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- [00:00]
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- [00:56]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [01:46]
Isaac Saul
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I am your host Isaac Stol. Back in the saddle. It's nice to be sitting here on the microphone. I'm at home now, my my four week old son sleeping upstairs peacefully for now. If you hear him in the background, you know that means one of his little two or three hour naps has been interrupted probably by my loud voice booming through the podcast. There's so much to say. I mean, I've been out for four weeks. It feels like I've been out for four months or a year. There's been a lot of news and that's why I'm here today, because I'm coming back in earnest to Tangle next week. And during the break I told the team I was going to just work on this piece kind of in the background. On Trump's first month. It occurred to me that I'd be coming back right around the one month mark. Took about five weeks of paternity leave by next week and Trump's first month just ended yesterday on Thursday and I'm Recording this on Friday. So there's so much to talk about, there's so much to cover, and I have a lot of feelings, strong and otherwise, about what we've seen in the first month. And we're putting out a newsletter today that is a beast of a newsletter. It's going to be a two part newsletter. It's 10,000 words, all me, everything that I've been thinking and feeling over the last month. And we wanted to get a podcast version out of that newsletter. So if I were to sit here and read the 10,000 word newsletter to you, it would probably take about an hour and a half and I think you'd fall asleep at some point. So I'm not going to do that. But I am sitting here with that newsletter in front of me as our editors scour over it, and I'm basically just going to walk through it and talk through some of what I've been seeing. And I've bucketed this podcast into four things. The good, the bad, the unclear, and the abhorrent, which sort of came up as I was doing the good, the bad, and the unclear sections. I want to be clear here that I decided to sort these buckets this way intentionally. I don't feel like what I've seen from the Trump administration in a lot of respects so far are things that I can rule on definitively. Most of what I've witnessed are things that I expect my feelings to change about. So the good and the bad and the unclear, they're sections that I hold with a kind of tenuous nature. I think as more information comes to light, as the evidence changes, as the policy changes, as the results of the policy come to bear, my opinions might change. As I was doing the bad section, I realized that there are some things where I don't feel open minded about. There are some things that Trump has done that I think are really, really bad so far. And I broke off that into this abhorrent section because I want to be honest, when I feel like I'm close minded on an issue and there are a few things that Trump has done that I feel close minded about and feel very negative about. I know a lot of you guys know me who are listening, some of you. You know, there's 20 or 30,000 people who've joined the Tangle community just in the last month. So there are people listening to this podcast or reading this newsletter who have never heard from me before, which is a really weird, interesting new thing for me. So for those of you who are new and aren't familiar with me or my politics. I'll just say for the sake of clarity that, you know, my feelings about this administration, about the Biden administration, about politics in our country more generally, tend to be all over the place. I don't think I fit neatly into any bucket. I do think I am a political moderate on most issues. And because I'm a political moderate on most issues, I'm not part of Donald Trump's base. I'm not the kind of voter or person that he's been targeting. So I expected to not be crazy about his first month. I think on top of that, most presidents, including Joe Biden, make their most aggressive, partisan and base oriented actions early on in their presidencies because we have this concept now of the first 100 days. Every president tries to make their first hundred days a really memorable, you know, important, impactful time. And that's often when they leverage their power to the strongest degree they can. It's when they signed a bunch of executive orders, they try to push through their cabinet members. You know, they push legislation that they want early that they think they're going to need to spend a lot of political capital on. The Trump administration's no different. In fact, it's almost on tilt because part of Trump's campaign and part of what he ran on was this, like, revenge tour against his, quote, unquote enemies. So I didn't expect to be a fan of Trump's first month or his first hundred days. I expected this to be a time of partisan rancor and him kind of doing his whole unchained flood the zone thing. And I was right. So you'll notice that there are more things in the bad section than there are in the good section. And that doesn't surprise me. And, you know, you can make of that or think of that whatever you want. I expect people to accuse me of Trump derangement syndrome because I'm critical of him. And I expect people to accuse me of, you know, sympathizing with Nazis because I talk about some of the things he's doing that are good. So I accept all the feedback. If you have thoughts, as always, you can reach us by writing in to staffeadtangle.com or by leaving comments on the article on our website, readtangle.com I've sort of stopped sharing my personal email because my inbox gets flooded and it's really hard for me to manage. But those of you who know it, have it. So please, you know, if you got criticisms, write in and be really, be really thoughtful and open minded. On your end, too, because that helps me hear you. As always, I'm just trying to offer my transparent, honest opinions and liable to change my mind, except for that abhorrent section, which I don't think I will. So that's a lot of preamble. We're going to jump in with the good, the bad, the unclear and the abhorrent from the first month of the Donald Trump presidency. All right, first up, we're going to start with the good. So these are the actions from Trump's first month of the presidency that I'm supportive of and that I expect to have some long term positive impacts on the country. These are also actions I am open minded about, meaning I'm willing to change my assessment of them as I watch them unfold or discover new evidence or hear fresh arguments. The first thing that I want to talk about is the arrests of dangerous, unauthorized migrants. So the definition of a presidential mandate is always up for debate. But if Trump actually has a mandate on anything, carrying out deportations is probably it. Even so, as the stories of initial immigration arrests began rolling in, I was left a little bit gobsmacked. Some of these news reports include people like Anderson Zambrano Pacheco, who was walking freely in New York City despite being the leader of the Trende Argo gang, which is a Venezuelan gang that is building its presence in the United States, quite infamously took over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. There was a ton of news reports about that and controversy about how real the takeover was, but they're the real deal. They're here. Dozens of members of their gang have been arrested now under Trump, and many of them have committed violent crimes. And apparently we knew where they were and they were here, obviously illegally. Same reaction for me when I hear of Wilkin Melo Marte, a Dominican Republic national who was wanted for a double homicide in his own country. There was an international arrest warrant out for his arrest walking freely in the United States. Fernando Vasquez Mendoza, a cartel hitman. There's a long list of people like this that the Trump administration has arrested. It says it has arrested 11,000 people that are here without authorization and claims many of them have committed violent crimes, which I'm going to talk about in a second. My question is how? How does it take the election of someone like Trump for people like this to be arrested? Is it a lack of willpower? Is it bad luck? Poor organization politics? Is it just timing? The Biden administration obviously arrested some people like this, too. Maybe they just didn't get around to these people. I genuinely don't know the answer, but it kind of boggles my mind. And I say that as a person who wants more legal immigration to the United States. I know it's not trendy to say this anymore, especially on the right, but I do believe diversity is one of our country's strengths. When you bring different cultures and worldviews and experiences and people together, it can cause tension, but it can also create high levels of tolerance. Like the United States is the most tolerant place on earth still today. And in our case, we have a supremely unique society full of opportunity. On top of all of that, I believe pluralism, that's a system in which multiple states, groups, principles and sources of authority can coexist together, is a fundamentally good and American value. And I say all of that just to make the point that an orderly immigration system producing positive results and encouraging the value of pluralism is not possible if we allow people like the people Donald Trump has been arresting in the last few weeks to brazenly violate our immigration laws and then violate our most basic laws in civil society against things like assault and robbery and murder. As I said millions of times, the best way to solve our immigration crisis is to increase our capacity to process the people who come here outside legal system, while also expanding the legal opportunities to come here to work or become a citizen. Are some stories about Trump's mass roundups concerning of course, stories of nonviolent migrants working here while they go through the immigration system being deported are genuinely heartbreaking. They're unauthorized migrants who have been here for decades, are productive members of society and know little of their home country, who should not be heartlessly shipped out without opportunities to get permanent legal status by the letter of the law. Being in the country as an unauthorized immigrant is not actually a crime. That is why we have courts to process whether someone's truly an asylum seeker or not. Yet some migrants right now are being sent to Guantanamo Bay without having committed any crimes besides crossing the border illegally or overstaying a legal entry. Is the way Trump advertising the deportation sometimes gross and inhumane? Yes, it is. They posted a video online the White House of ASMR deportations, where chains are clanking together and people are supposed to relax while they listen to these migrants being deported, many of whom are having their lives upended and as we know now, many of whom have not committed any serious crimes. They're just here illegally. All of that stuff is obscene. I agree. I understand why it makes people recoil from this administration. Yet Trump somehow is unique for unapologetically arresting and deporting the kinds of people we've seen him target in these first few months, again, many of whom are violent offenders or dangerous criminals that these administrations know are here. And it predictably makes him incredibly popular with a lot of Americans because it's common sense and it's good politics. He's not conducting the mass deportations of millions of people he promised, and I hope he doesn't, but he is targeting a lot of violent criminals who are here illegally. I just don't understand why Democratic administration can't get these people off the street the way Trump has done. And I don't understand why they hand him these wins on a silver platter when if you're somebody who wants more immigration, taking care of the people who are here illegally and committing serious heinous crimes by arresting and deporting them is so fundamental to building trust in the system. And a lot of Democrats just don't do it. So this is a good thing that Trump is doing because we need order in the immigration system in order for it to be humane, despite my concerns about some of the stuff that's happening. And I think he has a mandate on this issue, so I'm not surprised that he's pushing forward with it. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [14:43]
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- [15:10]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [15:47]
Isaac Saul
All right, next up is the permitting reform orders. I brought this up in my brief little pop up during paternity leave. The one thing I wrote for Tangle was that on Trump's first day in office, he actually issued several orders to expedite federal permits that will help Accelerate the timeline for building critical energy infrastructure. This is a long time, long standing, bipartisan complaint that there are environmental reviews in red tape that take too long, that are just, they're too cumbersome, and they're slowing down important energy infrastructure projects big and small across the United States. Trump immediately took action on this. It's an order that's within his power because a lot of the red tape comes from executive orders. And there's even left of center writers like Noah Smith who have championed these orders. And I think Trump should go further. Just as Los Angeles is now cutting red tape to rebuild after the wildfires, Trump should push to extend expedited permitting and construction of housing all across the country, because we need it. We need more housing, we need more energy infrastructure, and we should cut red tape to get there. I think this is great. Of all the things Trump is doing, it might actually impact your life more than others if he brings this into the housing space. We spend a lot of time talking about stuff that really won't impact a lot of Americans that much. This is one thing that actually really, really good. And I hope he push the envelope. The next thing is de minimis shipping Tangle editor Will Kbach talked about this in his take on Trump's tariff. But he closed this loophole in shipping from China, which I thought was a great move. The carve out previously allowed shipments below $800 to enter the United States duty free and with minimal inspection.
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- [17:34]
Isaac Saul
Which has enabled Chinese companies to undercut the US Market and has very likely been a gateway for fentanyl to enter the country. It is a loophole that Biden should have closed. Another one of those things that makes you wonder, why did he not do this? And Trump's action here is definitely going to save lives. The next thing is the tariff threats. Now, the operative word here is threats. Because I approve of Trump using economic pressure to negotiate for broader purposes. I'm very skeptical of the economic success that broad based tariffs will have. So to just put it simply, I don't mind Trump's exchange of threats with Canada and Mexico, which ended in commitments from both countries to do more on border security. Canada was headed that way already with a border security plan from December. Mexico already sends troops to the border. They did it during the Biden administration. I know both of those things. But for all the hubbub, Trump basically caused 48 hours of public relations chaos before coming to seemingly amicable terms with leaders of Canada and Mexico. And then he got them to commit publicly to helping us tackle two of our biggest issues, illegal immigration and illegal drug use. It's a very public thing that he forced them to do. He didn't have to levy any tariffs. I get why many people don't think it's prudent to negotiate with our allies in this manner, but I certainly approve of the outcome. All right, next up is Taiwan. A lot of pundits predicted that Trump was going to abandon Taiwan when he came into office. However, the administration's Taiwan stance is actually looking pretty positive so far. Last week, in fact, China accused the Trump administration of a, quote, unquote, serious regression in its position on Taiwan after the State Department removed a line from its website which stated that the US does not support Taiwanese independence. I know this may seem small, deleting a line sentence from a website. It's not. America does this dance with China on Taiwan. That is mostly public statements and posturing like this. The State Department dropping that phrase. It's a departure from long standing US Policy and it's a good one. There is a consistent ethic the United States should hold that Ukraine gets self determination, Taiwan gets self determination, Palestinians get self determination. If you're going to support the principle of independent democratic nations, you need to do it consistently. Even when it's inconvenient. Especially when it's inconvenient. And it is very inconvenient to support this ethic as it relates to Taiwan because it creates tension with China, a huge trading partner and another global power. The Trump administration is leaning in and they're right to. There was also some signaling on military spending that I was very interested in. Perked my ears up. Trump says and does a lot of stuff. Obviously he throws things at the wall incessantly. I'd estimate roughly 15% of it ever really sticks. It's hard to know what to take seriously and what not to. I get that. That being said, last Thursday, he made one of the most remarkable comments I've heard from a sitting president in a long time. He proposed publicly from the White House a trilateral agreement with China and Russia to mutually draw down military budgets by fear, 50%. Again, Trump says and does a lot of stuff. There's no details here. This is just something he said. But you never hear another president talking like this. And I absolutely love that a US President is suggesting a major reduction in military spending among the global powers. If you are someone who is serious about reducing our debt and deficit, you should support this. Anyone serious about a grand vision for world peace and balanced budgets should support this. Anyone afraid of what happens if three world powers end up clashing globally in earnest. Should support this. I have no idea what prompted Trump to make these comments, but I'm very interested to hear more. And finally, there's always the small stuff. Lifting bans on plastic straws, abandoning the production of pennies, banning junk food purchases with food stamps, floating the idea of a sovereign wealth fund. Moving the Greenland issue into the mainstream. No, we shouldn't take Greenland. But yes, as I talked about on this podcast, we really should increase our presence there. For all the attention Trump gets for throwing red meat to the base, he is remarkably good at taking action on exceedingly popular, simple to implement ideas for the masses. He is also good at just suggesting things, entering them into the lexicon that other people don't. I cover politics for a living and I was woefully unaware of the wastefulness of manufacturing pennies. And I agree there is nearly zero use case for them anymore. Why is Trump the first one to take action? I have no idea, but it makes total sense to me. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [22:41]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [22:59]
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- [23:49]
Isaac Saul
All right, that is it for the good. Which brings us to the bad. So these are the things from the first month of the Trump presidency that I am worried about. That means I personally expect these stories to have long term negative impacts for the country. I'll say again, I'm also open to changing my mind about these things as events unfold. The first one is Elon Musk and his involvement with this administration broadly. I'm going to use up a lot of space here because I've been holding a lot in and I think Elon's involvement might be the most consequential thing happening in the administration right now. I'm not even sure where to begin, honestly, so I'm just going to start here. I was listening to the Fifth Column last week. It's one of my favorite podcasts. It's three roughly libertarian, right of center political thinkers drinking and schmoozing and typically acting as a check on the mainstream media while also covering current events. Michael Moynihan, one of the show's hosts, was actually a guest at our second live event in New York City, and for what it's worth, he basically stole the show. Anyway, Moynihan was talking about Elon and he had an insight that I'm gonna steal here, and I think it's a good one. Musk is like a college kid who's first learning about politics and thinks everything he's discovering is brand new and incredible and eye opening and simple. And like most college age Americans who read Howard Zinn or Ayn Rand or Noam Chomsky for the first time, he is being radicalized. His radicalization doesn't make him special. It makes him just like every single person who learns about US politics in close bones, bubbles of thoughts before they expand. The kinds of things they are reading or consuming, where they moderate their ideas and they test them in the real world. What makes this remarkable though, is that he's doing it while exerting tremendous influence over the federal government. Unfortunately for all of us, Musk's maturation process is a roller coaster we are all strapped in for. And even worse, he isn't reading Zinn, Iran, or Chomsky. He's smoking the cesspool that is news on his platform X, which is replete with half baked ideas, conspiracies and outright lies. Most people defend Musk's involvement in a blanket nature. They argue that he's a genius and that his unfathomable riches prove everything he touches turns to gold. Until recently, I was actually one of those people. I was a Musk Stan myself. One of the people who thought he was a brilliant entrepreneur capable of winning favor across political lines and would advance humanity with unlimited Internet, sustainable electric cars and interplanetary travel in a take that has aged like milk. I even cheered his initial involvement with Twitter, predicting it would, quote, be a good move for political discourse. End quote. I was hopeful he would turn the 21st century public square away from its censorious liberal bent toward the long sought balanced marketplace of ideas. In the two years since, my criticism toward Musk has been soft and indirect. I've held out hope and I've often assumed the best of him, but he's lost that privilege. Instead of saving Twitter, he's turned it into a conservative mirror of what it used to be, a cesspool of shitposting, where he censors and nukes accounts that are a personal affront, applies zero consistency to his own moderation decisions, and has generally helped bots, engagement farmers and conspiratorial nonsense run wild. Now he's promising to change Community Notes because it is producing answers he doesn't like. Even Musk's own products, like his AI software Grok, will now tell you that he pumps out a fire hose of false or misleading claims on a daily basis. The truth is, even someone as brilliant as Musk in some disciplines can be exceedingly bad at even related ones. Michael Jordan might be the greatest basketball player ever, but I've actually seen videos of him playing table tennis on YouTube and I suspect I would smoke him. I don't know Musk personally, so I don't know what happened to him, but I mean this sincerely. I'm worried about him. For over a year there's been good reason to believe he's on some kind of manic rampage to try to run as much of the world as possible. He has changed in meaningfully bad ways, becoming more trollish, mean spirited, ignorant and unhinged. Some of what Musk is doing is simply annoying. He has popularized a bunch of know nothing tech bros like David Sacks or Jason Calacanis who speak confidently about how the government works and what we need to do to fix it, while simultaneously proving they do not understand most of what they are talking about. Sachs, for instance, recently claimed we have, quote, no idea where our federal dollars go and we can't ask about it. But we know exactly where the money goes, mostly to the military and the elderly. And we aren't only allowed to ask, we usually get answers when we do. Jason, as he's known on Twitter, a multimillionaire who recently begged for a government handout to save Silicon Valley banks, suggested we should quote randomly, end quote, cut 15 to 30% of the government, which is the kind of thing you say when you are a rich tech bro who knows literally zero people that rely on federal assistance to eat, grow crops, be housed, get an education, receive military benefits, or go to the doctor. More consequential than making so many politically ignorant smart people famous. Musk appears totally oblivious to the real world repercussions his team's actions inside side the federal government are having. Examples of this are endless and I've linked to them in today's episode description. Whether it's them not understanding how numbers related to Social Security work, or releasing bad data sets, or claiming they've saved X money by deleting a contract that never went into effect, whatever it is, his team either can't read these data sets they are accessing properly, or they're intentionally misrepresenting them to the public. Like the ludicrous claim that we are sending a new enormous sums of money to 150 year old dead people on Social Security at the same time he's degrading the entire administration. Musk rallied Vice President J.D. vance and the blob of technocrats who worship him to support the overtly racist programmer he hired and then fired and then rehired on the grounds that he was just a kid who deserved the chance to change after some bad social media posts when he was younger. In actuality, the programmer was 25 years old when he made the post, only weeks before he was hired. They were unapologetically racist. Musk naturally showed pity for this programmer while suggesting the Wall Street Journal reporter who did her job by truthfully reporting on the post was a quote, disgusting and cruel person, end quote, who should be, quote, fired immediately. I am a card carrying member of the anti cancel culture crew, but when groups like Doge don't appropriately police themselves, it actually justifies and encourages the mob. And who could blame Musk for all the madness? He doesn't sleep. He's trying to run a half dozen of the most important companies in the world and make sweeping cuts to the federal government all at once. It would all be impressive if it weren't so unbelievably terrifying given his vast power, influence and cult like celebrity status with nearly half the country all either oblivious or incapable of seeing how regularly he proves himself ill equipped for this moment. Frankly, so much of the quote unquote bad from Trump's first four weeks has to do with his decision to empower Musk and look away. I think the conservative writer Sohrab Omari is right that Musk is a threat to Trumpism and actually represents so much of what Trump claims to be fighting, which is plutocratic self dealing. I have more on Doge in my Unclear section because there are a lot of open questions about it, but it has produced a Lot of nonsense already. Contrary to Musk and Trump's claims, they have not uncovered any fraud. They've uncovered precisely zero fraud. They've shown federal spending they oppose on ideological grounds and some waste, for sure. We know there's lots of it, but that's been publicly available information for years. In fact, federal spending has actually gone up in the first 30 days of the Trump administration because of spending deals Republicans and Democrats have already made. And the big Republican spending bill that we we covered yesterday would cut taxes for the wealthy, increase military spending, and shave Medicaid. That means it would increase the debt and deficit. The exact thing must Doge program is supposed to be addressing. It's all backwards. And explaining this over and over on Musk's platform has left conservatives accusing me of being some kind of liberal hack. Because apparently wanting actual spending reforms and actual balanced budgets is now less important than blind loyalty to Emperor E Elon. The worst part, the really achingly awful and frustrating thing, is that it could have been different. This all had so much potential. To quote Andrew Sullivan. Imagine what they might have done. Trump could have announced that Musk and his minions were going to audit the federal government within a few months. They'd bring a report outlining every insane piece of waste or DEI excess or fraud they could find. Trump would then urge Congress to vote on these reforms. Win, win, win. It's a great idea to shake up the joint with an outsider, but nah, they're busy ensuring that any cuts they make are brutal, dumb and destined to expire. End quote. Perhaps most notably, and this is the last little flourish I'll have on Elon, because I know this is long. Nothing I've said so far even touches on the most likely reason we are all suffering through this incompetence and chaos, which is that Musk himself profits, and in obvious ways, from this entire arrangement. Almost every company he's involved with stands to benefit from his current position as pseudo vice president and spend cutter extraordinaire. And several of his companies are already reaping the rewards. Musk deletes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, defangs the National Labor Relations Board, which happened to have a dozen open investigations into his companies. Musk fires FAA employees and promises to revisit rebuild it with private sector workers from his company, SpaceX. Musk cuts hundreds of government contracts in his first month of doge, but doesn't touch any of the 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies worth $13 billion that are associated with his companies. It's happening in less obvious ways, too like Musk reportedly pressuring advertisers to come back to X or face repercussions from the federal government like like them tanking mergers. Can we really be this blind? Plenty of people obviously have grasped this reality. Kudos to reporter Jonathan Swan, who asked Trump a direct question about these conflicts of interest. Trump has promised to make sure there wasn't an issue with Musk. Here is Trump's response verbatim, which I transcribed to Swann's question about these conflicts of interest, quote well, I mean, I'm just hearing about it and if there is, he told me before I told him, but obviously I will not let there be any conflict of interest. He's done an amazing job. And then Trump glanced at his notes on the lectern. They've revealed, in fact, that he's going to be on tonight, a big show called Sean Hannity at 9 o'clock. And he's on and I'm on and we talk about a lot of different things and any conflicts, I told Elon, any conflicts, you can't have anything to do with that. So anything to do with possibly even space, we won't let Elon partake in that. This quite obviously is not a reassuring answer. It isn't just a jumbled non defense. It ignores the reality that the conflicts of interest are very real and they're already happening, even with space. So Elon Musk Bad all right, that is it for the free preview of today's podcast. If you want to hear the full full thing, the rest of the Bad section and my Unclear section and the Abhorrent section. You can subscribe to the Tangle podcast by going to retangle.com membership and find those subscriptions on our website. And I hope you do that because I think it's worth a listen. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K Back, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bova, who is also our Social Media Manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our foreign.
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