Donald Trump's long-promised "Liberation Day" of insane new tariffs approaches, but what's his plan for the global trade war he's promising to start? Jon, Lovett, and Tommy discuss all the latest madness, including Trump's new hints that he'll serve a third term, the galling new details about Alien Enemy Act deportations, and Elon Musk buying votes in the Wisconsin judicial race. Then, Jon sits down with Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego to talk about how Democrats can fight back against Trump and how we can win again in states like his. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: What is Trump's plan for a third term?
For what it would take for Donald Trump to become president a third time is a kind of Medvedev as president, Putin as prime minister, a
So an actual campaign in which Republicans are fully admitting that they are just vassals for a Trump dictatorship or some other ridiculous scheme in which he is made speaker of the House or some other cockamamie shit in which the whole the whole Republican Party is now completely given over to the idea that Donald Trump is a dictator. But we don't really need to worry yet.
about the possibility that Trump is going to behave like a dictator three years from now because he's behaving like a dictator right now. We probably should focus on that. And our job is to make Trump so completely unpopular and unpalatable to the American people that this becomes a joke.
Yeah, we need him to have a Katrina level approval ratings. Yeah, I think these things start as outrage bait. It's just like chum for media attention. It's chum to get MSNBC fired up like Steve Bannon being intimately involved in this, I think is a real clue.
But over time, I do think the outrage bait evolves into something real in a lot of cases like Greenland invading Greenland, for example, overturning the election. Yeah.
And once Democrats get really worked up about literally anything, negative polarization can take over and Republicans in Congress, for example, decide that politically they would rather be opposed to what the annoying Democrats say than in favor of what the constitution says. And so I do think there's like a real risk here and there's, it's part of a very rapid authoritarian slide, but I agree.
Like, I just don't want to take the bait on it. I don't think we need to have members of Congress putting forward bills to focus on it. Like focus on the here and now.
Those bills aren't going to go anywhere anyway. Just so people know, how this would work if it happened is he would try to seek his party's nomination, which the party probably would just let happen, maybe. Let's say the Republican Party doesn't stop him there.
He eventually would need to get his name on the ballots in all the different states, and certainly the blue states wouldn't put him on the ballot, so then it would go to the Supreme Court, and then we'd hear what the Supreme Court said, and then the Supreme Court would either Be like, obviously, this is fucking crazy. You can't do it.
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Chapter 2: How will Trump's new tariffs affect the global economy?
It's really strange, right? It's, it's what he's saying, right? Is that like, I am a representative of the president. This is the policy of the president. I'm not going to ignore that. But it's this deep, the, the, the way in which it's all revolves around Donald Trump's psychology.
Also, the trip started as Usha Vance going, doing a bunch of cultural stops and it evolved to JD Vance, like big footing the trip. And then they never left the US military base because everyone hates them.
Yeah, they couldn't find a person who wanted to talk to Usha Vance.
Did you see JD Vance with his tray getting a meal with the service members there? And you can just feel him having no place to sit at lunch in high school. You just see it in his face. I related to him. I felt it.
I felt it. I was just trying to make sure he listens to the president's desires. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the tools you need to promote and get paid for your services in one platform.
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Court of Appeals ruled that Trump can't just ship people to El Salvador's torture dungeon without due process, one of the judges actually said that, quote, Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act. The administration asked the Supreme Court to settle the matter.
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Chapter 3: Why are Trump's tariffs causing controversy?
I'm going to sound like I'm just going to be repeating their shit again. I haven't read the book yet, so I can't plagiarize. I think it's very simple. Number one, the problem that we have is we have a lack of energy, right? And we need to make sure that when we take power, we use power. What does that look like? A, actually fundamentally changing people's lives for the better.
And right away, I would do a good minimum wage increase, $15, $17, whatever it is. Peg it to inflation automatically so it keeps growing every year. Child tax credit, as I said, $200, $300 per family. Everyone that's making less than, I'd say, $100,000, $120,000 a year. for childcare.
I mean, right now, it's more expensive for you to send your kid to childcare than it is to pay for tuition, in-state tuition for most universities. Let's just give direct childcare subsidies to families to take care of that, to take care of their kids. These are the kind of impactful things we should be doing right away. I think we should help do a credit buster.
There's so many people right now that are paying off credit card debt that they were living off of inflation. During inflation, they basically survived by putting on credit card debt. Now they're carrying the highest amount of credit card debt in the history of this country. We should help these families at least pay off a good chunk of their credit card debt.
Now, that could just be a direct subsidy to them, but that would be a huge relief. We need to get... Americans to understand when you elect Democrats, good shit happens and I feel better, right? It's that simple. And a lot of times we get into these very kind of like wonky bureaucratic process that we think we'll end up getting credit for and we never, ever, ever do.
And that's the one time I can tell you like my family, working class family remembers, especially not my direct family, but my sisters and my cousins, they finally remember when they were all getting the child tax credit. And that's what they remember at Democrats as being good, right? So having a real focus on an energetic response really to the needs of working class America would be huge.
Something that every time there's an election, like Democrats got me this, right? That's it.
What lessons do you take from the Biden administration, which obviously passed quite a bit of significant legislation around infrastructure, climate, and then didn't really get much credit for any of it? Even if you put the worries about cost of living aside, which was hard to put aside, but not a lot of people sort of felt in their lives any impact from the Biden administration's legislation.
I hate to be the Cassandra here, but I was telling this to people in the administration from day one that they were too focused on, first of all, infrastructure. Every president runs on infrastructure. Do they pass it? Do they not? But no one ever gets credit for it.
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