5/8/25: Trump Hypes UK Deal, Trump Plans Gaza Occupation, MAHA Civil War, Libya Deportations & MORE!

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar: May 8, 2025 – Detailed Episode Summary

Episode Title: Trump Hypes UK Deal, Trump Plans Gaza Occupation, MAHA Civil War, Libya Deportations & MORE!
Hosts: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
Release Date: May 8, 2025
Platform: iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction

In this episode of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, the hosts delve into a spectrum of pressing geopolitical and domestic issues shaping the United States and the broader international landscape. From President Trump's ambitious trade deals and controversial plans in the Middle East to internal policy battles over Medicaid and the integrity of media institutions, Krystal and Saagar provide incisive analysis and critical insights.

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1. Trump’s UK Trade Deal and Tariff Strategy

Overview:
President Trump announced a potential trade deal framework with the United Kingdom amid ongoing tariff negotiations. Experts suggest that the deal is likely to outline a plan rather than finalize agreements, reflecting Trump's aggressive trade posture aimed at isolating China and renegotiating terms with other allies.

Notable Points:

• Keir Starmer’s Strategy:
  The newly elected UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is leveraging the trade deal to bolster his country's economic standing and political approval, which has been declining. By courting Trump, Starmer aims to mitigate the impact of tariffs and improve his government's popularity.

  "If you're Keir Starmer, who again is not particularly popular, but maybe this is a way for him to turn a new leaf in the UK... it's probably better than him doing nothing or making some type of like petulant virtue signal stand while people end up not getting any benefits to the economy."
  (04:03)

• Economic Implications:
  The trade deal is part of a broader strategy where the Trump administration seeks to secure multiple agreements rapidly, with claims of negotiating "90 deals in 90 days." However, the actual substance and effectiveness of these deals remain uncertain.

  "We're at now maybe the outlines of one is what we're looking at. There's a lot that's interesting about this."
  (09:00)

2. Federal Reserve’s Position on Tariffs: Jay Powell’s Insights

Overview:
Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell addressed the economic ramifications of sustained tariffs, highlighting the delicate balance between controlling inflation and managing economic growth.

Notable Points:

• Inflation and Growth Concerns:
  Powell emphasized that prolonged tariffs could lead to persistent inflation, slowed economic growth, and increased unemployment, complicating the Fed’s monetary policy decisions.

  "Avoiding that outcome will depend on the size of the tariffs effect, tariff effects on how long it takes for them to pass through fully into prices, and ultimately on keeping longer-term inflation expectations well anchored."
  (14:07)

• Stagflation Dilemma:
  The Fed faces a challenging environment where mitigating inflation typically requires raising interest rates, which could further dampen economic growth, potentially leading to stagflation.

  "The Fed chairs, they're always trying to be very neutral and mild mannered in their comments, but he's sounding a warning about the tariffs... leading to low growth and rising inflation."
  (14:33)

3. US-Led Administration of Gaza: A Controversial Move

Overview:
The U.S. and Israel are contemplating a temporary administration of Gaza, modeled after the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq post-2003. This proposal has sparked significant debate and criticism due to historical precedents of instability and conflict.

Notable Points:

• Historical Context:
  Comparing the proposed administration to the Iraq occupation highlights fears of prolonged conflict, civil unrest, and humanitarian crises.

  "A U.S.-led administration of Gaza, modeled on the Iraq U.S.-led government as if that's a model to follow."
  (04:46)

• Political Fallout:
  Critics argue that such an administration could lead to further destabilization in the region, echoing the negative outcomes seen in Iraq.

  "Mission accomplished is what I heard."
  (39:35)

4. Republican Medicaid Cuts: Policy and Political Implications

Overview:
Republican leaders are negotiating significant cuts to Medicaid as part of a broader budget reconciliation package aimed at offsetting tax cuts and tariff costs. These cuts threaten to disenfranchise millions of Americans relying on Medicaid for healthcare.

Notable Points:

• Specific Cuts:
  Plans include raising premiums and copays for Medicaid beneficiaries at or above the federal poverty line, reducing federal funding, and implementing work requirements.

  "The big one is that they're going to raise premiums and copays on beneficiaries at or above the federal poverty line."
  (63:10)

• Political Challenges:
  These cuts are expected to face backlash from moderate Republicans and vulnerable congressional members who represent districts with high Medicaid dependency.

  "Cutting Medicaid like it's just a disaster politically. There's no question about it. And they have."
  (71:15)

• Impact on Health Coverage:
  The proposed cuts could result in millions losing Medicaid coverage, worsening health disparities, and increasing financial strain on low-income families.

  "Anywhere from 8.6 million people to 2.3 million people would be cut off from Medicaid and you would have a significant increase in all instances in uninsured people."
  (67:10)

5. Corporate Influence in Media: The Case of Punchbowl News

Overview:
Punchbowl News, a media startup, has been scrutinized for its business model that heavily relies on corporate sponsorships from major corporations like Google, Amazon, and Goldman Sachs. This model raises concerns about editorial independence and media corruption.

Notable Points:

• Sponsorship Details:
  The leaked business plan reveals high sponsorship fees, exclusive content partnerships, and events designed to cater to corporate interests.

  "If you can tell advertisers, you know, my tip sheet is read by Mike Johnson, John Thune, Chuck Schumer, then advertisers will pony up big bucks to get their messages just in front of those basically handful of people."
  (07:27)

• Editorial Independence:
  Despite claims of unbiased reporting, the financial ties to corporations suggest potential conflicts of interest and influence over editorial content.

  "The whole business model is, hey, if you can tell advertisers, then advertisers will pay."
  (07:27)

• Impact on Journalism:
  Such models undermine the credibility of media outlets, making it difficult for audiences to trust the impartiality of the information presented.

  "They have to have events... to connect with these corporate sponsors, which again, you know, the D.C. newsletter tip sheet is so incredibly lucrative."
  (149:34)

6. Surgeon General Nomination Controversy

Overview:
President Trump recently nominated Dr. Casey Means as the new Surgeon General, replacing Dr. Jeanette Nishawat amid backlash from figures like Laura Loomer. The nomination has sparked debates over qualifications and ideological leanings.

Notable Points:

• Qualifications and Background:
  Dr. Casey Means, criticized for her views on vaccines and unconventional medical practices, has no active medical license, raising concerns about her suitability for the role.

  "President Trump's pick for U.S. Surgeon General, Casey Means, said she prays to inanimate objects, communicates with spirit mediums, uses shrooms as plant medicine, and talks to trees."
  (87:53)

• Political Backlash:
  Activists and conservatives like Laura Loomer have vehemently opposed her nomination, citing her questionable credibility and professional qualifications.

  "She's making me like Casey Means more... new Surgeon General is a total crackpot, a shroom consumer, and she talks to trees and doesn't even have an active medical license."
  (156:06)

• Internal Conflicts:
  The Means siblings, involved in the MAHA movement, face internal skepticism and accusations of ulterior motives, complicating their positions within the administration.

  "They come across to a lot of people in MAHA world as suspicious... aggressive about it."
  (85:43)

7. Libya Deportations and Legal Challenges

Overview:
The Trump administration plans to expand its deportation policy beyond El Salvador to Libya, despite legal barriers and the refusal of Libya’s divided governments to accept migrants. Legal challenges have temporarily halted deportation flights.

Notable Points:

• Legal Obstacles:
  Federal judges have blocked deportations to Libya, citing violations of court orders and concerns over the conditions migrants would face.

  "A federal judge warned Wednesday that the Trump administration's reported plan would clearly violate an earlier court order barring such summary deportations."
  (118:14)

• Humanitarian Concerns:
  Libya's detention facilities are notorious for human rights abuses, including torture and forced labor, making deportations there highly controversial and ethically problematic.

  "Libya remains divided after years of civil war or thanks to us controlled by a UN-recognized government in the west and a warlord in the East... conditions are deplorable."
  (112:21)

• Policy Criticism:
  Critics argue that deporting migrants to Libya exacerbates humanitarian crises and undermines U.S. obligations to protect vulnerable populations.

  "President Trump had suggested the number was lower at this point... millions of people there and they will all die if food does not come in."
  (46:18)

8. Migrant Deaths in Custody

Overview:
The administration faces increasing scrutiny over the deaths of migrants in detention centers, raising alarms about the conditions and adequacy of care provided to detainees.

Notable Points:

• Death Toll:
  Seven migrants have died while in custody, with ages ranging from 27 to 55, amidst reports of overcrowded and understaffed detention facilities.

  "Seven migrants have died while in the custody of immigration police or ICE... individuals ranged in age from 27 to 55."
  (120:14)

• Health and Safety Issues:
  The high death rate points to systemic failures in providing necessary medical attention and maintaining safe living conditions for detainees.

  "These policies are on shoring jobs, on shoring production... housing needs because of the massive inflationary pressures and the minimal capacity of the ports to keep shipping moving."
  (19:37)

9. Trump’s Meme Coin and Crypto Corruption

Overview:
President Trump launched a meme cryptocurrency coin, which has attracted significant foreign investment, raising concerns about corruption and undue foreign influence in U.S. politics.

Notable Points:

• Foreign Investment:
  Over half of the top holders of Trump’s Meme Coin are based outside the U.S., suggesting potential foreign influence and corruption.

  "More than half of the top holders here have used foreign exchanges that say they exclude customers living in the U.S."
  (125:39)

• Ethical Concerns:
  The promotion of the coin includes exclusive dinners and VIP events for top investors, blurring the lines between political influence and financial gain.

  "If you are a foreign person, a company, a U.S. person, whoever wants to get access to and get a goodie from the Trump administration... perhaps you buy millions of dollars in Trump's shit coin."
  (130:24)

• Impact on Governance:
  The integration of personal financial ventures like the meme coin and Starlink into political policy-making raises questions about the integrity and objectivity of administrative decisions.

  "It exposes the very corrupt dealings between corporate America, the media, and these members of Congress who are also showing up at these events and participating in them."
  (149:44)

Conclusion

In this multifaceted episode, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti navigate complex issues ranging from aggressive trade strategies and contentious foreign policy maneuvers to internal political battles over healthcare and the ethical boundaries of media funding. The discussions underscore a period of significant turbulence and ethical dilemmas within American politics, highlighting the intricate web of power, influence, and policy-making that continues to shape the nation's trajectory.

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Notable Quotes:

• "We honor their commitment, and they were... they gave us their word that they wouldn't be shooting ships anymore, and we honor that."
  — Saagar Enjeti (03:32)

• "Avoiding that outcome will depend on the size of the tariffs effect, tariff effects on how long it takes for them to pass through fully into prices, and ultimately on keeping longer-term inflation expectations well anchored."
  — Krystal Ball (14:07)

• "Cost sharing above 100% of FPL appears to mean that Medicaid recipients making at or above the federal poverty line... would have to pay some money for coverage."
  — Saagar Enjeti (63:10)

• "It's so funny to say they're unbiased because they genuinely believe that they don't have a bias... they are biased towards the ideology of corporate influence."
  — Emily Jashinsky (155:45)

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This summary encapsulates the key discussions and critical analyses presented in the episode, providing listeners and non-listeners alike with a comprehensive understanding of the episode's content and its broader implications.

Transcript

[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is the only place where you.

[Krystal Ball]

Can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see [e-mail].

[Sagar Enjeti]

Good morning everybody. Welcome to Breaking Points. Emily, how are you this morning?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I'm good, but when the bottom bar comes up, everyone is going to see why I'm not amazing. Good, but not amazing because we missed one critical thing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We fumbled the ball here on the A block. Otherwise it was a full M show. In honor of M. Yeah, it didn't.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Do that on purpose, but I spent all day yesterday trying to make sure we could have an M title for every show because at a certain point it just happened. And I was like, well, we have to do this now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. But Crystal, I screwed it up because I did the Fed block. So sorry.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I'm still blaming Jerome Powell. It's still his fault. He didn't have to speak yesterday. You could have called it money. It's your fault too. But still.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, and you know what else? You know what else?

[Emily Jashinsky]

What?

[Sagar Enjeti]

We added a story to the show and it's a story about Maha.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Oh, my gosh. It's just the level of consistency across the board. It was meant to be yesterday.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The stars were aligned. Yes.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So everyone enjoy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And there is some stuff going on in Maha that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. Trump's original Surgeon General pick was polled after Laura Loomer and others, I guess, criticized her. And the new person who he has picked is Casey Means, whose brother Callie Means. The two of them have become very like, prominent on Tucker and Joe Rogan. Whatever. I as an outsider were like, oh, Laura Loomer is probably gonna be happy. Like Nicole Shanahan. All these people are probably gonna be happy. Right? Right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, they're going after her. So there's. Nicole Shanahan is out being like, RFK Jr. May have lied to me directly cuz he promised me that neither of these siblings would be involved in the administration. So anyway, we're gonna dig into that one. That's a really interesting one.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's so messy and we have to try to get closer to the truth on this one. There's all kinds of rumors flying around. So we'll bring you all of that, of course, after we do the block that I'm just gonna call money called Fed. Jay Powell spoke yesterday. So lots of updates to talk about from the Fed and on the economy more generally.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, we're supposed to get some sort of a UK Trade deal announcement this morning. So we'll see what that entails, whether it's an actual deal or more likely, it's like the outlines of a plan to effectuate a deal down the line. Something like that. Yeah. It's a plan. It's the. What a concepts. Yeah, that's right. We also have some very significant news with regards to the Middle East. Trump making some pretty wild comments about the Houthis that we had to get into the show. But. But more significantly, they are. The US And Israel are talking about now a US Led administration of Gaza. U. S. Led administration of Gaza. They are modeling it on the Iraq U. S. Led government as if that's a model to follow.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, Wild Nothing but success.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Wild. So get into that. Also, Republicans are making more clear what sort of cuts to Medicaid. David Dayen actually got the scoop on what they're looking at specifically with regard to cuts to Medicaid. They are significant. Any one of the options would entail millions of Americans getting kicked off of that program. So obviously, we're going to dig into the details there. We have some updates with regard to migrants and where they're being sent. Marco Rubio had said, hey, we're looking beyond El Salvador. There are other countries that we're going to try to deport people into, you know, potentially prison systems in other nations. New York Times had that report that we talked about yesterday with regard to, hey, it looks like they're moving forward with Libya. This became quite urgent. There was a flight that was scheduled. Lawyers got involved. They went to a judge. A judge has now blocked any migrants from potentially being sent to Libya. But Libya's war torn is like divided between two different governments. Both of those governments said, hey, we have nothing to do with this. We would not accept these migrants. So anyway, there's a lot that is sort of mysterious and interesting going on there as well. And then we wanted to take a look at these several developments with regard to Trump and his Meme Coin. First of all, it appears that it is largely foreigners who are pumping big bucks into Trump's Meme Coin, raising even graver concerns about levels of corruption there. There are some legislation that is moving as well. And then also on the topic of corruption, apparently one of the things that countries are being pressured to do in order to get on the US's good side is to adopt Starlink. So, and that's being used in part of the trade negotiations. Jeff Stein did a fantastic report over the Washington Post. Finally, however, Emily's got a big scoop you want to break down. Give us the top line of what you're looking at.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah. So Breaking Points obtained a document from inside Punchbowl News, and we have basically, we're ready to reveal their entire business plan because for partnerships in 2025, that's the document that we got our hands on and got some comments from the White House, because you may remember just a couple of months ago, there was a big controversy over the government getting premium subscriptions to Politico. So in light what we have in this document that Breaking Point's got its hands on, we heard back from the White House about Punchbowl subscriptions. So basically, what we're gonna be looking at here is the. Chris, I would Call it soft corruption. It's just so. It's just corruption, plain and simple. But it's so banal and mundane here that nobody even blinks or thinks twice about it. But it is so gross. And we have some great excerpts, pictures from this document that we obtained that I think is well worth taking a look at.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. The documents are not indicative of Punchbowl being particularly unique in terms of the D.C. ecosystem. They just simply expose how banal and how commonplace these relationships are and, you know, how much money is at stake as well. It really is. It's a fascinating look inside the Beltway media and specifically the world of these sort of niche newsletters, which are just printing money because they're not that expensive to put together. But the whole business model is, hey, if you can tell advertisers, you know, my, my tip sheet is read by Mike Johnson, my tip sheet's read by John Thune, my tip sheets read by Chuck Schumer, then advertisers will pony up big bucks to get their messages just in front of those basically handful of people.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah. In this case, Google, Goldman Sachs. And just our last teaser here. So you stick around for the block. We have the actual price, first of all. We have their email open rates. We have their subscriber numbers, at least the ones that send corporate partners or prospective corporate partners. But then we also have the pricing levels that they offer newsletter sponsorships for. And that's what you're really going to want to stick around for because it will make your eyes pop out of your skull. So make sure to stay tuned for that block.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. All right. With all that being said, let's turn to the economic news. This broke yesterday evening. Put this up on the screen. So Trump expected to announce some sort of trade quote unquote agreement with the uk. Most of the experts are saying this probably isn't going to be a finalized agreement because it will be more like a framework including issues that they intend to resolve. But we don't know the specifics at this point. Trump said that he is going to make this announcement in the White House at 10am he put out a tweet, Truth Social. It was big news conference tomorrow morning, 10:00am Oval Office, concerning a major trade deal with representatives of a big and highly respected country. The first of many, Trump wrote. And this is of course, the first of the many trade deals that they were allegedly negotiating. 90 deals in 90 days so far. We're at. Now maybe the outlines of one is what we're looking at. There's a lot that's interesting about this. Obviously, they've been under a lot of pressure, Emily, to be able to show something. And the world has been pretty resistant to what they see as us bullying. Even close allies like Japan have really taken the side of we are not going to be bullied into some sort of a deal. Much of the world has made some overtures to China and the whole idea here was, oh, we're going to try to isolate and encircle China. That has not worked out either. The UK is interesting because Keir Starmer, the leader there, is really unpopular. He's just elected Prime Minister not that long ago. His approval is dramatically underwater. People are not happy with him, they're not happy with the economic situation there. And whereas a lot of liberals and liberals in Canada, Liberals in Australia have actually really buoyed their standing by opposing Trump, Starmer has taken the opposite path. He has really made a lot of overtures to Trump and has been aggressively courting him and trying to work out this deal, thinking that if he can blunt some of the impact of tariffs on the UK that that would benefit his country and benefit his political standing. So that is the bet that he has placed and that's sort of the context within which this framework agreement, whatever this is, is being negotiated.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, and like you said, we don't know much yet, but I think Keir Starme in the now Mark Carney category as well, where they're recognizing that the economic benefits they can get their own people because the disadvantages, the costs of this are going to, are likely going to be if they don't handle it diplomatically and in a way that pleases Donald Trump, where they're at least able to make a deal with Donald Trump, then the costs to their country are going to be way greater than the benefits of sort of making a kind of stand against Donald Trump. And that's not to say Mark Carney actually managed rather cleverly to do both to be really sort of diplomatic Trump and to butter him up while also putting his foot down and saying Canada will never be for sale. Starmonger got a carve out for high end British cars, according to Politico, at least. So that's, you know, you had Aston Martin, Bentley looking at really disastrous consequences of the 25% tariffs. So I think that's the right bet. If you're Keir Starmer, who again is not particularly popular, but maybe this is a way for him to turn a new leaf in the uk I sort of doubt it. I don't think he necessarily will be able to do that, but it's probably better than him doing nothing or making, making some type of like petulant virtue signal stand while people end up not getting any benefits to the economy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, we'll see how the politics play out. Because Donald Trump is not popular in, you know, certainly among Keir Starmers based in the uk and as I was saying before, you know, Mark Carney, the reason he was able to win was by positioning himself as an oppositional figure to Trump and someone who would be a steady hand. You know, when we talked to David Dole about how, you know, how people saw him, it wasn't that he was elected with this, you need to aggressively stand up to Trump, but it was more, we feel you're a steady hand who's gonna have our interests and not gonna kowtow to him. Starmer, potentially, because of the way that he has tried to maintain diplomatic relations with Trump and gone out of his way to do such. The UK has avoided some of the criticism that has been leveled at other European countries. JD Vance famously went and was really aggressively chiding them about their free speech, et cetera. And so they've sort of avoided and certainly they haven't been subject to the 51st state smears that Canada was very upset about and continues to be very upset about. So I think maybe some of the fact that Trump has not rhetorically gone after them is also probably because of Starmer's efforts behind the scenes to kind of butter him up. But on the other hand, they still were hit with the same 10% tariffs and other, you know, higher tariffs on things like steel that the rest of the world was as well. So those efforts were not really rewarded in real time. We'll see what comes out, what the specifics are with regard to this particular deal.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Trump needs this for the markets too, because everyone's waiting for deals. It's not just about the one deal. It's about the one deal showing that there are actual deals coming and that is obviously yet to be seen. So we will pay attention to that. But Crystal J. Powell, speaking of the markets, Jay Powell popped out yesterday and made his announcement.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's right. So holding interest rates steady and sounding some very significant warnings about where he thinks the economy is and where it is heading. Let's take a listen to that.

[Krystal Ball]

If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced are sustained, they're likely to generate a rise in inflation, a slowdown in economic growth and an increase in unemployment. The effects on inflation could be short lived effect reflecting A one time shift in the price level. It is also possible that the inflationary effects could instead be more persistent. Avoiding that outcome will depend on the size of the tariffs effect, tariff effects.

[Sagar Enjeti]

On how long it takes for them.

[Krystal Ball]

To pass through fully into prices, and ultimately on keeping longer term inflation expectations well anchored.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So, you know, Fed chairs, they're always trying to be very neutral and mild mannered in their comments, but he's sounding a warning about the tariffs. Tariffs and the tariff position has really put the Fed in a tough bind because on the one hand, you see slowing economic growth. That's what we saw with the GDP numbers and some other indicators that would push you in the direction of let's lower interest rates. However, you also see rising inflation that would push you in the direction of let's lift interest rates to try to keep inflation under control. And so that's why stagflation is so difficult to deal with where you have, have low, low or no growth and you have inflation, because you have to use some tools outside of the Fed's toolkit in order to deal with both of those problems. Because the tools that the Fed would use go in opposite directions with regards to those two things. So he's in a bind. So he's basically saying, hey, we're holding where we are until we see what's going on.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I mean, this wasn't surprising at all. It's kind of exactly what everyone was expecting to see from Jay Powell, although you never totally. No. But this also is connected to the block we're going to do on Medicaid because a lot of the economy right now is going to hinge on Donald Trump's ability to pass his big tax cut bill. And his ability to pass that big tax cut bill is going to depend on his ability to actually make enough cuts without going into the political weeds of cutting Medicaid in any way whatsoever, which, as Steve Bannon will tell him, a lot of maggots are on Medicaid. So uncertainty, I think, coming from all of that as well, because he wants that tax cut bill to also have industrial policy for reshoring. And if that doesn't get passed, that's a huge, huge setback for, I mean, they see this, as was described recently as there are two barrels to the gun and one of the barrels is the trade war, the tariffs, the other barrel is the tax cuts. And if you can't, if you can't have that, that's a big problem.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Interesting. Yeah, that's, that's an important note there for sure. Scott Bessant, Part of maybe potentially why they're anxious to announce this UK Trade deal is we talked yesterday about how they said, okay, we're going to meet with Chinese negotiators with regards to trade and we all just happen to be in what, Switzerland.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Switzerland. We just happen to be there.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So we're going to get together with them. The Chinese, by the way, are saying the US Were the ones that requested the meeting, which is an interesting note as well. Scott Bessant, though, yesterday really downplaying expectations for what could come out of these talks. Markets really took notice of this as well.

[Krystal Ball]

Let's take a listen on Saturday and Sunday we will agree what we're going to talk about. So my sense is that this will be about de escalation, not about the big trade deal and but we've got to de escalate before we can move forward.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, they said that they would not talk unless the reciprocal trade tariff of 145% was removed.

[Krystal Ball]

Would it be likely that you would.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Be able to go back to the president and say to show good faith we could drop this down in the interim to 50%.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Could that be in the cards?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Laura, you know I'm not going to negotiate.

[Krystal Ball]

You're the on tv. You're one of the most popular, the.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Anchors in the world.

[Krystal Ball]

So I'm not going to give away our strategy. And look, everything's on the table. It's up to the president. At the end of the day, the president has said that he's happy just to give all countries a number if the negotiations don't go well. And that's what we're doing with the other 17 important trading partners is look, you can negotiate in good faith that you can come with your A game or President Trump is happy to ratchet the number back up to your April 2nd number.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So, you know, seems like those talks are very preliminary, you know, long way from any sort of a deal actually being struck with China. And of course that is the really main focus in China. Of course, subject to those 145% tariffs which effectively cuts off trade with China. Now I'm sure there is going to be some because the tariffs in other nations are much lower, 10%. I'm sure there's going to be some of China shipping to other places that ship here already is they call it trans, trans shipping. They call that. Yeah. And that that was already being done and I'm sure that will only expand to try to fill the gap of trade that is just being, you know, Completely blocked from China, but it's still going to have quite a significant impact.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, which is why if they're still doing trade deals with oil deals, every country that was hit by the reciprocals, that means they're going to have to do deals with places like Cambodia, Vietnam and some of those places where things are being shipped first from China and then into the United States. So the level of unpredictability here, I mean, I know things feel like since what was Liberation Day, April 2, it's been more than a month now, we've sort of slipped into some sense of normalcy and it's. We're almost numb to what we're in right now because everything changed so quickly. But the level of uncertainty in the economy is hard to even capture with words. Words. I mean, it's, it's. We're not on the woods, that's for sure.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And, you know, there have been concerns about looming shortages, retailers sounding the alarm about that. You know, we played the director of the L A Port, or executive director of the L A Port, whatever his title is, saying, basically, look, it's already way down. You know, the shipments are receiving from China. We expect it to be much worse. I saw indications yesterday that, you know, there is vastly diminished activity at some of the major ports, shorts in the country. But, you know, the White House is saying basically like, yeah, they're just crying wolf, everything's fine, there's been no shortages yet. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Hassett talking about that.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, the scare monitoring is happening now, but I can tell you that I get real time data every day on whether there are shortages and I can report that there are still plenty of things on the shelves. There were a couple of weeks where shipping from China was lower, but now shipping from a lot of other countries is going way, way up, up. So people don't have to be worried about what the scaremongers are saying. These policies are on shoring jobs, on shoring production. You could see it in the jobs data, you could see it in the explosion of manufacturing jobs already, even before the tariffs came in. The way to think about it for me, Laura, is that President Trump did something last time, looked and saw that it really worked, and now he's doing more of it a little bit bigger. But that's what you should do. You should do something, see if it works or not, and then change. And that's what he's doing. He's ramping up, up the ante because he saw that it worked to the past.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So the question is whether this situation is able to persist. It's also funny, I mean, what he's saying there. Well, trade with China is downshore, but trade with these other countries is up. It's because of what we were exactly talking about that goods are being shipped from China to these other countries and then here to get around the, you know, the extreme tariffs that are put in place with regard to China. And we'll see because, you know, it takes. Takes roughly a month or more to ship goods from China to our ports. Louisiana, I think, is one of the places that goods can move most quickly to. And we're right in that time frame of when we'll see what the impact is. Now, a lot of companies did stock up in anticipation. That was part of what played into the GDP numbers in the first quarter. A lot of companies knew that something was going to happen, and so they aggressively imported what they needed to import so that they could have a sort of backlog and storage to be able to weather the storm. So that will help to buffer especially large companies that were able to do that and to get ahead. I think the first place we're going to really see impact and fallout is among those small and medium businesses that just do not have the size, scale or cushion in order to maneuver around these tariffs or in order to really prepare, fully prepare and soften the blow from the impact.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, absolutely, Chris. Also, this tear sheet, this Ford tare sheet, if we put this on the screen, a3, this is important because we had that clip yesterday of Mark Pocan going after Scott Besant asking who pays tariffs. And Scott Besant was really insistent about not answering that question. He was trying all kinds of clever ways to get around that question. The CNN headline is Ford will raise the sticker price on cars imported from Mexico. It just said it didn't expect significant US Price hikes. There you go. That's evidence right there. To the point Kevin Hassett was just making. You see something, you try it, you see what happens, and then maybe you pivot.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Well, Ford says they're going to hike the sticker price for three US models that they import from Mexico by about $2,000 each. I would say that's significant. That was only days after executives were like, I think it will be fine. And they had, and, you know, I think in an attempt to curry favor with Trump, had said they were going to hold the line with regard to sticker prices on vehicles.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And now here we are a short time later of them being like, oh, actually, we can't hold the line. At least on these three models, we're going to up the price by $2,000. And that is another question too, is we saw this during the post Covid inflationary period is there were genuine inflation pressures and there were also companies that were like, oh, people think there's inflation. I can raise my prices, I'm going to raise my prices. And by the way, when the input costs for those companies went down, did they bring the prices back down? Of course not. Of course not. And I actually saw that there's industry jargon for these types of practices. It's called taking price. So it's such a common practice that they actually have, like, industry jargon for what it means. It makes sense, of course, if you're a capitalist and you see you can get away with raising your prices, you're going to raise your price. So that's how you can also feed an inflationary spiral, even above and beyond the direct impact of the tariffs, which is also quite.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah. And you know, this is where it obviously should factor into the Trump administration's decision making process. I think it's unfair to let some of these corporations off the hook. Not that we do, but it's such a small part of the media conversation here is like they take the economic precarity that everybody is living in and just squeeze every little drop out they can and disproportionately end up sending that money continually to executives away from workers. They increase prices for customers. They pay themselves more and more. They do buybacks. And that's why actually an interesting industrial policy in the tax bill would have been something like the millionaire tax that Trump was talking about to pay for some of the cuts. That seems like it's off the table now, but there are all kinds of other things that you could do. It's not really, I guess I shouldn't call it industrial policy. There are all kinds of things that you could do to make this trade war, actually help workers and customers and pass those costs off in different ways. And there's not a ton of conversation happening about what could be done creatively in that big, beautiful reconciliation package Trump is hotly anticipating. But it seems to me like that would be a missed opportunity, actually.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And I mean, with regard to the corporations doing what corporations do, I mean, obviously we're going to call them out here. But also, you know, it would be like expecting a snake not to bite you, like 100%. Yeah. And so that's why you need government policy to protect workers, to protect consumers, and to understand the dynamics, the incentives that you're creating. And so what you're likely to have also is this situation where if you are a large player in particular and your competitor is suffering more from the tariffs and the import taxes, for whatever reason they import more from China, etcetera, You have two choices. You could hold your prices steady and then you undercut them and then you steal their business. That's going to work out well for you. Or you could take price and also up your prices to match them, knowing that you can get away with it because they had to increase their prices. So there are a lot of dynamics here and we have actually a lot of David Dayen's reporting in the show that he's been pointing out the way that this policy also really benefits the large players. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And one of them is also just the fact that if you are Apple, if you are Ford, if you are Walmart, if you are Costco, you can get those meetings with the Trump administration, you can argue your case, you can maybe get your car, you can get what you need to be able to survive. And if you are one of the smaller players, you are not going to be able to have that opportunity whatsoever. There's one more piece of market news we wanted to bring you that is kind of unrelated to the tariffs, but also really significant. Put this up on the screen. While I was keeping our eye on what the impacts of air are going to be wild story yesterday about the rampant use of chatbots and whatever cheating in college we could have. We'll do that conversation another day. But in any case, Apple stock price significantly fell after they are a top executive there said that it is considering injecting Safari with AI. And the big news here, by the.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Way, I love how they say injecting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I know going to vaccinate it with vaccinated Jabari Jab.

[Krystal Ball]

Whoo.

[Sagar Enjeti]

In any case, one of the biggest notable comments that was made here is that for the first time ever, Google searches are going down because people are using, they're asking Grok, they're asking ChatGPT, they're not going to Google. And I mean I can attest to that. It is like better Google effectively when you're using AI.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You and Saga are obsessed with AI. With the. I feel like Kyle uses it a lot too.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But like ChatGPT, Kyle loves making images with Grok, loves who among us spends hours over there just like, what if I did this? Yeah, it's really up to some thumbnail game, I have to say.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean what can't grok do? But seriously, the story is incredible. And Stoler was monitoring Google stock price yesterday and he had a great post on big his substack which is a great subscribe about how basically the markets were saying this is his headline, Wall street tells Google to break itself up up. Because the markets were reacting to this information as it was being. And he had an interesting point too which is that as the day went on you could see people kind of grappling, investors grappling with what it meant because it was a stiff plummet at first and then went up a little bit, but it stayed really low. Huge, huge problem obviously for Google and they're about to be broken up and it looks like they're about to be broken up in a couple of different directions.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So huge news for like our tech stocks in general. And it came out as this came out as part of the testimony in the Google antitrust trial. Isn't that crazy? I mean it just is like the wildest way for for Google to have their stock prices crater as Stoler put it. And last thought Crystal, Apple and Ford remind me of something. We covered this about a month ago when the Ford CEO around Liberation Day did an interview talking about how they suddenly realized none of their parts for any of their cars were like made in the United States at all. Like they had to get from so many different places. They may assemble them in the United States but they're sourced from everywhere. And it would be hard to a similar problem with Apple and these guys now find themselves in these companies that might not be his fault, might not be Tim Cook's fault, but this. We rely on iPhones and we rely on Ford cars. At least I do.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I do too have two of them.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's not just. I'm not saying the Trump administration's solution has been executed well, because it hasn't been. But they also hold the economy hostage to their shitty business models and it's like the same thing. Actually I think it's the same thing with Google here too. We're all held hostage to their complete monopoly that you see their stock tanking when then something obvious happens and it's like, are they prepared for that? What does that mean for Google? I don't know. But Stoller makes a good point. He compares it to Standard Oil. He compares Google potentially to Standard Oil, which created when it was broken up, all of these more efficient broken up companies in its place. And so this Actually might be a really positive piece of news, although it would be quite a transition period for the US Economy and certainly for Google.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. I mean, with regard to AI there, there's a lot to say there, but I feel like if we had a functioning society, we'd have a really aggressive national debate about how far we want to go with this and how much we want to limit it. And I was thinking about, I'm old enough so that when I first started driving, you could print out the MapQuest directions. Right. But I still had to occasionally, if you screw up the MapQuest directions, oh, it was bad. You got to go to the map.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Oh, it was bad.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You got to open up the map. You got to figure out, where the hell am I? You got to stop at the gas station, ask the guy, how do I get to this place or that place? And, yeah, it was rough. I much prefer being able to navigate and just have the phone be like, okay, you screwed up. Here's another route, whatever. But I will tell you, I was a lot better at knowing how to get places. Oh, this is a thing everybody who has had both experience knows is the thing. Like, I have to use GPS to get to places that I've been, you know, a lot of times. Whereas at that time, when you had to actually think and use your brain and engage, you were able to navigate places. And I feel like with AI, you can kind of extrapolate that to your entire brain.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes, yes. There's research on this, and Nicholas Carr started writing on this one. Was the shallows was like, 2011.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right. Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And actually, there's a decent bit of research about how your brain atrophies in different ways when you start outsourcing critical parts of it to computers. It's not to say that we should never allow anyone to touch a calculator. Obviously, I don't agree with that, but there's so much that we're going to lose so quickly and not even have a baseline. You know, there are people who don't remember MapQuest, don't know MapQuest, that are very much alive. Like, your kids, probably. They have no idea what it is.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Like, what.

[Emily Jashinsky]

What the hell is MapQuest?

[Sagar Enjeti]

He printed something out, like, what are you talking about?

[Emily Jashinsky]

It just gives me so much PTSD about, like, coming late to soccer games because the MapQuest was hard to get to the. Oh, my God. But in all seriousness, like, this is a real problem. But thankfully, we have a surgeon general who will be on top of it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, yeah, yeah. She'll be thinking all these things through very deeply with her lack of a medical license. All right, we'll get to that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I was gonna say for later.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's a deep tease. They're coming down the road.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Biden's surgeon general was excellent on that. Vivek Murthy, he was really good on this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You know what, you're right about that. You're right about that. He was very thoughtful. He put out a warning. He basically said that social media uses should be treated like tobacco, alcohol. Like that kind of seriousness. And we're all like, okay. Anyway, thanks. Have a tablet, kiddo. Leave me alone for a little while.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Be quiet.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, let's go ahead and get to some very serious topics. But starting with, you know, we were talking yesterday about how Trump has basically taken the Houthis up on their deal to they to back up for a second. Okay. Houthis have been doing their their operations in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. During the ceasefire, the brief Gaza ceasefire, they stopped all activities. When the ceasefire ended, they resumed activities. But just vis a vis Israel. They were not bombing or bothering US ships. We started bombing them aggressively and killing a lot of Civilians and signal gate and all of that sort of stuff they have long said. And a job site interview, to Ryan and Jeremy's credit, actually interviewed Houthi leadership who said, listen, we've always said, if you don't bomb us, we won't bomb you. So apparently, Trump decided to take them up on that deal and decided to stop bombing them. And in response, they are not supposed to bomb us either, even as they continue their hostilities vis a vis Israel. So Trump gets asked about this yesterday and has just about the most Trumpian answer of all time. So let's go ahead and take a listen to that. But so we. Do. We take their word for it. It was, you know, we hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment. They took tremendous punishment. And, you know, you could say there's a lot of bravery there, that it was amazing what. What they took. But we honor their commitment, and they were. They gave us their word that they wouldn't be shooting ships anymore, and we honor that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We honor the bravery of the Houthis.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Very brave. We honor their commitment. I mean, I mean, it's just like, it reminds me of some of the things that Trump would say in his first term, like when he was talking about Putin, he's like, what, you think we're so. You think we don't have the killers? Yeah. You think we're so innocent here?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Or the way he's going full chomsky.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Or the way he would talk about meeting with North Korea or meeting with the Taliban. Like, I feel like we got a little more of this Trump in the first administration. This was a bit of a throwback, but it's also funny just in the context of a bunch of lefties. Hasan in particular, have gotten a lot of shit for talking about the Houthis and being like, you know, it's brave what they're doing. And here you have Trump being like, they're very brave. What can I say? Honor their commitment.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Imagine Barack Obama calling the Houthis brave. Imagine how Republicans would react, my God. Honoring the bravery of the Houthis.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You just can't. You cannot.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It would be only Trump, Only Trump.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We would still be talking about the scandal of it to this day. I'm not even kidding.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean, it is kind of scandalous. It's kind of a crazy thing to say, but. Sorry, Hasan. But, like, it is kind of crazy from the president who's in charge of the United States foreign policy. And yet. And yet here we are. So. But I guess a little bit of good News on that front too and cannot be divorced from the broader context of the administration heading to Oman this weekend for negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal. We have some updates on that front as well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, we do, but before we get to that, I want to talk about this report from Reuters which is deeply troubling and really significant. Let's put this up on the screen. So they were able to get this exclusive report that the US And Israel are discussing a possible U S Led administration for Gaza. Let me repeat that. A U S. Led indefinite administration occupation, you could say, of Gaza. Let me read you a little bit of this report because just the utter insanity of this cannot possibly be overstated. The US And Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post war administration of Gaza, according to five people familiar with the matter. The high level consultations have centered around a transitional government headed by a US Official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged. I'm sure that'll be easy. No problems there. According to the discussions, which remain preliminary, there'd be no fixed timeline for how long such a U. S. Led administration would last. So we're talking about literally could last forever, which would depend on the situation. On the grounds of hive, sources said. Those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003 shortly after the US led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Emily, how did that go? Can we check back in on that? How did that work out for us?

[Emily Jashinsky]

No spoilers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

A great idea. Did we execute it well? Did it foment tons of terrorism and horror for years to come?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I think we were able to successfully win the love and affection of the people and establish a democracy.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Mission accomplished is what I heard.

[Emily Jashinsky]

What we did was spread democracy and democracy is contagious, as you know.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Especially in the Middle East.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I just. These words, they truly. I mean, few things are shocking to me with Trump at this point, but he ran in opposition to the Iraq war. This was one of his campaign innovations. Calling Jeb. I mean, we all loved watching him call out Jeb Bush to his face on stage for his brother going into Iraq. And, and that was one of the ways he really did separate himself from the pack and really did seem to represent some sort of a break from the traditional Republican establishment. And now here you are talking about perhaps the most disputed land on the entire planet and we are going to administer it indefinitely. And the model is the coalition Provisional authority in Iraq. I mean, the human horror of it, it, the stupidity of it, the insanity of it, I just, I literally cannot get over it.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And of course we fund one side of the dispute in that conflicted territory to the tune of billions of dollars a year. So trying to pitch that to the Palestinian people, you're already going to be like, what are you talking about? This is just basically the same thing as giving Israel the land 100%. And I can't tell if this Reuters story is a leak from people who think it's a really good idea or people who think it's a really bad idea. I couldn't genuinely, in the story if this is a trial balloon to try to acclimate people to this idea or it was to try to blow the whistle and say someone needs to stop this. My instinct is that this is people saying this is a really great idea. Let's slowly try to acclimate the media and the public to. This is a quote from the article. The quote. High level consultations have centered around a transitional government, as you read, headed by a US official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged. So just zeroing in on that. We have no idea what it's timeline would look like in that case, until a viable Palestinian administration had emerged. The word viable is incredibly vague. That could mean a million different things and it could mean a million years for as long as, for as far as we're concerned. Because viable is going to be in the eyes of the US beholder and the Israeli beholder in this case. And it's very hard to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition won't always be in power, but believes, you know, he's totally at odds with Joe Biden about the question of a two state solution. Doesn't believe in a two state solution. So what does viable mean?

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right. How did our viable government in Afghanistan work out? How did that one go as well? I mean, I just, I had the same question about who was leaking this and why. And then the other question I have is Trump teased this big Middle east announcement. Is this it?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I think so. I think that's exactly what it is.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You do?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, I don't even know what to say. I don't even know what to say. But it's consistent with what he's been saying all along about we are Gonn own Gaza.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So this is, this is the roadmap to the Gaza ruby era. Basically.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's Right. And you know, again, I think you have to take him seriously. I think he got this idea in his head and his eyes lit up at the idea of like the beachfront property or whatever. And now here we are planning some indefinite, endless occupation of Gaza. It's just, it's just an absolute horror. And at the same time, the Israelis, now the mask is totally off. You know, in the beginning days, Emily, I'm sure you remember, we had all these conversations about like, well, what's the day after the war and what's the plan? And of course, Bibi would never say, you know, he would always, oh, well, it's just, we're just focused on the hostages also, by the way, update on that in a moment. Stay tuned for how much they care about the hostages and what a priority that is for them in this new expanded Gaza operation that they just authorized. In any case, they have now made it plain the goal is we wanna permanently occupy Gaza, we wanna flatten Gaza. You and Ryan covered earlier this week and some Democrats are starting to be a little bit more vocal. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who I have to say has been compared to other Democrats, he actually had traveled to the region previously under the Biden administration and was blowing the whistle.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's right, that was him was blowing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The whistle on all of the ways that they were blocking aid and how insufficient the aid was. At least some aid was getting in at that point. But how insufficient it was and that it was the Israeli, Israeli's fault that more aid wasn't getting into the Strip. So he has been a vocal critic here for a while. He's now going one step further in saying that the Israeli plan is brazen ethnic cleansing. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I want to talk about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. It's now been well over 60 days since the Netanyahu government imposed a total blockade of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, not allowing any food or any other humanitarian assistance to reach the over 2 million civilians there. Withholding food and humanitarian assistance as a weapon of war is flat out illegal under international law.

[Krystal Ball]

It is collective punishment, pure and simple.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And now we're told that the Netanyahu government plans to seize and reoccupy huge parts of Gaza. And recently Ben gvir, one of the most ultra extreme members of the extremist Netanyahu government, was in Washington calling for the implementation of, of the Donald Trump plan to essentially force 2 million Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza. That is simply ethnic cleansing by another name. And Ben gvir, of course, very influential in this administration and, you know, very much in line with what many members of the Netanyahu government and frankly, much of the Israeli public also want at this point. And, you know, we are more than two months set since any food, water, medicine has been allowed to enter the strip. More than two months and you've got roughly 2 million people there. We really don't know how many people there are still alive at this point. President Trump had suggested the number was lower at this point. But in any case, you have millions of people there and they will all die if food does not come in. We already have dozens who have died of starvation, children in particular, suffering, suffering gravely from malnutrition. And that's where we are at this date.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Let's put the next element up on the screen. This is a tweet from Dropsite which looked at a Times of Israel report from yesterday, May 7th. And Crystal, this just makes your stomach sink. The headline here is leaked Israeli document rescuing captives ranked last in Gaza war goals. A leaked military. Israeli military document shows that rescuing captives in Gaza is listed last among six official objectives for a planned ground offensive in Gaza. And let's just go through these six, because if you're reading these as steps, and I think that's a correct way to read them, by the time you get to six, it just, again, it makes your stomach sink. One, defeating Hamas. Two, achieving operational control over Gaza. Three, demilitarizing the territory. Four, striking Hamas government targets. Five, concentrating and relocating the population. Six, rescuing the captives. And Netanyahu is already facing regular protests from the hostage families because many of them want him to make a deal to rescue any living hostages, obviously, and to return the bodies of any deceased hostages. But this has always been the fundamental early criticism, I mean, going back to middle late October.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Of the Netanyahu administration from hostage families. Not all of them, but some of them. Them who felt that actually rescuing the hostages was taking. Secondarytaking a backseat basically to this broader goal of taking over Gaza. Obliterate. I mean, to put it in the words of Netanyahu, obliterating Hamas, eliminating Hamas. But in the process of eliminating Hamas, do you eliminate the lives of hostages? In some cases, we know that is likely what happened.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And secondly, I mean, because this tweet says, despite repeated public claims by Israeli leaders, that freeing them is the war's top priority. But you know what, there's been mixed messages on that. They've kind of tried to have it both ways, saying that the hostages are their priority, but also that the top aim of the war is to eliminate Hamas and those goals are not necessarily categorically compatible.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's exactly right. And that is what many hostage families and many Israelis recognize. And that really has been the focal point from what I can tell of a lot of the protests. You know, if you ask Israelis, according to the polls, has the war been too brutal on Palestinians? The number that say that is like 4%. I mean, it's shockingly low. But there's been a lot of dissent around the issue of what the impact is on the hostages of this all out assault, genocidal assault on Gaza. And it has long been clear that Bibi and co did not care about the hostages. They were happy to use them for propaganda value and they aggressively. I mean, you remember in the early stages that the pictures of the hostages were everywhere. And if you weren't fully behind the Israeli war effort, well, you don't care about the hostages and you just want them to die. And for a long time from the beginning, what hostage families and others have been saying is, yeah, but you don't know where our family members are. So if you are bombing, starving this population, right, our family members are there too. So if you actually want to prioritize the hostages, what you would prioritize is, remember there was that brief deal early in the war that there was a brief cease fire and there was an exchange of hostages from both the Israeli and the Palestinian side. That's when most of the hostages who were released were released during that time period. That is how you actually get the hostages back is through diplomatic negotiations and a ceasefire. Hamas has said from the beginning, beginning, we'll do an all for all exchange. You release all of the Palestinian hostages prisoners that you're holding, we will release all of the Israeli hostages that we are holding as well. So it has always been clear. And the military efforts to rescue any of the hostages have been. I think there was one that was successful. And it also included mass civilian death and a lot of chaos and carnage as a result of that operation to rescue hostages, though it's always been very clear, clear, if you actually want to secure hostages, then you need to negotiate. Diplomatic resolution is the way that you're going to save hostage lives. And we were told that, no, no, no, the hostages are the number one priority. And now again, as I said before, the mask is coming off of Israel. They no longer feel the need to lie and pretend like hostage lives are the number one priority. And this leaked document just confirms, actually it's the Leak. Last, last on the list of war aims, the least important war aim is to secure the release of the hostages at this point.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, and it was always for the sake of this goal that, again, was unattainable without complete and utter civilian destruction. Because we knew, I mean, we could tell in the early stages of the war that Hamas was not going to be defeated without that, that they were already Reconstantuting within, like, six months. Months. About six months. They were already reconstituting control and like, government authority in particular areas of Gaza, like in Rafah. So it was all, I think if I were, you know, a hostage family, that is what would weigh most heavily on me, is that they're not like, what is the end here? I don't think anybody ever really knew because, well, I mean, the end for many people, let's say it was just this goal of quote, unquote, eliminating Hamas. But what that would actually look like when that would end, if it was attainable. Those were the questions, I think, that were haunting a lot of the families of the hostages.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, let's go ahead and get to this update with regard to Iran negotiations. J.D. vance, this was in Munich yesterday, correct? That he was speaking, getting asked about.

[Emily Jashinsky]

He returned.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He returned to Munich. By the way, the tone this time, much so different. Much softer.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, it's interesting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Little chastened was kind of. Yeah. What did you make of that?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, yeah, it was interesting because he started off by acknowledging, you know, the elephant in the room and breaking the ice, cutting through any tension and saying, I wasn't sure if I was going to be invited back. And his tone, overall, it was a conversation and not a speech. So I think that helped it the tone be more. A little bit more. What's the right word? Maybe chastened or just like buttoned down. He was a bit more relaxed.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The JD Vance that was on stage with Tim Walls.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes, it was very much like that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's like a very nice, moderate dude, like, very much like that. You know, we're trying to get along here. Whereas the. The first speech was very aggressive.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes. It was very prickly and abrasive. And this was him, I think, realizing that you can catch more flies with honey.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I think also the trade war has changed the dynamics where also they feel like they need Europe to side with the US Against China. And so there have been some shifts there.

[Emily Jashinsky]

In any case, he did have a really good quote where he said, basically, the point is not US versus versus Europe and I don't want things to seem that way, though you can understand why the Europeans, by the way, interpreted that earlier Munich speech as US versus Europe. But he's saying that's not the point. The point is that we actually need each other. It was actually, I think, a much more mature version of the argument. And obviously he's had a couple of months to get feedback and hear from people about how that first argument landed.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Don't forget, too, that the signal Gate chat that leaked out where J.D. vance is trying to make the case against the strikes in Yemen by being like, oh, we're just bailing out those crummy Europeans again. And Hegseth, I think, was the one that chimed in. Right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Who was like, yeah, we can't stand them. I mean, there's a lot of Euro bashing going on in that chat.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And they read those as well. So I'm sure they were also not super happy about the contents of that. Those messages.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Super quickly I pulled up the quote just because I think it gives a good flavor of his tone. Yesterday he said, quote, I wasn't sure if after February I'd get the invitation back. Everything, everything that I said there applied as much to the previous American administration as it did in any government, as it did any government in Europe. So he was saying, sort of humbling himself and saying, well, not. Not himself, but humbling his country and saying, the Biden administration was just as bad as I think you guys are. It's like Biden Starmer, same thing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Biden administration wasn't kidnapping students off the street for writing op eds. But then that part always goes on set.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, Then he goes. Then he goes on to say, it's not Europe bad, America good. Both Europe and the US we got a little off track. So that's a night and day tonal difference. But he was in conversation this time, so I guess it's not like a scripted speech attack. He was talking to some guy up on stage.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Gotcha. Okay. So in part of that talking to some guy up on stage, he gets asked about the status of the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. Interesting comments. Here, listen, take a listen.

[Krystal Ball]

So there are a couple issues with the earlier agreement. The jcpoa, as it's called here in the United States and I assume in Europe. But here, the two big issues with that agreement are, number one, the enforcement or the inspections regime was incredibly weak. And I don't think that it actually served the function of preventing the Iranians from getting on the pathway to a nuclear weapon. That's one thing that must be different. And Then second, yes, we believe that there were some elements of their nuclear program that were preserved under jcpoa, that, yes, they weren't nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, but allowed Iran to sort of stay on this glide path towards a nuclear weapon if they flip the switch and press go. And we have to think about this not just in terms of Iran, which again, the President has said this. We think that there is a deal here that would reintegrate Iran into the global economy, that would be really good for the Iranian people, but would result in the complete cessation of any chance that they could get a nuclear weapon. And that's what we're negotiating towards.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So what did you think of his comments there, Emily? What was noteworthy?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I mean, really interesting because they need the buy in of Senate Republicans who have been hearing these leaks, the broad contours of a potential Trump Iran negotiation and saying that sounds exactly like the jcpoa. The foundation for Defense of Democracy is very hawkish on this. Some of their folks have been making that criticism. And I think the Trump administration knows that they need the buy in of a significant part of the Republican coalition. And they're not going to get that for the jcpoa, even if it's Donald Trump. You know, you saw, we didn't talk about this yesterday, but Thom Tillis, under Thom Tillis coming out against Trump's D.C. attorney pick, Ed Martin and Tariffs had Rand Paul, for example, bringing together this bipartisan coalition to try and get a vote vote to take back, at least symbolically, Congress's power over trade. So I think they realized that on the highest priority issues, and I cannot think of a higher priority issue for the hawks in the Republican Party. The remaining neoconservatives, a Tom Cotton, a Lindsey Graham, whatever it is, you cannot just copy and paste jcpoa, even if you're Donald Trump. Which is one of the reasons actually people ended up getting on the Trump bandwagon back in 2015 and 2016 because he was such an opponent of JCPOA. So I think what JD Vance was doing yesterday was making a substantive and fair criticism of JCPOA's oversight, the oversight, let's say, regime that was in JCPOA. Like, you have to be able to verify what Iran is actually doing, otherwise the whole thing kind of falls apart and it's kind of useless. So I think it's a reasonable criticism. I also think it was a wet to distance the Trump plan.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Say, this is, this is totally different. This is nothing like Trump plan. Like this is way better than that. So it's not what I do as well.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's not impossible that they land on, especially if we're grading on the curve of, like, neoconservative Republican Party lawmakers. It's not impossible that they land on a solution here that is much better than your typical Republican or maybe even your typical Democrat would have negotiated. But that obviously remains to be seen. They're negotiating in Oman. It's the weird thing of the Trump era is that because of the oddities in the coalition and because of Trump's very eccentric, to say the least approach to these negotiations, they sometimes end up in good places. We'll see.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, we'll say fingers crossed that they just get back into something approximating jcpoa, but are able to put some rhetorical flourish on they that keeps most Republicans on board, because I do think that that is a genuine risk, given the fact we're about to transition a block on the Medicaid cuts, the block on what's going on with Maha. There are cracks that are starting to emerge. And as this administration gets more unpopular across a broader range of issues, as the economic numbers get more uncertain, it just gives you a lot less room to navigate. And also as the midterms get closer, closer. And many of these, the members who are up are looking at their reelection bids and getting very nervous. And then, of course, there are such hawkish organized forces in Washington that the vast majority of the Republican caucus has been aligned with. So it will be difficult for them to persuade their own caucus that this is a deal worth negotiating. We shouldn't just go to war with Iran, which of course, would be an utter disaster.

[Emily Jashinsky]

They have been flipping out over it. As soon as it became likely or possible that Trump was going to pursue a broad plan or a plan that broadly resembled JCPOA in some way or another, meaning allowing for some enrichment for at least civilian purposes in the agreement, quote, unquote, civilian purposes. And that's. It's not that they don't have a point that that's something that people should absolutely be concerned about. But is it realistic? No. In all likelihood, it's not realistic to start, let's say, thawing these tensions or cooling these tensions without coming to some sort of agreement that has. In an agreement, you have to give and take a little bit and you end up with no agreement whatsoever.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And the administration has been all over the map with regard to enrichment. J.D. vance There seemed to say no enrichment. Others have said no enrichment. Donald Trump got asked about it and he said he's not sure. So which is good. I'm glad, I'm glad he said that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I think Wyckoff's gone back and forth as well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I think, I think that's right too. And I don't, I'm not, I don't remember if it was in the clip we played there or not, but J.D. vance made a comment during there saying like that no country has ever had civilian enrichment and not ended up with a nuclear weapon. And that is just not true at all. Japan, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands are among countries that enrich uranium and haven't pursued nuclear weapons. So not that part was not particularly encouraging. But we'll see where it all goes.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Hey, that's a rare glimmer of optimism. I suppose that's the best you're going.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, let's go ahead and move. Speaking of not having glimmers of optimism, let's move to the quite drastic Medicaid cuts that appear to be part of the big beautiful bill that Republicans are in the process of negotiating. David Dayen over at the American Prospect Getting the scoop here on the specifics of the Medicaid cuts that the Republican caucus is planning on making. Let's put this up on the screen. And guys, I'm just, I'm gonna take my time to go through a little bit of this because this is so important. So he says, I've obtained a list of the Medicaid cuts in the Republican reconciliation pact. The big one is that they're going to raise premiums and copays on beneficiaries at or above the federal poverty line. That is what helps pay for the tax cuts. And that's what he has here in this text. He says the most potentially explosive item on the menu is cost sharing above 100% of FPL. That's the federal poverty line. That appears to mean that Medicaid recipients making at or above the federal poverty line which, which is 15,650 for a single individual and 21,150 so very low amounts here for a two person household would have to pay some money for coverage either in premiums, co pays or hospital visits and other treatment or other fees. Currently Medicaid gives states the option to impose out of pocket spending on recipients. So some populations and services like children under 18 or pregnancy care are exempted. Some premiums and enrollment fees are limited to beneficiaries above 150% of the poverty line. This policy would take that number lower. Making poor people pay more for health care is exactly the kind of cut, effective cut to Medicaid that moderate Republicans have sworn they would not abide. While reducing the federal share of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion which provides federal funding to extend Medicaid to adults under age 65 up to 138% of the poverty level in 40 states. And D.C. is not part of the menu. This is a backdoor way of achieving something like that reduction on the backs of individuals who get Medicaid. There are other provisions in here as well. There are some changes to the Affordable Care act that would also increase premiums and raise out of pocket costs for people who enroll through the ACA marketplaces. So that is significant. There's some changes here in terms of work requirements that also what has been found previously with the Medicaid work requirements in particular according to the Kaiser Family foundation. This is also in Dain's Reporting is that 61% of US adults on Medicaid already work. Large fraction of those who don't are either disabled or elderly. The requirement would primarily add red tape to the enrollment system, push People out of Medicaid using bureaucracies is a very common tactic. And states like Arkansas have already experimented with this and found that exact situation. It was expensive to implement and ultimately did not improve efficiency or anything the goals you might imagine with that. Instead, it just pushed people out of the program because they couldn't go through all of the bureaucratic red tape in order to get in. So bottom line here is that they are planning on making Medicaid more expensive, raising premiums, making people who are somewhat above the federal poverty line pay in, and doing some other tweaks around the edges, including these work requirements in order to reduce the cost of Medicaid. So quite significant. And we could put this next piece up on the screen just to get a broader sense of some of the different options that they had floated. This isn't specifically looking at the David Report of what they've sort of landed on, but it lists all of these different options that had been suggested, had been proposed. One of them is reducing the expansion of the population matching rate. Another one is limiting state taxes on healthcare providers, capping spending per enrollees, repealing eligibility and enrollment final rates. Any one of these options, they find, would, yes, reduce the federal deficit somewhat and also would reduce Medicaid coverage by millions of people. Anywhere from 8.6 million people to 2.3 million people would be cut off from Medicaid and you would have a significant increase in all instances in uninsured people. So that is where we are and what we're looking at.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is a tripwire for Republicans who want to need to, by their own strategic intentions, pass a tax cut bill in order to. We could disagree with their argument here, but in order to supplement the tariff regime and the trade war, they don't believe, I mean, they've said this over and over again, that they need a tax bill to have their intended effects in the trade war. And, you know, you could go and look at that and say, well, then maybe you should have done the tax bill first. And if you got it passed, passed, then done all of these tariffs at the sort of wild levels, unexpected levels that a lot of, you know, even the administration sort of admits were very radical because they ended up walking them back. And Trump said the bond market was getting a little yippee. So it's by their own admission that some of this is a little wild. So maybe wait till after you get the tax cut bill passed because now Republicans need to offset the tax cuts with significant spending cut. They believed that Doge was going to find Elon Musk first said $2 trillion in savings. He then said $1 trillion in savings. Now we don't even know if it'll be $200 billion.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They didn't say they probably spent more money than they say. I'm not kidding. Not genuinely. They did not.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Out of the question. Yeah. They have not come anywhere near what Republicans expected Dosh to do.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They actually thought they were going to cut a trillion dollars or something.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Absolutely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They really thought they that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I don't think anyone thought 2 trillion was possible. But I think, I mean the federal budget is a wild thing and I think even like some Democrats will. Yeah, you could probably do that. But the way they went about doing it, it's kind of exactly what you would expect when you let a oligarch run wild in the federal government with a bunch of 20 year olds. 20 year olds, right. Because it's the same argument that people made against throwing Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon. And we talked about this with Mark Lucas. Like you maybe you need somebody, you have to find the rare person who knows the bureaucracy in order to take on the bureaucracy. Otherwise you end up not being efficient at all because you don't even know where to look. You don't even know what to do. And that's sort of been an interesting, like Ezra Klein argument against Doge is that it's not efficient to just come in and make cuts. Some of these cuts end up being inefficient and then you end up maybe spending more money than you even cut. But the bottom line is Congressional Republicans not now have to come up with a budget that allows them to do these tax cuts because they're also full of deficit hawks. They now have populists because some of these Republicans represent working class, heavily working class districts with a lot of people on Medicaid. And Trump has said we could roll the tape back from, I think it was February 19th. He's sitting next to Elon Musk in an interview with Sean Hannity and says Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff will be touched. Then he goes on to say maybe for noncitizens, that sort of thing. And so he was assuring you, the US citizen, American taxpayer, your Medicaid, your Medicare is going to be safe. The only things we might make are tweaking around the edges to affect non citizens or fraud. So they might be able to make the argument that work requirements are going against fraud, whatever. I mean Medicaid spending is about 9% of the federal budget as of at least 2022. I mean, it's a huge amount of money. So it's irresistible for deficit hawk Republicans to want to cut Medicaid. But if you cut Medicaid, you infuriate a lot of people who put their rightfully or wrongfully their trust in the Trump Republican Party. And in Trump in particular, how do they get to the tax cut bill with enough votes even to pass the House? The slim margins that they have, genuinely a mystery at this point.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, and most of the tax cut bill is just to give away to the rich. I mean, it's. You are literally cutting health insurance for poor people to pay for a tax cut for the rich. That's what you're doing. And there was even some acknowledgement, remember, there's some leaked Republicans to Axios, I think saying, like, that's gonna be a tough one for us to message on.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yep.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because that's. It's so politically toxic that it is hard to imagine doing something more unpopular.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We have the C3. This is don't Bacon.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, let's go ahead and put Don Bacon up on the screen. Don Bacon is in this. He's in Nebraska, right in the swing district. Has not actually announced whether he's running for reelection. Again, I don't think there's any way he wins. I just, you know, I don't think he runs the way, the way that this year is shaping up. This is one of the districts actually Bernie Sanders went to as well, recognizing and very smartly recognizing that him and others in similar positions would be a vulnerability on trying to cut Medicaid and any. In case Don Bacon, one of the most vulnerable House members, is warning. Some Republican leaders have privately tried to get him and others on board with this reconciliation bill by claiming any steep Medicaid cuts passed by the House, they're going to be blocked by the Senate anyway. Here's the tactic they've been using. He says, don't worry about the Senate. They'll fix it. And now we're getting ready to take our third vote on this. Bacon said in a recent interview. We feel like we're being pushed up to the edge the of, of the cliff here. So here he is in the swing district. He knows that this is political poison, and yet they are. The tax cut thing, Trump, this is the one thing that he consistently promised to the financier class. I mean, really explicitly, like, vote for me and you're getting your tax cut. And they are not particularly happy about the whole tariff situation. So I think that adds pressure that on that piece, you have to Deliver. And Republicans have long been lined up behind giving tax cuts to wealthy people. That was the primary accomplishment of Trump's first administration. So I think he also has sort of ego commitment to it as well, outside of the way it benefits himself personally as well. So that piece has to be in. And then to make up for it, they're increasing the Pentagon budget. So it's not coming out of the defense side of the ledger. That would be the other place you could look if you don't want to take health care away from poor people. Well, that's off the table. They're upping the budget over there. So that leaves you with force to make really quite significant cuts to Medicaid that Trump promised he wouldn't and that are wildly politically unpopular and more importantly are going to be really devastating to millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid. And you know, in a way, this is a very, a real success of Obamacare. The way that Medicaid expansion has made this program much more politically popular and much more difficult politically to cut because you have so many more millions of Americans who benefit from Medicaid at this point than prior to the Obamacare expansion. So that's part of the background here as well.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I mean, the politics of this for Republicans even, you know, I went back. So I wrote about this yesterday. I was going back and looking at. Some of. You might remember this because you ran in the Tea Party years. Republicans were very careful the way they talked about Medicaid. Like actual Republican politicians were very careful the way they actually talked about. They would talk about, you know, needing to reform Social Security, whatever. But when it came to Medicare and Medicaid, there it was only like the hardest of the hardcore who would talk about like actually just cutting it and getting people off entitlement programs. I. There was this sensitivity around it. If you go back and look what they said, you'd be like, wow, that's really interesting because even at the time I think they realized how just disastrous, how important it is to the seniors and the working class people who hate the government and maybe saw some hope in the Tea Party movement. Cuz they were like, yeah, term limits and like screw the big banks after the recession, how important these programs are to people. So it's just like it. The chickens are coming home to roost for Republicans on this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And I guess. Emily, can you speak to. I mean, because the other side of it, you got the Don Bacons on one side who were like, I'm about to get tossed down and may not even run for reelection cuz it's looking so bad. Then you have people who are genuine fiscal hawks who have signed on to some letter saying like no, we need steep Medicaid cuts. So they're trying to balance all of these pieces, which is I guess why leadership is going to Don Bacon and saying like does trust us, it's gonna be fine, they'll work it out in the Senate. It's not gonna be that bad.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, well the Senate, I mean they're not. That might be their best option. And I think that's sort of what Mike Johnson is getting at because he's ruled certain quote unquote cuts out and that leaves them with like waste, fraud and abuse work requirements. And to quote Rick Perry here, there's a third thing, I'm just forgetting it, I have it right in front of me cuz Dan posted it. But yeah, they're going to get on whatever. Like they're going to find some outline but that outline is then going to be taken. And Dahn put it a great way and it's similar to what you just said. He said in his story, he was like, yeah, you're making poor people pay more for healthcare. That's the direct quote from Dayan. No matter what Republicans do to Medicaid, Democrats are gonna be able to say that. Yeah, it doesn't matter. That's what they're gonna be able to say. Yeah, it doesn't matter if you get it down to. Unless it's just on like noncitizens or something. But it doesn't matter if you add work requirements, that's still making poor people pay more for health care. And there's ways you can message it very effectively in some populous red districts. But it's an uphill battle, a real uphill battle. And it gives Democrats a huge gift with a very polarizing political environment and a polarizing president.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I just want to say with regard to work requirements, like I said before, Arkansas tried this. So this has been studied and it really should be seen as a similar tactic to what Doge is doing with Social Security where they're just making it so that you can, you can't get someone on the phone, you go to the field office, the field office has been closed or the field office has a three hour long line. So you're making it impossible for people to access those benefits. And this is a common tactic and issue in neoliberalism where they put up so much red tape and layer it with so much bureaucracy. This is the kind of thing we need a real doge to tackle. They lay it with so much bureaucracy that it means that people just cannot jump through all the hoops or don't have time to jump through all the hoops or can't figure out how to jump through all the hoops in order to access the benefits that they are entitled to. And that is I think what you should really, that's the real underlying goal of work requirements is the idea that if we make it more difficult for people to be able to obtain these benefits and you have to justify, okay, here's where I'm working, here's the hours and I talked to my boss and they're calling me on the phone and all of the these sorts of things, then you are going to make it so fewer people enroll in Medicaid and that's the way that you're going to cut the numbers that are on this program. So it is a backdoor way to make it so that fewer people are on Medicaid. It's a cut. That's it. Bottom line. And yeah, so Democrats will be able to point to the numbers whenever we get the final bill of exactly what is coming with what these cuts entail and say this many millions of Americans are getting canceled, kicked off Medicaid. For this many millions of Americans, you are increasing the cost. And Republicans will try to say, oh, work requirements, able bodied. And no, it's not really a cut all day long. But I think it's very difficult to explain your way out of your cutting healthcare for poor people to pay for rich people's tax cuts.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, it is. To put it in a bill with a corporate tax cut which by the way, I mean taking the corporate tax rate from 21 to 15%, we don't need, I mean it's a can of worms to open it. Now I'm just like a total, you need a flat tax basically type of person. And we probably disagree on that. But I just believe that's the only way to close loopholes. And closing loopholes is the only way to get corporations to pay their fair share and to pay like to put revenue into the treasury. But to do this, to add this into a bill that's cutting the corporate tax rate for 21 to 15%. Yeah, that might get companies to in some small way bring back their corporate headquarters which have, you know, like moved to Ireland. Johnson Controls, for example, moves to Ireland. But that's the corporate headquarters. It doesn't necessarily affect that many workers. Either way they can make this argument that it's about on shoring, bringing jobs back, et cetera. But at the end of the day, Democrats can now say in a corporate tax cut bill, you cut Medicaid like it's just a disaster politically. There's no question about it. And they have. This happened again in 2017. Paul Ryan was out there. This is just going to be my little rant for just a brief second. Paul Ryan was out there talking about how he was going to get taxes down to a postcard. And that is like actually a very. I think that would be. If you're talking about like doing it via a flat tax. That is a very just system of taxation. Wouldn't require corporations to actually pay their fair share if it had the right policy incentives in it. Not that I trusted Paul Ryan to do that. But genuinely, if you say we have this mandate and we are going to just revamp the tax system and you end up with, with the TCJA, which was a tax cut bill in 2017, and then you end up with whatever this bill is going to be, right? You have all of. If you claim this mandate from political heaven right now and you have the generational opportunity to do something like Doge, and you're not going to take it to do any. We know it's just because the lobbyists would swamp them. You can never have a fair system of taxation because lobbyists will swamp you and then you lose and you have no courage or backbone or spine. And that's how we end up with these awful third party ways.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yes, some of that I agree with. I think if you actually got rid of all of the corporate like deductions and loopholes and whatever, and had a lower, like top line rate, but they actually had to pay it. Like there is a version of that that I would support because many of these corporations pay nothing because they avail themselves of so many of these loopholes that exist in our tax code. All right, well, you know who understands some of these things?

[Emily Jashinsky]

No.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Our hero, our heroine, Lara Loomer. Laura Limmer, who is also.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Here's an invite out for tomorrow's show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

This is like. Yeah, she does. That's right. Laura, we would love to talk to you tomorrow. Genuinely. Laura Loomer and David Dayan are heavily featured. Yesterday was the Sean Duffy show. Tomorrow today was the Loomer showed.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is the difference between when I planned shows and when you plan shows.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I guess so Emily loves her some Sean Duffy. I don't know. All right, put this up on the screen from Laura Loomer. So this is so funny to me always how she phrases this. But anyway, she is hammering this Trump ally Paragon Health CEO Brian Blaise as a rhino saboteur because he's pushing for aggressive Medicaid cuts. I'm gonna read you her post here on Twitter, she says, in a shocking betrayal of President Trump's unwavering commitment to America's working class families and his promise to protect Medicaid, which he did promise. Paragon Health CEO Brian Blaise, a covert never Trumper masquerading as a MAGA loyalist is spearheading a dangerous campaign to undermine the Republican party's midterm prospects. 2016 tweets from Brian Blaise reveal He once said, this is why we can't have Trump. Meaning like, oh, he's a Trump critic. Along with bashing Trump on X, Blaze has also complicated complimented Barack Hussein Obama, God forbid. See screenshots below. Brian Blaise doesn't want you to know this, but he is propped up by millions of dollars from the Koch Network's anti Trump war chest. It's currently pressuring congressional Republicans to defy the president's ironclad pledge to protect Medicaid, a program critical to the heartland voters who propelled Trump to his election victories. Blaze's insidious push to eliminate provider taxes would gut Medicaid funding hitting Americans the hardest in rural red states like Texas, Florida and Louisiana. By the way, this is one of the pieces that Dan reported is planned to be in the bill where Trump's base depends on the Medicaid program for survival. This is why Democrats are falsely accusing President Trump of trying to cut Medicaid because they know it's an effective way to suppress GOP turnout for the 2026 midterm. She goes on to talk about Steve Bannon. It's a long post. I won't read you all of it, but basically, look, it's clever how she frames it. She frames this as like it's a betrayal of Trump's promises. When of course, obviously Donald Trump, if you, if he didn't want Medicaid to be cut, could just go to Mike Johnson and John Thune and be like, we're not cutting Medicaid. That's not happening. But definitely, yeah, but obviously she's gotta frame it in terms of like, he's betraying Trump and Trump's promises and endangering and intentionally endangering Republicans for the midterms. So that's her play here.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Clever framing, though. Let's throw this next tear sheet up on the screen because Republicans are going to be sort of flailing around basically that Republicans are looking to offset the tax cut cuts again by selling some public land. This is actually a fairly popular proposal in some corners of Republican. Well, I haven't looked too deeply into it and I will now, Crystal. But they're going to have to come up with some really creative mechanisms because Doge didn't do what they wanted Doge to do. And they are cutting taxes a whole lot on top of the tariffs. So they, they badly need this to be like a real shot in the arm to the markets and to the overall economy. And they also have to get the damn bill passed. So that's the. I mean, they have to make all of these cuts, like massive cuts.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And get the bill passed with what, like a 2, 3 vote margin in the House.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Increase the Pentagon budget. So you have to make up for that as well and increase the ICE budget and the detention. The, you know, the budget that goes to like these private prison contractors that stand up detention centers that's being increased massively. So it's not just the tax cuts, although that is the most sizable piece of it. But you're also upping, you know, the, the police and the military and so ice.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yep.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so now you're like, maybe we can sell off some public land, some public assets to fund taxes for the rich. I'm sure that's gonna go over well.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, this should be an easy sell back home at their districts over the course of the summer. But again, like the pressure here is so high, the stakes are so high, they can only lose like three votes or something. And you have the Don Bacons of the world who may not be running for reelection. He's actually critical. Was it Hegseth the other day that he came out and criticized? He's been critical of the administration in some surprising ways, which to me signals he doesn't think he's running for reelection or he's right now. I mean, it's like you said, could he even win reelection? I don't know.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think they've given him a lot of bandwidth to criticize the administration. Cuz they recognize the situation that he's in and they want him to run again. Because I think he's probably dead man walking in terms of getting reelected anyway. But if anyone could win the seat, he's like the only one that has a problem. So I think they're willing to give him a fair amount of bandwidth, is my read.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We'll see what they do for Republicans in that situation as they approach votes, which probably I'M guessing will be around fourth of July. So we'll follow it all.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Shall we get to this very interesting story with regard to the Surgeon General. Okay, I'll start from where we are and then we'll back up and do some of the backstory here. So put Trump's announcement here up on the screen. He polled his previous Surgeon General nominee and has now announced Dr. Casey means to be nominated as our next Surgeon General of the usa. Casey has impeccable MAHA credentials.

[Krystal Ball]

Every day our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are. There are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of.

[Krystal Ball]

At Ameca, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Ameca empathy is our best policy. Homes.com is the only place where you can find specialized neighborhood guides with the in depth insider info home shoppers want. Very in depth info. Want to know if there's homes for sale in the area? We've got it. How long has a home been on the market? We'll know it. Average lot size? Uh huh. Proximity to local parks. Of course. Insight into your neighbor's divorce. We're working on it. Homes.com we've done your homework. Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts. 20 more minutes to kill in the pharmacy before my procedure subscription is ready. Maybe I'll grab some deeply discounted out of season Halloween candy. I never had a chocolate pumpkin with raisins before. Those were raisins, right? Next time use Amazon Pharmacy. We deliver. And no, those were not raisins. Amazon Pharmacy Healthcare just got less painful.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We'll work closely. This is what Trump said with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To ensure a successful implementation of our agenda in order to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and ensure great health in the future for all Americans. Her academic achievements together with her life's work are absolutely outstanding. Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest surgeon generals in U.S. history. Congratulations to Casey. Secretary Kennedy looks forward to working with Dr. Jeanette. I don't know how to say her last name. Do you? Nishawat. In another capacity at HHS. Thank you for your attention to this matter, Dr. Jeanette. I'll just call her. Sorry that I don't have the pronunciation correct. Happens to be married to Mike Waltz.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So good.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There's another. Just gotta. Gotta love that one. So this is Shakespeare.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is Shakespeare.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It truly is so. And she. And the drama is as of yet unresolved. There are many acts, I guess, to go in this. In this drama. But wait, there's more. Dr. Jeanette gets pulled after criticism from Laura Loomer and others, I think, who.

[Emily Jashinsky]

By the way, now says she's been hired by Donald Trump himself about four times, but his staff has always thwarted the hiring process. Really? I just saw this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Okay, interesting. So anyway, the original one gets pulled because of backlash from Loomer and others feeling like she had been. She was too pro vaccine, that sort of thing. Right. She was like, too sort of normal in terms of the medical establishment. So they didn't like her, so they pulled her. There was also some question about her LinkedIn page. Said she graduated from a different medical school than she actually graduated from. Something like that as well. Okay, so she gets pulled and Dr. Casey Means gets put in. I'm gonna leave it to you to explain a little bit about Kasey Means and her brother Kali Means, who kind of came out of nowhere.

[Emily Jashinsky]

They did.

[Sagar Enjeti]

To be huge. I mean, I think it's fair to call them health influencers. You know, they make the podcast circuit. Rogan Tucker were very tied in with the Maha movement and have voiced all of the Right. Skepticisms of vaccines. We'll show you Joe Rogan clip where Casey Means is saying vaccines may cause autism. The same nonsense that RFK Jr. Pedals and is aggressively pushing with his study that he's conducting. That seems he's already come up with the answer of what he wants that study on autism ultimately to say. So that's kind of the world that she comes out of.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So I think maybe a good place to begin is with this clip of Callie and Casey Means on Joe Rogan's show. And actually, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Told people to watch their appearance on Joe Rogan's show. Kind of held it up as a good example or a good explainer primer on what Maha is all about. So if we roll this From Rogan, it's C7. You'll get a good flavor of sort of what they're all about. And then we can go a little bit deeper giving. Given that she's now nominated for Surgeon General. So let's go ahead and roll C7.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism, but what about the. The 20 that they're getting before 18 months? Like, we don't look at it in synergistic, you know, and so that's. That's a big problem. And this is where the cult of the science, and I say the science specifically because science is beautiful. Using the scientific method and using that way of inquiry into the natural world is a beautiful art. But weaponizing papers that are often bought for or corrupted and you know, they, the leaders of some of our key medical journals have actually even said that 50% of scientific research that published ends up being wrong. So it's bought for, corrupted or wrong. We rely on this. And if one interesting trend that we're seeing in our world is that if we do choose to put dots together or use our intuition, our God given intuition, anything other than this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need to really question. You know, I think especially as a woman, like, and I'm thinking about having kids soon, I'm like thinking about like, wow, like I, I have the ability in my body to like build a human, 3D, print a human, pull in a soul to that human. I don't need a peer reviewed study or a textbook to tell me how to do that. Our body and our intuition and our minds and the subtle things happening inside us are important. They are incredible. We have now been told that like, you can't trust it and you are dangerous if you do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated right now is because parenting, I'm not a parent yet, but you know, Callie is parents. But like, you know, when we're being told now that parents are the enemy for using their own judgment about their families and kids, like, I think that's probably, it's deeply frustrating to people and that's basically what we're being asked to do.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So I think that clip actually encapsulates a lot of Callie and Casey means in just the two minutes that you heard. So to Crystal's point, they did kind of come out of nowhere. Callie means, and I always confuse their names, by the way. Callie means the man, their brother and sister. So Callie means the brother sort of has this whistleblowing story of how he used to be a pharma. Not pharma, I'm sorry, a food lobbyist. So working for some of these awful, corrupt big food companies like Coca Cola. Coca Cola, right. And so he started doing like kind of whistleblower threads on X and that started to get a lot of attention. Now his sister, nominee for surgeon general, her personal story, and she explains it on that Rogan episode basically is that she went to med school and I think it was Stanford. Yeah, they were prestigious and I think they come from a pretty well off background.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think their dad is also a.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Doctor, something like that. Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And you wrote some book that Laura Loomer did not like about gay people.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes, it was about a flamingo.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's a kid. I don't know what the book is about.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Anyway, Laura Loomer said that it was about trans people, but apparently it was just about gay people. We don't even need to get into it. But she went to med school, did five years of her residency and then dropped out because she says she had this sort of awakening as to how. And this is very popular in Maha world. It's a very popular argument. Our medical system is obsessively treating symptoms for the sake of profits that go to pharma at Big Food and end up corrupting the medical system rather than treating causes in ways that don't benefit pharma. So Ozempic is a good example. They talk a lot about it. Instead of asking people to spend more time cutting out sugars or carbs or doing a lot of physical activity, we just give people Ozempic. And whether or not that's true, that's the argument that they have. I think there's actually a lot of truth to their criticisms and actually to RFK Jr. S criticisms of the corruption in the system. But do they then peddle appropriate solutions? That's where the question becomes much more significant.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's very well and diplomatically put because, well, and here's the thing, you know how I feel about these people.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Because she and Kelly means and RFK Jr and the MAHA crew, like they'll talk a lot about the profit motive and the corruption in the system, etc. But then your solution has nothing to do with getting the profit motive out of the healthcare system. And in fact, both Cali and Casey Means have their own for profit healthcare companies that their solutions, whether it's to Covid or anything else, just happen to bolster their own profit making direction. It's like, well, what if we apply the same analysis you're applying over here? What if we applied that to you? What is that? You know, what does that come out looking like? So in any case, these two individuals apparently a lot more controversial in some of the MAGA and Maha world than I really expected.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This was like overturning a rock and seeing beneath the surface that there's all kinds of bugs fighting each other. And I don't mean that that wasn't to imply people were Bugs. It was just to imply that beneath the surface of Maha there's this raging back battle for the soul of Maha. Because the close, close stakeholders have like, this is a very tight knit circle. I think that's a fair way to say, not just online, but offline. A lot of these people know each other, work with each other now. And RFK Jr. Is the figurehead of the movement. A lot of people have personal relationships with RFK Jr. And we didn't have time to put this in the rundown because it just kind of, this was all happening last night. But Dr. Jack Cruz, who is really big in Maha store and he's been on podcasts with like Andrew Huberman I think before is Maha guy, he says, quote, I have it on firm authority that Kelly Victory, another MAHA figurehead, was Bobby's pick last weekend for Surgeon General. Kennedy called people Monday and said Jeanette was out and Kelly was the front runner in a phone call to Kelly from rfk. All caps. This means Bobby has no juice, no pipe power. DJT Donald Trump allowed Susie Wiles to put in the World Economic Forum and Fabians inside the gate. So this is not a like random nobody. This is somebody in Maha world who's like pretty significant and is already staunchly against this nomination for Surgeon General. The meanss have been very close. The means. The means have been very close to Bobby Kennedy. Like that's obvious. Everyone kind of knows that. But they come across to a lot of people in Maha world as suspicious. And her nomination, when they thought that their other ally, Kelly Victory had it, just grated on these people who were already very suspicious of Kelly and Kayce Means. They do think the story is a bit convenient that both of them sort of dropped out of these prestigious gigs, medical school residency, lobbying work, suddenly started infiltrating Bobby Kennedy world, which is quite interesting. You can imagine those circles are filled with people from all walks of life, including, you know, like Intel World, including like quirky Science World. It's just gotta be the strangest place to go to Thanksgiving dinner. Can you imagine?

[Sagar Enjeti]

So be an Aussie.

[Emily Jashinsky]

No, actually people from Glossy magazine, like, it's just crazy stuff. So they're very suspicious of the means. They see them as people who may be compromised by the political establishment. And this just set that into hyperdrive.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So this is the one that was really shocking to me. Nicole Shanahan, who was RFK junior's vice presidential pick and has been. She has said some things that she was nervous about, but she's, as far as I know, really held back on any significant criticism of him or HHS or the Trump administration. She tweeted this. Yes, it's very strange with regards to Casey Means being put in.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Very strange.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Doesn't make any sense. I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment and that people much more qualified. Qualified would be. I don't know if RFK very clearly lied to me or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions. And it isn't President Trump. With regards to siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets. There is a lot going on in that one tweet. I mean, first of all, she has to be persuaded to support RFK Jr. In a Senate confirmation hearing. That's news in and of itself. And one of the pledges that was made is that Kayce and Cali Means would be nowhere in this administration.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So interesting, by the way.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. Because to your point, RFK Jr talked about them a lot on the campaign trail in big speeches. He would make a point of shouting out Cali Means in particular. And so. So the fact that this is a little behind the curtain and behind the scenes, she wants nothing to do with them, is actively seeking out pledges that neither one of them will have anything to do with this administration and is now saying, maybe he lied to me or maybe someone is. He has no juice. Someone regularly is controlling his decisions and it isn't President Trump. So there is a whole lot there. And I think it also comes in the context of, like we were saying before floor, as the administration becomes more unpopular, you're going to see more things, like, you're going to see more cracks emerge, more people coming out who are willing to be critical, who were not willing to be critical before.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's a good point. And by the way, paranoia breeds paranoia. So when I mentioned, like, intel a couple minutes ago, the reason I say that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is somebody who is incredibly critical of the CIA for obvious reasons and is like actively taking steps to get these files released that obviously the intelligence world does not want released. And we could have separate debate and segment all about what's actually happening in that space. But the bottom line is he's obviously somebody who would be a target for concern and surveillance from that world. And you see how that is. That's pretty, pretty much people agree on that. That's not crazy. And it's not a conspiracy theory. It's just, yes, of course they would be keeping track and keeping tabs on someone like that, especially now that he's in a really big position of power in the United States government. Now, on the other hand, because some of that stuff is obviously sort of true, logical common sense, you end up with paranoid people fighting other paranoid people. It's sort of a circle of paranoia that is trying to be a governing culture, and that is incredibly difficult to hold together. Just in a practical sense, like, not even based on the merits of Maha, just practically really hard. I think we saw this happening, actually, at the Pentagon, where they were so paranoid about leakers that someone who was trying not to leak ended up getting pushed out of the Pentagon for leaking, even when he was trying not to leak, because the paranoia is so intense. And I think we're seeing the same thing happen in Maha world. But that's where. Just my last point is. The language about born and bred Manchurian candidates in the Shanahan tweet is. And she calls it, quote, very strange. It is, I think, alluding to and generating a sense of paranoia in Maha world, which is already conspiratorial.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's such a great point.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Not in ways that are like, I think there are some really suspicious things about Robert F. Kennedy's. The shooting of Robert F. Kennedy. I don't think that's insane. But if your gateway into politics is from those issues, then you end up sort of in these paranoid firing circles, like Mexican standoffs like the Spiderman meme I saw.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Mike Flynn is now. Who was the number one QAnon hero is now some QAnon people think that he is.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Oh, boy, I did not see that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He came up with some other conspiracy in which he's the villain. So that's. That speaks to the dynamic you're talking about. I just pulled up Laura Loomer's Twitter feed, and she is going in.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Oh, is she?

[Sagar Enjeti]

She is going in on Casey Means. Yeah, she's fighting with Charlie Kirk about it. Ooh, let me just. I'm just gonna read you one of her posts because it's interesting. She says President Trump's pick for U.S. surgeon General, Casey Means, said she prays to inanimate objects, communicates with spirit mediums, uses shrooms as plant medicine, and talks to trees. She also doesn't even have an active medical license. That is actually. The inmates are running the asylum. This is literally from one of KC Means newsletters. I have the entire page archived and Took screenshot. She was just chosen by President Trump to service the next U.S. surgeon General. Take a look at this section on her newsletter. Casey Means said she was looking for romance. She would do shrooms, talk to trees, participate in full moon ceremonies, and pray to inanimate objects with a spiritual medium. So basically the new Surgeon General is a total crackpot, a shroom consumer, and she talks to trees and doesn't even have an active medical license. She's making me like Casey Means more.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I was supposed to. I was just going to say, you know, who we need to have on, in all seriousness is Ryan Grimm. Well, Ryan, yes. We should have Ryan and Marianne talk about the merits of this type of woo, as Kacey Means has put it. Like she's openly said embrace the woo. Woo.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And some of this stuff is unfairly derided by like snobbish elites. There's no question about it. Now, does the. Should the Surgeon General be somebody who's writing about openly talking to trees on her hikes? You know, Crystal, I'm less firm on that one. I think probably. No probably.

[Sagar Enjeti]

What about, you have an active medical license. How do you feel on that one?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Don't love that either. Don't love that either.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So her conclusion here is, again, it's never Trump's fault. Another failure by the geniuses who work for Trump on his non existent vetting team. It's the vetting team's fault. I guess there isn't a single conservative doctor in America who doesn't have a history of being a Marxist tree hacker. We are so doomed, aren't we? And. And then recedes.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So producer Mac just texted. The trees can talk. If you believe that's right. If Ryan were here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

If Ryan is seeing what happens.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We learned today as we were prepping the segment. I don't want to take Ryan's thunder. You can ask him about this tomorrow, Crystal. But he is a certified or former certified Reiki instructor. So we're not anti woo here at breaking points.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, not at all. Not at all at all. But I guess to make the political point, there have long been tensions and contradictions within the coalition which elected Trump. And it is true that like the Mariana is a perfect example of this. The like woo alternative medicine hippie, like the anti vax thing used to be like rich LA people.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Junior and Marianne were running in some of the same, you know, social circles that used to be on the left. And so when that group gets subsumed into the MAGA movement, there are going to be some beliefs that clash. In any case, I don't know. I think we're just still scratching the surface of this one. I really hope Laura Loomer comes on the show tomorrow so I can hear more from her about what she thinks.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I do too. We're going way too long on this. But the final point I make is like Alex Jones was popular on the left after 911 because of his conspiracy theories and that's another coalition or another coalition that's been subsumed into the broader MAGA coalition and is really paranoid. So again, like you put all of these eccentric puzzle pieces together and it's really hard to actually govern. And again, it's not that there aren't good reasons to question government and elites. It's just as a working coalition practice practically really hard to have so much eccentricity and distrust in one place.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I thought, I can't remember who wrote. Maybe it was Naomi Klein. I'm not sure. Wrote about like a crank realignment where it's like all the various conspiracy branches.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Naomi Wolf.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All sort of like coalesced within the Republican movement. And sometimes those conspiracies clash in important ways. And I think that's part of what's playing out here.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's right.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Okay, let's go ahead and get to the latest with regard to deportations. This is another one that I guess it's a little bit of a mystery at this point, although some pieces of it that are significantly reported out. So it looks like the Trump administration was maybe still is planning on expanding their worldwide foreign gulag deportation policy beyond El Salvador, also to Libya. President Trump was asked about this specifically. He says he doesn't know. There's so many parts of his administration that he just has no idea about, apparently, Emily. And that may be the case, actually. It may be the case that Stephen Miller is just handling this portfolio and Trump is like, do whatever you want to do. And that's how things are going in any case. Let's take a listen to the president. Any other questions?

[Krystal Ball]

Are the administration sending migrants to Libya?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't know. You'll have to ask Homeland Security, please. So doesn't know. Seems like a kind of important piece for him to have some insight into at this point. But he claims he has no idea what's going on here. So let's put this up on the screen. This has now sparked a quirk fight because you first had the New York Times and one other outlet, I want to say it was Reuters reporting that the administration was planning on shipping some migrants to Libya in an expansion of the El Salvador program. And they, you know, it's pretty well reported out. We talked about a little bit on the show yesterday. Then lawyers started getting wind from clients that they were being transferred and they were being asked to sign papers that told them that, you know, required them to agree to getting deported to Libya. And most of the immigrants, I think all of the immigrants who were receiving these papers were from somewhere in Asia, different Asian countries that were being given these papers and being told you are going to be, you are going to be shipped to Libya. So let me read a little bit from that political report we just have up on the screen. The Trump administration's reported plan to hurriedly deport immigrants to war torn Libya would clearly violate an earlier court order barring such summary deportations, a federal judge warned Wednesday. U.S. district Judge Brian Murphy's assessment followed an emergency motion filed by lawyers for a group of Asian immigrants seeking to block a military flight that appeared to be on the verge of taking off from Texas, even as the two competing governments that control portions of Libya reportedly indicated they would reject deportation flights from the US Libya remains divided after years of civil war or thanks to us controlled by a UN recognized government in the west and basically a warlord named Khalifa Haftar in the East. Haftar's son Saddam. Interesting. Was in Washington last week meeting with Trump administration officials. Interesting. Libya has a number of detention facilities for refugees and migrants which human rights groups have described as deplorable. I saw others described it as a hellhole, have warned that abuses are rampant, including torture, forced labor and slavery. That's what these Libyan prisons are known for. So effectively you get the New York Times report saying they're planning on doing this. Marco Rubio had previously said they were going to expand beyond El Salvador. So it fit with his comments. Then you have Asian migrants being moved around and asked to sign these papers telling them, asking them to accept their deportation to literally Libya. Lawyers intervene, they file this emergency motion. There was also a flight that you know how you're able to like look up scheduled flights. There was a flight that appeared to be the military flight. CNN had that going to take these migrants to Libya. So lawyers intervene, they have this hearing. The judge says you can't do this if you are planning on doing this. This would violate prior orders. So it's blocked from the now and then both of the Libyan governments are in this divided country are saying no, no, no, we wouldn't accept deportation flights. But the son of the warlord part of the government had met with Trump administration officials last week. So that's kind of where we are.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah. Here's a part from the political the Politico article. They say they've also worked to reach potential agreements the Trump administration with countries to detain people deported from the United States similar to the agreement they reached with El Salvador in South. So when you factor that in the United States feels that it was getting a deal with the sicot deportations but it was also helping to fund Bukele's prison expansion. And so you could see how warlords in war torn Libya would maybe see all of this money as potential like I'm going to say jobs program. But that means, you know, spoils program in like really corrupt countries. In all likelihood, war torn corrupt countries. Centuries. You can see where their motivations would be. Like we're going to actually get more power and control in our own country with these deportations. I mean it just the motivations on Libya's part, there's just it's money. It seems pretty clear that it's money.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Which puts and power because if you're in the midst of, you know, what's effectively a civil war and you want to bolster your position as the true legitimate government of Libya with the US doing a deal with the Trump administration seems like a pretty solid way to achieve that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking up how many people are registered lobbyists for Libya right now. I just went to farah.gov because that's typically how these sort of deals get greased. You have some lobbyist whose client is one of these governments and they make the introduction and then it goes from there. But Glenn has talked about this, Grunel has talked about this, how you actually can't deport people to prisons with particular conditions. You have to have conditions that are the same, that are like, in compliance with US Law, basically.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, this was established during the war on terror where it was like, no, you cannot deport. You can't send people to Egypt knowing that Egypt will torture them and then be like, well, we didn't torture them, even though you know that this other country is going to torture them. It's this, it's the same law applies here. You can't say, well, you know, well, it's up to Bukele what he does with them. No, you know, the record of these prisons, you know, the record of these prisons in Libya, which are described as a hell rife with, you know, slavery and sexual abuse as well, by the way, and just horrific, every horrific condition you can possibly imagine. So that appears to have been the plan. Now, it's interesting that both Libyan governments are denied denying that they would accept these deportation flights. That either could be cya with regard to domestic population that they feel would not like this arrangement, or it could be that the Trump administration asked them to say that they were not going to accept these deportation flights. Because when you look at the, it looks quite clear that this was their. They were planning to do this if they were not immediately blocked by the courts. They were moving aggressively, quite hastily, easily, to move these Asian migrants to get them to sign off these papers to, you know, they had the flight ready to go. And it's only because the courts were able to intervene pretty quickly that this was blocked. But I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't say that this is off the table at all. So we'll just, we'll keep an eye on this one. And certainly gives credence to what Marco Rubio had said previously, that they are looking beyond just El Salvador to other countries around the world. World as well. Go ahead and put D4 up on the screen here too, guys, because we had just a couple of other updates we wanted to bring to you guys. So federal court. This is from Prem Thakar. He says a Federal court has denied the Trump administration's efforts to stop the transfer of Ramessa Ozturk to Vermont. This is the student who wrote the op ed and then was arrested by some of the masked agents of the student. State court orders that she be there by May 14. The Trump administration was trying to keep her in Louisiana. She has been accused of no crime, just co writing a campus op ed, arguing for divestment. And this is really significant because the administration was really judge shopping and that's why they wanted her in Louisiana.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So where Khalil was as well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's exactly right. And they thought they had a much better shot there. And wasn't Khalil also. Wasn't, didn't he? Oh, it wasn't Khalil. It was the other Madawi who was released in Vermont. In Vermont, yeah. So I think that they feel like the Vermont judges are gonna be more favorable to these cases. So this is a really significant win for her in attempting to be released and this deportation based purely on speech to be denied. But these cases are definitely gonna go all the way up the chain. I would say to the Supreme Court especially going to have to say whether or not Marco Rubio can just decide based on your student op ed that you're a threat to our foreign policy and that you're an anti Semite and therefore you must be deported. That remains ultimately unresolved. But big temporary win for her to force them to move her back to Vermont.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, yes. And I think if the government this has happened a little bit with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, you have to wonder why all of this information, like the video from a shot traffic stop and in Tennessee and additional information about like the restraining order, allegations of domestic abuse which his wife has since walked back. It's very strange to me that that stuff wasn't immediately presented when the media started to focus on the Abrega Garcia case. It was first happened with an Atlantic article, actually. And the administration's response was piecemeal. And some people have speculated that what they were trying to do was lay out trap for Democrats like Chris Van Hollen who were going to El Salvador and then after he's in El Salvador release the spousal abuse allegations. And the reason I'm connecting this to austurk is that I genuinely think if they had any other information other than this op ed, there was any other evidence than this op ed that went into this woman's arrest by thug. Sorry. They're like masked, all black, wearing ICE.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Agents, act like a Kidnapping.

[Emily Jashinsky]

We still don't actually even know what government agency did this. That's true. And so if they had more information, I think we would know it. At this point, I don't actually think the administration was strategically dripping out information on Abrego Garcia. I think they're just shooting first and asking questions later and flying by the seat of their pants. And so again, I think if they. There was more evidence that Austurk was a reasonable candidate for this kind of deportation.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Some sort of actual Hamas operative or whatever.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Exactly. Right, right, right. Than we would know it by now. And literally nothing in her case, nothing has come out. They had that court filing in the case of other Vermont Madawi. Yeah, they had that court filing about the gun store claim clerk that came out. It took them a while.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I love that story, by the way. But anyway, it was a wild story.

[Emily Jashinsky]

But anyway, they at least have the story. They at least have that allegation. And in this case, there's been absolutely nothing over the course of what, more than a month now since her arrest.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, nothing. And she really has been one of the cases that has captured people's attention because it is. First of all, we have the video. Second of all, it is so preposterous, the idea that you would write an op ed for a student newspaper and be disappeared and vanished and, you know, disappeared into Louisiana and attempted to be deported just over that.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, not a crazy op ed either, like disagree with it, but not like an actual anti Semitic scream.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It was just like, you know, politely calling for divestment from, you know, by the universities. It's just really, really standard stuff in terms of basic campus activism. And yeah, so I think you're right about that. I saw some speculation also, like, oh, maybe there's something else that we don't know about it. It's like, I do think we would know at this. They would have dug something up if there was anything to dig up whatsoever. So in any case, that's a significant win for her. Just one last piece here just to keep an eye on, in terms of the conditions in our own detention centers, which are wildly overstretched and overcrowded. Put this up on the screen. We've had a fairly significant number of migrants who have died in custody during Trump's first 100 days. These are still under investigation, so in many instances, we don't know the details of what happened, whether they had preexisting conditions that contributed to these deaths, but certainly something to keep an eye on. Seven migrants have died while in the Custody of immigration police or ice. One woman in particular blazed. And two other migrants died in Florida. One died in Arizona, another in Missouri, one in Texas, one more in Puerto Rico. Individuals ranged in age from 27 to 55, came from different corners of the globe, embarked on the odyssey of the US for various reasons, through various means, but ultimately ended up in the same place, imprisoned in an infamous network of migrant detention centers, denounced for their mistreatment and conditions. So one other piece to keep an eye on is even. And then as we focused on the conditions in sicat, focused on now the conditions in Libya and what that would potentially look like. You also have allegations, significant allegations of mistreatment and lack of sufficient care in the detention centers here as well.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, I still look at these cases. I think one of the big questions is whether this rate is outpacing what we've seen before. That's one of the questions that the Trump administration is going to face on a lot of migrants are for understandable reasons, in poor health. And it's obviously incumbent on the U.S. you know, this is part of the problem with the law that people. I don't mean that it's a problem with the law. I mean it's a problem for providing health treatment to people. The law says you do have to detain people while their asylum cases are heard out. The Biden administration actually found ways to not do that, which is part of people like my criticism of them. But when you detain people, people, then that does create a huge burden on the health system because you actually have to attend to their well being. And so to let that sort of drop in the priority list is obviously that should be a huge, huge area of concern for DHS and anyone who's overseeing these facilities who are absolutely crowded. But are they then re detaining people for the sake of deportation at a rate that allows them to provide adequate medical oversight? Big question for them going forward.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

Quick question.

[Krystal Ball]

Speaking of workouts, how would you rate your athletic program? Bro, we're in the middle of the state championship. Oh, so like a B plus then? Dude, get out of our huddle. Well, at home style, we leave it all on the field to get you detailed information on local schools.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Off the field.

[Krystal Ball]

Off the field. Copy. All right, Go sports.

[Emily Jashinsky]

How'd he even get in here?

[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

Let's turn to what's going on in the crypto world. You know, favorite topic of mine, you're Emily. I still am not over the fact that Trump launched and then his wife launched these meme coins days before. I mean literally like a day before he was inaugurated.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Insane. It is Hunter Biden's art on steroids.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I mean, Hunter Biden's art could not have imagined the poss. I mean, Hunter Biden does.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Damn it. I should have done that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. I have a friend, I don't think he'll mind me sharing this story. I have a friend who was convicted of. He ran for. For state senate in Missouri. Congress in Missouri. Yeah. And he was convicted of. He was coordinating with the super pac. It was the most penny anti shit you could possibly imagine. But the government really wanted to throw the book at him and make an example of him and the Carnahans, which were very powerful. Missouri hated his guts. And so anyway, he gets sent to prison for a year and his fellow inmates were like, well, what did you, you know, how much money did you get out of this keeping? He's like, literally nothing. They're like, what's wrong with you? Like if you're going to do something and end up here, you may as well at least like really properly benefit. And that's how I. What I keep thinking about with regard to the, like the Hunter Biden, the Nancy Pelosi insider trading, all this shit looks like nothing compared to the billions that they're collecting through this. These meme coins, through their development properties around the world. I mean, it really, really boggles the mind and is in my mind one of the top examples of how we just are not a functioning society.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Agree completely.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The fact that this just happens and everyone just moves on.

[Emily Jashinsky]

This is like capitalism. You couldn't script it better.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, this is, this is has to be end stage capitalism where it's just eaten everything. It's eaten everything. So in any case, put this article up on the screen all right, so we are learning more about who exactly are the top Trump crypto buyers. Buyers vying for dinner seats. Since he's giving away these, you know, the top crypto investors are going to get to have a special dinner with him, which just again, astonishing. More than half of maybe some, maybe some business, I'm sure just how much they appreciate the, you know, his crypto savvy. Anyway, most of the more than half of the top holders here have used foreign exchanges that say they ban US use users suggesting many of the purchasers of these Trump crypto Meme coins are based outside the US Buyers of the Trump token, a cryptocurrency the president began marketing two days before his inauguration, drove sales higher in the past two weeks after its issuers announced an unprecedented promotion, more than 200 of the meme Coins largest holders would be invited to attend a May 22 dinner with Trump Virginia Golf Club, while the top 25 would qualify for an exclusive reception for and what the Meme coins website describes as a VIP tour. Now, an analysis by Bloomberg News shows that all but six of the top 25 holders who've registered on the website's leaderboard used foreign exchanges that say they exclude customers living in the U.S. more broadly, at least 56% of the leadership's top 220 holders used similar offshore exchanges. The prevalence of these likely foreign buyers echoes concerns that Congressional Democrats have expressed about the ethics of marketing the coin with a promise of presidential action. Access raises questions about how attendees at the promotional dinner who are publicly identified only by three or four letter usernames they've chosen will be vetted. So the TLDR here is that the Trump administrator, Trump himself, not the administration, just Trump, has opened up the most brazen avenue of obvious corruption you could possibly imagine where if you are foreign government, foreign person, a company, a U.S. person, who, whoever rich person who wants to get access to and get a goodie from the Trump administration, which has consolidated all this power within the singular person of Donald Trump. What do you do? Well, perhaps you buy millions and millions of dollars in Trump's shit coin which personally benefits him. Show him, brag about how much you pumped up his crypto coin or, you know, you get to go to this fancy dinner and get to get your, your time with him, him and plead your case.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, it's completely insane.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It is insane. It is absolutely insane. And again, if we were anything approaching a functioning society, there is no way that we would just permit this and go on and that this would be okay. We are Talking about world historic levels of corruption endemic in this whole play. And I just, I don't even know what to say about it. It's so nice naked. It's so incredibly naked. And of course, the idea that this administrator. Oh, it's America first and all for US interests. And how does that possibly comport with allowing whoever around the world, but apparently a majority of foreign buyers to outright bribe you through the mechanism of this meme coin?

[Emily Jashinsky]

I mean, it's exactly what we said it would be all along. It's a complete. And again, going back to the Clinton foundation. Remember the claims. Actually, I think people on the left and the right could probably agree, like left, left and populist, right, populist, left and right could probably agree that what Hillary Clinton was doing with the Clinton foundation was completely insane.

[Sagar Enjeti]

100%.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That is what Donald Trump is doing with this meme coin. Right. It's like a way for, to pedal influence and access with what is. No, with no transparency at all. That's exactly what this is. So the concept, and in principle it's very much the same thing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, it's like contraband start just accelerated through the magic of crypto.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And it's always been again like this Donald Trump is. You use the word naked and they've never really been particularly ashamed of this. I remember you would. All these events would be had at the Trump hotel during Trump 1.0 and, and you would see, I mean this never ending door of people from like diplomats, foreign businesses, American businesses all mingling together literally in the lobby, which is the actual, the etymology of our phrase for lobbyists is because people used to hang out in the lobby. I think it was of the Willard and talk to like Ulysses S. Grant. But that's what it is. It's getting access and influence to people in positions of power. And yeah, that's always, I mean, Trump divested from the Trump organization, I think in 1.0 and 2.0. And it's like, why, why even bother? Don't even bother. Like just buy the hotel back, you know, might as well just like move the White House business to the hotel.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, and I want to emphasize too the way this relates to the tariffs because, and this has always been my contention with the tariffs that yes, there may be various people in the administration have various goals, but one of the primary goals for Trump is power and the ability because, hey, this is a great marketing scheme for his crypto shit coin. Because now everyone in the world has incentive to, to pay the money, give you your millions, come to your dinner and make the case for why they need this exemption. They need this car bound, they need, you know, this particular goodie so that their business can survive the. And thrive in the Trump tariff regime. That. Which is precisely why the power to levy these tariffs is supposed to be with Congress to avoid exactly this sort of direct favor trading and having to come and petition the king. That's precisely why those powers are supposed to be with Congress. So it really fits together. I do wanna say Democrats don't get off the hook here. Put E2B up on the screen. This is our other David Dan work reporting out here. So you can. You got really a lot of bipartisan support for crypto at this point. And not just crypto, but like allowing crypto to do whatever sort of scams and schemes that they want to. And there was this bill that relates to a light regulatory touch for what's called stablecoins that looked like it was on its way to sailing through because crypto has massively invested in funding the campaigns, both of Democrats and Republicans, and punishing any Democrats, by the way, Katie Porter being the primary example of this, who were crosswise with them. So this bill looked like it was gonna sail through. Then all of this Trump meme coin stuff really starts to bubble and Democrats start getting uncomfortable. Okay, well, do we really wanna associate ourselves with this industry when you see what Trump's doing, et cetera. So it became somewhat of a question whether this pro crypto bill was going to be able to get through the Senate. And so basically, in a classic Schumer move, in fact, someone quotes this as being, quote, unquote Schumer 101. They're going to add an amendment to the shitty crypto bill that allows Democrats to virtue signal, an amendment that is definitely gonna fail, but allows Democrats to virtue signal about how much they disapprove of what Trump is doing and allow them to be able to message that like, oh, they were really trying to stand up to Trump, when really they're, they're just enabling the very corruption that Trump is aggressively partaking in. So that's their move.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah, great. I love it. Yeah, things couldn't be better.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Things could not be better. And last one here before we get to Emily's breakdown of what's going on with Punchbowl. Jeff Stein, great reporting on another facet of extraordinary corruption within the Trump administration, which is the use of. Put E3 up on the screen here. Here, guys. The use of pushing Starlink as a tool in the tariff trade war. So Jeff Stein says we've obtained internal cable showing how the US Government is pushing countries facing tariffs to clear the way for Musk's Starlink. State Department says it's good to encourage other countries to adopt Starlink. Others point to blurring of Musk's private and government roles. And, you know, in fairness, if Elon Musk was not one of the most powerful people within this administration, maybe it does make sense to, you know, the Biden administration also did some promoting of Starlink as an alternative to Chinese telecoms, like who owns the satellites? And the telecom infrastructure is very important. Personally, I don't want it to be owned by any singular person, even if that person does business in America, you know, or as American citizen as Elon Musk is. So let me just give you a little bit of the details here, because I think that is extraordinary. He says less than two weeks after President Trump was announced, 50% tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho. Something we talked about here, but I.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Think you pronounced it incorrectly. I think this was the whole thing when, remember, Lesotho was one of the. Everyone's like, such a random country, right? And then everyone was like, you're pronouncing Lesotho. Everyone's pronouncing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Oh, you don't say the. The. Th. It's just. Okay, I'm sorry.

[Emily Jashinsky]

I didn't. I didn't take this apology.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Lesotho, the country's communications regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink after their hit with the tariffs. The sacrifice satellite business owned by Elon Musk, had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho. But it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called for negotiations over trade deals that leaders of the country of roughly 2 million people awarded Musk's firm the nation's first ever satellite Internet service license, slated to last for 10 years. And it goes on to say they're far from the only country that has decided to suddenly take up Starlink. Company reached distribution deals with two providers in India in March, has won at least partial accommodations with Somalia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam. Although this is probably not a comprehensive count. So there you go. Congratulations, Elon Musk. Doge was not a complete and utter failure. Tesla may be in the tank, but your Starlink business is thriving.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, this is one of the complicated things about Elon Musk, and it's with SpaceX and Starlink in particular, I think are the best examples, is that Starlink is an excellent product. Like, it is genuinely a significant innovation, and it's helpful and it probably is the best candidate like SpaceX in a lot of these different bidding processes and a lot of these different negotiations. But you can never actually, like, nobody will ever know whether Starlink or SpaceX during the Trump administration were chosen because they were the best candidates because. Or other Musk products, by the way, get contracts because they were the best candidates, because obviously there's not a fair process, period. The illusion of a conflict is a conflict of interest. Anyone who studies conflicts of interest knows that they'll tell you just the appearance of a conflict in and of itself is undue influence. And so that is the problem with having Musk and the Meme Coin just be hovering over every policy decision that the Trump administration is making, foreign and domestic, is you can never disentangle the undue influence.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That their personal interest has in all of this. And I think that's probably why the Meme Coin, and I think even like Starlink is part of the background of our conversations. Not our. But like the national conversation about Trump and Musk, because it's never in the foreground. I mean, not often, although Jeff found a great example here. But it is always. It's part of the landscape. It is a permanent fixture. And you can never go back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the day tube when you have Musk not divesting, you have Trump. With the Meme Coin Coin, it just, it adds a permanent question mark. And that's what banana republics, like, that's what happens in banana republics. You have just these permanent question marks. And you can't always prove things. A plus B, you can't do. You can't do it in every case. But that's the problem in and of itself.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And sometimes it does seem actually quite clear in this administration what is going on. Last thing I'll say with regard to Starlink, just as a broader concern is, you know, in the early days, the Ukraine war, Elon Musk comes in and says, I'm going to provide access, Starlink access to the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. And Starlink has been extremely important for comms on the front lines in Ukraine. And then there were certain things that Zelenskyy did that he didn't like. And then he decided to pull access, I think, in Crimea or whatever. Whether or not you support the decisions he made in that instance, it was very troubling to realize this man is basically doing foreign policy as like a private businessman. And that's just to underscore, remember his Meeting with India. Yes. With Modi, Absolutely. Yeah. And that's just to underscore how important this infrastructure is, how significant it is to our country, to foreign policy. And, you know, the fact that one, one businessman, the wealthiest man on the planet, has so much control over it, I think everyone should be really uncomfortable with that to start with. And when you layer on top of that the level of power he has within the Trump administration, without having been elected, just installed in there, in this role, has always been really, really deeply troubling to me and continues to be so. And this is case in point of why this is really problematic in terms of our country and representing the best interest of Americans versus the best interests of Elon Musk.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It just makes me so mad because Musk, you know, leads this argument against George Soros influence over the American government. And Trump will talk about the same thing too. And it's just frustrating because it exploits the genuine concerns of a lot of Americans who feel like they get the short shrift and like they get left behind in this economy that's designed for political elites and a spoil system that's designed to benefit elites over them. And they're exploiting that in ways that's just like, give me a break, give me a break. And entirely predictable, not at all surprising. And Trump has always been much more open about it. I think that's what's even more grating about Elon Musk is he still sort of claims the moral high ground in a way that Donald Trump knows that he can't. And he almost just doesn't care. He's Roy Cohn, he's a mob boss, and he kind of revels in that. But Elon Musk really has an air of sanctimony about him when he talks about these things. I mean, he just isn't even trying to look like he's not part of it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

George Soros could never dream of the level of power and influence that Elon Musk has in the government at this point. Yeah. All right, Emily, what are you taking a look at?

[Emily Jashinsky]

Okay, well, we have a little exclusive here at Breaking Points this morning. Punchbowl News, the media startup launched by three POLITICO veterans back in 2021. We have a new document that reveals new details of how that company is supporting its journalism by courting deep pocketed corporations obtained by us at breaking points. The document, which is offering, quote, 2025 partnership opportunities, is hardly an aberration here in D.C. where outlets from Axios to Politico take major cash from corporate sponsors hoping to influence coverage and reach Beltway readers. The leaked Punchbowl deck, though, is rich with specific details about their business model, including a a $210,000 going rate for sponsorship of Punchbowl's flagship daily newsletter, $210,000 ahead of publication. A spokesperson at Punchbowl Punchbowl News told us at breaking points that a chart reflecting those numbers from the leaked document, quote, is an outdated price sheet that no longer reflects accurate data about Punchbowl News. They added, quote, we are proud to be a growing, profitable media startup that employs new nearly 40 people. So the deck that we got our hands on touts a quote from House Speaker Mike Johnson on March 11, saying he reads all of Punchbowl's newsletters, indicating that the deck is recent to at least the spring. And actually we verified that Punchbowl was passing the deck along just within the last week. So in its pitch to potential sponsors, Punchbowl claims that the newsletter reaches 210,000 inboxes every morning with a 40 to 50% open rate. The outlet says the midday and PM editions of that newsletter reached 6,600 inboxes with an open rate of 55 to 65%. Punchbowl also bragged about internal polling that found, quote, k Street leaders resoundingly pointed to us, invoking, of course, lobbyists when asked about the newsletter they would characterize as the most important part of their media diet. What a of pitch to sponsor the site for a week, during which Punchbowl claims to get 65,000 impressions, the rate is $30,000. Custom Content will run sponsors a cool $250,000. Summits and editorial events featuring two lawmakers go for $355,000, which then drops to 325,000 for editorial events that feature a single lawmaker. Great deal. Punchbowl describes its audience as being made up of, quote, elite influencers, including 100% of Senate and House offices and committees, with a 5050 split between Republicans and Democrats Democrats 97% Fortune 100 saturation, 100% executive departments and 11 offices in the White House. Indeed, when Caroline Levitt hosted Punchbowl in the White House's new media seat at an April 29 briefing, she said, quote, it is the first newsletter that Capitol Hill and the White House reads every morning in the middle of the day and throughout the evening. Amusingly enough, as it seeks to appeal to corporate sponsors in the Trump 2.0 administration, Punchbowl claims that it's, quote, not a legacy message media organization, which allows us to be more nimble, more authentic and more trusted by our core readership. Similar Beltway outlets. You probably remember this came under fire from the Trump administration earlier this year. In February, Team Trump ordered, quote, the General Services Administration to terminate every single media contract expensed by the agency. We knew that, according to an email that was obtained by Axios, which directed the GSA to, quote, pull all contracts for POLITICO, BBC, E&E, which is a political newsletter, and block Bloomberg. So at the time, Levitt said, quote, I can confirm that the more than 8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers dime will no longer be happening. Now, just last week, if you read Politico Playbook, you probably saw it was sponsored the entire week by Planned Parenthood, perhaps as a consequence of the outlet's rocky relationship with the current government. Gotta find more money somewhere. Asked by Breaking Points though, whether any of the subscriptions Punchbowl may have from cabinet agencies and executive branch office offices violate any instructions regarding media subscriptions, a White House official confirmed to us yesterday, quote, three subscriptions terminated, two at SBA Small Business and one at RRB as part of a broader effort to eliminate unnecessary media subscriptions. Little News there in the Deck Punchbowl touts past partnerships on custom content with Google, Amazon, Walmart and defense conglomerate RTX. Quote Google and Punchbowl News partnered together in 2021 through 2024 on a sustained messaging campaign through newsletters, custom products and events supporting its work focused on small businesses and local economies, the outlet boasts. Now this reflection on the outlet's quote, support for Google's work is of course not easily reconciled with Punchbowl's repeated claim in the Deck and elsewhere to present, quote, unbiased coverage. While the company may believe its coverage is free from partisan bias, it can't seriously claim to be free from ideological bias, given that its corporate benefactors are deeply ideological entities buying influence to advance those causes. In the Deck, Punchbowl sells its custom, quote, the future of collaborations as actually including, quote, editorial features exploring different areas of a mutually agreed upon topic and a podcast series. So in other words, it is selling influence over specific editorial decisions to major corporations. This is exactly what corporate funded news outlets denied doing, often arguing they do not allow advertisers or sponsors to influence coverage. We'll take your money, but we're going to do what we want. That's the line you hear. The Deck actually includes a Venn diagram illustrating the quote, custom product as the overlap between the interests of your brand. Described as a quote, true partner and the publication, I mean it's amazing. Punchbowl also uses the document to pitch social events which range in price from $100,000 to $175,000 dollars quote. A social gathering with Punchbowl news community members exposes sponsored brands to Washington's elite insiders. The deck says, adding quote, punchbowl news will work to bring together a high level audience of DC insiders from across industries and the public and private sectors. Throughout the deck, Punchbowl highlights its previous partnerships with McKinsey, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. One slide. This is amazing. Practically resembles like a NASCAR vehicle. It has the logos of 37 major corporate quote partners from massive pharmaceutical companies to defense contractors to oil and gas heavyweights. If you're listening to this and not watch it, watching it, go to YouTube and look at the video. Because just seeing those logos all in one place on a news outlet's pitch deck is incredible. It's again worth emphasizing though that Punchbowl is not alone in brokering these financial relationships or using them to get more business from the Fortune 500 world. The leaked deck is just a glimpse into the ordinary beltway corruption of these outlets where they peddle access to corporations and lobbyists. And they deserve very little credibility when repeatedly insisting that those critical sources of cash do not at all influence editorial decisions. It was plain of day, actually, plain as day in this deck that they do. As both the journalists and their corporate sponsors know, that's kind of the whole point. Crystal. When we were flipping through this deck, we were having a good time.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. I mean I said to you, I was like, here we are appealing to the unwashed masses like suckers when all we need is to be like Mike Johnson watches Breaking Point sponsored by Walmart. Yeah, I mean it's. But this is not a unique model to Punchbowl whatsoever. Politico Pro operates and these other. There's other like trade pubs where basically, you know, they gather information that is very valuable to one specific industry and then expect those members of that industry to pony up very significant sums for those types of subscriptions descriptions. But the, the D.C. newsletter tip sheet business is so incredibly lucrative and then.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You expect so lucrative $210,000 a week.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And they say like almost. They have almost 40 staff members. Their overhead is very low.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And then to be raking in these kinds of, you know, oh, you're going to pay $350,000 to have some one day event with two lawmakers or whatever.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Google and Goldman have done it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It exposes the very corrupt dealings between corporate America, the media, and these members of Congress who are also, you know, showing up at these events and participating in them.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Every consumer of the news knows that corporations and any person with common sense knows that corporations want good press and they want good access. In Washington, journalists have absolutely no right to give it to them. I mean, it's insane. They have no reason to to just give it to them. Unless, of course, it's genuine and vetted and reported out. They have no reason to give corporations this access and good press, which they do. You see it again. This has been going on for years. They will always embed a nice little ad. When you're scrolling, it's not just the bar at the top that says Punchbowl AM brought to you by Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or whatever has that. But then it usually has a little blurb, that's the skies to look like news in the middle of it. And most people just scroll past. But at the same time, it's like, give me a break. Yeah, they say in it. Because usually they'll say, that's not editorial content, that's an ad. But they say in this deck, the Punchbowl deck, this was one of my big takeaways from it. They say, we will do events on a mutually agreed upon topic, or we'll do custom content on a mutually agreed upon topic, and we will give you podcasts for it. Those are editorial decisions that you're farming out.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

You're selling them.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. I mean, you can't. Look, even if you are the most, you know, the most honest human being trying to maintain your integrity, when you structure a system where you are financially rewarded for toeing a certain ideological line or reporting something and not reporting something else, human beings are subject to those incentives. They can talk themselves into it and why it's the right choice and why it's noble and why actually they really do believe in going in that direction. So that's why it's so important to understand the incentives of your business and the way that you're structuring, which is, of course, something that we thought about very intentionally here. But one of the things that's ironic to me is in Trump 2.0, they're trying to brand themselves as like, we're new media. We're not like that. Like the media that's, like, biased against you. We're totally different. And in a sense, this is the danger of the new media era, because those old boundaries that are in place. Look, I worked at a cable news network. The advertising department is kept totally separate. When I was hosting a show, I had no idea what commercials were going on in the break. I wasn't involved in that. I didn't talk to corporate sponsors. I wasn't hosting events for a pharma or whatever or getting along. There was none of that. And when you break down those traditional norms and boundaries that have existed, one of the things you open the door to is just more brazen, outright corruption because it is lucrative and it does allow them to be, quote, unquote, more nimble in servicing Google or whoever is willing to pay the $250,000 price tag. So that's been one of the things that has been troubling to me, frankly, about the new media era, is that oftentimes it doesn't actually lead to more honesty and more independent. It leads to more brazen, more direct ties to whatever interest it may be. And that's certainly the case here with what we can see in this pitch deck.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's also not the same as, for example, rogan selling ExpressVPN. These are massive corporations with significant public interest. It's been political interest. And I always love when, whether it's Politico or Axios, their line is we are not. This is a firewall. It doesn't influence our editorial decisions whatsoever. But of course, if that was true, these companies would not pay them. They would absolutely not pay them if that were true. And it's also always on the front of your mind if Meta is giving you money for your newsletter, you're very conscious of that. And as a writer, you know, because. Because it's filed, when you file, you then see it in your publication or you see it in the commercial break, whatever. They know they get special access. They know that they get warmer sentiments from you. The other point I want to make, Crystal, is that it's so funny to say they're unbiased because they genuinely believe that they really, truly think that they don't have a bias, R or D. And that means that they're unbiased. But what they are is biased towards the ideology of corporate influence.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right.

[Emily Jashinsky]

That's ideological. That is a bias in and of itself. We're biased against that and we're open about that. We don't just pretend to be neutral. We are very against corporate influence. And so you have to recognize it's just like brain dead not to understand that that's a bias.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's such a great point. Because to Them, it's just like it's just the air that they breathe.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Exactly.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Just this is the default. And so they don't recognize you're supposed to be adversaries. What an extraordinary bias it is, and one that exists. Yes. In both parties. So you can be very bipartisan, but also very biased in the direction of corporations should get whatever they want.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Two final things. White House confirmation that Punchbowl subscriptions were canceled. Quite interesting because that was, you may remember, when the USAID money was being tracked by all of the right wing sleuths on X. Yeah, Politico got hit pretty hard. A lot of unsubscribes from government offices where you get premium subscriptions to Punchbowl that gives information that you pay a ton of money for the access to. So it looks like the White House, I don't know when that happened, can follow up with them on that, but looks like they had a few offices unsubscribe to Punchbowl. Not sure if that was a result of our reporting or if it happened before, but either way that's also happened. And then secondly, Punchbowl giving us a comment that this is out of date. At best it would be out of date within a week or so.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's technically out of date.

[Krystal Ball]

Sure.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I guess it's the other thing that I noticed is their numbers are pretty small, but they don't need them to be big as long as the power players are reading their publication. Small group of people, that's all it takes.

[Emily Jashinsky]

And small group of people with a lot of money.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's it. That's it exactly. And I think Ryan made this point when we were talking about like the USAID Politico Pro subscriptions. I think he was the one that made the point of like those publications like the trade pubs in particular that go deep in different industries where there's not a widespread news interest. But you know, if you're in this industry, like you need to know, like let's say you're in the trucking industry, logistics industry, you need to know like what's going on and what's going on in Capitol Hill, et cetera. And so it does create a genuine need for that information that's important for lawmakers and important for those industries to understand what is going on. So probably the only answer to that really is like public funding of that type of information being created. Otherwise it is going to be just like the politicos or the Punch bowls or whatever the world that capitalize on the need for that and the Extraordinary benefits of. To a small handful of people that justifies huge sums of money being spent.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Fun little document.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Nice work on that one.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Lots of fun, too. I mean, I did almost the whole week. I think maybe I did do.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You were a rock star this week. Thank you.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Well, thank you for having me.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All of us have lots of things going on in our lives.

[Emily Jashinsky]

It's crazy across the board.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Appreciate you being able to jump in. And I heard you and Ryan unilaterally decide that we're dishing the counterpoints. This is actually something we've been talking about because. Yeah, because it is like, you know, the original idea is you and Ryan show like it would be, you know, it'd be different and be your own brand and whatever. But increasingly like we're all just, we're doing a thing here, you know, and it's everybody's, you know, it's very egalitarian. We're all on an even footing here. There's no counterpoints and breaking point separation. So I think we are very much in agreement that we should move beyond these artificial borders. Artificial, arbitrarily drawn on the show schedule.

[Emily Jashinsky]

More to come in that space, I think. Yeah, people will be around. We will be around. Finally, Crystal, I did just want to make this point. We were talking about Libya earlier and I mentioned I was looking [e-mail] if there are any registered lobbyists. Indeed there are registered lobbyists. And Africa Confidential actually noticed one of these filings back in November 2023 and this is still an active registration. If you go to farah.gov Eyebrows have been raised in Washington, D.C. by the lobbying contract filed in October between the Libyan House of Representatives, now based in Benghazi, and K Street outfit Vogel Group. It's a Republican led by a Republican, which could benefit the political allies of Libyan national army leader General Khalifa Hafta. The contract is curious in that it is signed between CEO Alex Vogel, a former Republican staffer, and Joseph E. Schmitz on behalf of the Libyan Parliament. Fawzi Al Nuwari, the ambitious Deputy speaker of the assembly, is named as the principal. So to the point that Farah filing, actually, if you read it, you have to say what your work is going to look like. You have to say, like, roughly what it's going to look like. And of course, it's enumerated here. Government affairs and media consulting, including but not limited to providing introductions and to engaging with federal government bodies and entities, think tank, trade associations and other public policy groups, blah, blah, blah. Goes on to say that so we'll look into it and try to get answers to see if that had anything to do with the attempted flight. But we were talking in the segment about how those introductions between lobbyists are often how that happens. And come to find out, we see there is a lobbying contract that is specifically saying they're getting paid for introduction. So we will try to put those dots.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The sun was here last week.

[Emily Jashinsky]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And then a flight was put on the schedule to ship migrants to Libya.

[Emily Jashinsky]

So it could be nothing. I mean, like it genuinely could be nothing. We're just, you know, noting this, but we will look for answers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

A lot of journalism this morning, Emily.

[Emily Jashinsky]

A lot of Googling.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Nice work. All right, last thing, last thing, last thing. We'll be here for the Friday show. Ryan and me, definitely you, I think have some other things going on. So we'll see if you're able to drop in or not. In any case, thank you guys. Breakingpoints.com, for those of you who are premium subscribers, we super appreciate it. You have enabled the expansion and it's been, I think, really important in Trump 2.0 to be able to have that extra day and give you coverage Monday to Friday. Thank you for that. If you're not a member yet, if you're able to sign up as a premium member, we're going to have more news to come with regard to the premium subscription and membership. But just want to say thank you to all of you guys if you are not a premium subscriber. Subscriber like share, subscribe, share the videos, give us the good rating on the podcast, all that good stuff. It really does help a lot. Thank you guys. Love you. See you back here tomorrow. It's almost Mother's Day and you can now get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't order a relaxing show shower, but some beautiful flowers. You bet we deliver those. A bird bath? No. A bath bomb? Absolutely. It's no to a chocolate lab, but yes to some chocolate truffles. So whether it's a last minute gift for Mother's Day, fresh groceries or food from your favorite restaurants, get it delivered.

[Krystal Ball]

Today with Uber Eats. Order now.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Emily Jashinsky]

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