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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey, guys, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with managing editor Sam Stein for your late night Fox News react and respond. Last night it was Laura Ingram. Tonight it's Howard Lutnick and Jesse Waters. Boy, Sam, I guess I want to play for everybody the clip of Howard Lutnick, our Commerce Secretary, who's really out there quite a bit for a Commerce Secretary. He's got to be the most visible Commerce Secretary.
- [00:23]
Sam Stein
They're all out there. They're all out there.
- [00:25]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [00:25]
Sam Stein
I mean, Pam Bondi's out there. You know, like, I just, I've been.
- [00:29]
Tim Miller
Getting a lot of Lutnick in my life, I guess I'm saying. But I want to play this clip. But before we do, do you want to set, set the scene for anybody about what, what, what's happening here?
- [00:39]
Sam Stein
Yeah, well, I mean, the backstory is that Tesla, Elon Musk's company is under a lot of pressure from buyers and from Democrats who are saying, you know, use, you know, use it as a form of protest. Dump your Tesla. Dump. Buy Tesla. Even Tim Walls is out there being like, look at how Tesla stock is going down.
- [01:00]
Tim Miller
That makes me feel so nice.
- [01:02]
Sam Stein
Yeah, he liked. He made him feel tingly. And so this is becoming a thing. And then there's these acts of vandalism and, and basically the White House and the administration has taken upon themselves to try to pump up Tesla's reputation in shares and stock and purchases. Obviously, Donald Trump had like, what are we going to call this? Like a Tesla showcase?
- [01:25]
Tim Miller
Like a car show. A car showcase showdown.
- [01:28]
Sam Stein
Yeah, like five Teslas. Which one do I like? The cybertruck. But then there's something on that was obviously unseemly. But, like, then Lutnick gets on tonight and it's like, even more unseemly because he's just basically like, invest your money.
- [01:44]
Tim Miller
Oh, it's late night shilling. It's sham. Wow. Okay, I'm about to play the clip. One more thing, one more piece of context that's important. And we'll get into the details on the flip side. But Fox News poll is out. Just talking about how unpopular Elon and Doge is, even with independence. Right. So Tesla's stock price is down, Tesla's popularity is down. That's related directly to Elon's administration work, and that popularity is down. And so they're in crisis comms mode here. They're in crisis comms meets kind of home shopping network mode here. Here's the Commerce Secretary with Jesse Waters.
- [02:19]
Howard Lutnick
If you want to learn Something on this show tonight. Buy Tesla. It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again. When people understand the things he's building, the robots he's building, the technology he's building, people are going to be dreaming of today and Jesse Waters and thinking, gosh, I should have bought Elon Musk's stock. I mean, who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk? You got to be kidding.
- [02:45]
Tim Miller
All right, there. That man, he's in the Cabinet. What's happening? What do you think?
- [02:50]
Sam Stein
I just. It's like, like sometimes you kind of look at these things and you're like, how big a deal is this? And then you're like, this is a really. This is like a big deal. And like, we don't even need to go back that far to understand, like, that this is a big deal. Because I remembered instantaneously back in 2017, Kellyanne Conway, who was not the Commerce Secretary she's counseled to the president at the time she went on Fox and was hawking Ivanka Trump's, you know, clothing lines from the White House with the Fox News interview. And it was a big deal because people were like, wait a second.
- [03:24]
Tim Miller
It was Ivanka's made in China clothes, right? Wasn't it the Ivanka.
- [03:27]
Howard Lutnick
Yes.
- [03:27]
Sam Stein
Well, that was the secondary big deal. But the, The, The. The first big deal was that you're not. You really aren't supposed to use the, the office. The office of the presidency to push private businesses that are directly tied to, you know, you're the president. I mean, it's just crazy. And so at the time, this was treated as a huge deal. And we, and I went and I looked it up and. And Jason Chaffetz, who was the chair of the House Oversight Committee at the time, Republican, He's. He was a Republican from, From Utah. Utah, right. Yeah. So he says. He sends us. He sends a letter that says Conway statements clearly violate the ethical principles for federal employees and are unacceptable. But he himself said that it's absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. It is over the top. And Jason Chaffetz, like this, who ended.
- [04:16]
Tim Miller
Up on the Vox show.
- [04:17]
Sam Stein
He was now on Fox. Everything is circulating.
- [04:19]
Tim Miller
And then in the same thing, you sent me this article, because one that jumped out to me is that then White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Spicey, what do you say? He said that Conway had been counseled over her remarks and how it was inappropriate. So again, just the fact, again, it's not as if they were more ethical then or whatever. But the fact that they felt the need to do the pretense of ethics, it is a notable shift from that to just it. Like we're just gonna do Showcase Showdown on the lawn.
- [04:51]
Sam Stein
And what the thing is that Conway's comments aren't even like on the same level because.
- [04:56]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [04:56]
Sam Stein
She was talking about buying clothes and Ivanka was like a senior advisor to Trump, but not really that, like she wasn't at the Elon level. This is the Commerce Secretary again, the person who was in charge of commerce in the country going out there and encouraging people to buy stock in the company of the biggest donor to the president, who happens to be the biggest advisor to the president, who happens to.
- [05:19]
Tim Miller
Have been the biggest recipient of government money.
- [05:22]
Sam Stein
It's all like unbelievable.
- [05:23]
Tim Miller
David from Friend of the Pod points out also I think very aptly that it's already a very serious ethical offense, as evidenced by the fact that Kellyanne Conway was reprimanded for less. But if Ludnick owns the stock, it might be a law.
- [05:40]
Sam Stein
It's a partling dump.
- [05:42]
Tim Miller
This might be an SEC violation. There's reason to believe he does own the stock. I know his kids already in business with, with Trump's kids on. On the crypto scam. So, you know, and he does have like personal potential.
- [05:57]
Sam Stein
But from points out that if he doesn't own the stock, it's bad too because then he's just like duping people and he doesn't actually think it's a good stock. He's just like, you know what? Go help Elon out. It's all, it's all really bad and grotesque and it's also like really tacky too. Like, you shouldn't do that.
- [06:14]
Tim Miller
You know, me and JBL did the video. We were talking about the private business problems for Tesla and they're real. But this Fox poll, you know, is I think pretty striking because the way that they obviously, I kind of tried to game the poll wording in a way that would be sympathetic to them. I may as overstated. But they framed it up way like for example, they're asking, do you think the national debt is a crisis or a major problem? 6 and 10 say yes. Right. So like they, they set it up in a way, you know, that.
- [06:46]
Sam Stein
Yeah, you sort of condition the response to be like, oh, I do care about the debt. Oh, there's this thing that's going after the debt. And like that way you get engender good feelings basically for.
- [06:56]
Tim Miller
And then even after that, still like Elon Musk's Elon Musk numbers are like, totally underwater with, with, with the, with the voters. And, you know, I just, like, eventually you would think that Trump and him would find the same level.
- [07:18]
Sam Stein
Well, it's kind of interesting because I.
- [07:22]
Tim Miller
Guess I didn't say the extra number. 58% disapprove of Elon.
- [07:24]
Sam Stein
Musk told me that's very bad.
- [07:26]
Tim Miller
So that's an inverse. Like, when they ask people, what do you think? Is the debt a problem? Should we have a program to stop the debt? It was like 60, 40 in favor, and Musk's favorability is 40, 60 against. So there's like one fifth of the respondents, basically, people that. That could be on the side of a Department of government efficiency if they did it. The right. If they did it.
- [07:47]
Sam Stein
My theory of the. This is, my theory of the case is that Republicans kind of, and I don't know if they are aware that this is happening so much as they're just doing it intrinsically. You know, there's like, they probably have some general discomfort with what Trump's doing in the aggregate, but they like Trump or they're happy that Trump's president still and a way for them to exhibit that discomfort with the direction of Trump's presidency. They kind of say, well, I'm not totally on board with how Elon's going about things. And he kind of becomes a conduit for them to express their discomfort without having to admit that Trump empowered him. And so Elon gets psychology.
- [08:25]
Tim Miller
Sam, that's a good armchair.
- [08:26]
Sam Stein
I thought, I thought a part of that a lot. But, like, look, I mean, I think if you chisel down on these poll numbers, I mean, I. You can see that there is discomfort because. And this one was the biggest one. Seven in ten of respondents say they expect a recession this year. This includes the majority of Democrats, that's 93%, and independents, 72%. But half of Republicans expect it. So that that number really stood out to me because that's like Republicans basically, like, it's not going totally well. But I, I don't want to blame Trump necessarily for that. Like, I kind of want to blame Elon. And so Elon takes the brunt of it. Now the question is, does, you know, just Trump like it? Does it allow him? Again, we've talked about the human shield element of this. I will note Perticon, Joe Perdicon had a piece exclusive on this vote that's ad going after all the Doge cuts. The ad like, doesn't mention Trump once. It just mentions Elon. That's A Democratic allied group that put out a minute long ad targeting House Republicans and they're just making it all about Elon.
- [09:26]
Tim Miller
Fascinating stuff. All right, well we'll see what's happening on tomorrow night on Prime.
- [09:30]
Sam Stein
I just make one point, I just want to make one point about this Tesla thing, which it's kind of remarkable the degree to which like different apparatuses of the federal government have been like engineered to help Elon out. Like the, the show on the White House lawn. Lutnick in the Commerce Department helping Matt DOJ investigating these vandals. The FBI getting in on the act. Like that's four, four major departments that are all coming in to rescue Tesla. And like look, I'm, I'm not supportive of the vandalism and the fires and all that stuff. But like that's a fair amount of government resources devoted to one company.
- [10:02]
Tim Miller
I would also just now that you mention it also again, like where you put your time. I didn't. Here's a little preview. If you, if you're on the late night and you made the end of this video, you get to have a little secret. I've got Wes Moore on the, on the podcast Maryland. I know, great. And Wes was, and I pre taped the interview. So we've already spoken. And Wes was talking about, you know, in the context of how Democrats lost ground with younger black voters, younger black men, a lot of folks weren't, didn't feel like the Democrats were like really caring about them, putting in the time, like showing up like putting in the time, putting in the effort, demonstrating that you care about their, their concerns. So I say that to just say that like this administration that ostensibly like costs, you know, were the one or two issue for them coming in, depending on whether you think it's immigration or inflation, they just, they haven't demonstrated the level of care and interest on costs that they have on Elon Musk companies.
- [11:04]
Sam Stein
Right.
- [11:04]
Tim Miller
Like you mentioned the four agencies. You can imagine a similar thing. Trump doing a goofy thing on the White House lawn where he's showing off all the companies that have cut costs, you know, made things cheaper for people doing a PR stunt about that, having the commerce Secretary, you know what I mean? Like do you could do all kinds of gimmicks about, about groceries or about how whatever. They're not doing any of that. Like, like, like where they give their effort is, you know, it's all, it's.
- [11:32]
Sam Stein
Crony capitalism basically, if you want to call it that. But yeah, it's, it's kind of remarkable. Like the biggest thing they've done from, like, propping up an industry perspective is they've stopped killing chickens. Put the bird flu concerns aside, and they've propped up Tesla and, like, I really don't recall much else.
- [11:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah, on Canada. All right, we'll see. We'll see what happens tomorrow night. I guess we hit Laura Jesse the last two nights. I guess maybe we'll have to keep our eye on Hannity tomorrow. See what's happening.
- [12:04]
Sam Stein
Pick it up, buddy.
- [12:05]
Tim Miller
All right, guys, we'll see y'all then. Subscribe to the feed. Tell your friends. We'll see you soon.