September 3, 2025 • 50 mins
Think Like an Economist’s Justin Wolfers examines the latest developments in Trump’s tariff war.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed details his run for the Senate in Michigan.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 billionaire Ray Dallio says the US
is turning into an autocratic state. We have such a
great show for you today, Think like an economist. Justin
(00:20):
Wolfer stops by to talk about the latest in Trump's tarafors.
Then we'll talk to doctor Abdul l said about his
run for the Senate in Michigan. But first, here are
the stories the media is missing.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Savali.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
There was hundreds of workers over billionaires Labor Day rallies,
and you know what, that is music to my ears
because that's what I think the movement should be built on.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Again another case of massive protests not covered by the
mainstream media. We keep seeing this again and again, massive protests,
town halls, filled with angry people, horrible polling for Donald Trump,
and we don't see it in the mainstream media. We
don't see any of those stories reflect in the mainstream media.
(01:03):
Now there's a question whether or not there's some anxiety
about reporting some of this stuff, like maybe it's hard
to track down, but like people standing in the middle
of their towns waving signs that should not be so
hard to cover Labor Day's day about labor or in
(01:24):
and what better place to focus on during that day
than Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has been really catapulted
into the national spotlight because of Trump's use of ice
in the city and now the city again is in
Trump's crosshairs because he wants to federalize it. He denounced
Trump's threat to deploy federal troops to the city as
(01:46):
part of an immigration crepdown. He said, no federal troops
in the city of Chicago. At the workers over Billionaire's
demonstration in Chicago's Westloop, Johnson added, We're going to defend
our democracy. We're going to protect the humanity of every
single person in the city of Chicago. Go Over the weekend,
I interviewed kat Abba Guzala, and she's running for a
seat in Chicago, and she talked about just how aggressive
(02:09):
ice has gotten in their city. As someone who lives
in a city New York City, haven't seen that but
in New York, and so my hope is that he's
not doing it in New York. But I do have
a sense that they're trying to do it in all
of the Blue cities to make us all really scared
and uncomfortable, and also to her people, and also to
(02:32):
deport people who've been in this country for years and
years and years. Look, this is going to be the
beginning of a lot of protests. People are not happy.
And these demonstrations took place in New York, Houston, Washington,
Los Angeles, Cleveland, Ohio, Greensboro. When people are mad, they protest.
We saw this in Trump's first administration. We're going to
see this again.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
So by Trump is really really losing a court this week.
A judge ruled this morning that Trump illegally deployed National
guardens to Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, Posse comma Tatis Act. Look is this was always
the thing. The law, like with so many things Trump
is trying to do, the law says you can't do
this stuff. And here we have a US District Court
Judge Charles Bryer in San Francisco, fifty two page filing.
(03:22):
So not lightly. In short, defendants violated the Posse Commatatis Act.
And by the way, all of the Supreme Court experts
we talked to said the very same thing. Sending troops
on the ground is a violation of an act which
says we don't use troops on our people. This is
the difference between a free country and a military dictatorship.
(03:46):
Now again we get to a moment, as with many
moments in this political moment, where Trump now it's illegal,
they can't do it. That doesn't mean they won't. And
that is where we are right now. Again, in a
world with a Supreme Court that wasn't completely in the tank,
you would say, well, the Supreme Court is not going
(04:08):
to allow this. But because they made Donald Trump mango
god king with the immunity ruling, we really don't know
what's going to happen. But we do know, and I
think it's important for us to remember that there is
the law and this administration pretty much breaks it on
the regular And maybe that's okay for now, but at
some point the bill will come to and the American
(04:30):
people will decide are we a lawless country where we
allow people to break the law or are we not?
And I think ultimately, and I don't know when this happens,
if it's two years or five years, or fifteen years
or twenty years, but at some point, it's a big country.
It's been a democracy for a long time, and at
some point we're going to have to have a reconciliation
(04:52):
here about what it means to follow the law. I
don't know when that happens. So this is more legal
challenges I'm sure the Trump administration, and we'll run it
up to the Supreme Court. And again, at some point
the Supreme Court is going to stop rubber stamping things.
Or maybe they're not, and maybe you know, they just
like the Republicans in Congress, become completely irrelevant.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yeah, that sounds right. So Trump also, many people missed this.
On Friday, right before the holiday weekend, court struck down
his tariffs and boy they are as the kids say,
big Matt.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So the tariffs are allowed to be in place for
forty five more days. But there's a great Peter Navarro quote, America.
It's the end of America. So we have the highest
tariffs of any developed nation. We are alienating China, Russia,
those would be the ones that you kind of want
(05:48):
to alienate, but driving into their arms India and Canada
and Mexico and Europe, and basically we are becoming parias
in the world. And this may not even be legal.
In fact, it probably isn't legal. In fact, the Emergency
Powers Act that Trump is using does not once use
(06:09):
the word tariffs, which is kind of something to think about.
So look this again, like with all of these other
court cases, will likely go to the Supreme Court. I
just want to specify one thing about this, and I
think I've talked about it before, but the other side
of this case, simplify, is the Koch brother I think
(06:30):
we talked this about this on the last episode. Actually
the Koch brother and a lot of really evil Republican donors.
So this is a case where if the Supreme Court
will have to decide whether or not they're going to
go against Leonard Leo. I think Leonard Leo is involved
in this. Are they going to go against their donors
or their god king. You know, it's a very difficult
(06:51):
decision for them, and I personally look forward to them
really struggling with this. But you know, the rich Republican
donors don't want tariffs and rich insane president does. So
you know, it's anybody's guess how this goes. By the way,
I just want to play the tape for a minute.
(07:12):
Say the Supreme Court is like, no, you have no
legal powers for tariffs. They have to come off Okay,
say that happens, which I think is the best case
scenario for all of us. Even if they do that,
even if they're like, okay, the Supreme Court, and then
you have to assume that the Trump administration is going
to be like, oh guy, the Supreme Court is right,
let's not do the tariffs, which again we have never
(07:32):
seen Trump world ever. I mean, they might back down,
but it's hard for me to imagine they back down
on this. But even if those two things happened, which
would be kind of extraordinary, you would still have the
question of lowering the rates of things. And I'm not convinced,
like this is the problem with trade wars. Things get
more and more expensive. I'm not convinced that things get
(07:53):
cheaper when the trade war is over.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I've not heard a single person say how that.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Could happen, And in fact, we've interviewed people who have
said that it's very hard to get prices down after
a trade war. So I do see a real world
in which Trump cooks us up into something real bad,
changes his mind at the last minute because he sees
the wreckage that it's caused, and then is unable to reverse.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It always makes me think of that meme that's like
the I do something stupid, I convince my followers it's good.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I reverse my decision.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
I convince my followers that everything is solved, and then
it just repeats over.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah and over and over.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Probably fine.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, that saysn't sound like decline to me.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
No, In case you're wondering, decline is a choice.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
And a woke construct anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Okay, so, speaking of woke constructs, the Energy Department has
a climate report and you'll be shocked to hear it
has nothing but errors. It is totally just done very lazily,
probably in between jokes about really really stupid things that
are the Republicans discuss.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, so you're going to be shocked to hear that
this crew is bad at things pretty much everything. So
this is not our best and our brightest. This is
our dumbest and our worst. And they are publishing things
like they had a climate report and it is filled
(09:17):
with errors, and you know, look, this is all you know,
these people don't understand science, and they are making a
gamble that climate change won't create that it's some kind
of liberal fallacy, and that's not how it is, and
there are lots and lots of scientists who know the truth.
(09:37):
I think it's worth realizing, like, this is a war
on elites, this is a war on expertise, This is
a war on science, This is a war on education
and all of the kind of things that we hold dearest.
That's why they are against science and against progress and
against all the things you know that we cherish and
(09:58):
believe to be true. This is going to all end
in tears, all right. Justin Wolfers is the host of
The Thing Like an Economist podcast and a professor at
the University of Michigan. Justin Wolfers, Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
And Fast Economics malade.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
So I want you to talk us through tariffs. I
was told that trade wars are good and easy to win.
We now have the highest tariffs of any developed country
right in the world.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
And it's not even close. And so, Molly, your question
actually gets to the foundational mistake at the base of
all of this. When Trump was growing up, other countries
had high tariffs. So when Trump was growing up, he
felt we were being screwed, and in some sense we were.
When other countries divert their trade away from US, that
(10:56):
hurts them, but it also hurts American exporters. Subsequently, happened
was many decades, and during those decades, basically the entire
industrialized world got rid of tariffs. Now, when I say
got rid of tariffs, I should say there's politics and everything.
And so there's an intellectual sense shared by shared never
(11:19):
industrialized country that openness to trade is a good thing.
If you can help me and I can help you,
well you can both be better off. Simple as that.
So we had a general agreement on trade and tariffs,
and then we had a World Trade Organization. We had
Europe become a trading block, we had North America become
(11:39):
a trading block. We had countries individually just decide that
charging Americans more to support dying industries is not a
good idea, and they did that in other countries too,
And so what happened was we basically had universal agreement
that tariffs should be low and close to zero. And
(12:00):
then there was an asterisk, which is what happens is
when you get in the room with someone with another
foreign leader and say, hey, I want to cut my
tariffs that it'll be even better if you do yours too,
They'll say I agree, but I got a couple of
politically difficult industries in my home country. So let's like
eliminate tariffs everywhere we can, but there'll be a small
number of industries like the Canadian dairy industry, the American farmers,
(12:23):
the European mountains of butter where the politics are just
too hard. So let's agree we'll get tariffs down to
as close to zero as we can everywhere. But I'll
give you a bunch of political carve outs so you
can get re elected, and you'll give me a bunch
so I can get re elected. What that means is,
on the eve of the Trump trade war, the average
tariff right for every industrialized nation was between one and
two percent. And there are a few crazy countries that
(12:45):
have poorer countries that are small and run by idiosyncratic leaders.
There's some euphemism there. Autocrats tend to like tariffs, so
there are a few countries that do have tariffs. But
even outside of the industrialized countries, tariffs had their day thereover.
The reason this is central is it the most we
could ever have won out of the trade will if
initially tariffs were two percent and the lowest they can
(13:07):
go as zero percent. The most we could ever win
is very very little, and in fact, getting that very
very little, he's going to be hotted in it's worth
because these the industries where other countries have strong political interests,
it doesn't really matter we fight a trade. When we lose,
American consumers are screwed or we win, are not much changes.
It was asymmetric from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So that I think is a really good point. And
let's talk about asymmetric from the really big from the
very beginning. I would love you to talk about because
I feel like I haven't seen a ton of reporting.
I mean, I've seen some reporting on this, but it
hasn't I feel like it hasn't captured those guys the
way it needs to, probably, which is what is happening
with India and tariffs, because it strikes me that what
(13:52):
happened here is that Trump got mad at India. The
excuse we heard was that they were buying Russian oil.
I did know there was a sort of scam going
where they were buying Russian oil, processing it and then
selling it so that Russia could get around some of
the terraffing, etc. But whatever happened now the net net
(14:13):
is we had pictures of Mody with g and also putin,
which strikes me as probably not the ideal situation.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I mean, one thing is men don't hug in public enough.
And I thought they were showing tremendous leadership, tremendous and
just a whole new masculinity.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And if we mention we want our autocrats soft and fuzzy.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
We want all our men to be comfortable cuddling in public.
What I would like is, if we get a foreign
policy right, I want our cuddler over there, I would love.
I think President Trump doesn't cuddle enough in public either.
He does a whole lot of extraordinarily camp things, right,
but not Hugen dancing to Ymca. I'm just talking about camp.
(15:01):
I'm talking about just a modern, comfortable masculinity.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So our tariffs suppose, here's my question. Our tariff supposed
to drive business to other countries in a way that
cuts us out of the international world order? Is that
how it's supposed.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
To go on? Now, Well, if you were asking me,
if America disengaged from the rest of the world, would
other people go looking for friends elsewhere? It seems blindingly
obvious the answer is yes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Does, doesn't it.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
And so as a matter of foreign policy, maybe our
tariffs on China hurt the Chinese people. But the fact
that we have punitive tariffs, without direction, without predictability, that
not only are they punitive, I think people really really
misunderstand or fail to see the president comedy and he's
(15:53):
a very funny man, actually has very real consequences. Yeah,
my brother lives in Canada. They hate us.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Just talking about my brother, I mean no, no, they
hate us. They hate us, and we have really really
alienated Canada and Mexico, like real these shocking and also
their economy is already suffering. This gets me to this
next question I have for you, which is, we have
these tariffs, right, and we have this situation where the
(16:24):
market seems to not have priced in tariffs because they
think they're getting a rate cut and the rate cut
is enough to boost the market, and so who cares
about tariffs? But it strikes me that all is still
not fine in the American economy, and that the fact
(16:45):
that stocks are going up while all these other indicators
are not and are in fact going in the other direction.
And then we have this and I'd love you to
explain to us what is happening with the bond market too,
because that seems a bit scary and important.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So it's actually, I think, a very complicated story, but
I think you're right to raise it because at one level, frankly,
it is embarrassing for liberals. We say the sky is falling,
this is very bad economic policy, yet people want to
buy more of American stocks. So I just want to
sort of slow down and work our way through it
a little. The first thing is, you know, I'm not
going to go all the stock markets, not the economy
(17:25):
on you. I am, but actually what we should read
from stocks is interesting and subtle. So I'm not going
to be one of these people that says ignore the market.
What I'm going to say is listen, but didn't do
so in a sophisticated way. So the one thing that's
utterly absolutely true, we are on an unbeaten run that
every time Trump leans into trump Ism, imposing more tariffs,
(17:47):
firing the BLS Commission, and putting fed independence at risk.
Every time he leans into trump Ism, stocks fall. It's
literally unbeaten. Since January twentieth, there's not a single day
where it's gone the other way. Every time Trump backs
off from trump Ism, stocks rise when he suspends tariffs,
when he tells the Chinese that we don't need to
(18:07):
cut off all trade, and on and on it goes
when the courts rule Trump's tariffs to be illegal every
single time. So what that tells you is the market's
judgment is the value of American businesses are lower when
the president's instincts are followed. I think the market's worth
following on this. Why is that Because we're talking about
something like tariff's. If there are benefits for the American economy,
(18:29):
they're all downstream of helping American business, and so if
they don't even help American business, there's no way we
get any of the benefits. And that happens before we
even get to the argument to the benefits to American
business exceed the cost to American consumers, and so what
we do it's a very very shortcut argument. Normally in
economics we have to think about all the benefits and
all the costs, and here I can just say, hey, look,
the market seems to think the guys who are meant
to benefit actually have the opposite effect. That's an unbeaten run. Okay,
(18:53):
But how do we then sort out. So that's true.
Yet at the same time stocks have continued to rise.
What's going on here? A little bit of it is,
there's two Americas. There's an AI boom, which is seven
big companies that are worth an enormous share of the
S and P five hundred, and if you look at
the rest of the companies, you're seeing less optimism. That
(19:15):
are you still seeing some The other thing worth noting
is that Trump passed an enormous corporate tax code. Now
that corporate tax cup means any money big American businesses
get make, they get to keep more of it, a
lot more of it. That should have sent stocks to
the moon. It didn't. Actually, the amount it should have
boosted stocks is much larger than the amount of stocks
have risen. Basically, the federal government's just given them a
(19:37):
whole bunch more money back. Of course they're worth more.
We can try and think about in a fairly careful
way how much more, And it turns out their value
hasn't even risen that much.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So talk to us about the bond market. What's happening there.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
I'm going to do one more thing on the stock market,
partly because I'm not sure what's going on in the
bond market. I'm not sure what's on your main money.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Here's because of the difference between the law term and
the short I understand.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Yeah. I want to say one more thing on the
stock market. Okay, stock market is big American companies. So
it's not small companies. It's not cart ups, it's not
you and I, it's not the government sector, it's not
lots of things. As we move to a trumpest form
of statism or crony capitalism or interventionist, whatever it is
you want to call it, the folks who can look
(20:24):
for carveouts, Tim Apple can call the White House and
say I want tariffs to be different. Now, it turns
out Apple was founded in the garage by two guys
in Silicon Valley. Right now, there are two guys in
a garage in Silicon Valley trying to start the next
multi trillion dollar business. Those guys can't call the White House.
So what this is is an enormous preference for existing
(20:46):
large companies over smaller startups. Now the cost of crony
capital So the thing is who gains from crony capitalism,
the cronies, who loses everyone else, particularly entrepreneurs are the cronies.
They're the big ones who are in Trump's rolyodics. He
knows how to call and they'll pony up. It's CBS,
for instance, it's it is Apple, and on and on
(21:07):
it goes. So as we shift towards this form of capitalism,
the value of big companies can rise even as the
value of the rest of the economy falls. The stock
market only reflects the.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Former yields yond yields, right, So.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
What's going on with bond yields? So here's the problem.
When you attack the FED and you say, what I
want to do is put a lunatic in, and I
want the lunatic to always and everywhere move interest rates
to be low. And I want to do that because
I'm a property developer, or because they want to move
to what's called fiscal dominance. That's the word for the day,
fiscal dominance. Fiscal dominance is when monetary policy is set
(21:43):
not in trying to smooth the ups and down to
the economy, but instead to keep interest rates low so
that the government interest payments will be lower. It works,
we pay less, but if you keep interstrates too low
for too long, you get high inflation. So if you want,
if I want.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
To, we already have inflation ticking up.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
We have moderate inflation. It's higher than it should be.
But that's not the scare story yet, right, right, but.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Right, I know where this is going.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Go on. You know how exciting it is to be
Molly Jong Farce economic advisor. I am economists to the stars,
economics teacher to the stars, and sometimes my stupid star
Paul when she's worked through a few financial crises and
she ads written for that well known financial magazine Vanity Fair.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
And Vogue and known for covering.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
You, are the closest I've going to come to. Vogue
is talking to you and doing Can we do this together?
Come on, you can do it all. Go on to.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Okay, talk about the bond market, girl, bond market market.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I'm only going to talk bond market while you keep voguing.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
God damn it.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Okay, all right, it was too distracting for me. Thanks
for stopping mall Okay, So if we go the full
trumpest future, which is basically what id On did in Turkey,
we point lunatics who could be interest rates too low
for too long inflation rises. You'll notice I use the
word if may not happen good news. Problem is, if
I were to borrow money, say take a ten year
(23:17):
loan today, the lender knows there's some chance it will happen.
So therefore, already today, even without Trump having destroyed the FED,
the lender is weighing the possibility that Trump destroys the FED.
If he does, inflation will be really high, in which
case interest rates will be really high, in which case
they're only going to be willing to lend me money
for ten years if they added an extra premium, Which
(23:38):
is the probability Trump destroys things, multiplied by what will
happen to interest rates, And realize that when ERDA one
did this in Turkey, interest rates went up above ninety
percent at some point, or inflation went to eighty six percent.
So a small risk of a catastrophic outcome already right
now will add a lot to the interest rate that
I get charged. So that's long term interest rates. What
(23:59):
Trump has managed to do, he's managed to make people
convinced he's pro what's called it dove, someone who's in
favor of low interest rates, which has led markets to
believe interest rates might be a little lower over the
next year or two. But it's led them to worry
that on average, across all the possible states of nature,
they'll be higher in the future. So he's lowered some instrates,
has raised others. Which ones matter for business, the long ones.
(24:20):
Your mortgage is a long run interest rate. Your business
loan is a long run interest rate. If I'm breaking
ground on the manufactory, it's a long run interestrate. So
Trump's desire it's a lower interest rates has in fact tustrates.
He's actually undone the very thing he was trying to do.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
So I think that's a really a good point, and
I wonder if you could just for a minute, it
strikes me that there are other ways in which Donald
Trump has done that, where he has said he wants
something and caused the opposite to happen.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Okay, should I talk about tariffs?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, I mean tariffs are a great example, right. I
mean it just seems like so the tariffs he wants
to bring back American manufacturing. But the problems we see
is like, for example, it's cheaper with certain materials to
actually make things somewhere else and import them. So yeah,
tuk us through that.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
So there's a huge problem inside the White House. There's
some beliefs that I don't agree with. Fair Enough, we
can disagree on beliefs. There's ways of thinking about the
economy that I disagree with. I could be wrong, and
there's sharing competence. I'm against that under all conditions. So
if I were talking in a normal country at a
(25:32):
normal time about tariffs, I would say, if you put
tariffs that are designed to help the manufacturing sector, you
will help the manufacturing sector. And the question is to
the benefits to manufacturers offset the cost to everyone else.
But the way we've gone about tariffs breaks every rule
in the how to help Manufacturer's handbook, even though that's
what they're trying to do. I'm going to lead with
(25:52):
the fact this is a Dallas FED survey where they
surveyed Texan manufacturers and they said, what if tariff's done
for your business? Three point seven percent of manufacturers, this
is the group that's meant to help, three point seven
percent said it had helped. Something like ninety percent said
it that hurt, and a few other and a few
others you know, had different effects. You know, were unsure
(26:15):
what the effect was. So the way they've done it
actually fails to do what they were hoping to do. Well,
here's I've got the numbers. They had a seventy two
percent of text and manufacturing firms set tariffs that had
a negative impact, seventeen said no impact, seven percent didn't know,
and three point seven percent set it that helped. It
(26:36):
would be if you'd said to me justin, I want
you to be as incompetent as you can. I want
you to design a set of tariffs that will help
a mere three point seven percent of manufacturers, it would
have hurt my head. I would have been, how can
I implement tariffs that only help a tiny sliver because
it's reducing the competition from abroad. It does do that,
it's hard to do. And then I would have remembered
(26:58):
page one of the tariff handbooks, don't put tariffs on inputs.
And so then I would have said, well, I know
what I'll do. If I really want to hurt American manufacturers,
I will put tariffs on steel and aluminium and aluminum
as well. I will put tariffs on chips. I'll start
a trade war. So the input you want to get
from a broader harder to get. I will make it
(27:20):
so Canadians hate us and they don't want to buy
any of the stuff that we produce.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Right, this is like they would be our most, our
easiest trading partner, closest, easiest.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
I will get the rest of the world of likeness.
I will make it so there are a fewer skilled
workers for precision manufacturing by chasing away foreign students. I
will take the great engines of innovation and try to
shop universities, being of course our universities. So it's actually
a striking accomplishment. But I actually think it's something we
(27:53):
should talk more about. Not tariffs, not the bond rate,
but the extraordinary levels of incompetence, tariffs that are on
on Monday and off on Tuesday. This incompetence is above
and beyond any ideological divide. It means they're not even
achieving the right wing goals that they're after.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Thank God, we're out of Prat.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
God, because it means not even the region, not even
no one wins from stupidity.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So thank you. Justin Walfer Hers doctor Abdul l Said
is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in the
state of Michigan and is the former director of the
Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services for Wayne County, Michigan.
Welcome too fast politics, doctor abdulahs.
Speaker 5 (28:44):
Yet, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate
you having here.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
You're a doctor, but you are also running for the
United States Senate in the great state of Michigan. It's
a primary. It's a crowded Democratic primary with three candidates.
And I interviewed you this weekend on the Weekend Show
when I was filling in, and what I was really
(29:07):
struck by was that you have a very clear message
about your lane in the Democratic Party. So would you
talk us through what that message is.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
I don't know that there's a doctor lane in most
Democratic primaries, but I think most Democratic primaries would be
better if there was one. I never grew up thinking
I'd be great to run for office. I actually grew
up with a lot of my mentors telling me I
should and thinking that's crazy.
Speaker 5 (29:30):
Why would I do that.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
I have an eleven letter first name that's got sounds
that come out of parts of people's throats they.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Usually don't know they have. And I really wanted to be.
Speaker 6 (29:37):
A doctor in large part because of the contrast of
my upbringing. I was raised by my father who's an
Egyptian immigrant, and my stepmom, Jackie, who's a daughter of
the American Revolution, from like right here in Michigan, literally
the middle of the state, and I would get sent
off to Egypt often to spend most of my summer
with the wisest, most intelligent person I've ever met, who
was my grandmother, who never got to go to school.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
She was the ninth to fourteen herself.
Speaker 6 (29:58):
She gave birth to eight kids, got to raise six
because two died before their first birthday. She had this
incredible moral sense, and she always always would impress upon
me the fact that I had cousins who are smarter
and cousins who are harder working than cousins who did
all the right things. And the thing that I got
going for me more than any of the other ones
was that I had to go back to America at
the end of the summer. And the crazy thing right
(30:20):
was it would take me fifteen hours to get to
or from Egypt, and I travel though I didn't have
the language for it at the time, about ten years
different from life expectancy, and I didn't have to go
fifteen hours. I could go fifteen minutes from where I
grew up, just outside the city Detroit, into any neighborhood
in the city and travel the same gap. And the
fact that I got all those opportunities that even my grandmother,
(30:41):
who'd never been to America at the time, got to understand,
and then there were kids whose families had been here
far longer than mine who didn't get them is the
reason I went into medicine. And when I realized that
the things that were making my patient sick had more
to do with there. They had to breathe the water,
they had to drink, the jobs that they had or
didn't have, the opportunity to eat healthy food that they
had or didn't have the faster. I realized that I
(31:03):
was not long for the world of clinical practice, and
I went into public health to do something about that,
and rebuilt Detroit's health department to put glasses on kids,
to take on corporate polluters, ran Wayne Counties Health Department,
the largest, most diverse county in the state, to do
things like eliminate medical debt and put a narcan in
one hundred locations. And so I see politics to me
as more of a continuation of an answer to the
question of why people get sick in the first place.
(31:24):
And once you run up against the political challenges that
people face and start asking why do they make decisions
like that, you start to question, well, you know, maybe
I should, I should put myself in the position to
make those same decisions. And I told you, I grew
up telling people I would never run for office. In fact,
I graduated Valtctoria in my class at Michigan and the
main speaker who anybody actually went to listen to was
Bill Clinton, who after our speeches asked me, you should
(31:48):
run for office someday?
Speaker 5 (31:49):
Why not? And I told them about my name. We
Bill chuckled about it.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
But I'm finally at a position now where I've I've
kind of come to realize that if you're not willing
to articulate at the level of our politics, which to
me is a conversation about.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
Who we are and who we want to be, that
ideal of an America.
Speaker 6 (32:03):
Centered around the well being of all of its kids,
then I just don't know that we're going to be
able to take on either Trump or build the kind
of America where Trump can't exist in the future.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
One of the things that we see a lot and
by we I mean me in my second job, which
is yelling at Democratic politicians about all the things they're
doing wrong.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
Which you do so well, Molly. I really appreciate you
doing it.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
That's my hobby, by the way. And all those spokespeople
who think they're working me when I'm like, yes, let's
have a long conversation about what I feel your boss
is doing wrong. All of those people really hate me.
But one of the things that strip by is that
it's very hard to get good people to run for office.
Speaker 5 (32:44):
This is a terrible way to live your life.
Speaker 6 (32:45):
Like I to be honest with you, like, I've have
a two year old and a seven year old, and
I don't get to see them most evenings. And you know,
sometimes I think about, like, all right, if I win,
I'm going to be in DC four days a week,
and when I'm in Michigan, I'm going to be all
over the state being the senator and making sure that
I'm listening to the folks I serve. And it doesn't
leave much room for the things that, like, you know,
(33:06):
make you a person. And I think there's a lot
of folks who do this because at some point they
really like the idea of being like listened to because
you have a position of power. I think it would
be better off if more of our politics was about
the question of what do you want to do with
your power?
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Rather than do you want to be in power?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, I often tried to think of what politician I
feel the most betrayed by. Is it a Kirsten Cinema.
Is it a Joe Manchin, is it a you know?
Is it someone who knew the right thing but couldn't
get it done. But it strikes me that in the
moment we're in where public health has been so politicized,
(33:46):
the really the only solution is to have doctor senators.
And speaking of which, there is a Republican doctor senator
who was the designing book for R FK. Junior. And
I'd love you to talk us through a little little
bit about that cowardice and also sort of what you
think watching it and what you're feelings are.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Yeah, I got to meet Bill Classidy.
Speaker 6 (34:08):
Actually I've testified before the Senate Budget Committee and Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions or HELP Committee before, and he was
the ranking member on the HELP Committee when I testified
on medical debt, and it was fascinating to me. We
were having this conversation about the possibility of abolishing medical debt,
which of course nobody comes by because they were making
bad decisions. You know, you don't get medical debt because
(34:29):
you've got a Brazilian butt lift.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
You get it because you got cancer.
Speaker 6 (34:32):
He kept trying to make it about the three P
forty B program, which is this obscure program that reimburses
for pharmaceuticals and at times gets misused by large hospitals.
But you know, really is is a key lifeline for
getting pharmaceuticals to people who need them. I remember watching
him squirm around this question of the RFK appointment because
as much as I disagree with his ideals, he and
(34:53):
I received very different training.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
I'll be in different eras.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
But when you go through medical training, there's a very
rigorous process by which you are taught to ask and
apply an analytical lens to every question you ask. And
it's not just an analytic lens from the position of
your brain, like does this make sense, it's also like
an analytic place from the position of your caring for
the person in front of you. And I could see
he knew he was running in a bus saw And
(35:16):
then I also just watched that like flicker of his
political future in his eyes, and it was actually quite
illuminating to me, because I'm like, what's it worth? Like,
you know, you've already lived the whole career as a doc.
You got elected to the US Senate by the pardnerance
of your neighbors in the state of Louisiana, And what's
so good about the job that you can't just do
(35:37):
or say the thing that is so obviously wrong to you?
And I get that Donald Trump holds that entire party
enthrall to him in the most brutal kind of way,
But part of me says, like, if you're going to
go out on something, maybe as the doctor who got
elected to the US Senate, you're going to go out
on the idea that we shouldn't appoint a guy who
has no business in any legitimate conversation about the public's
(35:57):
health overseeing all of the public health infrastructure of this country.
And at the same time, there was a question for me,
like I was asking myself, I'm like, how do you
when you put yourself in a position like this, how
do you protect yourself from that? Like what is the
architecture of your morals or even your mind that keeps
you from putting the obvious wrong ahead of the obvious right.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
Just to save your political skin.
Speaker 6 (36:21):
I just think that maybe part of it is and
maybe comes down to this. Bernie told me something when
I ran for office the first time in twenty eighteen.
He's like, you know, in this business, you're either really
good at lying or withholding the truth, or you're really
good at telling the truth. And he's like, you don't
strike me as a good liar. I was like, no,
I couldn't do to save my life. So part of
me says that the thing that you can do best
in this job is to be a really good teller
(36:41):
of truth. I think a little bit about my grandmother
and about her leadership and my family, and about her
recognition of like the odd moral circumstances in which I
was growing up, or like I'm the one of my
cousins who gets to have this incredible life and the
others who are smarter, more capable than me, you know,
drive cabs or work working class jobs in Egypt, and
(37:02):
I hope that I can keep that. But like, there
is something corrupting about power. We know it.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
I mean, to your point, I'm trying to get to
really like Plummet. I don't know how we like get.
Speaker 6 (37:10):
More folks to see the like moral core of the thing,
or to be willing to be really good arbiters of truth,
because I think if we were really good arbiters of truth,
I think the Democratic Party would be a very very
different place. I think our politics would be in a
different place. It's that we have nobody who's willing to
courageously or very few who are willing to courageously tell
the truth who get to positions of power to be
able to tell it in a real way.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
First of all, I want you to talk about, like
what the headwinds are you have this primary. You have
two opponents, both women, both they occupy sort of different
lanes of the Democratic Party. If you win this primary,
you will go against the Republican. It's a purple state,
but there is definitely you have this sort of very
(37:50):
very scary like Michigan militia. And then it's a state
with like a lot of different kinds of people, a
lot of different kinds of voters, and a lot of
different kinds interests. First of all, I want to know
how you win in Michigan and then I want to
know sort of what you envision is a senator, what that.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Would look like.
Speaker 6 (38:08):
Yeah, the first thing I'll say is this, I think
we have an outdated political lens through which we try
to analyze our politics, which tends to be this right
left to divide. And I think in accordance with that lens,
you would say, well, Abdul is running further to the
quote unquote left, and you would say that other candidates
are running either further to the right or somewhere between
the two of us. And I think the proper lens
(38:31):
for our politics today that helps explain why a state
like Michigan would both support a Bernie Sanders in a
primary and then vote for Donald Trump in a general
election is more the separation between people who feel locked
out of our politics or institutions of power and the
people locking them out. And I think if you understand
Michigan that way, I think this race and my entry
into it makes a lot more sense. I'm somebody who,
(38:54):
by virtue of just happenstance, got to be in a
lot of the rooms that most people who look like
me get locked out of, and in so many ways
I've sort of looked at what's happening in those rooms
and felt just this deep guttural disgust to the way
that people are talked about and parsed and thought through.
And I have made my career about trying to unlock
a lot of those rooms.
Speaker 5 (39:15):
So when I travel my state, and.
Speaker 6 (39:16):
I've been to what fifty some cities, I've probably done
nearly one hundred public events.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
Because when your name's Abdul, you take nothing for granted.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
No matter where I go, people tell me the same stuff,
like you close your eyes and you could be in
a town hall in Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula, or
a church in Redford, and people are literally using the
same exact words, just that they don't know that they're
using the same words. And So I think that a
political movement built around unlocking our system and being one
hundred percent honest, clear and direct about the ways the
(39:44):
methods of the locking out that happened, the ways that
corporations can buy and sell politicians, the ways in which
it's corrupted Republicans wholeheartedly, but also unfortunately too many Democrats,
The ways that I've rejected that system. I've never taken
a dime of corporate money, both when I ran in
twenty eighteen, and when I'm running now, and I see
that I'm blocking as being a fundamental core value of
what I'm trying to do, I think I'm going to
win a lot of voters who otherwise.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
Folks would code as quote unquote right wing.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
Now, look, are there folks who are going to run
it who are going to vote against me because my
name is Abdul. Yes, but let's be clear, they're not
voting for any Democrat, right, So if like that's your assessment,
I think you're not really paying attention. But then the
other part of it is this think about who Democrats
lost in twenty twenty four. They lost mainly Arabs and
Muslims over the disastrous handling of Gaza, and they lost
(40:29):
young men over the notion that young men don't feel
like they have a place in the party. I happen
to be a younger I can't credibly call myself young anymore,
but a younger Arab Muslim man, and I think that
that allows for a conversation that Democrats too often have
not had. You couple that with the honesty and the
(40:49):
integrity of my message and the fact that I've been
saying and doing the same things now for a decade
in Michigan politics. And yes, my name might be Abdul,
but like I'm the Abdul who wants to make sure
you have healthcare, and the due who wants to make
sure you can keep your job and form a union
if they're trying to take it away from you. And
I'm the Abdul who's fought against the big corporations who
are polluting your kids air, and the Abdul who put
a pair of glasses on your kids face, and the
(41:10):
Abdul who forgave your medical debt. Like I think that
there's an opportunity here to win both in the primary
and the general. And so you know, maybe as a
child of immigrant, like as a hazard of that, like
we do math, but like the math maths. And my
job is to have the conversations that other Democrats are
not willing to have, because too often they're more interested
in the conversations they're having behind closed doors with the
(41:32):
corporation that's going to write them a pac check, conversations
that I've never had and will never have.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
We would love you to talk about the uncommitted movement
and just sort of what you tried to do there,
and there clearly was and I think a lot of
us worried about this failure on the part of elected
Democrats running for office to address the situation. And I
wonder if you could talk about that.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Yeah, people see the difference between principles and political position,
and I think the difference is whether or not your
principles apply in all places in all times, or if
they just apply in some places and sometimes, which makes
them just political positions. And I've tried to be principled
about the question of where our tax dollars go. And
I think a lot of us watched the just complete
(42:18):
dumpster fire of the Biden administration's mishandling of Gaza, and
I think it said a lot about his or his
administration's capacity to do the job. And I think the
question was, how do we make sure that folks understand
the risk of this ahead of the general election? And
so when the Uncommitted movement started to organize, I endorsed
(42:39):
it because I think we saw that Joe Biden was
not fit for the job in his handling of Gaza.
I think the whole world saw that after his first
disastrous debate performance and ultimately who is no longer the nominee.
And for me, the minute that Kamala Harris was announced
as the nominee for the party, I endorsed her. I
was the first Arab and or Muslim leader in Michigan
(43:00):
to do so. And the reason I did it and
it was not because I agreed with the administration's handling
of Gaza, but it was because whether you saw this
from the eyes of a child in the city of
Detroit whom I served, or the eyes of a child
in Gaza, there is no world in which Kamala Harris
would not have been better every single day than Donald Trump.
And that to me is again a matter of principle, right,
And so you know, I endorsed her. But here's the
(43:22):
hard part. One of the aspects of that was I
would have thought that that would give me some space
to have a conversation with the campaign and say, there
really needs to be some distance on this issue, because
there are a lot of voters for whom this is
a non starter and we're seeing the Natan Yahoo administration
disregard American public perspective or American political values, and you
(43:44):
need to call that out. And it didn't happen. And
at the same time, I'm on the phone with Arab
and Muslim leaders being like, y'ah, this is insane. Donald
Trump tried to like stop people who look like you
from coming to this country. This is ridiculous, and he
is going to come after our community again.
Speaker 5 (43:56):
Okay, this is crazy, crazy, And unfortunately it was.
Speaker 6 (44:00):
You know, you can imagine the frustration of months and
months on the phone with these different groups of people
and nobody seems to be listening, and you're like caught
in the middle, trying to be the arbiter of like
just basic logic and conventional wisdom and be like y'all,
like can we all recognize what's about to happen here?
And in some respects I think, you know, there are
frustrations obviously with the decisions that Arabin Muslim voters made.
Speaker 5 (44:21):
I have a lot of those same frustrations.
Speaker 6 (44:23):
And at the same time, we were talking about the
vice president of the United States, right, Like we're talking
about very very powerful people who who made political decisions,
and these are political decisions that put them on the
wrong side of the empathy anybody should have for dead, dying,
maimed children or orphan children and I just it was
(44:44):
just a dumpster fire waiting to happen, and it was
really truly one of the most frustrating four months of
my life. And so I supported Uncommitted because my principles
tell me that we owe a responsibility to our size
and our power not to spend our tax dollars writing
blank checks to foreign militaries who are dropping bombs on
other people's children when we have starving children here at home.
And I endorsed Kamala Harris because I knew that Donald
(45:07):
Trump would be worse when it came to those same principles.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah. No, as someone who was on the Jewish side
of that conversation, the same exact thing. I mean, fancy
Jews saying, well, he's better on Israel and me saying
a blank check to Israel to kill Palestinian children is
good for no One' sound good for Jews, it's not
(45:32):
good for Israel, It's not good for anyone. And it's
the same terrible tragedy and now it's just getting one
hundred times worse.
Speaker 6 (45:40):
So much of this conversation, especially when it comes to
Michigan in Dearborn, boils down to a certain like tribalism
about this thing.
Speaker 5 (45:47):
My position on.
Speaker 6 (45:48):
Blank checks to foreign militaries applies to Egypt, where my
folks immigrated from. It applies to Jordan, applies to Pakistan,
applies to Saudi Arabia. I just don't think that we
pay our tax dollars so that somebody can send blank
checks to another country's million terry. I think we pay
them to invest in our own kids. Similarly, right, it
has been really frustrating to watch anybody, right, whether with
good intention or bad intention, equate the actions of a
(46:11):
foreign government with the will or the beliefs of Jewish
people or the Jewish faith. And I find any attempt
to do that as being essentially anti Semitic. Similarly right, Like,
it'd be a crazy thing off somebody who was like, well,
the Egyptian government did this.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
So clearly you believe, like no, like what f is that?
Speaker 4 (46:27):
Right?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Like?
Speaker 6 (46:28):
And so when we do it to anybody, it's wrong.
Similarly right, there are basic principles that all of us
have to bring to this. I condemned Hamas from day one,
because anybody who puts children in harm's way is wrong.
No context needed, right, And so what I've always tried
to ask is take the same principle and apply them everywhere,
independent of your own background, independent of who the actor
involved is, apply the same principles everywhere. And I think
(46:51):
if we did a lot more of that, and we
had the courage to say what our principles were and
apply them evenly, I think that this would be a
far less challenging situation. And in the end, what the
issue is is you've got a special interest regime that
allows maga billionaires to spend a lot of money to
try and tell people what they can and can't say.
And like that's the same issue as we have with
(47:12):
pharmaceutical money that comes in and tries to truck you
if you talk about Medicare for All or health insurance
CEOs or utilities who come in when you try to
regulate them. And we've got to sort of name the
process and then also name our principles. And the contrast
between those things, I think is what can actually get
us back to a party that maybe can win elections again.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
You think the Democratic Party needs new leadership.
Speaker 6 (47:34):
Well, I think the Democratic Party needs to remember what
its base is about. Like here's the problem. There is
a fundamental wedge between Democratic Party voters or voters generally,
and Democratic Party donors. We need leadership that is going
to pay attention to the voters instead of the donors.
And you see a playout and it's like, we still
haven't learned the lesson. You look at this Gaza resolution
(47:55):
at the DNC meeting, you're like, y'all, your base every
poll that you have ever seen in the last month
or two has shown you that your base disagrees with
you on this. And yet and yet you cannot as
a party have the courage to proclaim that you agree
with where the base has moved, which, by the way,
is a statement of principle about what is happening with
our money, and you still can't say it.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
And part of me is is like, what are you
worried about?
Speaker 6 (48:17):
And the hard part to me is this, It's like,
there is a certain political economy and incentive set that
when you have the luxury suite on the Titanic, you're
more interested in keeping the luxury suite on the Titanic
than you are and making sure that the Titanic doesn't sink.
And unfortunately, that's kind of how our party feels right now.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
It was my privilege. I appreciate you having me a
moment ou.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Jesse Canon.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
So Maali, we previously discussed one of the most stupid
performative moronics I've come across in a minute, which is
that Oklahoma is going to test teachers from California and
New York to make sure that they're America first, and
the test is written by Brager, You who now seemed
to be the outsource for all things performatively stupid. Yeah,
what did it shocked you to hear that these questions
(49:05):
are some of the most ridiculously stupid misinformation I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Who is coming from New York and California to go
teach at Oklahoma?
Speaker 5 (49:13):
Like?
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Who is doing that? Who's like I need to go
to a state where they pay teachers less, where they
have less state taxes to pay for things. I want
to go work there because I mean Oklahoma. You guys
couldn't make yourselves any less appealing if you.
Speaker 3 (49:28):
Tried, agreed the thing, being though, you'd also have to go.
I want to go here because I want to teach
kids absolutely not true facts.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Nobody's doing this. I mean this is like this crew
is so delusional about being a teacher. It's like their
war on federal employees. They think federal employees are making
billions of dollars and they're doing it because they want
to help people. Like it's the idea that somehow wanting
to help people is not in the calculate at all.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
I almost wish they would go back to the War
on Christmas because that one at least had no victims.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Yeah, well it did. It had victims of me. I
was a victim of the War on Christmas.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
I mean, I'm a victim of Christmas music every year
and it makes me sad.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Happy Holidays, bitch. 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
(50:37):
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 billionaire Ray Dallio says the US
is turning into an autocratic state. We have such a
great show for you today, Think like an economist. Justin
(00:20):
Wolfer stops by to talk about the latest in Trump's tarafors.
Then we'll talk to doctor Abdul l said about his
run for the Senate in Michigan. But first, here are
the stories the media is missing.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Savali.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
There was hundreds of workers over billionaires Labor Day rallies,
and you know what, that is music to my ears
because that's what I think the movement should be built on.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Again another case of massive protests not covered by the
mainstream media. We keep seeing this again and again, massive protests,
town halls, filled with angry people, horrible polling for Donald Trump,
and we don't see it in the mainstream media. We
don't see any of those stories reflect in the mainstream media.
(01:03):
Now there's a question whether or not there's some anxiety
about reporting some of this stuff, like maybe it's hard
to track down, but like people standing in the middle
of their towns waving signs that should not be so
hard to cover Labor Day's day about labor or in
(01:24):
and what better place to focus on during that day
than Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has been really catapulted
into the national spotlight because of Trump's use of ice
in the city and now the city again is in
Trump's crosshairs because he wants to federalize it. He denounced
Trump's threat to deploy federal troops to the city as
(01:46):
part of an immigration crepdown. He said, no federal troops
in the city of Chicago. At the workers over Billionaire's
demonstration in Chicago's Westloop, Johnson added, We're going to defend
our democracy. We're going to protect the humanity of every
single person in the city of Chicago. Go Over the weekend,
I interviewed kat Abba Guzala, and she's running for a
seat in Chicago, and she talked about just how aggressive
(02:09):
ice has gotten in their city. As someone who lives
in a city New York City, haven't seen that but
in New York, and so my hope is that he's
not doing it in New York. But I do have
a sense that they're trying to do it in all
of the Blue cities to make us all really scared
and uncomfortable, and also to her people, and also to
(02:32):
deport people who've been in this country for years and
years and years. Look, this is going to be the
beginning of a lot of protests. People are not happy.
And these demonstrations took place in New York, Houston, Washington,
Los Angeles, Cleveland, Ohio, Greensboro. When people are mad, they protest.
We saw this in Trump's first administration. We're going to
see this again.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
So by Trump is really really losing a court this week.
A judge ruled this morning that Trump illegally deployed National
guardens to Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, Posse comma Tatis Act. Look is this was always
the thing. The law, like with so many things Trump
is trying to do, the law says you can't do
this stuff. And here we have a US District Court
Judge Charles Bryer in San Francisco, fifty two page filing.
(03:22):
So not lightly. In short, defendants violated the Posse Commatatis Act.
And by the way, all of the Supreme Court experts
we talked to said the very same thing. Sending troops
on the ground is a violation of an act which
says we don't use troops on our people. This is
the difference between a free country and a military dictatorship.
(03:46):
Now again we get to a moment, as with many
moments in this political moment, where Trump now it's illegal,
they can't do it. That doesn't mean they won't. And
that is where we are right now. Again, in a
world with a Supreme Court that wasn't completely in the tank,
you would say, well, the Supreme Court is not going
(04:08):
to allow this. But because they made Donald Trump mango
god king with the immunity ruling, we really don't know
what's going to happen. But we do know, and I
think it's important for us to remember that there is
the law and this administration pretty much breaks it on
the regular And maybe that's okay for now, but at
some point the bill will come to and the American
(04:30):
people will decide are we a lawless country where we
allow people to break the law or are we not?
And I think ultimately, and I don't know when this happens,
if it's two years or five years, or fifteen years
or twenty years, but at some point, it's a big country.
It's been a democracy for a long time, and at
some point we're going to have to have a reconciliation
(04:52):
here about what it means to follow the law. I
don't know when that happens. So this is more legal
challenges I'm sure the Trump administration, and we'll run it
up to the Supreme Court. And again, at some point
the Supreme Court is going to stop rubber stamping things.
Or maybe they're not, and maybe you know, they just
like the Republicans in Congress, become completely irrelevant.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yeah, that sounds right. So Trump also, many people missed this.
On Friday, right before the holiday weekend, court struck down
his tariffs and boy they are as the kids say,
big Matt.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So the tariffs are allowed to be in place for
forty five more days. But there's a great Peter Navarro quote, America.
It's the end of America. So we have the highest
tariffs of any developed nation. We are alienating China, Russia,
those would be the ones that you kind of want
(05:48):
to alienate, but driving into their arms India and Canada
and Mexico and Europe, and basically we are becoming parias
in the world. And this may not even be legal.
In fact, it probably isn't legal. In fact, the Emergency
Powers Act that Trump is using does not once use
(06:09):
the word tariffs, which is kind of something to think about.
So look this again, like with all of these other
court cases, will likely go to the Supreme Court. I
just want to specify one thing about this, and I
think I've talked about it before, but the other side
of this case, simplify, is the Koch brother I think
(06:30):
we talked this about this on the last episode. Actually
the Koch brother and a lot of really evil Republican donors.
So this is a case where if the Supreme Court
will have to decide whether or not they're going to
go against Leonard Leo. I think Leonard Leo is involved
in this. Are they going to go against their donors
or their god king. You know, it's a very difficult
(06:51):
decision for them, and I personally look forward to them
really struggling with this. But you know, the rich Republican
donors don't want tariffs and rich insane president does. So
you know, it's anybody's guess how this goes. By the way,
I just want to play the tape for a minute.
(07:12):
Say the Supreme Court is like, no, you have no
legal powers for tariffs. They have to come off Okay,
say that happens, which I think is the best case
scenario for all of us. Even if they do that,
even if they're like, okay, the Supreme Court, and then
you have to assume that the Trump administration is going
to be like, oh guy, the Supreme Court is right,
let's not do the tariffs, which again we have never
(07:32):
seen Trump world ever. I mean, they might back down,
but it's hard for me to imagine they back down
on this. But even if those two things happened, which
would be kind of extraordinary, you would still have the
question of lowering the rates of things. And I'm not convinced,
like this is the problem with trade wars. Things get
more and more expensive. I'm not convinced that things get
(07:53):
cheaper when the trade war is over.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I've not heard a single person say how that.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Could happen, And in fact, we've interviewed people who have
said that it's very hard to get prices down after
a trade war. So I do see a real world
in which Trump cooks us up into something real bad,
changes his mind at the last minute because he sees
the wreckage that it's caused, and then is unable to reverse.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It always makes me think of that meme that's like
the I do something stupid, I convince my followers it's good.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I reverse my decision.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
I convince my followers that everything is solved, and then
it just repeats over.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah and over and over.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Probably fine.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, that saysn't sound like decline to me.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
No, In case you're wondering, decline is a choice.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
And a woke construct anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Okay, so, speaking of woke constructs, the Energy Department has
a climate report and you'll be shocked to hear it
has nothing but errors. It is totally just done very lazily,
probably in between jokes about really really stupid things that
are the Republicans discuss.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, so you're going to be shocked to hear that
this crew is bad at things pretty much everything. So
this is not our best and our brightest. This is
our dumbest and our worst. And they are publishing things
like they had a climate report and it is filled
(09:17):
with errors, and you know, look, this is all you know,
these people don't understand science, and they are making a
gamble that climate change won't create that it's some kind
of liberal fallacy, and that's not how it is, and
there are lots and lots of scientists who know the truth.
(09:37):
I think it's worth realizing, like, this is a war
on elites, this is a war on expertise, This is
a war on science, This is a war on education
and all of the kind of things that we hold dearest.
That's why they are against science and against progress and
against all the things you know that we cherish and
(09:58):
believe to be true. This is going to all end
in tears, all right. Justin Wolfers is the host of
The Thing Like an Economist podcast and a professor at
the University of Michigan. Justin Wolfers, Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
And Fast Economics malade.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
So I want you to talk us through tariffs. I
was told that trade wars are good and easy to win.
We now have the highest tariffs of any developed country
right in the world.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
And it's not even close. And so, Molly, your question
actually gets to the foundational mistake at the base of
all of this. When Trump was growing up, other countries
had high tariffs. So when Trump was growing up, he
felt we were being screwed, and in some sense we were.
When other countries divert their trade away from US, that
(10:56):
hurts them, but it also hurts American exporters. Subsequently, happened
was many decades, and during those decades, basically the entire
industrialized world got rid of tariffs. Now, when I say
got rid of tariffs, I should say there's politics and everything.
And so there's an intellectual sense shared by shared never
(11:19):
industrialized country that openness to trade is a good thing.
If you can help me and I can help you,
well you can both be better off. Simple as that.
So we had a general agreement on trade and tariffs,
and then we had a World Trade Organization. We had
Europe become a trading block, we had North America become
(11:39):
a trading block. We had countries individually just decide that
charging Americans more to support dying industries is not a
good idea, and they did that in other countries too,
And so what happened was we basically had universal agreement
that tariffs should be low and close to zero. And
(12:00):
then there was an asterisk, which is what happens is
when you get in the room with someone with another
foreign leader and say, hey, I want to cut my
tariffs that it'll be even better if you do yours too,
They'll say I agree, but I got a couple of
politically difficult industries in my home country. So let's like
eliminate tariffs everywhere we can, but there'll be a small
number of industries like the Canadian dairy industry, the American farmers,
(12:23):
the European mountains of butter where the politics are just
too hard. So let's agree we'll get tariffs down to
as close to zero as we can everywhere. But I'll
give you a bunch of political carve outs so you
can get re elected, and you'll give me a bunch
so I can get re elected. What that means is,
on the eve of the Trump trade war, the average
tariff right for every industrialized nation was between one and
two percent. And there are a few crazy countries that
(12:45):
have poorer countries that are small and run by idiosyncratic leaders.
There's some euphemism there. Autocrats tend to like tariffs, so
there are a few countries that do have tariffs. But
even outside of the industrialized countries, tariffs had their day thereover.
The reason this is central is it the most we
could ever have won out of the trade will if
initially tariffs were two percent and the lowest they can
(13:07):
go as zero percent. The most we could ever win
is very very little, and in fact, getting that very
very little, he's going to be hotted in it's worth
because these the industries where other countries have strong political interests,
it doesn't really matter we fight a trade. When we lose,
American consumers are screwed or we win, are not much changes.
It was asymmetric from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So that I think is a really good point. And
let's talk about asymmetric from the really big from the
very beginning. I would love you to talk about because
I feel like I haven't seen a ton of reporting.
I mean, I've seen some reporting on this, but it
hasn't I feel like it hasn't captured those guys the
way it needs to, probably, which is what is happening
with India and tariffs, because it strikes me that what
(13:52):
happened here is that Trump got mad at India. The
excuse we heard was that they were buying Russian oil.
I did know there was a sort of scam going
where they were buying Russian oil, processing it and then
selling it so that Russia could get around some of
the terraffing, etc. But whatever happened now the net net
(14:13):
is we had pictures of Mody with g and also putin,
which strikes me as probably not the ideal situation.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
I mean, one thing is men don't hug in public enough.
And I thought they were showing tremendous leadership, tremendous and
just a whole new masculinity.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And if we mention we want our autocrats soft and fuzzy.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
We want all our men to be comfortable cuddling in public.
What I would like is, if we get a foreign
policy right, I want our cuddler over there, I would love.
I think President Trump doesn't cuddle enough in public either.
He does a whole lot of extraordinarily camp things, right,
but not Hugen dancing to Ymca. I'm just talking about camp.
(15:01):
I'm talking about just a modern, comfortable masculinity.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So our tariffs suppose, here's my question. Our tariff supposed
to drive business to other countries in a way that
cuts us out of the international world order? Is that
how it's supposed.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
To go on? Now, Well, if you were asking me,
if America disengaged from the rest of the world, would
other people go looking for friends elsewhere? It seems blindingly
obvious the answer is yes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Does, doesn't it.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
And so as a matter of foreign policy, maybe our
tariffs on China hurt the Chinese people. But the fact
that we have punitive tariffs, without direction, without predictability, that
not only are they punitive, I think people really really
misunderstand or fail to see the president comedy and he's
(15:53):
a very funny man, actually has very real consequences. Yeah,
my brother lives in Canada. They hate us.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Just talking about my brother, I mean no, no, they
hate us. They hate us, and we have really really
alienated Canada and Mexico, like real these shocking and also
their economy is already suffering. This gets me to this
next question I have for you, which is, we have
these tariffs, right, and we have this situation where the
(16:24):
market seems to not have priced in tariffs because they
think they're getting a rate cut and the rate cut
is enough to boost the market, and so who cares
about tariffs? But it strikes me that all is still
not fine in the American economy, and that the fact
(16:45):
that stocks are going up while all these other indicators
are not and are in fact going in the other direction.
And then we have this and I'd love you to
explain to us what is happening with the bond market too,
because that seems a bit scary and important.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So it's actually, I think, a very complicated story, but
I think you're right to raise it because at one level, frankly,
it is embarrassing for liberals. We say the sky is falling,
this is very bad economic policy, yet people want to
buy more of American stocks. So I just want to
sort of slow down and work our way through it
a little. The first thing is, you know, I'm not
going to go all the stock markets, not the economy
(17:25):
on you. I am, but actually what we should read
from stocks is interesting and subtle. So I'm not going
to be one of these people that says ignore the market.
What I'm going to say is listen, but didn't do
so in a sophisticated way. So the one thing that's
utterly absolutely true, we are on an unbeaten run that
every time Trump leans into trump Ism, imposing more tariffs,
(17:47):
firing the BLS Commission, and putting fed independence at risk.
Every time he leans into trump Ism, stocks fall. It's
literally unbeaten. Since January twentieth, there's not a single day
where it's gone the other way. Every time Trump backs
off from trump Ism, stocks rise when he suspends tariffs,
when he tells the Chinese that we don't need to
(18:07):
cut off all trade, and on and on it goes
when the courts rule Trump's tariffs to be illegal every
single time. So what that tells you is the market's
judgment is the value of American businesses are lower when
the president's instincts are followed. I think the market's worth
following on this. Why is that Because we're talking about
something like tariff's. If there are benefits for the American economy,
(18:29):
they're all downstream of helping American business, and so if
they don't even help American business, there's no way we
get any of the benefits. And that happens before we
even get to the argument to the benefits to American
business exceed the cost to American consumers, and so what
we do it's a very very shortcut argument. Normally in
economics we have to think about all the benefits and
all the costs, and here I can just say, hey, look,
the market seems to think the guys who are meant
to benefit actually have the opposite effect. That's an unbeaten run. Okay,
(18:53):
But how do we then sort out. So that's true.
Yet at the same time stocks have continued to rise.
What's going on here? A little bit of it is,
there's two Americas. There's an AI boom, which is seven
big companies that are worth an enormous share of the
S and P five hundred, and if you look at
the rest of the companies, you're seeing less optimism. That
(19:15):
are you still seeing some The other thing worth noting
is that Trump passed an enormous corporate tax code. Now
that corporate tax cup means any money big American businesses
get make, they get to keep more of it, a
lot more of it. That should have sent stocks to
the moon. It didn't. Actually, the amount it should have
boosted stocks is much larger than the amount of stocks
have risen. Basically, the federal government's just given them a
(19:37):
whole bunch more money back. Of course they're worth more.
We can try and think about in a fairly careful
way how much more, And it turns out their value
hasn't even risen that much.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So talk to us about the bond market. What's happening there.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
I'm going to do one more thing on the stock market,
partly because I'm not sure what's going on in the
bond market. I'm not sure what's on your main money.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Here's because of the difference between the law term and
the short I understand.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Yeah. I want to say one more thing on the
stock market. Okay, stock market is big American companies. So
it's not small companies. It's not cart ups, it's not
you and I, it's not the government sector, it's not
lots of things. As we move to a trumpest form
of statism or crony capitalism or interventionist, whatever it is
you want to call it, the folks who can look
(20:24):
for carveouts, Tim Apple can call the White House and
say I want tariffs to be different. Now, it turns
out Apple was founded in the garage by two guys
in Silicon Valley. Right now, there are two guys in
a garage in Silicon Valley trying to start the next
multi trillion dollar business. Those guys can't call the White House.
So what this is is an enormous preference for existing
(20:46):
large companies over smaller startups. Now the cost of crony
capital So the thing is who gains from crony capitalism,
the cronies, who loses everyone else, particularly entrepreneurs are the cronies.
They're the big ones who are in Trump's rolyodics. He
knows how to call and they'll pony up. It's CBS,
for instance, it's it is Apple, and on and on
(21:07):
it goes. So as we shift towards this form of capitalism,
the value of big companies can rise even as the
value of the rest of the economy falls. The stock
market only reflects the.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Former yields yond yields, right, So.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
What's going on with bond yields? So here's the problem.
When you attack the FED and you say, what I
want to do is put a lunatic in, and I
want the lunatic to always and everywhere move interest rates
to be low. And I want to do that because
I'm a property developer, or because they want to move
to what's called fiscal dominance. That's the word for the day,
fiscal dominance. Fiscal dominance is when monetary policy is set
(21:43):
not in trying to smooth the ups and down to
the economy, but instead to keep interest rates low so
that the government interest payments will be lower. It works,
we pay less, but if you keep interstrates too low
for too long, you get high inflation. So if you want,
if I want.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
To, we already have inflation ticking up.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
We have moderate inflation. It's higher than it should be.
But that's not the scare story yet, right, right, but.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Right, I know where this is going.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Go on. You know how exciting it is to be
Molly Jong Farce economic advisor. I am economists to the stars,
economics teacher to the stars, and sometimes my stupid star
Paul when she's worked through a few financial crises and
she ads written for that well known financial magazine Vanity Fair.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
And Vogue and known for covering.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
You, are the closest I've going to come to. Vogue
is talking to you and doing Can we do this together?
Come on, you can do it all. Go on to.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Okay, talk about the bond market, girl, bond market market.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I'm only going to talk bond market while you keep voguing.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
God damn it.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Okay, all right, it was too distracting for me. Thanks
for stopping mall Okay, So if we go the full
trumpest future, which is basically what id On did in Turkey,
we point lunatics who could be interest rates too low
for too long inflation rises. You'll notice I use the
word if may not happen good news. Problem is, if
I were to borrow money, say take a ten year
(23:17):
loan today, the lender knows there's some chance it will happen.
So therefore, already today, even without Trump having destroyed the FED,
the lender is weighing the possibility that Trump destroys the FED.
If he does, inflation will be really high, in which
case interest rates will be really high, in which case
they're only going to be willing to lend me money
for ten years if they added an extra premium, Which
(23:38):
is the probability Trump destroys things, multiplied by what will
happen to interest rates, And realize that when ERDA one
did this in Turkey, interest rates went up above ninety
percent at some point, or inflation went to eighty six percent.
So a small risk of a catastrophic outcome already right
now will add a lot to the interest rate that
I get charged. So that's long term interest rates. What
(23:59):
Trump has managed to do, he's managed to make people
convinced he's pro what's called it dove, someone who's in
favor of low interest rates, which has led markets to
believe interest rates might be a little lower over the
next year or two. But it's led them to worry
that on average, across all the possible states of nature,
they'll be higher in the future. So he's lowered some instrates,
has raised others. Which ones matter for business, the long ones.
(24:20):
Your mortgage is a long run interest rate. Your business
loan is a long run interest rate. If I'm breaking
ground on the manufactory, it's a long run interestrate. So
Trump's desire it's a lower interest rates has in fact tustrates.
He's actually undone the very thing he was trying to do.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
So I think that's a really a good point, and
I wonder if you could just for a minute, it
strikes me that there are other ways in which Donald
Trump has done that, where he has said he wants
something and caused the opposite to happen.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Okay, should I talk about tariffs?
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, I mean tariffs are a great example, right. I
mean it just seems like so the tariffs he wants
to bring back American manufacturing. But the problems we see
is like, for example, it's cheaper with certain materials to
actually make things somewhere else and import them. So yeah,
tuk us through that.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
So there's a huge problem inside the White House. There's
some beliefs that I don't agree with. Fair Enough, we
can disagree on beliefs. There's ways of thinking about the
economy that I disagree with. I could be wrong, and
there's sharing competence. I'm against that under all conditions. So
if I were talking in a normal country at a
(25:32):
normal time about tariffs, I would say, if you put
tariffs that are designed to help the manufacturing sector, you
will help the manufacturing sector. And the question is to
the benefits to manufacturers offset the cost to everyone else.
But the way we've gone about tariffs breaks every rule
in the how to help Manufacturer's handbook, even though that's
what they're trying to do. I'm going to lead with
(25:52):
the fact this is a Dallas FED survey where they
surveyed Texan manufacturers and they said, what if tariff's done
for your business? Three point seven percent of manufacturers, this
is the group that's meant to help, three point seven
percent said it had helped. Something like ninety percent said
it that hurt, and a few other and a few
others you know, had different effects. You know, were unsure
(26:15):
what the effect was. So the way they've done it
actually fails to do what they were hoping to do. Well,
here's I've got the numbers. They had a seventy two
percent of text and manufacturing firms set tariffs that had
a negative impact, seventeen said no impact, seven percent didn't know,
and three point seven percent set it that helped. It
(26:36):
would be if you'd said to me justin, I want
you to be as incompetent as you can. I want
you to design a set of tariffs that will help
a mere three point seven percent of manufacturers, it would
have hurt my head. I would have been, how can
I implement tariffs that only help a tiny sliver because
it's reducing the competition from abroad. It does do that,
it's hard to do. And then I would have remembered
(26:58):
page one of the tariff handbooks, don't put tariffs on inputs.
And so then I would have said, well, I know
what I'll do. If I really want to hurt American manufacturers,
I will put tariffs on steel and aluminium and aluminum
as well. I will put tariffs on chips. I'll start
a trade war. So the input you want to get
from a broader harder to get. I will make it
(27:20):
so Canadians hate us and they don't want to buy
any of the stuff that we produce.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Right, this is like they would be our most, our
easiest trading partner, closest, easiest.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
I will get the rest of the world of likeness.
I will make it so there are a fewer skilled
workers for precision manufacturing by chasing away foreign students. I
will take the great engines of innovation and try to
shop universities, being of course our universities. So it's actually
a striking accomplishment. But I actually think it's something we
(27:53):
should talk more about. Not tariffs, not the bond rate,
but the extraordinary levels of incompetence, tariffs that are on
on Monday and off on Tuesday. This incompetence is above
and beyond any ideological divide. It means they're not even
achieving the right wing goals that they're after.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Thank God, we're out of Prat.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
God, because it means not even the region, not even
no one wins from stupidity.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So thank you. Justin Walfer Hers doctor Abdul l Said
is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in the
state of Michigan and is the former director of the
Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services for Wayne County, Michigan.
Welcome too fast politics, doctor abdulahs.
Speaker 5 (28:44):
Yet, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate
you having here.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
You're a doctor, but you are also running for the
United States Senate in the great state of Michigan. It's
a primary. It's a crowded Democratic primary with three candidates.
And I interviewed you this weekend on the Weekend Show
when I was filling in, and what I was really
(29:07):
struck by was that you have a very clear message
about your lane in the Democratic Party. So would you
talk us through what that message is.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
I don't know that there's a doctor lane in most
Democratic primaries, but I think most Democratic primaries would be
better if there was one. I never grew up thinking
I'd be great to run for office. I actually grew
up with a lot of my mentors telling me I
should and thinking that's crazy.
Speaker 5 (29:30):
Why would I do that.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
I have an eleven letter first name that's got sounds
that come out of parts of people's throats they.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Usually don't know they have. And I really wanted to be.
Speaker 6 (29:37):
A doctor in large part because of the contrast of
my upbringing. I was raised by my father who's an
Egyptian immigrant, and my stepmom, Jackie, who's a daughter of
the American Revolution, from like right here in Michigan, literally
the middle of the state, and I would get sent
off to Egypt often to spend most of my summer
with the wisest, most intelligent person I've ever met, who
was my grandmother, who never got to go to school.
Speaker 5 (29:57):
She was the ninth to fourteen herself.
Speaker 6 (29:58):
She gave birth to eight kids, got to raise six
because two died before their first birthday. She had this
incredible moral sense, and she always always would impress upon
me the fact that I had cousins who are smarter
and cousins who are harder working than cousins who did
all the right things. And the thing that I got
going for me more than any of the other ones
was that I had to go back to America at
the end of the summer. And the crazy thing right
(30:20):
was it would take me fifteen hours to get to
or from Egypt, and I travel though I didn't have
the language for it at the time, about ten years
different from life expectancy, and I didn't have to go
fifteen hours. I could go fifteen minutes from where I
grew up, just outside the city Detroit, into any neighborhood
in the city and travel the same gap. And the
fact that I got all those opportunities that even my grandmother,
(30:41):
who'd never been to America at the time, got to understand,
and then there were kids whose families had been here
far longer than mine who didn't get them is the
reason I went into medicine. And when I realized that
the things that were making my patient sick had more
to do with there. They had to breathe the water,
they had to drink, the jobs that they had or
didn't have, the opportunity to eat healthy food that they
had or didn't have the faster. I realized that I
(31:03):
was not long for the world of clinical practice, and
I went into public health to do something about that,
and rebuilt Detroit's health department to put glasses on kids,
to take on corporate polluters, ran Wayne Counties Health Department,
the largest, most diverse county in the state, to do
things like eliminate medical debt and put a narcan in
one hundred locations. And so I see politics to me
as more of a continuation of an answer to the
question of why people get sick in the first place.
(31:24):
And once you run up against the political challenges that
people face and start asking why do they make decisions
like that, you start to question, well, you know, maybe
I should, I should put myself in the position to
make those same decisions. And I told you, I grew
up telling people I would never run for office. In fact,
I graduated Valtctoria in my class at Michigan and the
main speaker who anybody actually went to listen to was
Bill Clinton, who after our speeches asked me, you should
(31:48):
run for office someday?
Speaker 5 (31:49):
Why not? And I told them about my name. We
Bill chuckled about it.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
But I'm finally at a position now where I've I've
kind of come to realize that if you're not willing
to articulate at the level of our politics, which to
me is a conversation about.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
Who we are and who we want to be, that
ideal of an America.
Speaker 6 (32:03):
Centered around the well being of all of its kids,
then I just don't know that we're going to be
able to take on either Trump or build the kind
of America where Trump can't exist in the future.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
One of the things that we see a lot and
by we I mean me in my second job, which
is yelling at Democratic politicians about all the things they're
doing wrong.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
Which you do so well, Molly. I really appreciate you
doing it.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
That's my hobby, by the way. And all those spokespeople
who think they're working me when I'm like, yes, let's
have a long conversation about what I feel your boss
is doing wrong. All of those people really hate me.
But one of the things that strip by is that
it's very hard to get good people to run for office.
Speaker 5 (32:44):
This is a terrible way to live your life.
Speaker 6 (32:45):
Like I to be honest with you, like, I've have
a two year old and a seven year old, and
I don't get to see them most evenings. And you know,
sometimes I think about, like, all right, if I win,
I'm going to be in DC four days a week,
and when I'm in Michigan, I'm going to be all
over the state being the senator and making sure that
I'm listening to the folks I serve. And it doesn't
leave much room for the things that, like, you know,
(33:06):
make you a person. And I think there's a lot
of folks who do this because at some point they
really like the idea of being like listened to because
you have a position of power. I think it would
be better off if more of our politics was about
the question of what do you want to do with
your power?
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Rather than do you want to be in power?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, I often tried to think of what politician I
feel the most betrayed by. Is it a Kirsten Cinema.
Is it a Joe Manchin, is it a you know?
Is it someone who knew the right thing but couldn't
get it done. But it strikes me that in the
moment we're in where public health has been so politicized,
(33:46):
the really the only solution is to have doctor senators.
And speaking of which, there is a Republican doctor senator
who was the designing book for R FK. Junior. And
I'd love you to talk us through a little little
bit about that cowardice and also sort of what you
think watching it and what you're feelings are.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Yeah, I got to meet Bill Classidy.
Speaker 6 (34:08):
Actually I've testified before the Senate Budget Committee and Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions or HELP Committee before, and he was
the ranking member on the HELP Committee when I testified
on medical debt, and it was fascinating to me. We
were having this conversation about the possibility of abolishing medical debt,
which of course nobody comes by because they were making
bad decisions. You know, you don't get medical debt because
(34:29):
you've got a Brazilian butt lift.
Speaker 5 (34:30):
You get it because you got cancer.
Speaker 6 (34:32):
He kept trying to make it about the three P
forty B program, which is this obscure program that reimburses
for pharmaceuticals and at times gets misused by large hospitals.
But you know, really is is a key lifeline for
getting pharmaceuticals to people who need them. I remember watching
him squirm around this question of the RFK appointment because
as much as I disagree with his ideals, he and
(34:53):
I received very different training.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
I'll be in different eras.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
But when you go through medical training, there's a very
rigorous process by which you are taught to ask and
apply an analytical lens to every question you ask. And
it's not just an analytic lens from the position of
your brain, like does this make sense, it's also like
an analytic place from the position of your caring for
the person in front of you. And I could see
he knew he was running in a bus saw And
(35:16):
then I also just watched that like flicker of his
political future in his eyes, and it was actually quite
illuminating to me, because I'm like, what's it worth? Like,
you know, you've already lived the whole career as a doc.
You got elected to the US Senate by the pardnerance
of your neighbors in the state of Louisiana, And what's
so good about the job that you can't just do
(35:37):
or say the thing that is so obviously wrong to you?
And I get that Donald Trump holds that entire party
enthrall to him in the most brutal kind of way,
But part of me says, like, if you're going to
go out on something, maybe as the doctor who got
elected to the US Senate, you're going to go out
on the idea that we shouldn't appoint a guy who
has no business in any legitimate conversation about the public's
(35:57):
health overseeing all of the public health infrastructure of this country.
And at the same time, there was a question for me,
like I was asking myself, I'm like, how do you
when you put yourself in a position like this, how
do you protect yourself from that? Like what is the
architecture of your morals or even your mind that keeps
you from putting the obvious wrong ahead of the obvious right.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
Just to save your political skin.
Speaker 6 (36:21):
I just think that maybe part of it is and
maybe comes down to this. Bernie told me something when
I ran for office the first time in twenty eighteen.
He's like, you know, in this business, you're either really
good at lying or withholding the truth, or you're really
good at telling the truth. And he's like, you don't
strike me as a good liar. I was like, no,
I couldn't do to save my life. So part of
me says that the thing that you can do best
in this job is to be a really good teller
(36:41):
of truth. I think a little bit about my grandmother
and about her leadership and my family, and about her
recognition of like the odd moral circumstances in which I
was growing up, or like I'm the one of my
cousins who gets to have this incredible life and the
others who are smarter, more capable than me, you know,
drive cabs or work working class jobs in Egypt, and
(37:02):
I hope that I can keep that. But like, there
is something corrupting about power. We know it.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
I mean, to your point, I'm trying to get to
really like Plummet. I don't know how we like get.
Speaker 6 (37:10):
More folks to see the like moral core of the thing,
or to be willing to be really good arbiters of truth,
because I think if we were really good arbiters of truth,
I think the Democratic Party would be a very very
different place. I think our politics would be in a
different place. It's that we have nobody who's willing to
courageously or very few who are willing to courageously tell
the truth who get to positions of power to be
able to tell it in a real way.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
First of all, I want you to talk about, like
what the headwinds are you have this primary. You have
two opponents, both women, both they occupy sort of different
lanes of the Democratic Party. If you win this primary,
you will go against the Republican. It's a purple state,
but there is definitely you have this sort of very
(37:50):
very scary like Michigan militia. And then it's a state
with like a lot of different kinds of people, a
lot of different kinds of voters, and a lot of
different kinds interests. First of all, I want to know
how you win in Michigan and then I want to
know sort of what you envision is a senator, what that.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Would look like.
Speaker 6 (38:08):
Yeah, the first thing I'll say is this, I think
we have an outdated political lens through which we try
to analyze our politics, which tends to be this right
left to divide. And I think in accordance with that lens,
you would say, well, Abdul is running further to the
quote unquote left, and you would say that other candidates
are running either further to the right or somewhere between
the two of us. And I think the proper lens
(38:31):
for our politics today that helps explain why a state
like Michigan would both support a Bernie Sanders in a
primary and then vote for Donald Trump in a general
election is more the separation between people who feel locked
out of our politics or institutions of power and the
people locking them out. And I think if you understand
Michigan that way, I think this race and my entry
into it makes a lot more sense. I'm somebody who,
(38:54):
by virtue of just happenstance, got to be in a
lot of the rooms that most people who look like
me get locked out of, and in so many ways
I've sort of looked at what's happening in those rooms
and felt just this deep guttural disgust to the way
that people are talked about and parsed and thought through.
And I have made my career about trying to unlock
a lot of those rooms.
Speaker 5 (39:15):
So when I travel my state, and.
Speaker 6 (39:16):
I've been to what fifty some cities, I've probably done
nearly one hundred public events.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
Because when your name's Abdul, you take nothing for granted.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
No matter where I go, people tell me the same stuff,
like you close your eyes and you could be in
a town hall in Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula, or
a church in Redford, and people are literally using the
same exact words, just that they don't know that they're
using the same words. And So I think that a
political movement built around unlocking our system and being one
hundred percent honest, clear and direct about the ways the
(39:44):
methods of the locking out that happened, the ways that
corporations can buy and sell politicians, the ways in which
it's corrupted Republicans wholeheartedly, but also unfortunately too many Democrats,
The ways that I've rejected that system. I've never taken
a dime of corporate money, both when I ran in
twenty eighteen, and when I'm running now, and I see
that I'm blocking as being a fundamental core value of
what I'm trying to do, I think I'm going to
win a lot of voters who otherwise.
Speaker 5 (40:05):
Folks would code as quote unquote right wing.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
Now, look, are there folks who are going to run
it who are going to vote against me because my
name is Abdul. Yes, but let's be clear, they're not
voting for any Democrat, right, So if like that's your assessment,
I think you're not really paying attention. But then the
other part of it is this think about who Democrats
lost in twenty twenty four. They lost mainly Arabs and
Muslims over the disastrous handling of Gaza, and they lost
(40:29):
young men over the notion that young men don't feel
like they have a place in the party. I happen
to be a younger I can't credibly call myself young anymore,
but a younger Arab Muslim man, and I think that
that allows for a conversation that Democrats too often have
not had. You couple that with the honesty and the
(40:49):
integrity of my message and the fact that I've been
saying and doing the same things now for a decade
in Michigan politics. And yes, my name might be Abdul,
but like I'm the Abdul who wants to make sure
you have healthcare, and the due who wants to make
sure you can keep your job and form a union
if they're trying to take it away from you. And
I'm the Abdul who's fought against the big corporations who
are polluting your kids air, and the Abdul who put
a pair of glasses on your kids face, and the
(41:10):
Abdul who forgave your medical debt. Like I think that
there's an opportunity here to win both in the primary
and the general. And so you know, maybe as a
child of immigrant, like as a hazard of that, like
we do math, but like the math maths. And my
job is to have the conversations that other Democrats are
not willing to have, because too often they're more interested
in the conversations they're having behind closed doors with the
(41:32):
corporation that's going to write them a pac check, conversations
that I've never had and will never have.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
We would love you to talk about the uncommitted movement
and just sort of what you tried to do there,
and there clearly was and I think a lot of
us worried about this failure on the part of elected
Democrats running for office to address the situation. And I
wonder if you could talk about that.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Yeah, people see the difference between principles and political position,
and I think the difference is whether or not your
principles apply in all places in all times, or if
they just apply in some places and sometimes, which makes
them just political positions. And I've tried to be principled
about the question of where our tax dollars go. And
I think a lot of us watched the just complete
(42:18):
dumpster fire of the Biden administration's mishandling of Gaza, and
I think it said a lot about his or his
administration's capacity to do the job. And I think the
question was, how do we make sure that folks understand
the risk of this ahead of the general election? And
so when the Uncommitted movement started to organize, I endorsed
(42:39):
it because I think we saw that Joe Biden was
not fit for the job in his handling of Gaza.
I think the whole world saw that after his first
disastrous debate performance and ultimately who is no longer the nominee.
And for me, the minute that Kamala Harris was announced
as the nominee for the party, I endorsed her. I
was the first Arab and or Muslim leader in Michigan
(43:00):
to do so. And the reason I did it and
it was not because I agreed with the administration's handling
of Gaza, but it was because whether you saw this
from the eyes of a child in the city of
Detroit whom I served, or the eyes of a child
in Gaza, there is no world in which Kamala Harris
would not have been better every single day than Donald Trump.
And that to me is again a matter of principle, right,
And so you know, I endorsed her. But here's the
(43:22):
hard part. One of the aspects of that was I
would have thought that that would give me some space
to have a conversation with the campaign and say, there
really needs to be some distance on this issue, because
there are a lot of voters for whom this is
a non starter and we're seeing the Natan Yahoo administration
disregard American public perspective or American political values, and you
(43:44):
need to call that out. And it didn't happen. And
at the same time, I'm on the phone with Arab
and Muslim leaders being like, y'ah, this is insane. Donald
Trump tried to like stop people who look like you
from coming to this country. This is ridiculous, and he
is going to come after our community again.
Speaker 5 (43:56):
Okay, this is crazy, crazy, And unfortunately it was.
Speaker 6 (44:00):
You know, you can imagine the frustration of months and
months on the phone with these different groups of people
and nobody seems to be listening, and you're like caught
in the middle, trying to be the arbiter of like
just basic logic and conventional wisdom and be like y'all,
like can we all recognize what's about to happen here?
And in some respects I think, you know, there are
frustrations obviously with the decisions that Arabin Muslim voters made.
Speaker 5 (44:21):
I have a lot of those same frustrations.
Speaker 6 (44:23):
And at the same time, we were talking about the
vice president of the United States, right, Like we're talking
about very very powerful people who who made political decisions,
and these are political decisions that put them on the
wrong side of the empathy anybody should have for dead, dying,
maimed children or orphan children and I just it was
(44:44):
just a dumpster fire waiting to happen, and it was
really truly one of the most frustrating four months of
my life. And so I supported Uncommitted because my principles
tell me that we owe a responsibility to our size
and our power not to spend our tax dollars writing
blank checks to foreign militaries who are dropping bombs on
other people's children when we have starving children here at home.
And I endorsed Kamala Harris because I knew that Donald
(45:07):
Trump would be worse when it came to those same principles.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah. No, as someone who was on the Jewish side
of that conversation, the same exact thing. I mean, fancy
Jews saying, well, he's better on Israel and me saying
a blank check to Israel to kill Palestinian children is
good for no One' sound good for Jews, it's not
(45:32):
good for Israel, It's not good for anyone. And it's
the same terrible tragedy and now it's just getting one
hundred times worse.
Speaker 6 (45:40):
So much of this conversation, especially when it comes to
Michigan in Dearborn, boils down to a certain like tribalism
about this thing.
Speaker 5 (45:47):
My position on.
Speaker 6 (45:48):
Blank checks to foreign militaries applies to Egypt, where my
folks immigrated from. It applies to Jordan, applies to Pakistan,
applies to Saudi Arabia. I just don't think that we
pay our tax dollars so that somebody can send blank
checks to another country's million terry. I think we pay
them to invest in our own kids. Similarly, right, it
has been really frustrating to watch anybody, right, whether with
good intention or bad intention, equate the actions of a
(46:11):
foreign government with the will or the beliefs of Jewish
people or the Jewish faith. And I find any attempt
to do that as being essentially anti Semitic. Similarly right, Like,
it'd be a crazy thing off somebody who was like, well,
the Egyptian government did this.
Speaker 5 (46:24):
So clearly you believe, like no, like what f is that?
Speaker 4 (46:27):
Right?
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Like?
Speaker 6 (46:28):
And so when we do it to anybody, it's wrong.
Similarly right, there are basic principles that all of us
have to bring to this. I condemned Hamas from day one,
because anybody who puts children in harm's way is wrong.
No context needed, right, And so what I've always tried
to ask is take the same principle and apply them everywhere,
independent of your own background, independent of who the actor
involved is, apply the same principles everywhere. And I think
(46:51):
if we did a lot more of that, and we
had the courage to say what our principles were and
apply them evenly, I think that this would be a
far less challenging situation. And in the end, what the
issue is is you've got a special interest regime that
allows maga billionaires to spend a lot of money to
try and tell people what they can and can't say.
And like that's the same issue as we have with
(47:12):
pharmaceutical money that comes in and tries to truck you
if you talk about Medicare for All or health insurance
CEOs or utilities who come in when you try to
regulate them. And we've got to sort of name the
process and then also name our principles. And the contrast
between those things, I think is what can actually get
us back to a party that maybe can win elections again.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
You think the Democratic Party needs new leadership.
Speaker 6 (47:34):
Well, I think the Democratic Party needs to remember what
its base is about. Like here's the problem. There is
a fundamental wedge between Democratic Party voters or voters generally,
and Democratic Party donors. We need leadership that is going
to pay attention to the voters instead of the donors.
And you see a playout and it's like, we still
haven't learned the lesson. You look at this Gaza resolution
(47:55):
at the DNC meeting, you're like, y'all, your base every
poll that you have ever seen in the last month
or two has shown you that your base disagrees with
you on this. And yet and yet you cannot as
a party have the courage to proclaim that you agree
with where the base has moved, which, by the way,
is a statement of principle about what is happening with
our money, and you still can't say it.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
And part of me is is like, what are you
worried about?
Speaker 6 (48:17):
And the hard part to me is this, It's like,
there is a certain political economy and incentive set that
when you have the luxury suite on the Titanic, you're
more interested in keeping the luxury suite on the Titanic
than you are and making sure that the Titanic doesn't sink.
And unfortunately, that's kind of how our party feels right now.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 5 (48:35):
It was my privilege. I appreciate you having me a
moment ou.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Jesse Canon.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
So Maali, we previously discussed one of the most stupid
performative moronics I've come across in a minute, which is
that Oklahoma is going to test teachers from California and
New York to make sure that they're America first, and
the test is written by Brager, You who now seemed
to be the outsource for all things performatively stupid. Yeah,
what did it shocked you to hear that these questions
(49:05):
are some of the most ridiculously stupid misinformation I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Who is coming from New York and California to go
teach at Oklahoma?
Speaker 5 (49:13):
Like?
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Who is doing that? Who's like I need to go
to a state where they pay teachers less, where they
have less state taxes to pay for things. I want
to go work there because I mean Oklahoma. You guys
couldn't make yourselves any less appealing if you.
Speaker 3 (49:28):
Tried, agreed the thing, being though, you'd also have to go.
I want to go here because I want to teach
kids absolutely not true facts.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Nobody's doing this. I mean this is like this crew
is so delusional about being a teacher. It's like their
war on federal employees. They think federal employees are making
billions of dollars and they're doing it because they want
to help people. Like it's the idea that somehow wanting
to help people is not in the calculate at all.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
I almost wish they would go back to the War
on Christmas because that one at least had no victims.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Yeah, well it did. It had victims of me. I
was a victim of the War on Christmas.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
I mean, I'm a victim of Christmas music every year
and it makes me sad.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Happy Holidays, bitch. 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
(50:37):
friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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!
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.