September 1, 2025 • 44 mins
George Conway examines Trump’s lawlessness. Yale Budget Lab’s Natasha Sarin details the effects of tariffs on our economy.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Peter Navarro says that blocking tariffs
would be the end of.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The United States.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I don't think that's right. We have such a great
show for you today. George Conway stops by to talk
about Trump's lawlessness. Then we'll talk to Yale Budget Lab's
own Natasha Sarin about the effects of tariffs on the economy.
But first we have the most important stories that aren't
(00:37):
getting the attention they deserve.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Molly, So the Supreme Court, they really have become the
people who just really really rule these big decisions in America,
and well, now the fate of the US economy may
lie with it.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, so I think we pull back for a minute. Here.
Trump is crashing the United States economy because he believes
that tariffs will bring back manufacturing, and more importantly, he
can use them to punish people he's mad at.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Trade wars are easy to win, as I recall, Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
They're good and easy to win. I was told. So
here's what's happening. We have what looks to be a
pretty great showdown between the Koch Brother, who is set
up because there's only one now, and Leonard Leo perhaps
you'll remember him from episode one Buying the Supreme Court.
The Koch brother and Leonard Leo are together. They are
(01:28):
the challengers. So they have put together a particularly amazing
case called Simplified at All versus Trump at All. And
Simplified is a company with a CEO called Emily Lay.
She has a principle of based company owned by her
and several other Florida companies, and they are challenging Trump's
(01:49):
attempt to rely on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act IPA. Now,
I want to say something about EPA. IPA never says
the word tariffs in it, which is sort of amazing.
The idea here is that Trump is using an emergency
power that he doesn't have. Now we know that the
power of the purse is supposed to be with Congress
(02:11):
tariff's taxes, budget spending all Congress. Now, Donald Trump subscribes
to the unitary executive theory, which means nothing because it's
completely made up. But the idea here is that he
is the boss of everyone and forever and ever and ever,
and the United States is now basically his family business,
and he duels out what he likes to people he
(02:32):
likes and not to other people. And if you anger him,
you're fucked. And if you don't, you may get a
job in the admin. And so now this case so far,
you know, look, it's the idea that Donald Trump doesn't
have a complete blank check to ruin our economy seems
pretty reasonable. I hate to side with the Koch brother here,
(02:55):
but I think he's got a pretty good point.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
I might have just think of those team checks and balances.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, sure, Wait, I don't think these people have ever
been for checks and balances.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Well, it's true, but in this case, it is what
it is.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It's the worst person you know, meme right here, right,
the worst person you know has a good idea. So
here's what's going to happen. This is going to the
Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is going to have
to decide. They may pretend to have some ideological bullshit,
some clap trap it's textualism or internetalism or the unitary
(03:30):
executive shopping on the Internet, but here's what it's going
to be. They're going to figure out who they owe
to do they owe does John Roberts need to make
Donald Trump happy or does he want to make the
Koch brother who's paid for all their vacations and Leonard
Leo and they're big money people happy. And I don't
know what's the answer is. I do know that Trump World,
(03:52):
like with so many things, has cooked it up to eleven.
We have Peter Navarro saying it will be the end
of America. You have you know, they are off right,
they're all cooked out because they are super jacked on
the idea that Donald Trump should be able to do tariffs.
But I think it's important to remember we're not really
seeing what's happening because these tariffs are just starting to
be implemented, right, We're not seeing exactly what this is
(04:15):
going to be like. But this is wildly inflationary. And
you know, you have a situation where Donald Trump. All
Donald Trump wants is for the Fed to cut interest
rates because he thinks that if the Fed cuts interest rates,
the market will rocket. And that's why the market it
keeps not backing down when Trump puts in these tariffs. Now,
here's what's going to happen. If you are any person
(04:38):
who understands the economy at all, and you don't even
need to understand the economy. You can just need to
understand what happened with Nixon. So Nixon pressured the Fed
to lower interest rates because he was running for reelection.
The Fed lowered interest rates for Nixon. Nixon won. Interest
rates were low, Stagflation rocketed. The economy was in a
(04:58):
recession with inflation, and that's what stiflation is, and that
I think is a very likely scenario here.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Sami Axios Ipsos did a survey. Got to tell you,
while people like the idea of making America healthy again,
they don't like the things RFK Junior is doing here.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, I'm shocked. I am shocked that the guy who
is dismantling the health Department is not more popular. Kennedy
has a vested interest, right, he gets money from the
vaccine lawsuits. Okay, so he is connected to a personal
injury law firm that employs Kennedy's son, Connor, and it's
(05:39):
leading litigation against merk after about alleged serious side effects
from its HPV vaccine Guardassol. There is Kennedy has profited
from the consulting deal with the firm, and he would
retain a ten percent stake in the fees awarded by
the court. He is now about to make it so
(05:59):
that vaccine lawsuits won't be capped anymore. I mean, this
is just like an insane, insane, insane way to run
the Health Department. It just is completely insane. And the
fact that this is still going on is you know,
these people are so so, so, so conflicted, and that's
(06:22):
where it is.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, And I'd really like to see the Democratic leadership
taking stances about it. I mean, we see Bernie Sanders
demanding his resignation, and they should be making every Republican
waanemaker accountable that they're allowing him to stay on and
not calling for it too.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Well, Interestingly, Illinois JB. Pritzker is leading a charge that
other Democratic governors should take up, I think, which is
that Trump's decapitation the CDC really should be a.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Thing that we all are screaming with our air on
fire about.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah. And I think it's important to remember Hikim may
not have the majority, but he is certainly able to
start impeachment hearings, and it's a real question as to
why he's not. The thing that's bad is they're dismantling
the federal government. The thing that is, if you're going
to try to find a bright spot here, is that
if they're dismantling the federal government, then states can pick
(07:12):
up the slack to some degree. I mean, they're not
going to have the kind of money the federal government does.
And you have to wonder why we pay federal taxes, right,
you know, if Alabama wants to have Donald Trump steal
all their money, let them. But why should we New
York and Massachusetts and Vermont and Maine and New Hampshire.
(07:33):
Why do we have to send our tax dollars so
that Elon Musk can get huge tax right offs? I mean,
why should we be financing this?
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Beats the hell out of me.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So this weekend, unfortunately, we couldn't go a weekend with
a totally silent truth social post.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Despite the fact that he's basically been home all weekend. Yes, yes,
I'm playing Phantom of the Opera and that all of.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
God, that really was one of the more funny stories
of what everybody was expeculating if he's alive or not.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
It's like, well, that's definitely a yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah. No, I mean I'm telling you. One of my
favorite things about Donald Trump, his like playing music, and
is that this guy has gotten really far by being
really weird. People like the weirdness. They just it's just
the fascism and the racism and misogyny, stupidity, stupidity.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Well, speaking of the stupidity.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The wastefulness, yes, going, but otherwise good.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Here's what he said on true social voter ID must
be a part of every single vote, no exceptions. I
will be doing an executive order to that end. Also,
no mailion voting except for those that are very ill
in the far away military.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, you know what, all these executive orders are not real.
And this guy, by the way, stop taking him seriously
or literally or anything. Yeah, it's all hooey. You know,
he doesn't have the right to do any of this bullshit.
Just ignore it. It's not true. It's like, you know,
it's like when you have a parent with dementia. Yes, grandpa, Yes, grandpa,
(09:11):
we'll do that next time. Grandpa. By the way, looking
forward to Jake Tapper his book on Trump's house, what's
happening with that?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Well, what I saw this morning is he was dunking
on people on Twitter. So I don't think he's working
on it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
No, it's too bad. George Conway is the host of
George Conway explains it all. Welcome to Fast Politics. George Conway,
how are you. I'm good. I want you to talk
about what's happening right now with Donald Trump, because it
seems as if none of this is legal. We're every
(09:50):
day we see cords say none of this is legal.
I want you to talk to us about this. I
feel like the underlying thing we keep seeing is that
none of is legal.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
It's not that complicated from a legal standpoint. We elected
a criminal and he's president, and consistent with the patterns
he showed prior to being president and when he was
president previously. He doesn't believe in rules and laws. That's
why he's was a criminal. That's why he was convicted.
That's why he's so they don't He doesn't think they
(10:24):
apply to him. That's why he owes eaging Carol eighty
eight million dollars. And here we are. I mean, and
this is the difference between Trump two and Trump one.
To get a little more serious, but it really is
that simplistic. Is that there's nobody to say stop. He
doesn't have people around him who have enough respect for
(10:46):
the law, respect for the constitution, respect for the country,
respect for their themselves. Really to basically say we can't
do that, sir, or figure out some way to distract him,
like by taking things off his desk. Remember that Ryan Harris,
a fellow from Goldman Sachs, did that. Nobody can do that,
(11:06):
Harry Cohen, Because yes, answer me this.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
One of the things that in other countries they're shocked
by about us is how craven and pathetic and cowardly
our billionaires have acted. Are just different groups have just
caved in a truly pathetic, cowardly way. Are you surprised
(11:31):
and why have you not? Yes?
Speaker 5 (11:33):
If you would ask me six or seven years ago,
will I be surprised if this happens, I would have
been surprised. I am really not that surprised anymore. Because
I went through the first term of Trump thinking, oh, people,
sooner or later, people are just gonna say fuck this,
(11:54):
I can't deal with this enough. And I thought, actually
Republicans would do that, Republican senators, Republican members of Congress.
And it turned out no. People are very narrowly focused
on their own interests, what benefits them at a given moment,
and I don't mean that necessarily that because everybody's profiting
(12:15):
off those some people are yes, and some people we
know and they they talk people you were married to.
No comment there. But also people are acting in their
own self interest in the sense that they don't want trouble.
They like their lives the way there is. They they
go on there, you know, they do their social media,
(12:37):
or they have their jobs, and if it doesn't directly
affect them, then there's really no point because I can't
we can't do anything about it. And it's a it's
it's really a failure of collective action. It's it's the
it's the prisoner's dilemma problem. But it's also you know,
if there's a spectrum, there's a spectrum from pure corruption.
There's a spectrum from hatred. Okay, there's your Stephen Miller
(13:00):
pathological hatred, to the people who are just trying to
kind of make a name for themselves, the people who
are drifting off the government, people who are just afraid
but don't see any alternative but to just go along,
people who just don't want to hear anything about it.
And then there are the rest of us. And it's
(13:21):
a spectrum of ranging. For you know, from apathy to
absolute you know, corruption, corruption, and that's where we are.
We don't have the balance of people that we take
right now to stop it.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Do you think there will be a time when the
math will be sad that there will be Republicans who say, really, it's.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Not going to be the Republicans. They're not capable of
the people. The people who are Republicans or were Republicans
who are speaking out and doing something are the ones
that you see, Okay, we're here. They're just a they're
a handful of us, but there, we're here. The rest
of the people who have, if you have a semblance
(14:11):
of a conscience, what most people have been doing from
inside the Republican Party is just getting out of politics.
See Paul Ryan. They're numerous examples examples of pretty good
people who just basically just quit now. I mean, Jeff
Flake was sort of in the middle, for example, because
he actually spoke out, but you know, he's just gone.
(14:34):
He's gone, and he's living some nice life somewhere. You know,
ear much and so many other people. And now Jodie Earnest.
I think part of the reason why she quit was
not just because she said stupid shit I think she
actually has a conscience in there somewhere, And I think,
and somebody put it to me the other day, it's like,
(14:55):
I think the hegset thing took a lot out of her,
the fact that she couldn't bring herself she could didn't
feel she had the political power as a United States
senator with an expertise in the sexual and sexual sexual assault,
that she felt that she couldn't do what she knew
(15:16):
was the right thing to do with hag Seth. I
think that took a lot out of her. And I
think that took I think that it caused her to
do something she's not. She's a she's a political, politically
savvy woman, I think. But that that whole bit whether
we're all going to die, she just I think she
just lost her mojo because of the cognitive dissonance that
(15:39):
Trump enforces on the right. So I don't I don't
think if we if we're going to save ourselves, isn't
going to be from the Republicans.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
But eventually the calculus will be such. This is a question,
not a statement that people will decide it's better to
get off the Trump train or no. Ever, they just
ride it into the.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
I don't know. I mean, I mean, you would have
thought the Germans would have figured that out long before night,
but long before May nineteen forty five, but they didn't.
And it's the problem is how much damage is going
to be done before people reach that point? Or alternatively,
(16:26):
I think he, you know, he's going to blow himself
up somehow, one way or the other. And whether it's
whether it's you know, whether it's after everything around him
has can been completely obliterated, whether it's somewhere before then,
we don't know. I mean, it's really a question. Is
my favorite phrase I said, it's not a pretty phrase
(16:46):
to describe the issue here is what's the blast radio
is going to be when he blows himself up? And
it could be the entire country. Very optimistic moment.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
We're clearly heading towards catastrophe. And I don't you know,
like if you look at the way they're stripping the
federal government right regulation when it comes to stable coin,
when it comes to banking, when it comes to the FED,
when it comes to health and human services, stripping that
that section of the government right. So we're not prepared
(17:18):
for a pandemic. We're not prepared for a financial crisis.
We're not prepared for this.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
For that.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
For you know, the DoD is being run by a
weekend television host. As someone who sometimes hosts weekend television,
I can tell you we are not equipped. Okay, So
the question is, you know, as you're watching this sort
of marble run, where are you the most concerned?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (17:44):
I mean, I absolutely think the science stuff is very concerning.
I think that you know, the whole what's called the
notion and it doesn't even really make sense from Trump's
individual standpoint, the notion that you put this anti his
probably his single most significant accomplishment in his first term
(18:05):
was Operation warp speeding. He likes to talk, but only
in private. And yet who does he have as his
health secretary? Mister we don't believe in experts, brain words, okay.
Who is basically gutting the national medical establishment And so
(18:25):
it's crazy. But on the other hand, if you look
at it from a broader standpoint, that what a malignant
narcissist like Donald Trump, who is surrounded by other malignant narcissists,
what those characters are like, what those personality types are like,
is that they ultimately seek the structure they want to
(18:45):
control things, but they want to destroy everything that they
can't control, and that includes things that benefit the public,
including FEMA, including NIH and go down the list. It's
just things that they feel are not within their control.
Because those people are people who rely on facts and
objective logic and reason and will express disagreement from time
(19:10):
to time or very frequently with the government.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I'm going to read you a quote from the Sunday Shows.
I want your hottest take. I gave up everything for this.
I mean, you know, my wife is struggling. I stare
at these four walls all day in DC, you know,
by myself divorced from my wife, not divorced, I mean,
but separated. It's hard. Do you know who that is?
Dan Bongino, the FBI.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I don't know what to make of that. My take
on bang Bongino has changed over the course of the
last several months. I thought he was a crazy yahoo,
which he was and may still be. But I do
think somewhere in there, and this was reflected in the
(19:58):
way he dealt with you know, his position basically and
also specifically the Epstein files, I think there's a he's
another one of these people where there actually is a
conscience in there, and I think he realizes that what's
going on in the FBI isn't necessary. This is my project,
(20:19):
this is I'm projecting this onto him.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, I think so it.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
Could be I could be completely wrong that he sees
that maybe this isn't the best course for the FBI.
This isn't this isn't what I signed up for long
ago when I first became a law enforcement officer. And
he knows what's in the Epstein stuff, and there's something
in there that really really really bothered him about something
for somebody. Yeah, so that's what I think is going on.
(20:45):
And then at the same time, after the let's call
it a stunt, but I you know, I don't mean
that critically, because he actually was doing something useful. But
after what he pulls when he objected to after what
he did when he objected to the release non release
of the Epstein files, you know, the fact that he
(21:05):
is still there and wasn't fired and removed and instead
they're just putting another person in there right next to
him tells you something about what the White House thinks
of Bongino. They are afraid of him for some reason.
I don't know if that's at that counts as a
hot take. But that's my take on him. No hot
(21:27):
it's time of nuanced.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It's a hot take, and I think more importantly, there's definitely.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
Something a thoughtful take.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Yeah, no, I mean it's a thoughtful take. Like I'm
not one of these people who decides someone does a
bunch of bad things, they're permanently bad unless it's done. Yeah, Donald,
beyond redemption. You know, I think that everybody's capable of
good things and bad things. Some people. The mix changes
over time. And I think it's Bongino. I think there's
something there with him, even though he said he said
(22:00):
you know, I mean, he said some pretty nasty things
about me on social media and I have been but
I you know, I'd like to get the guy drunk
and find out what's going on.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yes, we love drinking. Let me ask you all right too. Yeah,
that's really body. But this week there's going to be
a lot more Ebstein stuff because we're going to see Yeah,
we're going to see a big press conference ten Ebstein survivors.
(22:31):
May there are more than two hundred survivors.
Speaker 5 (22:33):
This is tall think I think there's there are I
think there are over a thousand.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, so there are a lot. The point is these guys,
this may have been this guy, jeff Ray Epstein, may
have been the biggest sex trafficker, one of the biggest ever.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
Many people are saying this.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Many people are saying like swimen, beautiful women, some of
them on the younger side.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Oh yeah, did you hear that the Epstein estate is
going to release the birthday book?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah? This is not going to make Donald Trump happy.
What do you think he will do to distract from
this fom Mexico? I mean, what what do you say?
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Look?
Speaker 5 (23:12):
I mean I think his instincts will be everything that
we previously see do things to distract, although I don't
think he necessarily thinks that deeply about it. Like I
think he just impulsively does things to get attention. That's
what he normally does, except for this weekend for some reason,
he's not doing that. Interestingly, It's an extension of that
(23:38):
tendency to seek attention. It also helps him change the
subject to talk about me, all the great things about me.
So he wants to do something that he thinks he
should get credit for. I don't think it's I don't
know if I'm articulating it that well, but you are.
I think he's doing it just to distract. I think
he just does it because and I think when he
feels pressure, when he feels narcissistic in that's when he
(24:01):
acts out even more, which is consistent really distraction theory.
But I think it's a little it's a mixed motive.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I think, Yeah, George Conway, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I'll always come back. I may not be on time,
but I'll always come back.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Natasha Saron is the president and co founder of the
Budget Lab at Yale. Welcome to Fast Politics, Natasha, thanks
so much for having me. Allie, I wanted to have
you because, first of all, because we've been on panels
together and you always have a lot of really important
and interesting analysis. But the Yale Budget Lab has in
(24:38):
a world where you can no longer trust government numbers.
Non government numbers are going to actually be You're increasingly
the only game in town.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I think organizations like ours are always important, but increasingly important.
And we're in a world in which government statistics are
becoming kind of hard to evaluate as truth, which is
actually a really unfortunate world to the end, right, Molly,
because for so long been this like gold standard in
this country of having impeccable and almost real time information
(25:13):
about the state of the labor market or the state
of inflation, and I'm worried that some of the actions
that have been taken recently are pushing against that.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I want you to first talk a couple of weeks ago,
Donald Trump got these numbers. He didn't like it was
a revision on jobless claims. Right, that's right, it doesn't
not get us to where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Feels like it wasn't even that long ago because it
was the beginning in August. But a lot has happened
since then. Yeah, so basically until just on the substance first,
before we talk about the reactions to the numbers, there
was a bit of confusion for those of us who
watch these issues as we were trying to understand what
was happening in the labor market, because we definitely had
(25:54):
evidence that as a result of these tariffs and the
trade policies that the administration is pursuing, you had seen
economic growth slowing and in facts that's like consistent with
the work that my colleagues and I do at the
Budget lab. We estimated the economy would be about zero
point five percent of GDP smaller as a result of
these very high tariffs. And that's like kind of what
(26:16):
you were seeing relative to projections last fall about what
economic growth would look like. It was slowing down, but
at the same time you had the labor market that
looked like pretty steady for many months, and it was
kind of puzzling those two two things. How could they
be true simultaneously. And what we learned earlier at the
result of last month's jobs numbers is that those things
(26:40):
two things weren't actually true simultaneous, because the labor market
has in fact been cooling over the course of the
last few months, and there was a revision to the
jobless claimed. I want to be sort of clear about
the substance here, though. Revisions happen all the time, and
the reason they happen all the time is because we're
getting information, like in real time about the labor market,
(27:03):
basically by surveying a bunch of businesses about their hiring
and firing practices. And inherently, when you do that kind
of surveying, it is going to be the case that
some people don't respond within your survey window, and so
you're putting out information, but you know that as you
get more responses, you're going to update because you've learned
(27:24):
more about the economy, and so we always revise these numbers,
these revisions. It was a big number. It said the
you know, two hundred and forty eight thousand jobs fewer
than we thought over the course of a two month period.
But in reality, that's zero point one five percent of
payroll employment. So it's like a relatively small number in
(27:45):
a but it sounds big when you don't scale it
by kind of the size of our economy, which is fast.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
But it also set the table for firing people who
didn't do what he wanted. So Donald Trump desperately wants
to cut interest rates. He thinks that that will choose
the economy. This is a real estate guy's vision of
how to fix the economy. One might even say a
bad real estate guys vision of how to fix the economy.
(28:11):
I want you to explain to us sort of why
the Fed doesn't want to lower interest rates, because I
think Donald Trump thinks it's because they're against him, But
actually there's more to this story.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
There's a lot more to the story. And in fact,
like if you think about what the Federal Reserve is tasked,
what's doing, we are very lucky, just like we're very
lucky to have government statistics that we can rely on
and feel confident in. We're incredibly lucky. And it's another
pillar of our economic security that we have a central
(28:45):
bank that is independent, and that means that the central bank,
when it makes decisions, it makes decisions about just two things.
It looks at what the inflation outlook looks like in
the country, so what's happening to prices, And it looks
at what's happened in the labor market, so are we
adding jobs? Are we not adding jobs? And as it
weighs those two pieces of evidence, it says, okay, well,
(29:08):
should interest rates go up in order to stimulate in
order to cool the economy, or should they go down
in order to stimulate the economy so people borrow more
and invest more and the like. And what's been hard
for the Federal Reserve thus far over the course of
the last many months is that it's getting kind of
signals in both directions. So it's getting the signal from
(29:30):
on the inflation side, the Federal Reserve wasn't even back
to the level of inflation it wants to see in
the economy after the pandemic when the administration took office,
and then what happened is they turned around as a
result of these tariffs and executed the most inflationary policies
that we've seen in our lifetimes. So, like big inflation
(29:52):
pushes in one direction for the Fed, and then in
the other direction, you're starting to see the labor market
slow down, which pushes in exactly the opposite space. And
so I think it's actually a very difficult You could
make arguments, and in fact, we've seen the Federal Reserve
make arguments on both sides of this. Should we wait
and see what's happening with tarif uncertainty or other governors
(30:14):
have said, actually, now is the time to start cutting
interest rates. But importantly, by the way, no one is
saying No one on the Federal Reserve has said anything
like let us do what the President has suggested, which
is decrease the federal funds rate to one percent by
like two percentage points, by big numbers. No one is
saying that. What they're saying is let's do like relatively
(30:36):
small changes to the interest rate in order to kind
of make sure we have this balance right between inflation
on the one side and jobs on the other side.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
It seems like the anxiety here is something called stagflation.
I mean, the irony here is so rich. Right, Nixon
fullies the Fed into doing what he wants, creates stagflation,
can't get out of it. Talk us through what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
You're gonna make me say, I am so scared as
an economist to say the word stactuation. I say, I've
been saying like s word or something as I'm trying
to describe it, because it's such a difficult scenario to
be navigating.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Didn't Nixon do this? Well?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
So Nixon did exactly. And that's a little bit what
I find so frustrating about all of what we're seeing
over the course of the last many months with respect
to federal reserve independence, which is that like, we have
run this play before in the United States with respect
to bullying a central bank to lower interest rates. We
(31:39):
did it in the nixt administration. Arthur Burns said to Nixon,
you know, I've done everything I can to help you
win that everything I can was decrease interest rates ahead
of a presidential election, and the result of that was
that over a two year period you had inflation increase
from three to thirteen percent, and ultimately it took a
(32:00):
massive downturn and a giant recession in the economy to
try to bring back inflation towards expectations and bring back
interest rates towards the level that you would want to see.
And so it's like incredibly counterproductive to be playing around
with's federal reserve independence. It's not just that we've done
it in the US before. I mean, Turkey's done it,
(32:22):
Argentina's done it. You've been in situations where you've seen
central banks start to get politicized and the real risk
and government statistics start to get politicized, and the real
risk that economies run from that. And so I am
troubled by it. And I'm also puzzled by it because,
by the way, if they wanted to see lower interest rates,
which is what the President has been saying, Chair Powell
(32:43):
has been explicit that like, had it not been for
this tariff uncertainty, the Federal Reserve is already a cut
interest rate. So it's like they kind of have the
capacity to do the thing that he wants to see
happen in the economy.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yes, and the way the tariffs have been put into
practice are is insane, right, It's highly emotional, it's highly disorganized.
Were you doing this in a thoughtful way, you would
say raw materials when get tariffed, Like, we have situations
here where there are things that are where you are
tariffing the materials for the manufacturing. You know, he's tariffing
(33:21):
things we don't even make here, that we don't even
have here. And so if you wanted to onshore manufacturing,
this is absolutely not the way to do it. So
talk us through that, I mean.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
And one of the things there that's really important is
it is a bit difficult to understand what the actual
objective of these tariffs are, and so it's hard to
evaluate whether or not they are being successful and effectuating
their goals. The thing that I find really interesting and
(33:51):
kind of frustrating about the tariffs is that we you
and I might disagree about what the right effect of
tariff rate is in the United States, and right now
we're at an effective tariff rate of upwards of eighteen
percent at the beginning of this administration, we were at
two and a half percent, So that's a big significant jump.
(34:13):
That jump hasn't been like a singular change in policy.
What you've seen is a lot of starts and stops,
then a lot of changes affected. Teriff rates have changed
more than sixty times over the course of the first
six months of this administration. And so that type of
uncertainty kind of independent of what the level is and
what the exclusion should be, and does it really make
(34:36):
sense for us to be tariffing our allies like Canada
and Mexico in the name of fetanol that Canada doesn't
really have much to do with in the first place.
Like all of that, we can debate the substance, but
as an economist, you have to ask yourself, like what
is the sort of argument for the uncertainty, because what
we know that it does is it paralyzes businesses. It
(34:58):
makes it impossible to plan, like should you be moving
your manufacturing from China to India because when we know
that India's more of an ally than China is, but
actually now India today is being hit with a fifty
percent tariff, and so that kind of a move wouldn't
make much sense. If you're Apple thinking about where to
manufacture your iPhones, and so there's some that sort of
(35:18):
the uncertainty index is just really high right now in
ways that don't really make much sense to me from
a policy perspective.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Yeah, and that is the fundamental sort of one of
the great tropes of trumpsm is that it doesn't make
any sense. So let's just we got these tariffs. They're
the highest since what the Great Depression?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Oh yeah, in the last century.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, we're told by Trump that the companies are going
to eat the tariffs. Trump has also done a lot
of I actually like this as part of the horseshoe.
Here he's taking a steak in Intel. He's thinking his
music about taking steaks into fense contractors. If a Democrat
did this, Republicans Grover Norquest would run naked through burning man.
(36:09):
What is happening? And how unusual is it for America
to take stakes in private businesses?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, I don't know enough about the deal to
be able to evaluate it yet, and frankly I don't
think we do know enough about the terms. I can
kind of see some argument from a national security perspective,
certainly with respect to domestic chips production, and also, frankly
some argument for American taxpayers should get some of the
(36:39):
benefits of some of these investments that the FISK is making.
On the other hand, the thing that gives you a
bit of pause and gives a bit of pause to
economists who are looking at these things, and I suspect
gives a bit of pause to some of the critics
that you're talking about, Mollie is like, do you really
want the government to be in the business of picking
winners and losers in part because you worry that it
(37:02):
distorts the marketplace? Because does it then mean that if
you're a competitor to Intel, you're less likely to get
favorable terms, or you're less likely to find yourself being
able to compete with a legacy, older business that has
this attachment to the Fisk in this very precise and
pronounced way. And so, in some sense, are we distorting
(37:25):
competitive incentives in the economy by making some of these choices?
And is the government really well equipped to be looking
at the landscape scape and trying to pick out which
companies are likely to be successful in profit and which
ones are less.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Likely to be So yeah, And I mean there's a
really deep kind of crony capitalism vein in this administration.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I very much agree a little bit like you kind
of can't look at any of this stuff that we've
been talking about in isolation, because in aggregate, what it
feels like is that you're moving away from from a
rules based capitalist system and moving towards this you called
it crony capitalism, this like world deals based system of capitalism,
(38:11):
and that that feels a little bit uncomfortable and should
feel a little bit uncomfortable, not just to me and you, frankly,
but to financial markets as they watch and see the
integrity of some of these institutions brought into question, like
the Federal Reserve or our Bureau of Labor Statistics, but
also as they watch your stock with this administration start
(38:35):
to dictate the terms on which you're able to conduct
your businesses.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
So it strikes me that we're heading towards some kind
of impact event. Right. We're on a kind of collision course.
Things are getting more expensive. Trump has tried to fire
Lisa Cook. Lisa Cook is doing what anyone should do
in a situation like this, pushing back. But it doesn't
seem as if this is heading anywhere good. You will
(39:00):
see when this next quarter ends, we'll see if we're
in negative growth, right, I mean, that will be the
next indicator that will say if we're in a recession
or not, or is there something else coming up that
could show us that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It's an interesting question because you've started to see sort
of signs of instability in the economy.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
So, growth was supposed to be on track last November.
It was projected to be something like two and a
half percent this year. In the first two quarters of
this year, it was closer to one point two percent.
You saw when the President was contemplating earlier at this summer,
I had a letter that said he was firing Chair Powell,
and we were talking a lot about renovations to the
(39:43):
Federal Reserve building. You saw the market take like a
one percent hit kind of instantaneously on that new You
saw around Liberation Day a really sizable market reaction to
the announcement of terror f rates that we are basically,
you know, three quarters of the way back to right now,
and so you've seen like little points of nervousness, and frankly,
(40:08):
you've seen the administration react to some of that nervousness
particularly in the bond market. But you haven't yet had
what you're describing as like an impact the event. And
so I suspect, just based on the work that my
colleagues and I have been doing at the Budget Lab,
that some of the inflationary impacts that we have projected
(40:31):
from these terraffs are starting to hit in the economy
and they're going to continue to hit, in fact more
aggressively in the months ahead. And that's where you're hearing
retailers say two a bunch they had like stockpiled and
brought in a lot of inventory in anticipation of higher
tariff freights so they could keep their shelves stopped with
stuff that they brought in at lower tariff levels. And
(40:53):
that's not going to work forever. And so you're going
start to get to a point where the tariffs are biting,
and at the same time, you have some of these
deep threats to central bank independence, to the integrity of
government data that should make market participants very nervous and
should make them react negatively. And so I think you're
(41:14):
right to have a bunch of nervousness about this moment,
and I only help. My hope is that you've seen
the Supreme Court in a case that had nothing to
do about the Federal Reserve. Try to be specific that
the Federal Reserve is special and a quasi private institution
where it's really important that we have this independence. And
so I hope that the judiciary is going to stand
(41:37):
up against some of this. But again, only time is
going to tell.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
There's a tariff case working its way up to the
Supreme Court. Just say two seconds on that.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah, And that's actually a very good point. A bunch
of the tariffs. The authority that the president is using
to impose these tariffs has to do with very specific
emergency powers that he was given by Congress. It's really
it's hard to argue that it makes sense to impose
these very high tariffs on our allies based on some
sort of emergency associated with national security or anything like that.
(42:09):
And so that case is working its way up to
the Supreme Court, and it's going to be another moment
when you're going to I hope see the court pull
back from some of these very expansive uses of executive power.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. A moment
sick Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
I jumped fast the Trump administration cut a lot of
funding to shooting prevention programs in Minnesota just weeks before
the latest shooting, which they are now pretending should be
blamed on the fact that the shooter was trans.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So Cam Caskey, who was a victim of the Marjorie
Stone Douglas High shooting, he didn't get shot, but he
grew up, you know, he was in high school. He
was on this show last night, the weekend show that
I was filling in as a host, And one of
the things that I was struck by when I was
listening to him was just the incredible damage that these
(43:07):
shootings do to everyone around them. So you're not just
the kids in the school, but the parents and the
grandparents and the people who live in the town. You know,
we see two victims, but the reality is there are
hundreds of thousands of ancillary victims from these mass shootings.
(43:28):
And I just was listening to him, and I'm thinking
to myself, like, you know, even if you weren't even
in school, even if you were in middle school, even
if you were in kindergarten, the ripples of effect that
these have on everyone are just so incredibly shocking and
traumatizing and I just was listening to him and I
was thinking, just how destructive all that is.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
It's really bad.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
And Sebastian Gorka was on the Sunday shows blaming if
this on trans kids, despite the lack of proportionality of
that being being the case. I do find it really
disturbing that a lot of the recent shooters have all
participated in a particular discord chat. Yeah, you would think
that the FBI could spend time on that instead of
harassing their opponents.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Peter Navarro says that blocking tariffs
would be the end of.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The United States.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I don't think that's right. We have such a great
show for you today. George Conway stops by to talk
about Trump's lawlessness. Then we'll talk to Yale Budget Lab's
own Natasha Sarin about the effects of tariffs on the economy.
But first we have the most important stories that aren't
(00:37):
getting the attention they deserve.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Molly, So the Supreme Court, they really have become the
people who just really really rule these big decisions in America,
and well, now the fate of the US economy may
lie with it.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, so I think we pull back for a minute. Here.
Trump is crashing the United States economy because he believes
that tariffs will bring back manufacturing, and more importantly, he
can use them to punish people he's mad at.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Trade wars are easy to win, as I recall, Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
They're good and easy to win. I was told. So
here's what's happening. We have what looks to be a
pretty great showdown between the Koch Brother, who is set
up because there's only one now, and Leonard Leo perhaps
you'll remember him from episode one Buying the Supreme Court.
The Koch brother and Leonard Leo are together. They are
(01:28):
the challengers. So they have put together a particularly amazing
case called Simplified at All versus Trump at All. And
Simplified is a company with a CEO called Emily Lay.
She has a principle of based company owned by her
and several other Florida companies, and they are challenging Trump's
(01:49):
attempt to rely on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act IPA. Now,
I want to say something about EPA. IPA never says
the word tariffs in it, which is sort of amazing.
The idea here is that Trump is using an emergency
power that he doesn't have. Now we know that the
power of the purse is supposed to be with Congress
(02:11):
tariff's taxes, budget spending all Congress. Now, Donald Trump subscribes
to the unitary executive theory, which means nothing because it's
completely made up. But the idea here is that he
is the boss of everyone and forever and ever and ever,
and the United States is now basically his family business,
and he duels out what he likes to people he
(02:32):
likes and not to other people. And if you anger him,
you're fucked. And if you don't, you may get a
job in the admin. And so now this case so far,
you know, look, it's the idea that Donald Trump doesn't
have a complete blank check to ruin our economy seems
pretty reasonable. I hate to side with the Koch brother here,
(02:55):
but I think he's got a pretty good point.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
I might have just think of those team checks and balances.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, sure, Wait, I don't think these people have ever
been for checks and balances.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Well, it's true, but in this case, it is what
it is.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
It's the worst person you know, meme right here, right,
the worst person you know has a good idea. So
here's what's going to happen. This is going to the
Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is going to have
to decide. They may pretend to have some ideological bullshit,
some clap trap it's textualism or internetalism or the unitary
(03:30):
executive shopping on the Internet, but here's what it's going
to be. They're going to figure out who they owe
to do they owe does John Roberts need to make
Donald Trump happy or does he want to make the
Koch brother who's paid for all their vacations and Leonard
Leo and they're big money people happy. And I don't
know what's the answer is. I do know that Trump World,
(03:52):
like with so many things, has cooked it up to eleven.
We have Peter Navarro saying it will be the end
of America. You have you know, they are off right,
they're all cooked out because they are super jacked on
the idea that Donald Trump should be able to do tariffs.
But I think it's important to remember we're not really
seeing what's happening because these tariffs are just starting to
be implemented, right, We're not seeing exactly what this is
(04:15):
going to be like. But this is wildly inflationary. And
you know, you have a situation where Donald Trump. All
Donald Trump wants is for the Fed to cut interest
rates because he thinks that if the Fed cuts interest rates,
the market will rocket. And that's why the market it
keeps not backing down when Trump puts in these tariffs. Now,
here's what's going to happen. If you are any person
(04:38):
who understands the economy at all, and you don't even
need to understand the economy. You can just need to
understand what happened with Nixon. So Nixon pressured the Fed
to lower interest rates because he was running for reelection.
The Fed lowered interest rates for Nixon. Nixon won. Interest
rates were low, Stagflation rocketed. The economy was in a
(04:58):
recession with inflation, and that's what stiflation is, and that
I think is a very likely scenario here.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Sami Axios Ipsos did a survey. Got to tell you,
while people like the idea of making America healthy again,
they don't like the things RFK Junior is doing here.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, I'm shocked. I am shocked that the guy who
is dismantling the health Department is not more popular. Kennedy
has a vested interest, right, he gets money from the
vaccine lawsuits. Okay, so he is connected to a personal
injury law firm that employs Kennedy's son, Connor, and it's
(05:39):
leading litigation against merk after about alleged serious side effects
from its HPV vaccine Guardassol. There is Kennedy has profited
from the consulting deal with the firm, and he would
retain a ten percent stake in the fees awarded by
the court. He is now about to make it so
(05:59):
that vaccine lawsuits won't be capped anymore. I mean, this
is just like an insane, insane, insane way to run
the Health Department. It just is completely insane. And the
fact that this is still going on is you know,
these people are so so, so, so conflicted, and that's
(06:22):
where it is.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, And I'd really like to see the Democratic leadership
taking stances about it. I mean, we see Bernie Sanders
demanding his resignation, and they should be making every Republican
waanemaker accountable that they're allowing him to stay on and
not calling for it too.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Ye.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Well, Interestingly, Illinois JB. Pritzker is leading a charge that
other Democratic governors should take up, I think, which is
that Trump's decapitation the CDC really should be a.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Thing that we all are screaming with our air on
fire about.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah. And I think it's important to remember Hikim may
not have the majority, but he is certainly able to
start impeachment hearings, and it's a real question as to
why he's not. The thing that's bad is they're dismantling
the federal government. The thing that is, if you're going
to try to find a bright spot here, is that
if they're dismantling the federal government, then states can pick
(07:12):
up the slack to some degree. I mean, they're not
going to have the kind of money the federal government does.
And you have to wonder why we pay federal taxes, right,
you know, if Alabama wants to have Donald Trump steal
all their money, let them. But why should we New
York and Massachusetts and Vermont and Maine and New Hampshire.
(07:33):
Why do we have to send our tax dollars so
that Elon Musk can get huge tax right offs? I mean,
why should we be financing this?
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Beats the hell out of me.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So this weekend, unfortunately, we couldn't go a weekend with
a totally silent truth social post.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Despite the fact that he's basically been home all weekend. Yes, yes,
I'm playing Phantom of the Opera and that all of.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
God, that really was one of the more funny stories
of what everybody was expeculating if he's alive or not.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
It's like, well, that's definitely a yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah. No, I mean I'm telling you. One of my
favorite things about Donald Trump, his like playing music, and
is that this guy has gotten really far by being
really weird. People like the weirdness. They just it's just
the fascism and the racism and misogyny, stupidity, stupidity.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Well, speaking of the stupidity.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
The wastefulness, yes, going, but otherwise good.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Here's what he said on true social voter ID must
be a part of every single vote, no exceptions. I
will be doing an executive order to that end. Also,
no mailion voting except for those that are very ill
in the far away military.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, you know what, all these executive orders are not real.
And this guy, by the way, stop taking him seriously
or literally or anything. Yeah, it's all hooey. You know,
he doesn't have the right to do any of this bullshit.
Just ignore it. It's not true. It's like, you know,
it's like when you have a parent with dementia. Yes, grandpa, Yes, grandpa,
(09:11):
we'll do that next time. Grandpa. By the way, looking
forward to Jake Tapper his book on Trump's house, what's
happening with that?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Well, what I saw this morning is he was dunking
on people on Twitter. So I don't think he's working
on it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
No, it's too bad. George Conway is the host of
George Conway explains it all. Welcome to Fast Politics. George Conway,
how are you. I'm good. I want you to talk
about what's happening right now with Donald Trump, because it
seems as if none of this is legal. We're every
(09:50):
day we see cords say none of this is legal.
I want you to talk to us about this. I
feel like the underlying thing we keep seeing is that
none of is legal.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
It's not that complicated from a legal standpoint. We elected
a criminal and he's president, and consistent with the patterns
he showed prior to being president and when he was
president previously. He doesn't believe in rules and laws. That's
why he's was a criminal. That's why he was convicted.
That's why he's so they don't He doesn't think they
(10:24):
apply to him. That's why he owes eaging Carol eighty
eight million dollars. And here we are. I mean, and
this is the difference between Trump two and Trump one.
To get a little more serious, but it really is
that simplistic. Is that there's nobody to say stop. He
doesn't have people around him who have enough respect for
(10:46):
the law, respect for the constitution, respect for the country,
respect for their themselves. Really to basically say we can't
do that, sir, or figure out some way to distract him,
like by taking things off his desk. Remember that Ryan Harris,
a fellow from Goldman Sachs, did that. Nobody can do that,
(11:06):
Harry Cohen, Because yes, answer me this.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
One of the things that in other countries they're shocked
by about us is how craven and pathetic and cowardly
our billionaires have acted. Are just different groups have just
caved in a truly pathetic, cowardly way. Are you surprised
(11:31):
and why have you not? Yes?
Speaker 5 (11:33):
If you would ask me six or seven years ago,
will I be surprised if this happens, I would have
been surprised. I am really not that surprised anymore. Because
I went through the first term of Trump thinking, oh, people,
sooner or later, people are just gonna say fuck this,
(11:54):
I can't deal with this enough. And I thought, actually
Republicans would do that, Republican senators, Republican members of Congress.
And it turned out no. People are very narrowly focused
on their own interests, what benefits them at a given moment,
and I don't mean that necessarily that because everybody's profiting
(12:15):
off those some people are yes, and some people we
know and they they talk people you were married to.
No comment there. But also people are acting in their
own self interest in the sense that they don't want trouble.
They like their lives the way there is. They they
go on there, you know, they do their social media,
(12:37):
or they have their jobs, and if it doesn't directly
affect them, then there's really no point because I can't
we can't do anything about it. And it's a it's
it's really a failure of collective action. It's it's the
it's the prisoner's dilemma problem. But it's also you know,
if there's a spectrum, there's a spectrum from pure corruption.
There's a spectrum from hatred. Okay, there's your Stephen Miller
(13:00):
pathological hatred, to the people who are just trying to
kind of make a name for themselves, the people who
are drifting off the government, people who are just afraid
but don't see any alternative but to just go along,
people who just don't want to hear anything about it.
And then there are the rest of us. And it's
(13:21):
a spectrum of ranging. For you know, from apathy to
absolute you know, corruption, corruption, and that's where we are.
We don't have the balance of people that we take
right now to stop it.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Do you think there will be a time when the
math will be sad that there will be Republicans who say, really, it's.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Not going to be the Republicans. They're not capable of
the people. The people who are Republicans or were Republicans
who are speaking out and doing something are the ones
that you see, Okay, we're here. They're just a they're
a handful of us, but there, we're here. The rest
of the people who have, if you have a semblance
(14:11):
of a conscience, what most people have been doing from
inside the Republican Party is just getting out of politics.
See Paul Ryan. They're numerous examples examples of pretty good
people who just basically just quit now. I mean, Jeff
Flake was sort of in the middle, for example, because
he actually spoke out, but you know, he's just gone.
(14:34):
He's gone, and he's living some nice life somewhere. You know,
ear much and so many other people. And now Jodie Earnest.
I think part of the reason why she quit was
not just because she said stupid shit I think she
actually has a conscience in there somewhere, And I think,
and somebody put it to me the other day, it's like,
(14:55):
I think the hegset thing took a lot out of her,
the fact that she couldn't bring herself she could didn't
feel she had the political power as a United States
senator with an expertise in the sexual and sexual sexual assault,
that she felt that she couldn't do what she knew
(15:16):
was the right thing to do with hag Seth. I
think that took a lot out of her. And I
think that took I think that it caused her to
do something she's not. She's a she's a political, politically
savvy woman, I think. But that that whole bit whether
we're all going to die, she just I think she
just lost her mojo because of the cognitive dissonance that
(15:39):
Trump enforces on the right. So I don't I don't
think if we if we're going to save ourselves, isn't
going to be from the Republicans.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
But eventually the calculus will be such. This is a question,
not a statement that people will decide it's better to
get off the Trump train or no. Ever, they just
ride it into the.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
I don't know. I mean, I mean, you would have
thought the Germans would have figured that out long before night,
but long before May nineteen forty five, but they didn't.
And it's the problem is how much damage is going
to be done before people reach that point? Or alternatively,
(16:26):
I think he, you know, he's going to blow himself
up somehow, one way or the other. And whether it's
whether it's you know, whether it's after everything around him
has can been completely obliterated, whether it's somewhere before then,
we don't know. I mean, it's really a question. Is
my favorite phrase I said, it's not a pretty phrase
(16:46):
to describe the issue here is what's the blast radio
is going to be when he blows himself up? And
it could be the entire country. Very optimistic moment.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
We're clearly heading towards catastrophe. And I don't you know,
like if you look at the way they're stripping the
federal government right regulation when it comes to stable coin,
when it comes to banking, when it comes to the FED,
when it comes to health and human services, stripping that
that section of the government right. So we're not prepared
(17:18):
for a pandemic. We're not prepared for a financial crisis.
We're not prepared for this.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
For that.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
For you know, the DoD is being run by a
weekend television host. As someone who sometimes hosts weekend television,
I can tell you we are not equipped. Okay, So
the question is, you know, as you're watching this sort
of marble run, where are you the most concerned?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (17:44):
I mean, I absolutely think the science stuff is very concerning.
I think that you know, the whole what's called the
notion and it doesn't even really make sense from Trump's
individual standpoint, the notion that you put this anti his
probably his single most significant accomplishment in his first term
(18:05):
was Operation warp speeding. He likes to talk, but only
in private. And yet who does he have as his
health secretary? Mister we don't believe in experts, brain words, okay.
Who is basically gutting the national medical establishment And so
(18:25):
it's crazy. But on the other hand, if you look
at it from a broader standpoint, that what a malignant
narcissist like Donald Trump, who is surrounded by other malignant narcissists,
what those characters are like, what those personality types are like,
is that they ultimately seek the structure they want to
(18:45):
control things, but they want to destroy everything that they
can't control, and that includes things that benefit the public,
including FEMA, including NIH and go down the list. It's
just things that they feel are not within their control.
Because those people are people who rely on facts and
objective logic and reason and will express disagreement from time
(19:10):
to time or very frequently with the government.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I'm going to read you a quote from the Sunday Shows.
I want your hottest take. I gave up everything for this.
I mean, you know, my wife is struggling. I stare
at these four walls all day in DC, you know,
by myself divorced from my wife, not divorced, I mean,
but separated. It's hard. Do you know who that is?
Dan Bongino, the FBI.
Speaker 5 (19:36):
I don't know what to make of that. My take
on bang Bongino has changed over the course of the
last several months. I thought he was a crazy yahoo,
which he was and may still be. But I do
think somewhere in there, and this was reflected in the
(19:58):
way he dealt with you know, his position basically and
also specifically the Epstein files, I think there's a he's
another one of these people where there actually is a
conscience in there, and I think he realizes that what's
going on in the FBI isn't necessary. This is my project,
(20:19):
this is I'm projecting this onto him.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, I think so it.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
Could be I could be completely wrong that he sees
that maybe this isn't the best course for the FBI.
This isn't this isn't what I signed up for long
ago when I first became a law enforcement officer. And
he knows what's in the Epstein stuff, and there's something
in there that really really really bothered him about something
for somebody. Yeah, so that's what I think is going on.
(20:45):
And then at the same time, after the let's call
it a stunt, but I you know, I don't mean
that critically, because he actually was doing something useful. But
after what he pulls when he objected to after what
he did when he objected to the release non release
of the Epstein files, you know, the fact that he
(21:05):
is still there and wasn't fired and removed and instead
they're just putting another person in there right next to
him tells you something about what the White House thinks
of Bongino. They are afraid of him for some reason.
I don't know if that's at that counts as a
hot take. But that's my take on him. No hot
(21:27):
it's time of nuanced.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It's a hot take, and I think more importantly, there's definitely.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
Something a thoughtful take.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Yeah, no, I mean it's a thoughtful take. Like I'm
not one of these people who decides someone does a
bunch of bad things, they're permanently bad unless it's done. Yeah, Donald,
beyond redemption. You know, I think that everybody's capable of
good things and bad things. Some people. The mix changes
over time. And I think it's Bongino. I think there's
something there with him, even though he said he said
(22:00):
you know, I mean, he said some pretty nasty things
about me on social media and I have been but
I you know, I'd like to get the guy drunk
and find out what's going on.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yes, we love drinking. Let me ask you all right too. Yeah,
that's really body. But this week there's going to be
a lot more Ebstein stuff because we're going to see Yeah,
we're going to see a big press conference ten Ebstein survivors.
(22:31):
May there are more than two hundred survivors.
Speaker 5 (22:33):
This is tall think I think there's there are I
think there are over a thousand.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, so there are a lot. The point is these guys,
this may have been this guy, jeff Ray Epstein, may
have been the biggest sex trafficker, one of the biggest ever.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
Many people are saying this.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Many people are saying like swimen, beautiful women, some of
them on the younger side.
Speaker 5 (22:55):
Oh yeah, did you hear that the Epstein estate is
going to release the birthday book?
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah? This is not going to make Donald Trump happy.
What do you think he will do to distract from
this fom Mexico? I mean, what what do you say?
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Look?
Speaker 5 (23:12):
I mean I think his instincts will be everything that
we previously see do things to distract, although I don't
think he necessarily thinks that deeply about it. Like I
think he just impulsively does things to get attention. That's
what he normally does, except for this weekend for some reason,
he's not doing that. Interestingly, It's an extension of that
(23:38):
tendency to seek attention. It also helps him change the
subject to talk about me, all the great things about me.
So he wants to do something that he thinks he
should get credit for. I don't think it's I don't
know if I'm articulating it that well, but you are.
I think he's doing it just to distract. I think
he just does it because and I think when he
feels pressure, when he feels narcissistic in that's when he
(24:01):
acts out even more, which is consistent really distraction theory.
But I think it's a little it's a mixed motive.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I think, Yeah, George Conway, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 5 (24:10):
I'll always come back. I may not be on time,
but I'll always come back.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Natasha Saron is the president and co founder of the
Budget Lab at Yale. Welcome to Fast Politics, Natasha, thanks
so much for having me. Allie, I wanted to have
you because, first of all, because we've been on panels
together and you always have a lot of really important
and interesting analysis. But the Yale Budget Lab has in
(24:38):
a world where you can no longer trust government numbers.
Non government numbers are going to actually be You're increasingly
the only game in town.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
I think organizations like ours are always important, but increasingly important.
And we're in a world in which government statistics are
becoming kind of hard to evaluate as truth, which is
actually a really unfortunate world to the end, right, Molly,
because for so long been this like gold standard in
this country of having impeccable and almost real time information
(25:13):
about the state of the labor market or the state
of inflation, and I'm worried that some of the actions
that have been taken recently are pushing against that.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I want you to first talk a couple of weeks ago,
Donald Trump got these numbers. He didn't like it was
a revision on jobless claims. Right, that's right, it doesn't
not get us to where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Feels like it wasn't even that long ago because it
was the beginning in August. But a lot has happened
since then. Yeah, so basically until just on the substance first,
before we talk about the reactions to the numbers, there
was a bit of confusion for those of us who
watch these issues as we were trying to understand what
was happening in the labor market, because we definitely had
(25:54):
evidence that as a result of these tariffs and the
trade policies that the administration is pursuing, you had seen
economic growth slowing and in facts that's like consistent with
the work that my colleagues and I do at the
Budget lab. We estimated the economy would be about zero
point five percent of GDP smaller as a result of
these very high tariffs. And that's like kind of what
(26:16):
you were seeing relative to projections last fall about what
economic growth would look like. It was slowing down, but
at the same time you had the labor market that
looked like pretty steady for many months, and it was
kind of puzzling those two two things. How could they
be true simultaneously. And what we learned earlier at the
result of last month's jobs numbers is that those things
(26:40):
two things weren't actually true simultaneous, because the labor market
has in fact been cooling over the course of the
last few months, and there was a revision to the
jobless claimed. I want to be sort of clear about
the substance here, though. Revisions happen all the time, and
the reason they happen all the time is because we're
getting information, like in real time about the labor market,
(27:03):
basically by surveying a bunch of businesses about their hiring
and firing practices. And inherently, when you do that kind
of surveying, it is going to be the case that
some people don't respond within your survey window, and so
you're putting out information, but you know that as you
get more responses, you're going to update because you've learned
(27:24):
more about the economy, and so we always revise these numbers,
these revisions. It was a big number. It said the
you know, two hundred and forty eight thousand jobs fewer
than we thought over the course of a two month period.
But in reality, that's zero point one five percent of
payroll employment. So it's like a relatively small number in
(27:45):
a but it sounds big when you don't scale it
by kind of the size of our economy, which is fast.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
But it also set the table for firing people who
didn't do what he wanted. So Donald Trump desperately wants
to cut interest rates. He thinks that that will choose
the economy. This is a real estate guy's vision of
how to fix the economy. One might even say a
bad real estate guys vision of how to fix the economy.
(28:11):
I want you to explain to us sort of why
the Fed doesn't want to lower interest rates, because I
think Donald Trump thinks it's because they're against him, But
actually there's more to this story.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
There's a lot more to the story. And in fact,
like if you think about what the Federal Reserve is tasked,
what's doing, we are very lucky, just like we're very
lucky to have government statistics that we can rely on
and feel confident in. We're incredibly lucky. And it's another
pillar of our economic security that we have a central
(28:45):
bank that is independent, and that means that the central bank,
when it makes decisions, it makes decisions about just two things.
It looks at what the inflation outlook looks like in
the country, so what's happening to prices, And it looks
at what's happened in the labor market, so are we
adding jobs? Are we not adding jobs? And as it
weighs those two pieces of evidence, it says, okay, well,
(29:08):
should interest rates go up in order to stimulate in
order to cool the economy, or should they go down
in order to stimulate the economy so people borrow more
and invest more and the like. And what's been hard
for the Federal Reserve thus far over the course of
the last many months is that it's getting kind of
signals in both directions. So it's getting the signal from
(29:30):
on the inflation side, the Federal Reserve wasn't even back
to the level of inflation it wants to see in
the economy after the pandemic when the administration took office,
and then what happened is they turned around as a
result of these tariffs and executed the most inflationary policies
that we've seen in our lifetimes. So, like big inflation
(29:52):
pushes in one direction for the Fed, and then in
the other direction, you're starting to see the labor market
slow down, which pushes in exactly the opposite space. And
so I think it's actually a very difficult You could
make arguments, and in fact, we've seen the Federal Reserve
make arguments on both sides of this. Should we wait
and see what's happening with tarif uncertainty or other governors
(30:14):
have said, actually, now is the time to start cutting
interest rates. But importantly, by the way, no one is
saying No one on the Federal Reserve has said anything
like let us do what the President has suggested, which
is decrease the federal funds rate to one percent by
like two percentage points, by big numbers. No one is
saying that. What they're saying is let's do like relatively
(30:36):
small changes to the interest rate in order to kind
of make sure we have this balance right between inflation
on the one side and jobs on the other side.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
It seems like the anxiety here is something called stagflation.
I mean, the irony here is so rich. Right, Nixon
fullies the Fed into doing what he wants, creates stagflation,
can't get out of it. Talk us through what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
You're gonna make me say, I am so scared as
an economist to say the word stactuation. I say, I've
been saying like s word or something as I'm trying
to describe it, because it's such a difficult scenario to
be navigating.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Didn't Nixon do this? Well?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
So Nixon did exactly. And that's a little bit what
I find so frustrating about all of what we're seeing
over the course of the last many months with respect
to federal reserve independence, which is that like, we have
run this play before in the United States with respect
to bullying a central bank to lower interest rates. We
(31:39):
did it in the nixt administration. Arthur Burns said to Nixon,
you know, I've done everything I can to help you
win that everything I can was decrease interest rates ahead
of a presidential election, and the result of that was
that over a two year period you had inflation increase
from three to thirteen percent, and ultimately it took a
(32:00):
massive downturn and a giant recession in the economy to
try to bring back inflation towards expectations and bring back
interest rates towards the level that you would want to see.
And so it's like incredibly counterproductive to be playing around
with's federal reserve independence. It's not just that we've done
it in the US before. I mean, Turkey's done it,
(32:22):
Argentina's done it. You've been in situations where you've seen
central banks start to get politicized and the real risk
and government statistics start to get politicized, and the real
risk that economies run from that. And so I am
troubled by it. And I'm also puzzled by it because,
by the way, if they wanted to see lower interest rates,
which is what the President has been saying, Chair Powell
(32:43):
has been explicit that like, had it not been for
this tariff uncertainty, the Federal Reserve is already a cut
interest rate. So it's like they kind of have the
capacity to do the thing that he wants to see
happen in the economy.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yes, and the way the tariffs have been put into
practice are is insane, right, It's highly emotional, it's highly disorganized.
Were you doing this in a thoughtful way, you would
say raw materials when get tariffed, Like, we have situations
here where there are things that are where you are
tariffing the materials for the manufacturing. You know, he's tariffing
(33:21):
things we don't even make here, that we don't even
have here. And so if you wanted to onshore manufacturing,
this is absolutely not the way to do it. So
talk us through that, I mean.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
And one of the things there that's really important is
it is a bit difficult to understand what the actual
objective of these tariffs are, and so it's hard to
evaluate whether or not they are being successful and effectuating
their goals. The thing that I find really interesting and
(33:51):
kind of frustrating about the tariffs is that we you
and I might disagree about what the right effect of
tariff rate is in the United States, and right now
we're at an effective tariff rate of upwards of eighteen
percent at the beginning of this administration, we were at
two and a half percent, So that's a big significant jump.
(34:13):
That jump hasn't been like a singular change in policy.
What you've seen is a lot of starts and stops,
then a lot of changes affected. Teriff rates have changed
more than sixty times over the course of the first
six months of this administration. And so that type of
uncertainty kind of independent of what the level is and
what the exclusion should be, and does it really make
(34:36):
sense for us to be tariffing our allies like Canada
and Mexico in the name of fetanol that Canada doesn't
really have much to do with in the first place.
Like all of that, we can debate the substance, but
as an economist, you have to ask yourself, like what
is the sort of argument for the uncertainty, because what
we know that it does is it paralyzes businesses. It
(34:58):
makes it impossible to plan, like should you be moving
your manufacturing from China to India because when we know
that India's more of an ally than China is, but
actually now India today is being hit with a fifty
percent tariff, and so that kind of a move wouldn't
make much sense. If you're Apple thinking about where to
manufacture your iPhones, and so there's some that sort of
(35:18):
the uncertainty index is just really high right now in
ways that don't really make much sense to me from
a policy perspective.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Yeah, and that is the fundamental sort of one of
the great tropes of trumpsm is that it doesn't make
any sense. So let's just we got these tariffs. They're
the highest since what the Great Depression?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Oh yeah, in the last century.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, we're told by Trump that the companies are going
to eat the tariffs. Trump has also done a lot
of I actually like this as part of the horseshoe.
Here he's taking a steak in Intel. He's thinking his
music about taking steaks into fense contractors. If a Democrat
did this, Republicans Grover Norquest would run naked through burning man.
(36:09):
What is happening? And how unusual is it for America
to take stakes in private businesses?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, I don't know enough about the deal to
be able to evaluate it yet, and frankly I don't
think we do know enough about the terms. I can
kind of see some argument from a national security perspective,
certainly with respect to domestic chips production, and also, frankly
some argument for American taxpayers should get some of the
(36:39):
benefits of some of these investments that the FISK is making.
On the other hand, the thing that gives you a
bit of pause and gives a bit of pause to
economists who are looking at these things, and I suspect
gives a bit of pause to some of the critics
that you're talking about, Mollie is like, do you really
want the government to be in the business of picking
winners and losers in part because you worry that it
(37:02):
distorts the marketplace? Because does it then mean that if
you're a competitor to Intel, you're less likely to get
favorable terms, or you're less likely to find yourself being
able to compete with a legacy, older business that has
this attachment to the Fisk in this very precise and
pronounced way. And so, in some sense, are we distorting
(37:25):
competitive incentives in the economy by making some of these choices?
And is the government really well equipped to be looking
at the landscape scape and trying to pick out which
companies are likely to be successful in profit and which
ones are less.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Likely to be So yeah, And I mean there's a
really deep kind of crony capitalism vein in this administration.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I very much agree a little bit like you kind
of can't look at any of this stuff that we've
been talking about in isolation, because in aggregate, what it
feels like is that you're moving away from from a
rules based capitalist system and moving towards this you called
it crony capitalism, this like world deals based system of capitalism,
(38:11):
and that that feels a little bit uncomfortable and should
feel a little bit uncomfortable, not just to me and you, frankly,
but to financial markets as they watch and see the
integrity of some of these institutions brought into question, like
the Federal Reserve or our Bureau of Labor Statistics, but
also as they watch your stock with this administration start
(38:35):
to dictate the terms on which you're able to conduct
your businesses.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
So it strikes me that we're heading towards some kind
of impact event. Right. We're on a kind of collision course.
Things are getting more expensive. Trump has tried to fire
Lisa Cook. Lisa Cook is doing what anyone should do
in a situation like this, pushing back. But it doesn't
seem as if this is heading anywhere good. You will
(39:00):
see when this next quarter ends, we'll see if we're
in negative growth, right, I mean, that will be the
next indicator that will say if we're in a recession
or not, or is there something else coming up that
could show us that.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It's an interesting question because you've started to see sort
of signs of instability in the economy.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
So, growth was supposed to be on track last November.
It was projected to be something like two and a
half percent this year. In the first two quarters of
this year, it was closer to one point two percent.
You saw when the President was contemplating earlier at this summer,
I had a letter that said he was firing Chair Powell,
and we were talking a lot about renovations to the
(39:43):
Federal Reserve building. You saw the market take like a
one percent hit kind of instantaneously on that new You
saw around Liberation Day a really sizable market reaction to
the announcement of terror f rates that we are basically,
you know, three quarters of the way back to right now,
and so you've seen like little points of nervousness, and frankly,
(40:08):
you've seen the administration react to some of that nervousness
particularly in the bond market. But you haven't yet had
what you're describing as like an impact the event. And
so I suspect, just based on the work that my
colleagues and I have been doing at the Budget Lab,
that some of the inflationary impacts that we have projected
(40:31):
from these terraffs are starting to hit in the economy
and they're going to continue to hit, in fact more
aggressively in the months ahead. And that's where you're hearing
retailers say two a bunch they had like stockpiled and
brought in a lot of inventory in anticipation of higher
tariff freights so they could keep their shelves stopped with
stuff that they brought in at lower tariff levels. And
(40:53):
that's not going to work forever. And so you're going
start to get to a point where the tariffs are biting,
and at the same time, you have some of these
deep threats to central bank independence, to the integrity of
government data that should make market participants very nervous and
should make them react negatively. And so I think you're
(41:14):
right to have a bunch of nervousness about this moment,
and I only help. My hope is that you've seen
the Supreme Court in a case that had nothing to
do about the Federal Reserve. Try to be specific that
the Federal Reserve is special and a quasi private institution
where it's really important that we have this independence. And
so I hope that the judiciary is going to stand
(41:37):
up against some of this. But again, only time is
going to tell.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
There's a tariff case working its way up to the
Supreme Court. Just say two seconds on that.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah, And that's actually a very good point. A bunch
of the tariffs. The authority that the president is using
to impose these tariffs has to do with very specific
emergency powers that he was given by Congress. It's really
it's hard to argue that it makes sense to impose
these very high tariffs on our allies based on some
sort of emergency associated with national security or anything like that.
(42:09):
And so that case is working its way up to
the Supreme Court, and it's going to be another moment
when you're going to I hope see the court pull
back from some of these very expansive uses of executive power.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. A moment
sick Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3 (42:29):
I jumped fast the Trump administration cut a lot of
funding to shooting prevention programs in Minnesota just weeks before
the latest shooting, which they are now pretending should be
blamed on the fact that the shooter was trans.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So Cam Caskey, who was a victim of the Marjorie
Stone Douglas High shooting, he didn't get shot, but he
grew up, you know, he was in high school. He
was on this show last night, the weekend show that
I was filling in as a host, And one of
the things that I was struck by when I was
listening to him was just the incredible damage that these
(43:07):
shootings do to everyone around them. So you're not just
the kids in the school, but the parents and the
grandparents and the people who live in the town. You know,
we see two victims, but the reality is there are
hundreds of thousands of ancillary victims from these mass shootings.
(43:28):
And I just was listening to him, and I'm thinking
to myself, like, you know, even if you weren't even
in school, even if you were in middle school, even
if you were in kindergarten, the ripples of effect that
these have on everyone are just so incredibly shocking and
traumatizing and I just was listening to him and I
was thinking, just how destructive all that is.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
It's really bad.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
And Sebastian Gorka was on the Sunday shows blaming if
this on trans kids, despite the lack of proportionality of
that being being the case. I do find it really
disturbing that a lot of the recent shooters have all
participated in a particular discord chat. Yeah, you would think
that the FBI could spend time on that instead of
harassing their opponents.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.