Jonathan Cantor
Appearances
Pivot
Elon's Ultimatum, Trump's Military Purge, and Amazon's 007 Deal
The dirty little secret is that business actually likes what we do. They're the ones encouraging us to bring cases because they want access to markets. They want supply chains that are affordable. They want greater supply of key inputs, right? This is something that's quite popular in business.
Pivot
On with Kara Swisher: Why Ben Stiller Made Severance
The dirty little secret is that business actually likes what we do. They are the ones encouraging us to bring cases because they want access to markets. They want supply chains that are affordable. They want greater supply of key inputs. Right. This is something that's quite popular in business.
Pivot
Elon's First Cabinet Meeting, Trump's Gold Card, and Bezos' WaPo Revamp
This week on Profiteer Markets, we speak with Jonathan Cantor, former Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. We discuss which sectors he believes most need antitrust enforcement and how businesses actually feel about antitrust.
Pivot
Elon's First Cabinet Meeting, Trump's Gold Card, and Bezos' WaPo Revamp
You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
Pivot
DOGE’s Chaos Strategy, X’s New Valuation, and Guest Co-Host Katie Drummond
This week on Profiteer Markets, we speak with Jonathan Cantor, former Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. We discuss which sectors he believes most need antitrust enforcement and how businesses actually feel about antitrust.
Pivot
DOGE’s Chaos Strategy, X’s New Valuation, and Guest Co-Host Katie Drummond
You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Raging Moderates: What’s Trump’s Endgame in Ukraine?
She's asking what if Russia breaks the ceasefire?
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Raging Moderates: What’s Trump’s Endgame in Ukraine?
The dirty little secret is that business actually likes what we do. They're the ones encouraging us to bring cases because they want access to markets. They want supply chains that are affordable. They want greater supply of key inputs, right? This is something that's quite popular in business.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
He singled out Lawler and said, be happy with what you got, basically, and declare victory. And said, I know your district better than you do. And if you lose, you can't blame SALT. So Trump's sympathies are suddenly not with the SALT crowd. And guys, I think the reason for that is because Trump mostly just wants to get this bill done. He wants to sign a bill.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And anybody who's dragging their feet for any policy reason, it doesn't matter if right, left, or center, he's crotchety about.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
I mean, I think, look, I think for the red state folks that are from fairly low tax states, it's just not a significant issue because their voters aren't paying massive property taxes or facing a huge state tax burden like in California, Jersey and New York. where that bill adds up pretty fast. It's just not relevant for them.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And they tend to find these blue state members culturally kind of distant and say, why should us Republicans compensate for the high-tax Democratic politicians who are running California, Jersey, and New York? Pound sand, not salt.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Now, the blue staters say, yeah, we got liberal governors, liberal state governments here, but still we got a lot of Republicans or moderates who were voting Republican in House races, and we are the reason why you have that narrow majority in the first place. So do us a solid.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
It tells us that this party is much more oriented around working class voters in rural red America. It's become a southern and western accented party, quite literally. And, you know, Trump is the ultimate Manhattanite. And, you know, that's the irony that his his strongest base is in the south, because obviously he was born in Queens, but sort of made in Manhattan.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
But this is a southern rural party, and they're just not that interested in looking out for the concerns of folks from high-income, liberal parts of the country, even if they happen to be, in this case, their own GOP colleagues.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And I should mention that it's not a coincidence that the person who wrote the first draft of this bill in the House, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, by the way, is like the most coveted chairmanship in Congress – Jason Smith represents southeast Missouri, an incredibly low tax state and a very rural part of Missouri. And so this is just not front of mind for somebody like that.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
This is the first, but I think significant, you mentioned Medicaid earlier, which I think also is significant. It's the first test of, will the Republican Party reflect the coalition that increasingly makes up its rank and file? And they just happen to be a working class, you know, mostly non-college party now. And that's who they are.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And at the same time, a lot of their policies tend to benefit folks who are more affluent. And those people are voting for Democrats. And this is the great realignment of our lifetime in which the parties have really swapped their coalitions. The Republicans were always kind of the country club party and Democrats were the party of labor. And that is obviously changing.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
is the policies haven't caught up to the two coalitions. And when you see the House Republicans saying, we don't give a damn about your needs on salt, that's a first step toward a Republican Party that is more reflective of its much more rural, working-class coalitions.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Oh, for sure. I wrote this column last week about this issue, and I said looming over all of this is two midterms. One, the one that took place in 2018, which was just a sort of political killing field for suburban Republicans who got swept up in the anti-Trump fervor that year.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And the other midterm is obviously the next one, which is next year, Trump's second midterm, in which, once again, who are the most vulnerable Republicans on the ballot? It's those from center-left suburban districts who represent places where Trump is just culturally deeply this popular. I think part of what's delicate about this is that
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
We're talking about Republicans who are in the same party, but their identity and their culture and their, frankly, education and kind of income backgrounds are profoundly different. There's a class schism, frankly. in the Republican Party and Congress.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And I think the Republicans, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jason Smith, who wrote the tax bill, they just don't have a lot in common with some of the Republican colleagues from high income and sort of heavily educated parts of this country.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
It's the proverbial two Americas thing, blue America and red America, suburbia and rural America, but you're seeing it within the Republican Party in this context and within the U.S. House.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
So here's the salt part. This is the longtime write-off for state and local taxes that people could do on their federal taxes. Now, Trump's 2017 tax bill, which expires at the end of this year, got rid of the SALT deduction.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
And so this is something that is really problematic for folks in high-income states, typically blue states, where they got people who are paying exorbitant amounts of money in local taxes, property taxes, state taxes. So where it gets much more sensitive, delicate, raw, is the kind of class and regional divide here within the Republican Party. This is an intra-party fight.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
So the Republican Party has become a rural, heavily red state, heavily working class party. That's its coalition. But it has a narrow house majority. And the folks that come from a lot of the most marginal districts, kind of purple seats, tend to be from high-income places like Jersey, New York, and California. And yes, those are the folks that care the most about this issue.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Because the suburbs, exurbs, and even some rural areas of Blue America, Jersey, California, New York, most significantly, do have a handful of Republican lawmakers. Now, the last Trump midterm, 2018, was really brutal for that kind of suburban Republicans. There's not a ton out there. But the last two elections, 20 and 22, some folks have won back seats in places like
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Westchester County, New York, Orange County, California, and the Republicans who are right of center and whose voters give them a hell of a hard time every weekend about cost of living and taxes.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
I talked to Mike Lawler, who represents a sort of heavily Westchester-based district in New York, who said that Johnson gets it, he understands, and that Johnson is willing to work with these members because he recognizes that he's Speaker in no small part because of this narrow majority that is made up of folks from Blue America. President Trump's more complicated.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Like on so many things, he's difficult to pin down. This is trying to tack Jell-O to a wall because Trump tends to veer between the last thing that somebody told him and his mood in the moment. So, When I talked to Lawler last week, he's the New York congressman who's been one of the leading figures in this fight. He told me, Trump gets it. He's from midtown Manhattan, for crying out loud.
Today, Explained
Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”
Nobody knows the issue of the tax burden than him. We talked to him three times in three months. He's for us. Well, flash forward to this week when Trump went to... Capitol Hill.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
The dirty little secret is that business actually likes what we do. They're the ones encouraging us to bring cases because they want access to markets. They want supply chains that are affordable. They want greater supply of key inputs, right? This is something that's quite popular in business.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
This week on Property Markets, we speak with Jonathan Cantor, former Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. We discuss which sectors he believes most need antitrust enforcement and how businesses actually feel about antitrust.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.