Emma Vigeland
Appearances
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Absolutely. I mean, we're now getting reporting about how much further along both China is on AI. We heard that a few months ago with DeepSeek and how much cheaper it is, but also their electric vehicles. There is some early reporting that shows that BYD, the EV kind of behemoth in China, has developed a battery that can charge
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
in the same amount of time that it takes to fill up a petrol tank or your gas tank at the gas pump, or at the very least, they're close. And so when you think about these tariffs, why wouldn't Canada look to China and say, hey, if the United States is going to treat us this way, we should start buying from China. We should start buying Chinese vehicles. Mexico, the same thing.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And it's even more common sense for our allies across the Atlantic to And elsewhere, or former allies, I should say. So it's nonsensical. It really is. And like inflation, I was kind of alluding to this earlier, these tariffs don't prevent domestic manufacturers from raising prices. Oh, no. They'll encourage it, yeah. Right.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
It encourages it because, frankly, they can just blame the tariffs like corporations did with inflation really in 2022, 2023. And in part, I think because they were pissed that the Biden administration was doing some more enforcement with Lena Kahn and with Jonathan Cantor and that part of the administration domestically that I was very much a fan of.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And so, yeah, I really do think he's opening the door for more price gouging. And instead of inflation this time, US companies can just blame tariffs and say, what else can we do?
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Oh, thank you, Tommy, for the kind words. I really appreciate you having me on today.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I mean, never say never, but we're going to, I think, move that ball along.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I'm sorry, but we've got to enjoy that schadenfreude. It's the only thing that we have going on.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Well, as we talk about tariffs, this is a good way to just say Chuck Schumer giving away all of our leverage is a huge reason why we're in this situation with tariffs because the continuing resolution that was not a continuing resolution, it was a dirty CR in the dirtiest sense, it basically removed Congress's ability to review these tariffs.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And so now you have this bipartisan bill with Grassley and I think Cantwell that is supposed to say like, hey, can we reassert our authority over tariffs? Because Donald Trump just did a really bad thing well, look, the Democratic leader in the Senate just gave that leverage away. And I think, obviously, in my view, Schumer's time, he's on borrowed time as leader of the Democrats in the Senate.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I don't see how the Democrats can continue to have him as leader, especially, you know, after the midterms in 2026. But yeah, there are some bright spots. I think that It was encouraging to see the House all stand together on that continuing resolution vote. It is encouraging to see some members of the party speak about billionaires, speak about the oligarchy.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
It's encouraging to hear, I heard Tim Walz on Molly Jong Fast Show talk about how next election cycle people are going to be expecting universal health care as a part of these proposals. Going bold again is really important.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And, you know, I try not to pigeonhole my politics, right, because, like, I'm a DSA member, right, and I'm someone who obviously believes strongly in something like Palestinian liberation, but I can also encourage my listeners to vote for Kamala Harris because that's the best option within our set of circumstances.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And, you know, I can appreciate Bernie Sanders is outside politics and how incredible it is to get people involved. But Elizabeth Warren's inside politics and influencing Biden to appoint Lena Khan, as I keep singing her praises throughout our conversation. But Um, there is more consistency here, I think, than there was in the wake of 2016, where there was a lot of anger within the party.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I think there still is that. But there's also just a universal desire to fight. And it crosses ideological lines. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ability to honestly meld Bernie Sanders's outside movement with the inside game of Elizabeth Warren is one of the most impressive things that I've seen in politics in quite some time.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
She's getting centrist Democratic lawmakers to say, I will write a check if you primary Chuck Schumer. And that is incredible, given the fact that she came into politics as a Democratic socialist and a rabble rouser who was going into Nancy Pelosi's office and helping the Sunrise Movement stage protests. But I think that with this kind of insurgent movement of younger progressives in the House...
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
There is a lot of anger, I think, at some of the folks in the Senate who are institutionalists. But I get the most hope from folks in the House, Democrats in the House, and also our governors, who, whether it's Pritzker, Whitmer, Walls, what have you, they understand what it's like to respond to Donald Trump as somebody who's in an executive role, not someone who's...
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
or negotiating with Republicans or treating our budget as contract law or as if we're doing a merger or something like that.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
It's somebody who knows how to lead and somebody who knows how to respond to Trump's actions, not as somebody who's going to tweak around the edges, but using the bully pulpit to cut through the noise because I'll shut up in just a second, Tommy, but we are in such a corroded media environment and especially on the right. They're just... Eating up this slop on the Internet.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
How do we break through? How do we break through? And having a simple message doesn't mean we're stupid. In fact, it means we're better at politics. And I think Democrats have to stop resting on our laurels and thinking that just because our policies are better than the Republicans, that's true. It doesn't mean it's self-evident to voters and it doesn't mean they're dumb because they don't get it.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
It's also because people want a clear, coherent vision and a way to differentiate yourself from the other side. And it's not about converting those Republicans. There were so many people that stayed home and just didn't show up. Those are the folks we need to be activating. And I think they were...
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
depressed because of the foreign policy of the administration and that seeing their tax dollars going to the slaughter in Gaza. And also just the fact that they didn't feel like they were being offered anything transformational on the economy. So they rather just stay home and not vote for anybody. And those are the people I think we have to target.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I agree with you. And I I think, you know, to to bring it back to your comment a little bit earlier about about Biden and his inability to really he was unable to use the bully pulpit for like two years at all. And we're getting more reporting about his condition. And and, you know, I really do think he set Kamala Harris up to fail in many ways.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I think that was a dereliction of his duty to the country. But it also was a problem in which the Democrats didn't perform democracy. So a lot of the messaging in this election was rightly, as we're seeing, that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, as he demonstrated on January 6th. OK, but first you have to sell democracy.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
to the American public that democracy, as you're describing it, not just as a virtue, but in practice, is something that needs to be protected. And you may think that's self-evident, back to our point about how the Democrats feel like they should be above communicating these things. You may think that it is self-evident, but why is democracy so important to protect?
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I think Cory Booker agreed with what you had to say about maybe the lack of specificity or perhaps I would love if it was focused on those broad-based social programs a little bit more. But overall, it's a really good thing because at the very least, you are performing services to your constituents.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
You are performing the act of standing up to somebody who is an authoritarian and showing folks what it's like to be politically empowered. There's an old phrase, you'd rather be strong and wrong than basically weak and losing. And I really do think the Democrats could be OK with being strong and wrong and swinging for the fences and then maybe not necessarily delivering on everything.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Although I think that the conditions now, given what we've talked about with oligarchy, given what we've seen with Donald Trump and how he's so carelessly wielded the executive branch for whatever the hell he wants. I think a lot of Democrats are going, why can't we do that?
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Why can't we have a president that acts in a manner that addresses the urgency of our both economic situation, but also when it comes to systemic racism or the Supreme Court or abortion rights. I mean, there's a lot of ways that I think Democrats can show that they are democratically responsive because when it comes back to Biden, a primary would have done this, right?
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
You would have heard Democrats speak about and hash this stuff out. You would have heard what these different Democrats stand for, even if Kamala Harris wasn't the nominee in the end. And that would have been a performance of democracy that would have...
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
bolstered the underlying message about Trump's threat to democracy because you would have shown that you took it seriously in practice and I think that when I speak to people who are not really politically engaged just kind of your everyday person that has some family members, right? They'll say, well, the Democrats are liars too. Biden was so old and what did they do about it?
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I think that like, again, when we bring it back to this information age, having a president that couldn't use the bully pulpit and who chose not to perform democracy because he wanted to hang on to power for another term was a really, really bad cocktail to give to the American public with Trump on the ballot.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I think that he's making it extremely easy, even though the facts are that people are going to be really harmed if these actually go into effect. You can just basically talk about tariffs as a tax on the poorest Americans.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I think and Kamala Harris, she's she's OK. She's not a victim. And I had some issues with how she ran her campaign. Obviously, I thought the elevating of Liz Cheney was insane. But I feel for her in the sense where I think a lot of women have experienced this in their professional lives. I am not shading Sam Seder here. I just want to be clear.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
But older men who often think that they know better and will talk down to you and are dismissive of you broadly because a lot of the reporting is that she was broadly sidelined. And he elevated the fact that he wanted to appoint a black woman as his VP instead of just doing it. And I think that gave this opening for the Republicans to attack her in this like racist and misogynistic way.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And the fact that he didn't really groom her as his successor, there should be probably a bit of soul searching on the Biden side as to why they were so dismissive of somebody who has great credentials and who has been Senator, attorney general, went to Howard, smart person. Their politics were similar.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Why they didn't choose to give her a leg up and elevate her as Biden's potential successor instead of just throwing her in at the 11th hour when Biden couldn't do it. And then he was calling her and saying, don't break from me at all, even though obviously my approval rating is in the gutter. So there's misogyny and racism everywhere.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
On that side, too, in my view, that hopefully Democrats begin to examine about themselves and some of the leaders in the party, frankly.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
When you look at a sales tax, right, the sales tax is essentially a flat tax on all goods, and it is called a regressive tax because the less money you have, the more you're disproportionately impacted by a sales tax. If you're a millionaire... A sales tax on a banana or on some groceries isn't going to affect you as much as somebody in the middle income bracket or in the lower income bracket.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I think it's a tough question. I do think we're in a better position, as I said earlier, than after 2016. I'm hopeful that folks deploy an intersectional analysis of why the Democrats lost. And it is very... very much a lack, in my view, of focus on broad-based social programs with a vision that we haven't seen since the New Deal or really since Medicare or Medicaid.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
These are the kinds of things that we're due. It's time to propose.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
these kinds of broad social programs for people that's a huge part of it but i also think that kobe broke a lot of people's brains we're in an extremely reactionary time period there's a me too backlash where i don't know if i can remember such a anti-feminist moment i mean really since like the tabloids and the way that they treated women in the early
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
but that seems so small ball compared to the normalization of this kind of thing at the Trump administration level. I think we can heal these divides by having a shared vision of boldness going into 2028. I think a lot of The base is frustrated by the lack of fight in the Democratic Party, which aligns much more with how a lot of us felt back in the day.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And you see this bear out in Chuck Schumer's poll numbers. They want Democrats to be fighting and they don't want to constantly be cutting deals. They don't want to have to meet these fascists halfway because it is the bitch slap theory of politics and it's all Donald Trump knows.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Even if you don't win the fight, you've got to show that you can fight them because otherwise they're otherwise they're going to walk all over you. And I think that the base is behind that as a broad vision for how the party should move anti oligarchy and also fighting. Right. And we didn't have that in the wake of 2016.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
There was just arguing and it was a lot of Bernie supporters saying, hey, we were right the whole time. This is these were the kinds of politics that we we should pursue.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
But as I said earlier, you know, I guess I'm somebody that's taken some grief on the Internet from even my side because I was somebody who saw a lot of value in Elizabeth Warren's politics and antitrust and going about making people's lives better within the set of circumstances that are given to us. Right. And so I can say, like, yes, I support decommodifying housing.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I support a universal health care program. I support free college for all and a foreign policy that is a lot more humane than what we've been seeing. But I can also understand that we have to have the requisite dexterity to respond to the far right fascist elements that we're with right now. So we can't all be perfect allies. We have to come together.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And perhaps through that process of coming together and fighting Donald Trump, we will come out the other end with a more cohesive vision of how to move forward. But I do think that This anti-oligarchy stuff can't just be for the benefit of electoral politics.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And tariffs essentially function as a compounding sales tax because they raise the cost of basic goods. And really, like, let's just zoom out for a second and say, OK. Donald Trump wanted to onshore manufacturing and he wanted to further build up our domestic manufacturing capacity here in the United States. We would need a, I don't know, billions and billions of dollars of investment.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
This has to translate into the Democrats taking on campaign finance reform and also pairing that with broad-based social programs that tax the rich. We have to tax the rich. We have to return to higher marginal tax rates. I'm not even saying we need to go to what it was like in the post-World War II era where we were at our most...
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I'm industrious and the country was growing I'm I'll settle for pre Reagan numbers but really these billionaires are out of control and governments what they do they redistribute wealth it's just a question of how we choose to redistribute this wealth and we are it at such catastrophic levels of incoming wealth inequality that frankly many people in our body politic are not making sane choices about who they're electing for president so how do we make sure that we cut off some these reactionary elements
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Make sure that people's basic needs are met and we are past due for a broad-based social program like a Medicare for All or something that helps people in that manner.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
That's hard for me, but yeah, I'm trying.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Look, I mean, you mentioned Obama. I was 14, right, in 2008. Obama's candidacy is why I cared about politics. It's literally what got me interested. And it was truly his opposition to the Iraq war. And I think that sometimes there's this consensus in Washington that, that there are people that don't vote on foreign policy.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I don't think that's true anymore, especially when you can see children whose brains are falling out of their head and their fathers wailing over their carcass on your phone. This had an effect of really muddying the waters of the morality of the two political parties that can get elected in this bipartisan system. And I
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I think that the Democrats really are doing a disservice if they don't reckon with how they damage their brand with young people by supporting this.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I would love that. Thanks so much for having me, Tommy. And I really appreciate all the work you're doing. You're bright spot in this insane media environment.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
We would need it to happen over a multi-year period to even create the factories and systems and supply lines that would be needed so that we could onshore this manufacturing and produce the goods here that are now going to be hit by these tariffs. But he's doing it in reverse, and I don't even think that would work.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
He's now imposing the tariffs when we don't have the capacity to produce a lot of these goods that are going to be hit with the tariffs and these price increases. And so Americans have no choice. but to pay more and more and have their wallets hit here.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And it's not entirely clear what he thinks he's going to gain from this, except I think he genuinely has a complete misunderstanding of trade policy. He thinks he can shake down other countries this way.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And, frankly, it seems like ever since January 6th, he's been holed up in Mar-a-Lago with very little connection to the outside world and to even the threadbare pieces of liberal society that he was connected to via Ivanka or whatever in 2016. he's in OANNville and doesn't know left from right.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And so my guess is somebody got into his ear, maybe somebody who read that Karl Rove book about William McKinley, who he's now obsessed with, and said that this is going to be the thing that allows us to raise revenue without having to go through the cumbersome process of developing tax policy via the legislature. It allows Trump to act as a king.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And I do think the other side of this is that for the industries that are affected by these tariffs, now Trump feels like they're going to have to come to me and they're going to have to give me goodies like he got from various news organizations with his frivolous lawsuits. It's open corruption and also corruption.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
An open war, frankly, if these go into effect and are more permanent and there still is potential to back off of it, hopefully, it's really going to harm the lowest income people in our society.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I mean, if we wanted to reindustrialize, again, tariffs can be used in a targeted way. Say if it were just purely for the auto industry and we were trying to develop that capacity, I could even understand that, right? But that's not what he's doing. These are broad-based tariffs that he's calling reciprocal, but they're not.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And the other thing that is just so terrifying is that all of this talk about short-term pain in the stock market, what happens... when the Republicans gut Medicaid as they're promising to do with their budget in the fall. 72 million people are on Medicaid that rely on it for their health care. Half of the folks on Medicaid are well below the poverty line.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
These are the people that would be hurt the hardest with this compounding sales tax, with this regressive tariff that would function as a tax. And so they would be immiserated if the Republicans get their way. And we're seeing, I know Ted Cruz, as of right now, is coming out a little bit against the tariffs.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
And as you mentioned, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, they dipped their toe into criticizing Donald Trump because, by the way, Kentucky bourbon, Kentucky, I think, produces over 90% of the world's bourbon. And these tariffs on Canada, those guys are saying, hey, screw you. We're not going to buy bourbon from you anymore if you're talking about making us the 51st state. So
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
This affects folks in Republican states. And like the 2008 financial crash, the people that are closest to retirement, whose 401ks do not have the time to replenish, don't have the ability to wait out this short term pain. Their entire retirement could be cut in half right now because Donald Trump and his buddies are playing with the stock market, basically.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
I think you've hit on it. It absolutely does need to be paired with, you know, a positive agenda. And talking about the oligarchy has proved to be immensely fruitful for the Democrats, because you also have a mascot for yourself right there in Elon Musk, who nobody likes. The more they see of him, the more repulsive he is. And frankly, I mean, it's quite clear why.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
He's just not somebody that has natural charisma and is obviously saying things like Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. And we know that Social Security is one of the most successful programs in the history of our country, if not the most successful program. It keeps two-thirds of our seniors out of poverty. It is self-funding.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
You fund it and Medicare via the payroll tax, and it's set aside in the budget so people don't have to worry about it. It's not a Ponzi scheme. It's a retirement fund that all Americans pay into. So I think talking about Social Security, talking about our social programs and, of course, a positive vision of we do need Medicare for all. We do single payer.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
We need some sort of health care plan that is not just improving the Affordable Care Act. And I think Tim Walz has been really good about this. But but tapping into the pain that Americans are feeling where.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
You know, traditional economic indicators don't necessarily pick up on what folks had been experiencing in the run up to the 2004 election, I should say, because obviously I was hoping Kamala Harris was going to win. But the the way that the campaign was run.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
and and saying that the economy is good we just have to improve on it it didn't prove to be the most salient argument in this time because there are things that traditional economic metrics aren't picking up on like the fact that rent has never been higher like the fact that
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
Corporations took advantage of inflation and artificially kept their prices higher in the wake of COVID and took home record returns. And even though Lina Khan was doing her best, it's quite difficult to get these corporations in line when they have somebody. who's running on the presidential ticket, who says, hey, if you elect me, she'll go away. Don't even worry about it.
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
We'll make sure that you get to keep doing what you want to do in terms of extracting profits from the rest of Americans. And frankly, it's almost as if Donald Trump learned from corporations during COVID, where basically you can take advantage of naturally occurring inflation or persistent inflation and
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Trump's "Liberation Day" Crashes the Stock Market
In order to cement those prices and then he doesn't have to address it via Congress, but he can essentially elevate tariffs, impose them on goods and and say, like, what can you do? This is naturally what has to happen. And then he thinks he can bend the American people to his will.