← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
America’s Housing Crisis: Why You Can’t Afford a Home, Supreme Court Blocks Trump Tariffs, Democrats Hand Trump a Midterms Ad | Weekly Recap
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Political Commentator 1
A lot of people are saying that the reason why the young people are swinging to socialism is they think that it's othering of economy. I don't care that you're taxing billionaires. I'm not a billionaire. It's not going to impact me. I don't care that you're increasing property taxes. I rent. That's not going to affect me at all. So there's this othering of the economy. And Kalashi just announced that the US housing market has reached its most unaffordable level in history ever.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Yeah. So on the othering of the economy, people really have to watch how things are playing out in New York right now. Watch how they've played out historically. It doesn't work because the people are mobile or you just disincentivize them. And I don't think people are being honest about what it takes to get the smartest and best among us, to build things, to innovate, to create things, to actually drive GDP forward if you want. Just like the most shocking history lesson, look at China. Finally, after decades and decades of murdering his own people, starving them to death, Mao finally died. And then Deng Xiaoping takes over. And what was his solution? Let people get rich. And I quote Dang Xiaoping, the successor to Mao, said to get rich is glorious. So the way out of this stuff is to understand that humans have a drive to get better. They have a drive to get ahead. They have a drive to compete and to win. And. And for a lot of the brightest minds in the world, the competition is in the realm of business. And the way that you make the most money in business is to create something that people want. So you innovate and you build something that's better, cheaper, faster and it works out well when you have light touch. Regulation to avoid things like monopolies. And a regulatory capture is very important to avoid. But when you do that, well, like China did, you pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, I mean, and rapidly. So it's absolutely extraordinary. However, once you stop understanding that mechanism that you're allowing those people to get rich precisely so they will pull everybody up with them. But you want those workhorses, the people that are excited, they're smart, they're driven, they just want to win. And you get to harness that as a society. But you have to let them run. You have to let them get as far ahead as they're able to get. You have to do it. And as soon as you start disincentivizing them, you get less rich. Now you have to protect the middle class.
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Political Commentator 2
Hopefully.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
You guys know that is like the core of my focus is making sure the middle class can thrive. But you're never going to have a middle class if you don't have that top whatever 0.01% that is just psychotic about giving up their entire life to build something extraordinary. So let us all be thankful that they exist. But you have to let them run. And so when you're just like those kids and you want to tax them into oblivion, they just stop being incentivized. As I've said many times, you, you start clamping down on them, putting restrictions, and then they can't even if they want to. Now, speaking on home prices and what's going on there, to Drew's point, home prices are completely out of control, and it is damaging this country massively.
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Political Commentator 2
In the 1990s, the median American home
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
cost about three times the median household income today. Today it costs five times. That is the highest ratio in recorded American history. It's higher than the peak of, of
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Political Commentator 2
the 2006 housing bubble, which I hope
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
we can all agree was a catastrophe. Unlike 2006, nobody's calling this a bubble. They're calling it normal. They're not thinking about it. They're, ah, everything's okay. It's not normal. Home prices are going up like 60% just since 2019. The median home now costs $417,000.
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Political Commentator 2
To qualify for a mortgage on that,
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
you need to earn roughly $127,000 a year.
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Political Commentator 2
And the bad news is the the median household only makes 83,000, which means
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
the average American family is now mathematically locked out of the average American home.
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Political Commentator 2
It's so simple.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
You can see it in the math.
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Political Commentator 2
When you can see it in a spreadsheet. Make more homes.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
A study tracking 95 major housing markets, which they did across eight countries for
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Political Commentator 2
21 years, just published its latest findings.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
For the first time in the study's history, not a single market was rated as affordable.
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Political Commentator 2
Not one.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
We are now short just under 5 million homes in the US alone, which
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Political Commentator 2
is an all time high.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
According to Zillow, 8.1 million families are doubling up and sharing homes with people
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Political Commentator 2
they're not related to, not because they want roommates, but because they can't afford a place of their own.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Now, I hope you guys are all
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Political Commentator 2
asking, how on earth did we get here? And the honest answer is that our
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
policies are designed to make housing go up, not come down. In a world where deficit spending is
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Political Commentator 2
eroding the value of every dollar you
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
save, people have piled into real estate as a hedge. You have to, you have to go into some asset.
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Political Commentator 2
And real estate is the one that
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
people actually understand intuitively. Homeowners right now sit on $35.8 trillion in aggregate equity. They are a massive political constituency and no politician wants to tell their whole group the biggest asset that they own is going to lose value. Trump has said out loud that that's the case. In December, he admitted the two goals are in conflict. In fact, we have a clip.
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Political Commentator 2
Are you still considering a national emergency over housing?
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Donald Trump
I'm looking at it. What would that look, what would that. You know, I have to. There's two thoughts on housing. You have a lot of people have housing that. Because we have such a strong time and such a strong market there, houses are very valuable. It's a big part of their. It's called inflation net worth, their house. I don't want to knock those numbers down because.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Because they'll stop voting them to continue
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Donald Trump
to have a big value for their house. At the same time, I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy housing. In a way, they're at conflict. In a way, you create a lot of housing all of a sudden and it drives the housing prices down. So I want to take care of the people that have houses that have a value to, you know, to their house that they never thought possible, that have sort of made them wealthy.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Listen, man, there are weird ways that you might be able to get both, but the reality is that you've just got to give up on trying to balance these two things and just say, we are going to focus on housing affordability. So his promise to make housing affordable and his promise to to protect home values can't be true. At the same time, he told his Cabinet, I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own them. Don't we all? I get it. But the solution has been to focus on lowering mortgage rates. He directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds. But here's the math. Even if rates drop to an impossibly low 1%, the typical monthly payment would still be higher than than it was in 2019. Let that one sit with you for a minute. Rates are not the problem. Supply. That's the problem. The national association of Home Builders found that regulatory costs. This one made me sick to my stomach.
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Political Commentator 2
Regulatory costs.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Permits, impact fees, zoning delays, code mandates. They account for nearly 25% of the price of every new single family home and over 40% of the cost of a typical apartment. That's $93,870 per house.
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Political Commentator 2
Complying with the regulations adds an average
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
of six and a half months to every project. And Goldman Sachs found that 60% of residential land in the 240 largest U.S. metro areas is capped at two or
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Political Commentator 2
three stories by height restrictions alone.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
This is the part that should drive people nuts. Goldman modeled what happens if you reduce
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Political Commentator 2
land use regulations in major metros to
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
match the 25% of cities with the fewest restrict.
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Political Commentator 2
The result is 2.5 million additional homes
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
in the next decade, eliminating half of the shortage.
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Political Commentator 2
A little more. We don't need a miracle. We need to get out of the way, let the market do its thing.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Trump's National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett hinted at this, saying that the administration could reward states that make it easier for people to build.
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Political Commentator 2
That would be good, but it needs
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
to be way more than a hint. It needs to be the centerpiece of their policy around housing. Because what everybody is dancing around but not saying is you can't make housing affordable without housing prices coming down. It's just supply and demand, or at least like flattening the increase for long enough for wages to catch up. And you let builders build. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.
- [09:28]
Grainger Advertiser
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
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Political Commentator 1
This tariff thing is breaking. This is a report. CNN confirmed it. NBC News. The justices divided 63 held that Trump's aggressive approach to tariffs on products entering the United States from across the world was not permitted under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economics Power Act, IEEPA. The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by three liberal judges and two fellow conservatives, Justice Neil Gorsch and Amy Coney Barrett, in this majority. So three conservatives, three liberal justices, and then the other three justices, also conservative Justice Clarence Brett and Samuel Alito, all said yes for it. The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope, Roberts wrote. But the president, the Trump administration points to no stature in which Congress has previously said that the language in the IEEPA could apply to tariffs. He added, as such, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It is a rare setback for the administration. At the Supreme Court, which has a 6:3 conservative majority since Trump began his second term in January, they gave him the blessing on deporting even to other people's countries. And then this is, I think, the first L. He actually publicly took this.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
This is more than just an L. Like, this is a very big deal that if what they have just said is that, that what he did was unconstitutional and now companies are going to go after him hard and they're going to sue the life out of this administration for the damages that they perceive will have been done. And so the unwinding of all of the money that's been collected via the tariffs.
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Political Commentator 1
Whoa.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
So this is one where there's no doubt that the administration will have some other trick up their sleeve, like, oh, okay, we're not doing it because of the IEP A, whatever it is, we're doing it because of. And then insert thing. I cannot fathom that they're going to back off of tariffs, given the catastrophe that would be unwinding them just from a pure economic standpoint. And then also it's given him so much leverage in negotiations internationally. The odds that he stops doing it again again are vanishingly small. But now you're like in constitutional crisis territory where it's like, okay, if he skirts around that and goes somewhere else and then that has to work its way through the system again. First of all, you exacerbate the problem of him collecting more and more tariff revenue, which then open if. Then whatever other thing he tries gets shut down again. Now you've got both periods of time of collecting these tariffs that you're just going to get sued to do death over. So, man, this, this one is a really big deal. This is, this is a meteorite strike. And so we have to find out whether they've got a legitimate thing that they're going to try to go down but. Or if it just seems blatantly obvious to everybody that this is him just saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court. And if you've got a president saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court, you have a constitutional crisis, man. Hey, let's wait and see what happens. But this is, this is big news.
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Political Commentator 1
I want to jump back into the article. The decision does not affect all of Trump's tariffs, leaving in place ones he imposed on steel and aluminum using different laws. But it upends the tariffs in two categories, one in country by country, or reciprocal tariffs, which range from 34% for China to 10% baseline for the rest of the world. That was a tariff bingo day. The Other is a 25% tariff imposed on some goods from Canada, China and Mexico for what the administration said was to fail their curb the flow of fentanyl. So the Canada, China and Mexico under the fentanyl clause are able to be upheld. These other ones, the reciprocal ones, would be struck down. And to your point, companies that had to pay tariffs may be able to seek a refund from the Treasury Department and hundreds have already sued.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Yeah, bro, this is going to get messy. This is going to get messy.
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Political Commentator 1
It's interesting to me, though, because I'm looking at it from an international perspective, because he was using this as leverage. Let's make a deal with the Ukraine and Russia war or I'll impose a tariff on you. I need Europe to pay more to NATO or I will pose a tariff on you. Yes, and now that he kind of loses that card, that weakens his negotiation power in the next rounds of elections. If I'm one of these foreign companies that pay the reciprocal tariff, I'm suing. I'm coming back and want to renegotiate. So it seems like he has to have to do everything over again.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
So here's my gut instinct. You're going to have two things playing out in parallel. He's going to find other ways to tariff people. So let's say he's got the problem that he has on everything historical where he's going to have to figure out how you deal with. Can we just say, okay, those tariffs still count, but they count under this other regulation or. No, they can't. You can't just move them like that. You said you were doing it for this reason and that was unconstitutional and so bad on you. But that still doesn't stop from moving forward and saying, oh, cool, so what you've given me is like, if this is a war powers or whatever, stop Fentanyl, whatever that got classified as you're
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Political Commentator 2
saying that one's good. Yeah, cool.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Then I'm just going to find a way to do things like that to all these other countries, but I am not going to stop tariffing that. That is my prediction. Now, this is one of those strong convictions very loosely held. I, I'm going to say what I think is going to happen partly so I can see how well I'm mapping Trump. My instinct is he is not going to relinquish financial controls over other countries from a negotiating standpoint. So he is going to find some way to have the same cudgel just under a different name. What exactly he ends up finding that I don't know. I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm not in these rooms. I have no idea what they're going to do, but he's going to find something. I will be utterly shocked. The only way that you're really going to be able to defend Trump if you don't like the way that he's going about things is to flip the Senate and, or the House. Like, if he loses at the midterms, they impeach him, then it's game over. Failing that, like, if he wins at the midterms, he's going to find another path to this. It really comes down to a question. Do the American people want the executive branch and then specifically Trump as the wielder of the executive branch? But they, they do well to think of this as policy, not as just Trump. Do they want the executive branch to be able to use tax effectively as a weapon against other governments? And it's an interesting question because traditionally the executive can do a lot more internationally than they can do domestically. You more or less go, okay, the executive branch, like, we can't babysit everything. So Senate, Congress, we're going to deal with things that affect us domestically. And then you do. It's not like whatever you want, but you do with much lighter restrictions what you want internationally.
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Political Commentator 1
Yeah.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
So I could see something that ended up settling out where it's like, first
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Political Commentator 2
of all, we're never going to call it a tax because that gets muddy from a constitutional perspective.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
But you've got like broader authority to
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Political Commentator 2
act outside of the country. But things that are domestic, you can't touch that. So then it will become a debate about whether we're going to consider tariffs domestic or international. Because as people will be right to point out, when you tariff somebody, it's the importer within your own borders that ends up paying that. So now it becomes, how do we define tariff? Is it a domestic tax or is it best understood as an international tax? He'll probably lose that, given what they've just said. So then it becomes, okay, what is the thing that you can do? Like, is there a new thing that
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
isn't a traditional tariff where you are
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Political Commentator 2
directly imposing the fee on the outgoing shipment?
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
I don't know.
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Political Commentator 2
I don't know if that's possible.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
There's a reason that it doesn't exist currently.
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Political Commentator 2
There's a reason that everybody does it,
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
I imagine, just for reasons of collection. But you could certainly stop things at the border and then say, this, this
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Political Commentator 2
payment has to come from them. You could do that.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
But yeah, this is going to get weird.
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Political Commentator 2
So that is my bet is that
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Trump is going to find a way
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Political Commentator 2
to keep doing this because he can't give up that leverage.
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Political Commentator 1
And it's interesting, to your point, he probably has a team of lawyers spinning something up to get out of its finesse.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Probably they've already done it, guaranteed. Taking a short break. But there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned.
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Political Commentator 2
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it. We here are just basking in the afterglow of the State of the Union.
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Donald Trump
We're winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you're going to win again.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
Let's go.
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Political Commentator 2
The State of the Union. Drew, did you watch the whole thing?
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Political Commentator 1
I did. Cover to cover, from ape sign to applause. So, you know, it's. It was sad.
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Political Commentator 2
This is America, Drew.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
I wanted to be inspired. I was not inspired. And listen, I understand that when we look back and see things like from JFK and stuff, you're. You're seeing a truncated version. It's a highlight reel. You're not seeing the whole thing. You don't have the context to understand if it was considered very divisive in its time. But when you think about a hit song, a hit song is the thing that it lasted. So it wasn't just good in its moment, it actually can find a new audience. As you know, the era goes on, and as the things that you remember because they had enough emotional resonance, they. They stick with you. And when you look back at historical things that presidents have said that really got the nation inspired and become the things that stick to our ribs, that we remember as a nation, that become a part of the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, there's just none of that in this moment. I don't think you're going to get any of that from either side of the aisle. It's just not what people speak to anymore. They're not trying to inspire people. And that makes me very sad. Like, we've got to find our way back to that. You're not going to be able to survive on a diet of the other side is a moron for long. It. It does rile people up, but it's a very caustic strategy in that it hurts you as much as it helps you. We're just losing the plot on this stuff. To hate your enemy is not a good strategy long term. And that, like, seems to be the thing. And look, we'll talk about it in a minute, but if you're a seal clapping for Trump setting traps for his political opponents, it's like you've already lost. I didn't think it was particularly good. I didn't think it was as bad as it could have been, but it wasn't inspiring. It's not going to be remarkable remembered. This is not something that becomes part of our national identity once we get over the fever dream that is populism.
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Political Commentator 2
It's a missed opportunity.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
So Trump's approval rating as we come into this is 36%. So it is the lowest point during
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Political Commentator 2
either of his terms in office. And 61% of people say that the economy is not working. Well, for them personally. But last night, as he's giving the State of the Union, he stood before a joint session of Congress and called this moment a golden age for America. Now, as always, the night just ended up feeling like a tug of war between two warring factions that are far more interested in controlling the national narrative than they are actually helping the American people. And before Trump even got his first full sentence out, Congressman Al Green of Texas was standing in the chamber holding a sign that read, black people aren't apes, which is a reference to a video Trump's own account shared on Truth Social earlier this month, depicting Biden and the Obamas as apes. Republican senators physically tried to grab the sign away from Green, and then he was quickly escorted out within minutes. The biggest beat of the night, though, came when Trump asked members of Congress to stand if they. They agreed that the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Republicans obviously stood, but Democrats stayed seated. This was exactly what Trump was hoping for. They handed Trump a midterms campaign video. I won't say I don't know what they're thinking. I know what they're thinking. They want to make it clear that they stand in opposition to him and everything that he stands for, full stop. But especially as it plays out in
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
immigration at the moment, in the whole
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Political Commentator 2
event, Trump, as they're seated, looks at them and says, isn't that a shame? You guys should be ashamed of yourself for not standing up now. That exchange set up Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashid Talib to shout at the president when he called members of Minnesota's Somali community Somali pirates, and he claimed that they'd stolen $19 billion from taxpayers. To be abundantly clear, nobody's proven anywhere near that. Omar then yelled, you've killed Americans and you're a liar, referencing the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Omar also fired back with her own, you should be ashamed. To President from. For me, the unhinged shouting, which has been going on for a while now, is just. It really is disgraceful. It's horrible. None of us should be excited about that.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
I don't care who's doing it.
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Political Commentator 2
It's just a terrible, terrible look. Meanwhile, dozens of the Democrats just outright boycotted the entire night. Now, getting into the substance of what Trump's speech was all about. He opened with the economy making some big claims that I imagine felt a little hollow to everyday working people. And if he's going to try to win the midterms, he's going to have to be a lot more careful. He claimed he inherited a stagnant economy and has delivered a turnaround for the age. Said more Americans are working today than any other time in history. Now, that is a fact that actually is true, but it's both true and yet fails to capture what making ends meet right now, today would feel like. It feels pretty horrifying in a just grotesquely K shaped economy. Going back to the whole employment thing, what's true is that the employment is at a record high in terms of just the raw number of people that are employed. But the population of working age people in the country is growing faster than the jobs are growing that those people would otherwise fill. So on the ground level, the sentiment is likely to be way closer to something like, I can't find work. So if he can't delineate between those, not just try to spin a story, but actually help people understand the cause and effect of all this, I think it would go a long way. Americans right now are not feeling a golden age. It just doesn't feel like that. 57% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy and 64% say he's out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. Like, if you're giving the speech, it isn't about repeating that everything is great. When people don't feel that, you have to first say, okay, this is why you feel the way that you feel heard. Got it. Let's break it down into a few metrics. Probably three to five. You're not gonna overwhelm them and you're gonna show the ones that you've made progress on. You're gonna explain why that hasn't solved the whole problem. Cause remember, you have to explain why they feel the way they feel or they're just gonna think this is all a bunch of bs. So here's what we've done. Here's why you still feel the way you feel. Here's the other things we've got coming. And we think over time it's gonna make you feel better for these exact reasons. What you're gonna more money in your pocket, all of that. Focus people on the tax returns that are going to be coming their way, all of that. And then explain why you need to stay in power. Because if you stay in power, you're going to keep pushing XYZ thing.
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
And these, you know, very limited number
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Political Commentator 2
three to five things that you want people to just be circling on over
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
and over and over and over and over.
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Political Commentator 2
And how the other team isn't going
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Drew (Host/Analyst)
to get them there.
- [25:19]
Political Commentator 2
If you want to win, that's exactly what you have to do. But if you don't explain why they feel the way they feel now, it's never going to work. Now, amid all of the partisan noise, there was one announcement last night that I was actually legitimately excited about. It's one of the best things that was talked about. Trump proposed giving roughly 50 million working Americans who don't have access to an employer match 401k the option to open a retirement savings account modeled after the federal Thrift Savings plan, the same low fee index based plan that government employees use. And the government would match contributions up to $1,000 a year. Now, in a world where real wages have been flat for decades and inflation is absolutely gobbling people's savings alive, so at being in assets is a matter of survival. And this plan would give millions of Americans a simple vehicle to invest through, which would hopefully help tremendously in terms of getting people into assets. Is a thousand dollars a year going to make anyone rich? No, it is not. But it gets people in the game and makes investing a part of the average American's routine conversation. You want them to get obsessed with hey, that free money the government made me, that's now compounding in the stock market, how's it doing? You will actually get them to care. So when you talk about the stock market at 50,000 that people actually give a shit. Now Trump also said Republicans will always protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
- [26:41]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
The catch?
- [26:41]
Political Commentator 2
The one big beautiful bill cut Medicaid by more than $900 billion over 10 years. Whoopsies. The way that it was presented borders on gaslighting. Instead of actually helping the American people understand what's really going on on the international front, Trump was wisely very brief. Right now people want him to be focused on domestic issues and not on on foreign policy. No matter how many wins he has internationally, if he does not get his act together domestically and people don't feel that, oh buddy, they are going to turn on him hard and fast. His quick coverage included pointing out how the US is amassing military assets around Iran. But he still didn't make a very compelling case for why we might launch an attack now. Boy, oh boy, are there rumors flying. So we'll see. Now one thing that was notably absent from his international talk was any real mention of Ukraine. So this was the exact four year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion. I just am shocked and aghast that
- [27:41]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
it's been four years, man.
- [27:43]
Political Commentator 2
But nonetheless, he was pretty quiet about it. There's one more elephant in the room, and that's the Department of Homeland Security has been shut down since February 14th. And that means TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and the Secret Service are all operating without funding. Workers are about to miss paychecks. No bueno. Trump demanded Democrats restore funding immediately. During the speech, Democrats say they're not going to do it until there are reforms to ICE and, and cbp, particularly after the fatal shootings in Minneapolis. Last night was the longest State of the Union in at least 60 years. It was 1 hour and 47, 48 minutes. I saw different reports and in all that time, the biggest thing that was missing was any acknowledgment that Americans are struggling.
- [28:22]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
I have a deep fear that the reason Trump has been elected twice is that he understands a thing that I really don't want to understand. That, that you have to simplify things so much for the average person that it's just more effective to lie and just repeat it over and over and over and over and over than to actually give them the okay. Here's the cause and effect.
- [28:43]
Political Commentator 2
This is how we walk through some
- [28:44]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
of the things that he, he will say are so, like, easy to fact check and just be like, that just
- [28:49]
Political Commentator 2
isn't true, but that doesn't really matter.
- [28:51]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
Like, he's trying to get people to feel that it's true. If you're just trying to drive home this feels true, then it's a totally different game. And so if we're judging him from the outside as like, no, hold on, wait a second. That isn't actively true.
- [29:03]
Political Commentator 2
That isn't empirically true.
- [29:04]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
He's just like, what game are you playing? Like, he's never going to acknowledge it.
- [29:08]
Political Commentator 2
He's just going to keep repeating the thing.
- [29:10]
Political Commentator 1
Was this enough to get him over the hump for the midterms?
- [29:13]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
Right now he is on a one way course to calamity in the midterms. It will flip for sure. The House will, the Senate, I don't know. I don't know how many people are coming up for reelection because they're on different schedules. But yeah, if the elections were held right now, today, he loses for sure. Sure. He's already made the structural bets that he's going to make and now they either pay off or they don't. If he can make things settle down in Mexico. And there's a perception that this whole strength through, sorry, peace through strength thing is working. It worked in Venezuela. It worked in Iran, it worked in Mexico. Like if he gets that trifecta running and people are seduced enough by big wins from the tax refunds, he could be in a much stronger position. Or he would be unequivocally be in a much stronger position going into the midterms. Will it be enough? I don't know.
- [29:58]
Political Commentator 2
It all comes down to how the
- [30:00]
Drew (Host/Analyst)
average person feels about the economy.
- [30:01]
Political Commentator 1
I think we're mad at the wrong 1%. I think the right is convinced that there's a bunch of furries and blue haired people that want to blow up the country. And I think the left is convinced that there's just a bunch of Nazis that are walking around that are trying to burn down all the Jews. And I think that we want the poor people to be mad at the rich people. We want the rich people to be mad at the poor people. But the 1% that's really been us this whole time is politicians. I think that is the 1% that we need to do. I think that same energy that we have for cops and ICE agents and all that stuff needs to be had for everybody that was in that congress building yesterday. All of them got more money, look better, increase their net worth, are living in beach houses, they have three, four houses. They're on private jets because they're traveling so much. And meanwhile you're trying to scrape up like scrap up, change the future. Kids like it's crazy.