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- [00:00]
Boost Mobile Advertiser
If this back to school season talking to your teenager sounds like this.
- [00:06]
Peter Harrell
With.
- [00:07]
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- [00:33]
Scott R. Anderson
So, Tyler, our producer, Noam, who is obviously more deeply, deeply aware of culture than I am, was able to ID from like 100 meters away. A playbill for oh Mary hanging over your shoulder on your bookshelf. Talk to us about this play and how cruel it is for people to making such mockery of Mary Todd Lincoln, our most tragic first lady.
- [00:54]
Tyler McBrien
I think it's a celebration of. No, it's not. It's a completely ahistorical ro reimagination of Mary Todd Lincoln as a former cabaret star who aspires to take the stage again, who is a terror in almost every way, an alcoholic, and also the funniest character I've ever seen on stage. It's really just the funniest thing I've ever seen. It's written and originally starred a comedian named Cole Escola. I feel like this should be my. It maybe was my object lesson at some point, but it's. Yeah, I saw it maybe six months ago before it won a Tony, and it was just incredible. Just batshit crazy, but amazing.
- [01:39]
Scott R. Anderson
See, this is what you get from being in the city. Is it a musical? It's not a musical, right?
- [01:43]
Tyler McBrien
No, it's a play.
- [01:44]
Scott R. Anderson
Okay. I have reached the conclusion about. This is something that happens maybe in your 40s where you're confident that you're like, yeah, I have kids. I can finally admit things to myself that I thought were too masculine. Admit earlier, I discovered I really like musicals and musical theater in a way that I was like, huh? I never thought this was part of my identity. So now I'm, like, actively kind of watching around. I saw Hamilton, I saw Book of Mormon. I always liked Les. Les Mis and a couple other things. They're like, I've always been. I was always like, that's about history. I'm a history nerd. No, I think I just like musical theater. And so now I'm, like, on the hunt for, like, you know, cool, funny musical opportunities that come to my way, which in D.C. are rarer than New York, sadly.
- [02:23]
Anna Bauer
You know, who else likes musicals, particularly Les Mis, Donald Trump.
- [02:29]
Scott R. Anderson
I know. Well, I was like, maybe. Maybe this is the silver Lining to the Kennedy center takeover is that more musical theater. They had a good ratio of already. I don't know if it's gonna go my way, though.
- [02:41]
Anna Bauer
It was so funny over the weekend when everyone got into this. At first I thought everyone was joking about the is Donald Trump still alive? Thing. And then I slowly had the horrifying realization that the conspiracy theories that people were spouting they really believed to be true. But it was funny because there was at one point when all this speculation was going and the hashtag Trump is dead was trending, and Trump had not been seen for, like, two days. And there were these White House pool reports about Les Mis music playing in the Rose Garden. And, like, it was like, you know, I dreamed a dream from Les Mis. And I was like, okay, he's gotta still be alive, clearly, because who else would play I Dreamed a dream from Les Mis in the Rose Garden?
- [03:41]
Tyler McBrien
I gotta say, it's so funny that Les Mis is his favorite. I mean, I'm like, what songs are resonating with him? Is it master of the house?
- [03:48]
Scott R. Anderson
I don't know what it would be. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security, the show where we invite you to join members of the lawfare team as we sit down to puzzle over the week's big national security news stories. I am thrilled to be joined by several of my colleagues as we walk through a couple of the week's biggest stories. First off, joining me once again for our second or third appearance, I cannot remember, Peter. But we are thrilled to be joined by CONTROL contributing editor, Man About Town, economic statecraft expert extraordinaire, Peter Harrell. Peter, thank you for coming back on the podcast.
- [04:26]
Peter Harrell
It's great to be on with you guys.
- [04:28]
Scott R. Anderson
We're gonna. We're gonna make you a Rational Security regular, whether you like it or not. At a certain point, if I just like sending too many invitations, you should never give me your phone number. That was your mistake, number one. Also joining us is lawfare senior editor Anna Bauer and trial correspondent extraordinaire, here to talk to us about a trial that ate up a good chunk of her weekend. We'll get to that in a minute. Anna Bauer, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me and giving Anna some real competition. In the stylish New York apartment department, we have Lawfare's own managing editor, Tyler McBrien, with a perfectly manicured conversation. Ready? B roll. Providing bookshelf right behind him. Tyler, thank you for joining us back on the podcast.
- [05:08]
Tyler McBrien
There's plenty more Easter eggs where that came from if you want to look closely. But the exposed brick is very nice. Anna I don't want to exposed brick.
- [05:14]
Scott R. Anderson
And like a little peek of what looks like a bar but may just be a kitchen right behind it. I particularly like it's like, I think it's the secret of like the New York. I don't know if your apartments are studios, but because they're in New York, having lived in New York myself, I assume they're somewhat compact. That's the secret in the Zoom era, is to live in a small New York apartment because you have so much interesting stuff in the background. It's like a perfect background no matter what because like, you know, you have bookshelves and walls. You gotta find places to put stuff. All my New York apartments looked really great in just one still photograph back in, you know, 2005, when I was living there in 2007. Well, either way, I'm thrilled to have you all on board. We have a lot talk over. Let us get into it. Our first topic for this week, faganomics. With the recent announcement that the US government would be taking a 10% stake in the company intel, the Trump administration has ushered in a new era of state guided industrial policy fueled by concerns of major power competition, particularly around the race to AI. How does this new policy intersect with its other novel economic priorities, such as the imposition of tariffs and how legally viable is it given present and potentially Future legal challenges? Topic 2 Menage Atois on the margins of the recent meeting of the China and Russia led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a point of warmly and very publicly embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a move that many have taken as a clear shot across the bow at the Trump administration, which has been in heated economic negotiations with India over tariffs and other trade relations. What does this exchange say about the Trump administration's handling of the US relationship with India and other key US relationships? And topic 3 midnight planes going nowhere. In an emergency hearing over the holiday weekend, Federal Judge Sparkle Souqanan stopped the Trump administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan minor migrants to their home country, a move that the government of Guatemala has now claimed that it invited. What should we make of this move by the Trump administration and how does it fit within its broader immigration crackdown? So for our first topic, Peter, I want to start with you. You wrote a phenomenally useful piece for us at Lawfare about this intel deal, which in my mind is the latest kind of salvo we've had from this administration. A very novel, in some ways understandable, in some ways very alien economic policy, industrial policy, somewhere between the trajectory between the two. We of course have this intel deal where the United States is Now taking a 10% stake of intel in exchange for funds that the Biden administration had originally intended to kind of provide, I think in the form of loans primarily, but nonetheless making it a partially state owned sort of entity. This comes on the aftermath of the announcement. The Trump administration was going to be taking a stake in the proceeds from the sale of certain chips by companies like AMD a couple of weeks ago. And against the backdrop of a huge shift in economic policy around tariffs, which the Trump administration and President Trump very much personally is really using a variety of economic tools to reshape the broad trajectory of U.S. trade relationships, more or less across the board, almost entirely across the board, as we have global tariffs. He's negotiating with almost every country. All of this kind of knits together into one package, but it's one I have trouble kind of digesting and making sense of as a cohesive whole that I kind of want to dig into. But let's start with the intel deal. At least talk to us about what's happening, how it's happening, whether it's even legally feasible or whether there's something they're going to have to go to Congress for, get other authorization, and also why it may make sense or may not make sense. Like what is the policy logic behind it.
- [08:37]
Peter Harrell
Well, let's step back and talk about how we got here to where we have the intel deal. So I'd say there is a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the U.S. needs greater capacity to manufacture leading edge chips. In particular, leading edge chips being like the high end chips go into AI, Also a lot of them go into cell phones. Just because you need a lot of computing power in your pocket and leading edge chips. Intel used to be the world's leader in leading edge chips. It's kind of lost some of that edge over the last five or six years. And TSMC out of Taiwan is now the world leader in leading edge chips. So there's kind of bipartisan consensus that we need more lead leading edge chips here in the United States. So going back to 2020 to 2022 period, Congress passed something called the Chips act, which I know many of the listeners will be familiar with, which was a bill that was designed, a law that was designed to give mostly actually grants with some loans to a wide range of chip companies to build leading edge and also some more mature node fabs here in the U.S. intel was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Chips act under the Biden administration. The Biden administration had announced it was going to Give intel nearly $11 billion out of Chips act funding in order to build fabs in Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico and Oregon. It also gave money to a bunch of other chips companies. And when the Biden administration gave that money, it was actually mostly just a grant program. It was kind of going to cover about 15,1 5% of Intel's cost building a bunch of these fabs. And intel didn't really have to give much back to the government. Intel was committing to build the fabs, right? It was going to raise 85% of the money and build the fabs, and the government was going to pay 15%, roughly of the cost of these fabs. Intel had kind of fallen into some trouble over the last year or two. It's lost a lot of engineers. It's been through two CEOs. So it's a company that's in a bit of turmoil, not kind of about to go out of business, but a company that is in a bit of turmoil. And that created some leverage for the Trump administration to basically renegotiate this deal where the Biden administration had said, we're going to give you $11 billion to help build out these fabs in the U.S. the announcement last week has actually really fundamentally changed the deal. So the Trump administration deal with intel is giving intel not quite all of that money. It's giving them about $8 billion, it appears, for a 10% stake in Intel. And the Trump administration is also. Although intel has not, in fact, built most of the fabs, it has built one of the fabs. Although intel has not, in fact, built most of the fabs, intel no longer has the obligation to build most of the remaining fabs. They still do have an obligation to build a line for DOD to make kind of highly protected, secure chips for the Defense Department and the ic. But mostly this converted what was a grant program to give intel grants to build fabs into a kind of, as one person put it, it's a debt to equity conversion. Except there wasn't debt. It was really grant to equity conversion, where instead of giving them a grant to build fabs, now the US government owns 9.9% of intel, and Intel has less of an obligation to actually go out and build new fabs. But we're all shareholders now, so why.
- [12:09]
Scott R. Anderson
Does that address the underlying policy need, or is the Trump administration's assessment of that need changed? Because if they don't have the obligation, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that, A, it's a minority share, obviously, and B, I think they, at least at one point I was seeing reports that they weren't going to try and exercise or claim any governance rights arising out of this share, although maybe that's gone to the wayside. So is there a reason to think that this shareholder model lets them guide or incentivize or promote the indigenous development of, like, chip manufacturing capacity in a way that makes the prior obligations unnecessary? Or is the administration just changing its policy priorities?
- [12:45]
Peter Harrell
So I think it's better to understand this deal as a shift in policy priorities. Now, I think the administration in intel would argue. Whether they'd argue on the record or not, I don't know, but I think they would argue. First of all, the practical reality was intel was going to have trouble actually building the fabs it had promised to build. So in some sense, and let's be very clear, under the law, if intel didn't build the fabs, the US Government could have legally extracted the money back. So I think the government probably was looking at this as in the real world, we have a choice of converting these grants into equity or just taking the money back and maybe giving it to somebody else. But clearly a change in policy towards Intel. The other thing that intel has come out and said is that the deal there has been, I mentioned Intel's had some sort of business troubles over the last couple of years. One of the things that several of Intel's investors have suggested intel do is break itself in half so that intel would no longer both design chips and manufacture chips. Currently, Intel's the only logic chip company in the US that both designs and manufactures sort of leading edge chips. They've been talking about splitting themselves up, basically because the design part of the company is more profitable than the manufacturing part of the company. The deal does discourage intel from doing that. It doesn't prohibit them from doing that. But the U.S. government would actually be entitled to an even slightly greater stake in the company if it was split up. So it sort of discourages the split. And if you think this split is a bad idea, maybe there's some benefit to the government there. I sort of view this as actually quite meddling in corporate business, though, weirdly, as you say, Scott, the government gets to. There's a little bit of a structural incentive for intel to stay together. But in terms of business strategy, not only Is the government not taking a board seat? Other than this issue about a split up, on most questions, the government has committed to vote its 10% share the way the board recommends. There are a few exceptions to that, but by and large, this actually gives the board in some sense greater control over the company because it, on most votes now has 10% of the shares in its pocket.
- [15:07]
Scott R. Anderson
That's wild.
- [15:08]
Tyler McBrien
I mean, I actually had another question. But staying on this topic, I'm curious. I mean, the government is not just any other board member, obviously. So are there, are there like unspoken sticks that intel has in mind that the government can use that other board members can't? Is this really such a quiet member of the board as the government seems to claim it will be?
- [15:33]
Peter Harrell
So, Tyler, I think that's a great question. It brings. Actually this question sort of relates to Scott's initial question about why is this good for intel or for the United States? And I mentioned Intel's a troubled company, but intel was not actually about to go bankrupt. Like, it's got some technological problems. It's been through leadership change, it's had to lay people off. But it's not, you know, this isn't a case like when the government bailed out General Motors in 2008, 2009, or if you didn't have the government put money into intel, it was going to go bankrupt and, you know, close down later, later this year. It's just not that kind of a case. What intel needs to be successful is not actually more money. What intel needs is A, customers and B, relatedly, customers who will work with intel on designing and buying intel leading edge chips. If you look at how tsmc, the kind of current leading edge chip champion out of Taiwan, got to be good, a lot of that was its own management and engineering, but it was also because it developed kind of a business model where it works very closely with its customers like Nvidia, like Apple on the manufacturing process. And there's a very tight integration there. And traditionally chip design companies haven't wanted to do that with intel because intel also designs its own chip. So if you're Apple or you know, you're Nvidia or you're Qualcomm, you worry like if I share too much IP with Intel, are they somehow going to steal it and put it in their own chip? So what intel needs is a way to get customers at the leading edge to work with it on chip design and manufacturing. Now, the government buying into intel doesn't directly do that, right? But on the other hand, you could tell a story where the government either kind of via its persuasive powers or via actual regulatory tools that aren't legally the same as its intel stake, could actually begin to put pressure on companies to work with intel and actually give intel what it needs to turn around. Of course, the risk with that is like Intel's not currently the leading edge may not be the best bet on leading edge. And so if we're going to have a world where, you know, company or the government is telling companies, innovative chip design companies, you have to work with this guy, maybe that works out also. History would suggest that may just like mean a slower pace of innovation going going forward.
- [18:10]
Scott R. Anderson
That's what strikes me as just so extraordinary about this moment, because you cannot imagine in my mind a sharper 180 from the Republican Party of the 1980s of the Reagan era and Reaganomics, where there was elements of industrial policy and promotion engagement, but a big focus on it was on the free markets, objection to government intervention, concerns about deregulation being a big issue throughout the 70s into the 1980s. And you know, those issues. I think people, there's a strong sense across political spectrum may have swung the pendulum too far the other direction that, you know, strict laissez faire economics poses lots of other downsides and complications. But it's so remarkable to see particularly a Republican president swing so far on this, to insist on this sort of 10% share and not as a temporary measure and not even as a measure that's clearly like compelling a particular policy outcome, because it seems to beg all the sorts of moral hazard that traditional laissez faire economists would say, like, you know, you're going to beg the government to start weighing things towards one company for reasons that don't have to do with efficiency and that they're going to deter competition and deter other people from entering this industry. So are there a reason why those aren't concerns here? Or are those concerns just being overshadowed by other drivers like related to major power competition, other concerns?
- [19:33]
Peter Harrell
Well, I personally think those aren't very serious concerns. I think it was a week or so ago, I can't remember who some commentator on Twitter made this point. Sort of maybe another Biden former Biden official, something like made the point of, they told me if I voted for Kamala Harris, we'd get socialism. And they were right. And I think that you can sort of. It is a remarkable departure for a Republican president to not only be taking a a 10% stake in intel, but also the intel deal follows on a deal in July in which the Defense department took a 15% stake in a US rare earth mining company. And of course, now we've seen Secretary Lutnick and Secretary Bessant and others, NEC Chairman Hassett come out and say, well, we want to do more of these intel type deals. So, I mean, I think we are really seeing a sea change, certainly from the traditional Republican sort of starting in the 1970s, 1980s worldview of let's separate the government and the market into much more of a activist state where the government is going to have stakes in, in large private companies. And I think that does create a fair amount of economic risk. It also creates governance questions. How are these things going to be governed? It creates favoritism questions. And of course, the, the way the government is doing this doesn't have a lot of oversight. We can talk later about the legal mechanism. So this isn't sort of that Congress has passed some statute setting up, say an American sovereign wealth fund where there's like an independent board that would decide how to govern this and a lot of distance between the government and the companies the government is invested in. The way say like a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund invests sort of a passive investor in lots of we don't know. Right. And so I think there are a bunch of those questions to be worked out. I'm not sure with these stakes that I think the Trump administration has a clear cut strategy here. I think there is a kind of a moral argument and a sort of intuitive policy logic of, well, if the government's going to give a bunch of companies government money, maybe the government should get something back. I mean, you see that on the progressive side of the Democratic Party, right. Bernie and other Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren and others have argued if the government's going to get a lot of money to companies, government should be able to get something back. So there is this like intuitive kind of moral view I see when I see the Trump administration doing this. So it doesn't look to me like they have kind of a strategic framework of here's when we're going to buy in. And not it looks more frankly opportunistic to me of like we saw an opportunity to get a stake here and so we're going to go out and get a stake.
- [22:15]
Scott R. Anderson
So let's talk about that legal mechanism because that's the part of this that I thought your piece was really valuable and worth listeners going to check out on lawfare. But let's talk about at least at the highest level we can over the next few minutes. This is a weird move because it bucks so much of the trajectory of US Policy for the last half century or close to half century, and by that virtue of that is not super supportable or compatible with the statutory regime Congress has enacted over that time to do a lot of this sort of stuff, at least at first blush, at least the way it's been conventionally used. But we've seen kind of unique set of legal arguments they seem to be leaning on. Talk to us about what those are and your sense of them. I mean, are these sustainable arguments or are these things that we are going to see a legal challenge potentially tee up that might, like in the terrorist context, pose a potential concern about their viability in the long run?
- [23:06]
Peter Harrell
Yeah. So let's start from a point that given the US government has not, historically, at least in the post World War II era, often held shares of companies, there's not kind of a standing statutory authority for the US Government to buy shares in companies. There have been episodic authorities to do that. So 2008, 2009, Congress passes a financial crisis. Congress passes the ESSA Economic Support and Stabilization Act, I think is what it was called, which gave the treasury for a period of two years, but it was very tightly limited on time. The ability, clear legal authority to buy kind of bad equities, bad stakes in companies to help companies turn around. That was the basis for the government buying into GM and some of the banks at the time. But that was sort of A, clearly established and B, the idea then was government to hold this for a short period of time until things stabilize and then sell it off. There's not really outside of those kinds of contexts, and outside of the U.S. development Finance Corporation, which is a sort of overseas development body, there's not really like a clear cut authority for the government to buy equity stakes in companies. So the Trump administration's logic here appears to be kind of the old, well, if it's not prohibited, it is allowed. And so they have relied on in the CHIPS context, what they appear to be. In the intel context, what they appear to be relying on is the fact that the CHIPS act is pretty broad. It says the purpose of the act is to provide support to expand domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Congress very clearly envisioned that as being grants and loans. But it's broad in its language. And Congress passed this thing called other transaction authority in the CHIPS act, which is a broad and flexible contracting mechanism. And so what it looks like the Trump administration is basically saying is, well, the CHIPS act doesn't the money is appropriate to expand chip production. We have a broad grant making authority here. It doesn't prohibit us from asking intel to give us a stake in the company as part of the grant deal of giving them money. So it's a kind of. Because it's not prohibited and we have this broad language in the act, it's allowed. Now, the reason I wrote in the piece that I think this violates at least the spirit of the CHIPS Act. I actually think that there'd be a reasonably strong argument that if the Biden administration had sort of said to intel, hey, we're going to give you $11 billion to build fabs, and as part of that $11 billion, in addition to building the fabs, you need to give us some stock or warrants or something to protect our interest. I think that would have been a fairly strong argument that that is allowed. The question I have with this deal and why I think it violates the spirit of the law, though probably not the letter, and then we'll come to who can challenge it, is that actually, as we discussed earlier, what Trump has done is sort of converted what were grants to build fabs into a purchase of a stake in Intel. So we will probably have fewer fabs than we were going to have a year ago. And I think that part of it is hard to square with the intent of the CHIPS Act. Now intel has built one fab in New Mexico. They are kind of slowly moving forward with their FAB in Ohio, though. We'll see if that. You could sort of tell a story while they are still sort of excited expanding capacity. So maybe it is legally allowed. But the bigger issue or the other big issue, in addition to the kind of, how do you read into the statute who's going to sue? Intel's not going to sue. Intel's probably very happy with this deal. They no longer have to buy the fabs. The board now gets to vote 10% of the shares for free. They got a government that might order customers to come buy things from them. So makes sense for intel to take this deal. They're certainly not going to turn around and sue. And so then the question is, well, does anyone else have standing to sue? And that's a really kind of complicated question. It may be a while, if ever, that we actually see this thing challenged in court.
- [27:22]
Scott R. Anderson
The question I, and this is my ignorance about the industry. Is there a domestic competitor like competitor standing is the clearest way you would have an avenue here. If a competitor could say this gives an unfair advantage to intel and Even that I'm not 100% sure would withstand. But there's at least an argument there, like, are there other big competitors that would be in a position or incentive to do that, or are they too all reliant on government support, or are there just not enough of them to really make that sort of argument?
- [27:50]
Peter Harrell
Yeah, so I don't practice in this area of challenging government contracts. And so I'm not the right lawyer. You should find somebody, some other lawyer to get into this particular issue. But with that big caveat, I look at it kind of as follows. So, first of all, these grants were done under this other transaction authority of the original grants and this deal, right. This sort of flexible contracting authority, which means that the. There isn't, you know, some kinds of bids. Like when the Pentagon puts out certain bids, depending on the way they do it, there's actually a formal mechanism for like a losing bidder to apply that. That doesn't apply to the way the CHIPS act works. So there's not sort of a formal, like, protest mechanism. So then the question is, you know, was a company just kind of be able to say, oh, it has standing, that the government's doing this with intel, but, like, maybe that, I don't know, they presumably would have to show things like, well, maybe they would have gotten more money if this deal hadn't happened. That's hard to show, right? Like, the linear connection, I think is hard, is hard to show. Plus, as you say, Scott, like, one thing we have seen is, you know, large companies have been reluctant to sue the Trump administration. That's just been like a fact of life. You see that in the tariff litigation context or large companies have sat it out small, sort of small importers have gone into court. So, you know, I'm not sure any of the obvious big competitors either a would have any desire to sue and be, even if they did, if they could get over, you know, issues of.
- [29:15]
Scott R. Anderson
Standing, I guess a shareholder maybe be the other potential thing, maybe we should all buy a share of intel and see if that is the basis we can actually get through. So before we move on to our next topic, I want to ask one for umbrella question here. What does this all amount to with the broader trajectory and the other elements we see? We see profit sharing with chip sales, right? We see tariffs designed to make, you know, domestic, in theory at least, designed to make foreign imports more expensive so that domestic industries can sort of thrive a little bit more. But there is a little bit of tension there between, you know, if we're going to start taking stakes in companies that we want to be able, for example, compete internationally. Right. Like, what is the economic vision here? Is it really autarky? Is it something like the model of this? We saw a lot of the developing world do in the 50s, 60s and 70s, I think import substitution industrialization, the idea that we're going to start building the things we import and develop our own autonomy. What is the Trump administration's strategic overall view for the economic picture about where it wants to go? There's clearly a desire to be less exposed to global risk in the kind of post supply chain crisis, post Covid, major power competition era. But that is a lot of ways you can get to that. And it seems like that alone can't explain the trajectory, the Trump administration's kind of moving on. Or is it just opportunistic? Do you not really see as much strategy behind all this?
- [30:42]
Peter Harrell
So I guess if I was going to be sympathetic to their sort of sympathetic explanation of what they're trying to accomplish, I think they are clearly trying to boost onshore manufacturing generally and in particularly in, you know, a number of sort of specific sectors. So like generally, right, we have a bunch of tariffs to try to boost onshore manufacturing generally, but then, you know, sort of double and triple down in things like steel that they've talked a lot about. You know, they're talking about how they want to onshore pharmaceutical manufacturing. So I think it's sort of both a general and a sort of sectoral approach to boosting onshore manufacturing. And they, they think their tariff policy is serving that objective. I could tell you a lot of economists could tell you lots of reasons why their very broad tariff policy is probably not actually going to boost onshore manufacturing. But their argument is that will, and I think that is their interest, their intent. They also have a clear desire to boost what you might think of as kind of blue collar wages. Right. They very clearly want economic policies that kind of run manufacturing and the blue collar part of the economy hot in a way of driving up wages for what you might think of as blue collar wages. I also think some of their deportation agenda fate figures into that. Right. If they are deporting a bunch of foreign workers, presumably that will put upward pressure on, you know, kind of domestic wages of people who might have been competing to some degree with that foreign at least in their head. I think this is part of their strategy of boosting blue collar wages. So I think those are their two kind of core objectives, right? More manufacturing and then boost middle income sort of blue Collar, blue collar growth. I don't actually see where the buying stakes in the company companies fits into that. I see the buying stakes in companies as more opportunistic. I guess the one thing I would say not in the buying state, maybe buying stakes in companies maybe also though related to the Nvidia deal and the tariffs, I actually think that, well, Trump's one big beautiful bill act clearly continued to put the government on a poor fiscal footing. Right. We have a rising debt, we have interest payments on the national debt are likely to become the second biggest part of the federal budget this year. I think at some level, although Trump doesn't really understand the numbers, I do think he understands the government needs to find money somewhere. And so he's thinking about tariffs like I can find some money if he can get a few billion dollars out of Nvidia. He's found some money. If he can get $11 billion for free. It's not actually for free. Cause we gave them grant money. But I think Trump in his head thinks maybe we got this stake in intel for free. Again, he's wrong on that. But I think he may think that, I think he may kind of have a little bit of a view of like he's, you know, picking up the couch and shaking it and seeing if, you know, some money falls out. Maybe a piece of this.
- [33:53]
Tyler McBrien
I was going to say something pretty similar. I mean it's. Yeah. From just like a political optics point of view, Trump cut another deal, you know, added to the tally. And it's especially this model. It reminded the debt or grant to equity conversion. Also, maybe this is an imperfect, probably is a very imperfect analogy, but it was reminiscent to me of the proposed minerals deal with Ukraine. You know, it's like here's all the money that we gave you. At the time, we may have said it was no strings attached, but really actually now the bill's coming due and we want stakes in the minerals. So there was a pretty telling quote from Lutnick in Politico about how the government flipped this into something better. And yeah, I think that's absolutely part of the messaging.
- [34:42]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, it's so interesting because it really is and this goes actually is perfect segue into our next topic. So thank you, Tyler. That's ideal, which is this idea of this kind of zero sum game mentality, which is that little dings, little material, short term gains you can get outweigh potential longer term costs that are more ephemeral, harder to kind of recognize or experience. Maybe that's a political calculation. It's an economic calculation. Maybe it's like a psychological balancing. I don't really know. That seems to be there's big time preferences really playing hard into the way they're choosing to do certain things because a lot of the costs of these things, the negatives are years, a decade or so down the line. But the gains are much more short term and immediate and again, cognizable. So let's talk about that in the context of our second topic. While we were talking about difficult trade relations, we have had some with India the last few weeks and they seem to reach something of a head. This past week, we saw this highly publicized, not coincidentally, highly publicized meeting between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi, the head of India. Remember, Modi is the same man who the Biden administration feted at the White House not two years ago now, I think less than two years ago now, somebody who was very actively, despite reservations about his human rights record, about his rhetoric domestically in India, particularly when it comes to ethnic identity and different communities there have been engaged in different types of sectarian violence, a person that a lot of people have a lot of reservations about him and his politics. The Biden administration, like the first Trump administration before it, had really been trying to play into and build a relationship with India substantially. But this has been taken and I don't think it's a wrong interpretation, though I'm open to criticisms otherwise that this was a shot across the bow to the Trump administration saying you are now fighting with us with India over these trade relationships. The fact that we've now got tariffs imposed on Indian imports, we're having these heated negotiations. Remember, we have other allies in other places like China and Russia we can pivot to because the major power competition with China, Russia was always such a context for way people justify this outreach to India. And India is well aware of that. It's worth noting this wasn't a spontaneous meeting. This was happening at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a multilateral, you know, entity, I don't know technically an organization, but you know, a body that has had these meetings in the past, trying to rush it, let it for a long time. India's participated pretty regularly in the past and they weren't the only ones there. Turkey was there, Pakistan was there. A couple other notable powers that the United States has a substantial relationship with. It's not always an easy one, but India really stood out because of that contrast with how the Biden administration approach relationship with the current state of it. So, Tyler, I want to start with you on this, talk to us about how you perceive this moment significantly. Does it jump out at you as maybe being overplayed about how big a deal this is? Was it a very deliberate sort of maneuver on the part of these three national leaders to kind of send a message to the Trump administration? And what is the driver behind the Trump administration's seemingly, at least, deprioritization of the India relationship from what had been seemingly like actually a pretty robust bipartisan consensus just eight months, nine months ago?
- [38:04]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah. Before I answer your question, I want to make sure I get in this quote from Xi Jinping, who reportedly said in a meeting with India's Modi that it is, quote, time for the dragon and the elephant to dance together, which I think is just about the coolest way you can talk about that.
- [38:18]
Scott R. Anderson
What about the bear? You gotta get the bear in there, too, man.
- [38:21]
Tyler McBrien
But to answer your question, I mean, I certainly think it is far too soon to declare a new global order and a massive realignment. I think the three leaders are very savvy and knowing that this would be a very public photo op that the media can, can use. And I think it's certainly the most visual and visceral in many ways, illustration of a dynamic that's already been happening for some time, especially in this administration. I mean, everything we just talked about in the last segment, plus immigration policies of deportation, interdiction, exclusion, pulling out of international treaties, sort of equivocating on security guarantees, is in many ways creating a vacuum on the global stage. And China and other Global south actors are all too eager to step in and take advantage of this moment. There was an interesting piece in the Financial Times, I believe, about a study that China is rapidly trying to increase funding in the UN number of personnel in Geneva, for example. So I think it's part of a shift. But I think one group hug does not a new global order make. But it's certainly trending that way.
- [39:36]
Scott R. Anderson
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- [42:48]
Scott R. Anderson
So, Peter, I kind of want to come to you on this. You worked in the Biden administration on a variety of issues. I don't know if India or trade relationship with India was part of a portfolio or not. I suspect you probably couldn't avoid it entirely if it may not have been one of your major responsibilities. But am I mischaracterizing the Biden administration's approach to the India relationship? And if not, what was the motivating logic there? And where do you think that may have fallen apart for Trump in these last few weeks?
- [43:16]
Peter Harrell
Well, I'd actually say it's not just wasn't just a Biden administration approach to India. I'd actually say going back to the Obama administration and very much during Trump's first term, you saw, as well as the Biden administration, you saw a very strong desire to deepen America's strategic relationship with India as a way of countering China. Maybe encircling no one would talk about it publicly, sort of encircling China, but very strong, very much a way of countering China. I mean, it was the Trump first administrator is Trump's first administration. That whole, you know, we used to talk about the Asia Pacific and they had this whole Indo Pacific strategy. Right. I mean, even in their, even in their verbiage, they were thinking about how do you deepen the relationship with India? And the Biden administration very much thought, look, we're going to have some tensions with the Indians over the trade front that we're going to have to work through, but we're going to figure out how do we work with them on technology, how do we deepen that strategic relationship to counter China. And my read, and I'm sitting here looking at the Trump administration from the outside, my read is that sort of a couple of different things have happened in Trump term two that have made Trump much more willing to take tough action on India in a way that is actually setting back many years, these years of efforts to deepen the strategic relationship. I think the first thing is I actually think on the economic front this time around, Trump looks relatively less China focused to me than his first time around. Right. I mean, he's concerned about, in his mind, every country who's ripping us off, not just China. Right. First term 1 Trump trade policy was heavily China focused. There's a China focus here. But he's like, you know, he wants to whack the EU and he got his deal, but it's sort of tariffs on everybody. So he's kind of relatively less China focused against that backdrop. Like, India is pretty protectionist. Like, if you care about the economics and bilateral relationship, India is pretty protectionist. So I think he cared less about China and cared more that he thought India was being unfair to us. So I think that's a piece of it. He's genuinely kind of ticked at them on the economic front. And then, and I am not the India expert. I mean, Tyler, you and Anna, maybe you follow us more close than I do, but I, I do. When I talk to friends who are genuine India experts, everyone brings up the fact that Modi didn't thank Trump for pushing for the ceasefire with Pakistan earlier this year. And you know, the Pakistani army chief of staff has been in the Oval Office twice in the last couple of months. And you know, they've talked about, the Pakistanis have talked about how they, you know, think Trump deserves a Nobel Prize. And I, you know, I kind of don't like to spend too much time psychoanalyzing our president, but the folks I know who cover India very closely all spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing this, you know, deteriorating Modi Trump relationship here.
- [46:14]
Tyler McBrien
I will say, I mean, I think as, as recent as like a month ago I was seeing stories about how China is bracing for war with India. I mean, they are, they are longtime rivals and they have come to blows before about all this infrastructure that's, that China was building up along the border that could serve another, also a military purpose. And then in a month's time, Xi Jinping and Modi are embracing each other. Maybe Trump does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for avoiding conflict between China and India, even if it's not intended.
- [46:46]
Scott R. Anderson
Perhaps, you know, at a certain point you gotta throw whatever spaghetti you have against the wall and see what sticks if you're gonna get that Nobel Prize, so get what you can get. So I want to expand the aperture a little bit beyond India because I do wonder whether this is indicative of a broader trend. Right. Particularly around the tariff issue. Not exclusively, but the tariffs issue in some ways because it has, this reflects a zero sum is not quite right, but a very transactional kind of short term gains relationship. Where the view is, look, with all our trading partners, we're going to go out and we're going to get a better deal because we can and we should be getting whatever the best deal we can and segregating and prioritizing that in a way that really bumps trade Relationships at a much and economic relationship more generally at a much higher set of priorities against the other interests that motivate U.S. relationship with other actors. Right. Like, you know, India has benefited from the fact that it has a strategic surplus that it can spend with the United States because of its geopolitical position, because it's position with China, because it's part of the quad with Australia and Japan. That's supposed to be like a big aspect of efforts to balance against China and keep it kind of contained in the region. That's part of the reason it's gotten away with protectionist policies and frankly bad and concerning internal politics by Mr. Modi and the Trump administration in a way that a lot of other people who would like to push back on Modi and others on human rights and other issues would say is maybe good for the United States is breaking that sort of view that that sort of strategically driven logic can dominate and dictate the relationship, but it's doing it in favor of these small to medium scale, potentially significant but so far not transformative economic exchanges. Is that just indicative of a broader deprioritization of any kind of strategic interest to the United States? Because you think about Greenland, you think about NATO spending, you think about approaches to Ukraine, all these seem to be of the view that the broader would have been conceived as strategic interests of the United States overseas don't weigh as heavily as these more immediate economic concerns. And is that just a symptom of this administration or a reflection of the worldview that we just have to downgrade what we think of as strategic concerns compared to much more immediate economic concerns or political concerns or even maybe as you're getting at, Peter, like optical and individual concerns of the president, you think about Zelenskyy's relationship without not wearing a suit and the presentation of his February meeting versus most recent meeting. There's clearly just a personal relationship that really matters to Trump. Peter, I'd be curious about your thoughts about this. Somebody who's been close to the folks and the big personalities that dominate policymaking in this era. Tyler and Anna, curious for your thoughts too.
- [49:37]
Peter Harrell
That's an interesting point. I guess what I'd say to that, Scott, is I think you are right that Trump seems to have decided that economics matter much more in America's big bilateral relationships relative to other strategic priorities than past presidents have. Past presidents always thought the trading relationship was important. Clearly trade with some countries very important. Going back to Clinton, North American trade was very important for sort of economic reasons. But we've Also always seen it's important to have a good relationship with Vietnam because we're trying to deal with China, or we want to have the European Union on board because we're dealing with Russia. The strategic element is played a huge role for many presidents. And Trump basically seems to be saying, you know, when I look at a bunch of these relationships around the world, 80% of my thought is on the economics. And maybe that's we're getting ripped off on trade. Maybe that's that we've given Ukraine too much for free and Ukraine's got to figure it out. Maybe it's that, you know, South Korea, Korea needs to pay more for the fact our military bases are there. But he's like, very much, let's rebase these relationships around our economic needs and concerns. Now, lots of economists would say Trump is going about that in a very bad way. Just the economics of Trumponomics is bad, like a lot of economists would say. But let's put that aside for a moment. I think Trump in his own head would embrace the idea. We really got to focus on getting the economic relationship right. He does tend to see these economic relationships in a kind of mercantilist win, lose, lose sort of scenario. And so he's pursuing a lot of these policies that I think in his mind are about rebalancing the economic relationship. I agree with you on that, Scott.
- [51:20]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. And I think there's a coherent ideology or Trump doctrine. I think there is one to be found in this America first transactional relationship where it is zero sum, and America as the Trump administration conceives it, and Americans as they conceive them, should always come first. And I think it's also a view of power in which power means you can dictate the terms of the deals and force people to take them. And I think it's falling flat because it's based on an overestimation of where American primacy is right now. And I think it's also just completely shortsighted and doesn't take into account long term benefits. I mean, Putin is getting a sweet deal. It's a photo op with two major powers. His own country is a fraction of the size population, a fraction of the size. It's bogged down in a war with what was supposed to be a much weaker opponent. And it's just, it's elevating, you know, Putin's Russia on the world stage already. So I think it's, yeah, it's a mix of all of those ill fated instincts that the Trump administration has.
- [52:29]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, speaking of shifting priorities in the Trump administration, let us turn to our third topic, a little bit of a microcosm of that that happened over the weekend that, Anna, you were in a position to bear witness to. There were reports over the weekend coming from council family members, other members of a number of unaccompanied migrants, I think several hundred of them from Guatemala who were put on a plane or on the verge of being flown back to Guatemala before a judge intervened over the weekend in an emergency hearing. We are still hearing debates about that policy. We have more litigation coming in the next few weeks, more briefing, more debates. We saw the government of Guatemala issue a statement this morning where they said essentially this was actually a suggestion that they had given to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a meeting a few months ago where they said essentially, hey, you have all these unaccompanied Guatemalan children, you should send them back home. And we're going to figure out family relations with them. Although reports don't indicate too much more about details about plans in that regard. But they claim to have some sort of plans about how to connect them with their families, provide support for them. Talk to us about what we saw over the weekend, what almost happened, what didn't happen, where we think this is going and how it fits into the kind of broader picture of this administration's immigration policies, that this is the latest and in some ways, by some accounts perhaps most troubling iteration of.
- [53:48]
Anna Bauer
Yeah. So, Scott, this all kind of started to develop over the Labor Day holiday weekend. There was some initial reporting, I believe, first by CNN that the Trump administration potentially had plans to remove a number of unaccompanied migrant children from Guatemala to Guatemala. And then after that story and those news reports, started to develop counsel for the children and also a number of the care facilities where these children are in custody, that includes foster programs, care facilities, various places in different states where the children and have been placed started receiving notices that indicated that indeed there were plans for the government to move the children and then potentially put them on planes to remove them to Guatemala. All of this, you know, develops within a very short period of time. And on Sunday night around one o' clock, or I guess I should say Sunday morning, rather, Sunday morning around 1 o' clock a.m. the council for the Migrant Children who have started to be moved to be removed to Guatemala, file a complaint in D.C. district Court and then follow up very shortly thereafter with a motion for a temporary restraining order to bar or Block the removal of these kids. The duty judge over the weekend, Scott, for emergency motions, because, you know, it's a holiday weekend and you have someone who is judge on duty. It happened to be Judge Sparkle Sukhnanan, who has the best name of any Article 3 Judge, in my view, truly just an incredible name to say. But Judge Sukhnen is the duty judge. She, according to her, at a hearing, we kind of heard her retelling the series of events at a hearing that happened the next day. But according to the judge, she got a call alerting her to this. Around 2:30, she wakes up her clerks. They try to get in touch with the Justice Department to try to figure out, you know, what's the Justice Department's position, what is happening on the ground, what's the plan here? And the judge could apparently not get in touch with any Justice Department officials. And so by 4am she actually issued a temporary restraining order because she wasn't able to reach the Justice Department. And it was unclear when some of these flights might take off. She issues a temporary restraining order only as to the named plaintiffs who are, you know, in this suit. So 10 of these kids have a temporary restraining order by 4, I wake up, you know, Sunday and see that this has all happened on the docket. The judge also, at the same time, plans to hold a hearing at 3pm that afternoon to consider whether she ought to certify a class so. So that the order applies to a broader group of children who might be removed. The plaintiffs estimated that that number could be in the hundreds. But in the meantime, you know, even though this, this hearing was set at 3, the plaintiff's counsel informed the judge that, actually, we think that these kids are being loaded on flights right now and that these flights could take off, you know, at any moment. And so the judge then subsequently moved the hearing up to 12:30pm all of this being very reminiscent, Scott, of what happened during the Alien Enemies act litigation when once again, on a holiday weekend, Judge Boasberg, being the emergency duty judge, set a hearing. And as that hearing was ongoing, there were flights that were taking off. But in this instance, the fact that the judge moved the hearing up, and then right when the hearing started at 12:30, she announced that she took the liberty of going ahead and issuing a second TRO that would apply to the entire class of potentially affected minor migrants. So the first thing that she did was tell Drew Ensign, who again is a reoccurring figure who was involved in the Alien Enemies act litigation, before Judge Boasberg. But she Told him, you know, I just issued this new order. I want to. The first thing I want to do is just stop, and you go and tell your clients about this. So he goes away, comes back, and she asked for an update from him. He says that his understanding is that the planes are on the ground and that they're not going to take off. There may have been one plane that was in the process of taking off or took off, but had turned around at that point. So, again, if it had not been for the judge, I think learning from the experience that Judge Boasberg had in the Alien Enemies act litigation, if it hadn't been for that kind of proactive decision to move the hearing up and then go ahead and issue a class certification, it very well could have been the case that some of these children would have already been removed. Then there was a hearing on the matter. Frankly, I think that the government drew Ensign did not have a fully developed understanding of the legal basis for which some of these children were being removed. Some important background context here, Scott, is that, you know, there's already a number of procedural protections that people in immigration proceedings have, but that is especially true for minor migrants, as we have here. There's specific statutory protections under statutes like the Trafficking Prevention Reauthorization Act. I hope that I'm getting the acronym right. But that specifically was Congress recognizing that migrant kids are particularly vulnerable. You have to be provided with things before removal, like access to council and immigration proceedings and various other things. So there's kind of this unique status that children, unaccompanied children have. And here, one of the issues is that the counsel for these kids were saying, you know, some of these kids have ongoing immigration proceedings. They're not being given an opportunity to contest this removal, to do this and that, and be provided with many of these protections that they should have under the statute. And so it then, you know, Judge Sukhnanan went to the government and said, all right, well, what is the reason? Like, how are you just summarily removing these children? And the explanation that Ensign gave, at least at this preliminary hearing, has to do with a statute that deals with the care and custody of unaccompanied children. Essentially, under Title 6, Section 279, there's a provision that transfers the responsibility for the care and custody of of migrant children from DHS to orr, which is the Office of Refugee Resettlement. That's a office within hhs. And it's basically like, you know, they're responsible for placing kids in care facilities, looking after the best interest of the child while they're in custody, like all different types of things. And then one of those provisions says something to the effect of ORR is responsible for reunifying children with parents abroad where appropriate. And the government's legal basis for summarily removing these children seems to be that that is an independent authority that gives them the ability to just remove children for the purpose of reunifying them with parents abroad, separate from the Title 8 protections and that immigration process. So basically, they kind of don't have to follow any of those other protections because this is an independent basis. I frankly don't see how that can be the case, that that provision about the care and custody of children overrides all those other protections that were specifically given to unaccompanied children. But we don't have a whole lot of more information about what exactly the government's argument is to that end. And the way it ended, basically, is that Judge Suknan kind of wasn't buying it, said, I want to leave my order in place. I want to give you more time to brief this issue, because you're not really giving me a whole lot of arguments here. How long do you need, Drew Ensign said that he needed five days to brief the matter.
- [63:21]
Scott R. Anderson
Quite the rush at that point.
- [63:22]
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- [63:23]
Anna Bauer
Which again, was quite surprising given that there was this huge rush to remove these kids. And then DOJ comes in, doesn't seem to have a full grasp of what the legal basis is. And also there's all these contradictory representations that are being made like. Like, you know, Ensign says, oh, these are kids who were reunifying with their parents. My understanding is that their parents and the government of Guatemala have requested their return. But then the plaintiffs have these declarations where, you know, in some instances, the parents have not requested the return of the child and have just been called up and told, like, your kid's gonna be deported with a larger group. There are other instances as well where, like, all of the named plaintiffs who file declarations express some type of fear of being returned to Guatemala. Many of them express fear of return because they suffered abuse or neglect at the hands of a family member or a parent. And so even on the government's own logic of, oh, this is to reunite them with caregivers and with family in Guatemala, a lot of it just does not seem to add up. And Ensign did not have, you know, a sufficient response to that, according to Judge Suktanan. So basically, where we left it is the government has to file, you know, its opposition. This TRO by Judge Suktanan stays in place. And then she also ordered the children to be returned to the care facilities where they were placed in ORR custody, because many of them were in foster care programs, various facilities in different states. And so the government went through the process throughout that whole day of returning those children to where they were previously.
- [65:20]
Scott R. Anderson
And there's an interesting part of that we talked about offline, which is that the judge actually seemed to impose really kind of micromanagey reporting obligations on the government as it was doing those returns. You know, a lot of times, ordinarily you would expect, particularly with the government, the courts just issue something to happen and assume it was going to be happening. But that wasn't the case with Judge Sukh Nanan on this particular issue, right?
- [65:42]
Anna Bauer
Yeah. And again, I think that it really highlights how judges, especially in the district court for the District of Columbia, have taken note of what happened in the Alien Enemies act litigation with Judge Boasberg, but also just more broadly, how judges are seeing the presumption of regularity kind of being weakened, if not obliterated, because it felt at times like watching this, like, you know, Judge Sukhnen, like, could not trust the Justice Department to obey her order to return these children to the custody of orr. She required them every few hours to provide updates on whether the children have been deplaned. Because There were about 76 children who had been actually put on planes. Although the class itself of potential children affected is. Is larger than that, the estimate is around potentially 600. But the actual kids who were put on planes, that number was about 76. And so throughout the day, they were able to return some of them. But every time that they would say, we still have this many left to return to custody of orr, she would say, all right, I want a status report. And, you know, it. Again, it was a type of micromanaging that you don't really see. But, you know, these are kids who are, like I said, really vulnerable, uniquely vulnerable group. Right. Who have been yanked out of these facilities in other states, some, in some instances, put on a plane that they'd been on for by the time everything was kind of done. Like, I think that it. They, based on what I'd seen of the timeline, like, you know, they'd been potentially on planes for hours and hours and hours. And I think that the judge really wanted to see to it that these children, some of whom were as young as 10 years old, were put back to where they were before. And so it wasn't until, oh, gosh, the next day that they were able to do that, but we got five status reports in the meantime.
- [68:07]
Scott R. Anderson
Wow. I think this is a really challenging case on a personal level when you're dealing with such a vulnerable population. But I think it's worth stepping back a little bit and think about what this means in the broader trajectory of what the Trump administration has been proposing. Because you've got a couple elements here that are really troubling in my mind. You've got the element that is a vulnerable population. The Trump administration has thus far saved its most troubling actions in the immigration front to people it claims are members of violent gang terrorist groups like Trinidad or are actually convicted criminals in the US justice system or are very credibly alleged of having engaged in activity and are adults. Think of people being deported to South Sudan and things like that. They've picked victims who are not sympathetic, quite deliberately, I think, or less sympathetic, because it lets them paint a better narrative. This is a complete 180 on that. This is very clearly seeming to say, an appetite for some real political blowback. We have to remember the. The treatment of children in detention was maybe the most salient immigration challenge the first Trump administration encountered. That led to, I think, some of the first substantial pushback that they started really, really getting from the more draconian elements that they implemented at the time, which, frankly, don't really measure up much to what they're doing today. The other element is this lack of a legal basis. Maybe this is a communications issue with Drew Renson and dhs. Maybe there is a fully developed legal theory under this. But it strikes me as quite concerning and novel that you don't have anyone able to make a legal argument about why they have the ability to do this on relatively short notice, even if it's just a couple hours. You would think AGC's office at DHS could send the memo they wrote or the email they wrote, or relay the verbal advice they gave to say, here's the legal basis for this to their DHS colleagues. If anybody had bothered to check, to doj. Now, maybe DOJ doesn't rely on it. Maybe that's the problem. They thought the argument was so weak, they didn't think they should. They could rely on it. They needed to search for alternatives. But that's troubling in its own way. Tyler, do you. Do you have a reaction to this? I'm just kind of curious. I mean, in my mind, this really actually, even though nothing has come with it, even though Trump administration, to its credit, to the extent it deserves Credit for this is obeying the law, it's following the judges, it is not doing a JGG and planes took off anyway. Although that we seem to have gotten close to that, it still is really troubling because it really is illustrating the moving boundaries that even, you know, exist for the Trump administration's approach to these sorts of policies and a real leap in both in the, you know, questionable legal basis direction and in the target population direction. Am I off on that? Is that too concerned or is there a thread that resonates with you?
- [70:59]
Anna Bauer
You?
- [70:59]
Tyler McBrien
No, I mean, it's all extremely concerning. I guess I would slightly reframe the first part of what you were saying in that it seemed like DHS and the Trump administration were saying that they were going after these unsympathetic victims, the drug traffickers, the human traffickers, et cetera, when in reality the majority of people that they've deported so far are not in those categories, even though they, they, the government claims that they are and in fact have diverted resources away from finding human traffickers, et cetera. But you're absolutely right. They can't even make a bad faith argument that this particular population, children, are a threat to national security, are bad people, are criminals because they're children. So I really, really, I think it's, it's a measure of this, how comfortable the administration has gotten with this incremental testing of the boundaries, it seems. But I don't, I don't know, I'm curious Anna's thoughts on this as well.
- [72:06]
Anna Bauer
Yeah, I'll just say, like, I mean, one pattern that we saw in the Alien Enemies act litigation is even if some of these people, many, many, many, most of these people, as I understand it, were people who did not have criminal records that didn't fit with this narrative that the Trump administration was pushing with regard to, oh, we're, we're, you know, just sending away all the really violent people. But here, you know, instead, what they're doing, instead of trying to say these kids are violent threats, what they're doing is saying, I've seen the same, you know, from Stephen Miller, from various officials, this, what they call Judge Sukhnanan, this Biden judge, has prevented these kids from being reunited with their parents and their families. And they're suggesting, you know, that this is all about merely reuniting people. And, you know, I, I recommend that people who want to know what the situation is go and read some of these declarations because it is, you know, you've got 10 year old kids saying, my dad is my only surviving parent and he didn't take good care of me. You know, I was abused and neglected and things to that nature that like those are the kids that this administration wants to send back under the guise of being reunited with their parents. And the statement from the Guatemalan government, meanwhile, to me, and maybe there's a different statement now, Scott, that you saw, but I think is quite vague on the question of whether or not all of the families or parents actually did request the return of these kids.
- [74:07]
Scott R. Anderson
It did not go quite that far.
- [74:09]
Anna Bauer
So, so there's, there's a lot of, you know, similar themes here in terms of the murkiness of what is the agreement and the circumstances and the facts, the shaky legal basis. But then also I think just most diabolically the the fact that, like, what the kids they're sending back to potentially like terrible circumstances and there seems to be no process that has been given to try to figure out whether they're sending people back to the circumstances that I just described. And so it is a really disturbing escalation of some of the administration's previous tactics.
- [74:57]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, we will have to leave the topic there for now as we are out of time, although I'm confident for better, for worse, almost certainly worse, we'll have opportunities to revisit it. But this would not be rational security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Tyler, what do you have for us this week?
- [75:14]
Tyler McBrien
This one goes out to any New York or Tri State listeners or anyone who's passing through the region. I hopped on my bike this Labor Day weekend and biked up to City Island, New York, which is a very small mile and a half long, small island in the Bronx, all the way, kind of the top of the Bronx off of Pelham Bay park, which is actually New York City's largest park. I learned it is very charming. I got amazing seafood at a restaurant called Johnny's Reef, just a mess of fried seafood. There's fun little bookstores and antique shops and it takes you about an hour because it's about a mile and a half long. Getting, getting there takes about three times as long if you live in Brooklyn like I do. But it's once you get there, it's beautiful. There's beaches. It's like a kind of like a hidden, tucked away gem in New York.
- [76:03]
Scott R. Anderson
My favorite thing to do when I lived in New York long ago when I was like fresh out of college, is taking the train almost all the way to Far Rockway where You can get to a pretty decent beach if you take the train all the way there and just walk a mile or ride a bike for a mile, which is. I would haul my bike and go. It was great. It's amazing when you can take a train to a beach. It's like a dream scenario. How many cities can do that for you? Anna, what do you have for us for our object lesson this week?
- [76:25]
Anna Bauer
All right, so we were talking about musicals at the beginning of the show. This is not a musical, but since I've been in New York, one of the shows that I went to see is called John Proctor is the Villain. It's a play that is actually written by a woman who is from my hometown in rural Georgia and is kind of a take on, you know, it's set during the time of. Of the MeToo movement in a rural Georgia high school. And it is about a group of students who are reading the Crucible for the first time, and a group of the girls at the high school kind of come to the slow realization that John Proctor is the villain. And there's a lot more to it than that. But I don't want to spoil too much, but it is a show that I didn't expect to cry in, and I got to the end of it, and I was just sobbing. And then I read a New York Times article about it afterward, and the New York Times article was, like, quite literally titled the Broadway show that's Making Every Woman Cry. And it was just so good. And it also. A big part of the show is music, and the people in the show talking about music and bonding over music. And the end of it kind of ends with a big musical moment that involves Lorde's green light. So I highly recommend it. It was an amazing show. I think it's only on if you're in New York for two more weeks. So I hope that people can catch it if they're able to.
- [78:20]
Scott R. Anderson
Ooh, I like this. A very cultured episode of Rational Security with all these theater recommendations. I like it from our New York contingent. Unsurprisingly, for my recommendation, I am offering not quite a me occult, but maybe a small amendment to a prior object lesson. I have a few times on here sung the praises of Backyard Grill Pizza, which I stand by, which is great. I think I mentioned at some point that I erected for many years a very homegrown contraption of fireproof bricks and steel sheets that I used to build a pizza oven into my grill so I could get it up to, like, 650 or 700 degrees to grill make pizza at home, which was good and worked really well. But I have to say I had a conversation a few weeks or months ago now with some guys who make run an amazing pizza food truck. That's Pizzeria Loco out of Purcell, Virginia. Check them out. They're great. Which makes some of the best pizza I've ever had out of what is essentially a portable oven. And I asked them, how do you do this? And they're like, we were just backyard enthusiasts. We were just doing it. We realized if you really want to get like the puff, the chew and the crunch and everything, you got to get over 850 degrees degrees, which is really hard to do without a dedicated pizza oven. So I broke down and I bought a dedicated pizza oven this past week. One of the ones that hooks up to a propane tank. It gets so hot that at one point it broke into the thousand degrees Fahrenheit and could no longer tell me the temperature on the gauge. It just said hot on the little built in thermometer. It's kind of amazing. Zgozny ARC xl. But I gotta say, it makes some really crazy good pizza. I think it's kind of awesome. It's not cheap, but it's not, not a crazy expensive investment. And you can move it with you from house to house. Which when I thought about building my own pizza oven, my wife talked me into this as an alternative because this one we can actually take with us if we move. And I gotta say, I burned the shit out of my first three pizzas. But once, once I got past that and figured it out, they're really, really good. So if you were really a backyard pizza enthusiast, I still think the grill works great. If you want to improvise your own with the steel sheets, it's a lot cheaper and still came with pretty good pizza. But for like real Neapolitan style, like chewy, puffy pizza crust, I finally nailed it. And it's pretty amazing. So check it out. And I got more updates coming. Don't worry. I gotta rework my crust recipe. Everything's coming around. But I got a few more months before the snows. I can still work on it. So more updates are coming in the pike. Just wait for it.
- [80:23]
Anna Bauer
I'm so jealous. I love pizza so much. That's incredible.
- [80:27]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, we have had, we talked about doing a pizzeria cook off at my house for lawfare employees and associates. So that might be coming in the fall some weekend. We can lure you guys down to D.C. peter, bring us home. What do you have for us for object lesson this week?
- [80:40]
Peter Harrell
I'm jealous of that. I got nothing good like that on the food. Although I will say I tried being summer shifting into fall farmers market season. I tried topping some risotto that I made over the weekend with roasted delicata squash and that actually worked very. You know something else you can do squash. No, but my, my, I'll use a book for my object less lesson that I'm not quite done yet with, but I've been enjoying quite a bit. The very serious and dour a book called when the Clock Broke on kind of how we got to the politics we have today came out, I think last year, maybe late 23. And it basically argues that we are all living in the political world that Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot and Newt Gingrich created in the 1990s. And the book's a little bit and David Duke, you know, we, we are just living in their political world today. And it's a very interesting read, particularly for those of us who kind of vaguely remember that period from our childhoods.
- [81:35]
Scott R. Anderson
But well, yeah, politics debates from middle school. Like you're bringing me back to like neurons are firing from debates of yesteryear. I'll have to check that out. That's a great recommendation.
- [81:45]
Peter Harrell
But the other one I want to flag, which is more serious. We didn't talk about the tariff litigation all that much, but I think the Supreme Court is going to get an object lesson in the challenges of their Trump vacasa decision earlier this year on injunctions because there's a little hidden, you know, didn't dominate the headlines when the Federal Circuit ruled against Trump's tariffs on on Friday. They also remanded to the cit. I mean, it's all going to be stayed pending Supreme Court review. But like, can the CIT only give relief to the named plaintiffs, the kind of small importers who are importing, or could it issue a more universal injunction on tariffs? And I would posit that if the Supreme Court takes to its logical conclusion, this and only the named importers can get tariff relief. We're gonna see this small wine store that is a named plaintiff become like the worst world's biggest importer as everyone else contracts with them to be the named importer in the, in the record.
- [82:50]
Scott R. Anderson
It is, it is one of the wilder fun parts of that opinion we didn't talk about. We actually just did a live stream on it which lawful listeners can check out, which Peter, Peter didn't join us for but a few of us were on and that came up. It is. There's a lot of little, like fun nuggets in that opinion. We're waiting to see if we get the D.C. circuit opinion or Supreme Court cert first. We'll have to wait. They're kind of in a race at this point. Well, folks, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. But Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to Visit us@lawfaremedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes, for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media wherever you socialize your media. Be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening. And sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast and other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was Noam Osband of Go Rodeo and her music, as always, was performed by Sophia Yan and we were once again edited by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guests Tyler, Anna and Peter, I am Scott R. Anderson and we will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [84:04]
Peter Harrell
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Scott R. Anderson
New 5G phone? Enough, but I'm your hype man. When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months with credits totaling one year of free service, taxes extra for the device and service plan online only.