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- [00:00]
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- [00:21]
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- [00:26]
Isaac Saul
When.
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- [01:16]
Isaac Saul
This is Kartrax with Turtle Wax. Your car says a lot about you.
- [01:22]
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So if we asked your car what it would say about you, what would it say?
- [01:26]
Isaac Saul
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- [01:43]
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You are how you car.
- [01:50]
John Lowell
From executive producer Isaac Saul.
- [01:53]
Isaac Saul
This is Tangle Foreign.
- [02:06]
Good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tango podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the America party. That is Elon Musk's new effort to try to form a third party and I guess upend the duopoly. We're going to talk a little bit about how he plans to do this, share some reactions from the left and the right, and then of course, you'll get my take. Before we jump into that, I want to give you a quick heads up about tomorrow. I'm going to be doing a podcast about some things I've been wrong about. Something that has always irked me about political coverage is the way pundits and people who offer analysis or commentary like me, are drawn into making hot takes to get attention, but then never take ownership of them when they're actually wrong. I've set out to make sure that tangle is never like that. So every once in a while I like to take stock of what I've gotten right and wrong. And in tomorrow's Members Only edition, I'm going to focus the lens a little bit. I'm going to be taking personal stock and answering the question, what have I gotten wrong about Trump's second term so far? Because I have made a number of predictions about how things would go in his second term and I came up with five good examples of things I got wrong. So I'm going to talk about them tomorrow. All right, with that, I'm going to send it over to John for today's main topic and I'll be back for my take.
- [03:37]
Thanks, Isaac, and welcome everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports beginning Aug. 1, while also criticizing Brazil's legal action against its former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Number two, President Trump named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. In June, the president withdrew his nomination of tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to lead NASA and has not named a new appointee. Number three, Russia launched a large scale aerial attack on Ukraine on Wednesday, launching 728 drones at targets across the country. Number four, Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of X, but did not disclose the reason for her resignation. At number five, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the California Department of Education over its policy allowing transgender girls to compete in girls sports.
- [04:45]
Political Analyst
This morning, the feud between President Trump and Elon Musk escalating. Trump calling Musk a train wreck after the billionaire announced he's starting a new political party in the wake of his public split from Republicans, calling it the America Party, saying when it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one party system, not a democracy. In response, Trump saying, I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely off the rails. The one thing third parties are good for is is the creation of complete and total disruption and chaos. Musk hitting back, mocking Trump's social media platform, asking what's truth?
- [05:22]
Isaac Saul
Social On Saturday, Elon Musk announced his intention to create a new political party called the America Party. The announcement follows Musk's public fallout with President Donald Trump over Musk's exit from the administration and spending provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill act enacted on Friday. While the America Party is not yet an official political entity, Musk says he hopes to crack the uniparty system and represent the 80% in the middle of the United States before it can raise and spend money at the federal level. Any new political party must first be approved by the Federal Election Commission or the fec. However, due to leadership vacancies, the commission has been unable to approve Musk's party. The FEC lacks the four member minimum to conduct essential business such as issuing advisory opinions to approve new parties, and President Trump has yet to nominate members to fill the open seats. Furthermore, Musk will need to navigate the complex process of getting candidates on ballots as a third party, which varies from state to state. However, several political leaders have reportedly reached out to Musk to offer assistance with creating the America Party, including the Forward Party, led by Andrew Yang, the Libertarian Party and prominent political consultants. Musk has not established the party's formal platform, but on X he has endorsed calls to focus on reducing the federal debt, using artificial intelligence to modernize the military debt, decreasing regulations on energy and other policies. He also signaled that he may direct the party's efforts toward two to three Senate seats and eight to 10 House districts in the hopes of electing candidates who would serve as swing votes on contentious legislation. President Trump criticized Musk's proposal, writing on Truth Social I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely off the rails, essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a third political party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States, the system seems not designed for them. Separately, Musk's investors and business associates have expressed concern about his third party plans. On Saturday, James Fishback, a businessman and strong supporter of both Musk and Trump, posted a letter he sent to the chair of Tesla's board of directors, calling on the board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full time obligations to Tesla as CEO. Tesla shares fell roughly 7% on Monday and the stock is down 6.2% over the past five days as of Thursday morning. Today we'll explore reactions from the right and the left to Musk's plan for the America Party and then Isaac's take.
- [08:05]
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- [10:20]
All right, let's start with what the right is saying. The right is opposed to the America Party, with many expecting the effort to fail. Some say Musk's political ambitions exceed his capabilities. Others contend the party's central tenets are not as popular as Musk thinks, the New York Post editorial board said. Log off, Elon Elon Musk's brain is grinding gears at high rev, doing no one any favors. Since stepping away from his Doge work, he's been in and out of public hysteria, even devolving into a full on meltdown. His latest eruption centers on launching a third party, an idea that last worked in 1858 and only because an existing second party was in total collapse, the board wrote. Elon, like countless businessmen dabbling in politics before him, wants a quick, drastic fix, when any political reform under our system of government usually takes decades of sustained effort and at least careful work. This basic misunderstanding is a big reason Doge's results were rather underwhelming. It's not a question of new management upending failed practices. Governments just don't run like private companies, even though poorly run companies can come to behave behave like governments, the board said. Log off politics, Elon. Get some sleep and take a long, cool think before you ever try again. For now, you're far better off focusing on what you do best pushing American innovation forward through companies like SpaceX. In American greatness, cynical Publius argued, the America Party seems to think business and politics are the same. Musk has transformed reality and stood conventional wisdom on its head in so many areas electric vehicles, Internet access, space travel, social media and soon, neurological disorders. But like Icarus flying too close to the sun, even great men have their failures, publius wrote. Musk's foray into politics beyond the America saving help he gave Donald Trump in 2024 is destined for similar ignominy, both because of the historic failure of American third parties and because of the blind spot so many otherwise successful tech entrepreneurs have about how politics and human emotion work. Musk seeks the immediate perfect spending cuts in the current year that will eradicate the debt and the deficit. Mathematically, this seems possible and such mathematics appeal to the engineer in him. But he fails to understand that politically such an instant solution is utterly impossible and will accomplish nothing other than turn America over to the Democrats, publius wrote. If you are one of those opponents of the uniparty who see Musk's third party efforts as supporting your longing for fundamental changes, consider that his central issue of minimizing the debt will serve only to draw away GOP voters. Democrat voters care almost exclusively about entitlement spending, and a reduction in the national debt is an anthem to this ideal. In National Review, John R. Puri explored the conflict at the heart of Elon Musk's America Party. The very name of the party suggests that Musk believes his views reflect those of the nation. There's just one problem. The two pillars of Musk's party fiscal responsibility and elevating the will of the people are discordant, burry wrote. What drives the nation's gargantuan deficits is a structural mismatch between tax revenue and spending, which is primarily the result of popular demand. The American people are overwhelmingly unwilling to pay enough in taxes to cover all the government spending they enjoy. In fact, if the people had their way in politics more fully, the the national debt would be far larger than it already is, not smaller. Herein lies the dilemma that Musk fails to recognize. Our looming financial crisis will not be caused by government's inefficient responsiveness to the will of the people. Rather, the problem is that government is too responsive to the people, perry said. Politicians who vote for lower taxes and higher spending are not defying their voters. They're honoring their wishes. And if the 80% of citizens whom Musk purports to represent got even more of what they wanted from government, our inevitable fiscal calamity would much nearer, if not already upon us. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. The left mostly dismisses Musk's proposals, saying his plan has all the flaws of past third party attempts. Some suggest the America Party is just GOP light. Others say Musk could succeed by strategically targeting a select number of congressional seats. In the Washington Post, Philip Bump said, there's a reason that the third party dream has never been made real. You create a political party to build institutional power, to create a receptacle that pools money and energy on behalf of candidates. And that's the real question for who's going to help construct that institution? Former Trump adviser Hogan Gidley wasn't wrong when he said Musk has no natural political base, bump wrote. Who's going to donate to a party created by the richest man in the world? Who's going to volunteer? Trump managed to get people to donate to a billionaire, but he did so in large part by taking over an established institution with tens of millions of existing members. The most obvious answer to the question of who Musk's America Party is meant to serve is Elon Musk. Maybe he can convince other people to sign on, get candidates to run and maybe even get them elected. As Ross Perot learned, that's actually the easy part. Building a powerful party takes more than that and for both ideological and structural reasons has proven very difficult to do, bumps said. Just ask millionaire Andrew Yang, who founded the Forward Party after his unsuccessful presidential bid in 2020. He is now reportedly offering his advice to Musk for whatever good that will do either of them. In New York magazine, Ed Kilgore called the America Party the GOP by another name. Musk wants massive reductions in the size and cost of the federal government, along with the attendant public debt. That's not only a slender read for a disruptive third party, but it's at least rhetorically identified with the gop, despite the party's own spotty fiscal record, Kilgore wrote. From a practical point of view, why would some aspiring deficit hawk in any given state or congressional district want to take a flyer on a candidacy under the America Party banner when they could just as easily run as a Rand Paul Thomas Massie fiscal hardliner in a Republican primary? The only answer I can think of is that it may be a way to gain access to Musk's money, and it's unclear at this point how much of his fortune Musk is willing to devote to this effort. More likely, Musk is just the latest in a long list of political amateurs who look at the unhappiness of the two party system and make two major mistakes. One, they don't grasp that most self identified independents are what Nate Silver calls IINOs and independents in name only who routinely vote for the same major party even when given alternatives. And two, they assume all these people share the same grievances with the current party system, kilgore said. At this point, Musk isn't offering anything voters can't find in the right wing of the Republican Party or, barring that, in the Libertarian Party. In the New York Times, Nate Cohen wrote about why a third party bid is unlikely but not impossible. With third parties unlikely to obtain power, people often see a vote for a third party as a wasted vote that might be better spent ensuring the preferred major party prevails. The wasted vote problem is clearly a very significant issue for third parties and probably a prohibitive one, but there are paths to overcoming it, cohen said. The simplest path is if a third party polls so well that it seems viable against the major parties. This is not without precedent in presidential politics Ross Perot briefly led polls in 1992. Similarly, independent or third party candidates have led polls for governor, Senate and House and ultimately won like Angus King, governor and senator in Maine, and Jesse Ventura, governor in Minnesota. A more clever path exploit America's predictable and polarized political geography. In the 80% of states and districts that aren't competitive between the major parties, a third party could flip the script and argue that the usually doomed minority party is the possible spoiler, not the new third party. The usual minority party may as well drop out and give the third party a shot, cohen wrote. With only a handful of seats, a third party could represent the balance of power in Congress. As Musk mentioned this weekend, whether for determining control or electing a president in the House, if NO candidate amasses 270 electoral votes all right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
- [19:10]
All right. That is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. Let me put it this way. If I were Elon Musk and I had all the money and the influence that he has, I honestly can't think of a better way to parlay it into an impactful third party than his current proposal. Musk is suggesting a campaign of maximum influence, targeting a few vulnerable Senate and House seats. If you're after short term political gains over building a decades long movement as Musk is, then that's the smart way to play it. It's less ambitious than throwing a presidential candidate into the mix, which is what no Labels mused about and ultimately failed to do in 2024. Instead, it's pretty similar to Andrew Yang's Forward Party, which Yang hoped could get its start by advancing a few candidates in competitive districts. Yang actually described his plans In a 2021 interview I did with him in nearly identical terms to Musk's. Imagine a group of current and former swing vote senators like Joe Manchin, the independent from West Virginia, or Kyrsten Sinema the independent from Arizona, or Lisa Murkowski the Republican from Alaska, or Susan Collins the Republican from Maine, or Mitt Romney, the Republican from Utah, all flying under the America Party banner. Their position at the fulcrum of the political machine would give their small bloc a tremendous amount of leverage. This is even more true in the House, where a dearth of competitive districts and a very tight partisan divide gives outsized power to a few very competitive seats. Musk is also identifying a legitimate opportunity the country agrees on more than we realize. Self identified political independents are at their highest numbers ever. Approval for Congress is near an all time low. And as President Trump has proved throughout his political career, the Overton window can be shifted by a political movement if it is compelling enough and Musk's timing is good. By 2028, the Republican and Democratic parties will both be embroiled in open battles for their new leaders. Now, I personally think our political duopoly is ripe for a recharge, but questioning whether the system will benefit from Musk's new party is fair. Our broken electoral system, which produces consistently non competitive elections and increasingly partisan candidates, needs substantial reform. And I believe in the potential of solutions like open primaries, ranked choice voting, and genuinely competitive third and fourth parties. The first two reforms are happening now but slowly, while competitive third party requires a grassroots movement or in this case, an absurdly wealthy and politically influential backer. I'm not a fan of how influential money is in politics, but if it's a means to a productive end, then I wouldn't mind seeing Elon take up the cause. And it's no sweat off my back if he lights another $40 billion on fire, which I'll concede is the most likely outcome here. Musk is right that our national debt is a brewing disaster, but I think he's wrong that a coalition of voters will care enough about that to rally around a party running on it as their core issue. Yes, polling consistently shows that voters share many of Musk's concerns about the debt and deficit. Indeed, fiscal responsibility is one of those 8020 issues politicians typically chase. However, it's also a low salience issue. How many voters would cast a ballot for a party that aligns with their view on the debt, but not on immigration or abortion or guns or healthcare? Not many. Creating practical policies is Musk's biggest problem. If America Party politicians are going to die on the hill of fiscal responsibility, they'd have to vote down any piece of legislation that increases the debt or deficit, meaning opposing popular spending, which is risky, and supporting more taxes impossible. There's a reason politicians like Thomas Massie, the Republican from Kentucky, are so rare. And it's not because nobody has ever tried to sell the public on loyalty to deficit reduction. As John Pury put it under what the Right Is saying, what drives the nation's gargantuan deficits is a structural mismatch between tax revenue and spending, which is primarily the result of popular demand. The American people are overwhelmingly unwilling to pay enough in taxes to cover all the government spending they enjoy. When push comes to shove, people aren't going to back Social Security reforms or military cuts en masse, which is why Democrats and Republicans never do it. It's certainly why they never make them a core wedge issue. So what exactly will the identity of the America Party be that draws people together? That part is unclear, and it's probably why it will fail. Even if Musk were to somehow conquer all of the above and rally a few good politicians to the cause, he'd run into perhaps the most important problem. Musk himself is now toxic. I'm not the only American who has soured on him over the last year, and nothing that has happened in the last few weeks, aside from this idea, has changed my opinion. Doge was a completely disorganized mess that caused extreme disruptions in the federal workforce, destroyed foreign aid, misrepresented its own savings regularly, and ended up being meaningless in the face of a bill that added trillions of doll dollars to our debt. The effort itself was only popular among Trump's base, who Musk now seems keen on going to war with. How do you think that will go? Meanwhile, Musk is continuing to step on PR landmines. His attempt to fix Grok turned into the first ever AI to dub itself Mecca Hitler, which users prompted to fantasize about raping journalists and sexually harassing the CEO of X, who interestingly resigned the next day. His own companies seem hamstrung by how politically repellent and seemingly scatterbrained his interests are, and in his last independent political forays, like in Wisconsin where he tried to swing a state Supreme Court seat, he failed epically. None of this inspires my confidence that this is the man who can unstick what is probably the most entrenched political duopoly in the Western world. No labels failed because they couldn't find the right candidate to represent their cause, and everything about their brand seemed stale and disorganized. The Forward Party faded into non existence because they could never rally a movement. It had no ideological core, didn't grow grassroots support, and often refused to take positions on controversial issues. Their core proposal, which was universal basic income, didn't have enough broad support to break into the Zeitgeist, and nothing they ran on clarified what they'd do if they ever actually won seats. Not to mention that they never stopped running into election law barriers. Musk can learn from these examples, but he'll face a lot of the same issues. His brand isn't uninteresting, but it is toxic. He doesn't have any grassroots movement. He's trying to generate it top down. His core issue reducing the debt and deficit is probably less potent than universal basic income. His ideological core is often hard to discern, aside from being trollish on the Internet, but it might be indistinguishable from Trump's, and he's already running into election law challenges. Still on the main points, Musk is right that a competitive third party would be good for America. He's right to imagine a way to focus on pressure points in swing districts, and he's absolutely got the money and name recognition to stand a chance. Do I think he'll succeed? Almost certainly not. Will I gleefully encourage him to spend a bunch of money and time trying? You bet. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [26:31]
John Lowell
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- [27:40]
Isaac Saul
All right, that is it for my take. Which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from David in Stanford, Connecticut. David said, do you believe that the increased productivity from AI will result in primarily 1 a shorter work week or 2 job reductions? I love this question, David. So much so that we decided to open it up to a kind of rapid fire response from our entire editorial team to give you a sampling of our opinion. So we're going to do that today. You're going to hear a number of different voices here and I'm going to have everybody introduce themselves before they give their answer. I'll start. I'm Isaac, Executive Editor at Tangle. My opinion is that it's hard to imagine a world where a shorter workweek comes before job reductions. I've long been skeptical of the imminent impact AI is going to have on our society, and I still think it can be vastly overstated. But of the two options, job reductions will almost certainly come first or are already here and will have a much broader impact. Although maybe all you lucky software engineers start getting shorter work weeks since you can just ask AI to do your job, I guess. But not us here at Dangle.
- [28:47]
Lindsay Knuth
Hi David, I'm Lindsay Knuth, I'm the Associate editor and I think of those two options it's job reductions by a landslide. AI tools. They might make us all a little more productive, but that heightened productivity has long been an argument for four day work weeks and we really still have no widespread adoption to show for it. As for layoffs from AI, we're already seeing them across blue and white collar industries. CEOs are no longer dancing around the cuts they have and will make. And labor automation startups abound with goals ranging from making AI really good at one task task to enabling the full automation of the economy that is taking everyone's jobs.
- [29:26]
Ari Weitzman
This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman here with my answer to this question. In the short term I think it's going to be option three, which is same hours, more productivity, but different jobs. I doubt our output centric society will encourage a reduction in hours, so instead existing professionals will get increasingly more efficient at their jobs. However, in the long term, I think AI adoption will cost jobs. The skills the technology replicates are the same ones new professionals need to learn, so hiring recent graduates will decrease. How that affects the future job market is unclear, but it initially does not look great.
- [30:04]
Political Analyst
I'm Audrey Moorhead, Associate Editor. I think AI will result in job reductions, especially for white collared positions. Corporations will be more likely to refuse new hires than experiment by restructuring the work week, and I think we can already see that trend happening. The college grad unemployment rate is the highest it's been in a decade. As companies have fewer entry level openings, the next logical step is reducing the existing workforce. And CEOs are already hinting that they plan to do so if AI becomes a viable competitor.
- [30:33]
Ari Weitzman
Hi, this is Will Kbach, Senior Editor, and here's my response to the question. I think job reductions are more likely than a shorter workweek. Here's my thought. If AI driven efficiencies reduce workloads to a point where workers in a given industry don't have enough work for a five day week, I think companies would be more inclined to reduce headcount and redistribute the work to a smaller pool of employees, saving money without a drop off in production in theory all right.
- [31:02]
Isaac Saul
That is it for today's reader Listener question. Thank you David again for giving us something to chop up here in the office. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace.
- [31:19]
Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under the radar story for today, folks. On Tuesday, the American Federation of Teachers announced it would launch the National Academy for AI Instruction in the fall, which will offer free virtual instruction to the union's 1.8 million members. The initiative, funded by generative artificial intelligence companies anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI, will work with educators to develop strategies for implementing AI in the classrooms. While many educators have expressed concern about their roles being replaced by AI, the AFT and AI companies say the Academy aims to ensure that teachers remain at the head of the classroom as AI adoption scales CBS News has this story and there's a link in today's episode Description alright, next up is our numbers section. As of July 9, the percentage of Americans with the favorable view of elon musk is 35%, and the percentage of Americans with an unfavorable view of elon Musk is 56%, according to the Silver Bulletin's aggregate favorability rating. The number of distinct ballot qualified political parties in the US as of January 2025 is 55, according to Ballotpedia. The number of state level parties as of January 2025 is 238. The number of minor parties, not Republican or Democrat, recognized in more than 10 states as of January 2025 is three. The number of candidates on the ballot in the 2024 presidential election in Louisiana was 11, the most of any state. The percentage of Americans who think a third major party is needed and that the Republican Party is doing an adequate job of representing the American people is 58%, while the percentage of Americans who think a third major party is needed and that the Democratic Party is doing an adequate job of representing the American people is 37%. That's according to a September 2024 Gallup poll. The percentage of Democrats who think a third major party is needed is 53%, the percentage of independents who think a third major party is needed is 69%, and the percentage of Republicans who think a third major party is needed is 48%. And last but not least, our have a nice day story. Zion is one of the most visited national parks in the United States, but it wasn't always so popular or pristine. The park suffered from crowded traffic, parking, congestion and smog that disrupted wildlife and frustrated visitors. I personally saw fist fights over parking spaces because it was so congested, lisa White, Zion's transportation manager, said. That started to change in 2000 when the park launched its first shuttle system. Now that the park attracts 5 million guests a year, Zion has transitioned to an all electric fleet of 30 buses in 2024, further reducing noise and pollution. The smog is gone, white said. Reasons to Be Cheerful has this story and there's a link in today's episode description all right everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to retangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. In tomorrow's Friday edition, Isaac is going to be answering questions and taking stock of what he's gotten wrong about Trump's second term so far. A reminder that Friday editions are for paid subscribers only. You can be one of the 65,000 Tangle members who receives these editions and more by going to the link in today's episode description or readtangle.com to sign sign up. Isaac, Ari and Camille will be here with the Sunday podcast. I'll be out next week. Senior Editor Will K. Beck will be filling in for me and I'll be back the following week. For Isaac and the rest of the team, this is John Law signing off. Have an absolutely fabulous weekend, y'.
- [35:03]
All.
- [35:04]
Peace.
- [35:06]
Our Executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited in X Engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Caspersen. Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saw Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.
- [35:39]
Lindsay Knuth
Foreign.
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I
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- [36:45]
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- [37:13]
John Lowell
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