Part of the reason for the market bloodbath is because the finance wizzes didn't factor in that Trump would actually do the truly moronic thing he kept saying he would. Their shock over his recklessness is intensifying the crash. Meanwhile, a trio of administration fools trying to defend the tariffs—Lutnick, Bessent, and Hassett—showed there is no grand design to the trade war, White House infighting is getting hot enough that even Elon is subtweeting Trump, and the folks we elected over on the Hill could actually do something to try to stop the market carnage. Plus, new reporting on our government's kidnapping of migrants, Republicans in North Carolina are trying to steal a supreme court seat, and where is JD Vance? Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes JVL on the end of the American Age Lauren on the backlash against Dems in major law firms who are bending the knee 60 Minutes segment on migrants sent to the Salvadoran penal colony Tim's 'Bulwark Take' responding to the 60 Minutes report Tim talking with AEI's Stan Veuger about Trump's terrible tariff math The book, "The Captive Mind" by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz
Chapter 1: What is causing turmoil in the Trump administration and markets?
Hallo und willkommen zu The Bulwark Podcast. Ich bin euer Host Tim Miller. Trouble inside the Trump Administration. Big trouble in the markets, trouble in the world. It's a bloodbath, in particular in the S&P, which is now at its worst three-day performance since 1987, as Trump refuses to back off his moronic tariff regime.
Here to discuss that and much more, it's Monday, so it's Bulwark Editor-at-Large Bill Kristol. Hey Bill, what's up? Hanging in there, Tim. How are you? I was just talking to your pal Stan Voyger. He's an economist over at AEI, who's been one of the ones who's been stalwart in opposition to Trump's excesses, particularly on the economic side of things and his stupid trade wars.
Chapter 2: Why are Trump's tariffs considered a failure?
People can check out over on YouTube on the Bulwark Takes feed about his paper about how stupid these tariffs are. They didn't even do their own math right. And we were joking at the end that... You know, the schadenfreude of watching all the terrible people be wrong and lose money is nice. It's not exactly going to pay for kids' college fund or the retirement home.
You know, so it's mixed feelings.
It would be nice if Trump could discredit himself without ruining the country. I mean, this is the... Ja.
Ich meine, Vorges' Sache ist unglaublich, weil, wie er gesagt hat, er ist sowieso Anti-Tarif, er ist ein Freetrader, aber wenn du es tun würdest, sie sehen es so aus, als ob sie es in der stupestesten, am schädigendsten möglichen Weise gemacht hätten, including the math errors and the kind of insanity of how they calculate this country by country tariff.
So it's really, it is like, let's have a bad policy and then execute it horribly, you know.
You hate to hand it to Elon Musk, but it's not just the AEI. It's not just us at the bulwark. It's not just the Democrats. Even the shadow president is starting to have some concerns about the policy. Are you ready to side with Elon Musk for a second here, Bill? He was subtweeting the president this morning. Some issues on the home front with the shadow president subtweeting the president.
He just posted the video of this classic free market fundamentalist text, The Pencil. I want to get your former Republican muscles pumping this morning, so I want to play a little bit from the pencil.
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Chapter 3: How do market reactions reflect on Trump's policies?
There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore.
Dieses schwarze Zentrum, wir nennen es Leid, aber es ist wirklich Graphite, kompresster Graphite. Ich weiß nicht, woher es kommt, aber ich denke, es kommt aus einigen Miningen in Südamerika. Dieser rote Top hier, der Ersatz, ein bisschen Rubber, kommt wahrscheinlich aus Malaya, wo der Rubbertree nicht mal nativ ist.
Es wurde von Südamerika importiert, von einigen Geschäftsmann, mit der Hilfe des britischen Governments. Es war die Magie des Preissystems. The impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum.
Schön. Bilton Friedman, die Simplizität. Fühlen Sie sich gut? Fühlen Sie sich wie Straussian wieder, Bill? Wie fühlt sich das an?
Das war so ein fundamentalistischer Freemarkt. Vor Friedman, ich denke, Friedman narrierte es, aber ich denke, es war in den 50er oder 60er Jahren. Es gab eine Organisation, die mich verletzt hat, die wirklich populäre Bildung in Freemarkten promotierte. Das wird er korrigieren. all the errors of the due deal and of democratic socialism and stuff. Hey, don't get our listeners mad about the pencil.
Well, there was interesting about free trade, incidentally. Someone made this point in an article over the last few days. John Gans, I think. Free trade was an important part of the due deal. People forget that. I mean, what's the most famous tariff in recent times? Smoot-Hawley, 1930, Republican tariff. What did Roosevelt do? He reduced tariffs in 1934.
Labor wasn't crazy about some of the free trade stuff, so he didn't publicize it as much, but it was very much part of the intellectual, you know, sort of organization, so to speak, of the New Deal.
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Chapter 4: What are the criticisms against Trump's economic team?
Iglesias made this point, too, about how, like, actually, it's weird, it's flipped, that the populists are pro-tariffs now on both sides. It's like, back then, it was like, tariffs raised prices on working people, and so a lot of them, a lot of the... Intellektuals in that era were against it, as you said.
And tariffs historically, you know, could be gamed by the big corporations, the big businesses. So, whereas you can't do that if you're just a working guy and you have to go to the store and buy stuff and so forth. So, and invest in, you know, modest amounts in the stock market. Anyway, the Friedman thing, it is a kind of nice, simple explanation of free trade.
I mean, that's why these tariffs are so particularly stupid. They seem to be premised Voyager könnte das besser erklären, ich bin sicher, dass er das besser erklären würde, als ich. Und die Idee, dass unser bilateraler Handelsbalanz mit jedem Land 0 sein sollte, sollte even sein, richtig?
Ich meine, nicht, dass wir handeln, wir wissen, wir importieren mehr Sachen aus diesem Land, damit wir mehr aus diesem Land exportieren können, und es ist ein riesiges Ding, und es ist even, und es hilft jedem über die lange Zeit. Das ist eine vergleichbare Vorteile, und jeder hat ihre spezialisierten internationalen Ressourcen. Das ist so dumm. Ich meine, es ist so dumm.
Ich meine, es ist so dumm. Ich meine, es ist so schrecklich und die Märkte sehen es richtig. Ich habe mit einem anderen Ökonomist dieses Wochenende gesprochen, der in diesem Fall nicht steht. Ich habe gesagt, sind Sie überrascht von der Severität der Marktreaktion und was für das wirklich zählt?
Und er sagte, es ist teilweise so, dass die tatsächlichen Tarife die tatsächliche Wirtschaft, die Preise, die Importe usw. schaden werden. Aber es ist auch die unglaubliche Blödsinn und Unwissenheit, die Trump und sein Team gezeigt haben. Der Markt preist das jetzt ein, was, wie Sie und ich schon diskutiert haben, sie für die letzten drei bis fünf Monate seit der Wahl beurteilen wollten.
Es wird nicht wirklich passieren.
You kept dancing around it, moron, stupidity. They said we can say the R-Word again, Bill. They said we can say it again, and this is... I don't even know if it would be the R-Word. S, I think. This is the subtarded economic policy that has put this collapse in place. It has no rationale at all across any level. The funny thing is, Besant was on... All these things are darkly funny.
When I say funny, it's not really funny to see what's happening to our 401ks. But Besant was on NBC this weekend and he's like, you know, this is these finance guys underestimating Trump again. Und ich sage, nein, Scott, das ist das Gegenteil. Das ist eine Reflexion auf den Fakt, dass sie überestimiert haben, dass sie nicht erkannt haben, wie furchtbar und dumm ihr seid. Sie haben nicht gehört.
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Chapter 5: How is political infighting affecting the tariff debate?
Sie haben gehört zu mir und Bill. Sie hätten das Ganze zwischen November und jetzt verkaufen lassen, weil wir den Leuten gesagt haben, dass es kommen wird. Aber es ist dieser große Schock und Schreck, weil Investoren nicht glauben, dass sie so dumm sein könnten.
You know, I watched the clip of Besant. Yeah, he's such a bad defender. I do feel like, I think I tweeted this, the Democrats should just stay off all TV for the next two weeks and let Besant and Kevin Hassett and Lutnick go on. Because every time they go on, they make it worse for Trump. But Besant's super clever thing was, we should be glad the markets worked well.
You know, like the actual computers were able to process the trades as the markets dropped 2,000 points. Thank God for that. And secondly, he had this fake argument that, well, the markets dropped on election night in 2016, which is true. I think they went down several hundred points. They literally rebounded like in three days, if I'm not mistaken, right?
And the markets priced incorrectly that Trump, I mean, whatever you think of Trump, obviously, but that he was going to be kind of a pro-business president. And mostly they priced in the fact that we were at a strong recovery finally after the Great Recession and it was going to continue. And Trump didn't mess it up, actually. weil diese Terroristen im ersten Termin sehr unabhängig waren.
Das ist ein guter Fallstudium, auch in dem, worüber wir schon lange diskutiert haben. Der zweite Termin ist nicht der erste Termin. Der erste Termin war ein bisschen Blödsinn, ein bisschen Trumpfigkeit, ein bisschen Willenswürdigkeit, aber verhängt von den Angriffen. Nicht hier, verhängt von all diesen Leuten.
Und natürlich kann ich sagen, dass ein Freund von mir, ein Freund von mir auf der Wall Street, mich bemerkt hat, dass Scott Besant in Ordnung sein wird. Er wird der Junge im Raum sein. Und es ist wirklich wichtig, dass er den Treasurer-Sechretär-Job hat. Und How's that working out?
Yeah. That person might not have looked that closely at Scott Besson's returns, because one of our super listeners was texting me a chart of how much money Scott Besson had in his hedge fund over the years. The chart kind of looks similar to the S&P 500 right now, actually.
I wanted to just zero in on the Commerce Secretary, Howard Nutlick, for a second, because he was not exactly knocking it out of the park over the weekend as well. I want to play a clip for you of Possibly one of the worst talking points I've ever heard on a Sunday show.
Let's listen. Remember the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America.
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Chapter 6: What role could Congress play in changing tariff policies?
Es ist auch einfach so, dass Ackman Trump unterstützt. Die Leute wissen nicht, dass dieser Typ ein Clown ist, ein reiches Clown, der den Markt während Covid-19 verringert hat, also er weiß ein bisschen über das. Und er muss mit dieser konvoluten Theorie kommen, warum diese Leute, die er in die White House gelegt hat, alles zerstören. Ich möchte nur sagen, Bill,
Bill, you supported the stupidest person in America who bankrupted everything he ever did before he created a TV show that made him seem like a good businessman. Like, that's what happened here. There's no 40 chests. They're not trying to lower interest rates for a long, you know, Mar-a-Lago Accord. And Lutnik isn't secretly helping his bonds. Like, he's just a suck-up.
He's just a clown who wants attention sucking up to the idiots that we made president. So, hopefully that clears things up for... für Ackman. I want to play for you. My father sent me a little comedy bit. I think dark comedy. He's trying to process how things with the mutual funds are going as much as me.
I think that Dave Chappelle went pretty anti-woke and was celebrated on the right for his kind of anti-trans comedy. Seems like he's also had a turn already in the first Whatever it's been, 10, 11 weeks of this administration. And I think his little comedy routine from last week does a nice job of rebutting Howard Letnick's screws theory. So let's listen to Chappelle.
So iPhones can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs. None of us want to work that hard. What the fuck is he thinking? I want to wear Nikes. I don't want to make them shit. What the fuck are you doing? Stop trying to give us Chinese jobs.
That's a good line. I want to wear Nikes. I don't want to make them. I mean, it's a deep kind of understanding of free markets and comparative advantage. You should go to AEI, Chappelle. That was good.
You should. And then Volger could do a co-bill.
I don't know, my life is so crazy right now. I was out somewhere and I can't remember where it was and a nice woman came up to me and she was like, I just want to hear the latest with the cat. Just want to hear the latest with the neighborhood cat. So I'm glad people are out there following the saga. It was nice to share.
The neighborhood cat, Aretha, a boy named Aretha, was actually in the house this morning. He's now our cat. Took to the vet, did all the things y'all told me to do. I still like to spend a lot of time outside, but was inside today because we had a very minor cold front in New Orleans. It got down to 55, brr. And the kitty doesn't like that. He's inside snuggling up.
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