As the economy reels from Trump's sweeping tariffs, Jon is joined by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to examine the fallout. Together, they explore what Trump's levies mean for everyday Americans, discuss how to bridge the divide between politicians and the people they serve, and consider how a new generation of leadership might rebuild in the years ahead. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests featured in this episode?
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. It is, I'm telling you this, April 8th. I always tell you now, the day that we're taping this, because of the velocity by which change occurs in this nation, which is becoming great again. By leaps and bounds, you may say to yourself, okay, occasionally we take a step or two back, but clearly...
in the right direction. So this comes out Thursday. So by then we could be at war with China or more likely, I think President Trump will do the thing that he always does. And I use this analogy with Rahm Emanuel on the show, but I think it's instructive to say it again here. I used to have a dog who would eat things on his own volition. This was not, he was not encouraged to do so.
He would eat grass and sticks and whatever he could find outside inevitably He had a delicate stomach. He is my dog after all. That's how we knew we were each other's soulmates. The way I process lactose is the way he processed everything that he would eat from the outside. He would become nauseous. He would vomit. And then before I had a chance to get the towels, he would lap it up, clean it up.
And then he would look at me like, hey, huh, buddy? I did your favor, right? Can I get a treat? And I would always think like, no, that was your, you made a mess. And yes, you did clean it up. But I got to tell you something. You didn't clean it completely up. You left damage, residue, things like that. And that is what Trump will do.
He will come out and be like, oh, the nuclear bomb I dropped on the economy, it worked. Vietnam has decided that they're going to make a deal like nobody's ever seen before. And that's going to be the way that this thing off-ramps. You would imagine, because these guys are, I mean, between the signal chats and the trillions in the economy and firing people at the FAA and nuclear commissions...
they are forgetting, uh, the first rule of authoritarian regimes, which is you kind of have to get shit done, right? That's, I think that's the whole point, isn't it? We, we let them disappear people cause they do shit, right? Is that, is that how things go?
Then you get to wear, uh, I went over to come out and wear the jacket with the epaulets or whatever it is that those guys like to do come up with the nickname, but you gotta live up to that end of the bargain from what I understand. Uh, But it's been very interesting. And we've been spending a lot of time talking with some Democrats about where they see this thing going and their frustrations.
And there's someone that I really wanted to talk to about it because I find that he's so articulate and well-versed. He's been an executive as a mayor. He's been within administrations. He's well-versed in a lot of different aspects of it. And he's one of the few people who's able to articulate those experiences in such a great way. So I'm just going to get to our guest for today's program.
Here he is. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today, very excited, our former Secretary of Transportation, Mr. Pete Buttigieg is joining us now. Pete, look at you with the scruff. You're not working for a month or two and you're growing out the beard now?
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Chapter 2: What is Pete Buttigieg's experience leaving government service?
Exactly. To hear it laid out in that way. Exactly. I could be the 10th person to say roughly the same thing on a liberal show. Or I could literally be the first time somebody heard a certain idea if I'm in a more conservative space, which is why right wing spaces like X and like Fox News, I think, continue to be important for people like me to be in.
But we've also got to be finding folks who are not always looking for politics.
Right. People who have other shit to do. Yeah. Yeah. No, I find that a lot of the media now is, it really has become a kind of self-sustaining legacy kind of complex. And I always tell people, you know, like even with shows like mine, I run like a tower records. Like we are in many respects, dinosaurs, dinosaurs of infrastructure.
Like I'm out there like, hey kids, come on in and see the new CDs on the rack. And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't go into brick and mortar stores. I don't listen, you know. And these things naturally evolve and there is a churn and new voices arise and those voices can be really exciting and valuable and it creates, you know, new avenues to express these ideas.
And that should be exciting and empowering, but only if we know what we're doing and we can't be naive about it, right? So on one hand, things are, you know, ideas are spreading and compelling voices are emerging and are spreading in this space. But also, let's be clear, the right has a very sophisticated infrastructure to amplify some of those voices.
No question.
And it feels organic. It looks organic. They have these things, many of them propagating through spaces that I barely understand like Discord, but that reach people and feel real. And so we need to be as savvy about the mechanics of that kind of stuff. In the same way that 30, 50, 70 years ago, a DNC operative would need to be smart about
I don't know, how to buy radio ads in the new radio era or a bunch of stuff they probably hadn't thought about a generation sooner.
But there is a lot more Trojan horsing going on nowadays than I think I can ever recall. Things that are, you know, they keep exposing, oh, there was a Russian oligarch who bought $8 million worth of podcast shows and nobody ever said anything and they just went through it and You know, they are incentivizing and there's, I guess they used to call it payola, but there's a great deal of that.
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