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- [00:00]
Jasia Monk
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- [00:54]
Jasia Monk
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- [01:00]
Isaac Saul
The Trump administration's goal here, I think is, is not to go win these cases in court. It's to kind of inject the shock and awe and fear into the populace. It's to get the quote, unquote, self deportations. It's to sort of get people back underground who previously felt comfortable, you know, lifting their heads up and speaking out about the administration or saying, you know, quote, unquote, the wrong thing publicly.
- [01:27]
Jasia Monk
And now the good Fight with Jasia Monk. There is such a daily onslaught of news and headlines about the Trump administration that it's really hard to keep an overview about what's actually happening and which way the country is going. Is the Supreme Court just selling out to Donald Trump, or are many jurists constitutionalists who are actually trying to preserve the basics of the American republic? Are we on the road to fascism? Or is Trump's attempt to expand executive power being constrained and slowed down by the checks and balances in the political system? Are deportations at a much higher level than they were in the past a deeply a moral abuse of political power? Or are the lower than they were in Barack Obama's time in office? Are they an appropriate way to make sure that the laws of the land are respected? Well, my guest today, Isaac Saul, is used to trying to elucidate questions from different point of view and coming to a carefully considered judgment about them. He has founded the newsletter Tangle, which gives the view from the left and the view from the right, and then often his own view about what the truth actually is. And in this conversation today, we have tried to gain not a 10,000 foot view, but perhaps a 5,000 foot view about what has been happening so far with the Supreme Court, the Trump administration hot button issues like immigration. In the last part of the the conversation reserved for those of you who want this podcast to exist, who want to support the work we do, we talk about where Isaac went wrong in the past, how he misunderstood Trump, where he had wrong predictions, some overly positive, some overly negative, about how Trump would actually act and what we can learn from those failures. To listen to that part of a conversation, please go to Jaschamonk Substack to become a paying subscriber and I'm throwing in a discount today, which makes us about a dollar a week. Jasamunkt@substack.com the good fight. Isaac Swu welcome to podcast.
- [04:07]
Isaac Saul
Thanks for having me.
- [04:09]
Jasia Monk
So I've been reading Tangle for a long time. It's a really interesting publication which is doing something which perhaps every publication should kind of be doing, that we are doing in a more deliberate way at a time when it's very hard to actually accomplish this, which is to be a fair guide to this political moment, which expresses and explains the views both from the left and from the right and helps people orient themselves in the political moment through that. Tell us a little bit about sort of how you stumbled onto this format and what you think is so important about it.
- [04:56]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, sure. I mean, I sort of have two Genesis stories, I guess. The first is just that I grew up in Pennsylvania and in particular in Bucks county in Pennsylvania, which is a purple county in a swing state critical to every presidential election. So I just have friends from all across the political spectrum and grew up in a really politically divided area where people spent time with each other despite the fact that maybe they didn't see the world the same way. And the kind of second Genesis story is that I got into the media world when I was 23 with my first job at the Huffington Post, which is a media outlet that has a clear ideological tilt. So I got to see a little bit how the sausage was made in a newsroom when there is an opinion being expressed through, you know, a lot of the news that's being published or a viewpoint, a world viewpoint, being expressed through a lot of the news that's being published. And I didn't love that. I didn't love kind of what I saw there. Not because HuffPost didn't have great reporters. It does. But because I realized that they were giving their audience a lot of the news that they wanted to consume and a lot of the perspectives that they wanted to embrace. And the result was that they weren't reaching people who, you know, didn't share those political views. So conservative readers weren't reading my columns when I published them on the HuffPost blog, because there were no conservative readers there. It was just liberals. And that kind of bifurcation, you know, seems obvious now, but 10 or 15 years ago, the sort of echo chamber that social media was creating and the more divided and fractured media space was creating, it was kind of a new concept. And leaving that experience, I had this idea, this desire to go somewhere or build something where I could bring conservatives and liberals and independents and people on the far left and people on the far right under one roof because that media organization doesn't really seem to exist in today's America.
- [06:57]
Jasia Monk
And that was interesting about this. What's interesting about this a little bit is that in a sense, what you're suggesting was what most mainstream outlets at least pretended to do until quite recently. They would have said the New York Times, the newspaper of record, it didn't sort of deliberately try to say, here's the left wing view, here's the right wing view, but the caricature of what a New York Times news report would have been, was there some controversy, something that's being debated in Washington D.C. or somewhere else in the nation? And you're going to get quotes on both sides and the write up is going to meticulously sound as though the journalist has no opinion one way or the other. Now, I think conservatives will say that wasn't really true of New York Times 40 years ago, and it wasn't really true of the New York Times 20 years ago, but it certainly was much more true than it is today. What's interesting is that at least in how journalists would have described themselves and these outlets would have described themselves was absolutely mainstream 20 years ago, has now gone very quickly to being kind of countercultural. And I can already hear the questions that some of my listeners are going to have, of course. Well, but isn't one side more right than the other? With Donald Trump in the White House and all of those things, isn't an attempt to be like, here's what the left is saying, here's what the right is saying just going to lead you to Pretend that there's an equality, equal, justifiability of worldview, of outlook, of even sort of factual truth, when one side is actually interested in truth and all of those things and the other side just isn't. I'm sure you get that kind of question over time. So how do you deal with that and what tangle does? And why do you think that that sort of concern, that perhaps allergic reaction is misplaced?
- [08:46]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, well, first of all, I think the both sides kind of criticism is probably one of the most common criticisms that we get, which typically happens before people actually engage the work that we're producing. So, two things. First of all, we are not trying to say that all opinions are equal. Our viewpoints on every issue are equal. What we're trying to do is actually just show people strong arguments that exist across the political spectrum. It's more about exposure than anything else. I think the reality that I've observed and that I think a lot of social science studies have borne out is that a lot of Americans just don't really understand the other side or they don't really have an accurate representation or picture of who those people are. That's true about a basic, you know, basic questions like the demographics. You know, you can ask conservatives what percentage of the country they think is black, and they will wildly overestimate that percentage, or what percentage they think is lgbt, and they'll wildly overestimate that percentage despite the fact, you know, and again, that's before they even get into what those people believe or what their political views are. So I'm working from a premise that, like, we don't actually understand each other that well. The second thing I would say is
- [09:59]
Jasia Monk
my favorite formulation of this is the ideological Turing Test. So the idea of a Turing test, of course, has traditionally been whether or not a machine can successfully pretend to be a human in some kind of interaction. You join an online chat, you think you're talking to a human at Apple, but really you're talking to a bot, right? And if a bot manages to make you think that it's a human, then it's passing the Turing test. The idea of ideological Turing test, which I think is really smart, is you get a bunch of liberals into a room and a bunch of conservatives into a room, and you tell the liberals, write a conservative argument against abortion, and you tell the conservatives, write a liberal argument for choice, and you then give that text to a bunch of conservatives and say, does that sound like a conservative argument against abortion to you? Does this sound like. Does this express what your Objection to abortion is. And you do the same with a liberal side. And so that's the ideological Turing test, the kind of metric by which partisans on one side of the political spectrum are able to successfully channel the arguments of partisans on the other side. So they say, yes, that is what we believe. And one interesting finding about the United States, in part, I think, because so many mainstream institutions do have a little bit of a tendency towards embracing the views of progressives and of the left, is that conservatives tend to be better at passing the ideological Turing test when liberals are. So conservatives are better at understanding what liberal arguments about some subject are when liberals tend to be about conservatives. And I can see why, if you were conservative, certainly in the milieu's that I run in doing, let's say, for example, a graduate degree at an elite university, you would definitely know what the liberal arguments are because they're all around you. Whereas as a liberal you can go through those institutions and unless you are seeking out right wing publications, you'll just never really hear conservatives put forward their arguments in their own voice.
- [11:59]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the recent studies there, I think have been encouraging in that people are getting better at that, which I think indicates more exposure, which I wouldn't be surprised at all as a product of the fracturing of the media that we've had in the last 10 or 15 years. So I mean, that part is that one element of it, like getting the country closer to a point where we're good at articulating the views of the people that we disagree with. To just address the second point, I would just say some people who hold liberal or conservative views, they come read our content and it actually hardens their own positions where they feel like, oh, I better understand the other side, and I still disagree with them. So our goal is not to say like, let's all get in a circle, hold hands and agree about everything. It's not that it's fundamentally that most people don't have a great grasp or aren't being exposed to the really strong arguments that exist across the political spectrum. Sometimes that's the right left continuum, you know, the traditional conservative and liberal tribal politics that we talk about. Sometimes it's, you know, injecting kind of heterodox opinions into the articles that we're sharing and the opinions that we're sharing in our newsletter to give people a look at maybe how somebody who's thought of as being liberal or conservative is kind of breaking away from the pack and charting a sort of new ideological path. Forward, we've seen a lot of that with Trump in the last 812 years, who's really scrambled the political north stars, I think, for both parties in really meaningful ways. So it's a really interesting time to be doing this work. But I think generally, people who engage with our content find themselves a lot more open minded, with a lot more flexibility to hear other people's perspectives and have a better, more holistic understanding of the worldviews that exist out there on really divisive topics.
- [13:52]
Jasia Monk
So this is all interesting and it sounds very worthy, and it's also a little bit abstract. So perhaps one way of making this concrete is to look at what insights we can gain about the world by really trying to understand the viewpoint of each side, to just start in one place. One of the big debates for the last, certainly six months, but also the last years more broadly, has been about the Supreme Court. And parts of the right would think that the Supreme Court is finally redressing decades of wrong jurisprudence on really important issues, decades of judicial activism that basically misshaped the Constitution by trying to make it serve progressive political priorities. A lot of the left and a lot of the mainstream, I mean, a lot of people who are not particularly radical perceive the Supreme Court and its conservative majority as basically writing a blank check for Donald Trump, as basically saying, you can do whatever you want, you can have immunity for whatever you do, you can dismantle the institutions of the government without the Department of Education recently, without a congressional mandate, they are just rubber stamping whatever Trump wants to do. Having covered this issue carefully and trying to follow the arguments from both sides, what do you think is actually happening?
- [15:17]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good lay of the land about some of the kind of common 30,000 foot baseline arguments, I would say. My personal view on this, which I think steals a little bit from both sides, is that the Supreme Court is basically making it clear that Congress has kind of abdicated its duties for a few decades. And, and a lot of the decisions that they've handed down have come down to a really simple premise, which is like, this isn't our job. This is Congress's job to kind of legislate into existence a more clear and direct law that we can follow. Trump is certainly taking advantage of that posture that the Court has taken by gathering up executive action, which I personally find very alarming. And I think a lot of the things that, you know, liberal and mainstream pundits have said about the Court sort of pushing through some, some green lights for him, you know, they can be overstated at times, but the general thrust of it is true that executive power has continued to grow over and over across every administration, and Trump has just turbocharged that the last four years. And many Democratic liberal groups would ever have tried to stop him via the courts because they lack power in Congress, and. And they've failed so far in a lot of meaningful ways. Now, you know, it is worth saying that there's typically more nuance to some of these decisions than you'll gather from logging onto X or, you know, just reading the headlines and not really pass them. I think the nationwide injunction story is a really good example of that, where the kind of blaring headline was that the Supreme Court stopped all nationwide injunctions, which wasn't really even even.
- [17:07]
Jasia Monk
Just take a step back from this. Right. So this is a case which was sort of ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but what was at issue was, and you'll have details more accurately here than I do, in case I misspeak, please correct me that I believe it was a district court judge basically stopped the Trump administration from changing its interpretation of who was entitled to citizenship because they believed that the Trump administration's actions violated the amendment of a constitution which grants birthright citizenship. The legal issue was not about the substance of this case. It was about whether or not any one of, I believe many hundreds, if not quite a thousand federal judges should be able to stop these kind of nationwide injunctions. When I read about this in the mainstream press, I got the feeling that if you were not legally sophisticated, you did not know what was going on. You may not even realize this is about nationwide injunctions. You may just think this is about birthright citizenship. And you may think, oh, look, the Supreme Court has rolled over and said Trump can revoke birthright citizenship. Whereas if you read the ruling of the Supreme Court, it says very, very clearly that we're not in any way taking a judgment on the substance of this legal question that's going to be negotiated at a later stage and may very well make its way back up to the Supreme Court at the appropriate time. So I think what's interesting is that often when you read mainstream coverage of legal news, there's not even a disentangling between procedural questions where courts have to decide, does somebody have standing? Is there some question of procedure that's at issue here, et cetera. And the substantive ruling papers report about those procedural decisions as though they had decided about the substance. Normally, in paragraph 13 of the article, it kind of explains to you that it's not really about the substance, but unless you're pretty legally knowledgeable, you just look at the headline and the ambient news, you're going to think that the court has basically said, go ahead, Donald Trump. Birthright citizenship doesn't apply to children of ideal immigrants, for example.
- [19:34]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. And I would add two things to that for emphasis. One is that in the oral arguments of the case, the court, actually, most of the justices, the conservative justices on the court, made it pretty clear that they were not viewing his birthright citizenship push favorably. They always use hypotheticals in their arguments, and everybody reads the tea leaves. And none of the hypotheticals they presented created a framework where the birthright citizenship, you know, getting rid of the 14th Amendment was constitutional or avoiding it. They all were basically like this. You're going to. You're going to lose this case. I am very confident if the birthright citizenship question ever gets before the Supreme Court, it will be an 8:1 or 9:0 ruling basically striking it down. So I think what Trump did is fundamentally unconstitutional. But the second thing is also that the court didn't say, you know, nationwide injunctions are, you know, no longer something that any federal judge can do. They just raised the bar, raised the standard for when and where judges can invoke them. And one of the things they did was very clearly open the door for kind of class action lawsuits that were brought by state or state attorneys general to be able to invoke these nationwide injunctions. And then literally several days later, the same people who were brought forward the first case brought forward a class action lawsuit, and they got a nationwide injunction again immediately. So the. The process has actually panned out fairly well for the people challenging the birthright citizenship push that the Trump administration is making, even though at the same time, the Trump administration is sort of celebrating this as a green light to do whatever they want. So, you know, it's this very interesting kind of example of. Yeah. How the lenses sort of distort reality. And I would say, again, when we covered this, a lot of conservatives made really good arguments about why this was bad for the conservative movement long term, which was that President Biden was slowed down significantly by nationwide injunctions and Trump won't be president forever. And I think really smart, wise conservative commentators are looking ahead and knowing that at some point a Democratic president will be back in office and he's going to have a lot more power in the future now, which they don't find particularly appealing. I think rightly so.
- [21:48]
Jasia Monk
Yeah. This is the thing that I find most frustrating about a certain kind of partisan politics where it's Democrats are in office, Republicans shout murder about federal deficit, Republicans get into office, suddenly the federal deficit is not important or certain kind of procedural things. Should college students be allowed to vote in the states in which they go to college if a permanent residence continues to be in some other state? I don't think there's any particularly deep principle to the matter one way or two or the other. But each party pretends there's a deep principle to which way around that regulation should go based on its calculation about where its partisan interest happens to lie. I think often what's interesting is that movements then can be quite naive about its long term interests. It's always struck me the filibuster is a relatively recent invention, certainly in the way in which it is used nowadays. I don't have any deep constitutional attachment to it, But I always thought that Democrats were a little bit naive about thinking that abolishing the filibuster would be in their interest, as I think many people in the party seem to believe, in part because Republicans have an inbuilt advantage in the Senate, given their stronger support among rural voters. It's not inbuilt in the Constitution, but it is inbuilt in the way that American politics has panned out over the last 30 or 40 years. And so abolishing the filibuster by and large is going to help the party that tends to hold a majority in the Senate. It's striking to me. The Democrats haven't really fought through that very much. So let's talk for a moment about this actual legal issue. I can see arguments on both sides here, which is to say that if there are hundreds and hundreds of federal judges and any one of these judges can basically stop the executive from taking just about any action based on a nationwide injunction, then we don't just have the veto power of the House of Representatives and the Senate and the President who has to sign a law and the Supreme Court that has to accede to something. America already has incredibly many and unusually many veto powers to getting action done in our political system. We now basically have over 500 veto powers spread around the country. And anybody who wants to stop something from happening can shop for the venue. They can make sure that they bring the suit in whatever district of the country is known to have the judge who is most favorable to your political point of view. And they can cripple the administration. That seems like a real problem. Now, on the other hand, the argument that Ketanji, Brown, Jackson and others have made is, well, if you can't stop unlawful executive action in any way, if you don't have national injunctions and the executive started to do something really wildly dangerous and constitutionally inappropriate and you have to wait for a three, four year judicial process to play out until judges can put a stop to those executive actions, then you really don't have effective control of abuses of power by the executive any anymore. So what did the substance of a Supreme Court judgment actually mean for how to maneuver through this, and what's your considered judgment about whether or not that gets the balance between these different considerations? Right.
- [25:12]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I think this is actually a really you raise sort of two of the, I think, core arguments that were being made not just before the Supreme Court, but nationally. And I actually think the Supreme Court landed somewhere in the middle of those two, which I found particularly heartening. I mean, I think I said in, you know, we wrote about this, I didn't know whether it was a hot take or maybe a lukewarm take, but I thought the outcome of the ruling was actually fairly positive. And I say that because it didn't do the thing Kentanji Brown Jackson said it would do. And it also, you know, didn't raise a lot of the issues that the current system raises now, which is basically that, as you said, you can get 99 out of 100 federal judges to look at what you're doing and think that it's constitutional. But if you find one who doesn't, you can basically halt a president's executive power or a new law that's been passed or whatever it is in its tracks. And I don't think that's a real functioning system. And it's absolutely true that we've seen the proliferation of the national injunctions, the nationwide injunctions, universal injunctions, whatever you want to call them, over the last 10 or 15 years. So, you know, we are now living in a situation, like I said, where it's not impossible to get a universal injunction, but it is a little bit harder and the bar for it is a little bit higher. It's this kind of class action lawsuit bar, which is one example of how groups are going to bring something forward to a federal judge and hold these policies. And also Justice Kavanaugh in the ruling sort of signaled the Supreme Court's open for business. Like, if we are going to do this thing where we are limiting the degree to which federal judges can institute universal injunctions, we have to take on some of the responsibility and fill the gap there. And he basically said in his, you know, he penned his own opinion, and it's not totally clear whether the other conservative justices are on board with him or not. But he basically said the Supreme Court can't hide in the tall grass. You know, we have to say, stand up and actually address these issues in a timely fashion if we're going to make a ruling like the one we're making today. So I think what's really possible is we see on one hand the sort of class action lawsuit stuff ramp up, which will be slower, and there's more procedural hurdles for people to get to, and the bar is higher. And I think all of that is good. And we'll also see the Supreme Court addressing things on their emergency docket in, in a faster way when people come to them seeking immediate relief. And that's a good backstop for situation that some of the liberal justices brought up, which is like, you know, a Democratic president of the future could decide he's going to seize everybody's firearms and he wants to, you know, amend the Second Amendment in some particular way, and he writes an executive order and they start collecting Americans guns is like, what's the mechanism to stop that if we don't have a universal injunction? And so the Supreme Court's saying, well, we can step in if somebody comes straight to us, and situations like that. So I think that's good. Typically, these court rulings play out in ways that we can't really expect. It's actually really hard to predict the nuances because lawyers are so good at finding angles on particular language in rulings like this and exploit them to their own benefit. And so I'm sure we'll see some sort of iterations of how this will play out that none of us can really think of right now. That's just kind of how the law works. And it's a very interesting and exciting and odd thing to live through. But on net, I don't think. I think this was a fairly middle ground position that they staked out, even though it didn't address the big elephant in the room, which is unfortunate, which is that Trump's trying to do something blatantly unconstitutional and they did nothing to stop him. So that's problematic to me, obviously, about the ruling. But in terms of how it's going to, you know, what kind of rulings it'll trigger in the future, I think it actually is a pretty good outcome. And who knows, again, maybe we'll see Congress act in particular ways to sort of address some of this stuff, which, by the way, they can Do. I mean, this was another thing I really only saw conservative writers talking about, which is that Congress could wrest some of its power back by removing references and all these laws that they've written about, the judgment of the president or the opinion of the secretary. I know it's hard, again to imagine Congress sort of like doing its job right now because it hasn't been doing that for a very long time. But there's an opening here where the power that Congress has can be flexed in a way where they can bring some clarity to some of the laws that are already on the books. And they can also, you know, craft future bills and legislations in a way that don't open them up to universal injunctions because they're poorly written or, or because they're giving too much power to a different branch of government.
- [30:16]
Jasia Monk
So we sort of did a quick, deep dive into one particularly important judgment of the Supreme Court in the last weeks. Let me try and get your view overall on what the Court has been doing. And perhaps rather than taking what I think are the kind of simplistic views of left and right, let me try and give you what I hope is a more sophisticated optimistic and a more sophisticated pessimistic reading. I think the most sophisticated optimistic reading of a Supreme Court is to say that conservatives are not being truthful when they are saying that the Supreme Court is merely rectifying the misjudgment of the last 30 or 40 years. We are seeing a very clear conservative majority that is, broadly seen speaking, doing what the Federalist Society has aspired to for a number of decades, and so on many cultural issues of long standing concern to a conservative legal movement, the Supreme Court is clearly trying to change where the balance of forces lands in the United States. But that is very different from thinking that the Supreme Court either sees itself as an ally of Donald Trump or is going to be quiescent in constitutional abuses. When it comes to questions like abortion, the Supreme Court hews closely to the long articulated views of a conservative legal movement. But when it comes to questions about whether or not the executive is going to be able to hugely extend its powers, certainly when it comes to questions about whether the executive is going to be able to abuse its powers, the Supreme Court is going to stand up quite clearly, and it has proven willing to do so in a number of cases. In fact, one of the striking things about the last month is that in the vast majority of cases which pitted the federal government against some plaintiff on these questions of constitutional concern, whether in the Supreme Court or in lower down federal courts, it is the state that lost, which is certainly not something that you would see in Turkey today or in India today or in other places where populists have effectively gained control over judiciary. Now, I think the pessimistic reading is to say, yes, that's broadly speaking, where the preferences of a majority of Supreme Court justices might lie. But they also deeply dislike the political left in various ways, and some cases have good personal reasons to be upset with it. And they also might be a little bit scared about Donald Trump. They also might think, whether for the prestige and the long term interest of a court or because they don't want angry people outside of their houses, that they shouldn't go for a full frontal confrontation with the executive. And so perhaps they're pulling the punches a little bit. Perhaps they are being overly indulgent in trying to bend backwards a little bit to appease the executive when it is doing things that really are sort of questionable in terms of its authority. I would take that to be sort of the most sophisticated articulations of an optimistic and a pessimistic case about the Supreme Court having covered not just this case we talked about, but a lot of them for the last months. Where do you land on those?
- [33:41]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, so look, I think, first of all, we're living through a pretty extraordinary moment that touches on everything you just said, which is that we have a sitting president who has appointed three of the nine conservative or three of the nine Supreme Court justices. So a third of the court, and is, you know, also somebody who very clearly is interested in stretching the bounds of his power. So the optics that that creates are, they're, they're difficult to process if you're somebody who's concerned about, you know, the gathering of executive power and a president who is willing to flex that power to the maximum degree. And it's always hard to wonder, you know, it's hard not to wonder the degree to which any particular justice is trying to appease him or doing, you know, intellectual gymnastics to, to get to the outcome that they want. That being said, I do think this court has been much less predictable than people thought. I mean, it's typically constructed and talked about in the Media as a 6, 3 conservative Supreme Court, which I think is mostly right. But there is sort of this 3, 3, 3 split that really exists on the court, which is, you know, you have the liberal wing of the court, Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Jackson, and then there's kind of this less predictable middle, which is Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and then a more predictable conservative kind of right, which is Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. And I think that dynamic is actually more important than the 6:3 dynamic that we typically talk about in the media and that a lot of people focus on. And when you sort of zoom out at those last two terms of the Supreme Court, I mean, unanimous nine to zero decisions are far and away one of the most common outcomes of cases that come before the Supreme Court. The 6:3 ideological split of, you know, Republican appointed versus Democratic appointed justices happens in like, 1 in 10 cases that the Supreme Court hears. And, you know, it's true that often those 1 in 10 cases are really big divisive topics, issues like trans rights or this birthright citizenship case that became a case about universal injunctions. But it's still a minority of the rulings that they have. And then the thing that's really common is the kind of like cross ideological agreement where you see Justice Jackson and Justice Kavanaugh sort of joining an opinion together. That to the public, I think is a very untold story because we focus so much on the really divisive rulings that come down. So, again, my general view of the Court is, of this particular Supreme Court is that they've been a little bit less predictable than I thought. They're definitely not willing to just wrangle in Trump for the sake of wrangling executive power. A lot of what they do is sort of the, we're not going to step in here because this isn't our job when that's a convenient position for Trump and we're going to step in here and stop this thing when that's a convenient position for Trump. And I find that worrisome. Like, I don't love the optics of that. There's all sorts of, like, legalese and justification for it and ideological justification for it that comes out in the legal writing that I find plausible and convincing. But it's just, it's hard not to be made uncomfortable by it. So I'm not like a hair on fire freaking out. I'm sort of skeptically watching what they're doing and pleasantly surprised in a lot of instances where, you know, they come out, I think in with really strong consensus against the Trump administration's wishes in a way that I think speaks to the ideological independence of the court. And for what it's worth, I think these people are human. Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, had a really, really bruising confirmation hearing. I Remember, you know, I spoke to, when I was reporting a piece, spoke to somebody off the record who was fairly close to him and basically said he's pissed and he's hurt. And I expect that to come out a little bit in like, his ideological positioning. And I think we saw that in his first term on the bench, and I think in the years since, we've sort of seen him moderate back to the center. I mean, when he was in Washington, D.C. as a district court judge, he was not somebody who was known as being this, like, hard line, right wing partisan hack, though that's his image to a lot of people in the, in the public right now. And I just think we're seeing him moderate a bit. Amy Coney Barrett, until recently, you know, until she penned this nationwide injunction, was like public enemy number one in MAGA world, because they all thought that she was undermining the Trump administration, when really I think she was just ruling on cases with genuine independence and not coming out on the side of things the way they expect it. So, you know, I just don't think that the court is as corrupted as a lot of people on the left think. And I think you can see that when you look at the whole breadth of their work, rather than just like these really controversial hot button cases that they take up.
- [39:12]
Jasia Monk
All right, so the Supreme Court was for od'. Oeuvre. The main cause is executive overreach by the Trump administration. I think there are clearly all kinds of ways in which the Trump administration is pushing the limits of executive power in ways that violate longstanding democratic norms, that go against what I think some of the basic principles of liberal democracy are that may actually breach long standing law in various ways, or that do all three of those at the same time. I think it is much harder to see in the fog of war what that actually amounts to. Will we look back in three years and say those things were bad, but they were contained and they didn't fundamentally transform the nature of the American government? They'll be remembered in history books as bad episodes in our nation's history that there will be footnotes rather than neat stories? Or are we looking at the beginning of an authoritarian drift which in retrospect is going to very clearly look like step one and two and three of a rapid march towards the breakdown of democratic institutions. And obviously there's very strong views about this. Let's say, from the very alarmist side, which says we're on the road to fascism, to the kind of area of moderate concern that this is some significant Violation of a rule of law that is very concerning, but might be contained to people who, presumably on the right, refuse any of those interpretations and say, no, this is just the executive rightly reasserting its authority to set public policy rather than let the deep state determine everything. Small little question, where do you fall on that scale? Or how would you formulate what is going on?
- [41:30]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I would say this is for me personally. My personal opinion is that this is the most alarming part of the Trump administration for a couple reasons. One is that it's a continuation of successive presidencies going back to George W. Bush that we've seen where the executive has been pushing the limits of its power further and further. Every president has done this since then. Bush did it, Obama did it, by Trump did it, and then Biden did it, and then Trump did it again. And each time it feels like the Overton window is moving to the point where now we're sitting in the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, and you know, he's just having rose gardening, rose garden press briefings where he's announcing massive tariffs on all of our trading partners and blanket global 10% tariffs with 150 plus nations across the world without consulting Congress, without any kind of legislation, without any kind of oversight. This is like totally insane banana stuff that we would never accept 20, 30, 40 years ago. But we've been kind of conditioned through every presidency where that Overton window has been shifting to view something like that as like a little bit crazy, but on the outside edge of normal, because we've seen, you know, a president conduct a military strike without the authority from Congress, or we've seen a president declare a national emergency around the border or around Covid or around student loans, and then implement a policy without Congress that has really, really big meaningful impacts for the country as a whole. So Trump is pushing the limits further than I think any of his predecessors have. And I think of the, the things that worry me, the one part of it is that this is really just the continuation of a trend. So I would expect it to keep going. The next president who's going to come into office is going to see what Trump got away with and think, oh, I guess I can do that too. And that's really dangerous. And the second thing that really worries me about is that Congress has done nothing. I mean, they practically nothing. They have basically not stood up for the very basic responsibilities that they're supposed to have. The power of the purse, of taxing Americans and foreign trading partners. I mean, these kinds of Things are so basic and so elemental to what Congress is supposed to be doing, and yet they are basically ceding the field to Trump because they don't have any long term vision about how this is going to turn against them at some point, or they don't care because they're in power right now and they're worried about the next election. I find that really alarming. I mean, I think I would have expected a little bit more, and my expectations are pretty low for some action there. And then there's the stuff, I think that falls more into the authoritarian bucket for me. I mean, it's hard for me to declare the tariff stuff. It just doesn't have that kind of authoritarian fascist feel. That really concerns me.
- [44:36]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, that's an interesting distinction. Right. I mean, one question is just where does the rightful competence of the executive lie? And to what extent are the limits on it being breached in ways that might be bad? For all kinds of reasons, including the fact that a lot of literature suggests that when one person makes a decision without any real input, that decision might end up being a lot worse than if they have some mechanism by which they have to consult others, such as Congress. But that is different from the question of where is an executive taking actions that rig the rules of a game that help it to sustain itself in power, that makes it harder for the opposition to run a political campaign that, at the limit, allows those who lose an election at time one to then win an election at time two and send somebody who's in office back home. So I think what's interesting about the tariff stuff is that it's really bad in that first count. It feels like this is something where we've had very longstanding economic policy. I happen to think that that economic policy has all kinds of advantages, but there's nothing democratically illegitimate about changing that policy. Right. I mean, certainly it is absolutely possible for the United States to say we want to have 50% tariffs on everybody in the world, but that should not be the decision of one man. That should be the decision of Congress. And Donald Trump, with his majority in Congress, should be willing and able to, to push that legislation through Congress. And if he can't, well, then he doesn't have the majority to do that. So that's an example where we're really overstepping in that way. But you're right that despite the concerns that some people have that basic tariffs is the way of opening the door to corruption and all kinds of other things, I don't think instituting these tariffs is what's going to stop us from having fair elections in 2028? So then we get into the second area where the concern is not this is a policy question that should be rightly decided by the legislature and has now been absorbed by the executive. But it's rather we are starting to make an even playing field, less even. We're starting to create disadvantages for the opposition. And there you might get into the obvious case. I think constitutionally, it is probably true that the Secretary of State has great leeway in deciding who should be allowed to get a visa to come to the United States and even whose visa should be de recognized on grounds of national security. From my limited understanding of the law, Marco Rubio has very, very, very large leeway in making those decisions. Having said that, I think it's really concerning for both fundamental values which do go to the heart of our systems, like freedom of speech, and for the maintenance of an even playing field of political competition, that the executive can't suddenly say, anybody who criticizes Donald Trump is not allowed to visit the United States. Anybody who is already in the United States who expresses the wrong view in quotation marks on the Israel Palestine conflict is just going to have a visa de recognized and be put in deportation proceedings. All of that may be perfectly legal. It may not overstep the boundaries of executive authority as they have been construed for a long time now, but it is really concerning in this other way.
- [48:00]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, some of it is perfectly legal, but a lot of it's not. And the Trump administration's goal here, I think, is not to go win these cases in court. It's to kind of inject the shock and awe and fear into the populace. It's to get the self deportations. It's to sort of get people back underground who previously felt comfortable, you know, lifting their heads up and speaking out about the administration or saying, you know, quote, unquote, the wrong thing publicly. I think you really hit the nail on the head with kind of zeroing in on immigration, which was sort of the second thing that I was going to say. If you're looking for something that has that kind of authoritarian or fascist texture, I would say the way the Trump administration has been handling basically the whole of its immigration policy is that thing. And, you know, to me, nothing sort of sends a chill down my spine like seeing the kind of masked federal agents who are hiding behind cloaks of anonymity, raiding workplaces or suburban neighborhoods in vans with tinted windows and grabbing people off the street and arresting them and throwing them in the back of a car and trying to put them in the deportation proceedings without any real due process. Even the bare minimum, which I don't even know would qualify as due process, looks like some kind of adjudication of a person's immigration status or legal status in the country and gives them an opportunity to kind of represent themselves in front of an immigration judge. And a lot of them aren't even getting that bare minimum. And we've seen US Citizens getting caught in this dragnet, which is not the only thing that's problematic about it. But it's happening already where maybe they're not getting deported to Bolivia or, you know, a foreign gulag somewhere, but they're getting held in custody for 8 hours or 12 hours or 16 hours or 2 days or 2 weeks without being able to contact a lawyer, without being able to contact their family. I mean, we've seen that happen on numerous occasions now. And again, I don't think Trump is doing this because he thinks that's a legal way to handle his deportations. I think he's doing this because he wants to send the message that he can and that he wants to scare people and particularly scare the kind of immigrant community, the illegal immigrant community, into going back underground, into leaving the country on their own. That kind of stuff really worries me. I think seeing people justify it, justify, we have this big broken immigration system, and therefore it's okay that we have mass federal agents who are concealing their true identities and conducting these kinds of arrests and raids in public places, dressed in army fatigues or rolling up in Humvees and tanks or whatever it is. That feels to me just as scary as the fact that Trump's doing. And it's that there's so many people who have convinced themselves that, that it's okay. There's, again, a lack of imagination there about what it's going to look like in the future when a president who doesn't share their priorities is in office. And that sort of falls into, like, this national emergency bucket that I think we're seeing more of the. It's. It's less exciting to talk about, but it's just as important to get there, is that, you know, Trump is declaring that there's an invasion at the border, and therefore, he can use the National Guard, he can use the military, he can use the Alien Enemies Act. He's. He's sort of setting the table with, like, we have this major national emergency problem. And so I can use the absolute maximum force of my powers to do these certain Things, these immigration enforcements, getting Secretary of State Marco Ruby to start revoking people's visas or deporting people who've been here for 10 years that have no criminal record just for saying the wrong thing about a foreign conflict. I mean, all this stuff is really frightening to me. And again, you know, I wish that Trump supporters, and this is something I talk to my readers about, my audience about, of which is, you know, I have many Trump supporters and my family, friends, whatever, and my audience, you know, I say, like, it's not hard to imagine a world where in five or 10 years, some of the more extreme views that people in Trump's base hold on immigration are deemed, you know, terroristic threats, domestic threats by a future Democratic administration who goes out and jails those people. I mean, it's like sort of what we saw after January 6th on a mass scale where far more people are being caught up in this kind of prosecution of right wing extremism, and yet they just like, won't. They, they won't go there. They just accept that this is good because we're detaining illegal immigrants. And I don't buy that. I think it's really dangerous. I think it's bad that we've let so many people into the country illegally. At the same time, I don't think we should sacrifice American values and laws or the rights of those people in order to solve the problem. So that's a really good example of one of the things that I would say really worries me about the administration. And then the thing, the second thing that sort of comes in there too, is just the media treatment, which is, you know, threatening all the journalists with lawsuits who report accurately on this stuff. The, the constant, you know, creation of this myth that the media is the enemy of the people. And that's what his supporters should focus on, which has been really effective and really potent. And, you know, we see some people bending the knee, whether it's Paramount or 60 Minutes or, you know, whatever. They, There are people who want access to the administration, news producers who want access to the administration. So they're willing to kind of do what the Trump administration wants them to do in order to maintain that access in order to not be sued. And I think that's creating all sorts of problems in the industry that worry
- [53:52]
Jasia Monk
me a lot on immigration. It's very difficult to get a handle on what has actually happened so far. And part of the difficulty is that Trump has just won a lot of money in the, quote, unquote, big, beautiful bill to expand immigration enforcement. And it's quite clear we're trying to ramp up efforts very, very significantly. From some of the numbers I've seen so far, the number of deportations isn't actually that much higher than it has been at previous junctures. And there's this kind of incentive that people both on the left and the right have to overstate the number of deportations that are happening so far. But the left, because it is rightly concerned about some of those steps and it wants to say that the Trump administration in this kind of ruthless and lawless way, is just deporting people willy nilly. And we're right, of course, because they're boasting about it. Trump wants people to believe that he stepped up deportations a lot, even if it's not true, because that's what he promises based and he wants them to believe that he has. So I guess one simple question I have is how there's some things that are clearly extremely unusual that have happened that don't affect a lot of people, but that are consequential. And that's the category of derecognizing people's F1 student visas because of views they've expressed. For example, at Israel, Palestine. There's not a ton of people that that's happened to, but I do think it has a very significant chilling effect. And for anybody who's concerned about freedom of speech, as I am, that's a very significant thing. Right. But sort of compared to the number of people who are deported in a regular year in the United States over the last 10 or 15 years, that is a very, very small number indeed. But when it comes to absolute numbers, have we actually seen a significant step up of deportations? And the sort of broader question is that because I'm trying to channel here one of your right wing readers and to think about how they would respond to the concerns you express, which I personally share. But I think what they might say is we've had so much undocumented immigration, we have so little control over the southern border with Mexico. More broadly, we see that countries, whether in North America or in Western Europe, has so little effective control over the borders and the laws as they stand. And the rule of law as it's set up makes it incredibly difficult to actually deport people. If, for example, you don't know where somebody is a national from because they burn their papers once they cross the border, it can be incredibly difficult to get any nation to readmit them. This is particularly a problem for European nations, and this has Basically led to a frustration of popular will for a very long time. Right. Most people, most Americans actually have much more favorable views of immigration than most Europeans. But even those who think that we should be a nation of immigrants, that immigrants have made very significant contributions to the well being of the United States, many who are themselves immigrants, will say we have to get this problem with illegal immigration under control. And the truth of the matter is that if we completely follow all of the restrictions on how these agencies can act, it's going to look like the last 30 years we're never actually going to have any effective control over border. And so what are we supposed to do? What's supposed to be the solution to this problem?
- [57:20]
Isaac Saul
Yes. So those questions are actually directly related, which is interesting. The short answer to the first one, the first question is that Trump, right now, with the most recent updated numbers that we have, is still deporting fewer people than President Barack Obama did. So to just put that in historical context, you know, it's early yet. He's only six months into his administration. And right now there's something like 50,000 unauthorized migrants who are in detention facilities in the US which does represent like a significant increase. So they're arresting more people, though those people haven't gone through deportation proceedings. The reason that it's slower than Obama's numbers are that he's deporting fewer people than Obama did is that Obama set up a system where he was deporting a lot of people immediately after they crossed illegally so they would come across the border. And this gets into some kind of boring nuances in immigration law and how it works in the U.S. but the general thrust of it is Obama changed some of the rules about what we could do when somebody crossed the border illegally and created a sort of window for removal. And he acted on that window. It was one prong of a multi pronged strategy, had to reduce illegal immigration. So more people were coming under Obama and he was deporting them quickly after they got here. And so his deportation numbers are really high right now. Very, very few people are coming across the border. Historically low numbers of people. That's one of the big wins of the Trump administration. And I do think that's a good thing, which I'll talk about in one second. But because there's fewer people coming across the border, Trump can't just do what Obama did in order to deport people. What he has to do is go all across the country, like we're seeing now, and go find people who are in the US Interior who are working, who are going to school, who have families who have been here for many years and are here illegally and try and find those people and then arrest them and then get them out of the country, all while actually, you know, if he does it my way, respecting the rights that they're entitled to and their rights to representation and their rights to due process, which in a lot of cases he's trying not to do, because that is so cumbersome. Our system makes it really, really hard to get rid of people once they're here, if they come illegally, which is why it's been so hard for so many people, so many presidents to do. And it's also a really good justification for keeping the rate of illegal immigration low, which I think is something Trump deserves credit for. I don't think it's a humane system to allow people to cross the border illegally, and then they have to, like, slip into the shadows or claim asylum and get put into a system that's going to take them five years to get before an immigration judge or, you know, go live in hiding and off the grid for the next 20 years and have to start a family in order to eventually apply for a visa or whatever it is, that's not a good, humane system. There's a couple of ways to fix it.
- [60:15]
Jasia Monk
Can I cut here for a moment? Because this is a backbear of mine, and I completely agree with you on this. A lot of the times when I speak to people about this topic, and I have very, very deeply. I'm very deeply torn on this topic. I mean, my family have been refugees practically in every generation in living memory. I have the deepest concern for people fleeing civil war and persecution in big parts of the world. And there's still a lot of people who have general reason for that. I also have a deep understanding for people who are here here for economic reasons. If you come from a place where you just have very, very little opportunity and you don't know if you're going to be able to put dinner on your table, even if you work hard and you have an opportunity to come to a place like the United States, well, of course, the most ambitious and courageous people are going to try and take that option. So I have deep empathy for all of that. At the same time, I think the empathy for those people in those groups can sometimes lead to a complacency about just how messed up the current system we have is. And that is true in the United States is perhaps even more true in Europe at the moment. If you can afford the money to pay criminal bans to get you across the Mexican U.S. border or to get you across the Mediterranean to Europe. If you're willing to, to risk your life in the Darien Gap or in the desert on the southern border of the US or in the Mediterranean, then you get to the country. But you are at the very best a second class citizen in the United States. The fact that you don't have a work permit means you can stand outside a Home Depot and be hired for odd jobs at somebody's home for the day. But you don't have the kind of economic opportunity that citizens and residents of our country should have. You're vulnerable to all kinds of forms of exploitation. You're not able to participate in many basic systems of our Social Security setup. You may not be able to go see a doctor because it's going to be hard to get health insurance. You're probably not saving for a pension. And by the way, if your parent back in Central America or elsewhere in the world is deeply sick and you want to go and say goodbye to them or attend their funeral, you probably can't do that. It is a deeply unfair existence. In Europe you are immediately given an apartment and a monthly stipend, which probably is rather more pleasant than what you had in the country where you came from. But you're not allowed to work and you're at the margins of society and don't really have many prospects in the country in which you're at. And at the very moment when you in principle are most likely to integrate to learn the language, to learn a trade, you are legally barred from doing any of that while you're waiting for 3, 5, 10 years for your claim of asylum to be adjudicated. And so even if ultimately you gain that claim to asylum, or more likely, it's rejected, but nobody actually deports you, you have gotten used to sitting around and doing nothing and vegetating. And the people who have the most energy, who don't want to sit around and do that, well, they're going to do the one thing they can do, which is to engage in criminal activity. So just to step back, I think a lot of the things that people are suggesting for how to fix all of these problems are morally very fraught and unjust. But let's not kid ourselves and pretend that the status quo is particularly rosy or morally just either.
- [64:01]
Isaac Saul
Right? And I think it's beautifully said and I've seen a lot of your writing about this, which I also really appreciate, because similarly, I think the way you just articulated is really in line with my views here. And I'll just add to that something the Trump administration did in the most recent bill, the big, beautiful reconciliation bill that didn't get a lot of attention and they haven't gotten much credit, for, which I think they should, is part of all the funding that they dumped into the immigration system included funding for new immigration judges on the border, which is so critically important because that backlog of asylum seekers who are waiting to have their cases adjudicated is a really big problem for the people who are genuine asylum seekers, because they are in the mix with a lot of economic refugees and economic migrants, which I personally, again, my personal view is that I'm happy to welcome those people to the United States because when people come here and work, it's good for the economy. I think it's interesting culturally. I think there are all these benefits and upsides of it, and I think they're actually, we've demonstrated that we're much better at assimilating people in the US Than I think a lot of folks on the right give us credit for. But those people aren't here for the same reasons that someone fleeing a civil war is or someone fleeing a governmental collapse is. And I think they should be treated differently by our immigration system. And right now, they're not. I mean, our asylum system is effectively a loophole to get into the country and buy yourself a couple years without having your case heard or without being, you know, properly assessed for whether you should be allowed here legally. And the Trump administration wants to put more judges on the border, and their motivation for doing so is not. Not to allow more people in. I don't want to, like, twist that, but long term, the structure that we have on the border should be representative of the democratic will of the people. So if we have 800 more judges on the border in four years, and there's a Democratic president whose authority is pushing the federal immigration system to allow more asylum seekers in, then we'll be able to actually process those people who are showing up the border. And that, to me, is a good thing. So getting that backlog clear and, you know, limiting the amount of illegal immigration that there is, those are two really important parts of bringing order to the system, which will let us make it more humane. And Trump is doing that. Right now. We have historic low legal border crossings, and he just dumped a bunch of money into the system. Now he's doing it for a different reason than maybe many liberals want. But in the long term, I think it'll be good for the immigration system to have more resources and have more funding in that way. I don't think we need ICE agents and funding for ICE and you know, law enforcement, immigration law enforcement, that is more than many countries military funding. But I do think the immigration system is sorely lacking the kinds of resources and money that it needs to bring that kind of order, which I think is upstream from having a humane, functioning system, which we don't really have right now. So there are elements of that that I think are hopeful for the future.
- [67:12]
Jasia Monk
I'm struck that a few years ago I was a fellow at the University of Oxford and I arrived late in the day to occupy the rooms that I would kindly be given. And I had trouble accessing them because I first had to prove my right to be in the country. And the person who was qualified to ascertain that wasn't in the office. And so they wouldn't give me the key to these rooms. And for a while it looked like I'd have to sleep in the street for night or whatever. I'm saying that as a small anecdote to illustrate that in most countries, in order to work somewhere, including in order to be a fellow at a university, you have to prove that you are legally entitled to be there. And if some employer fails to ascertain the right to work of employees, they're going to face very, very stiff penalties. I know that there are some such systems in the United States and they've in some ways become more rigorously applied over the last years. But isn't the much mocked idea by Mitt Romney to use that as the lever to control illegal immigration actually plausible? Isn't the point that we should want a workforce that is actually legally entitled to be here with all of the rights and all of the ability to advocate for themselves that comes with that? And then we can hopefully win the political argument for various groups of workers that should be able to come to the country, because America has historically been a country of immigration and that is going to have all kinds of economic benefits. But shouldn't we be much more strict about clamping down, for example, on employers, like virtually every restaurant in the country that employs a lot of illegal immigrants? And isn't it something on which there's a weird bipartisan consensus because Democrats don't want to do that out of some understandable but perhaps misplaced concept of humanitarianism? Republicans don't want to do that because they worry that they're going to piss off corporations and chambers of commerce and some of our Rich donors.
- [69:33]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I think there are solutions that are out there that exist, like the mandatory E Verify system, which wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a step in the right direction to set up a system where employers have to verify that. That the people they're employing have legal status to be here. I mean, the big picture of it is that there are basically three ways to solve this problem. One is kind of the Trump method, which is you just limit the amount of people who are coming here illegally by posturing, you're not welcome, and by having these really draconian policies to scare them away. The second way is you implement a bunch of legal pathways to citizenship, which Biden tried to do, but he tried to do it without Congress. So a lot of what he tried to do is now being undone by Trump because it was all executive power. But it's like you open more legal pathways, you get fewer people coming here illegally. And the third way is some kind of combination of the two, which is that you have really strong border security, and you tie up the loopholes that exist in the asylum system, but you also create many more pathways for temporary legal status for people who want to come here to work or people want to come here for school or training or whatever it is. And I. I favor the third method because I think it kind of brings in the best of what both sides have to offer in our kind of, you know, tribal duopoly politics. But, yeah, I don't think it's an unreasonable thing for a country, a sovereign nation, to say, we want to know all the people who are here, and we want to have documentation of them, and we want to make sure that if they're working or they're claiming benefits or. Or they're in our university systems or our public schools, that they're here legally. And they, you know, they're. They're like in the umbrella that all the citizens who exist in our country are in. I think that's a totally fair thing for a lot of people to desire, and I think it's a reasonable thing for a sovereign nation to desire, and I don't think we've done a good job of it. I think, you know, Joe Biden really made a mess of the immigration system and the kind of situation that we're in right now, and we're seeing the backlash for it right now because President Trump has a really good wedge issue, which he's used to sort of, again, gather up all this executive authority and power, and he's finding broad political support for it because people were so fed up by what they saw during the Biden administration, which again, is a very good reason to limit illegal immigration in the first place.
- [72:12]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of A Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Isaac and I talk about where he went wrong, the times in which he misjudged Donald Trump, the times in which his predictions about what was going to happen turned out to be erroneous, and what we can learn about that for the difficult project of figuring out what's going to happen in the three and a half years we have left of a Trump presidency. If you want to listen to Isaac and me try to grapple with how to get a handle on what's around the next historical corner, please support our work. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to jasamunk.substack.com and that'll give you ad free access to all full episodes of the Good Fight and it will allow us to do this work. Amonk.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [73:50]
Isaac Saul
Some Follow the noise, Bloomberg Follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.