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I'm white pilled by this resistance rising up that is questioning government power. And I feel like if the libertarians aren't part of that, we have missed one of the biggest opportunities I've seen. I'm right there with you. The opposite of libertarian is authoritarian, and that can have right or left manifestations. I see the same things you do. You were there with the Tea Party, as was I, and you know, I saw a lot of similarities between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall street movement. One was left, one was right, but they were both against elites and corporate types and people in power screwing them over. I think that's what we see now. A lot of people saw resistance to that and Donald Trump and voted accordingly. A lot of people saw a continuation of that in Kamala Harris and voted accordingly. Or voted against that accordingly. I'm white Bill too. I see a lot of opportunities I saw. I see a lot of people having the right feelings for the right reasons, even if they're confused about what to do, who to listen to, what to say, how to vote. That's okay. We're all human beings. But their, their intentions and their reasons are correct. Their. Their gut is correct. And yeah, I am very optimistic about what happens over the next four years and even beyond what that legacy could be if it turns out and the positive waves that we hope for. Cool. Let's check in in 2025 and see how foolish we look. See how foolish we look today. But must admit. Welcome to kibbe on lib. It's funny, I actually read the Doge executive order because there was all this suddenly our friends on the left are rediscovering the separation of powers and that Congress has the power of the purse and they are supposed to legislate and the executive branch is supposed to stay within its things. But the Doge department is actually something that Barack Obama created under Obamacare. Isn't it amazing to focus on computer systems and data integrity? Well, that's precisely what they're doing and I can't wait till they get to the big boys like Medicare, Medicaid. I'm now starting to think that there's a lot more waste, fraud and abuse in those systems than even I imagined. I would tend to agree. Obviously, that's just impressions that we have, but I mean, you can just see the kind of nuggets that they've thrown out thus far. Probably for you and me, we're like, yeah, we thought that all along. But for the average person out there who doesn't pay that close of attention to these things. It's probably shocking. Yeah. To see that we fund transgender studies or, you know, creating transgenderism in rats. Right. That we're sending money to China to do experiments and torture dogs. And those are just. Those. That's not even. Those are the best. Those are the best programs. Yeah. Yeah. But those are actually the small. The small dollar programs. Imagine what happens when they get to the big stuff. You know, I'm generally not a big one on executive orders. What he's doing is. Is pretty amazing, though, because a lot of what he's doing is actually just turning back other executive orders. He's not really legislating in that way, which is the problem with executive orders. So this, I think when. I think when President Trump won in 2016, I think they were a little surprised when they got into office. And I once heard him at a private event say that he was new to politics and he didn't really know what he was doing. He was brand new. Right. This time, they know what they're doing. I mean, it has been impressive. I think Susie Wiles is brilliant. And, you know, these first two weeks have been amazing, but it's only the first two weeks. Sure. And then, as you said, eventually, you know, you start losing that momentum. And the problem always is, you know, hey, I'm with you for everything else, man. I can't be with you on that one. And everybody has their one thing. So, yeah, I think that he's made a lot of progress over these first couple weeks. But. But as we move into the next few years, it's going to be more difficult to keep on making that kind of progress. I mean, I'm 100% behind them. That's just, unfortunately, the way politics works. I think there's. I'm proud to be an American vibe in the maga, Maha. Yes, my team gets mad, but I think there's something called mafa, Make America Free Again, because there was an explicitly libertarian piece of the Trump puzzle this time. I mean, I voted for Trump and I vocally supported him. I don't think he's perfect. I think there's plenty of trouble. But the choice to me was crystal clear. It's just like appointed statist with the worst voting record in history who's just, like, always lying to Trump. Who's. They all lie, you know. But I mean, one of the things that's so interesting about the time we're in right now is you have this sort of crazy chaos where you've got Trump and Elon both tweeting every move they make. And I think the criticism that this has got oligarchic elements is completely legitimate. He's the richest man in the world and a military contractor, so that's weird. But I would rather my military contractor billionaires be actively tweeting and exposing every move they make to what has been the billionaire military contractors doing it all behind closed doors while the head of the CIA lies to the public, and then the guy that exposes it is called a traitor. Right. Like, that was that. That is what. That is what we're up against. Like, we're not up against enlightened elite diplomats who are refined and who are smooth with their words, and they're very, you know, Pete Buttigieg types. No, they're just. That's just a mask. All that's fake. That's all fake. Yeah. I would rather have, like, the. And maybe this is just the South Philly in me, but I would rather have, you know, I would rather have them scream and go F yourself on Twitter, being all genteel while they murder people all around the world. I sort of love the fact that a sitting president will drop the F bomb in a press conference. So I don't. Did you ever see the Dave Chappelle bit that he did for Saturday Night Live? And he didn't do the bit that they had screened him to do, but he did a bit about Trump where he makes the case for why his neighbors in Ohio were supporting Trump, and this was the first time, not the second time, and he calls him an honest liar. And I think it's such a profound way to understand why people are attracted to Trump, because he just says it. And in this context of this bit, he's talking about the debate with Hillary, where Hillary is using the typical talking points, you're just going to give your billionaire friends tax cuts. And Trump says in response, I know the system. I use the system. And I know that you will never change the system because all your friends use it, too. That is a level of honesty that most Americans have not heard from a politician in a long time. I think one of the things that is part of the distinctly American culture, and you really hear this when you travel abroad, is that we are a cowboy country. Like, in some respects, this sort of the crazy crudeness of Trump is very American. Yeah, he's like the. He's. He's like. He's what the Europeans have always thought we were, even when it was. Even when we had the genteel presidents. You know, do I wish he was even Better on, on, on philosophy, like Ronald Reagan, 100%. But I, I think the. We don't we. You know, you dance with the one you, you came with it, right? To some extent. It's like we have the choices we have. And I think there's something, there's also something really interesting about where we are right now, which is. So he comes into office in 2016 and it can be reasonably hand waved as a bizarre fluke because Hillary was a particularly corrupt and despicable candidate and yet she won the popular vote by a decent margin. So it's like, okay, this was weird. And he was the TV guy and he's in half of the rap songs of the past 30 years. This doesn't say anything about what's happening in our culture or our politics really. And then he's out of office and we go through this sort of COVID woke communist revolution in the society. And now he comes back having won every county by larger margins than before. Like not one county shifted to the left of 2020, of 2020, as I understand it. That puts him in a very different, like it's an almost unprecedented position for an American president to be in, including to have been in office for four years, seen the way that all works, and then have four years in the wilderness plotting right, and then come back and you like, look at the velocity. It's. I don't know, it's exciting. Even in the areas where I'm like, do I want the US to take over the Gaza Strip and turn it into a hotel? Is that what we're supposed to. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. And yet there is still like a silver lining in that level of disruptive rhetoric. There still kind of is. I'm not like, I'm not pearl clutching on anything on this front. There's a, I mean there's, there's a, there's a method to his bluster and lunacy sometimes that I definitely didn't appreciate in 2015 when I was running a Rand Paul super PAC against him. I thought he would be. Yeah, I didn't vote for him in 2016. I thought he would be a dangerous, particularly on foreign policy. I thought he would be dangerous. And it turns out that the bluster in practice was more about restraint. It's funny because there is. He's not especially ideological, but he does have a pretty consistent position. Some of it good, some of it not great. When it comes to international relations, I think he's not great on trade. He views it like some Zero sum game, where it's America the corporation negotiating with Japan the corporation, or China the corporation. That's not how trade works. Although the way he's used the bully pulpit of threatening tariffs does seem to at least get other national leaders to move on things. So if he'd use it to reduce tariffs, that would be ideal in my world. I think his Achilles heel is if he actually creates a trade war, he will destroy his presidency. Because people are still hurting about not just the cost of eggs, which is more complicated than other inflationary food, but they know how much stuff costs in their cart. And if that keeps going up, this is how presidents lose. Here's the one area where I've allowed myself to have some hope, and that really comes from Doge and from the fact that I do believe that more than any other administration in my lifetime, we do have a president that is gunning for the bureaucracy. And I'm a big believer that if you actually want to. If you actually want to stop some of this stuff, it's not just about cutting wasteful spending, it's about eliminating federal agencies and departments. And I don't think there's been anyone in my lifetime that has been as. At least appears as determined to do it as he is, and quite frankly, got raked over the coals. I'm a big believer that the Trump we're getting right now is far better than the Trump we would have gotten with two consecutive terms. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, no question. Trump. Trump 2.0 is a very different animal. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Well, he went in the first year. He went in the first year. And I thought. Here's what I think he thought. I'm going to go into D.C. and we're going to drain the swamp. But I've got to pick people that know how the swamp works. So I'm going to put them into cabinet positions. I'm going to trust them for leadership in the House and the Senate, and then they're going to help me understand how DC works, and I'm going to show them how to fix it. And what he found out is that's not the way it works. The swamp protects the swamp. The bureaucracy protects the bureaucracy. And so this time he came in and it was just like, f. That I want people that are every bit as mistrustful of the federal government as I am. And you see that with people like Tolstein, you see that people like Pete Hegseth, and you see that with people like rfk. And so that is what gives Me some encouragement. But trust, but verify. Right. Like, we need to see things up front and we need to see straight structural things. Because to your point, there's no shortage. There's no shortage of Republicans that will justify, you know, pro business big spending, which is cronyism. And then there's the others that will support. Those are the Chamber of Commerce Republicans. Right. And then you have the, you know, military industrial complex Republicans. And, and look, I recognize the military is actually a legitimate function of the federal government. I want a military that's strong, well trained, powerful, all that good stuff. But I don't want either a foreign policy or a corresponding military who sees its personal responsibility to go around and make the world safe for democracy. Right. Because we've seen what that's translated into, and especially now, it's essentially the exporting, like woke. Woke ideology is the primary export of the United States right now. So, yeah, I agree. It's a big problem. So the context for this, and maybe I already said this, I don't know, because I just did this other podcast, but Trump is threatening once again to primary Thomas Massie, which he's done before. And I won't defend Trump on this, but if I were to put myself in his shoes, what he's doing is he's sending a signal to other Republicans. Don't disobey. Yeah, but what I wonder about this is if you're actually talking about the type of structural reforms that you just outlined and that both of us hope are the actual outcomes of this process. You want to align with Rand Paul, not Lindsey Graham. Yeah. You want to align with Thomas Massie, not Mike Johnson, because Mike Johnson is. Is not of that philosophical ilk, if he has any philosophy at all. And I'm like, if you're going to use your political capital as president to demand that Republicans do something, why not demand they do the radical thing? I think so. Here's what I think. Obviously, I don't know this, and I've spoken to Speaker Johnson before. We spoke to him right after the address to the joint session of Congress. And here's what I think it is. I think Trump is looking for what he would consider to be team players. I think one of the things about the Trump administration that has been different from a lot of other administrations is it's been this idea of going out, showing all your cards and operating, and so everyone can see what your cards are and then decide where they line up. I think Trump goes into a negotiation holding some back and showing some. And what he wants is people that are gonna fall in live and back his play so that he can have, like, the big reveal or he can turn it when he needs to or whatnot. But I think he judges loyalty and trust and his ability to make the negotiation above everything else. And I think he sees, like, a Lindsey Graham as someone that, oh, that's easy. I get him in a back room and I say, this is the play and you're gonna back it. And he backs it. Whereas with a Massie or a Rand Paul, they've been fighting a particular battle for a very, very long time. They've heard it all said before, and they're going to stick to what they believe. They're going to stick by their word. And so if they. If they buy into what you're saying, okay, they will be good, loyal. In fact, you'll be able to trust them when you can't trust anybody else. But this is what I always tell people. I want a fighter. I want a fighter. Do you? Because what happens when they don't agree with you? You're going to get a fighter. Right? And in reality, what most people want is people to just go along with whatever their play is. And look, I think that. I think Massey has. Massey, Paul and others, they've been fighting this for a long time. They've heard it all before, and they want to know it's actually going to get done. And I will say this. I understand Trump wanting people to back his play and feeling like they should trust him. But I think going after Thomas Massie is. Is a big mistake. And I say this as someone that enthusiastically voted for Donald Trump, that is very, very happy with what's been going on in. In the short term here, wants him to be successful. But Massey is not the guy we need to be picking fights with. Um, Massey or Massey and Paul and some of these other guys are the people that have been holding the line to ensure the Overton window doesn't shift too far. And to some degree, they're entitled to respect and loyalty. And that's the part that bugs me about this exchange right now, is that stop giving me this either or proposition between what Trump wants or what Massey wants, and let's figure out how to do both, because I think ultimately, what Massey wants is a lot closer to what Trump wants in the end than what Lindsey Graham wants. Yeah, it's. I mean, there's all these. There's all these lines, tenuous lines that hold Trump 22.0 together. And so you have the Liberty Wing, including some actual big L, libertarians that came out for Trump. You have the, well, there's multiple wings. I'll call it the Doge wing because Elon's not just a tech bro. Elon is his own universe of. And I take his commitment not just to Doge, but reining in the debt. I take that very seriously. He's paying a price for doing what he's doing. And then you have the tech bros and the crypto bros. And that's an interesting libertarian ish wing too. And then the whole Maha wing, the RFK wing, to hold that coalition together. To reiterate your point, you need to move more towards Rand Paul and Thomas Massie because of those concentric circles. The thing that holds that coalition together is small l Libertarian. I'm old enough to remember when sort of the radical protectionism that we're debating right now was exactly what Bernie Sanders wanted. Remember when he complained that free trade was a scheme of the Koch brothers to undermine America. And I'm confused now. I have whiplash like which side is which. But digging into the history a little bit in preparation for this conversation. And President Trump, Trump's new favorite politician, McKinley, he was sort of the, not the granddaddy, but one of the OG protectionists of his time as a member of Congress before he became president. And you know, back then the Republican Party was protectionists and the Democrats were free trade. And McKinley actually ended up losing his job as a congressman because because of the tariffs that he successfully pushed through and Republicans got trounced in the midterm election. Maybe history rhymes, I don't know. But I'd like for people that like all the Trumpists and the advocates for tariffs are acknowledging the pain, but somehow there's magic at the end of this tunnel from their perspective. I don't quite. I don't even understand the argument. Do you understand what, like steel, man, this like, what are they thinking happens once we get through the disruption of tariffs. I don't think I'm a good person to steelman the argument because I don't see a strong argument unless one ignores the unseen. And you can say, well, you know, the tariffs will protect the American industry and bring back the factories in Detroit that we lost. All of that, even if it is so still ignores the unseen. I think it makes another perhaps error in that we have this fixation on goods versus services, that somehow manufactured good goods are a better thing for the economy than intangible services are. And that's false. The fact is a good economy produces things that people want. It doesn't matter what those things are, be they tangible or intangible or require heavy industry or require thought and software, if it's something that people want and you're good at producing it, well, you've got the first step towards strong economy. Yeah. You tweeted about this recently that our greatest export is a mindset. It's the entrepreneurial mindset. Yeah. And I think that's worth talking about. You asked earlier what strong argument I have, and this one I kind of threw out there and was surprised how it resonated. It goes like, in my opinion, our greatest, or at least one of our greatest exports isn't counted as an export. And here we have a divergence between the economic reality and the accounting definition. This great export that we have is entrepreneurship. Now, strictly speaking, you can't export entrepreneurs entrepreneurship, but you can export the fruits of entrepreneurship. That's companies. So we sell to foreigners stocks and bonds and American companies, and in so doing, we're exporting our entrepreneurial talent. It's one of the things we're really good at. Now, that doesn't show up on the list of exports. In fact, the way it shows up is, oddly, in a trade deficit. That is, we buy more things from foreigners than they buy from us, and they end up with all these US dollars. And what do they do with the US Dollars? One of the big things they do is they buy the American companies, they buy the stocks, the bonds, they invest in new companies. And critics will look at that and say, well, hang on, you do that. And that's a recipe for the foreigners owning all the American companies down the road. To which I respond, no, we make more. That's what we do. Go ahead and sell all the ones we have. We'll make more. It's like arguing that if we sell all our soybeans to China, we'll have no more soybeans, we'll grow more next season. And so too, with the companies. Someone who might look askance at that. I would challenge to write down the five biggest companies you can think of just off the top of your head. And I guarantee you, if we took those top five companies of a bunch of people, 90% of them would be companies like Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Google, companies that were all founded in the past 30 years. 35 years. They didn't exist before that. We made them. In 35 years from now, they'll be another set of five companies that are, by the way, in total worth about $15 trillion that don't exist now. We make companies it's what we do. And our trade deficit is in very large part exporting those companies. I have this wild idea. I haven't yet gotten anyone to take the bet, but I have this idea that someday a Democrat will sit in the White House. Someday. I don't know when maybe. Whoa. I don't know if that will ever happen. Matt, is there any precedent for that? I don't know. I don't know. And we're creating all these. These extraordinary executive powers. It's great. What could go wrong? Nothing. The one thing we're not doing is seeming to move forward on actual budgets and legislation that would implement the Doge proposals. One of the things that I've been really excited about. I know you've been excited about it, and I'm wondering where we are on that, because we were, you know, you guys, against your vote, passed a budget resolution, and then you passed another cr, and I didn't see any of the Doge in that stuff. But I assume the appropriations bills are slaving away to get these done. Pardon my sarcasm. No, it's warranted. There was a moment at the State of the Union address where Trump was rattling off a list of things that Doge had found, found that were really embarrassing wastes of money. And he, you know, in Trump style, he was talking it up, and it was great. It really was great. He was just. His intonation made fun of this stuff. And my colleagues got up on the Republican side of the aisle and were just clapping every time, like, yeah, that's ridiculous. I can't believe were spending money on this. And to me, it was almost like a dystopian future. Was like, wait, you guys are standing up and clapping because he's making fun of what you spent money on. Yes. Like, you are the ones. You wrote these bills, you voted for these bills, and now you're clapping that he's making fun of the money that you spent. It was. It was pretty wild. Yeah. And I don't think they're making the connection, or at least people aren't holding them to account because Congress has the power of the purse. Now, Doge has found a lot of things, a lot of wasteful things that need to be cut. It adds up to billions of dollars. The problem is we have trillion dollar problems, and Doge has billion dollar solutions. Now, I hope that we do cut that ridiculous money. But last week, and this week, particularly this week, I got excited. We were supposed to come to Congress and vote on rescissions. I was like, whoo. Finally, we rescissions by the way, are a way to cut money. And you don't need 60 votes in the Senate. You can do it with 51 votes. So because we have a majority in the Senate, in the House, we could actually consummate the things that Doge has done. And we, unfortunately, we passed a continuing resolution that funds all the things that Doge. This was like a week after everybody clapped for the Doge cuts, they found they funded all of it in Congress. And a lot of Republicans voted for that cr. So I was excited. I'm like, okay, well, you voted for it in the cr. We're going to come back and rescind that money. And the money was going to be rescinded from, like, pbs, npr, and usaid, which, you know, are things that Republicans shouldn't be for. Well, guess what? It got pulled from the docket, these rescission votes. Why is that? It's because when you dig down into it, Republicans, there are too many Republicans who support that nonsense like socialized broadcasting and money to NGOs that are funneling money to organizations that they might be on the boards of. Yeah, they're not going to cut that stuff. I groked the Republican legislators on sitting on the boards of NGOs that are funded by USAID, and it gave me guys like Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham. I know he'd be shocked to know that. But. But it said mostly. I don't know, which is. Maybe it's a. Maybe it's a grok thing, but I bet you there's layers of mystery between where the money goes in and where it comes out. Well, and don't forget, Trump has endorsed Lindsey Graham's reelection now, which is interesting to say at least. Has he endorsed your reelection? I can't remember that. Well, actually, he's endorsed my primary opponent, who. Whoever that might be. He said he. There isn't one yet. Right. Somebody against me. Yeah, there's nobody serious that's up for the task yet, but I want to cut government. Lindsey Graham wants to fund bigger government. And Trump has endorsed Lindsey Graham, who's for the next war already. I'm against the next war already, regardless of where it is in both instances. And anyways, that's where we are. Speaking of mean tweets as we speak. There's kind of an ex war going on between Elon Musk and President Trump, because Elon came out, I think, yesterday and said this bill, echoing everything that you've been saying. This bill is a big spending boondoggle, and it undermines everything that we said we were going to do. And now President Trump is shooting back, but at least he's not shooting at you anymore. Maybe he's redirected your target. I don't know. I don't fear controversy or the interaction with the president. I think that the fact that you're getting flack shows that you're over the target, as they say. And the principles are too important. And this is never really book. This isn't about me. This isn't about Donald Trump. This is about principles that preexisted before any of us. These are about basic principles of do you want more power centralized? Do you want more division of power? Do you want checks and balances between the branches of government? Our founding fathers struggled with all that. So when we fast forward to tariffs, there's a. I think they're terrible economically, and there's a great economic argument against tariffs, but there's also a constitutional separation of powers argument that presidents shouldn't have so much authority, that by emergency they can pass taxes. Tariffs are a tax. They're supposed to go through Congress. Even more specifically, they're supposed to start in the House. And a lot of people forget this. So many people really liked me during COVID because I stood up to Anthony Fauci. I stood up to emergency powers. Our governor took emergency powers. He shut down churches. He shut down gyms, restaurants, hotels. He asked you to present papers if you left the state, you had to present papers to get back into the state. Most of these things were struck down by court. But almost every Republican said no one man should have that kind of power. So we passed emergency reform in our state. Emergencies last 30 days unless reaffirmed by the legislature. Interestingly, I've had that same bill in Washington for several years now. And many of my Republican colleagues were for it when, when Biden was president. But now that Trump is president, they don't see seem to be. But it's the same principle. Any kind of no rational, limited government, conservative or libertarian, should be for emergency powers. And yet you have all these people seem to just say, oh, well, whatever, it's Donald Trump and he's going to be strong. We're going to make America great again. Well, yeah, but there's this Constitution thing. There is this separation of powers. And so I think that I don't know how many people are hearing that argument or not or how many people are just so blindly loyal they don't want to hear the arguments anymore. I have this theory that maybe someday a Democrat is in the White House. Again, Possibly. And all of those expansions of emergency powers and success in growing that can be turned against the same people that are celebrating it now. Exactly. And I try to remind them, what if AOC wins? You think she might do a climate emergency? Do you think you might be free, forbidden from driving a gas car immediately under an AOC climate emergency? Well, nobody would be for that. And all the Republicans are storming back and they'll all be with me next time. But we have to have a little bit of consistency between the administrations and it doesn't have to be, oh, you hate Donald Trump. I don't. I voted for him. Look, I support him. I've supported most of his cabinet. Some of them have been amazing from libertarian point of view. Tulsi Gabbard, the biggest, most significant skeptic of intelligence, power and misuse of it ever in our country's history. Robert Kennedy, most skeptical of the connections between Big Pharma and big government. I mean, these are amazing. Marty Makary at fda, a great reformer. So a lot of good things. Jay Bhattachary at nih. But it's funny, I have to kind of recite those things because people think, oh, you're just always against the president, you, even the president. I had to remind him, you know, you remember, you were impeached twice and I defended you both times, you know, but it's, what have you done for me lately? So. I feel like you're the right person to grade the first four months of the Trump administration on economic policy, tax policy, speaking, spending policy, the T word, tariffs. What's your, what's your general take first, like, how is the economy doing? The economy is, has great resilience despite all the abuses we put on it. And what is needed, people are ready to go ahead is what are the rules of the road? And so in terms of what the Trump administration has done is doing one of the most important and things which is not glamorous is attacking regulations. As you know, regulations are a form of taxation and they've imposed a huge burden on the economy, especially in recent years. The previous administration just went bonkers on it. And one of the targets has been manufacturing for 20 years. Number I saw was over 1,400 large major regulations have been imposed on manufacturing. As somebody pointed out, it's as if factories are these dark, satanic mills of the days of old. No, it's all about control and manipulation. And that's why, for example, thanks to regulation, we have dishwashers that can't wash dishes in Less than a day. And why they want to make air conditions unable to cool anymore and making you buy E EVs, banning gas stoves, all the things in modern life that you might like. There again. And so it's been calculated, just talking about manufacturing, that a small typical, large typical manufacturer regulations cost about $25,000 per employee versus $5,000 of taxes. Ponder that for a moment. And for smaller manufacturers, it can be $50,000 per employee versus 5,000 in taxes. So you look at that and then you look at our friends in China. There's no way that they have regulations that are costing their manufacturing employees $50,000 a year. So we've put a 25, $50,000 burden on our own manufacturing. It's not if we can't manufacture. As we know, a lot of foreign auto manufacturers went south starting in the 80s, and guess what? They make great cars. They even export cars with a foreign nameplate coming from the United States of America. So deregulation is critical, and I hope they relentlessly pursue that. They've got to reduce taxes. We'll see what happens in the big beautiful bill. The bill will pass. The question is what will be in it. What I wish they'd add to it is I know there's going to be a lot of stuff in there, so I'm not going to be happy with some of it, like taxing remittances and junk like that. But why not reduce the capital gains tax? That's good for investment, entrepreneurship, and it instantly raises revenues for those who worry about government revenue. And why not reduce individual income tax rates? Our friends in the blue states worry about? They don't have a deduction for taxes. State and local taxes. Well, if you reduce two of the brackets from 22 and 24% to 15, you take care of it. So you have lower rates, which is good for getting ahead. And you also deal with the problems of deductions. So in terms of tax thing, I see that as something still in the making. And in terms of what I worry about that gets attention from time to time is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve does not understand inflation. There are two kinds of of inflation. One is what you might call non monetary, which is prices changing because of, say a storm or an earthquake or a lockdown, which artificially raises prices. You put say a 10% sales tax on and $100 item suddenly becomes 110. That's not traditional inflation. That is just imposed costs by either weather factors or the government. And the Fed can't do anything about those But. But traditional inflation, which is reducing the value of the dollar, that the Fed can deal with. But name me one central banker in the world that talks about stable currencies. Money measures value like a clock measures time. We all know fixed weights and measures are great for markets, but if you don't have it with money, you get the kind of slowdowns, distortions that we have today. This is going to be an unanswerable question, but how does it. How does it. You spent 12 years. Close. Eleven and a half. Yeah. Fighting for your son's freedom. Yeah. How does it feel now? Well, it was very surreal at first. It was almost hard to believe, honestly. I really didn't expect a full pardon. We. We didn't know what to expect, really. I did trust that Trump would do it because he pledged twice and he told me personally he would. But it was still very surreal, you know, and at times, it still is, but it feels great. I honestly, and I think this is true of everyone who has a loved one in prison. I just had this. I was happy at times. I had fun, sure. And all of that, but I always had this. It was always the sadness, you know, And. And then, you know, if I really thought about it, I was very sad. And, you know, my son, who I love so much, was just rotting away. I mean, he made the best of it, but still he was confined in this cage. And I never knew. I didn't know. I just didn't know how it all, you know, work out. And I just knew that I had to do everything in my power to get him out of this situation, and I was willing to do it till I died, you know, and. Because I just couldn't. So I don't have that sadness anymore. And it was like a day or two after it happened, it suddenly I was in just a parking lot, walking in the parking lot in Tucson, and I was just, like. Felt so happy, and I hadn't felt that happy in some. So long. It was like this sadness went away. It's, you know, it was really. It's really. It's. People who have loved ones in prison, they're doing time, too. Yeah. Which. Which brings us full circle, I think, to the. The critique of the Trump administration's approach on tariffs. Right. Which is certainly chaotic. And whenever I am criticizing an administration, Republican or Democrat, I always try to find a path towards better policy. Sure. And so when Trump originally announced the list of reciprocal tariffs, which itself was sort of a mathematical fiction, I'm like, okay, maybe, hopefully that there's some Method to the madness. Maybe he wants to negotiate tariffs down in the EU and other places because every country to greater or lesser extent is protectionist. Some sort of residual protectionism. I mean, there's sometimes worse than that. There's exceptions, like Iceland is not particularly protectionist because they can't survive without trade. And I was hoping that is true, but it doesn't look to be true. That's exactly it. And I think it's helpful to contrast where Trump was in his first term versus where he is today. He was still a protectionist. I mean, this is like the one political constant of Donald Trump's political philosophy. Going back to the early 1980s, he's believed in tariffs and tariff protectionism. And a lot of people on the right free market world are willing to pinch their nose and saying, okay, well, he's also for tax cuts and deregulation. So there's always a tradeoff. And part of that's the strategic calculation. But in his first term, his tariffs were much more directed and narrow. They did have an ostensible foreign policy objective because he went after China. And I can disagree with him on that particular policy. But at least he had a rationale that was rooted in, well, China's engaged in militarism abroad and this is a tool we can sanction them with. And he did that through a route. So US Trade law is really complex, but there are all these provisions that Congress has adopted over the years that they allow the President under certain emergency circumstances that are met. And it could be a national security issue, it could be a specific industry is facing what they call unfair practices from abroad. And the president has all these clauses that he can invoke and say, we're going to put in for 150 days a tariff to counter this emergency, or we're going to tariff this one industry to save the United States ability to manufacture steel. And that was always the rationale. Again, I disagree with it on protectionist grounds, but it was legal when it was permitted under those clauses. And by the way, bipartisan tradition, Presidents as far back as I can remember. Exactly. Would invoke these powers. Ronald Reagan famously bailed out Harley Davidson. Exactly. And other things. Yeah. So this is a time honored tradition of presidents and they always do it. You know, it's right around election time and they'll find an industry that's in Iowa or an industry that's in Pennsylvania or one of these swing states that matters or something that matters for the primary and that's what gets the tariff. But yeah, it was that kind of a tool. No president had ever claimed the power to rewrite the entire US Tariff schedule. So Trump gets to his second administration, and most people don't really notice this nuance of it. He says, I'm not going to use any of these previous laws that granted me the power that other presidents have used. I'm going to invent a novel legal theory that says there's something called the International Emergency Economic Powers act, or ieepa. He says, I'm going to invent this novel legal theory that says ieepa, which is usually the law that's invoked to sanction Iran when it's building a bomb or sanction a foreign power abroad that has done something in the international arena that's militaristic. That was the purpose of it. But he's going to say, well, I'm going to declare the trade imbalance of the United States as an international emergency, and I'm going to use iaipa, even though it doesn't have a tariff clause in it, doesn't even use the word tariff. He says, I'm going to use IEEPA to put a tariff on every single country on Earth. And IEEPA does not have the same congressional oversight as these other laws do. It doesn't have the regulatory investigation that's required. It's not narrow around a single industry. It doesn't have a time limit of X number of days that it can be in place. So it's basically he can rule by executive order and rewrite the entire tariff schedule. And that's what he started to do on a liberation day back in April. So to be clear. Clear. He could have done it the old way. Absolutely. And no one would challenge him. I mean, we'd argue the politics. We'd argue, is this good economics or not? But we'd have that debate. There'd be votes in Congress, there'd be hearings, all the usual procedures. But he chose not to do that because it had too many obstacles and requirements to meet, and it didn't allow the sweeping power where he can rule by, you know, he can decide on Tuesday that the rate's 25%. Thursday, he's mad at the ambassador and the rate jumps to 45%, and it's just a new executive order. It's fascinating because I had Senator Rand Paul on my show several months ago. I forget the timing, but he was thinking as someone that is philosophically and economically and America first opposed to tariffs, and there's clear rationale for all those positions. He was like, unfortunately, Congress has ceded the President a lot of power on this stuff. He was thinking of the way Trump did it, and it's honestly quite reckless because the chaos of unwinding Trump's tariff regime for the Trump administration, for the interests that they have, is going to be incredibly chaotic. And the longer it stays in place place, the worse it gets. If we go back to. So when Trump started using these powers, of course it gets challenged in court, and it's a very solid case. They filed it originally, and this is the VOS selections case, the one that's now headed to the Supreme Court, but it was filed in this obscure U.S. court of International Trade, which is a nationwide jurisdiction court created by Congress to only hear basically tariff disputes. Of course, these are never in the news. And suddenly this national constitutional implications case is in the news. And the lawsuit basically says the statute Trump is using to impose these tariffs does not sanction tariffs. It doesn't even mention the word. And if we were to interpret it the way that the President does, it would be unconstitutional. Because the tariff power is situated in Article 1 of the Constitution. It's granted to Congress as Congress has the power to lay duties imposed and excises as the impost is the tariff power. And this has been the case since 1787. Now Congress, they grant some of that authority to the President, but it's a discretionary authority on Congress's own parameters. It's not, Mr. President, you get to go rewrite the tariff schedule that we've passed into law. It says, here's the tariff schedule we've passed into law. You have within these parameters, the ability to vary it. That's always been the historical approach, going back to the 1920s is when they started creating that power. And the Supreme Court reviewed it back then and they said, okay, as long as there's an intelligible principle that's put in place around the statute, Congress can grant some of these powers to the presidency. But. But it's not a blanket license to do everything as Trump has interpreted. So the court hears this case. It's a very quiet proceeding until they hand down their ruling. It's a 3, 0 ruling against the administration at the end of May that says this is an illegal and probably unconstitutional claim of IEEPA's powers by emergency decree. You've not met the basic constitutional standards. And they use arguments that are fundamentally conservative. They're originalist. They are principles such as Congress cannot illegally and unconstitutionally delegate its power to an executive branch agency. They are principles that say on questions of major political and economic importance. Congress itself has to set the guidelines. The president can't interpret that. If you remember some of the Supreme Court rulings recently, this is how we struck down Biden's student loan emergency order. It's how we struck down the EPA's plan to phase out power plants that it deemed to contribute to global warming. These are major recent court precedents that said, no, the president cannot take powers that he infers from a statute that it doesn't grant them. And that's what the court ruled on. And they said, okay, this is unconstitutional. We are ordering you to stop. But the administration appeals and they're granted a stay. And that's been months of legal jockeying. But throughout those months, while the case is playing out in the court system, the Trump administration has not only continued to do the same unconstitutional behavior, they've ramped it up. We got Liberation Day 2.0 in August with a whole new set of rates. We've got all these tariff deals that Trump has negotiated again, all using the IEPA power. So he's in a giant, tangled mess mess today that had they stopped this back in May, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. If you look at the polls, you do see that there's a real disaffection for President Trump. People are disillusioned with what he's done so far. And I think that gives. And people are also, by the way, at the same time, very happy nationwide with someone like Thomas Massie. And he put up something on X the other day about where his donations are coming from. And it's broadly spread throughout the country. And these are small, low dollar donations. So his popularity is nationwide. He's become a national figure now. And Trump doesn't realize by attacking him, he's actually helping Thomas Massie become a national figure. I mean, God willing, maybe it would propel him into a presidential race. I don't think he would want to do that, but it certainly could. Yeah, well, it'll be very Ron Paul of him to get forced into running for president. He would have to be forced against his personal wishes. But, yeah, every time Trump mean tweets him or whatever you call a truth, I don't know what they call those things, but he writes a mean post and Thomas retweets it and says, they're after me. Give me money. And it's like a money bomb all over again. Right? The white. The President himself is called the Epstein Files a hoax. And we know it's not a hoax that my press conference with Ro Khanna involved almost a dozen survivors of Epstein's sex trafficking ring. And they were there to tell us there are other men who they were trafficked to. And they've together collectively. They know what some of those names are. In fact, through their lawyer, their lawyer has informed me there are at least 20 names. And he described their professions, which I said to the FBI director, Kash Patel, when he was there. But getting back to my favorite. One of my favorite memes on the Internet was, it's too bad Epstein killed himself before he realized this was a hoax. Yeah. Like, if it's a hoax, why are they resisting releasing the files? And it's because it's not a hoax. And then literally the day while I'm doing the. The press conference with Ro Khanna and the survivors, the White House issued a statement saying it would be considered a hostile act if any Republican were to sign my discharge petition. Now, I got to give the three Republicans who have co signed that with me a lot of credit. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace have been under extreme pressure, political pressure, to take their names off that discharge petition. And I think that's another thing. The speaker is hoping that the longer he drags this out, the more likely one of those people might take their name off, for instance. The pressure must be insane. And you and your colleague at Cato just wrote a piece for the American Conservative. Don't do it, Mr. President, U. S led regime change in Venezuela would worsen the problems Trump promised to fix. And I want to start, and I should give a shout out to Senator Rand Paul, who has been quite lonely on the Senate floor, pointing out that the ostensible rationale for the ramping up of the US Position vis a vis Venezuela and Maduro is that they're running fentanyl on these drug boats. And it's almost laughable propaganda because. Why do you think. Do you think it is laughable propaganda? Well, yeah, because for starters, by the government's own admission, just from the dea, the amount of fentanyl that comes transited through Venezuela is minuscule. Most of it comes from Mexico, precursors in China. Some of it's made domestically, also made in Canada, smuggled over land into the United States from Mexico. So the idea that there is some fentanyl pipeline running itself out of Venezuela that can be easily closed by interdiction. Lethal interdiction. Am I. I'd say legal interdiction by the US Navy is absurd. It's funny, because now they've kind of mudded the waters Especially you see people talking about cocaine. Okay, well, it's not fentanyl. It's just drugs. Okay, well, they've obviously, you know, shifted the goalposts there. And even in most of the. I mean, cocaine, now the big market is Europe. It's not even necessarily the United States. So they've muddied the waters with. With these categories in order to create some kind of casus. Bella. Yeah. And I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was doing these extrajudicial killings. That's a mouthful for me, that conservatives were the first to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't have the authority to do that. Only Congress can declare war, particularly when it comes to droning American citizens. We mostly agreed on that. Maybe Lindsey Graham and John McCain was on the other side. But now a lot of conservatives are like, america F. Yeah, let's get those guys. It seems like a dangerous precedent. Well, I mean, it certainly is, because if you just look at the path that God is here. Right. This was. The President, earlier this year here, designated a bunch of cartel organizations as terrorist groups, including one of them, TDA or Trendiagua out of Venezuela. And if you look back at the targeted strikes, kinetic action, whatever euphemism you want to use in the Middle east, at least those were conducted under authorizations for use of military force, often tenuously, sometimes very thorough, thinly. But at least there was something with here. Here there is no authorization for use of military force, at least not yet in Latin America. So this is just being done without any kind of top cover from Congress. And the President is saying that he has the power to do this because they are terrorist organizations. Of course he declared them as terrorist organizations. But legally speaking, this is a completely novel argument, one that has yet to be testified by the courts and honestly probably won't be, at least for some time. Right. I think this is to think the President realizes that he has some leeway here to do this so long as Congress is hesitant to stop him. And as far as precedents go, I mean, yeah. I mean, we've gotten here incrementally, and I think it's true. I hate the phrase Rubicon. Right. Because it gets used a lot. I think we truly have crossed one. And I think at best, and I use best in scare quotes here, this is going to be used as a pretext for some larger military action just called war. It's what it is in Venezuela. Yeah. By the way, we've probably crossed the Rubio. Rubicon. There's some sort of joke in that and obviously Marco Rubio is kind of the ringleader, former senator from Florida. He's been saber rattling about regime change in Venezuela as long as I can remember. But why like the idea that the Trump administration, the America first foreign policy, everything that Trump has represented and ran on successfully in 2024, why such a radical shift? Do you have any understanding of the dynamics that would look lead. Because to me, it looks like the neocon agenda has just run the boards within the Trump administration. Well, I think on this particular issue, you basically have three ways of thinking or three camps. One of them is the Marco Rubio neocon, particularly those in South Florida who, as you say, who have been hard up on doing this for at least 15 years now. But also you do have the drug issue, which the President has always been quite hawkish on. I think we need not forget that. Even going back to his first administration, he talked about doing this. And then I think there's also a third component, which is this kind of great power competition that still appeals to a president like Trump, who while, yes, he ran against endless wars, nevertheless still talks about American strength, American power, American greatness. So I think in Mexico, I think you had some forces in the administration working at odds with each other. Like there was reports that Sebastian Gorka wanted to go Connecticut, as they say in Mexico, against the cartels. But at the time, Stephen Miller, who was sort of running the President's immigration operations, was hesitant to do that because it would create. It would, in theory, and I would think almost certainly in practice, create migrant flows. That would make his job more difficult. But, but I think with Venezuela, I think that break on military action has been released because, I mean, this is. Venezuela is diplomatically isolated from the United States in a way that Mexico is not. They can do this incrementally through naval operations, in a way that doing so in Mexico with ground operations could create all kinds of contingencies like civilians, casualties, never mind the people actually on the boats being killed. But now with Venezuela, that roadblock has been lifted. I'm assuming that. So President Trump has also said that he's going to give everybody a $2,000, whatever he's calling it a rebate check paid, paid forward tariffs, moderate income people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how's he. It goes to the Treasury. He doesn't have control over that, that all monies have to be dispersed by Congress. So he needs Congress to help him. You can't just be handing out $2,000 without some sort of congressional action. So that also. And plus the money's been spent. All our money's been spent. We. We have a huge deficit. It's not like we have a bunch of money where you can. In Virginia, okay, We had a surplus, and the legislature and the governor sent it back to us. Right? We had a surplus. So we don't have that in America. All the money's been spoken for, plus for the next four generations. So speculate some more, because when I saw the president do that, I assumed he was trying to create a political constituency for tariffs that has not emerged otherwise. And so somehow that would pressure the courts not to shoot down his tariff authorities. Do you buy that as a plausible player, or is he just pandering? I think he does want to make a constituency, and he does want. If people aren't getting that money, he wants them to blame the congressman and not him. I think that's true. I don't think you can threaten the court in that way, because they don't care that much about. I mean, that's like a real long bank shot with a lot of balls spinning before it gets to them. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's revisit this question of executive authority. The entire purpose of your litigation team is to reign in the power of the administrative state. That's sort of what we were promised from this administration. We're gonna gut the deep state, the administrative state state. We're going to rein in the swamp and all this arbitrary power that these faceless bureaucrats have make the case as to why MAGA Republicans should still demand that that be done. So there's two different ways to rein in the administrative state. The Trump administration wants to make the entire administrative state automatically responsive to the president's whims. Okay. There's a new Netflix out, lightning strikes or something. It's about the assassination of President Arthur. And so he's the guy who put in civil service reform. Right. So. Because the way people got jobs in Washington was so corrupt, and the Republicans were the main beneficiaries, but it got so corrupt that the Republicans who controlled everything said, okay, we need civil service reform. And so they. Chester Arthur comes in, they put in all this civil service reform. That insulation from politics is now bothering the current Republicans because they believe the people who are insulated are against them. So the one aspect of the administrative state is controlling the administrative state through the executive. So that's one piece of this. And that's why you have cases like Slaughter where I can fire independent agency people, which we think that's right. But at ncla. But the other One is arbitrary and capricious activities that they're just doing it to exercise power for something they want at the moment. The reason MAGA shouldn't be against that second one and why, I promise you they'll be upset with the first one, cuz when the Democrats in, he's gonna have whatever powers to fire and have the eight all the agencies turn on a dime to, to whoever the Democratic nominee is to his. So you, you don't like it for that reason because it's, it's not settled. It's not. You never know what the agency's gonna do because it all matters what the big man says, not what the law says. So that is that problem. But the other problem with it is, is that you do not want, with your business, in your personal life, you do not want the government to be able to run in a 360 degree direction. You want it to operate within a certain parameter that's understandable to everybody. Otherwise first people will be upset and you'll have societal instability. All right? And then you also won't be able to plan your business or life. And when the other guy's, the other guy's gonna get in. And I can't say this enough to anyone listening, the other guy's gonna get in. You know, it's always the wheel comes around and the next guy gets dunked. That's just the way the world works, especially in America. So look at these powers that Trump is claiming. Would you want AOC to have those powers? And this, this was a big thing at the argument, even on the IPA tariffs. Well, how about gas powered cars? Can the President just put in 50, 70% tariff because of global warming on any gas imported car? And John Sauer said yes. Well, isn't that why we have a Congress? The Supreme Court has been saying for about a decade now, congress, do your job. Congress, do your job. That's what Wilbur Bright was. They said, look, Congress, do your job. Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.