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A
This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O O dot com.
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B
Have you guys seen Brendan Carr, the new head of the fcc? Yes.
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C
The button.
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B
He's wearing a Mao badge.
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C
It's unbelievable.
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B
Bad. It really is. I mean, this is an absolutely hilarious threshold to have crossed in 1966. This was one of the opening moments of the Cultural Revolution. They started printing up badges of Mao's face and everybody started wearing them as evidence of devotion. You would wear bigger ones and you would start to have them go down your sleeve and drape down. And then eventually they were doing. They were printing so many Mao badges that it was disrupting industrial production in China. And finally they had to bring it to a close because Mao said, we need to be able to make airplanes.
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D
Evan, are you suggesting that there is a cult of personality underway here with Donald Trump? I mean, I don't know.
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C
Not to mention we're in a cultural revolution.
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B
Well, that's it. Those were the opening strands of the Cultural Revolution. And that is a sure as hell sign that you've got people losing the plot here.
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D
Washington is an officially irony free zone at this point.
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B
Well said. Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos and I'm joined as ever, by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi, Susan. And hi, Jane.
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C
Hi, Evan.
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D
Hey there. So great to be with you guys.
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B
Well, in the second week of Donald Trump's trade war, he put the global economy into chaos. On Wednesday, after Trump's taxes on imports had torched trillions of dollars in value in the financial markets, he abruptly blinked. He retreated. He surrendered. You can choose which verb suits you. The new plan, which might well change while we're taping this show is for a 90 day delay on some tariffs, except notably on. And we'll have a bit more on that in a moment. So today we'll discuss the ideology, if that's the word, underpinning the turmoil in the global economy and some of the larger forces that have brought us to this point. And, Susan, we'll start with you. You've been thinking about this over the last couple of days. We were in fact all meeting on Wednesday when the word came out that he was retreating from the latest round of tariffs. 13 hours actually, just after he'd put them in. He still has us at this point at a really 100 year high point for tariffs on goods. Coming to the. You've seen the market gyrating ever since his people came out and of course said, oh, this is brilliant strategy. Other people have said that this is something more akin to, as one person put it, I like this formulation. This was like somebody setting fire to their house, watching it burn, losing their nerve and then having to live in a half burned house. What do you make of all this.
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D
Susan, as far as Donald Trump and four dimensional chess, you know, I think that's a metaphor we need to finally be done with, get out of our minds here. I think the record actually is pretty clear and pretty well documented. Lots of excellent reporting that while aides puffed him up and said this was a genius maneuver, Trump himself admitted no, things got a little yippee. And in particular, of course, it was the sell off in the US Bond market at the very same time that global stocks were also plunging that really started to make Republicans in the Senate in Trump's cabinet realize that they were headed over the cliff without a real plan. And that's when and only then when Trump pulled back. Now, of course, we've seen this drill before, too. So it's not incorrect to say that Donald Trump has a playbook here, which is threaten a very disruptive action, see what the political climate will bear, pull back and say, hey, listen, I generated leverage and now they all want to talk to me. Remember that the night before the pullback, when the retaliatory tariffs on almost all countries and some uninhabited islands too, were about to take effect. Wednesday at midnight, Trump gave this remarkable speech to a Republican fundraising dinner. And what did he do? He bragged about how they are all begging to come make deals with me. They're kissing my ass. But there's no evidence that there are any consequential deals being made, in part because what Donald Trump has managed to blow up in less than 100 days of his second term is American market credibility.
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C
I'm so glad you pointed this out, that there actually is not a single deal deal that has come out of this. They Keep repeating that 65 countries have come begging. Okay, let's see.
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B
And they won't even release the names of the countries. It's worth pointing out.
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C
Right.
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B
But it is amazing to realize just how much is hanging essentially on the whims of one man. Is that not the biggest takeaway that we've talked about?
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C
I think that's probably part of the tremendous appeal of this to Donald Trump. I was talking to an economic expert who basically swatted away the idea that there was some kind of rational economic, economic policy here and said, this is ego. This is a concentrated power in the hands of one person who loves the attention and can make the world just leap at the flick of his finger. And he's loving that. He also has an extraordinarily high tolerance for chaos. If you go back and you read the biography of him by Wayne Barrett, which is really probably the best book that was ever written on Trump, the thing that jumps out at you is anybody else would need to be hospitalized for the amount of stress that he causes and lives through, but he thrives on it.
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B
His tolerance for chaos is perhaps gonna end up running up against China's tolerance for pain. His bet now is that by driving all the attention onto China, that they will be able to get Beijing to blink on this. It's worth pointing out the White House, after people had tried to tally up the numbers and say, well, what are the actual tariffs? Turned out it was even higher than 1. 125%. It's actually up to 145%. And that news is one of the reasons why the stock market again went way down today, Today being on Thursday.
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D
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Evan, because when you're talking about numbers that high, well over 100% tariffs on China at this point, that meets the definition of a trade embargo. Essentially, if one side or the other doesn't climb down at this point, we are talking about a catastrophic confrontation between the two largest economic forces in the world. Today, we're interdependent with China in ways that make this not a viable long term option. It strikes me that in Trump's first term, he threatened China, he had terrorists, but nothing like this scale of confrontation. And that finally, Donald Trump seems to have done that move of a bully, which is actually punched where it hurt enough that the other guy has to fight back with everything. And I feel like that's a different dynamic now where we're seeing people call his bluff in a way that never happened in Trump's first term.
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B
Look, the truth is that Donald Trump has done a lot of work for Xi Jinping on this already by, in effect, forcing out into the open. The idea that Donald Trump is expecting China to bend the knee and what he has done, by refusing to acknowledge his own concession, by refusing to recognize his own retreat, his own surrender, he has broadcast the message very clearly into the mind of every Chinese decision maker. Oh, Donald Trump does not see concession as a good thing. He sees concession as a sign of weakness, and therefore you cannot make concessions. In a sense, he's tipped his hand. The Chinese have a whole lot of political reasons, domestically and internationally to try to retain the credibility that Donald Trump has just lost over the last 72 hours. They want to show that they are capable of resisting this kind of pressure, resisting this kind of bullying. It's very congenial to their long term political message, which is that we are encircled and suppressed by the United States. That's the language that appeared on the front page of the People's Daily the other day. So they are saying, look, we've been telling you for years, the United States will never let us thrive, will never let us become a peer, will never let us surpass the United States. And Donald Trump is now, in effect, carrying water for them. The question really comes down to who has more capacity to resist pressure. The United States, as we've seen over the last couple of days. We have members of Congress who get calls from bankers. We've got people who go out into the streets over the weekend and protest in large numbers. All of that prevails on our politics. China has a pretty demonstrated track record of essentially crushing dissent, silencing other views. So they don't have the same kind of mechanisms. Ultimately, this will come down to which side is willing to take more pain. There are people within the administration who are pushing the idea that accelerating this kind of confrontation is a good thing, that this is actually a desirable condition. Have you guys developed a sense of some of these personalities, some of these people, some of these ideas that are circulating? Susan, you pay close attention to it.
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D
Yeah, I mean, look, Donald Trump is not a China hawk. I mean, he often speaks, for example, of his personal admiration for Xi Jinping, as he says of Vladimir Putin. He says, we got along great. He's a good guy, he's a strong man, he's a strong leader. He has real ideologues who are working with him and for him, who have a vision of China as a long term threat, an enemy in the world, not just in an economic sense, but in a security sense. There are people who believe that it's in the long term interest in the United States essentially to decouple from China. That's been the phrase used in recent years. That's part of the America first protectionist agenda of basically bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
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C
I mean, you have some advisers who are obsessed with China. If you go back to the first Trump administration, Jared Kushner was looking for someone who could advise the campaign on China. They didn't have anyone who had views anything like Trump's. So he went online and came up with the name of Peter Navarro, a very eccentric professor who had written a book called Death by China. He came up with an anagram of his name. He made up somebody named Ron Vara as an expert, which turned out to be just a complete invention, fictional invention of his, who I guess was boosting his theories. And Navarro was really kind of a conspiracy theorist on many subjects. He became enmeshed in trying to overturn the 2020 election, was convicted of contempt when he wouldn't testify to Congress about it. Served time in prison for this. And he's now back in the White House. And he was the one who has been advising on a maximalist position on tariffs, one of many. I mean, and some people would regard him as a quack, but there he is. He kind of got pushed aside in this when the yips took over, even in the Oval Office.
- [11:49]
D
Well, that's right. He published a piece of the Financial Times saying these tariffs are non negotiable at the exact moment when the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessen and Trump were saying, actually, it's in negotiation.
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B
And by the way, just some personal texture on this. I remember I've interviewed Peter Navarro over the years. I remember he once got angry that we were reporting that he doesn't speak Chinese. He somehow didn't like the idea that somebody was pointing out. The familiarity with China was perhaps not as deep as you might wanna suggest.
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D
To the point, though, of what influence he has or doesn't have. He's also a man who literally went to jail for Donald Trump. You know, in Donald Trump's book, that counts for a lot, but it doesn't mean everything.
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B
We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna be joined by a political economist whose research focuses on how outlandish ideas can become the cent. The political scene from the New Yorker will be right back.
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E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
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F
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
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G
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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E
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
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H
Right.
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F
So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [13:20]
G
Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [13:23]
E
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [13:38]
B
With the economic turmoil of the past week, it may be baffling to hear that key figures in Trump's orbit were still publicly urging the President to stay the course. So why is Trump so hooked on this idea of tariffs and the potential they might have? Joining us now is someone who has long studied the intersection of political ideology and economic policy, Mark Blyth, a political economist and professor of international economics and public affairs at Brown University. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.
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H
It's lovely to be on your show.
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B
Mark, I wanna start by getting your reaction to the chaos of just the last couple of days. Stocks have been up, they've been down. Trump is calling this a transitional phase. Would you describe it that way?
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H
To be a transitional phase, you have to have a point where you begin and a point where you end and you transit across. And given that we have no idea where the point is at the end, and we probably don't share the same departure point as to where we think we're going, I would say that's not exactly how I would describe it. I think there's a couple of things going on. There's a bunch of folks in the administration, and Trump himself has a kind of intuitive feel for this. America's been hollowed out. We've lost our manufacturing. We need to bring it back. Even the Democrats did this. Right? Nobody believes in free trade anymore. So we're going to put these tariffs up, and then it's going to be really expensive for firms unless they move to the United States. Job done, promise fulfilled. Right? That's basically it. And then you discover when you do that there's a giant thing out there, they're called the treasury market. And it really doesn't like it when you cause ruptures in the treasury market. So what happened to our friend Donald was what happened to Liz Truss in Britain a little while ago when the bond market went. We don't think this really adds up and you shouldn't be doing it. And what do you think you're doing? Because this is never going to work. Once everyone sort of caught onto it, the cost became apparent, you start to get the market reaction and he got slapped.
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C
Well, I do wonder, is the theory of the case right that if you put up huge tariffs you're going to re industrialize America or is that just basically wishful thinking that we could go back to 1940?
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H
I think the way you're framing it's exactly right. The foreign policy imagination of these guys seems to be the 19th century. Someone told them what McKinley did and the next thing is Canada is on your bingo list. The 1950s is definitely the imaginary for like the factory jobs, et cetera. They're coming back. There is way of doing this. Absolutely. But it involves things like having a functioning state that can guide the re industrialized process, not one that you're trying to hack bits off at the same time because you don't like it. It involves things like having really world class training institutions. So why beat up on your university sector at the same time? So whereas the IRA was the smart version of this, meaning the Inflation Reduction act. And even then, whether it would work or not is an open question. What you've got now is no state action, no training, just tariffs and the magic of the market's gonna do it. And that's not gonna work.
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D
So can you help us understand, I mean, Donald Trump has had a view of everyone is ripping us off. There's no such thing as real allies. He's been in favor of tariffs since he entered public life, but he's no intellectual. We can be sure that he's not sitting around reading a history going back to McKinley. Who are the people who've been peddling this idea and how seriously should we take them?
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H
Whether he's working with the theory or not, there are people around him that certainly are. Navarro is the most obvious candidate. Right. There's also in the kind of kitchen cabinet, you've got people like Bannon who are very much the kind of national conservatives who want to re industrialize America. And it's that strand of the Republican Party which is tilted to as they see the abandoned, neglected or disaffected working class. The sophisticated version can be found in a book which is written by two people who have nothing to do with the Republican Party, Klein and Pettis, who wrote a book, Trade Wars, Class wars, from a couple of years ago. And they make the following case, which is if you have the dollar, everybody wants to hold the dollar as the global savings asset, right? So if I'm a country and I send you stuff and you send me dollars. I don't want those dollars in my economy because if everyone has a party with my dollars, then ultimately prices and wages go up, my exports get less competitive, and that's bad. So what I do is I kind of sterilize that money at the border. And the easiest way to do that is to basically buy a Treasury note that then sends the money back to then lower their interest rates because you give them the money back and then we buy more of your exports, rinse and repeat for 30 years. And you get to the situation where the three biggest employers in the United States 1975 were what became Exxon, General Moores and Ford. This year, in reverse order, the Home Depot, Amazon Logistics and Walmart. In other words, we went from a place that made stuff to a place that sells stuff that's made somewhere else. If you keep this going forever, eventually you're going to get called on these bits of paper called Treasuries that you've been handing out as IOUs use, because there's gotta be something real behind it. And if there isn't, eventually you're going to have a kind of big problem both with the dollar and with the fact that you don't make anything. And that's why this has power. This is why it captures the imagination. Does this actually just mean stick up tariffs and everyone will be fine? Absolutely not. But that's where the ideas are coming from.
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B
It sounds like for this process to unfold in the way that Pettis and others have described it relies on the the continuance of the dollar as a safe and reliable currency. There are other things that the administration was banking on for this process, like the bond markets cooperating that didn't turn out to be correct. Are there other assumptions that you see that may be dubious that this process is predicated on?
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H
You need dollar stability to pull this off. If you manage to succeed, you will export more, which will mean that you're importing less, which means less dollars will be going out. You're kind of winding down the clock on to make it work. Right. And it's exactly the same with the tariffs. Either the tariffs are permanent, in which case everyone has to adjust to it and it sticks and it works in some shape or form, or they're bargaining chips. So when basically the bond market takes your pants down and smacks you, which is what happened to them the other day when you pivot and say, well, really it was just this giant head fake and now we're really going to go after China. Everyone kind of knows you're ad libbing at that point, right?
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D
Speaking of a spanking, I gotta ask you about your economist's reaction to the formula by which they arrived at those.
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H
Retaliatory tariffs under the sum line, right? The bit on the bottom, like it was just three things stuck together. I mean, it didn't even make sense as a kind of a formula. So once we figured out that they really just asked ChatGPT how you would do this, and the numbers were the.
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D
Same, you know, and it's been reported that it was Peter Navarro.
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B
Yeah, I was gonna say Navarro, who.
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D
Used that formula, which was focused, as I understand it, on essentially just saying, here's every country's trade deficit with the United States rather than the much more sophisticated calculations that our Treasury Department or our economic advisors could have come up with.
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C
And this is how you get to gigantic tariffs on Lesotho, right?
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H
There's actually something even more silly about this if you think it through for a minute, right? The whole idea that we are being ripped off.
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B
Off.
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H
You're not being ripped off. You're engaging in voluntary transactions, right? Now, let's take a very simple example of this. The United States does not make bananas. I've been all through this country and I can assure you they don't make bananas, right? Maybe pineapples in Hawaii. If you want to eat bananas, you're going to have to buy them from someone else. When they sell them to you, they are not ripping you off. And of course, any country that's poor enough to make bananas and export them probably isn't exporting anything else. So you will have a trade surplus with them in bananas. This is the natural course of events. So the idea that, like, we're not challenging this thing, that we're all being ripped off, that's the fundamental claim and it's fundamentally flawed.
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C
It's very much the ethic, though, or underlying this sort of national conservative mindset, which is the idea that the globalists are ripping off our people. If in fact this is what seems to be incredibly haphazard version of how to re industrialize America, what are you expecting we're gonna see when you've got tariffs of this proportion on the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, what can we look forward to now?
- [22:13]
H
Well, what you can look forward to is reading all about it in my book coming out on May 5 called inflation a Guide for Users and Losers, which is coming out with Norton. There's the book plug, because you're gonna be looking at inflation. Now, had it been the massive across the board, every country tariffs, it would have been an enormous supply shock, even bigger than coal. But right at this point in time, think about what happened in Covid. You had a supply shock because basically supply chain shut down and you had a demand shock at the same time because everyone looked behind them and said, oh crap, we need to buy a new couch. We're all living on zoom. And those factors came together to push up prices. If you start tariffing China, from whom you buy lots and lots of things, and also the other countries that are on 10% and the people who are paying 25% for cars, I don't even know at this point how much Canada's tariff is. But that's your entire auto supply chain. The idea that this is not going to be inflationary simply is incredible. It's got to happen.
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D
So basically we should go out to the stores and purchase anything that can still be purchased right now. Is that what you're recommending?
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H
And if you do that, you'll push prices up and cause an inflation. So you can't even win by doing that.
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C
We're going to have to stockpile toilet paper again.
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B
I'm interested in how bad ideas get popular or get adopted. I mean, this has been a subject of your research. You focused on, as you put it, why people believe certain economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. As you look at what we'll call this cracked notion of re industrialization, this idea that by snapping your fingers and putting tariffs all over the world, that you could somehow do it. Do you have a feel for how this idea happened to gain attention? Is it just because Donald Trump has this specific weird political effect, or is there something else over the last 25, 30 years that you think has given it more lift than it deserves?
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H
So part of it is the fact that Trump is very good at sniffing out particular moments of opportunity. He has this unique knack of being able to do that. And the second side of this is that the downsides to many communities of free trade became apparent in the 2000s. Wisconsin lost one third of its industry. Not to China, not to technology, but to moving to Texas and other right to work states just to get away from unions. And then after that, remember Ross Perot? Well, the guy got millions of votes for pointing out that when you moved to Mexico, there was going to be a lot of dislocation, which there was. The China shock in 2001 when they joined the WTO was just the third iteration of this. And then we had the financial crisis. Now, if you're in one of these communities where your mortgage is underwater, it's hard to move, the tax base collapse, your schools are getting worse and worse, nobody wants to move in, everybody starts to go on disability, you've got drug problems, deaths of despair. And every four years someone rolls around and says, hey, the economy's doing great. How would you believe them? And that's exactly what this movement has fed upon.
- [25:08]
B
And we've never done real trade adjustment, we've never done real training in any sort of earnest way.
- [25:13]
H
Exactly. Because what we assumed was that people adjust, that labor markets are fluid, that when jobs go here, they go somewhere else. And it turns out, no, that doesn't really happen, particularly when you get these highly concentrated shocks.
- [25:26]
C
It's interesting that you're bringing up the right to work laws because aren't there many other policy prescriptions for the problems that these communities have faced? The minimum wage hasn't risen since 2009. Corporate profits are through the roof. I mean, there are many other things that Donald Trump and others could be talking about doing. Are tariffs the answer to the problems?
- [25:51]
H
They are the answer to someone who thought they had the answer to everything for 40 years. This is a great example of the power of a bad idea idea. Once you convince everyone that this is all you need, you don't need to talk about any of the other things that you talked about because these things will follow from the magic of the tariff. It excludes the conversation about everything else. The problem the Democrats have is quite the opposite. Many people in Democratic Party want to talk about these things, but the Democratic Party as a whole doesn't want to do anything about those things. Democrats became the party of the status quo.
- [26:21]
B
Before we let you go, Mark, if you were advising the president, if he suddenly needed to hire a guitar playing Scotsman and you got the call, what would you tell them to do?
- [26:30]
H
Now if you're serious about doing this, first of all, don't turn it into a bilateral fight with China because ultimately they can take the pain more than you can. They have locked down their cities for a year or more. They can deliver food through the window through drones. They don't care if you cut them off from certain things. So getting into that fight is very, very disruptive. The second one is don't kick the hell out of your state and your training institutions if you're serious about this, because you need to do that and you need to invest in the things that people actually need to enable them to move and take part in this revolution, which would be housing, which would be skills. And if you're not doing that and you're just giving your friends a tax cut and sticking up some tariffs, you're just doing damage.
- [27:13]
B
Mark Blyth of Brown University, just immensely interesting. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.
- [27:19]
H
Absolute pleasure. Pleasure.
- [27:20]
B
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, will Trump face any political blowback from this economic turmoil? The political scene from the New Yorker will be right back. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening, Katie.
- [27:46]
E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [27:49]
F
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of consumer tech and Culture.
- [27:52]
G
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [28:02]
E
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in the tech.
- [28:11]
F
Right. So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [28:22]
E
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [28:38]
B
Guys, we just heard from Mark Blyth talking. I thought in very interesting ways about how, as he said, bad ideas can get attention. What did you take away from that, Susan?
- [28:49]
D
Well, I'll be leaving this conversation and going directly to the store.
- [28:54]
B
The liquor store, I take it.
- [28:56]
C
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Susan, you need to tell the truth. Susan's husband already told her we're not going to start pre buying and stockpiling.
- [29:04]
D
Yeah, I believe there was a ban on panic buying. But honestly, at least the coffee, I mean, you know, that is the textbook economist definition. You know, he said, yes, we have no bananas in America. Well, we also don't make the coffee that we need to keep listening to the doing the podcast and writing the columns.
- [29:23]
B
Susan is waving her hands in an increasingly frantic way. Actually, on the subject of this, I'm.
- [29:28]
D
With you on this more seriously as well, though. We can't put too much of an intellectual veneer here on a horseshit item.
- [29:35]
B
I'm glad you say that.
- [29:35]
D
Okay. And the truth of the matter is having the learned economist on from the Ivy League university to tell us about how markets are supposed to respond when, as he said, the formula that they use to put these tariffs on literally makes no sense.
- [29:52]
B
Yeah, I do find sometimes the effort to try to make sense of not somebody who's not playing three dimensional chess, they're just throwing the chess pieces at each other and it sometimes feels a little daffy.
- [30:02]
C
I mean, that's why when I spoke to an economic expert other than the one we had today, and they said, just stop trying to rationalize this, it's about his personality, it's about power, it's about abuse of power.
- [30:15]
B
But I also think that the collision then is with the real world financial implications and the geopolitical implications and the fact that China does take, even if these are essentially metabolic decisions that Trump is making, they have very practical geopolitical consequences.
- [30:31]
C
Well, yeah, well.
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D
And I think that is where we're really seeing something different. This notion that he's finally kicked Xi in the balls and that there is going to be this kind of response from China is really striking to me. He's manufactured his own global crisis and it's gone beyond the realm of one man's ego to actual table stakes for the two biggest economy.
- [30:55]
C
And I think so what we're dealing with now are the repercussions, the real repercussions that we somehow escaped in the first term, thanks maybe to the people who put the brakes on Trump. The other thing that I thought, though that is less. We underestimate Trump's appeal even in the face of these incredibly sort of ruinous, damaging repercussions is I thought the professor's point was really interesting about how he has this feral instinct for the resentments of people out in the country that he knows how to weaponize. He does have a feel for that.
- [31:35]
B
Yeah, kind of resentment radar. He is very, very good at finding that. Here's the question. I mean, we've now brought it to the inevitable natural end to this conversation, which is the politics and the effect of it. Just in the last day or two, you have heard people who were his cheerleaders, Bill Ackman earlier, who said that this would end up in a nuclear economic winter. He is now racing to applaud Trump for his retreat. But it is also notable that Dave Portnoy, who's a podcaster who voted for Trump, told CNN that he said he would absolutely could see himself voting for Democrats in the midterms if Trump doesn't get the financial picture back on track. We just had an election that came down to the price of eggs on some level. What do you think about the political consequences for losing a few trillion dollars.
- [32:32]
D
On the markets, the damage that Trump is doing to the country, its institutions, the global economy? I think we get it too tangled up into the very partisan capital D considerations of what's going to happen to the Democratic Party in next year's midterm and in the presidential election that follows that. I've been amazed at the weakness and lack of coherence to the Democrats response to what is a really pathetic display by Trump and his Republicans over the last couple weeks. I mean, they do not seem to be providing a kind of strong alternate leadership and vision to the country at this point. They're still in their kind of regrouping, pathetic phase after the election.
- [33:23]
B
Jane, what do you think?
- [33:24]
C
I certainly agree that we have not seen strong, at least not unified, clear leadership from the top of the Democratic Party. But I actually think what we've seen is really interesting, which is pushback from two very different sectors in America. One is the business community that really didn't believe he was really going to do this. And when he did, and they lost incredible amount of money and they watched the bond market falling apart, that was a wall that Trump hit and he backed down. Okay. We've been wondering what's going to back him down. That was a wall. He hasn't completely backed off. But he said, uncle. The other thing are the grassroots out in the country where we've seenthere hasn't been, I think from my standpoint, enough coverage of all of the demonstrations that took place over April 5th. But there's been a real outpouring all across the country, and it's not organized and coherent with the leadership that's driving it, really. But those two things are where you're seeing the action. You're not seeing it from the top of the Democratic leadership. And I think Professor Blyth sort of hinted at why, to some extent, the Democrats are the corporate party. Both parties have gone along with Free Trade.
- [34:42]
B
Well, those protests, and I agree with you, Jane, I don't think that they've been talked about and digested enough really, to recognize how profound that outpouring of outrage was. It's not despair. It's not paralysis. It was outrage. So. So this week's show was essentially about how the rest of the world and the bond markets and places like that are going to have a vote in our politics. But I think in the weeks and months to come, we may be talking more about the kinds of voices and votes that you're hearing from people on the ground who made themselves heard last weekend.
- [35:12]
D
Yeah. Although if I could point out that our politics and our elections and these policies are decided on the margins, it's important, but it's not necessarily game changing to rally the definitely close to 50% of this country that hates Donald Trump. That doesn't change any minds. It doesn't change votes in Congress. It doesn't change outcomes at this point. It's a very small number of people in this country who decided the election in a very small number of states. And it's the same with the brat summer of 2024. Millions of Democrats were really excited when they got rid of Joe Biden and they had Kamala Harris as the nominee. That was genuine. Those crowds were huge. They were much bigger, many of them, than the crowds that we saw last week in those protests. The problem is, is that that's the Democratic base that already it's baked into our politics. That already hates Donald Trump, that already hates his trade war.
- [36:06]
C
I'm not so sure. You may be right. You're right that there was excitement and there is one analysis of the election which was a lot of Democrats stayed home and they didn't like the choices. If they, if that analysis is right and people are now really motivated, then it might make a difference. If you're looking across the country trying to figure out what kind of reaction there is to Trump, it seems to be coming from way out there and Wall street much more than pushing back from Capitol Hill.
- [36:34]
B
One thing people don't like is losing a lot of their retirement savings. So we'll see what the ultimate political effect is. But I'm not sure I'm ready to say it's immaterial. Susan, Jane, thank you both.
- [36:49]
C
Thanks, Evan. Thanks, Susan.
- [36:51]
D
All right, great to be with you guys.
- [36:54]
B
This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening.
- [37:22]
I
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [37:49]
B
I want a shark that that eats.
- [37:51]
I
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [37:55]
B
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. Online. To the best of my ability.
- [38:03]
I
Every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false?
- [38:10]
E
You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across.
- [38:13]
B
From me, one day, at some point.
- [38:16]
E
As of yet undefined in the future, you will die.
- [38:20]
I
False.
- [38:21]
C
Tell me more.
- [38:22]
I
Listen to the Big Interview right now, in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:34]
H
From.
- [38:34]
D
PRX.