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10 Minute Drill
Tariff-Watch, Big Gretch, and the Long-Awaited Return of Kamala Harris
00:14:18
Tariff Watch Update: Trump’s Trade Plans, Markets React + checking in with Dems like Kamala. Dive into the latest on President Trump’s tariff policies—markets, exemptions, and competition insights.
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Tariff Watch. We check in on the latest on President Trump's roller coaster trade announcements and plans and a tradition unlike any other. Here's what Democrats said this weekend. All that and so, so much more today on 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up.
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The story of America is the story of an adventure. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free.
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Over the weekend, there was a flurry of both polling and messaging from the White House. Last week. You'll remember there was a lot of discussion, particularly in D.C. media, about the White House changing their direction on messaging and trying to focus more on the expected outcomes and the deals that they were hoping to negotiate with countries around the world that seemed to calm markets and put things in a better place. And then late in the week and into the weekend, President Trump announced that there would be some exemptions to tariffs, particularly for tech, with a focus on competition and not wanting to disadvantage America while these negotiations are going on, particularly because so much of that tech is done in other countries, some of which we have adversarial trade relationships with. But over the weekend, there was a shift back to what we saw last weekend with a little bit of mixed messaging from people like Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
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All those products are going to come.
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Under semiconductors and they're going to have.
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A special focused type of tariff.
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I believe there are two major concerns right now that President Trump is facing. First, people do not necessarily believe that President Trump has a plan. CBS polling over the weekend highlighted this. 58% of independents believe that President Trump has no plan. As we talked about right after this announcement was made, you can ask people to trust the process, but you need to show very clearly that there is a plan. Point number two that I believe is their biggest, maybe one of their biggest challenges is these mixed messages are cutting off their own ability to create momentum. They're talking right now about creating 90 deals with 90 countries in 90 days. To do that, they need to be able to have a steady message, a focused communications plan, and they need to keep the ball rolling towards that progress. Over the weekend, with Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick and others, people were getting a mixed message about what this White House hopes to achieve with these tariffs. As President Trump is back in Washington, he can continue to sort of rein in the messaging. He can have that plan flow through Treasury Secretary Besant and his team that have continued to maintain focus on these trade deals and what America hopes to achieve. Through all of this, the third biggest challenge that I believe that they face is setting realistic expectations about what bringing back manufacturing looks like. We've seen a lot of polling that shows the American people would love to see a manufacturing renaissance. We hold a romantic view of what bringing back manufacturing looks like. It's a noble cause, and it's one of the things people actually feel really positively about when they hear about President Trump's tariff plans. Some of those same polls, when you ask people if they themselves visualize working in a factory or working in a manufacturing job, that dwindles to below 20%. So it's a very, very different question when you ask people to consider themselves in that role. And that goes back to this larger dynamic over the last few decades. America shifted our focus as an economy. We are not the producer economy that China is. We are a consumer economy. And so it will take a lot, and it's really important for President Trump and his team to manage expectations for what that transition is going to look like. For that, I want to point you to a piece. Molson Hart, the founder and CEO of Via Hart, had a very interesting piece on X about this, pointing out some of the 14 specific challenges to bringing manufacturing back to America. The couple that I want to highlight. First, labor laws. One reason that China has been such an effective producer is they basically have no labor laws. If something's not being built in a sweatshop, it's likely being built by slave labor. That is why they're able to produce so many things at such a low cost. Whereas in America, over the last several decades, our labor laws, some of which are driven by unions, some of which are just driven by progress of people wanting to demand better standards in their workplace. That's why we see so many estimates showing that building an iPhone in America could cost somewhere between 30 and $50,000 per phone. It's those labor law issues, but it's also the materials. The second point that I want to highlight from Molson's column was about materials. We do not have the supply chains to be able to build from, you know, minerals to a working iPhone, that entire process. And when a lot of people visualize this, they're visualizing putting together components that are already made. But to bring back manufacturing to the degree that somebody like Secretary Lutnick has talked about, we need to build supply chains all the way back to the beginning, where we're taking minerals that we currently don't have in the United States, turning them into individual components, and then putting those components together. A lot of people are visualizing the components to the finished product. But it goes back so much further than that. So there are 14 different pieces he highlighted in that that I thought were really smart to manage our expectations. Now, that's not to say we can't bring back manufacturing. I think it's a noble cause. And as we've talked about with polling, people overwhelmingly believe it's a noble cause. But we need to manage expectations for how long that's going to take, how much it's going to cost, and if there are certain parts that we still want to lean on. International partners about. Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill called the SAVE act, which is focused on ensuring that only American citizens are allowed to vote in our elections. Naturally, Democrats had a lot to say about this. It's the only way they can win elections is by making it absolutely impossible for people to vote. What's important to remember is, as we talked about a few weeks ago, when President Trump signed an executive order about non citizens voting, 89% of Americans support only allowing American citizens to vote. And that includes 82% of Democrats, 80% of black voters, 78% of Hispanic voters. The process with the SAVE act is very similar to how you get your passport. But Democrats are raising all sorts of alarm bells about how this is going to stop married women from, from voting because they change their name, things like that. The process will be very similar to changing your driver's license, changing your passport, anything else like that. The American people understand the importance of election integrity. And I think it's a hard sell to say that voting should be so much easier than something like signing up for a passport or signing up for a driver's license. People want to feel like our elections are secure. We have hundreds of instances of noncitizens voting in America. And you need to understand, as you hear these Democrat attacks against the SAVE act, particularly as this bill goes to the Senate for a vote where Chuck Schumer already said they're going to block it. This is the same party that said voter ID was Jim Crow 2.0. That voter ID, which again has close to 90% support, is Jim Eagle, which was just so outrageous. And when Democrats said that about Georgia's election laws, they were immediately, immediately covered with egg on their face because Georgia saw the biggest election turnout in their history. So again, as they shout and scream and try and derail a process to ensure that only Americans are allowed to vote, they don't have a lot of credibility on this issue. And Americans overwhelmingly support limiting voting in our elections to American citizens.
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Now all of a sudden a tie. All of a sudden the Democrats who are the party of the people, no more.
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This polling was interesting because it came in the midst of tariff news and so many other major challenges, but it showed that Republicans have made major gains in who the American people overall believes better represents their values. Democrats have seen a massive drop in that, which to me shows more anything that their campaigns over the last few months. To say Republicans only care about billionaires, only care about oligarchs is really falling flat on its face. To illustrate Democrats being a little bit out of touch, let's check in on a few of them. A big New York Times piece over the weekend described Kamala Harris's efforts to get back in the game. She's facing a little bit of trouble. For one, in Wisconsin during the heated Supreme Court election, Democrats asked her not to be involved. And when she made a call for fundraising, they asked her not to release it until after the election had happened, which is a bit of a rough scene. But my favorite part of that story was a little anecdote that Kamala Harris aides are trying to push her to open a center for policy and ideas. Those of you who follow this election closely will get a good laugh at the idea of Kamala Harris opening a Kamala Harris center for Policy and Ideas because that was not necessarily the strong point during the election, her short term in the Senate or anything else she's done. Kamala Harris opening a Center for policy and Ideas is a little bit like Hunter Biden opening a center for responsible cybersecurity and family values, or Tim Waltz opening a center for smooth dance moves and acting masculine, which I think we all agree they don't know anything about either. Also checking in on Gretchen Whitmer, who was in the Oval Office last week to visit with President Trump and was involved in what may be the most awkward photo op we've seen in recent years. To quote Keith Olbermann with a rare bit of wisdom from him, it's rare when you get a shot of the exact moment a politician's career ends, but there you go. Now if anyone knows anything about careers ending, it's Keith Olbermann. Lastly, let's check in on Jasmine Crockett, who always has amazing things to say. It's not just the libtards, right? It's not just the lefties that are being impacted, but it's all of us. I think that clip speaks for itself. Moving on, I want to talk a little bit about Medicaid now, before your eyes glaze over, we're going to talk about this in a very broad sense. First, what is Medicaid? Medicaid is a program, a safety net program that was designed to help lower income people, particularly the elderly, people with disabilities and low income children who are in difficult situations to get healthcare coverage. The problem is, in the last several years, particularly during the pandemic, the program has expanded massively. During the pandemic, Congress passed a law or a rule telling Medicaid not to kick anyone off the plan until the emergency had passed. The problem is now several years after that emergency has ended. The participation in the program has not gone back down. So there are far too many people on Medicaid, and that's where the conversation is today. Democrats used to have major concerns about Medicaid fraud and about abuse of the program.
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About a third of all of the spending that's done in Medicare and Medicaid, I would imagine a lot of it's in the private sector as well. Doesn't go to really good health care, goes to other things. If we're going to eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare, it does mean we're gonna cut some of that out.
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Now, it appears that Democrats primarily see Medicaid as a political opportunity to attack Republicans. They have attacked the Republican budget and spending bills as including $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid. One Democrat on TV actually had to walk that back because it was false with respect to the budget that was voted on. Congressman Lawler is correct. It doesn't say anything specifically about Medicaid. Lest we forget, Joe Biden actually said we beat Medicare if we finally beat Medicare. But what I really want to highlight today briefly is there are actual problems with Medicaid. First, the issue of fraud and the issue of improper payments is something that everyone has talked about for a long time. The center for Medicare and Medicaid Services releases estimates every year of how many improper or how much money has gone out in improper payments. They estimate that in the last 10 years, $543 billion in improper payments has been distributed. That is a lot of money. $543 billion over a decade is a big deal. But a group called Paragon Institute for Health has released research finding that it might actually be double that. In short, CMS estimates the amount of improper payments, but they've only done eligibility reviews in two of the last 10 years. In those years, improper payments were at 25%. If you extrapolate that to the full 10 years, you get close to 1.1 trillion in improper payments. You would think Democrats would want to get the best information about how much fraud, waste and abuse is in that program. The problem is they want to keep those benchmarks incredibly high so that money keeps going into that program. However, now we can see there are gigantic areas to cut into fraud, waste and abuse. The other issue is something that Speaker Johnson talked about yesterday. We have to eliminate people on, for example, on Medicaid who are not actually eligible to be there. Speaker Johnson is talking about a work requirement for Medicaid. Now, polling shows us that between 65 and 80% of people support a work requirement to ensure that people that are getting Medicaid are either actively working or applying for a job in that process. Because we need to ensure Medicaid is only going to people who really need it again, the elderly, people with disabilities, or lower income children who are in families facing much bigger challenges. But what we've seen, particularly since the pandemic, is the number of able bodied males who are not working, who are receiving Medicaid benefits has simply exploded. So again, this is what Speaker Johnson and Senate Republicans this week are gonna be talking about. Things like an eligibility requirement where we can find ways to cut waste, fraud and abuse. But as Democrats attack an eligibility requirement, you're gonna hear them say things like, you know, an eligibility requirement would kick millions of people off of their coverage. It's not kicking them off their coverage. It's finding other ways to get health care for people who shouldn't be on Medicaid and shouldn't be abusing that safety net. One issue that we've talked about in previous episodes is how companies are trying to hide their dei. The diversity, equity and inclusion, the racial quotas and preferences that President Trump has tried to ban through executive order behind new terms. Today. The group Consumers Research, one of the oldest consumer protection organizations in America, released a WOKE alert about several companies doing this. Popular American companies like Kohl's, Dollar Tree, Disney Nationwide and UPS have said they're scrapping their DEI as a part of a publicity stunt. But really they're just changing some of the words around. For example, Kohl's the chief diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer is now the chief Inclusion and Belonging officer. So again, as President Trump passed an executive order banning DEI and as it's become incredibly politically unpopular, companies that want to say they're getting rid of their dei, but they're maintaining those functions, just hiding it behind something like a chief belonging officer. So as you hear that word belonging, make sure that you know that it simply means DEI just by another name. Thank you to Consumers Research for highlighting this. Thank you for joining us today. That is all the time that we have. Please subscribe on YouTube, tell your friends, leave us a review on Apple Podcast Spotify. Thank you for joining us.