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Isaac Saul (15:46)

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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Isaac Saul (17:34)

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.

Ryan Reynolds (22:41)

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Isaac Saul (23:48)

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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