Just Another Orange Monday

Summary

Pod Save America: "Just Another Orange Monday" – Episode Summary

Release Date: April 8, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Just Another Orange Monday," hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and guest Oren Cass delve into the tumultuous political and economic landscape shaped by former President Donald Trump's recent policies. The conversation navigates through Trump's aggressive tariff regime, controversial immigration policies, widespread protests against his administration, and significant remarks from influential figures like Barack Obama.

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Trump's Tariff Regime and Economic Fallout

Overview: The hosts kick off the discussion by addressing Trump's declaration of a global trade war, leading to severe market downturns and economic uncertainty.

Key Points:

• Market Impact: Trump’s tariffs have triggered the worst market decline since 1987, with massive sell-offs on Wall Street and predictions of an impending recession.

• Economic Predictions:

  • Jon Lovett references headlines highlighting JP Morgan raising the chance of a recession to 60% and The Economist warning that Trump's trade war threatens a global recession.
  • Tommy Vietor notes that major financial institutions are expressing fears of a recession, exacerbated by Trump's unpredictable tariff policies.

• Trump's Response:

  • When questioned about reversing tariffs due to market pain, Trump dismissed concerns, stating, “I think your question is so stupid. I don't want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something” (04:21).

Notable Quotes:

• Donald Trump: “I think your question is so stupid... sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” (04:21)
• Jon Favreau: “Sometimes you have to take your medicine.” (04:41)

Discussion: Oren Cass, a conservative think tank leader and critic of the free trade consensus, explains that the current tariff strategy under Trump aims to rebalance trade deficits, especially with China. However, the implementation has been chaotic and damaging:

• Unilateral Actions: Trump’s approach lacks coordination with allies, leading to retaliatory tariffs from countries like South Korea, Japan, and China.
• Economic Disruption: The sudden imposition of tariffs on countries like Vietnam is causing significant economic harm without clear strategic benefits. This has led to job losses, factory shutdowns, and increased costs for consumers.

Notable Moments:

• The hosts express frustration over the lack of a coherent strategy behind the tariffs, highlighting the disconnect between intended economic goals and actual outcomes.
• Discussion on how Trump's tariffs on Lesotho, a poor African nation, are disproportionate and ineffective, fueling anti-American sentiment globally.

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Controversial Immigration Policies

Overview: A major focal point is the Trump administration’s alarming immigration practices, particularly the deportation of American citizens to El Salvador without due process.

Key Points:

• Case Study – Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

  • The government admitted to mistakenly deporting Garcia, an American citizen, to El Salvador, where he was placed in a torture dungeon.
  • A federal court labeled the deportation a “grievous error” (32:39).
  • The DOJ has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, pushing the case closer to a potential landmark ruling.

• Administration's Stance:

  • The White House has shown blatant disregard for court orders, as evidenced by Trump’s willingness to send American citizens to foreign gulags.
  • Donald Trump stated he would be “honored to give” American criminals to foreign prisons if it means reducing costs (32:44).

Notable Quotes:

• Federal Judge (Fourth Circuit): “The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who was lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process.” (32:39)
• Donald Trump: “If we could take some of our... guys that push people into subways... I'd be honored to give them.” (32:44)

Discussion: The hosts express deep concern over the administration's erosion of civil liberties and the potential for future abuses. They highlight the lack of media attention and public outcry despite the severity of these actions. The conversation underscores the chilling effect such policies have on American citizens and the rule of law.

Notable Moments:

• Tommy Vietor emphasizes the administration’s refusal to admit mistakes, stating, “They are enjoying this confusion. They are dividing this chaos.”
• The comparison of Trump’s actions to authoritarian regimes, highlighting the dangers of unchecked executive power.

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Public Resistance and Protests

Overview: Amid economic turmoil and oppressive policies, widespread protests have erupted across the United States, signaling a resurgence of resistance against Trump's administration.

Key Points:

• Mass Mobilization: Millions took to the streets in all 50 states, with significant turnout in major cities like Atlanta, St. Paul, Boston, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

• Democratic Leadership:

  • Barack Obama delivered a speech at Hamilton College, denouncing Trump's regime and emphasizing the importance of democratic principles.
  • Other Democratic leaders, including Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have stepped up their rhetoric against the administration’s policies.

Notable Quotes:

• Barack Obama: “...there is a basic compact we have as Americans. I think people tend to think democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press, that's all abstract stuff.”

Discussion: The hosts commend the public’s active participation in protests and the increased vocal opposition from Democratic leaders. They argue that these movements are building the necessary momentum and solidarity to challenge the administration’s policies effectively.

Notable Moments:

• Jon Favreau praises Obama’s genuine and heartfelt speech, noting, “It’s starting to give people cover. Let’s talk about the sort of resistance more broadly in the rallies.”
• The discussion on the need for more focused and specific demands in protests to strengthen the movement’s impact.

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Interview with Oren Cass: Critique of Trump’s Tariff Strategy

Overview: Jon Lovett interviews Oren Cass, a conservative thinker and critic of the current free trade consensus, to dissect the shortcomings of Trump’s tariff policies and propose alternative strategies.

Key Points:

• Critique of Free Trade Consensus:

  • Cass argues that traditional free trade policies haven’t functioned as theoretical models suggest, particularly with non-market economies like China.
  • He emphasizes that trade deficits are often the result of unfair trade practices and policies rather than inherent economic weaknesses.

• Trump’s Strategy:

  • Cass acknowledges the need to rebalance trade but criticizes the haphazard implementation of tariffs.
  • He suggests that a phased approach to tariffs, coupled with clear strategic goals, could mitigate economic disruptions and foster more balanced trade relationships.

• Proposed Solutions:

  • Phasing in Tariffs: Introducing tariffs gradually to allow industries time to adjust.
  • Clear Objectives: Establishing specific trade goals to provide certainty and stability for businesses.
  • Allied Collaboration: Working closely with allies to create a united front against unfair trade practices, ensuring that tariffs serve as effective negotiation tools rather than unilateral economic weapons.

Notable Quotes:

• Oren Cass: “Free trade with China does not promote a free market; it distorts our free market. We are essentially mortgaging our future.” (65:34)
• Oren Cass: “Phasing tariffs in is a huge potential piece of the puzzle on the front end... greater clarity and certainty.” (82:38)

Discussion: The interview highlights the importance of strategic implementation of economic policies. Cass argues that without a coherent plan and phased approach, Trump's tariffs not only fail to achieve their intended economic balance but also damage international relationships and domestic industries.

Notable Moments:

• Cass draws parallels to Reagan’s 1981 tariffs on Japan, illustrating how a strategic, phased approach can yield more favorable outcomes.
• The conversation underscores the necessity for the administration to delineate clear trade objectives and collaborate with allies to ensure the effectiveness of tariffs.

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Conclusion and Future Outlook

Summary: The episode paints a grim picture of Trump’s administration, highlighting the economic chaos wrought by ill-conceived tariffs and the alarming erosion of civil liberties through aggressive immigration policies. However, amidst the turmoil, there are glimmers of hope as mass protests gain momentum and Democratic leaders begin to vocally oppose the administration’s actions.

Key Takeaways:

• Economic Instability: Trump’s tariff policies are causing significant economic disruption without clear strategic benefits, risking a recession and alienating international allies.

• Erosion of Civil Liberties: The administration’s aggressive immigration tactics, including the wrongful deportation of American citizens, threaten the foundational principles of democracy and the rule of law.

• Rise of Resistance: Massive protests and increased opposition from Democratic leaders signify a strengthening resistance movement that could challenge and potentially reform the current administration’s policies.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Lovett: “We're not even like there's so much like kind of rationalizing and like kind of intellectualizing. We're not doing it. But even we are just sort of, I think like this is the dumbest thing a president has done in our lifetimes.”
• Tommy Vietor: “This is basically the authority we use to sanction foreign leaders... He's essentially creating a backdoor tax on every single consumer in the United States.” (12:57)

Final Thoughts: The hosts express deep concern over the administration’s direction but also convey optimism through the growing public resistance and the emergence of strategic opposition from within the political landscape. The episode serves as a comprehensive critique of current policies while advocating for a more measured and strategic approach to economic and governance challenges.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Tommy Vietor: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” (04:21)
• Donald Trump: “I think your question is so stupid...” (04:21)
• Jon Lovett: “We're not even like there's so much like kind of rationalizing and like kind of intellectualizing.” (10:43)
• Oren Cass: “Free trade with China does not promote a free market; it distorts our free market.” (65:34)
• Oren Cass: “Phasing tariffs in is a huge potential piece of the puzzle on the front end...” (82:38)
• Barack Obama: “...there is a basic compact we have as Americans.” (47:05)

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Note: Timestamps correspond to the transcript sections where quotes were taken.

Transcript

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.

[Jon Lovett]

I'm Jon Levitt.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'm Tommy Detour.

[Jon Favreau]

On today's show, we're going to talk about Trump saying he'd love to send American citizens to the Gulag in El Salvador as his administration is fighting court orders to bring back a man the government admits they sent there by mistake. That case is now headed to the Supreme Court. We're also going to talk about how the resistance to Trump is finally showing some life. There were huge protests all over the country this weekend. Barack Obama also spoke out for the first time since Trump's inauguration. Then Lovett talks to Oren Cass, one of the intellectual godfathers of Trump's tariff regime.

[Jon Lovett]

I called him the architect. He didn't like that.

[Tommy Vietor]

He didn't like it.

[Jon Favreau]

Big, big week for him.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Big week for him.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Speaking of tariffs, we will start there since that is the biggest story in the world right now. Our last pod together was right before Liberation Day and boy, has that left a mark.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Remember, remember life before Liberation Day.

[Tommy Vietor]

Barely.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah. Liberated some. Liberated some stool for some traitors, you know? Stool.

[Jon Favreau]

Stool. Wow.

[Jon Lovett]

I didn't have a. I didn't know what else to do.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's very clinical.

[Jon Favreau]

Speaking of stool, here's just a small sampling of recent headlines. Wall Street Journal, Trump's tariffs wipe out over $6 trillion on Wall street in epic two day rout. The Economist, Trump's trade war threatens a global recession. Fox Business after Trump tariffs. JP Morgan raises chance of recession to 60%. CNBC quote this is the Trump recession. CEOs say with price increases, job losses coming. Seems bad, but our boy isn't worried. Trump spent the weekend hosting a Saudi backed golf tournament at his beach club in Florida. And good news, the White House put out a statement saying the president did win his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship.

[Tommy Vietor]

Senior club, although I've seen it, I.

[Jon Favreau]

Don'T know what happened in the finals.

[Jon Lovett]

They showed his swing. His swing looks like dog shit.

[Tommy Vietor]

Really? I didn't see it then.

[Jon Favreau]

On Monday, after China announced retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. trump announced yet more tariffs on China totaling 104%. If they don't back down. It seems like Trump's certainly not. Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One on his way home from golfing on Sunday when asked whether there was a level of market pain that would make him reverse course.

[Donald Trump]

I think your question is so stupid. I don't want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something. I think it's not going to be. I don't think inflation is going to be a big deal because if you look at me, I took in hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not new to me.

[Jon Favreau]

Look, sometimes you have to take your medicine. Guys.

[Jon Lovett]

Tim Cook is like, what do I got to do? I'll put Ted Lasso in a MAGA hat. I'll fuck I'll fuck a woman. What does it help me?

[Jon Favreau]

I can't be selling $30,000 iPhones in the United States, please.

[Tommy Vietor]

Saying your question is so stupid. It's still funny to me.

[Jon Lovett]

It's great, guys.

[Jon Favreau]

General reactions to the insanity of last week and what do you think Trump's plan is here? There seems to be conflicting views coming from the White House. I know you're surprised on whether he wants to negotiate and what he ultimately wants out of this trade war. He was also on Monday in the Oval Office with BB Netanyahu. There was a press avail and someone said, are these going to be permanent or are you going to negotiate? And he said, they can be permanent and I can negotiate.

[Tommy Vietor]

Loves of both hands.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you guys think?

[Tommy Vietor]

I assume it's primarily a negotiating strategy. I guess he's going to cut some deals. But again, the complicating factor is the issue doesn't seem to be the tariffs. It's the trade deficit. I'm not totally sure how you fix that. Well, it's a hard policy.

[Jon Lovett]

You can't. Well, you can't fix it overnight for. For sure. It takes time. Yeah, well, look, all these things are in conflict. If tariffs are a means of reshoring a bunch of domestic industry, then they're not a negotiating tool. If they're a means of raising a bunch of revenue, then they're not a negotiating tool. If they're negotiating tool, they can't do both of those other things. I will say I was thinking about our conversation last week, Pre Liberation Day. We were in a pre Liberation Day mindset and we're talking like, it's strange that the markets don't seem to be behaving as if this is real.

[Jon Favreau]

I remember you saying that, and I.

[Jon Lovett]

Was like, now they are.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, now they are.

[Jon Lovett]

Now they are.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

But I mean, if it is a.

[Tommy Vietor]

Negotiating strategy, the process is making him very, very unpopular overseas or abroad.

[Jon Favreau]

Everywhere.

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, look at what's happening in Canada. The Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is running on fighting Trump. And this issue has revived the Liberal Party, which was dead in the water after nine years of Trudeau. There's also no clarity, like, the tariffs are on, they're off, they're delayed, they're doubled, we're golfing. No one seems to know, like, what's going to happen next. And there's no prioritization. We're tariffing everyone. Like, in the Oval Office today with Netanyahu, this reporter is like, do you think you might get rid of the tariffs on Israel? Since they got rid of all of theirs on you. And he's like, no, no, I don't think so. And then we're tariffing like the Canadians. We're tariffing Lesotho. We're trying to destroy the country of Lesotho.

[Jon Favreau]

Lesotho. Derek Thompson wrote about this, and I think for. Because what we didn't talk about was the trade deficit part because we didn't know about the whole crazy formula last week. So for people who might not understand what we mean by the trade deficit and how it's based on that, Derek wrote a piece in the Atlantic about this. He said one of the highest tariff rates, 50%, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day because Lesotho citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports. While the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our possible tariff rate for one of the world's poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the US to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing the sentence.

[Jon Lovett]

I just. There's also, like, this whole idea that, like, a trade deficit means other countries are screwing you. And, like, there are a lot of. I'm not an economist. I talked to Oren about this a bit. There's a lot of reasons we have trade deficits with countries. Sometimes it's because we import their fossil fuels. Sometimes it's because they do have unfair practices to try to using their own industrial policies to grow their manufacturing base.

[Jon Favreau]

But overall, it's because we're the biggest, richest country around. And so, like, how do we expect smaller, poor countries to buy more stuff from us than we buy from them?

[Jon Lovett]

And what. Listen, I don't know if this is. I don't know if you guys are history buffs, but I don't think of Vietnam as a country we've been getting. Taking shit from. You know, like, I don't like, view it as a place like, finally, we're going to get back at those Vietnamese. What are you talking about?

[Tommy Vietor]

To me, I'm glad you brought up Vietnam, because the most confusing part of this is the China piece to me. Because if China is the primary, if China is the problem, why aren't we focused on China? Why are we tariffing the shit out of Vietnam? Because in Trump's first term, the tariffs on China convinced a bunch of industries to slowly move manufacturing to Vietnam. We liked that the Biden administration, in 2023, they've signed a big security deal with Vietnam because everyone used Vietnam as a critical partner in dealing with China. But Trump just slapped a 46% tariff on Vietnam that will put 5.5% of the country's entire GDP at risk. We're going to crush their economy.

[Jon Lovett]

Why?

[Tommy Vietor]

Like, and all the US Consumers that are buying products like Nike shoes, which makes half of their shoes in Vietnam, are going to pay a 46% tariff on every single sneaker.

[Jon Favreau]

Got to make those shoes here.

[Jon Lovett]

Everyone is just sort of intellectualizing what is like Trump's sort of lizard brain, 1980s idea of what tariffs are for. Done in as stupid a way as possible. It fails on its own terms. Right? Like we're not isolating China, we're uniting the world against us. There's no strategy here. We don't even know what people are supposed to do other than reduce their trade deficit, which is a long term problem. A lot of the governments aren't explicitly responsible for the exact amount of the trade deficit like we have. There's no like, we. This started with Canada and Mexico where he was like, oh, it's about fentanyl and it's about immigration or whatever kind of set of issues it was.

[Jon Favreau]

It's also not protecting critical industries. Like, we could have had exceptions on certain products from certain countries. Like tariffs on things like bananas, coffee, avocados. Like, we're not making those here.

[Tommy Vietor]

We're not making bananas, famously.

[Jon Favreau]

We're not doing that here. And then of course, now you got some, some people are like, just don't buy coffee. We shouldn't buy coffee anyway. Have fruit juice instead. It's like, I hate to tell you about the fruits. Yeah. Because the fruit, the fruit, that's also a problem as well. I mean, some of the, some of the rationale here is out of fucking control.

[Jon Lovett]

The number of conservatives that spent last year saying that Joe Biden is driving up the cost of eggs and everything comes down to the cost of eggs that are now these sort of Zen, like anti materialist kind of people. It's incredible. Like all, there's too many things. We've all become too obsessed with things.

[Tommy Vietor]

And oil and gas got a carve out, by the way. Surprise, surprise, that the biggest industry of donors to the Trump administration, to his campaigns got a carve out. But their little goofy ass math equation excludes services. So financial services, digital services, cloud computing, tourism. That's not part of the math. And that's where the US has a trade surplus with a lot of countries, but we just decided not to put it in.

[Jon Favreau]

So endgame here, like, could he negotiate down a bunch of tariffs and then declare victory when it's not really a victory just to save face? Yes, I guess you could. You could see that as an outcome, a very typical Trump outcome. He says, oh, I, I finally, you know, I told the Vietnamese, this is what I'm demanding. And I got him, you know, But I think the damage is already done. And the, A lot of these CEOs and economists who are predicting recession or at least predicting a downturn, they're predicting that based on the idea that he may pull back some of this, not that it could get even worse. Right. Companies are already canceling plans to build new factories. They're already announcing layoffs, which is just funny because I thought building new factories here was the whole point of the tariffs, but they're already starting to cancel that, so there's no certainty. And he's already doing damage. Also, a lot of the CEOs that CNBC was polling and talking to were like, they're, they have a real fear that there's just going to be a boycott of American goods all over the world because of the sentiment, the anti American sentiment, and that's going to really hurt U.S. corporations.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, there's no. How are you supposed to plan, how are you supposed to decide how to. Where to invest or where not to invest, where you have no idea what's going to happen next. And by the way, like, it'll. It matters that Congress is so feckless and pathetic in the face of all this, because the tariff power belongs to Congress. They've given it to the President. Though even in this case, this is being abused on some sort of specious emergency ground. We have a, we have a global emergency against every single country on Earth at the same time. So we have to declare a trade war. And that's within the President's authority. But regardless, Congress could take this authority back and then you could have a policy that was set through an actual democratic process. Like, this is so much power for one fucking moron to be exerting over the whole world. Who on earth would want to invest United States? Who on earth would view it as a good investment to try to plan your business in terms of building jobs here. It's ridiculous.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's wonky and nerdy. But, like the fact that he's doing this with the IPA authority, which is just completely unprecedented. This is basically the authority we use to sanction foreign leaders and terrorists and Stuff and bad people. It's never been used like this before. He's essentially creating a backdoor tax on every single consumer in the United States through this authority. And just going around Congress.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. And you know, unsurprisingly, the most hardcore MAGA faithful are, are still on board with Trump's trade war, which I gotta say has led to some real North Korean levels of propaganda coming out of the administration and state media. Let's listen. You have to just let him do what he's gonna do. Give him some time, because he is.

[Jon Lovett]

A businessman, he's a billionaire, he knows what he's doing.

[Jon Favreau]

And every.

[Jon Lovett]

Everything is working very smoothly. So the American people, they can be very. Take great comfort in that. See, what's going to happen is robotics.

[Jon Favreau]

Are going to replace the cheap labor.

[Jon Lovett]

That we've seen all across the world. Remember the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America. Losing money costs you nothing. This is just the reality of life.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're gonna, like, were you young, young and dumb?

[Oren Cass]

How much money did you lose?

[Tommy Vietor]

Everyone loses money. Everyone loses money.

[Jon Lovett]

It costs you nothing.

[Tommy Vietor]

In fact, it builds quite a bit of character.

[Jon Lovett]

In fact, you learn a lot of lessons, actually. Wow. Just real, real, real White Lotus vibes there. There's a lot of, like, just, just close your eyes and think of England.

[Jon Favreau]

So for those who aren't watching but listening, that was Fox and Friends asking us to give Trump time. That was Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who, you know, really killing it on tv. Scott Besant, by the way, he looks waxed.

[Jon Lovett]

If I see that guy of pride, I swear to fucking God, I'll spit in his feet.

[Jon Favreau]

Scott Besant might be a smart guy. He does not quite have the, the reassuring presence that you want from a Treasury Secretary during a time of economic calamity caused by the administration.

[Jon Lovett]

Better than Lutnick.

[Jon Favreau]

So then there's like, who looks like.

[Jon Lovett]

He'S about to steal. He looks like a used car salesman. It's unbelievable.

[Jon Favreau]

So, yeah, that's the Commerce Secret trying to tell us that Americans can get excited because they're going to get jobs screwing in tiny screws into. Can't wait.

[Jon Lovett]

Once we close the schools, it'll be a good thing for the kids to do. No, get their little hands in there.

[Jon Favreau]

Besson also said somewhere else, by the way, that just remember this, that all of the federal employees that are being laid off can be the source of new labor for these factories. So the cancer Researchers that were firing, they can make the iPhones.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's economically fantastic.

[Jon Favreau]

And the last person that was talking, that was Benny Johnson.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, that's great stuff.

[Jon Favreau]

As Benny Johnson that you propagandist. That's the. We don't really need money anymore.

[Jon Lovett]

What is money? Ones and zeros.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's like a bitcoin, seascaping libertarian nightmare. Jesse Waters said, I'm not panicking because I'm not looking. My people are going to set me up. So when this thing rallies, I can say in your face, hey, man, glad you're rich. Glad you can, like, buy the dip. A lot of people can't. But also, like, for all the stock traders out there, in the past, when the stock market took a hit, the Fed rode to the rescue with a rate cut. And that is a lot more complicated this time because there's lingering inflation, and it is not clear to me that they're willing to put that at risk.

[Jon Lovett]

I was so, like, I just. I was. Over the weekend, I just. I've been trying to explain this feeling, because I do think it explains, I think, the broader reaction a little bit, which is, I just assumed, based on nothing, that of course there's going to be announcements of a couple of deals and Trump's going to save face and pull these things back like he did for. For Canada and for Mexico. Like, this has gone far enough. You know, rationality and reason would prevail. And then this morning I was like, why did I think that? What evidence did I have to believe that other than just a. Just a fruitless hope?

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, it's all crazy, of course, and nothing should be surprising coming from the Trump administration, but I gotta say, like, we literally just had an election just a couple of months ago where the Trump and the Republicans had been for four years bitching about inflation and higher prices and costs. And it was. The whole election was based on that. And in three months, they go from that to being like, suck it up. Stop bitching about the economy. What do you need money for? Who cares about prices?

[Tommy Vietor]

And putting a strategy that seems to be designed to address unemployment when that's not the problem anymore, like this. None of these solutions fit the challenge.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is not even. Like, maybe years from now the reshoring will happen. Right?

[Jon Lovett]

But no, actually, no, not the way they're doing. Like, they're not. They're failing on the. Like, there is a critique of free trade that we all agree with that's from the left for the ways in which it has enriched, like a small Percentage of wealthy business owners, stockholders at the expense of working people. There are whole parts of the country that exist in a kind of permanent recession because of the hollowing out of whole different parts of our economy. Joe Biden cared about this a lot. The industrial, the inflation reduction act, the CHIPS act, the infrastructure bill. A lot of this was about trying to create an industrial policy to reinvest in American manufacturing. This is just so stupid that it is just, it is so counterproductive. I mean, there's all these reports out of Michigan of these auto parts suppliers and companies in the, in the supply chain of making cars. They're just, we're gonna have to shut down production because people cannot afford, if they cannot afford to make these cars without raising the price by $10,000, $20,000, and consumers can't afford that. Big difference. They're just not gonna buy fucking cars.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it's like what Tommy was just saying about Jesse Waters. Like all these people who are saying, well, suck it up. You gotta have some, you gotta take some pain and take the medicine. And this is gonna work long term. Like they're all fucking rich.

[Tommy Vietor]

What if you're on fixed income?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, they don't care.

[Tommy Vietor]

What if you're about to retire?

[Jon Favreau]

Donald Trump and Scott Bessant and all these people, they're fine with a little economic pain. You know, Donald Trump, he's, he's not running for reelection again.

[Jon Lovett]

We have no idea what Donald Trump was doing with his money in the days before he knew he was going to fucking set this bomb off in the global economy.

[Tommy Vietor]

The chart of the S and P today, someone tweeted, looked like an EKG just going up and down and up and down. The only people benefit from that are traders and people with inside information. I could, I would love. You can only imagine the sketchy stuff going on.

[Jon Favreau]

So there are some signs that some Trump fans are starting to get a little bit uncomfortable. Here's billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, barstool sports Dave Portnoy, and most notably Elon Musk. Donald Trump supporter Bill Ackman is now.

[Tommy Vietor]

Somewhat leaving Wall Street's backlash to the tariffs, calling Trump's tariff plan a quote.

[Oren Cass]

Self induced economic nuclear winter.

[Jon Favreau]

This is like a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market. That's why we're calling it Orange Monday, not Black Monday.

[Jon Lovett]

Both Europe and the United States should.

[Jon Favreau]

Move, ideally in my view, to a zero tariff situation.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ooh, I like the Elon part. Bill Ackman's having like an op ed length Emotional breakdown on Twitter at all times.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, he also, like, went after Lutnick, too, and then apologized and accused Lutnick of, like, personally profiting off of this because he's long bonds.

[Jon Lovett]

Because.

[Jon Favreau]

Or because Cantor Fitzgerald, as his firm was. And you know that it's get all this is getting under Trump's skin because he posted a truth on Monday morning saying, don't be weak, don't be stupid, don't be a panican, which I guess is supposed to be, like a Republican, but as he says, it's a new party based on weak and stupid people. Don't be a panican.

[Tommy Vietor]

Got it.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't think that's the best. I think he's had better names.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, he's done better.

[Jon Favreau]

Better, better terms. But how significant do you guys think the criticism coming from Elon and some of Trump's most prominent fans is?

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, look, it's. I think a question we've always had is, is good information reaching people who are just kind of like Trump, Curious.

[Jon Lovett]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

The Joe Rogans of the world. Dave Portman, I think, is actually a pretty smart, sophisticated person who consumes a lot of news. But, you know, last week we talked. We, we didn't talk about it, but we all noticed that Rogan talked on his show about some of these worst immigration cases where people are getting sent to El Salvador with no due process, and talked about how awful it was. And so it's good news that it's getting to him. I think, you know, the fact that the stock market and Bitcoin are crashing at the same time is hitting a lot of these sort of, like, guy influencers where it hurts in their, in their wallets, and they're reacting to it. And they're also, like, they're desperately trying to find some method to the madness, but they can't, because there isn't really any. And, you know, that doesn't mean that, like, they're all flocking from Trump yet or they're liberals yet. But I do like Portnoy, in his long, nuanced rants today about this was like, I support the broader principles Trump is talking about, but if this is still happening by the midterms, like, I'm gone, I'm voting Democrats.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, the polling is, you know, it's getting worse for Trump, but it's still early days, and polling always tells you about, like, what people felt like three weeks ago. So let's see what the next couple weeks bring. But John Byrne Murdoch at the Financial Times, he had a thread of charts that sort of gathered all the data from like the economic surveys and the Michigan consumer surveys and all that. And couple interesting points from that. Number one, Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as the global pandemic. Number two, the share of adults who have a negative opinion of government's economic policy is the highest it's ever been in the United States. That is higher than the 2007 financial crisis. That's from the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment survey. And then the third one is there are similar peaks in the percentage of people who expect the economy to deteriorate, who expect their own finances to deteriorate and who expect like higher levels of inflation and that, that the inflation number is as high as it was during the peak of the higher prices under Biden. So, so this is, it's getting bad.

[Jon Lovett]

It's, we're not even like there's so much like kind of rationalizing and like kind of intellectualizing. We're not doing it. But even we are just sort of, I think like this is the dumbest thing a president has done in our lifetimes. We have never seen a president do something this destructive. It is very hard for one person.

[Jon Favreau]

Certainly, certainly with regard to the economy.

[Tommy Vietor]

I was going to say the Iraq war is way I'm saying, but even.

[Jon Favreau]

People say Herbert Hoover and, but like no one has single handedly by their own decision, no president caused this much.

[Jon Lovett]

Economic, no one has destroyed this much wealth in such a short period of time and done it so haphazardly, brazenly, stupidly, irrationally without a plan, without a strategy, without any explanation for how it's supposed to lead to anything better other than sort of these sort of tilting at these ridiculous ideas that like oh, tariffs are going to, they're going to cause a rebirth of American manufacturing. Even the charts were incredibly stupid. The tariff numbers don't actually make sense. The countries on there aren't even countries. It's, it's, it's, there's penguins. There's penguins. It seems like maybe they really did go into a large language model and try to use it to do the work for them. And so watching a president, another job.

[Jon Favreau]

That'S not coming back, right?

[Jon Lovett]

Just, we're just like. And so when the president does the dumbest thing in the economy that any president has ever done in our lifetimes, maybe ever, you will get some feedback from his biggest supporters that are like, hey, hold on a second, buddy. I'm a little bit confused because I thought can we, we can fix this, right? We can still fix this. And, and they cannot accept that they've signed on to. They've, you know, they've hitched their wagon to the dumbest, worst human being we've ever put in this job. And they can't obviously accept that. And so they're really like, well, actually, I think there's a strategy here. He just, there wasn't, there wasn't enough specifics. He has to give more clarity. There's still time to fix it, but they still can't face what they're a part of.

[Jon Favreau]

If only there were signs. It's as if this guy has just come out of nowhere. Absolutely not. That we've been dealing with him since fucking 2015.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, even on this shit, they all, like, even the most hardcore pro Trump, let Trump be Trump. People benefited and lived in the luxury of a world in which his worst impulses were prevented in the first term. That's what they could. They can't believe that he's actually falling through on this stuff because the Jared Kushner coterie is gone. And instead we have these sort of sycophants and enablers and the supposedly serious people, the Marco Rubio's, the Scott, the Scott Besants are either unable or unwilling to stop it because they're sad little weasels.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I mean, the, the kind of economic equivalent would probably be Paul Volcker jacking interest rates up to like 20% in the early 80s and triggering a recession, but that was to deal with massive inflation that everyone hated. And there was like a clear purpose and end game, and it wasn't.

[Jon Favreau]

And no one elected that guy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, and it wasn't like 20% one day, 2% the next, 5% the day after that. Right. There was some consistency.

[Jon Favreau]

One more thing before we move off this topic. Like, I think Republicans in Congress are not getting nearly enough shit.

[Jon Lovett]

No, they're not. They're not.

[Jon Favreau]

So Congress could stop this at any moment. The White House did say on Monday that Trump would veto any legislation that curbed his tariff authority, which means that, you know, to override a Veto, you'd need 2/3 of the house and 2/3 of the Senate, which we can barely get a majority right now. But Republicans should be held accountable since they're going to be up in 2026 in the House and in the Senate, because. So we have seven senators. Seven Republican senators have signed on to this legislation that would curb his authority. Don Bacon, Republican in the House, has said that he, he's introduced companion legislation in the House, he's talked about maybe a discharge petition, which would be forcing a vote because obviously Speaker Johnson won't put it on the floor.

[Tommy Vietor]

A discharge for that.

[Jon Favreau]

A discharge, I know it would take.

[Jon Lovett]

But even nobody's discharging in this economy, you know what I mean? Everybody's too stressed.

[Jon Favreau]

That would take 30 days, 30 legislative days. So we will, we'll have no more economy by the time, by the time he's ready to discharge, you know.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, electricity. Yeah, but we have electricity. Then the, the, Yeah, I will say like this, this whole, like John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, was asked about this and he said, well, it's not happening because Trump's issued a veto threat. We're not that far from a veto proof majority on this. We're just not.

[Oren Cass]

Right.

[Jon Lovett]

Like seven, you know, you need another. What, like 12.

[Jon Favreau]

You need 67. Yeah. Right.

[Jon Lovett]

So you need another 12, you know, 12 senators, you know, and then in the House, you need basically roughly a third of the Republic, if we can get it to a vote. You need a third of Republicans to join basically half of the Democrats, the half that is Democrat to get this to a veto proof majority. And if ever there was a moment that called for a veto proof majority.

[Jon Favreau]

It'D be this or Tim, our friend Tim Miller was talking about this.

[Jon Lovett]

I saw this.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. I realize it's fantasy politics, but we're in crazy land now. And he was saying it wouldn't take much for a couple of Republicans who were like retiring moderate Republicans, vulnerable Republicans who don't like this. You already got Don Bacon talking about it would switch parties or not just totally switch parties, but at least say we're gonna caucus with the Democrats and get a new speaker in there.

[Jon Lovett]

I mean, that's not that. You know what, it's not that crazy. Arlen Specter changed the majority majority in the US Senate at a moment not, I mean, a very different moment than this, but when he had the same powers, worried about his own seat. So crazier things have happened, including Donald Trump declaring war on the whole world, as you say.

[Tommy Vietor]

The difference this time was, I bet they'd feared that Donald Trump would literally send like proud boys to their homes to hurt them.

[Oren Cass]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, this isn't even in the outline today, but they did send armed U.S. marshals to the home of a former DOJ lawyer who was going to testify against the administration.

[Tommy Vietor]

Great.

[Jon Favreau]

In Congress. Just to let her know that that was violating. Violating some, you know, employment agreement.

[Tommy Vietor]

Not at all. Intimidating.

[Jon Lovett]

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[Jon Favreau]

Trump's economic meltdown has overshadowed what he's doing to turn America into a police state. He has now been ordered by a federal court and a federal appeals court to bring back a Maryland father named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who The government essentially kidnapped and disappeared to a torture dungeon in El Salvador. The federal judge in the case called it a, quote, grievous error that, quote, shocks the conscience. And this is from the fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimous decision which called the move unconscionable. Quote, the United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who was lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. So the Trump DOJ has appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has said, okay, we will ask for a response from Garcia's lawyer by late Tuesday afternoon. So they sort of pushed the deadline. The deadline was supposed to be midnight Monday night. So the Supreme Court will hear this. The DOJ also suspended the career prosecutor who represented them in court for this hearing after he basically admitted to the judge that Garcia shouldn't have been deported and didn't have answers as to why he was. This is a prosecutor who Trump's DOJ had just promoted a couple weeks ago for his good work on sanctuary cities. So this is not a career servant. Deep state liberal squish, you know. There was also a six minutes report on Sunday that found 75% of the Venezuelan men who the government has imprisoned in El Salvador with no hearings, had no criminal records at all, just tattoos that ice in most cases wrongly assumed were connected to the Trend Aragua gang. The White House response to all this has basically been we don't give a fuck. Over the weekend, they tweeted an AI generated Studio Ghibli meme of a JD Vance quote, what a sentence. Quote, we do not ask permission from far left Democrats before we deport illegal immigrants. And here's what Trump himself said on Sunday when asked about an offer from Salvadoran dictator Bukele to house American citizens at his prisons.

[Jon Lovett]

The president there said he would be.

[Jon Favreau]

Willing to take American citizens in the federal prison population.

[Tommy Vietor]

Is that one of the ideas are.

[Oren Cass]

Going to be discussed.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, I love that.

[Donald Trump]

If we could take some of our 20 time wise guys that push people into subways and that hit people over the back of the head and that purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I'd be honored to give them. I don't know what the law says on that, but I can't imagine the law would say anything different. If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I'm all for it, but I'd only do according to the law. But I have suggested that, you know, why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally. We have some horrible criminal, American, grown and born.

[Jon Favreau]

He loves that. He loves that. He doesn't want to follow the law, even though he's not following the law so far, but he does want to follow the law.

[Jon Lovett]

There was a concurrence, the Wilkerson concurrence, where he basically lays out in the.

[Jon Favreau]

In the court of appeals, the Court.

[Jon Lovett]

Of Appeals, that lays out the. Just the simplicity of the stakes, which is worth mentioning. The government has admitted they made a mistake in one of these cases. They have made many mistakes that they're refusing to admit and lying about, which is its own huge problem. But they've admitted they made a mistake. And instead of fighting to free this person, they're fighting the courts that are saying they have to free this person. And what the concurrence says is if the government can take someone from this country and put them in a foreign prison without any due process, and then once they are in that foreign prison, claim they no longer have the ability to bring that person home, it's pretty clear where you are heading. You are heading to the place where the government can pluck anyone, including American citizens, as Trump is now suggesting he's willing to do, put them in a foreign prison without due process. And even if they know they were wrong to do it, say they have no recourse and that the courts have no recourse to force the government to try to bring this person home.

[Jon Favreau]

Also, this is now the third time that Trump has mused about sending American citizens to this foreign gulag. He did it during the end of the campaign once. Cause I remember, like, seeing the clip and being like, what the fuck is he talking about? Did everyone see that? And then it just sort of, you know, it was the end of the campaign, so no one paid attention. Then remember he was asked about Tesla vandalism and whether he would deport some of the American grown American citizens who might be, you know, accused and convicted of terrorizing Tesla dealerships to El Salvador. And he said that sounded like a good idea. And now he just said he loves that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, I don't remember the campaign piece, but Bukele pitched this idea in February. When Marco Rubio went there. He was like, we offered the. That we, you know, outsource part of their prison system, including for American prisoners, for a low, low fee. And Rubio called it an act of extraordinary friendship and said he would brief Trump on it. So I imagine that stuck with him.

[Jon Favreau]

I just. There's been, like, shockingly little reaction to this. And I don't know what. You guys, what is it all about? Like, do people think Trump's not serious? Do they think the courts would be able to stop him? Or do people just think, oh, it won't happen to me?

[Tommy Vietor]

I don't think anyone's hearing this. There's just too much going on. I mean, the stock markets are melting down. There's a trillion stories a day. I just don't get. I don't think these gaggles are making it to people.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, yeah. I also, there's a. I think there is a little bit of. If we're talking about immigration, we're losing. I think that's in there for some of these Democrats, and I think that that's wrong. I think part of it also is there is a helplessness, which is. Okay, I speak out about this. I think this is awful. I think it is terrible. It has to play out through the courts. It has to like, you know, the process, the lawyers. What I, What I can't get past is, what if that time photographer wasn't there? Right. And we.

[Tommy Vietor]

Would.

[Jon Lovett]

We even.

[Jon Favreau]

Time photographer who went to the prison. This was on. Well, watch the 60 Minute segment.

[Tommy Vietor]

60 Minutes is great, I think. Well, I thought you were asking about.

[Jon Favreau]

I was asking about all of it.

[Jon Lovett]

Okay.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, I think the deportations of U.S. citizens to El Salvador, like, people are just not hearing that or. I think it's Trump fluster.

[Jon Favreau]

Totally.

[Tommy Vietor]

I actually think this has gone from a thing where people were not talking about immigration to once the specifics of the stories were public. People are talking about it a lot that, like the case of Andre, the gay makeup artist from Venezuela, once his photo was online and you could see just how fucking absurd it was to declare that man was a. Was a gang member or some hardened criminal. I think it became very much in the public discourse.

[Jon Favreau]

I agree with that. I think I'm. I'm like, Democratic. Elected Democrats have not been talking about it. Like, I, like I said, I could count on like, two hands the number of statements I've seen. There's a couple tweets, and it's from this, you know, Veronica Escobar and Pramila Jayapal and I saw Ro Khanna tweet about it and a couple other people, but it's been very quiet among elected Democrats and I don't understand it. And, you know, you heard Ruben Gallego's answer to me, which was like, well, it's a trap and blah, blah, blah, you know, And I have heard from some people, I've Talked to friends about this and they're like, well, you know, if, if it turns out that this guy's really ms.13, it's gonna be a crazy hill for Democrats to die on. And then you have to go to the process, the due process argument, right. Which I know that's more like esoteric and it's about due process. But again, there is nothing stopping them from grabbing anyone off the street. And maybe they're not doing that now, but like it's early couple months from now, they see some. There were protests and they're mad at the protesters and someone does something stupid and they, they send them tells what's, what's stopping them.

[Jon Lovett]

I also, I do think it's really important the third piece of it. So, so there's the lack of due process. There's the. Now the claim that they can't fix it if they've ever made a mistake. I do think the third piece of it is a very important piece of it, which is they are willing to lie about these people that really matters. Tricia McLaughlin, who's a spokesperson for the administration, said in March, at the end of March, not only is Andri a part of MS.13 or trend, there's a record in his social media that proves it. 60 Minutes goes through a decade of his social media. What you find is exactly what you'd expect in a gay stylist's makeup. It's makeup photos. It's the gayest shit you've ever. It's just gay glamour shit. And like the idea that she's just lying. She's just straight up lying. You don't think they're going to lie about the, about the Americans they're going to grab and sent to this place? You don't think that they're going to claim that these people belong there. They're willing. They have already admitted that they've sent someone there by mistake and they are fighting to keep that person there. You don't think that they will, that they will let an American rot in this place? And I, I keep, like, I have this, like this thought I can't get, I can't stop thinking about, which is, these people don't know that there's a public outcry. They don't know that their lawyers know where they are. They don't know any of this is going on. His head was shaved. He was put into this prison. He has not had any communication with the outside world since that happened. He is in a nightmare. He is in a nightmare and he's Been there for three weeks, as have a bunch of other people who were sent to this place.

[Jon Favreau]

And look, I mean, my interview with Jasmine Mooney, the Canadian actress, and that was just U.S. detention centers. And those conditions, while they sounded absolutely fucking horrible, aren't nearly as bad as this fucking prison in El Salvador where they literally house, like, rival gangs together so that they can commit violence against each other and just kill each other off. I mean, that's what we're talking about here.

[Jon Lovett]

And you know, Marco Rubio, who spent so many years talking about the importance of freedom and how much of his politics draws from America defending freedom and the kinds of abuses committed by communist regimes. These are those kinds of abuses. That is what these are. We have disappeared people and we have sent them to a gulag where they're where they are meant to rot without any idea how long they're supposed to be there, without any ability to question it or challenge it. We are doing the thing that all of these conservatives spent decades claiming that they got in politics to fight.

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, look, yeah, these are the worst, but also these guys all defended, like, the worst excesses, the war on terror. So I just, I don't expect any better from them. I do think we need if hopefully John Roberts will come back with something reasonable and force the administration's hand to get these guys back. Like, the 4th Circuit today was like, we're not suggesting you need to invade El Salvador to get this person home. You need to make a good faith effort to get this man back. That you admitted you wrongfully rendered to a foreign country. And that doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask. That's not putting the judiciary above the executive branch when it comes to foreign policy.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, yeah, and one of the judges who had written a concurring opinion there, who was a Reagan appointee, I think he even said, like, he took the government's, like, concerns seriously and that he's like, you know, I'm not saying necessarily that the government can and must order El Salvador. You can at least try. You can at least call him up, try to facilitate.

[Tommy Vietor]

Kristi Noem was there filming a TikTok.

[Jon Favreau]

Exactly.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, the thing that's also, this is what I think is chilling about all of this too, which is Trump can say, like, well, if only we have to follow the law, of course we're gonna follow the law. Bukele knows that Trump wants, wants these.

[Jon Favreau]

People to stay there.

[Jon Lovett]

Of course they know it's a fake request. I'm sorry, no. Then what?

[Jon Favreau]

I can't tell if I'M I'm more worried that the Supreme Court will rule against Garcia or will rule for Garcia and Trump will just ignore the ruling. Because I think either way, we're in fucking. I mean, maybe. I guess. I guess the best outcome would be that they rule for Garcia and the administration backs down and tries to get him out of El Salvador. But that seems.

[Tommy Vietor]

I just think the administration has the politics of this wrong. Like, they seem to think they cannot give an inch on any of these cases no matter what, or it might unravel the whole policy if they just showed a little human decency and were like, yep, we made a mistake. We're going to make mistakes every once in a while. We're trying to deal with really bad people. I think that would actually get them some credibility, though. Maybe that's undercut by the fact that, you know, 60 Minutes, I think, dug into the numbers and only 12 of 238 of the men sent to Venezuela of any, like, real, like, rape, murder, serious cases, there are others who had, like, petty theft or trespassing, and most.

[Jon Lovett]

Had no, according to 75, no record at all. And again, if the Trump administration believes that that's wrong, they can just produce the evidence. They are refusing to. They are daring, they are. They are enjoying this confusion. They are dividing this chaos. And in part because I do think they want people afraid to be critical, because they're afraid that they're gonna go to bat for somebody who's gonna turn out to be in Trente Aragua.

[Jon Favreau]

And, you know, good for YouGov for asking this incredibly specific, dark question, but they asked in a poll last week, do you support or oppose deporting migrants who haven't committed crimes or had due process to el Salvador prison? 60%, yeah. And 46% strongly opposed. So I guess that's something.

[Tommy Vietor]

Well, that's an American citizen. I think you're talking 80, 90%.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes, I agree. But again, I hope that, like, Democratic officials see that poll and I get that they're all, you know, you're representing the people of Michigan and Arizona and American citizens. But it could happen to, like, someone's gotta speak up for the possibility that this could start happening to American citizens, to legal residents. And also, like, if you wanna deport people again, the president has broad power to deport people and to deport immigrants. Why are we putting them in this, like, terror dungeon? This is crazy.

[Jon Lovett]

Also, like, even if they do not claim to be targeting American citizens as they ramp this up, which of course is what they plan to do, American citizens will be ensnared in it.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

We've just made Friends of the Pod subscription even better by adding more ad free shows. If you enjoy Crooked Media's content and want to support our work, subscribing to Friends of the Pod is the best way to do it. Now you can enjoy offline with Jon Favreau and love it or leave it completely ad free. Wow. And for the month of April we're offering a 30 day free trial. No commitment, just pure ad free joy. When you subscribe, you'll also unlock Ad Free Pod Save America and Pod Save the World exclusive content like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer and gain access to our Discord community where where you can connect with other anxious yet civically minded people who believe a better world is possible. Your subscription helps power everything we do here at Crooked. Sign up [e-mail] friends or through Apple Podcasts to start your 30 day free trial. Alright, so some potentially hopeful signs amid all of this God awful news CNN reports that over the weekend, quote, millions of people took to the streets in all 50 states to protest Donald Trump's new regime. Organizers of the rallies called hands off, said the attendance was much bigger than they expected. 20,000 in Atlanta, 25,000 in St. Paul, 25,000 in Boston, 30,000 in Chicago, 100,000 in Washington. We know a lot of friends of the pod were out there, which we love to see. We've also seen some Democratic leaders start to speak up and actually break through all the noise. We haven't all been together since Cory Booker's record breaking filibuster speech last week. Kamala Harris was out there, she started to speak up. And then our old boss, Barack Obama, held an event at Hamilton College, which got a bunch of attention for these comments on Trump's new regime.

[F]

When I watch some of what's going on now, it does not look. I don't think what we just witnessed in terms of economic policy and tariffs is, is going to be good for America, but that's a specific policy. I'm more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don't give up students who are exercising their right to free speech. The idea that a White House can say to law firms, arms, if you represent parties that we don't like, we're going to pull all our business or bar you from representing people effectively. Those kinds of, that kind of behavior is contrary to the, the basic compact we have as Americans. I think people tend to think democracy, rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of the press, that's all abstract stuff. Because it's not affecting the price of eggs. Well, you know what it's about to affect the price of eggs.

[Jon Favreau]

What did you guys think of Obama there?

[Tommy Vietor]

I think the most important thing he said was it's not enough to just say you're for something. You might actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I was going to. The whole clip would have been way too long. His pauses are getting long.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, 1.5x that guy, he said at one point, he kind of basically said some version of like, I'm a little rusty. It was kind of. It was sweet.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it's also, when I first heard about it, I thought it was a speech. He was just doing like a Q and A. So it was definitely off the cuff, which is when you get that. But.

[Tommy Vietor]

But I do think that sacrifice pieces is missing.

[Jon Lovett]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

Like I have. I feel badly for the law firms that were attacked by the Trump administration and had other competitors go and try to Poach their clients. That's a disgusting, shitty, corporate thing to do. But when you stand up for principle, you might have to give something up and sacrifice something and sacrifice some profits. And so that piece has really been missing, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, he had this. The other part of that, right, where the quote that you were talking about, he was like, there's this idea. And I've noticed this among some wealthier folks who, after George Floyd, they were right there, and a bunch of companies were talking about how they cared about diversity and they wanted to do this, and they were all for that. They're mute now. What that tells me it was okay when it was cool and trendy, and when it's not, not so much. And I think we all have to examine, like, what we're willing to do.

[Jon Lovett]

Yeah, look, these. Their values are being tested. Their fund, like, their values as institutions are being tested. And a lot of these law. We've talked about this. These law firms, they are, you know, they have good values in certain respects. They are craven corporations in others, as are many institutions. The colleges, too. They have their intellectual principles, their great academic, liberal spirit. And then they have the fact that they are giant financial institutions beholden to trustees and alumni. And those things are in conflict in some of these places. And when those values are being tested, they're caving. And you think someone like Doug Emhoff is at one of these firms. He's at one of these firms, and Kamala Harris is giving speeches about the importance of doing everything we can. Doug Emhoff recently talked about how important it is to do everything we can wherever we can.

[Jon Favreau]

He said he got outvoted.

[Jon Lovett]

And that must sting. Must sting to get outvoted.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, look, I just think it's. I think the purpose of, or the benefit of someone like Obama speaking out and others is it starts making others feel like, okay, maybe. Maybe I should say he said something. Maybe I should say something, and then maybe someone else will give away. You know, like, it's start. Yeah, it's starting to give people cover. Let's talk about the sort of resistance more broadly in the rallies. What did you guys think of that? How do you think everything's going here?

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, I think it's great to see people in the street. I mean, the protests themselves were kind of about everything. I think that reflects honestly the challenges of the Trump era, which is there's so many things happening. It's like, where do we focus? Is it the. What we're doing to kids on campuses? Is it what we're doing to migrants? Is it the tariffs? Like, we're mad about everything. And these protests were people who are mad about everything. There were protests about the Doge cuts. There were some against the arrest of Gaza protesters. There's some about cuts to park services.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

So it was just a little bit scattered shot. But I think the hard part is getting people out. I think the next round of these protests would benefit from more specific framing if it's around a thing or a demand or a desire. But, like, I think once you get people out and they see the power of it and they feel the community of being in the streets, hopefully they'll do it again and again and again.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I feel like this is building the muscle, or at least like the muscle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

It was. It's been. I think we're seeing more and more of this. We've been seeing this with the Bernie rallies. We've been seeing this. I do think that the incredible response to Cory Booker, which I was surprised by just how much it caught on, I think was interesting. I think you see it in the results in Wisconsin. We have to keep. Like, we don't know how this story ends, but as we, like, the mass mobilization will be increasingly important. And I do think as we were talking, like, for me, the deeper question is, when does mass mobilization become not just a means of drawing attention, but about actually using power? And I think the more we have people out there, the better, because there is one dark path this ends where we have to get millions of people into the streets. And. And the more people get used to doing that and excited about doing that and being with each other, the more powerful and stronger the movement becomes.

[Jon Favreau]

I thought about the Cory Booker speech for a while because I sort of felt the same way at first. I was like, oh, I'm surprised that this broke through in such a big way. And love Cory Booker. You ask him a question, he will give you a lot of civil rights quotes.

[Jon Lovett]

He did the third longest filibuster on this show.

[Jon Favreau]

But, like. Like, the reason I think it works so well and the reason that, like, good for fucking Cory Booker is because the guy is genuine about what he believes. He genuinely cares. And in the last couple months and since the election, even during the election, it's like, been a whole bunch of Democrats trying to figure out, like, okay, how do I figure out my TikTok strategy and how do I get the exact right message and this. And Cory Booker thought to himself, you know what the platform I have and the one I'm comfortable with is speaking on the Senate floor. That is what he has done now for many, many years. And he's like, I'm gonna use that platform where I feel comfortable to the best of my ability to, like, break through and do something. And that's what he did. And he like. And he fasted before and he thought about it and he figured out the speech together. And it's like, everyone doesn't have to, like, strategize and calculate the exact right strategy. Same thing about the protests, too. It's like, yes, it's. We can figure out the message and the slogan and what it's called and all that, like, that'll all come later. But just using the platform you have, using the abilities you have, the talent you have to go out there and just speak, that's a first step, and it's a step that a lot of people aren't taking. So good for Cory Booker for taking it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I mean, my constructive criticism was a lot of the sort of tweets and coverage I saw of the filibuster was about the existence of the 25 hour filibuster, and he had the same challenge as the protesters. It was sort of about everything.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

So it's hard to sort of focus a message. But again, he showed personal sacrifice. You know, for 25 hours, his body was standing and speaking, and that's hard. And it shows courage and a commitment, and I think that inspires people. A similar thing that's happening that's not getting a lot of coverage. Brian Schatz is holding up like 300 Trump nominees in the Senate, just gumming up the works in a lot of different ways, and using his power as one US Senator to constrain the Trump administration or at least try to piss them off enough to get some leverage to get something in return.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. My criticism about the Cory Booker speech was not at Cory Booker, but it was like there were so many other Democrats that were just praising Cory Booker. And I'm like, you do something. Don't just praise Cory Booker. Like Brian Schatz. He got out there and he's doing the hold, like, whatever works for you. Whatever you're good at, you go do it. And I'm glad, of course, we're praising Cory Booker as well, but it was just like a day's worth of, okay, now I gotta do my tweet praising Cory Booker. Like, go do something.

[Jon Lovett]

I think, Yeah, I think that. What. What is the kind of like, I, I turned. I was sort of. I was really glad to see Cory Booker do. I was really glad to see the response to it. And it's funny because, like, Cory Booker jokes, like, he could be cheesy and like sometimes, like, I asked him a question once and I think we got a MLK quote, Andy, and a Gandhi quote in the same answer. But that's a great, like he was just down there, like being himself, who.

[Jon Favreau]

He is and what he really believes.

[Jon Lovett]

And I really, I really like that. But I do think some of the kind of attaboyment were a little bit kind of like it is. I think in part, like we just went through a continuing resolution battle where they didn't do all that they could. And they know that and that's part of it too.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Jon Lovett]

And so, you know, it is a performance and I'm glad we're doing it. That's the power we have to draw attention. But I think that's where I was a little bit like, well, hold on a second. You're holding the floor. That's great. You're saying we need to do everything we can and that's great. We just chose not to do everything we can. And maybe there was a difficult strategic choice there, but that for me is why it rang a little bit hollow, the praise of it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. All right, one last thing before we get to Lovett's interview with Oren Cass. Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer at the Atlantic are reporting that my guy, Doug Burgum, North Dakota governor turned long shot presidential candidate turned secretary of the interior, has been demanding that political staff at his agency bake him fresh chocolate chip cookies using industrial ovens at Interior headquarters.

[Jon Lovett]

And quote, those things are for cooking moose.

[Tommy Vietor]

What is an industrial oven?

[Jon Favreau]

That's a great question. I was hoping you would not.

[Jon Lovett]

Thank you.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know. Once instructed political appointees to act as servers for a multi course meal. Apparently staff have been asked at least once to redo a batch of cookies because they weren't good enough. An Interior spokesperson said these are just smears from, quote, unnamed cowards who just oppose President Trump's energy dominance agenda.

[Jon Lovett]

But they're not smears because they also admitted that it wasn't like they were freshly baked. They were from store bought dough.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, that was two additional unnamed cowards. They were trying to clean up the story. They clarified that the cookies are made from store bought dough and are offered to Department of Interior guests as a treat. Doug the Diva, should we be demanding more cookies?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yes, apparently. ChatGPT says an industrial oven is a large heavy duty oven designed for high Volume or specialized heating applications in commercial or industrial settings like large batches of bread. I don't see why that would be tougher on you for making cookies.

[Jon Lovett]

I don't think it makes it harder. It may take longer to preheat, but the, the other part of it is the multicourse meal. The defense of the multi course meal is very funny because the, the, the, the. The anonymous staffer defending Bergen was like. It was, it was salad, lasagna, dessert, three plates, three forks and, and, and. Which I love. I love that spin because. Hold on a second. This is just a lunch. Who's having a three dessert at lunch? You're gonna need a nap after that.

[Jon Favreau]

And this was all pre tariff, pre hope. Those cookies are made in America.

[Tommy Vietor]

Also restaurants. I don't need a new fork. I don't need a new plate. Just leave it there. What a stupid waste of time and energy and dishes.

[Jon Lovett]

Salt of the earth, this guy.

[Tommy Vietor]

You know what I mean?

[Jon Lovett]

This guy can eat salad and steak.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm more comfortable back in the kitchen than out here.

[Tommy Vietor]

But I was on the iron range.

[Jon Lovett]

The also, like Doug Burgum's in his house. 50s, 60s.

[Tommy Vietor]

He's older than that.

[Jon Favreau]

We're like, there's like, there's like 10 old billionaires in the administration. 68 who you wouldn't know if you fell over.

[Jon Lovett]

They all look, you tell me midday at work, I'm having salad, lasagna, and dessert. I'm out. I'm laid flat.

[Jon Favreau]

You know what he probably is? What? He's the. He's. He's the secretary for Donald Trump, Trump's second term Department of the Interior. And as they're, as they're cutting national parks and forest service all over the place, what do you think he's doing?

[Jon Lovett]

Think of the damage that would do to my interior on fire today.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, we started and ended with stools.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, boy.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but before we do that, if you haven't checked out Crooked's newest series, Shadow God's Banker, you really should. Journalist Niccolo Minoni uncovers a hidden story about Vatican banker Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under a London Bridge in 1982. The series takes all kinds of crazy twists and turns. It's got money laundering, secret societies, assassination attempts on the Pope. It's really wild. You will love it. Listen to Shadow Kingdom God's Banker now. Wherever you get your podcasts or binge all episodes [e-mail] friends or on the Shadow Kingdom Apple Podcast feed.

[Jon Lovett]

Pod Save America is brought to you by Policygenius. Look, everybody works hard to achieve their dreams. Financial, personal, political, relationship, relational. You know, goals, goals. You know, we started a business. The only thing more important than achieving a dream is protecting it. Safeguard your family's future by securing a life insurance policy through policygenius. It's crucial to protect your loved ones with a financial safety net that can be used to pay off debts, cover daily costs, or even invest that money to generate interest over time. Policygenius simplifies the process of finding and purchasing life insurance, ensuring your family's financial security. With policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. With Policy Genius, you can compare quotes with America's top insurers side by side for free with no hidden fees. Their licensed support team helps you get what you need fast so you can get on with your life. They answer questions, handle paperwork and advocate for you throughout the process. Secure your families tomorrow so you can have peace of mind today. Head to policygenius.com crooked or click on the link in the description to get your insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com Crooked Good News.

[Jon Favreau]

We've just made Friends of the Pod subscription even better by adding more ad free shows. If you enjoy Crooked Media's content and want to support our work, subscribing to Friends of the Pod is the best way to do it. Now you can enjoy offline with Jon Favreau and Love it or leave it completely ad free. Wow. And for the month of April, we're offering a 30 day free trial. No commitment, just pure ad free joy. When you subscribe, you'll also unlock Ad Free Pod Save America and Pod Save the World exclusive content like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer and gain access to our Discord community where you can connect with other anxious yet civically minded people who believe a better world is possible. Your subscription helps power everything we do here at Crooked. Sign up [e-mail] friends or through Apple Podcasts Cast to start your 30 day free trial.

[Jon Lovett]

And we're back. It's been five days since Trump declared a trade war against the whole world. Markets are tanking. We're seeing the worst decline since 1987. The Fed chair Jerome Powell is warning of higher inflation. JP Morgan at Goldman Sachs are saying it's increasingly likely we're heading toward a recession. So I wanted to hear from a conservative who is among the right wing voices arguing against the Republican consensus on free trade. He runs the conservative think tank American Compass and he's the architect of Trump's current tariff policy. He's the one to blame. Oren Cass, welcome to pod Save America.

[Oren Cass]

Well, I'm not sure about that introduction, but thank you very much.

[Jon Lovett]

No, you, you are. I wanted to talk to you because you're someone that has been arguing for a different direction for conservatives. And I would have said if, you know, last year, last couple of years, that there was a kind of intersection between, I think what some progressives have been saying about the economy and what you and some others have been saying from the right. It's all come to a head now as we see Trump kind of blundering into tariffs over the last week. So I do want to talk about what's happening right now, but before we get there, I think it's just helpful to understand what your critique is from the right of the free trade consensus that was that I think did span from center left to center right and what you view as the goals of a reorientation, even if what we're seeing right now doesn't look like it.

[Oren Cass]

Sure. So I think the problem with the free trade consensus was that free trade in the real world was not operating the way that, that everybody seemed to think it would on the economics blackboard. I think actual trade between countries where we specialize in different things and we sell things to them and they sell things to us, that's terrific. What we have in the globalized economy, especially after embracing China, which is a non market, authoritarian, communist state controlled economy, bears no resemblance to that. We have trading partners that pursue active policies to shift manufacturing out of our country to them, not so that they can sell to us and buy something else from us, but so that they can sell to us and not buy anything from us. And that sort of strike one is the way that that hollows out our manufacturing sector. And then strike two is that it's not that we get the stuff for free. Instead they take back our assets. So they take ownership in our corporations, our real estate. They take our debt, debt, which is just pieces of paper saying we'll pay you for this stuff some other day. And so we simultaneously hollow out an important sector of our economy and basically mortgage our future. And that's not a model that I think has been working very well at all.

[Jon Lovett]

So I feel like a lot of different aspects of this get combined. One is trade deficit versus a trade surplus. Another is tariffs, what the goal of tariffs is. And then there's what happens when you do free trade with a country like China that isn't a free country, that isn't a free society, that. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the difference between say a trade surplus with Canada, a country that is a democracy, that has a high standard of living, that has benefits, that has environmental and labor protections, versus a trade surplus with China.

[Oren Cass]

Yeah, I think that's very well put, the way you've sort of separated that out. And so I would say China is its own problem. And regardless of what we do elsewhere, I think decoupling our economy from China is what I call. I think decoupling sounds too nice. I would say really a quite hard break with China, recognizing that free trade with China does not promote a free market, it distorts our free market. That's kind of bucket built one. I think when you get beyond that into our trade with the rest of the world. I think you're right. A trade surplus or a trade deficit with any one country is not necessarily a problem at all. In fact, you would expect those to emerge naturally. The problem is that we have large systemic trade deficits with virtually all of our trading partners. And that is to a large extent a function of policy. To some extent, it's a function of our policy. Running huge budget deficits here does not help, and we should do something about that too. But when you see countries like Japan, Korea, Germany that are explicitly pursuing an economic model that calls for them to be doing large amounts of exporting to pursue growth, and they're adopting policies to achieve that, we shouldn't then scratch our heads and say, gee, I wonder why the thing they said they wanted to do and made policy to do is therefore happening. And so I do think it's fair to say yes, in a healthy free trading system, you'd have surpluses and deficits. But what we have is a much more systemic imbalance where essentially most of the rest of the world is all expecting to do more producing and then we do the consuming on credit.

[Jon Lovett]

So with a country like Canada though, right, we have an incredibly interconnected economy. We actually run a surplus with Canada on manufacturing, we're on a surplus with Canada on services. We just have a deficit because we get a lot of raw materials from Canada, we get a lot of oil from Canada. And yet, like, that's not something a tariff can correct for, right? We don't, we can't suddenly, unless you. What we want to kind of Cut down the Rocky Mountain, like, all the forests in Colorado. Like, I just don't. What I don't understand, right. Is, like, I don't know, like, I go to a hot dog stand, I buy a hot dog. I have a trade deficit with the hot dog stand. I still really like the deal. It's better for me. I'm eating hot dogs. He's making hot dogs, or she's making hot dogs. All right, thank you. It's important to know.

[Oren Cass]

Thank you for calling her in.

[Jon Lovett]

But if the government suddenly taxed that hot dog vendor into oblivion, like, to ostensibly create more domestic hot dog production. Yeah. Like, I guess I could go to the store and start buying all the supply, increase my domestic hot dog supply. But the reality is I'm just going to eat fewer hot dogs. Right. And so, like, I guess I just want to understand what the. What the goal is. Right. Like, is each of these examples seems to require a specific set of policies. Right. And yet this ends up being this debate about kind of trade deficits and trade surpluses and tariffs, which almost feels like beside the point to me.

[Oren Cass]

I think it's actually useful to sort of start from the other end and think about what the actual goal is. What is the end state we want to get to, because, frankly, a lot of what is going on here is at that sort of. It sounds grandiose, but grand strategy level, where the US has been pursuing this, what gets called liberal world order for a long time, where we want to advance markets everywhere. When we were welcoming China, part of the theory was this was going to liberalize them, democratize them. Obviously, we make a lot of defense commitments around the world. And the idea was that, yes, we would absorb a lot of excess production from other parts of the world. We would subsidize a lot of defense costs. But ultimately, as the hegemon, we benefited from that. We could have a longer discussion about how much that was ever true.

[Jon Lovett]

True.

[Oren Cass]

But I think what certainly folks in the Trump administration would say today is that we no longer benefit from it. Part of the problem is that we are moving into a multipolar world. We can't be the hegemon, even if we want to be. Secretary Rubio has talked a lot about how China is going to put aside trade. China is going to assert its own influences in the world and is going to have its own sphere. And then in the economic context, we are obviously not in the position we were in in the post World War II years. As the dominant industrial power. We frankly have a lot of problems in our own economy. And so I think what the goal is is to say this sort of liberal world order needs to be replaced for the US's purposes with more of a US centered, ideally economic and security bloc. And we want to have high levels of free trade with allies in that block, block. But we would like to see overall trade within that block balanced. So we are overall both buying and selling in relatively equal measure. Just as you don't worry about your deficit with the hot dog stand, but you do need to earn enough money from someone else to buy the hot dog, right? You can't just take out credit cards to buy the hot dogs. And for that to work, we're also going to then need everybody to agree to keep China out. We can't keep China out, but have Mexico welcome them in and then have free trade with Mexico, Mexico. And so I think if that's the goal, big block balance trade China out. How do you get from here to there? I think tariffs play an important role in that potentially. And that's what you see the Trump administration trying to move toward.

[Jon Lovett]

So there was an let's talk about what's happening right now then. So in the wake of, I think this was just before Liberation Day, but you saw South Korea, Japan and China announcing they're going to respond together. If your goal is to build a big kind of anti China bloc with as many countries on our side as possible, can you come up with a way to be more alienating of the countries we need than what we've seen in the last week?

[Oren Cass]

Well, I would say two things about that. One, I agree with you to the extent that I think sort of how we treat our allies matters and we should be be engaging with them constructively. And there is definitely room for improvement on that front. That being said, I do both think that reporting, I think was rather overblown. And even in just the last few hours here on a Monday afternoon, we've both seen China announce it is potentially planning retaliatory tariffs leading to more retaliatory tariffs from the us, while Japan has announced, or I think it was Secretary Besson just announced he's delighted that Japan has come forward to proceed with a constructive negotiation. So in fact, I don't think it's the case that countries like Japan and Korea are thinking about siding with China. I do think it's the case that we owe our allies very clear explanation of where we are trying to go, what our expectations are, and that we give them a fair opportunity to work that out.

[Jon Lovett]

But the tariffs Announced they were described as reciprocal tariffs. But as you've noted, they're not based on tariffs, they're based on trade deficits. And look, there's value to America rebalancing trade. I think Democrats, Republicans or some Republicans now would agree with that. But a country can't do that overnight. We just spent the last 75 years building up an interconnected system. People in Vietnam, just working people. Right. They're not taking advantage of us. I don't feel taken advantage of by working class people in Vietnam. Auto suppliers in Michigan are terrified today. Right. They're talking about the fact that they're going to have to shut down production, that the costs are going up, it's alienating allies, it makes, it may cause a decrease in domestic production. All because this is being done in this incredibly ham fisted way. And at a certain point, do you worry that what you're doing is kind of intellectualizing like coming behind Trump like an intellectual Zamboni cleaning up what is just a rash kind of gut instinct 1980s pro tariff mindset being put in place by people unwilling to tell him no?

[Oren Cass]

Well, I guess I don't worry about that broader dynamic that you just described. I mean, I've been writing about the need for the United States to start a trade war with China in particular and use tariffs for more than a decade now. It's certainly where I see that the free trade consensus went wrong and we need to take a different approach even with something like these reciprocal tariffs. It was interesting. I wrote a piece, I guess it was back in February, looking at just what the Trump administration was saying and inferring. I don't think it was that hard to do that. Clearly what they meant was not tit for tat reciprocal tariffs based on tariff rates. What they meant was they were going to focus on trade balances. They were going to try to induce those countries to change their policies. By the way, just to give a concrete example of what that looks like when it works, this is what Reagan did in 1981 with Japan. I mean, under threat of heavy tariffs from Congress, Reagan got the Japanese to self impose a quota on exports of Japanese vehicles to the United States and the result was the Japanese auto industry in the US South. So I share many of your criticisms about the details of how this is being executed. But I think it is important to separate the question of tactics from strategy in a sense and work on getting the tactics right. Right. And I think there are a lot of opportunities to get these tactics right and in fact achieve changes that are Worth making.

[Jon Lovett]

There's a little bit of a kind of trick there to me, which is you're pointing at a specific example of there was a strategic goal, there was pressure applied. People understood the stakes, they understood what the goal was. They could. The US Policy was predictable, all right. It was also targeted. Right. And at a certain point, the markets, and I don't think the markets are a reflection of the economy in full. Right. There's a lot of, you know, some. We have spent decades watching wages stay flat while markets went up, but the markets are responding terribly. There's a warning of inflation, there's a warning of a recession. Our allies around the world are telling us that they're going to put retaliatory tariffs on us. At a certain point, you can't separate the tactics from the strategy. Right. You are saying, oh, there's a strategy that I largely agree with, but I have some quibbles with the tactics. But fundamentally, are we watching kind of Donald Trump take what you view as the. The ultimate goal and kind of proving the opposite case, showing you that, like, show basically. Basically obliterating the argument you're making by fucking this up so thoroughly?

[Oren Cass]

I think that's a rather crass way to put it.

[Jon Lovett]

The way that I. Yeah, it's a little crass. It's a little crass. Or by the way, I should say, you and I went to college together.

[Oren Cass]

We did.

[Jon Lovett]

We weren't close.

[Oren Cass]

No. We must have taken a class together at some point.

[Jon Lovett]

I'm sure we did. I'm sure we did. But. Sorry, I just was interrupting you.

[Oren Cass]

What I would say is, and maybe there. Even the term strategy sort of. Of is two different things, because when I think about strategy, what I'm talking about is the way that we're defining and recognizing this as a problem at all, which is, I think, a really significant shift. And that goes a little bit to your point about even before the current Trump administration starting to see a new consensus developing on that point. The fact that we are actually now recognizing that this model of hyperglobalization is a bad one and we need to change it. The fact that we're recognizing that manufacturing matters, that trade deficits matter, and that we should do something about those things, I think that's really important and a positive step. The fact that the tools we're talking about to do something about that, that we are talking about having a low, stable global tariff, the fact that we are really talking about very high tariffs on China, we're taking seriously the idea of disentangling from that them and the idea that we're trying to actually get to more balanced trade, I think those are, those are the right things we should be doing and the tools we should be using. So I don't think that it would be fair to say, well, look, I don't like the set of things he announced on Wednesday. Therefore, I'm not even sure kind of what the punchline is, therefore forget about the whole thing. I think that.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, no, it would be to say, as much as I agree with the goals here, that as much as I believe we need a reorientation, the way that this is happening is so awful and destructive and chaotic that it is not the approach I would take, but it is antithetical to the way that I believe we should be pursuing an economic agenda. No, we should not rebalance the American economy by going through a recession, having all kinds of supply shocks, causing all kinds of job losses and alienating our allies around the world. If that's the price of reorientation, we should not do it.

[Oren Cass]

I guess that strikes me as, as maybe a bit overdramatic just because, just to give you a very concrete example, let's say we took essentially this policy that the administration is pursuing and we said it would make a lot more sense to phase tariffs in than snap them in on day one.

[Jon Lovett]

Because it takes a decade to build some of these factories. It takes because it decade to undo some of these interconnected supply chains.

[Oren Cass]

It takes a decade to do some things. I think we should be a little skeptical of people saying that you, it takes five to 10 years. When we've seen that when businesses really, I mean, it did not take that long, for instance, to massively offshore production to China. Right. I mean, take a look at the drop in US Manufacturing employment and you will see how quickly these things can move. And so I think we said, look, frankly, I think the 10% global tariff is something that you do sort of do and among other things that conveys that you really mean it, you're serious, and that this is going to start changing the equation. I think something like the tariffs with China, ideally you do phase in. And by the way, there's very good bipartisan legislation in Congress right now to revoke permanent normal trade relations with China and go all the way up to 100% tariffs on strategic goods, but do it over five years. And so if you think about kind of the 60% that Trump is talking about at that point point, if you did that 20, 20, 20 over three years, I think that would be a Fairly reasonable approach. And I think when you then talk about these negotiations with specific countries, again, you make a very good point that we have obviously built up these relationships over a long period of time. If we're not happy with how they're behaving, we've certainly tolerated it for a long period of time. I think if we say, look, this is what the consequence is going to be if we don't have a plan to fix this. This here's a period of time for having an initial negotiation and seeing if we have a way to fix this. If we can't agree, half of this goes into effect. And if a year from now, if you're just out on this project, then we do go up to the full level, I think that would be a reasonable way to proceed. And so it's an interesting question. Obviously, this is a very significant question. Do you snap it into place or do you phase it in? But I think there is still a lot of room to take these ideas and say that there is actually a path forward here that accomplishes some really important things.

[Jon Lovett]

Last question. Is there a version of this in which we wouldn't be seeing incredible economic disruption, the possibility of a recession, markets crashing? What does a version of this that you would think is working well look like?

[Oren Cass]

Well, we just talked about a piece of it which is phasing things in. I think the phasing makes an enormous difference in minimizing the cost. Because basically what you're saying is you want. The costs that you're imposing are intended to be an incentive. You want those to come into play as quickly as it is reasonable to expect people to change their behavior. If you impose the cost faster than that, you get the cost, but you can't get any faster change in behavior. So I think phasing these things in is a huge potential piece of the puzzle on the front end. And then I think the flip side is just greater clarity and certainty.

[Jon Lovett]

Well, greater, yeah. But we have no idea even what the demands are. Right. They're being implemented instantly, and we don't know what they want, what other countries can do to lift them. I mean, it's really like a. It's a blank. There's no hostage. We've taken the hostages, but we have no. We started killing the hostages, but there's no demand.

[Oren Cass]

Well, we know one demand which is more balanced trade. And we know that they just prepared an enormous report documenting the unfair trade practices that countries are engaging. So I think there's a start there. But I absolutely agree with you on both of those. And that's why I say these are the two things. One, the phasing in to reduce the costs and two, a much clearer description both of where we're trying to go and what we're asking people to do so that there is some certainty and some credibility of this is what the long run is going to look like. People can be reasonably expected to act accordingly. And at the end of the day, the actual benefit we're trying to achieve is a different pattern of investment. Investment getting people to invest more in the United States. And if you want them to do that, you have to give them the stability and certainty about what the long run is going to look like.

[Jon Lovett]

I guess what I want you're so mild mannered and measured. I really want you to say some version of of course I'm for rebalancing trade. These people are behaving like fucking morons.

[Oren Cass]

Well, again, that's a lot crasser than I would tend to be. I work on improving policy and that's what I'm doing.

[Jon Lovett]

Oren Cass, thank you so much for your time.

[Oren Cass]

This was great. Thank you.

[Jon Favreau]

That's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with a new episode on Friday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the pod [e-mail] friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, be sure to follow Pod Save America on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for full episodes, bonus content, and more. And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Reid Churlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill as our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanter is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madelyn Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kiril Pelaviev and David Toles. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America. Each Easter.