes.

This court that most Americans, including myself, had not heard of.

And three judges unanimously ruled, one of them appointed by Barack Obama, one of them appointed by Ronald Reagan, and the third one appointed by Guess Who

unanimously agreed that it was illegal what the administration is doing.

And so I think there is now more confusion, not less confusion.

I've been texting today with somebody from the European Union who's like confusion added to incompetence when it comes to American trade policy.

But the markets like it.

They think that this means the end of Donald Trump's trade war.

I'm not so sure, Michael, what do you reckon?

Do you think the White House pushes back on this one or finds another way to do something that Donald Trump has clearly always wanted to do?

Exactly.

So, a couple of things out of the gate.

One,

the ruling by the International Trade Court is

important

because it is a court of particular jurisdiction that actually read the Constitution of the United States.

Imagine that.

The White House never did, but they did, and they know where the power of tariffs lies.

It does not lie in an executive order of any president, especially this one, but it rests in the authority of the United States Congress.

Now, there is a bill,

as you've probably been tracking in Congress, a bipartisan bill that

pulls that power back to the legislative branch that would set up a 60 to 90 day review of any tariff order by the president.

That's not moving at the moment, but at least it's there.

So, this is profoundly important.

What it says to the markets is what the markets should have already understood from the very beginning is that the action by the president was an illegal action.

And so, any actions by the markets should be based on that fact.

So, I had this conversation with a couple of Wall Streeters the past week.

And my attitude, Kat, is I'm sick and tired of them playing stupid and just whipsawing back and forth.

You know, one day the market's up because, oh, Donald Trump just got rebuked by a court.

And then the next day it goes down when Donald Trump comes back and goes, I'm going to impose a tariff on this or that.

They know what they're dealing with.

And so the back and forth with the markets to me is ludicrous because the one thing they're known for is stability.

So find a stable place and stay there until the administration works their ish out, right?

Right.

Or it is worked out for them by the international or U.S.

courts.

So, the reality

right now is, yeah, markets may be up to date.

They may like this.

They like this ruling.

But I guarantee you, and you can bank it, Donald Trump and his team will come back around with something else that's going to roil the markets because the instability is the feature.

It's not the bug.

Right.

I mean, look, you look.

I mean, I was

doing some research on this this morning and the court has said you can't use this method, as far as I understand it, to implement these global tariffs because you're using one weapon for another problem, but that weapon isn't allowed to be used for that problem, as far as I see it.

But there are other ways that if Donald Trump had been more patient, if he had been prepared to follow the process, if he'd been prepared to take longer and be a bit more gradual, he could have done these tariffs.

And he still may be able to do these tariffs.

It's just his instinct is always to go for the maximum bang with, you know, full headlines.

And he wanted that instant impact.

He didn't want to have to wait and do it properly.

And that's how he's got himself into legal problems this time around.

Yeah, when you unpack that a little bit, Caddy, I think,

yeah, you're right.

If there was some logic and there was a rationale.

But what's the rationale to impose tariffs on our European allies, on Canada, on Mexico?

What's the rationale?

There is no economic rationale.

The only behemoth in the marketplace that you have to deal with is China.

That's the one Europe and Asia and the Americas are concerned about.

So a coordination.

between the United States and our allies, our economic partners, to stem the bad behavior of China.

I never was a fan of them joining the WTO.

Shouldn't be there in the first place.

They're outside actors.

So deal with that.

But what you've got now with Trump is, to your point, the slapdash, this, I want the Big Bang.

I want to show people putting it on street turns.

I want to show people minds bigger than yours.

I have no idea what you're talking about, Michael.

I don't know what you're talking about.

My hands are bigger than yours.

Okay.

And that's all he's doing.

But what the markets are saying is, no, it's not.

No, it's not.

Because at the end of the day, the bond market is bigger than yours.

And by the way, the courts are bigger than yours.

Well, and the courts are bigger than yours, too.

And the stress test on the courts is whether or not he

violates an order or ruling of a court,

which some have argued he has,

certainly in the case of Mr.

Obrego Garcia, the individual from Maryland who was taken out and sent off without due process, illegally, and falsely accused of being a gang banger and all this other stuff.

And as well as with other migrants who were shipped off on planes that were told to turn around or not even leave.

So there are those pieces.

But on the economic front, the other side of it is if there is some level of consistency, you're right, the markets will settle.

They will respond, but they will settle.

And our allies are working in coordination to deal with whatever whatever that economic issue is relative to China or other markets.

But that's not the case.

Donald Trump's deal is to try to make a big splash because he wants to control the outcomes.

And what he's finding out and what I think a lot of Americans right now are going through with more pain to come is that he can't control those outcomes.

And in fact, those outcomes are very harmful to a lot of people who are really about to feel the full brunt of the decisions that were made in March and April will come home big time in June and July.

So I think, look, I think this is interesting because I think, first of all, other countries are waking up to this, right?

They're waking up to the fact that the bond markets and the American courts are going to contain to some extent Donald Trump's worst instincts, which is why you're not going to get the Europeans suddenly rushing to make concessions at the table.

In fact, there's going to be questions about the concessions that Kirstalma made for the United Kingdom.

Was he too hasty?

And is that why we've had so a little bit of slow pedaling from America's trading partners saying, actually, you know what?

Maybe the courts are going to intervene here.

And now they have intervened.

Why would you go to the table?

Why would you go to the table when,

as the favorite Wall Street saying of the week is, it's not taco Tuesday, it's taco Thursday.

Trump always chickens out, which he hated.

And he called that the nastiest question.

You could tell in the White House how much that bothered him.

My goodness, that bothered him.

It did.

Well, you know,

it's Taco Trump.

You know, what can you say?

He is a chicken.

He's backed down from every fight.

He's backed down from every fight.

That's what bullies do, whether they are bullies on a playground or bullies in a marketplace.

That's what they do.

When there are other players who stand their ground and

draw the line that they know the bully is not going to cross, they're not going to cross it.

They do stand out.

And so when he gets called out, he gets the reflexive response of, you know, of a seven-year-old who has been reprimanded

and throws a little temper tantrum and he makes his threats.

But at the end of the day, that goes back to my point about the limitation of what he can control.

And so, yeah, you know, with respect to the prime minister, yeah, was it premature?

Possibly.

But when you look at the deal,

nothing changed.

We still had 10% tariffs on UK extra.

Right.

It's an innocuous transaction.

The prime minister was like, okay, let me just go here and butter up the guy, slather him in with praise.

Yeah, we'll cut a trade deal that really doesn't amount to too much because it's not just

the tariff and trade situation between the UK and the U.S.

It's all the other partners who are tied into both of those economies.

So, you know, at the end of the day,

you have the U.K., along with other economic partners, now looking around and seeing we don't need to play with the U.S.

as much as we used to.

Yeah, we can slap Dash a little, you know, knockups deal.

And oh, by the way,

Europe, just a little secret, I don't know if you guys know this.

But not everybody's lining up to do a trade deal with Donald Trump and his administration.

There's no long line of ambassadors and prime ministers and finance ministers wrapping around the White House.

Well, there certainly isn't now.

Even if you're not.

So I just want to share that with y'all because in case you were worried that you didn't have a place in line, don't worry.

There is no line.

There's no line.

You don't have a place in line because there is no line.

I think the other thing that's interesting, so there's the trade part of this.

And will he bypass the ruling?

Yes, it's pretty clear.

The judges have noted that there is another law from 1974 that gives the president the authority to impose 15% tariffs for 150 days.

He can still impose sectoral tariffs, the tariffs on steel and aluminum, aluminium, as we call it.

Aluminium.

I never understood

how you guys put the syllable where you do, but that's okay.

Aluminium.

I mean, what the hell is an aluminium?

I mean, wait.

Aluminum.

Aluminum.

The tariffs on aluminum are still there.

The tariffs on cars are still there.

So, yeah, he can bypass this.

But I still think tariffs aside, the issue here that other countries are going to look at and that the United States can look at is the rule of law held.

And that is a huge win.

I mean, let's take the finance out of this.

Here's what the Oregon's Attorney General, Dan Rayfield, who filed one of the lawsuits, said.

We brought this case because the Constitution doesn't give any president unchecked authority to upend the economy.

This ruling from the Court of International Trade is as much about the rule of law as it is about trade.

And the rule of law has prevailed in this case.

It is.

And I think that's important.

That is a profoundly important aspect.

And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the courts understanding and recognizing where the authority line is, that the power to impose tariffs rests not in the executive branch, but in the congressional, the legislative branch.

You have a legislative branch.

Is there one in America at the moment?

I didn't really.

Well, on paper.

On paper, there still is one.

Who knew?

In practice, the Speaker of the House is basically a feckless puppet.

I've talked to enough members now on both sides.

The quiet Republicans shake their head in frustration.

The Democrats shake their head, but they also get a laugh because how ridiculous the House is run right now.

Donald Trump Trump is effectively the Speaker of the House.

He's dictating the terms of engagement.

The Senate will be an interesting, and we can chat about it a little bit more if you want on the big, beautiful bill, which is the budget for the country, which is now in the Senate's lap.

There's some noise around what Republicans don't like about what the House sent, but the realities that the courts are reminding our legislators of is: you have the power.

Why are you giving it to the executive branch?

Why are you allowing this president to basically grab and hold and wrest away from you authorities that are exclusive to you?

And to be fair, Caddy, you know this.

You've been in Washington a long time and covered many administrations.

There has been a successive ceding of that power from the legislative branch to the executive branch going back to 9-11.

Since the early days of the Bush administration, Bush 43,

you've had this, oh, well, you know, world events, we have to trust the president to sort of manage those and we need to give him the authorities he needs to do that.

No, you don't.

You don't see the authority to declare war, therefore the Iraq war should never have happened.

You don't see the authority to just willy-nilly impose tariffs.

That's what Trump is doing.

So we've seen this successive diminishment of legislative authority.

Our judicial branch has been sitting there trying, particularly with the Roberts Court, Chief Justice Roberts, as you know, is trying to navigate that oh so carefully, not wanting to touch on a political thread or seem overly political in its decision making.

But what we've discovered is in the non-decisions or in the punting of the judicial ball or in some outright

rulings, the Dobbs decision on abortion, for example, it is political.

And it is caught up, particularly as two of its justices are steeped in some of the most pathetic ethical lapses on the planet for the job that they have, with seemingly no one giving a damn that billionaires are paying for their kids' education and building them homes, and they're flying flags that show how much of a white nationalist they are.

So you have this sort of destabilization in our political, social,

judicial ecosystem right now, Caddy.

So when the courts do cut through that with clarifying rulings, it's a big deal.

When people have asked me, as I've, you know, particularly when I've been abroad and they've asked me whether American democracy, is America still a democracy?

Is America still going to be a democracy?

And I've seen all the studies that suggest that America has been downgraded from, you know, healthy democracy to fragile democracy as it was downgraded after the election of 2020 and the events of January the 6th and the riot on Capitol Hill.

But I've always believed and I've felt, you know, sometimes I've kind of thought, am I being naive here?

But I have felt the system has held, right?

The system has been stress-tested enormously in the last eight years, but it has held.

I mean, 93%

of the Trump administration's actions that were challenged in court, 93% of the time when he was challenged in court, he lost.

There are now, I think, over 100 federal lawsuits against Donald Trump.

If you take that by business days, that's three a day.

I mean, there is an enormous amount happening in the courts, but the courts time and again, we've seen it this week with the law firms that have

also had rulings in their favor that Donald Trump can't put the kind of pressure on them that he has been trying to put on them.

We've seen it even with university students who have been detained and that the Trump administration is trying to deport.

And the courts are saying, no, not so fast.

You can't just pick people up off the streets.

So I feel that the courts are doing what they are meant to do.

And that is what has always given me hope, the kind of optimist in me hope that the American system holds.

Are you suggesting that we can't be that optimistic until we see how the Supreme Court rules on a lot of these controversial issues?

Do we have to wait?

Yeah, we do.

We do.

Because lower courts, whether they're district courts or they're appeals courts, and particularly given that that authority is now being challenged by some Nimrods in the Congress and outside the Congress in the MAGA verse that say, you know, saying that, I'm sorry, a federal judge can't impose

a ruling across the country.

Right.

So if the federal government takes an action and

the district court says, I'm sorry, that action is unconstitutional and therefore I impose a gag order

or I

impose a stay

rather on those actions.

They're now saying, oh, you can't do that.

You can only, we want it limited to the jurisdiction in which the matter arose.

Meaning, if it rose in the fourth circuit, it wouldn't apply in the fifth, the ninth, the seventh circuits

of the system, which is crazy.

I mean, the jurisprudence has allowed that it was a statewide, a nationwide ban or stay on that action.

They don't want to do that.

As I pointed out to a couple of folks, well, that ought to be

real interesting when the next Democratic governor, a president, decides that they want to start stripping away your rights to own a gun.

And a court says, oh, you can't do that.

And

they can't put in place a nationwide stay on that action.

It'll only apply to the jurisdiction in which it comes, which means if it ain't Texas, guess what?

Yeah.

So, you know, so it's that they're not thinking ahead.

They're not thinking about how this, these stories, these, these efforts play out beyond Trump.

And that's the point.

This is all about how they A, consolidate power into one man, B, in the process of consolidating that power, butter him up, keep him happy, keep him fat and happy and orange, right?

Got to look tanned and beautiful.

And three,

destabilize the system so any attempts to correct for their first action is either forestalled or limited in terms of recovery, right?

And that's the part where the courts, when you're looking at the stair step of the courts, become so important because they play such an important part in our system for the recovery, right?

That's where you go and all the way up from the district to the appeals court to the supreme court, along the way, that's the corrective action.

That's the reframing in the constitutional framework.

And ultimately, the Supreme Court is where we hope rulings will go, and they will limit the president's authority under the emoluments clause.

Now, just for the audience to know, we have this little thing called the Emoluments Clause, which means basically you can't take a plane from Qatar.

Yes, you cannot take a plane from Qatar.

Basically, Basically means

it just can't happen.

You got to register that bad boy.

You just can't accept it.

Little aside, it does look like the legal work has not quite been finished on that one.

There may have been a little bit of a preemptive announcement of that plane coming.

Yes, yeah.

That plane is not going to happen.

It's just not because the Fed, I don't care what Secretary of Defense Heg Seth says, he can accept all day long.

The reality of it is that that $400 million plane is going going to cost U.S.

citizens about a billion and a half dollars because they're going to have to retrofit that bad boy because it will nowhere meet the standards that go into anything the president of the United States flies on

and just to get the damn bugs out that are going to be placed in the plane.

But anyway, I digress.

So

the point is the courts are where we go to hold that, to hold the wall in place against

an aggressive executive branch or an overreaching legislative branch, you know, through its regulatory power

legislative power.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And we've always said when the White House defies a clear Supreme Court ruling, that is when you reach for the emergency ripcord and you pull fast, because that'll be the moment at which there is a real constitutional crisis.

You know, somebody else who feels that the system is strong and held and tried to destroy the system?

Elon Musk, who announced this week, that was a pretty good segue, right?

Anyone would think I'd done that before,

you know, that was like television host to television host.

TV and radio.

Anyway, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that his scheduled time as a special government employee was coming to an end.

He did say he'd like to thank Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.

But he's done a whole series of kind of, I suppose you call them exit interviews, where he has pointed to the fact that when it came to Elon Musk versus the swamp, effectively the swamp one, let's face it, and that it was much harder to cut government spending than he thought it was going to be, even up until about a month ago, when he was promising that this was going to be easy and it was cutting billions of dollars in a day, and that it was wild how fast he was succeeding.

Now, here is Elon Musk saying, actually,

damn the swamp.

It's very difficult to make savings.

There's a reason it's called a swamp, and you don't wander into it unless you've got very big wellies on.

And also, he's, I think this is interesting too.

He's kind of putting distance between himself and the Trump administration, right?

I mean, he's sort of like saying, actually, I don't really love everything there.

Do anyone would think he'd suffered a reputational defeat and that his companies were suffering because of all of this?

Poor little stupid.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay, so at first,

yes, I don't know how

you look at aluminum and come up with aluminium.

Okay.

And I don't know how we look at schedule and come up with schedule.

So there we are.

I just want to know.

I just, you know, inquiry minds.

And these are the important questions of our time.

These are the important questions.

I always think that I love it.

I love it when I hear the Brits go schedule.

What is the schedule today?

Yeah, baby.

Let's talk about the schedule.

I think it automatically sounds a lot calmer, right?

Like, it's not going to be too busy.

A schedule sounds harder.

My schedule.

My schedule.

Oh, okay.

Let me find out what you're doing.

All right.

I digress.

I apologize.

I like the linguistic comparisons, and I like it when I come out on the right side of them.

It's very good.

It is so rich.

Can I give you, here's a little linguistic thing I came across.

Do you know where the word deadline comes from?

No.

So in the Civil War, they ran out of prisons, American Civil War, this is, not the British one, and they would round up the Northern forces, well, the Union forces would round up the Confederate soldiers, and they didn't have any prisons to put them in, so they would lay a rope around them, and they would say to them, If you cross outside that rope, we shoot you.

That was the deadline.

Wow.

There you go.

There we go.

A little bit of trivia for our rest is politic.

We like a little bit of trivia for our restaurant.

My mama says, Learn something new every day, and guess what?

So here's learning something new.

How much money did Doge actually save?

None.

Do we know?

None.

You know, hundreds of millions, maybe.

The problem here is it's not just what they save, it is what they expensed in the process.

So, meaning, okay,

we shut down this department.

We'll fire these 1,500 people

and we'll save $250 million.

Okay, but guess what?

Since you shut down the department and fired the 1,500 people, the work they were doing still goes on because people are calling the department.

People are trying to get some stuff done.

And now

you've got the added cost of trying to manage

that effort.

In other words, eliminating a department doesn't stop the need.

It doesn't address the need.

No one took the time to sit down and go, okay, exactly what does Department A, B, C, and D do?

Is there overlap?

Is there,

you know, are there pens, meaning positions that are not being currently filled, that we can eliminate, et cetera.

There's no analysis.

They just eliminated department.

They just fired federal employees.

The USAID is the perfect example of it.

They just went in and took a cleaver or buzzsaw, chainsaw to USAID.

And right now, around the globe, children are dying.

In Africa, the AIDS epidemic is epidemic again.

It is AIDS is on the rise between, especially among young kids, because the medicines are no longer there.

Yeah, so we saved a lot of money with USAID, but what is the ultimate cost?

Because guess what?

At some point on the back end,

we're going to see that cost come back.

And so Elon Musk was full of crap from day one soft power is cheaper than hard power and america just forfeited it soft power

and when you fundamentally disregard that it's not a question of understanding it they understand it they're not stupid people they understand it they just disregarded it because they have no concern for anyone other than themselves and in so many ways elon musk donald trump are the best representatives of the most selfish society in american history a lot of Americans right now, in my estimation, I've been saying this for a while, this generation is the most selfish we've ever seen.

Thank God they weren't around in World War II, because the outcome would be very different.

It is all about how I'm impacted, what's happened to me.

And so it's this lack of appreciation of the humanity of others, the concern for the larger community

and the impact that we have played in the world and the benefits that come from that, to your point about the soft power.

So, Elon Musk was never about any of that.

He got what he wanted because he wrote a $250 million check to Donald Trump's campaign.

And Donald Trump said, all right, let me make up some

BS position, put you in charge of it.

and let you run amok with the federal government.

And that worked fine until what Donald Trump, with the rest of what Donald Trump team was doing, started to impact his business.

And we saw it in the stock price of Tesla.

We saw it in the fact that people were burning that ish on the street.

We saw it in the fact that

his rating among people who used to really like him turned upside down.

And he became no different than any other government official.

And so

the villain that is the government became him.

He became that image, which worked fine for Donald trump right because donald trump whole numbers weren't impacted by what musk was doing yeah i mean it's interesting isn't it because there is elon musk who clearly was kind of brilliant in some ways as an innovative business person and entrepreneur but his expertise in one well he kind of i think he did do he pushed electric vehicles

his backstory really yeah well funny you should say that for any founding members who have been listening to our elon musk Musk series, where we are exploring the making of the so-called unelected president of the United States, this week's fallout between Musk and Trump is particularly resonant because in this week's episode, we have just left Musk with incredible ammunition.

As he's been snubbed by Biden, he's slowly falling down his own woke mind virus hole of Twitter, and he's looking towards his next venture.

Next week, we'll get into the reasons behind Musk's decision to endorse Trump as president and how he used his power and influence to get them both into the White House.

And of course, if you're not a member, you know you can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com.

There it is.

There it is.

That's what we're dealing with.

But I think it's whatever expertise he had in the field of business, he did not transfer that into his job in government.

And it's interesting that you can succeed in one area, but actually be pretty dumb in another area.

And he didn't realize how much it was going to impact his reputation, which would therefore impact his customer base, which happens to be pretty liberal, and that would impact his companies as well.

Well, yeah,

that's the perfect analysis of that.

And there are a couple of things that are top of line there.

And first is, I'm sorry, businessmen aren't presidents.

And presidents aren't business people.

Because the requirements of the job are very different.

Your constituency is very different.

Your bottom line is very different.

And so when when I, you know, having the shareholders of Tesla is not having the same as having the shareholders of the entire country.

And so, you know, it's just, you know, the people who are investing in Tesla aren't on snap programs and food stamps.

Right.

All right.

So that's a different constituency that you have to account for.

You just can't go in and say and tell,

it would be like Elon Musk going to his shareholders and telling them, okay, well, today we've decided that we're not going to do X, which will take about 30% of the value of your investment away from you.

They're not doing that.

Nor is a president, at least anyone with a mind and a heart that functions, are going to go and tell their constituents, okay, today we're taking away your food stamp program, so you won't be able to feed your family.

They're two different things.

So when Musk goes in and says, oh,

we're just going to end

these programs that impact your health, your education, where you live, how you pay your bills.

What does he care?

He doesn't, he's not tuned into that.

They're not his constituents.

They're not his investors.

And that's the problem.

The second part of it is when you get past all of that, Donald Trump is a user.

He knows where Elon Musk stood in the last presidential campaigns.

He knows knows Elon Musk was not a supporter of his, but they worked it out because Elon Musk wanted something and Trump wanted something.

So the deal was made.

Give me $250 million, get me elected, and I'll give you the keys to the government.

So now Elon Musk had his 19-year-old idiots.

who aren't really idiots, go into the government and start strip mining it.

All that data, all that information.

Guess what they're getting?

So Elon Musk is, oh, you know, my government services are done.

I just, it's just so much

I just can't do.

I can't do.

Yay!

I can't do it, right?

That's Elon Musk.

Why is he so happy at the end?

Because he got all our data.

He got it all.

And so it doesn't matter to him.

He walks away.

And Donald Trump don't care because guess what?

He was the front man for the ultimate deconstruction of the federal government.

It's so disrupted internally now that agencies and departments can barely function.

And so now the strip mining is much easier to do to go in and say, well, this department isn't working.

Let's shut it down.

It's just mind-boggling to me how members of Congress, especially Republicans who control the House and the Senate, have sat by and allowed these individuals, Trump and Musk, to basically go to their constituents in some of the poorest parts of our country, Alabama, Mississippi, for example, and just take away the very thing that they need to sustain themselves.

That safety net is there for a reason, regardless of what you think about it.

And the people who complain about the safety net are the people who don't use it, who have no need for it.

It's the lack of empathy.

And it's not like America's safety net has ever been very robust compared to many other countries.

And those people really did need that.

Yeah.

No, I can tell you.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we will come back and talk about the latest, talking from one end of America to another and talk about Harvard.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katie Kaye, and the very great

Michael Steele is with us.

Another big story this week, of course, has been the ongoing trials and tribulations and battles between the Trump administration and the University of Harvard.

First of all, the Trump administration said that they were going to ban international students.

We spoke about that on our members-only question and answer when that broke last weekend.

But this is about a quarter of Harvard's student body.

It would be an enormous financial blow to Harvard.

And now we've got the Secretary of State saying that he is going to stop all student visa interviews for America, but particularly targeting Chinese students,

saying that anyone that is associated with the Communist Party can't come to the United States.

I imagine that's quite a lot of Chinese students because they're going to have some sort of affiliation, even if it is not direct.

Basically, that's going to be Chinese students.

Sorry, you're not welcome to come.

I mean, this is, this, this seems to me, what I think about this story is that the thing that has surprised me is the degree to which during that four years out of office, clearly people like Stephen Miller went through all the rule books and they looked at all of the ways that they could

enact retribution.

against these liberal institutions that they don't like because they see them as bastions of liberalism.

And in some ways, they are right.

There are not nearly enough conservative voices represented in many of America's universities.

But the way they are going about this is not necessarily legal because there is no process.

So again, you're going to have the courts.

We spoke about the courts in the first half of the program.

You've got the courts already intervening saying, hold on a second.

By the way, this isn't legal.

You have to allow these foreign students at least temporarily.

But the outcome is the same.

The rest of the world, if you're thinking, if you're a Brit and you're thinking of sending your kid to university in Harvard, or if you're Chinese and you're thinking of sending your kid to university in Harvard, to give America the benefit of those best in the world minds, you're not going to have a second thought.

You're now going to think, is it worth it?

Because I don't know.

Yeah, okay, the court has a temporary restraining order, but I don't know if that's still going to be in place.

So my child is going to have to be checking the federal docket every Monday morning before lectures begin.

The damage to America's as a place of reliability and excellence is already being done.

Yeah, I think honestly, Caddy,

the damage that Secretary Rubio, who should know better,

not should, excuse me, I'm sorry, does know better.

He does know better.

Let's be clear.

Marco Rubio does know better, but it speaks to desperation to have the job and be in the power and to be liked by Donald Trump.

I just replay over and over in my head everything that Marco Rubio said about Donald Trump, all of it he believed until

power and

position

was of greater value.

And so now you have the Secretary of State issuing these blanket,

I'm just going to say it, dumbass rulings that

will have an irreparable impact on our system.

Because one of the, like USAID, one of the soft powers of our of our great system

is the ability to attract incredible talent.

Talent that wants to be here, talent that will come and do incredible things in engineering and math and science,

culturally.

The storylines of great minds that started at a university, not just Harvard.

I mean, you know,

we've gotten great, great minds

from students from other lands at every university in our country.

So, yeah, Harvard's become sort of the poster child for the conversation.

But it's not just about the elite universities, it's about the state schools.

I mean, the University of Maryland here in the state of Maryland has an incredible network of students from other countries.

And that's because of of the ability to create programs that attract them and for them to expand the opportunity into other areas because of their studies.

And the symmetry and synergy between those students, our students, and these in the university system, I think is one of our soft powers, one of our great strengths.

And now we're sitting here talking about, to your point, having students check in every morning to see if they're still legal.

Why would a parent put themselves through that?

Why would they?

And I can tell you the outcry from the selfsame numb nuts here in the U.S.,

if Cambridge or a great university in Great Britain decided, you know what, we want to check your visa.

You know, you're a U.S.

citizen.

We just want to make sure, you know, it matters what state you're from.

You know, if you're from, if you're from a red state, we don't want you here at our university because we're concerned about your political ties.

Or have you ever said anything on social media against Keir Starmer and the Labor Party?

You know, these people would be losing their minds.

Absolutely.

How dare you?

We are the United States.

You can't do it.

Our students are great.

All of that crap.

So this is all, it's performative, but it's dangerous.

It's performative and it's harmful.

And so, what will happen is, yes, we're going to see a brain drain that's going to have a direct impact on our universities and our system as a whole, because that soft power will dissipate because those students won't come.

As a parent, I wouldn't want my kid to be subject to it.

I'm not going to risk their education in a place where they're not wanted.

The other thing that the Trump administration has just threatened to do as well is cancel the government contracts.

So he's going to try and order federal agencies, and again, this may well be challenged in courts, but this is the state of play.

As we record on Thursday, the federal agencies have been asked to cancel all government contracts with Harvard.

That's estimated at $100 million.

Now, the kinds of things that might be, there's a $50 million National Institutes of Health contract to investigate, for example, the effects of coffee drinking.

There are other contracts out there in the business school to look at leadership and training programs.

So the government gives these contracts.

The country benefits because this kind of research gets done.

And that's where I think the other real risk here is that it's not just performative, because the relationship that you just described, Michael, between it's not just between the

universities and the students, it's also between the universities and the governments.

American universities are where a lot of research gets done that benefit the United States.

So, here's a question for you: Is America at risk of sabotaging itself from within with this kind of action?

Absolutely.

It is.

And again, for me, all of this comes back to the Congress.

We have in our system three independent co-equal branches.

And when one goes a little rogue, the other two are there to go, okay,

slow down, right?

There's the check to rebalance

that relationship.

And it applies to everything.

Everything we do in this country runs through that system, excuse me, runs through that system in a way that

you balance, rebalance, balance, rebalance.

And so what we're facing now is that when you're only left with one branch, the judicial branch, to rebalance for the other two, it becomes much more difficult.

And there's a lot of damage, Caddy, that's done before it even gets to the courts, right?

Because we have this requirement, little thing called standing.

Not everybody can get into a court and sue to try to get that rebalance, right?

And so

absent someone who actually brings the kind of legal challenges that allow for the rebalancing to take place, that effort stays in place and it takes hold.

And the longer it has

the more damage that is done.

I've been asking this question.

And in fact, it's funny.

Last night after my show in MSNBC, I was talking with one of the folks that was on with us.

And I was like, you know, I'm just asking a question.

Is anyone considering what this looks like on the other side?

Let's say four years from now, Donald Trump does finally sit his behind down and is gone.

And whether it's J.D.

Vance or some other MAGA nut who's president or a Democrat who's trying to figure out where the light switch is in the room, the damage, the institutional damage to our government and the institutions therein and the programs and the processes is there.

And in a very short time between now and then, without that corrective action,

that damage gets harder to fix.

And that's, to your point, the problem we're going to face.

When you have the brain drain, when you have the breakdown of our partnerships with our allies like Great Britain, when you have the internal confiscation of authority and rights of individuals, that's hard to fix on the back end.

No one's giving any consideration to that right now because everybody, it's, you know, it's

to the point, it's like you're looking at a blazing fire in a big home, right?

And the goal is to try to put the fire out.

And you're not really thinking about, okay, so how easy will it be to rebuild, right?

And what will that require?

And that makes sense.

But at some point, as you're standing there looking at the fire, at least for me, I'm going to stand there and go, you know what?

Maybe now, next time when I rebuild, I'll add a wig.

You know,

you have to start thinking about what it looks like on the other side.

And we haven't, and we're not.

And our Congress certainly isn't helping in any regard.

And I think the damage is going to be much more long-lasting and more difficult to heal from and to fix than a lot of people realize.

Put a pin in this part of the conversation, and we'll see in a few years how right or wrong I am on this.

My suspicion is this is going to be a lot harder to undo

than it has been to do it.

And some of this, what's happening right now, everybody listening, we don't know the full impact of yet.

We don't.

This is so early, and the long-term impacts of some of this stuff is going to take years to shake out.

But I agree with you, Michael.

I don't think that this is going to do any good to America's competitiveness.

Let me ask you a question on that, if I can, Caddy, because it's gotten me thinking.

The Brexit effort, how is that going?

You look at the polls in the UK, and there's generally a feeling, and the polls have become more against Brexit recently.

There's generally a feeling that it didn't help Britain's economic standing, which is why, I mean, Anthony talks about this, that America is at risk of Brexiting itself from the rest of the world.

That's it.

That's doing itself

that long-term economic damage.

Okay, so one question, though, that I keep getting asked, is this personal?

Is Donald Trump taking retribution against Harvard because Baron Trump was rejected from the storied university.

As was Steve Miller, I believe, yes.

Melania Trump has denied that he ever applied to Harvard.

I know that he applied to universities in New York and now goes to New York University.

As far as I am aware, he didn't apply to Harvard.

So I don't think this is personal in that way.

But it is personal in the sense that Harvard stood up to Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump has a worldview that if you are the strongest, then you have a right to have a fight with somebody.

And if you are the weaker in the partnership, then you don't have a right.

He said this about Ukraine, that the Ukrainians were dumb to go to war against Russia.

Even though they were invaded, they were dumb to try to defend themselves because they were not the strongest ones.

He said they didn't have enough missiles.

I think that's how he sees this fight with Harvard.

Says the man who claims bone spurs for his lack of service in the Vietnam War.

As somebody who's just had bone spur surgery myself, I'm very embarrassed about that, Michael.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm trying to pretend it was something else, but it wasn't, but I was not using it to get out of a draft in Vietnam.

Real quick on Trump, yes, it's all personal for him.

Even if it's not to do with Barron, it's still personal.

There are a lot of reasons why Trump has it in for Harvard.

I think you aptly describe it.

It's the way he sees other big institutions and, you know, the power and the ability to challenge and take them down to show, again, mine is bigger than yours.

And so, you know, using the power of the presidency in a very retributive, personal way, the important thing is to know that there's a real psychopathy here that is dangerous and problematic for the United States of America.

And the people in this country, the 78 million who decided that this would be better than

Kamala Harris, for example, that that's what the country has to reconcile itself with right right now.

Which is why there is never going to be a quiet news week during the Trump administration.

This was, by the way, the mine is bigger than yours episode of The Rest is Politics US with Michael Steele and me, Caddy Kaye.

Join us, of course, for our question and answer for founding members on Sunday, where we're going to discuss Putin and Trump's relationship and whether we are on the verge of a new Cold War.

If you want to sign up and become a founding member, of course, it's The Rest is Politics US.

Sign up, come Come on, what are you doing?

Sign up.

You get more Michael Steele on Sundays.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Thanks, Michael.

It was so fun to have you back.

It's good to be back with you, Caddy.

And, you know, don't stress yourself where you are, babe girl.

Just, you know,

get that bone spur relaxed.

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