Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Newsom's Centrist Approach and Kamala’s Political Future
Tue, 11 Mar 2025
Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov break down Trump’s tariff whiplash and the chaos it’s causing for businesses. Then, they dig into Rep. Al Green’s censure after protesting Trump’s Joint Address and what it says about divisions within the Democratic Party. Plus, Governor Gavin Newsom stirs controversy over transgender athletes, and James Carville urges Democrats to sit back and let Republicans self-destruct. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the impact of Trump's tariff changes?
And you're 37, 38?
No, the big four ones. So seven years until my midlife crisis, according to you, right? Where I started traveling only with my girlfriends and dancing with my belly out.
But the good news is, is that for men, 50 is the new 30. And for women, 40 is the new 80.
I hadn't heard that one before. That's good. It's not really. It's upsetting. But thank you.
That's good. There's a term for that, New York. All right, enough of that. Let's get into it. President Trump sent financial markets into a tailspin last week.
Today, we're going to talk about Trump backtracking on tariffs, Representative Al Green getting censored for protesting Trump's trying to address, what Governor Newsom really thinks about trans rights, and James Carville's surprising advice to Democrats, do nothing. So markets kind of very volatile this week or last week with this ever-changing trade policy.
On Thursday, he delayed tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, giving industries a brief bit of relief. But on Friday, He was back on offense, threatening new tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy, claiming Canada has been ripping us off for years. The back and forth has left businesses scrambling and critics warning of economic fallout. Just
How did these sudden shifts in trade policy impact businesses and global markets?
Really badly. And the strangest part to me has been how little he seems to care because he was totally like live by the market, die by the market. And he's taking a very laissez-faire attitude towards it. He was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo and she was asking him about this because, you know, business anchors, no matter their partisan affiliations, have been freaking out
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Chapter 2: How are businesses reacting to sudden policy shifts?
It might be true, excuse me, of Mexico and China, or you could at least make a philosophical argument. The amount of fentanyl that's coming across the Canadian border, I think, could fit in a backpack. It's less than 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the nation. And in addition...
We're now at a point where I don't even know if the tariffs are on or off based on what hour it is, where people are going to start clearing the shelves or developing alternative supply chains and alternative alliances, regardless of whether he takes the tariffs off again, because we just have no credibility.
The Atlanta Fed tracker, or they basically have a mechanism for predicting GDP growth, has gone from positive 4% to negative 2.8. Consumer sentiment has had its largest fall since COVID. The economy is contracting at its fastest rate since the lockdowns. It's just really difficult to understand that.
What the endgame here is, if he's putting this out to try and accomplish some big, beautiful deal that he can take credit for. Any thoughts on what's motivating the administration right now?
Well, he has always loved tariffs. Like, the McKinley obsession is legit. And he can, at certain moments— wax quasi-lyrical about the beauty of tariffs and McKinley and, you know, we have Mount McKinley now in Alaska as well. So I think there is a fundamental affection that he has. And that's not to say that all tariffs are bad. And I I saw actually your markets co-host, Ed, pointed this out.
There was an op-ed in The New York Times by a Rust Belt Democrat, Chris Deluzio. He replaced Conor Lamb, who also ran in the Senate primary against John Fetterman. And he wrote a piece defending tariffs and saying that anti-tariff absolutism is not good policy. And there was a very strong argument to make that
that we need some protectionist tariffs, even when it comes to Canada and Mexico, to make sure that we're producing things at home, that people can earn a good wage, which I know is fundamental to what you're doing with that Project 2028, which I think is so cool. And I was... pretty taken with his argument. And he mentioned how we're all okay with the China tariffs, right?
So Trump had the 10% tariff on China and Biden actually tripled it when it comes to steel and aluminum. And we get basically all of our construction supplies from Canada, including a lot of steel and aluminum, plus a ton of cement and lumber. So
why, I'm not saying a 25% tariff, but using the same logic that we do against China, which is obviously an adversary versus a friend, but there's some good economic policy to it, right? We're not just punishing China because it's run by an authoritarian and they're terrible on human rights. There's a reason we're trying to protect the American worker there.
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Chapter 3: What are the key differences between Trump's first and second term?
I read that the average car, should these tariffs hold, is going to go up in price somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000. The way cars are manufactured is you actually have certain parts that leave Lansing, Michigan, go to Canada, have worked under them, then go all the way down to Mexico, have more work or assembly, and then come back to Lansing, Michigan for assembly at a Ford plant.
Some of the parts used to assemble a car go back and forth a half a dozen times across borders. So $8,000 to $12,000 increase per car. They're talking about an average increase per household of $1,200. I mean, this is really weird. And even more so than the actual tariffs is the sclerotic reputation we're establishing.
Because even if you decide, okay, we're going to do a deal and we're going to come to some sort of accommodation that works for both, who can trust that we're actually going to do what we said we're going to do? We're now talking about, supposedly, Trump wants Iran... to think about another deal where we're shutting off intelligence to Ukraine and then they bomb a hotel where Americans are.
We talk about putting it back on and putting sanctions back on Russia. I mean, it's just the world economic policy is being run on this guy's blood sugar level at that moment, which means that if you're going to base billions or if you're the EU or trillions of dollars in trade and alliances and supply chains,
on one man's blood sugar, you decide, no, I'm going to just have workarounds, even if they're more expensive. It's just the automobile industry right now. I'm at South by Southwest and a key theme here when I talk to advertisers is that they're advertising businesses down. I mean, this has so many ripple effects across the economy.
They're advertising businesses down because some of the biggest advertisers are automobile companies and they literally are just, we don't know what to do. We've paused all marketing and spending because as far as we know, we're not going to have cars on a lot and we're just not sure what's going to happen. So they can't even plan.
If the tariffs were absolutely going in, they would say, OK, we need to plan our business model. We're going to raise prices, find alternative routes or supply chain. But they would have a business plan. Right now, this is the worst of all worlds. I think that's what Eisenhower said. The wrong decision is bad, but no decision is worse.
There are entire companies who have to make essentially no decision because they don't know what environment they're going to be operating in.
Yeah, well, Trump backed off of this round of tariffs because the CEOs of the major car companies reached out to him, right, and called and said, you can't do this. I mean, it's $8,000 to $12,000 extra for a regular car. It's $20,000 for a truck. So anyone who's actually using their car for work is facing an extra 20K, which is obviously unaffordable. I agree with what you're saying.
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Chapter 4: Why are tariffs considered a controversial economic tool?
Right. A Jewish climate scientist lady has an 85 percent approval rating in Mexico during a time when dealing with one of the more xenophobic American presidents in history. Just crazy. It is crazy.
Or like Mark Carney, who's going to be the new prime minister of Canada, won the race to be the head of the Liberal Party over the weekend, has no technical political experience, but he was a central banker, which is why people picked him. And he went after Trudeau consistently about how poorly he had handled the economy.
And the major thing that he said was, you need someone who can steer Canada through this war with America. When would you ever think that that would be a platform that a Canadian premier would have to run on, right? This idea that we are going to be at war with our neighbor, that we are in incredibly friendly terms or historically speaking have been on incredibly friendly terms with.
So that's happening there. You look at the European countries that are building up their own defense. They're thinking about, you know, what nuclear arsenal can they get to to help with sharing their weapons. We're cutting off the intelligence sharing with Ukraine at this moment. They're being embraced by Europe. We're on the wrong side of everything with that vis-a-vis cozying up to Putin.
And I see everybody else getting a lot stronger while we're getting weaker at home and abroad.
Yeah, it really is. It's very difficult to understand the trade. And the trade right now at a very macro level is the following. We're basically trashing and fraying
and making much more brittle and fragile these 80-year alliances with the world's largest economies that through free trade, coordination, general goodwill, cooperation towards each other, lower costs for Americans, and increase the sales of our products abroad. And now these nations are just going to figure out different alliances. And even if we go back and say, hey, just kidding.
We didn't mean it. Love you. Come down to Mar-a-Lago. They're going to say, sorry, boss. You're just not a reliable partner. I don't know who I don't know who I'm waking up next to. And for me, everything comes back to high school. And then as I saw this fantastic study that attempted to figure out and get to the bottom of why popular kids were popular.
So they looked at the most popular kids in high school. Were they the best looking? No. Were they the best athletes? No. Were they the smartest? Again, no. The thing they had in common was they liked the most other people. They were that kid that would, going down the hallway, would yell, hey, you know, Lisa, Jim, good to see you. What'd you do this weekend?
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Chapter 5: How are global alliances shifting due to US trade policies?
Yeah, no, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be getting mail from the AARP. But yeah, it was sort of interesting and— I was initially going to go over and talk to him. I thought that's just going to depress me. Anyways, I'm now going to parties with Doge children. But this is it's hard to see how we don't come out of this pretty structurally damaged. It just doesn't doesn't make any sense to me.
All right. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
The Trump administration is defying a federal judge who's demanding details about a flight to El Salvador. It carried almost 200 men who the administration says are gang members and who were flown from U.S. soil after the judge said, don't.
President Trump and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele posted video of the shackled men being pulled from a plane by guards in riot gear and transported in white buses to prison. The official White House Twitter account also reposted a remix of the video set to Semisonic's closing time. Semisonic responded, the song is about joy and possibilities and hope.
And they have missed the point entirely. Lest we all, let's focus up. The administration acknowledges that many of these men don't have criminal records in the U.S., and some of their family members say they're not in gangs at all. You can get Today Explained every weekday afternoon.
Welcome back. Last week, Texas Representative Al Green was formally censured after interrupting President Trump's address to Congress, shouting, "'No mandate to cut Medicaid!' as he waved his cane." The moment led to his removal from the chamber and a 224 and 198 vote to rebuke him, with 10 Democrats joining Republicans in the censure.
This split underscores ongoing divisions within the party over how to push back against Trump. Greene, who has a history of direct action, including being arrested alongside the late Representative John Lewis, seems unbothered by the consequences, saying, Jess, what do you think this says about the Democratic Party that 10 of their own members voted to censure Greene?
Is this about decorum or is it a sign of deeper fractures?
Well, I think that there is an unfair expectation that Democrats are supposed to have it perfectly together at this moment. Like after Romney lost in 2012, they spent years trying to figure out what to do. And they had a plan and they ended up with Donald Trump as the nominee in 2016 anyway. And that definitely wasn't their plan. So I'm trying to take a step back.
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Chapter 6: What does Al Green's censure reveal about Democratic Party divisions?
I was like, this is if you think she's too conservative, you don't like that she voted for the Lake and Riley Act. You're concerned about, you know, how she's going to be on trans issues, etc. That's fine. There's a time and place for that. But when you see someone that gets up.
After Trump's speech, which had a very high approval rating in terms of the audience, which was skewed Republican, of course, but still, like he did well in terms of his delivery. She gets up there.
She gives a succinct response to it that talks about what really should matter to the party, like the economy, our national security, making sure that the day-to-day lives of Americans is improved and better. And you want to shit on her? Like I have no time for that at all.
Yeah, what the Republicans have that the Democrats lack is a certain level of synchronicity and coordination. And that is, if you look at the relationship between these kind of conservative think tanks, conservative media, and Republican talking points and discipline, they're coordinated.
And the sum of its parts or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, whereas the Democrats look sclerotic, like, oh, we don't like the person giving the response because they were too moderate. Oh, we're going to have these random interruptions and yell out. We just look all over the place and disorganized. And quite frankly, we just don't have our shit together.
And something that people vote for is they would rather vote for someone who seems resolute and youthful and vigorous and competent than someone who just seems to be kind of flailing and don't know. You don't get a sense for where they stand. And the same reason why I think our trading partners are going to not trust the U S around different alliances.
I think that the American public right now looks at the democratic party and it's like, Jesus Christ, pick a theme. Like what, who are you guys? What are you? And the response to this has been ranging, you know, ranges from ineffective to kind of overly, overly emotional. It's just a, it's just not a good look for us. All right. Let's take one more quick break. Stay with us. Welcome back.
Before we go, California Governor Gavin Newsom is under fire from LGBTQ plus activists after saying it's deeply unfair for transgender girls to compete in high school girls sports. He made the comments on the debut episode of his new podcast while chatting with right wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. Newsom wants a trailblazer for LGBTQ rights.
also agreed that a Trump campaign ad attacking Kamala Harris over gender-affirming care was politically devastating. Speaking of Harris, she's reportedly considering a run for California governor in 2026, and she's told allies she'll decide by the end of the summer. One could cement her leadership in the Democratic Party, but take her out of the running for president in 2028.
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Chapter 7: How do Democrats handle internal conflicts and public perceptions?
crossings in february it was 250 000 peak on a monthly basis under biden and this started under biden for sure coming down but it's quite clear there have been no new laws passed the rules on the books if they are enforced can do a lot in stemming illegal immigration yeah it's
I think in general, people look at the Democratic Party and are drawn to some of the ideals and some of the people and then go, oh, wait, but they're fucking insane. And this is one of those issues. I said this two, two and a half years ago on Pivot and got a lot of pushback.
But when there was a bicycle race or a bike race in North Carolina, not a big race, but a race that was big enough that it had cash prizes. And a transgender woman came across the finish line five minutes before the rest of the crowd. And then you saw the footage of basically a six foot four swimmer with just enormous wingspan shows up and takes the NCAA finals and like shatters every record.
And I think America looks at that and goes, they've gone fucking insane. And they're defending this because they decided this was some sort of woke, to establish your woke bona fides, you immediately had to go, okay, I'm going to ignore all common sense. And it was just it's done enormous damage that we don't have basic common sense.
And I think I believe our view on this should be, look, if a local school board, we believe let's embrace the Republican ideology that on decisions around nuance, individual schools and parents should make up their own mind.
If there's a school where they say, look, a 14 year old transgender woman would really benefit from participating in junior high school or high school sports, where, quite frankly, the stakes aren't that high. then fine, they can decide to let her participate. But anything involving scholarships, money, accolades, admissions to colleges, whatever it might be, or contact sports, quite frankly, no.
And I don't see the crime against humanity here. I will never play basketball. I don't have those skills. I wasn't born with those skills. And I believe if you're born with testicles and a penis and the advantage of testosterone and that bone structure... Unfortunately, you don't get to play women's sports because to me, the math was just so simple.
And that is, if we're going to permit this and have no regulation around it, then essentially what you're saying is all the accoutrements of athletics, all the money, the fame, the prestige, the relevance, the self-esteem is going to slowly but surely be sequestered to people born with a penis. I was just shocked feminists didn't say, no, we can't. We can't have this.
And we just allowed this just strategically on an issue that really doesn't impact that many people. And I'm sure we'll get emails on that. That was where we were going to say, okay, this is a big issue for us. And we just come across as just insane.
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