79. Insider Trading in The White House?

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Okay, 3.03 in the afternoon on the East Coast.

Damn, I wanted to start bang on at 3 o'clock to make sure that you didn't get told off, Anthony.

I'm very worried about the fact that people, you know, somehow seem to get the short end of the stick.

You know, it's.

Yeah, everyone thinks that I'm because I had that one kerfuffle.

I'm the one that's always late now.

It's fine.

I was here.

Okay, you were here.

It wasn't a confafe, it was a kerfuffle.

But anyway, you say cafe, I'll say kerfuffle.

I'm just, you know, I'm looking out for your reputation as ever as your reputation management consultant.

Yes, you've managed to enhance my reputation, so

I am grateful for that.

So we're in the middle of a constitutional crisis, but everything's fine.

So what do you want to say?

Can we tell people who this is?

This is the Rest is Politics US, by the way, in case you hadn't figured out, but I'm assuming that if you've joined us, you did figure that out already and came looking for us.

Thank you, founding members, for joining us for this question and answer session.

I'm Kathy Kaye.

That's Anthony Scaramucci.

needs absolutely no introduction.

Um,

so there's a whole bunch of stuff going on apart from the oh, we have people from everywhere.

Look at this before we get to that, Switzerland, my home country, Robin Munger.

Thank you, my fellow compatriot.

Karen is joining us from Germany.

Somebody's already commenting on your haircut.

You get so many comments on your haircut, on your moisture.

Carol Smith, thanks to you.

Hampshire,

the French Adams.

It's probably well moisturized today.

Malta, Dunbar, Scotland, from all over the place.

Thank you.

Your hair is looking great.

Thank you.

For those of you who are listening and not watching, we've just had a little hair rearrangement from Mr.

Scaramucci.

Okay,

we're going to take a lot of your questions today because there are so many different things that we want to talk about.

Obviously, updates on the tariffs,

the Ukraine situation,

the president of El Salvador, who has been in the White House speaking, we are recording this.

We are talking to you at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon.

So the two have just wrapped up in the White House.

But Anthony, you want to start with the small matter of a constitutional crisis, which I think will get us to El Salvador.

Well, I mean,

there was a 9 to 0.

Supreme Court decision.

The gentleman who was sent to El Salvador, he's here illegally.

I just want to point that out to everybody.

He was sent to El Salvador.

He's not a nonviolent violator of the immigration laws in the United States.

But he was deported and sent to an El Salvadoran prison without due process.

And so in this country, we've always have had due process.

I mean, there was one period of time when we didn't.

That was during the Civil War, where the

habeas corpus, the writ of mandamus, all that stuff was repealed by Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln is the only president, really, to disavow the Supreme Court.

He did it with the Dred Scott case.

He basically said, the Dred Scott case basically said that blacks could not be U.S.

citizens.

Lincoln did disavow that.

That was like a form of civil disobedience.

So the second president to disavow a Supreme Court case now is Donald Trump.

People say it's Andrew Jackson, but if you actually really understand constitutional history, it isn't.

But I bring this up because it was 9-0 Caddy.

They said you have to go and get the guy and bring him back here.

Of course, now that he's in another country, the president, quote unquote, does not have the power to do that.

But of course, he could have leaned on President Bukole, the president of El Salvador, to do that.

And he purposely did not do that.

And so in the Oval Office, the two presidents, Bukole from El Salvador, President Trump, are saying that the prisoner is staying exactly where he is.

And then they laced into the media by saying that the media wants us to let criminals out of prisons.

But El Salvador is now a safe country because we keep the prisoners in prison.

And Trump was loving every minute of that.

I'm sure the MAGA crowd loves that.

But it does bring us closer to the line of what the president's doing.

And so, again, just three quick things.

Went after the law firms.

He's rebuked the media.

He's gotten settlements from the law firms.

He's gotten settlements from the media.

He's had a chilling effect on the corporations in terms of the CEOs, what they're going to say and not say no money center bank will disavow its tariffs, even though it's crumbling.

The U.S.

stock market probably putting us into a recession.

And so he's slowly creeping down the road.

We're moving down the road of Project 2025 to more authoritarianism.

So please push back on me.

Tell me I'm wrong about this and what I'm thinking about.

This is misguided.

So the Supreme Court case was interesting that it ruled nine to zero.

And the thinking is that the Roberts Court framed the ruling to be

technical enough that he could get all nine of the Supreme Court justices to rule effectively against the administration, and that that was important for him.

But there is some thinking that the ruling itself, the language of the ruling, suggests which said that the White House had to facilitate

Mr.

Garcia's extradition from El Salvador

was woolly enough in a way that the word facilitate, what does it actually mean?

It doesn't say they didn't, the Supreme Court didn't say to the White House, you have to have Mr.

Garcia on the plane with President Bukele when he comes to Washington, D.C.

next week.

They didn't say that.

And

what does facilitate mean in that context?

And I guess that leaves enough wiggle room for people in the government to say, well, we're not defying the Supreme Court order.

We've spoken about this with President Bukele, and President Bukele has said he's not going to send him back to the United States.

As he said in the White House today, that would be akin to sending a terrorist back to the United States.

I'm not going to do that.

And you saw President Trump sitting there kind of positively grinning like a Cheshire cat next to President Bukele.

So

can the White House now try and make the legal claim that they're following, you know, they've raised this and President Bukele says he's not going to do it.

And it's actually a foreign policy issue now, not a contractual law law issue.

And so there's nothing more that they can do.

And I think,

I don't, we've been waiting, right, for the moment when there is a clash between the Supreme Court and the White House.

And the White House ignores a Supreme Court ruling.

And that is the moment at which most lawyers have suggested, yeah, this really would be a constitutional crisis.

And what would that mean?

Obviously, the Supreme Court is painfully conscious of its own standing amongst the American public.

Its opinion

approval ratings are lower than they have been.

It's seen as very political,

which is not what Justice Roberts wants it to be seen as.

And maybe that's also why the Supreme Court is kind of

trying to get into a position where it's urging slowness and deliberation

rather than having a head-on

confrontation by saying, you've got to bring.

Mr.

Garcia back by next Monday to the United States.

And I don't know.

I'm not a constitutional lawyer.

I only play one on a podcast.

I don't even play one on a podcast.

I promise you that.

But I do read some of them.

And

there seems to be some confusion about whether this really does constitute, if they don't bring him back, is that the crisis that constitutional lawyers have been looking for?

You're a lawyer, Anthony.

Would that be it?

Would that be the moment at which

we take the matches and set our hair on fire?

Actually, I'm not going to set my hair on fire.

I've just just spent a lot of money getting it highlighted, so I'm not going to do that.

But would that be the moment?

I wouldn't, God forbid.

I mean,

my hairdresser would be very offended.

And my hairdresser.

Why would we let a constitutional crisis turn into a self-arsonist, God forbid?

That's another issue going on in our country.

But

I guess what I would say is this is going to be a non-event.

Republican senators are going to ignore it.

Democrats are fighting with themselves, Caddy, so they're not going to be organizing any type of dissent of it.

But I do think it's going to do something to the court.

And so I do think that Justice Roberts has taken notice of this now.

And I think he's now sitting there saying, hmm, he's going to come after the court and the checks and balances and Marbury versus Madison and the whole 250-year structure that's made the country successful.

And I think he's going to turn a modest friend, someone that is generally supportive of him and wrote a pretty stunning, gave him a very wide berth in terms of presidential immunity.

But I think he's going to turn.

I think he's going to turn the guy.

And I think he's going to turn this guy from a modest friend into a modest adversary.

So that's what I think the outcome will be.

And obviously, I could be wrong about that.

By the way, you could see 30 days from now, 60 days from now, the guy slips back into the country when it becomes less of a triggering thing.

Sorry to interrupt, but our producer Fiona is pointing out something very smart, as ever.

Fiona, thank you, which is that we should step back a little bit and just explain what what this story is before jumping straight to our hair on fire.

And that is that since March, El Salvador has accepted from America more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants and some other immigrants who have been sent to the country's notorious maximum security gang prison just outside the capital.

That's of course made President Bukele a very popular ally in the Trump administration, which is why he's in Washington today, because he's agreed to take these migrants who are here in the country illegally.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump, of course, had said that they would be sending back the criminals.

There's quite a lot of evidence reporting now that the people who were sent to El Salvador were not actually criminals.

And amongst them is this Maryland resident, Kilmar Abrego-Garcia,

who the administration has said was deported because of an administrative error.

And that the error was that he had had a court ruling in his favor, that he could not be sent to El Salvador because that would put his life in danger.

And so that's the kind of background to this story.

But I think the bigger context of this story is the clash that this is setting up with the Trump administration pushing the Supreme Court to almost daring the Supreme Court to take on an immigration case.

The Supreme Court historically has not wanted to take on immigration cases, but there are now, I think we've got six that have been ruled on and four that are pending of what are called these emergency docket cases before the Supreme Court around the issue of immigration.

So it's the Trump administration really pushing to the max its own authority to get rid of people, but the Supreme Court pushing back and saying

You have to give people due process before you just put them on a plane and send them to El Salvador.

You have to have them have their rights.

I mean, they have, even if they're in the country illegally, they do have right to due process and to have their case heard.

And so you can't just whisk them off the street and send them off to a foreign country.

Well,

one of our founding members, Olivia O'Neill, is pointing out that she's right, that they weren't deported back to the country that they came from.

They've now been imprisoned in a dictatorship.

And so she is correct.

This is a major international human rights violation.

It should be treated very seriously.

But unfortunately, Olivia, in this country, the one I live in, they're not going to treat it seriously.

Maybe there'll be some human rights activists that will voice concern.

If the Republicans did voice concern, Trump would turn to them and say, hey, let's leave it alone.

30 days from now, we'll get the guy back.

You know,

that sort of thing.

But

I guess you're left out there to think.

I ask everybody on this podcast listening to think about this.

Imagine you're out there on your own.

He did come into the country illegally, but now you have no human rights, you have no due process, you have no advocacy.

And then it's the age-old question, Caddy.

They came for that group.

I didn't care.

Then the domino hit another group.

Oh, I didn't care.

Okay, wait a minute.

The domino is hitting me.

Now I care.

And who's coming to help me?

And who's coming to help me?

And I think this is the big issue.

And so

this is where organized leadership, organized dissent, somebody's got to come in here and provide advocacy.

And let's go to Lincoln for a second.

It's interesting because he did disavow the Supreme Court, but he did it on a human rights basis.

He did it on a human rights basis, and there was clarity in his thinking.

And of course, Lincoln would be saying to people, because I've tried to read a little bit of Abraham Lincoln's old words almost every week, but what Lincoln would be saying is that a person doesn't have the right to govern another person without their consent, number one.

And number two, you can't apprehend and hold somebody without a due process.

That's the whole anchor of the system of freedom, Caddy.

So this is super upsetting.

If we go from kind of constitutional crisis to kind of the sort of meta-issue of all of the things we've been speaking about over the last couple of weeks, and this crisis of confidence that the world has in the United States,

in the competence of the leadership of the United States around tariffs, but also in the system of the United States, don't underestimate the degree to which the rule of law is the kind of diamond in America's crown.

And if the rule of law, whether it comes to immigration or to other issues, is seen not to be adhered to, then America loses something that has made it very special over the last two and a half.

you know, 250 years.

And it does so

I would say it is peril.

Okay, there's one other question here, and then we're going to take other questions.

Joe here, who's a YouTube user, is asking: now that the Trump administration is actively defying the Supreme Court, what action could SCOTUS take unprecedented times?

I guess the question is around this narrow legalese, Joe, and we have to look at this: is the Trump administration actively defying the Supreme Court?

And I think that is something that constitutional lawyers are sifting through at the moment.

And I think the Supreme Court phrased this in such a way way that it has allowed the administration a certain amount of rigor room because they know

the risks of an open confrontation.

And they know the risks in terms of their own standing, the Supreme Court standing, but the risks also in terms of what would happen if the Trump administration didn't do anything.

We're going to take a quick break and then take more of your questions.

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Here in the United States, it's been a very busy week already, and we are only Monday.

We're going to talk about the tariffs as well, or no?

I thought we were going to talk about those until this happened.

We are going to talk about the tariffs right now.

And I'm going to start the tariff discussion with Alina Steffelbauer's question, which I think gets us into this.

Anthony, can you explain insider trading and why it is illegal and how does SEC process Liberation Day?

I'm going to just quickly put the context of that and why Alina's asking that.

There's been a lot of questions, particularly online, go on social media platforms and in some of the press, about whether

and the Democrats in the Senate have launched an investigation into this from the Democratic side about whether there was illegal trading around the tariffs.

Because did the White House, in other words, give anyone a heads up that it was going to put the pause on the tariffs, thereby giving some people the opportunity to buy as the market was really at its bottom and then make money when it started to rise after the president changed

the policy?

I have never been accused of insider trading.

Clearly, I'm not even quite sure if I've explained it right, But

I think you've done a pretty good job.

And I just want to proly some historical context for people.

In the 1920s, professionals had the inside information, they had the scoop.

So if I knew about a merger and you were my friend, I could call you and say, hey, buy Anna Dark O'Steele or whatever it is, and they're going to announce a merger next week.

And so it was causing a lot of unfairness in the marketplace.

And so stock markets crashed.

People lost trust in the markets.

And so in 1933, Joseph P.

Kennedy became the first commissioner of the SEC and he tried to go through what caused the crash.

And he tried to regulate or create rules that would prevent this stuff from happening again.

And one of them was the insider trading laws.

So there's a tipper and a tippy.

And so if I'm tipping you on something, I'm the tip E, I am breaking the law by telling you something that I know that I know is inside information.

And you're breaking the law by acting on it if you decided to do that.

Now, that's for the average American.

Now, here's the irony and here's the hypocrisy.

This is why people don't like people in the Congress.

The Congress have been trading on inside information forever.

And so Peter Schweitzer, I think you know who he is, investigative journalist, he wrote an article about this, turned it into a book in 2011.

And the 60 Minutes actually did big interviews on this.

Well, wait a minute,

they're allowing themselves to trade on insider information.

And the answer is yes.

And And so then the Congress voted to renege that.

And that lasted about six months.

And then on a voice vote, Caddy, not on C-SPAN, not in the public, but on a voice vote over the phone, they reinstated it.

And so people like Nancy Pelosi, people,

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is dead against it.

She doesn't have her own personal trading account.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene does.

Others do.

And what they do is they trade on the information.

And it looks like there's lots of patterns that have happened where before Liberation Day, a lot of people were selling the stock market in the Congress, but also friends of those people and friends of Donald Trump.

And then it looked like they were buying several hours before Donald Trump, quote unquote, went to the 90-day.

Didn't Marjorie Taylor Group make a lot of money just before the port?

She did.

And that's one of the things that's fueling the questions about whether there was

a loose, and there's Sherlock Holmes is out there with their magnifying glass looking at the data.

And she got caught, but she doesn't care because for her, she has an exception.

So literally, I can join the Congress.

I know about legislation or I know about a drug that's about to get approved from the FDA.

I can buy call options in those stocks and I can trade.

You know, my buddies in the hedge fund community always laugh.

They say, well, the best hedge fund out there is Nancy Pelosi.

If we could just figure out what she's doing, we'll shadow her trades.

Of course, she gets upset when we say that.

But I I mean, the truth of the matter is there's a high level of unfairness going on.

And there's a feeling that Donald Trump's friends are trading the volatility of his decision-making.

Do we have any evidence?

And I know this investigation has only just been launched by Senator Adam Schiff,

the Democrat from California,

looking into this.

But at the moment, my understanding is that this is speculation.

There isn't actually any evidence.

Is that right?

That the little, the little looking glass that

Dr.

Watson is walking around the halls of Congress with has not actually produced anything.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah,

here's what I would say is no one's going to get in trouble.

But I think he's raising it because he wants people to know that there is a high level of corruption.

I told Alistair, and Alistair loves using it, there's a golden age of corruption taking place.

Bloomberg reported that the Trump family has made a billion dollars off these internet money scams.

We'll call them that, okay, because they're meme coins and the pump and dump that they're doing.

And they've made a billion dollars off of that.

They've got the true social thing that they have wired, although that's down heavily recently.

But Donald Trump is letting people know what he's doing before he does it.

And then he was literally bragging in the Oval Office.

And he said, oh,

this guy made a billion, and that guy made a billion.

And, oh, you know, it's peanuts to that other guy.

It's only 500 500 million and what it does is it decays

it decays the trust

and it it it it causes people yeah and it causes people to lose faith and then with cynicism you do get compliance, Caddy.

If you do study human behavior, what ends up happening is you give up on the idealism, you become a cynic, and then all of a sudden you comply with whatever the nastiness is going on out there.

So you know,

it's it's a problem.

Will Parker is asking, is this the most corrupt administration in U.S.

history?

I don't know if I would say it was the most corrupt, but I think there is.

Not yet.

Not yet.

We are only three months in, and there are a lot of questions about the corruption.

The first Trump administration, too.

There was one thing, I remember the Wall Street Journal, when the tariffs were first announced, had this great line saying Liberation Day is going to be buy another yacht day for the swamp.

Because on top of all of the issues around insider trading and whether people are being given proprietary information and actually making money out of it because they're Donald Trump's friends, don't forget that for all of these countries that are coming to the United States trying to negotiate trade deals or industries that are trying to negotiate carve-outs, somebody is making an awful lot of money.

And this city makes money through lobbying, and those foreign governments will have lobbyists.

So, yeah, somebody's buying extra yachts at the moment.

Okay, the other thing that I wanted to ask about is

you talk about is Ukraine

because we've just had Donald Trump as we're recording this on Monday afternoon in the Oval Office and he said something pretty startling on top of the attacks and we can talk about those the awful attacks in Sumi that happened on Sunday night.

Here's what Donald Trump said today.

When you start a war, you've got to know you can win a war.

You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.

So that is the level of Donald Trump's empathy for the fact that Ukraine was invaded by Russia, did not start this war.

The Russians walked into it and would have tried to take the country in the space of three days if the Ukrainians had not fought back far more ferociously than most people gave them credit to.

But it was also another thing that Donald Trump said about this that struck me.

When you had, I think it was Chancellor-in-waiting Mertz of Germany questioning whether that attack on the town Sumi in Ukraine was actually an act of war crimes because civilians were being killed as they were going to Palm Sunday Mass, including children in Sumi.

And what was Donald Trump's response?

Donald Trump's response was he was told that it was a mistake.

Without questioning whether it was a mistake, you're saying, oh,

it was tragic.

I hear it was a mistake.

But the degree to which Trump now seems to, having a couple of weeks ago pushed back against Vladimir Putin and seemed to get annoyed with Vladimir Putin for not coming to the negotiating table, I think two things are happening.

One is that Putin is emboldened by the lack of resistance from Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump once again seems to have given Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt over this civilian attack.

And now here he is again saying that you that Ukraine started the war against somebody 20 times their size.

I mean,

what's going on here?

Is he getting frustrated that he can't end this on day one?

And so he just wants to give Putin whatever Putin wants?

Is that what's happening here?

I don't understand what's happening.

I mean, it could be that.

It could be something more sinister than that.

But I think that the 60 minutes, I encourage everybody, if you get a chance, just go online, watch the interview.

It was broadcast in the United States last night, the 60-minute interview of Zelensky.

If you could just see the facial expressions when he asked, Does the U.S.

have your back?

Does the U.S.

have your back?

And I think that the facial expression that Zelensky gave off in that interview is a metaphor for the rest of the free world.

And so I would imagine any Western leader sitting there with the 60 Minutes journalist being asked the question, does the U.S.

have your back?

The facial expression on Zelensky was such that, no, actually the U.S.

doesn't have my back, but I can't say that because I'm hoping against hope, a glimmer, that there is leadership inside of the U.S.

that would want to support a free country defending itself against a dictatorship.

And so we're here now,

very dangerous time in the world, very dangerous time in America.

And

a lot of stuff doesn't add up.

And the thing that I'm confused by is the

lack of dissent, the lack of opposition.

There are people protesting.

The media really doesn't pick up the protesters that much.

I'm not saying that there's grounds for a protest like there were during the 60s civil rights movements and so forth.

But there just seems to be an encroachment.

One of our founding members is saying, well, what's the plan?

What's the Project 2025 plan?

I think that you have to take these guys at their word.

The plan is to weaken the

judicial branch, weaken the legislative branch, and figure out a way to get Donald Trump back in office on January 20th, 2029.

I mean, even,

you know, look, I mean, Steve Bannon is saying that.

Why should we pretend otherwise, Caddy?

Oh, it's just they're saying that to trigger the liberals.

You and I last July.

He has now said he's not joking about it.

So I guess.

Yeah, so he's not joking about it.

I know he's not joking about it.

You know he's not joking.

But didn't you and I last July go through Project 2025 in one of our episodes?

And we said, okay.

And then Trump was getting a lot of heat on it.

He said, oh, no, I don't even know who these guys are.

J.D.

Vance wrote the foreword.

He's got all these guys in the administration.

The guy that was the principal architects is the OMB director.

Oh, no, I don't know who these guys are.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Or what does Trump do?

He goes, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

You ever see Trump do that?

With the bing, bing, bing?

That's what he's doing.

He's going down the list with the bing, bing, bing.

I'm sorry.

Okay, Jackie McGinn is asking the press.

When it gets to bing, bing, bing, I'm going to bring in a question.

I'm just saying that's what you're bringing in the question.

I'm just quoting him.

Jackie McGinn, why doesn't any journalist contradict Trump when he says something that is so patently untrue?

I'm referring to his latest comment that Zelensky started the war.

We just brought up that comment about how he said when you start a war, you should win, you should know that you've got to win the war.

But that point about the journalists, so those settings, Jackie, where the journalists are in the Oval Office and they're shouting questions to the president, it's a little bit of a free-for-all with them shouting the questions, but the White House staff also calls on journalists and increasingly they're calling on journalists who are friendly to the White House

as the ones who can launch those questions.

So that is some of the reason you're not getting as many questions on that.

But it's also what we were just saying in a way is that there is so much.

If you were to fact-check Donald Trump every single minute, you would get nowhere.

I mean, you would spend all your times.

I mean, I found this as a journalist covering the Trump administration, and there are networks that literally employ fact-checkers whose job it is after he's given, who, you know, they will have done this on American television after an Oval Office appearance, and they will run through.

Here are all the different facts.

It's certainly kind of full employment for fact-checkers.

But it makes it difficult.

Do you keep calling him, I mean, what's he going to say?

He's going to repeat the same thing.

He won't,

he's hard to fact check because there are so many times that you would have to jump in.

And I imagine that's why

the journalists in the room, because the journalists actually do spend a lot of time, the good ones, spend a lot of time calling Donald Trump on what he says.

It's just not easy to do it full time because there are often things like that.

that he will say that are hard to

before we go to another question, Caddy, someone is asking about El Salvador accepting Venezuelan immigrants.

Why would they do that when these guys are criminals or accused of gang activity?

And the answer is money.

Yeah.

They're getting paid.

The $6 million came from the administration for the first batch of prisoners.

It's a one-year contract.

And actually, some lawyers have pointed out that this isn't sort of diplomacy law or

human rights law or First Amendment law.

This is a contract law that the White House has paid El Salvador for one year.

And at the end of that, presumably, El Salvador is going to give these people back, which also gets to the question of if it's going to give them back after one year, if that's built into the contract, then couldn't it give them back

now?

Here's another question that I think is interesting.

on tariffs.

What can Carney in Canada and the EU do concretely, not just jawboning, in the next 90 days to counter this madness and protect their economies?

That's from Per Joe 123.

I mean, that's a great question, Per Joe, because we know that all of these,

both Canada and the European Union, are reaching out to the administration and having conversations with the administration and particularly with the trade envoys

and trying to see what exemptions they can get, how they could bring down the rate of tariff that they might be slapped with, what they can do in their own countries

around sales taxes, for example, what are the other list of things that's on the Trump administration's list that they can do, that they can get away with doing politically and economically to satisfy the Trump administration in order that in 90 days they don't get hit by these tariffs?

But some of it is also political.

What can they do politically in the European Union, for example, to hold together if the Trump administration were to try and pick off certain countries separately?

And what can Canada and the European Union do together, bigger picture, to try and increase trade amongst themselves as a way of countering the United States?

Let me ask you something and get you to respond.

What if they all got together?

The facts are undeniable about what happened to the decline in exports, the decline of living standards for the United Kingdom at this moment.

So what if the United Kingdom, the EU, and Canada got together and created a free people, free trading block and just said, hey, listen, we get it.

We got the fact that you guys want to be alone.

We got the fact that you want a MEX it, which is an American Brexit from the world.

We understand that you want to do that.

But we've learned our lesson.

We learned our lesson over the last decade.

We're going to team up with the Europeans and the Canadians.

And we're going to form this free people, free trading block.

I'm just throwing it out there as a potential idea that people could think about.

I would just implore people to think differently now.

You have the U.S.

is telling you that they're done.

They want to wall themselves off literally and figuratively from the rest of the world.

I don't know.

Is that going to happen?

Is some

are a few Republican senators going to say, geez, guys, I'm really sorry.

We don't want this to happen.

We're crossing the aisle.

I can tell you, it's not going to be Ted Cruz.

I mean, that cat looks like Reek from the Game of Thrones.

You know, he's like wearing the the gimp suit at the UFC thing.

You know, and this guy went after his wife.

He's waving to the crowd.

He's gained 60, 70 pounds since him and Trump started the fight.

It's not going to be Ted Cruz.

Who's going to be the group?

Is it Thune?

Is Thune going to say, geez, I'm really sorry.

I gave Schumer a call.

It's me, McConnell, Markowski.

I don't know.

We're going to move over and caucus with the Democrats to end this nonsense.

We're going to take the tariff power away from you.

We're going to deny deny your quote-unquote emergency act.

And we're going to go to our allies and say, hey, you know,

we're going to sit this one out.

You tell me, Caddy, or are they going to let one guy in 80, 90 days wreck 80 years' worth of work by the Americans?

Is that what they're going to do?

No, I think they're trying to do that.

I mean, I think

things are happening simultaneously.

So they're talking to the administration because each of them, these leaders, are trying to protect their own economies.

They're also talking to each other.

The problem is,

as

Alice is also pointing out, what will happen when the 90-day freeze on the tariffs are lifted?

Will the fallout be as severe as Liberation Day or will it be worse?

The problem is this is only 90 days.

You look back at, I was looking back at this the other day, NAFTA, which was the North American Free Trade Agreement that Bill Clinton signed in 1994.

The very first discussions around NAFTA actually happened under George H.W.

Bush and the Mexicans in 1990.

So that took almost four years to negotiate.

How do you negotiate a free trade agreement between the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Australians, the Europeans, and Canada when you've got the gun of 90 days hanging over your head with the American?

I mean, you can start the process, but let's be realistic.

You don't negotiate, or it hasn't been done before, a serious free trade agreement between countries in the space of 90 days.

Aaron Powell,

and And I understand that, but there are measures.

And this is an extreme circumstance.

You have Admiral Yamamoto.

That is Donald Trump.

Who is Admiral Yamamoto for all your history buffs?

He's the one that did the sneak attack, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

So Donald Trump is the Admiral Yamamoto of Trade War I.

You are in a trade war.

It is a world war.

It is a trade war.

Get your stuff together and start moving.

Okay, you know, it's also really, really ironic is the guy Greer, who is the trade representative now, he's getting grilled last week in the Congress.

And they're saying, well, how are you going to handle China?

He's talking about teaming up with Asian countries.

Gaddy, that was the TPP.

Let's just remind everybody.

So all of a sudden, everybody before Donald Trump and his minions, dumb.

have made horrific decisions.

The State Department told him, don't go to North Korea.

He's just going to use you as propaganda.

Trump said, no, he's going to give up his nuclear weapons.

He went to North Korea, got used as propaganda.

People told him, don't give up on the TPP.

This is a way to corral China, contain China, make the other countries safer and freer.

Trump ripped it up.

And of course, you know, Hillary Clinton, she ripped it up too because, you know, it was politically expedient.

Rather than explaining to the American people the value of what Mike Froman and Barack Obama were doing, they said, oh, we're going to rip it up.

It's the political winds of our time.

Lots of populism out there.

So the question really is, you're at war.

Let's not pretend that we're not at war.

Unfortunately, our leader, the one that I, the country I live in, started the war.

But you got to recognize that you are actually in a trade war.

Carney knows this.

He's not stupid.

Carney's attitude is, okay, we're in a trade war, and I got to protect my people.

I got to win this election on the 28th, and then I'm going to go into lockdown.

He'll start doing things like what i'm describing right now because he's not going to sit there and say roof roof donald trump i'll do you are you going to throw me the ball and i'll chase it and run it back to you well he wouldn't get elected if he did his only chance of getting elected is standing up to do that and nor is xi jinping by the way i mean more importantly in terms of the global economy than canada we love the canadians we love the chinese too more importantly xi jinping is not going to go roof roof right i mean that's just well not only that he's been preparing for this for decades.

So,

this is a country that thinks in 50-year units of time they've been preparing for this Trade War I for decades.

And Admiral Yamamoto of the United States, he doesn't know what he's doing.

One day, he's got the tariffs on, then he's taking them off, then he sends Lutnick out there to say that they're going to go back on.

Now, we don't know if they're on or off.

The market's flipping and flopping.

Yeah.

100% pushing us into a recession.

It's a competence issue.

I mean, there's a real competency

question about America at the

And the economy is going to get worse when you stop financing science and stop financing universities and all of the things that made America so competitive, that made it first in its class, if you will, are also at risk because of what is happening in this administration.

If you were in leadership,

you understand the Chinese culture.

You've traveled through China.

You've met with many of their people and leaders.

So they're just, you know,

the right-wing chant in America is that China is going to get demolished by America.

They sell to us.

We're 26% of the world's GDP.

We're 33% of the world's consumption.

And China is going to get annihilated by the United States pulling the plug.

So the United States is 250 years old.

The Chinese culture and the Chinese nation is 5,000 years old.

So they're not going to outlast the Americans.

You tell me, Katie, tell me I got to make the right-wing argument that the Chinese are going to capitulate after they've got J.D.

Vance calling them peasants and Trump acting like a maniac.

President Xi's going to be like, hey,

no problem.

We'll do whatever you want, but we don't know what you're doing because you're zigging and zagging so much.

We don't even know what you're doing.

So

the Chinese don't know.

And there's a lot of confusion in China at the moment about what the Americans actually want and what would lead to the kind of deals that the Americans want.

But the Chinese also have their own political problem, which is that Xi has painted himself to the Chinese population as a strong leader.

And a strong leader doesn't capitulate in the face of threats.

And then we have another leader here who is obsessed with demonstrations of strength.

Everybody has their own domestic issues politically that they have to deal with.

And I think the Chinese are aware of that.

They're very aware of the domestic political issues that Donald Trump has.

I'm not not as sure that this administration or this White House understands the domestic political issues thoroughly that China has.

Okay, Tobin Sanson, here's a great question.

How is everyone on the Trump team not exhausted?

It's like your six-year-old took over the furniture's broken.

It's like your six-year-old took over and the furniture's broken, the lawn's on fire, the power's out, and you still have to pretend you love him and it's fine.

Full disclosure, when my six-year-old behaved like a brat and did all of those things, didn't put the lawn on fire, I did actually still love him.

I didn't have to pretend I still loved him.

But I think, Tobin, you're referring to the cabinet meeting that we had last week, which was a fantastic display of how much everybody in the White House loves President Trump.

By the way, you did make me blush last week with the compliments after I asked you, I needed compliments.

Yeah, you did.

I really can't handle the compliments that well.

Very good at this.

Thin skin, but

you know, Vance Cochran is saying something really interesting.

I have to bring this up.

Sorry, Anthony, a better analogy would be Hirohito, not Yamamoto.

And

I hear you from a leadership perspective, Vance, but if you read Gordon Prang's book or other great history books about Pearl Harbor, Hirohito did not want to attack the United States.

He was very, very worried about it.

He succumbed in November of 1941 after the U.S.

put sanctions.

Remember, the U.S.

stopped selling oil to the Japanese.

And it was really Yamamoto Yamamoto more than any of the other people in the military leadership that pushed the attack.

But I love that.

I love the fact that Vance brought that up because

it makes the podcast fun, and we can talk about and debate history and what happened.

But one of the reasons why he was left in power, and MacArthur said this, he was deemed to be a reluctant wartime emperor.

They certainly didn't want to dismantle the entire Japanese culture around their emperor and all that other stuff.

But I hear you.

I appreciate you bringing that up.

Yeah, I lived in Japan for a few years, and obviously, that was always referred to as a low moment in Japanese history.

And it's something that has dogged Japan ever since their conduct in the Second World War, and why they still want to be a pacifist nation.

But I think we may be at a moment

with what is happening here in the United States, where it actually pushes Japan, and it's an interesting place to end, because you could have a situation where where pacifist countries, we've already seen it in Germany, where they've lifted the debt break and increased a commitment to spending on defense.

And I don't think it's impossible that we see Japan and South Korea looking at having their own security umbrellas, whether that includes nuclear weapons or not.

But that is something that would have been unthinkable when I lived in Japan in the mid-1990s.

It was not possible.

It was not a discussion that was going to be had.

But we are now in a position where the Japanese have to look at at fending for themselves and supporting and giving themselves their own security.

And that if Japan ends up with a nuclear weapon, or South Korea ends up with a nuclear weapon, or other countries like Poland that have spoken about it end up with a nuclear weapon because they can no longer rely on the American security umbrella, does that make the United States a safer country?

Well, I mean, again, the hallmark of the, you know, we dropped two bombs, and then for 80 years, we really haven't dropped any more bombs on people.

We've tested them, but the of this thing was the non-proliferation.

And so this would be very damaging.

Okay.

I just want to address this, if you don't mind, very quickly.

What steps could we take in the 90 days?

People are asking that question.

And I would say,

I would get on the phone and say, okay, let's get together.

What are the most important things that we're exporting?

And let's see if we can have an agreement where we can zero out those things

while we're trying to figure this out with

Donald Trump.

That's what I would say.

You got it.

Got to move.

Got to move.

Yeah, and they've got to move fast.

They've got to try.

Donald Trump has not just

done things that other administrations haven't done and broken norms that other administrations haven't broken.

He is doing it at lightning speed.

This is not a time, as Germany has found, for countries to move slowly.

They need to be able to move fast and find ways to have these conversations.

Britain with the European Union.

And maybe that's good.

Maybe, actually, in some ways, speed can help get people through their old traditional barriers that they had with each other to say, okay, we have this existential threat right now.

We have to act fast.

Okay, we're going to leave it there.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Great questions.

For the person who picked up a bottle of American wine and put it back down again, don't worry.

There's lots of great wine from France and Italy.

and Spain and Portugal and all the other great wine producing companies.

There's still a lot of good people in America, Linda.

Still a lot of good people in America.

Still, Anthony and me living here drinking our lives, California.

Please don't.

Please don't give up on it.

All right.

Okay.

We'll see you later this week, guys.

We'll be back on Friday, of course, with our regular podcast.

So join us for that.

Thanks for tuning in, guys.

We'll see you next week.

No promo for the founding membership.

I'm impressed.

Oh, impressed, Katie.

Did I miss it?

Did I miss it?

It's okay.

It's okay.

Is that the first time ever I haven't said?

Please tell your friends to be founding members alongside of you.

And where should they do that?

Where should they do that if they wanted to?

They got to go to our website.

The restispoliticsus.com.

Okay.

To become a founding member and get to become a founding member.

Okay, I think we did our sales job.

No merch, but merch will be coming.

Bye, guys.

Oh, that's good.

I need merch.

I need merch.

All right, we'll see you guys.

Thank you.

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