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A
Hello and welcome to the restless politics US Caddie. We of course, are going to be talking about Trump's tariffs, its ongoing tariff, but there's been a lot of movement since the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs as illegal last week. We're also going to talk about what's going on in Mexico this week and some of the violence there and the drug cartels. But before we dive into all of this, there is something bigger going on here. Gatti Because Donald Trump's position on tariffs has been the same for the last 40 years. This is exactly why we made this brand new series, Becoming Trump. We are rewinding the clock. Katty K. To dig into the people, the events and the scandals that built him.
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B
We made this series because the whole world is obsessed with Donald Trump, the president of the United States. But we felt it was worth giving you some of his backstory, trying to understand everything that he had gone through in his childhood, when he was a young man, when he was in real estate, when he was A TV producer. We've gone into the seedy side of his love lives, his divorces, marriages, and it's not really just to tell the biography of Donald Trump. I felt, and I was kind of reminded of this, Anthony, while we were researching and doing this series, that in order to understand this guy, you have to go back to the origin story of him. Because so much of what he felt and said and did and believed right back when he was a young man is what the world is living through today. Right. I mean, you even see it in the tariff story that we are going through this crazy roller coaster of a news cycle and an economic cycle because of something he believed way back in the 1980s. For me, that's why it was important to do this series.
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A
All of his philosophies are coming out now. Right. So we know about his family's secrets. We know about the heritage of lies in his family's history. We know that his father was tied to the Ku Klux Klan. Trump acted like a bully, got sent to a military school. But it's also a story about how a bully can win because he's won a lot. Gatti. And so this is gonna be a four part series where we delve into it, but we're gonna take the perspective not only of history, but of what really happened during our lifetimes. Especially me as a New Yorker observing Donald Trump literally over the last four decades.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah. And how big and how famous he became. I mean, he'd always wanted. I hadn't realized that until we started doing the series. That was a fun thing to find out that he had always wanted to be a TV guy, that he'd thought of going to university to study television and film and then the family business. But actually, of course, his big success was as the star of the Apprentice. It was very edited. It made people believe around the country that he was this fantastic businessman, which he wasn't necessarily. And we get into all the close shaves that he had as a businessman. Anyway, I think you're going to enjoy it. I think there's really never been a more urgent time to understand the world that Donald Trump has made for all of us, the world that we are all living in. It's really worth understanding how we got to where we are and how he got to where we are. So you can Listen to episode one from Wednesday. Sign up at thereestispoliticsus.com to become a founding member. It is all there for our members. Or click on the link in this episode description box and you'll find it there as well. Did you have fun making it, Anthony? Did you have fun or did it make you like relive your PTSD moments?
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A
No, it was somewhat traumatic because again, doesn't reflect well on me. I was remarkably naive about the sinister nature of Donald Trump and I frankly wish I had had four part miniseries delivered to me on my doorstep in 2016 and I probably would have handled things differently. But we're here now. But let's go back to what happened on Friday. Trump is petulant. He's upset exactly as we predicted. He's wildly swinging and overreacting his approval rating. I think we should just point this out. He has a negative 27 point approval rating. His approval rating is below where it was on January 7, 2021. Caddy K. That would be the day after the insurrection. McConnell and McCarthy said Trump was finished when he got to an approval rating this low. But here we are. Okay, but he's flailing now. So he's going to use section 122 of the 1974 Trade act and he was going to put on 10% tariffs. Caddy but you know, he didn't like some of the news reports. It was hurting his feelings. So he's upping it to 15.
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B
Listen, when, when Donald Trump's feelings are hurt, the rest of the world suffers. That is what we have learned.
- [06:48]
A
What is the economic rationale? No economic rationale. We're just going to do this. Neal Cat y', all who you know well, the attorney who helped win the Supreme Court court challenge says, yeah, he probably can't do this. He probably doesn't have the right to do this. Moreover, even his attorneys said that Section 122 wouldn't work to put on these carriers. So where do you think we are now?
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B
Kat I think Donald Trump, in his reaction to what happened on Friday has made it pretty clear that he is a president who wants total power. He wants to be able to implement tariffs and as he sees fit. As he wants to. He said over the weekend, which oddly, Republicans haven't responded to very much, I can do anything I want. I can do anything I want. Constitution obviously doesn't say that, but that's what he believes. He wants to be able to tell Americans they're going to have National Guard troops in their cities. He wants to be able to tell American companies who can sit on their boards. We had him over the course of the weekend telling Netflix that they had to take an Obama administration official off their board. So he wants to be able to run Everything. And when he is stopped from running everything by the courts, because as we said last week in that emergency session we did on Friday, the system is holding and the courts are holding, he lashes out. I mean, he's lashed out in rather petulant ways, saying that he's going just put out a truth social post. We're recording this on Monday morning. He's just put out a truth social post saying he's going to lowercase Supreme Court because they're such a disgrace. Anthony, if you misbehave, I'm going to lowercase your name. It's Anthony Small A from now on. I mean, this is what 5 and 6 year olds do, right? I don't like you, so I'm gonna spell your name with a lowercase. I mean, that's what he's doing. But he's also doing stuff that I think is genuinely dangerous. I mean, I think the way he called out the Supreme Court justices who disagreed with his theory of the case that he could use a state of emergency to declare these powers, the way he called out their families puts those people in greater danger. I mean, this. This isn't a joke. We've seen one of the justices he likes, Brett Kavanaugh, have somebody outside his house kind of stalking him, posing a threat to his life. There are images of Amy Coney Barrett going around the justice who also disagreed with him in this case. There are images of Amy Coney Barrett going around on the kind of maga Internet with a sign in front of her saying I am a traitor. I mean, it reminds me of when I went down to Arizona to that Trump merchandise store. I told you about that. And they had T shirts with Mike Pence and his face behind bars and the big word traitor. And they told me that was one of the biggest selling items they had in the store. Part of it is silly and petulant, and these tariffs may not hold. So it's confusing. Other countries are having to deal with the chaos. But part of this is also dangerous. When he gets like this. It puts people's lives in this environment that we're in. I can't imagine that Amy Coney Barrett hasn't had to step up her security over the course of this weekend.
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A
Right? Yes. I want to make a statement. I would like you to react to it, I feel like, because I've read through carefully all the opinions now, including the Neil Gorshik brilliant concurrence, which I would recommend to anybody that has any love of the US Constitution to read it.
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B
He doesn't spare anybody.
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A
Yeah. And it basically is. He's being very honest about where we are culturally. But I feel like we have three political hacks, okay? Clarence Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Alito. Now, some would say that there are political hacks on the other side, that the three liberal justices always vote the same way. But I feel like Gorsuch is not that way. Gorsuch actually looked at the case cleanly and made the assessment. But, Katie, what does it say about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court today?
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B
Look, we know that the Supreme Court's approval ratings are at record lows. We know that they are seen as partisan. There's a very good editorial in the Wall Street Journal that is worth everybody reading, saying that this is arguably the worst moment of Donald Trump's presidency and that he owes the three justices who he maligns and he owes the court as an institution an apology. I agree with you. This partisanship on the court predates this ruling and that those three liberal justices gave Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt in cases that were not entirely dissimilar to this in terms of executive power. So the court has been drifting in that partisan direction. But I actually believe that you can take a kind of barometer of Donald Trump's anger over the weekend and kind of correlate it with actually the degree to which the court has held. And I think the Supreme Court has done what the Supreme Court needed to do. And I think historians may well look back and say that could have been a turning point for the court. Maybe not some of the individual members who you say are so partisan, but the court itself put down a marker that defended the American constitution, defended Article 1. Am I being too Pollyanna ish about the court?
- [12:09]
A
No, I think there's a real problem, though, because you have one branch of the government that has no respect for the other two branches of the government. You have one branch of the government that's saying, hey, this is toilet paper, the Constitution, and therefore, I'm going to be disrespectful and intimidating and threatening to the other two branches of the government. And so it's having an impact. It's hurting the society. There's no question about that. And I want to respond to some people that are from Wall street who called me over the weekend and said to me, oh, you're being too glib. You sound like an Ms. Snow host, where you're saying, the age of Trump is over, the age of Trump is not over. And they're giving me all these different reasons why but let me push back and tell you the age of Trump is actually over. I want to explain to people why I'm adamant about saying that. It's not me being partisan, it's me looking at that court holding its ground and Neil Gorsuch's opinion. And I believe that more people will look at that opinion and they will say, hey, we've had enough of this. And that negative 27% approval rating is not going up. Caddy, if he continues this. So why don't you tell us, if you don't mind, what he's doing now, what is a licensing fee and what are these new tariffs that he's trying to impose using Section one?
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B
So I'm not a tariff lawyer, but as I understand it, he signed this proclamation. It's a 1974 trade act. It allows him to put 10% temporary tariffs. And I think that's the key thing on goods from all countries. He's raised that to 15% on Saturday. But the key thing here is they're only valid for, what is it, 150 days. So these are short term tariffs, and there has to be an investigation into what? He can't just fire off a bazooka and impose a tariff because he wants to. There actually has to be a formal investigation, and they don't last for terribly long. Well, take that period of time. Where does it get us to? And then Congress, after that period of time would have to vote on whether to make these tariffs permanent. Well, that gets us to midterm territory. And the sigh of relief that you're hearing around Washington, D.C. is from Republican members of Congress who think they won't have to go to their electorates and say tariffs are in place. Now, they may have to go to their electorate and say, okay, there's been a lot of chaos, but actually the good news for Republicans is hopefully that these tariffs come off. I don't see this Congress or any other Congress voting to make those tariffs permanent because they see the damage that it does to them. I was getting texts from European officials who are saying, we don't think this is permanent. Like you saying, the Trump era is over. This tariff era is over. So if you're a business trying to make a decision and you've committed to, you know, or you're a country who's committed billions of dollars under some deal that you've done with the administration already, you're now thinking to yourself, well, why on earth would I go and spend billions of dollars in order to get myself a better tariff deal? These Tariffs may well not be there in six months.
- [15:26]
A
Yeah. So Trump could have taken the win. Right. So what he could have said is, okay, they've ruled against me with the tariffs, let's refund some of the tariffs and let's move on. And that would have actually created an economic stimulus for his team going into the midterms. And then sometime in September, as the economy's humming from this additional money flowing into the economy, he and the Republicans could have taken credit for that. Okay. And that's basically what the Republicans wanted him to do, but he's not doing that. And so he's now using this obscure thing called a licensing fee. And this comes from a 1976 case called Federal Energy Administration vs Algonquin. I'm not going to bore everybody with it, but what the court basically said there is that the President does have a right to. To use some tools to adjust imports if he thinks it's going to protect the US Economy is sort of a different thing from iepa, and so he's going to try to use that. But I've talked to three or four different trade lawyers and constitutional scholars over the weekend, and they say that this would function exactly like a tariff. He would try to structure it differently, but if it got back up to the courts, it would be disallowed. So he could do it, which Neil
- [16:49]
B
Katyal has also suggested it would happen.
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A
Yeah, right, exactly. So he could do this, which he. Because he's a petulant guy and he's arrogant and egocentric and he wants to flex on everybody and prove to people that he's the boss. But this would be what your European friends are saying, okay, we'll pay the tariffs now, and then it'll get disallowed 6, 8, 12 months, and then it'll have to get reversed. Now, I want to explain to people how this works. So the big companies are always getting rebates and refunds at the ports. And so I just want to make it very, very clear to everybody, if you paid a duty at the port, there's a system in place to unwind that duty and to credit your account. Now, if you're a small guy, if you're me buying wine or you buying wine, it's a different process. But somebody like Costco or Walmart is going to get the money back at it, and this is going to flow through to their earnings. It's going to be very positive for them in the economy. So I just want to point out Trump is going to push this. The Republicans don't want it. The Democrats are like, this is great. Continue to push this because this is going to help us as we get towards the midterms. But I guess my question to you is I haven't heard a coherent Democratic response to all of this. And if you have, tell me what it is, because this is what I'm always worried about. And it's something Bill Maher said over the weekend when he was getting teased by Trump. He says, you know, I feel like the Democrats, I can't find a way to win. So I don't understand why they haven't responded effectively to this. But if they have, push back on me and tell me what their coherent response is to this Trump disaster.
- [18:36]
B
I think you're right that over the last three days we haven't seen a particularly strong Democratic response. When I've had a couple of Democrats texting me saying that they feel they have the momentum going into the midterms. There are also some who are suggesting that we could have kind of inflation creeping back into the economy if there's no new tariff revenue that comes into America. But that's a sort of pointing the finger at Donald Trump strategy rather than them taking control of this. But I also think the Democrats can look at the polls and see which way the American public is going. And as you and I have had conversations with senior Democrats who have said, actually they have had at a legal level quite a lot of wins over the last year, and they would count this one as another win. I separate two things. One is that you're going to have the Democrats at a small local level over the next six months running for their midterm reelections in small local races. And the question is, you know, do they go left or do they go center in those individual races? And then after the midterms, the Democrats are going to have to come up with some kind of coherent national figure and message that can carry their standard forwards. But I don't think you're going to hear that honestly until after the midterms. I mean, maybe there should be a united message that comes out of this tariff fiasco. But I think what you're going to have is constant pointing out the chaos that comes from this administration. And chaos, by the way, is what got Joe Biden elected in 2020 because the country was tired of the chaos. So in a way, I mean, there's the old political playbook, which is when your enemy is shooting themselves in the foot, sit back and let them carry on shooting themselves in the foot. And right now over the course of the last three or four days at least, White House has done a very good job of shooting itself in the foot. So maybe that doesn't need to be. What I'm saying is I think you're right, obviously that going into 28, they're going to need a very coherent strategy to run an election campaign effectively against Whoever it is. J.D. vance, Marco Rubio. I'm just not sure that you're going to get that in the space of four days from a party that still hasn't gone through its primary season and doesn't have a leader yet. But they only need to. I mean, the polls. You, you mentioned one poll. Let me ask you about these polls. There's this CNN poll that came out this morning. Hispanic supporters dropped from 41 to 22% in the last year. Independent support has dropped from 41% to 26% in the last year. 18 to 34 year olds has dropped from 41% to 25% in the last year. And here's the worst number for the President. Only a third of the electorate thinks that Donald Trump has the right priorities. I mean, I think those poll numbers are brutal for the administration. So here's a question for you, Anthony. Does he now try and turn them around? What does he do to now try and get everyone going into the State of the Union, Republicans, MAGA and Independents alike and the overall electorate are saying we just want him to talk about affordability. Is that what we hear at the State of the Union? And is that what we hear from the White House?
- [21:40]
A
No, I don't think so yet. He lost the case and so he's going to be very fired up about this, you know, but I, I'm going to make a couple of predictions quickly. Okay. I think this licensing fee gambit dies on arrival. Less than a 5% chance that it succeeds, I think.
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B
What's the time frame on that?
- [21:59]
A
Well, he's got to go, he's got to, he's got to go right now and say that he's using this. And then Neil, Katya and those guys are going to go to the court and they're going to get what's called an injunction or a, a temporary restraining order or TRO to stop the American government from imposing the licensing fee. And I think that's gonna be successful. And then if you're telling me that the treasury or the Department of Justice is gonna negate the court, then we have a full on constitutional crisis, at which point I don't think Trump can survive that because I think he got pushed on Greenland by Thune and McConnell and those guys. And I think they'll say, hey man, we're not up for this. And oh, by the way, you're approval rating is going to go to 26% down from 36%. So that's number one. Number two, apropos to what you said about the European business leaders, the clock is now running. The 150 day clock becomes a real story. First of all, I think somebody like Neel Katja can get that too invalidated because it doesn't really work based on the balance of payments test. You need to have in section in 122 to apply the tariff. So, so that's probably not going to work. He could go to the Congress and say, okay, I need you to pass tariff legislation. But they're not going to do that.
- [23:18]
B
They're not going to do that. No. There was meant to be a new round of trade negotiations with the Indians. They pulled out this week. It was meant to be this week. They have just pulled out. That is a symbol of how the rest of the world views us. We don't need to negotiate with you anymore because you don't have the big stick anymore. Somebody I know who's in the truck in the trade department in this administration told me that it was last summer. It's great. Under Trump, we actually have leverage with big trading partners. Now they have no leverage. They've just lost their leverage. He has just given away America's leverage.
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A
So, so, so, and I agree with that. And I'm going to make this last prediction because this classic Donald Trump, he will then cut deals. He will then go to the Indian government, the other governments, and he will cut deal deals that are off of the IPA decision. They will be lower tariff deals. He will then declare victory and call these the greatest trade deals in history.
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B
It all caps, right? All capital letters in all caps.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You'll be back to all capital letters.
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A
He'll be using all caps.
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B
Okay, that's great.
- [24:22]
A
But this is exposing something that at some point the American body, politicians, public servants, the American electorate is going to have to address. We have a extremely dysfunctional political class because the leaders of the Congress should have gotten out last Friday and they should have made a joint statement. I am Chuck Schumer. I'm John thune. I'm Mitch McConnell. I'm Hakeem Jeffries. We resoundingly support and defend the three articles of the Constitution. And we resoundingly support the decision that the Supreme Court made in defense of the Constitution. But they did not do that, Katty. And that's telling you that this is a failed political class and very dysfunctional.
- [25:17]
B
And I think that's what Neil Gorsuch is trying to say. Neil Gorsuch is trying to say to the members of Congress. Guys, to your point, wake up. Where have you been for the last year? Step up. You are part of the Constitution. You've got to do the thing you are meant to do. So it's going to be very interesting to see the State of the Union is Tuesday night. It's going to be super interesting to see how he is received. It's going to be, I'm going to be watching to see whether all nine members of the Supreme Court are there because I think actually this is the moment for the conservative members and the liberal members to come together and so and the centrist members, the swing voters and support each other because they don't want to have attacks on other members of the Supreme Court in the way that Donald Trump has been attacking them. So we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about what's happening in Mexico, which has really blown up over the last day or two.
- [26:15]
A
This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Now, it's Mother's Day coming up and over. Aura Frames is perfect for the mom who says she doesn't need anything.
- [26:23]
B
Yeah, and moms are always tricky to shop for.
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A
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- [26:37]
B
And what I love is that you can preload it, right, Anthony, with photos. You can personalize it. So even if your mom isn't great at tech, you can make it easy for her.
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A
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A
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- [27:25]
D
This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. And it's Tabby and Dominic here from the book club Goal Hangers latest show.
- [27:34]
E
Now, Tabby, as you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others you especially return to again and again. And those second kind of books, they really deserve to last, don't they?
- [27:44]
D
That's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent employee owned publisher based in London.
- [27:51]
E
Every book is produced with specially commissioned beautiful artwork and a specially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context.
- [28:00]
D
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- [28:34]
B
I've been watching Mexico over the last 24 hours with some increasing alarm, Antony. Not just because my daughter was about to go on holiday there, which I'm now rethinking, but the speed with which things have blown up in Mexico over the last day or two, I think is worth noting. But I'm also interested in whether this is a strategy from Claudia Sheinbaum to go after the leaders of cartels that has then caused this outpouring of violence across the country and whether this is a strategy that can work so quickly. Just to update people, members of cjng, I'm just going to call it that. The CJNG cartel have unleashed a wave of violence across 20 Mexican states. They've torched businesses, they've put up roadblocks, and it's all in retaliation for the killing of their leader, who goes by the name of El Mencho. He was declared dead yesterday after he was seriously injured in a shootout between his bodyguards and the military commandos who'd been deployed to capture him. We do now know that the raid was supported by American intelligence. 26 people have been killed in unrest across the country since then. You've got these kind of extraordinary photographs from Puerto Vallarta, which is a tourist resort of columns of smoke. Americans living in Mexico have been told to kind of shelter in place the drug war in Mexico. And how to handle the drug war has been going on for decades. Some presidents have tried clamping down very hard. I remember Felipe Calderon, who was elected in 2006. He tried to clamp down very hard on the cartels during his six years in office. And some 60,000 people died. The subsequent two presidents, Pena Nieto and AMLO, both went much softer. Claudia Sheinbaum, looking at Donald Trump and Donald Trump's threats to use military action against the cartels and after Venezuela, you don't want to mess around with that.
- [30:35]
D
You.
- [30:35]
B
You take it seriously. She is also taking this much more draconian approach to the cartels going after this guy and killing him. It'll be supported by Donald Trump. He likes to see this kind of display of force, but it's not clear from history, Anthony, whether actually doing this kind of thing helps, because you end up splintering these cartels and you can cause more chaos than you wanted in the end. So I guess this is something that the Trump administration wanted. I don't know if they were involved in the operation, but beyond the intelligence, I don't think they were involved actually, militarily, kinetically, but it's certainly something they'd welcome. But it's not always the smartest way to handle these drug wars.
- [31:16]
A
So let's talk about President Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico. As you're pointing out, her hand was sort of forced by the American government. Has this weakened hero?
- [31:27]
B
Probably not in the short term, but it depends how quickly this violence can be tampered down. Now, you had a big uptick in the number of people. Calderon played tough, and it did weaken him because there was so much violence across the country. Apparently, some of these roadblocks are already coming down. The government is trying to say, look, we are reasserting control, but if we see ongoing violence and it starts. Starts to impact Mexican people, then it does weaken her. She has another four years in office, so she's in office for a while. She doesn't have to run again for an election. It just depends how this plays out. And I think you can't judge that just by the death of one person.
- [32:07]
A
I'm gonna turn it back to Trump for a second. Okay, So I think Trump wins here because he's occupied with his loss with the Supreme Court. But if I was on Trump's political team, you know, and MAGA person, I'd be putting out a truth social post right now saying, see, the tariffs work. And let me explain to you why the tariffs work. I. I put the tariffs, onerous tariffs on the Mexicans, and I push them to assassinate this cartel leader, which will reduce the flow of fentanyl into the country, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'm a. I'm a winner. And this is a great thing for the United States. However, what you're saying about past history 20 years ago, okay. What typically is happening is because whether we like it or not, the cartels are entrenched in the government layer of the government, the corruption layer of the government. If you want the tourism to come into the country, you got to let us traffic the drugs. If you don't want the terrorism of the country, you want to start killing us, we're gonna start murdering the tourists, okay? Which will drop real estate values, drop tax revenues, drop tourist revenues, et cetera. So the Mexican government is in a real bind, Caddy. But Trump, if he played this right to his base, he could declare victory here. Do you agree with that or am I being. Am I overstretching?
- [33:31]
B
I think Trump operates on a short term frame, right. And I think he benefits from the fact that our attention spans are also very short term. So I think it's quite possible for him to declare victory in this moment. I'm just looking at how these things play out. The head of the Sinaloa cartel was taken into American custody back in July of 2024. That region has been soaked in violence ever since, even though around the rest of Mexico, the murder rates have dropped. So the reality of how this pans out, we don't know yet. You're going to have to ask me and ask Claudia Sheinbaum and ask the Mexican people. In two years time, did this lead to a reduction in violence in that region? We don't know now. But that's not going to stop Donald Trump and the media world in which we live, which has the attention span of anat of saying, okay, this is a victory. And it was a display of force, and he always likes a display of force. By the way, how much does this also help him with distractions? We. I'm sure in the next week or two, you and I are going to be doing an emergency episode on Iran on where there's a massive. We're not ignoring that, guys. We're aware that it's happening, but we're going to talk about it when it actually happens. There's a massive military buildup going on. Trump always likes a distraction. Back to our series. When something controversial happened to him all through his real estate building past, if he hit up against the New York City government and he ran into some kind of roadblock over a development, he would flood the newspapers with other headlines. Or if he was about to face bankruptcy around Atlantic City and his casinos, he would flood the newspapers and the media world with other headlines. Well, I think what is happening in Mexico. He's not orchestrating it, but it's a form of that. He is the master of finding distractions when he's got something negative going on. I think this helps him in that respect.
- [35:24]
A
You brought up Iran, so I'm just going to make a quick statement there. The Iranians are talking to the Chinese about putting military bases, Chinese military bases in Iran. And so what the administration is doing is they're now opening the door. Kissinger told Carter and Kissinger told other future presidents beyond Nixon, keep the Russians out of the Middle East. We didn't listen, but the Russians in Syria created all sorts of complications for the American balance of power. Now we're going to have the Chinese with an opening in Iran. And by the way, I'll stipulate here based on my knowledge of the region and business executives that I talk to in the region as well as political leaders. You know, the Persian Gulf states are never going to say this openly, but they do not support a regime change position for Iran. They do not support a military strike in Iran by the American government. The only group that would be supporting it is Israel. Okay, so, and again, I'll opine on this if and when it happens. But I'll just say this to everybody listening. I really hope it doesn't happen. It's not that I like the Iranian regime, of course I don't. But I think there's some things that we have to be very careful of because we suck katigay at regime change. We have never been successful at it going all the way back to the coup d' Etat in 191953 that our buddies on. The rest is classified. Talk about.
- [36:52]
B
Donald Trump gave a big speech in Saudi Arabia saying his was not going to be the presidency of regime change, that he was not in the business of telling other countries how to run themselves. That went down very well in that area of the world, by the way.
- [37:04]
A
There were no Epstein files, but we're still waiting while our FBI director is celebrating with the U.S. olympic team. We're still waiting for the other 3 million pages. We're still looking for Savannah Guthrie's mom, but he's there shaking beers in the locker room. But let's go back to this Mexican thing, if you don't mind. And I'm sorry we're beating around a little bit, but what I feel is very ironic here is he hit them with the tariffs. The intersection of the timing. The Supreme Court is taking away the tariff power, but the Mexican government is more or less reacting to the tariff power by Doing what Donald Trump wanted. Claudia Sheinbaum basically did more or less what Trump wanted. He's going to take a victory lap at the State of the Union address. Katty, for sure.
- [37:52]
B
Yeah. And I think the risk for Claudia Sheinbaum as it is for all of the other countries that have had to deal with Donald Trump, the Europeans, who all have their own constituents, countries in Latin America, countries all over the world, is that some of those countries have subjugated their own domestic concerns in order to try to curry favor with Donald Trump to get a favorable trade deal. And now those leaders who was one of the first, Keir Starmer, one of the first to try and get a deal, looked very sensible at the time. Now he has to go back and explain to his people, sorry, I made those concessions on chlorinated chicken. Sorry I made those, those concessions on X, Y or Z. The Mexican people feel that the reason they have a drug war in their country is because of consumption in America. If it wasn't for American demand, then we wouldn't have to be the conduit country for all of this supply. And so they don't want to see her kowtowing at a time when he is looking weaker. So it's going to be interesting to see how these countries go back to their populations and sell whatever concessions it is that they have made to the United States. If the president now looks like he doesn't have the big leverage that he thought he did. Super interesting time.
- [39:07]
A
What a mess.
- [39:08]
B
It's a mess. Yeah. I think that's the only thing we can say at the moment is that it's a mess. And good luck. If you happen to be in the business of either trying to do business with the United States or trying to negotiate trade deals with the United States, we wish you well. From the rest is politics us because you need the patience of job. We're going to leave it there. Guys. Thank you very much for listening. A reminder. Remember that we have our new series on Donald Trump which is starting right now. If you would like to listen to that, please do. We'll be back later this week as well with our regular episode. And of course you can all become founding members@therestispoliticsus.com. bye, guys. Thanks for listening.
- [39:47]
A
Okay, guys, thank you. See you soon.
- [39:56]
F
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