Trump’s Lunatic Tariffs Continue to Destroy U.S. and World Markets 4/7/25

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Thank you all.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
It is the Monday recorded audience. It's my favorite recorded audience.
Hello everyone. I know none of us have any more money,
but that is the state of America.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
You can be the.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
True Maga devote that you will find in a couple
of people in our chat and tell yourself that this
guy is a super genius and we're all going to
find our way out of the woods to the Promised Land. Everyone,
you can tell yourself that the delusional drunkenness that typify

(00:38):
some of the people in our Maga world, and you
will get a chance to visit with them if you
jump into our chat. You know, we're a YouTube show
live between two and four every day on the East Coast,
between eleven and one on the West coast, and so
because we're live, you get to see all of these
Most people are not mega people are in our chat,
but they're a couple of them and they are, and

(01:00):
they're gonna tell you about everything's Oh, it's all according
to plan. This guy's a he's a super genius. Right,
So if you want to see some of that, you
can jump into our chat. But I will share a
couple of morsels along the way today. Also a terrific
mind joins us today. David Serota from the Lever They

(01:22):
do incredible journalism, incredible investigative reporting. He is a brilliant
journalist himself. He has a history in Washington, so he
understands the culture of government, and he will join us
in the second hour. We'll discuss all things Trump. We'll
discuss economics. We'll also discuss legislation and government changes. Might

(01:48):
be the charitable way to put it. All of that
in a second hour with David Serota. Course, Gary Dietrich
joins us in the first hour. He of iHeartRadio and
CBS News. He'll talk about what's happening politically. He's a
guy who can give us a bit of what I
think is an interesting angle on all of this, particularly
if you look at how certain states are affected by

(02:11):
these Trump economic lunatic policies, because California is such a
strong economic engine that California may have leverage when it
comes to tariffs and individual deals that are made with
foreign government, so that to come as well. And finally,

(02:33):
toward the end of the show, the first Monday of
every month, Karen Dawn joins us with a word about animals,
and she sort of focuses on this world of the
creatures that we tend to ignore, and so we'll have
a word with her as well toward the end of
the show. By the way, it is Kim is here.

(02:55):
It is also a Tony Day.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Tony.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Tony has been very helpful. We've had some major technical
problems prior to the show, but we are now on
a smooth glide path to instruction, which is a world
markets are getting slammed, says Rich.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Yes, it is true.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
The entire world economy has been thrown on its side
because the the mad King has decided to start something
where it need not be started.

Speaker 4 (03:31):
Come, so don't be a pelican.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, he is my Lord and savior, so I can
talk about him that way. This from Luis Mark. He
is a true super genius in the proud tradition of
Wiley E. Coyote. Things really went well for that dude
as well. Lol, Yeah he is.

Speaker 5 (03:50):
He is.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
We have a moronic mob.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Boss, says Silicon Valley Blocks a moronic mob boss. Businessman president,
Well it is it is true that he has a
few flaws.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Okay, everyone, he has a few flaws.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
I do want to get deep into this and I'm
going to get right into this, but we are in
the middle of March Madness, and I just wanted to
mention that over the weekend we have some perhaps some
new I know you're going to run the bed. Don't worry.
I was just running it here for to give it
a little field. Jesus christ Man.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
I can't believe they do this all the time. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
I don't. I tell you, today is the day I
lose it. Today is the day I lose it. But
I I not yet. You're not going to run it, Okay, okay,
all right. This is why I miss radio, because it's
so easy in radio and this with all of these
different sources, and you got to run this, and you
have that, and we're going to change the computer, and
we're going to do this, and this is the thing.

(04:53):
And if you look at your preferences and what have
you selected. So we're going to get deep into it.
But what I do want to do is to let
you know that there is a new face off in
Marx madness. Marx madness is paralleling March madness. March madness
is college hoops Marx madness. We played drops off against

(05:18):
each other and today is the start of another round. Now,
Tony please no.

Speaker 6 (05:25):
Now Marx madness.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
You'll vote right now, and you'll vote until midnight tonight
for either.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
It's a wild idea, but it just might.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Or you'll vote for when you're angry. That's right. You'll
vote for either.

Speaker 7 (05:43):
It's a wild idea, but it just might, or.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
You'll vote for all right, it's wild idea versus love
it when you're angry. You'll have till midnight tonight to
vote in the posts section of our YouTube channel.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
Good luck Now, without any further delay, I'd like to
the Mark Thompson Show.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
I'd like to attend to the fact that the world
is on fire economically and it was all started by
our president. I mean, you really want the bizarre death
cuip that Donald Trump has on bad ideas and now
unfettered power with all of the guardrails off no one

(06:26):
to tell him, mister president, I think you should maybe
modify these positions we end up where we are. I
will give you a couple of pieces of video. Chaplain
Fred says, good morning, Mark and Kim and all who
make the show work like clockwork. I guess Trump is
a stable genius, so he says, well, I don't know

(06:49):
small g on genius, whereas Mark Burnett asks Biggie sixty one,
you know it's funny. Mark Burnett really made us, the
TV viewing audience believe that Donald Trump is a brilliant businessman,
when the truth is he's a wildly failed businessman. He's
virtually no business he's ever had has been successful. He's

(07:11):
had six bankruptcies. And again, declaring bankruptcy in itself isn't
a problem, but when you do it over and over
and over, now you're a chronic bankruptcy, the declaration waiting
to happen. And that's what happened with Donald Trump and
his money's He was essentially gifted of fortune and then
lost that fortune, and now he's making the fortune up

(07:31):
on grift. Of course, his biggest assets in the real
estate business oftentimes were receptacles for money laundering through Russia.
They bought the entire floors of his hotels, I'm sure
of his buildings in New York and overpaid for them.
That's a classic way in which high end real estate
can be used to launder money. Russia, China does it

(07:54):
as well. Let some though, So I'm just going to
put that aside. But that was in response to the comment. Now, Tony,
give us the latest from the White House, which is
to threaten even more tariffs on top of the tariffs
that have already been imposed on China.

Speaker 8 (08:11):
We are following the breaking news of President Trump threatening
to slap China with additional tariffs. Let's go live to
CNN senior White House reporter Kevin Liptek. So, Kevin, what
is the President saying about this potential escalation here?

Speaker 9 (08:23):
Yeah, and it's a major escalation in this tit for
tat tariff between Washington and Beijing. Remember, Pam. Last week,
President Trump applied that thirty five percent reciprocal tariff on China.
China retaliated applying its own thirty four percent tariff on
the United States. Now, President Trump saying this, if China
does not withdraw it's thirty four percent increase above their

(08:46):
already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April the eighth,
the United States will impose additional tariffs on China of
fifty percent, effective April ninth. He goes on to say
that additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings
with US will be terminated. And I just want to
break down the math for you here, Pamela, because remember

(09:08):
President Trump had already applied a twenty percent tariff on
China for its role in the fentanyl crisis. He applied
that thirty four percent reciprocal tariff last week that goes
into effect later this week. Now he's threatening this additional
fifty percent retaliatory tariff on China, this tit for tat

(09:28):
back and forth. That would bring the total tariffs on
China by the United States to one hundred and four percent,
which is a huge number. China the world's second largest economy,
one of the United States's largest trading partners. This could
have a serious effect for American consumers given the amount
of goods that come into the United States. And I think,

(09:49):
just as we have seen today, the market's clearly looking
for some kind of off ramp here, for some kind
of easing on the part of the president. This shows
that the President is very very much committed to this
tariff plan exactly not what the markets were looking for.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
Pimela. Yeah, thank you, Tony. That's great.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
I feel as though he's of course started something and
he doesn't know how to end it. He doesn't feel
compelled to end it. I can't even we talked about
this last week see a coherent explanation for why this
happened or even how it happened. Meaning there is such

(10:29):
chaos associated with even the methodology with which he comes
up with these tariffs.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
And you'll hear some of that in the videos to
come that I.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Struggle to see the now it'll be used over and
over the off ramp that everyone's looking for.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
You know, how do we get out of this? What
is the end game?

Speaker 2 (10:51):
I think you struggle to find it because there is
no coherence to this policy.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
What else do you have? Tony?

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Show me the this is this is actually pretty go.
I think this was the economist I believe who looks
hear from her.

Speaker 10 (11:04):
Of the weekend, China's Foreign Ministry saying that quote, the
market has spoken when it comes to President Trump's tariffs
and for more now on how China is responding. Want
to bring in very Lovely, a senior fellow at the
Peterson Institute.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
This morning to you.

Speaker 10 (11:17):
We're all trying to make sense of what may or
may not happen here as these negotiations, if that's what
they even are play out to the extent that you
think that the Trump administration or the Chinese government has
the better hand in terms of what happens next, And
if there's an off ramp, what do.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
You think happens.

Speaker 11 (11:37):
Well, we know that the first thing that happened was
that the Chinese government decided to levy its own thirty
four percent tariffs on USX sports. So if there is
going to be a negotiation, and the Chinese still hope
there will be a negotiation, the President of China, she
jinpaign wants to go to those negotiations with some AMMO
in hand. There has to be something to bargain with

(11:58):
if there's going to be So we're hoping that there's
a deal somewhere here if you're concerned about what these
mean for you as consumers and US businesses, But it's
not really clear as far as we can tell. The
Chinese have no understanding of what the Trump administration would
accept in a deal. The Chinese are not sure what

(12:21):
they'd be willing to give, So we're still very very
far away from a deal.

Speaker 10 (12:26):
Mary, the thing that I can't understand is who has
more leverage in all of this, Because as the market
here in the United States continue to drop. And that's
not to say that they're not dropping obviously an Asian
around the world as well. But you have to imagine
that there will be a tipping point where constituents of
this administration and members of Congress in the House and

(12:50):
the Senate start to say, no, Mas, we're not doing this.
And so there is going to be a double pressure,
I would imagine on this administration.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
To make a deal.

Speaker 10 (13:00):
The question is, is that double pressure if you will
exist in China? Or do they have more patients than
we do.

Speaker 6 (13:07):
Well.

Speaker 11 (13:07):
The Chinese, as we know, been trying to revive their economy.
They've had very weak domestic demand. They've been using both
monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus. They have more to give
on the fiscal side, and they're already beginning to use it.
Manufacturing is a significant share of their economy, but exports
to the United States are not. It's less than ten

(13:27):
three percent of GDP. That three percent does matter. There's
a lot of softness, particularly in the factory sector, and
that represents a lot of jobs.

Speaker 12 (13:38):
But China has already decided this is not where its
future lies.

Speaker 11 (13:42):
It has been shedding jobs and so called labor intents
of activities for years, and its plan is to continue.
They want to move up the value chain as we know,
into higher tech type of manufacturing as well as services.
So there are many Chinese who who see this as inevitable,
something they're going to do anyway, and they're right now

(14:05):
behind their president in terms of not giving into what
they see as US aggression.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
So let me translate that thank you. That means that
the Chinese have as a government and as an economy,
they have the leverage because again, we're their biggest customer,
but they're our biggest supplier. And when you see that
it's only three percent of GDP, they don't care about
giving it up. And I believe that Trump has got

(14:31):
to get that memo. I don't think he'll get it
because I don't think he reads memos to begin with.
But this is the state of things. You get into
an adversarial economic I'm going to just call it pissing
match with China, and you're going to lose. And when

(14:52):
I say you're going to lose, I mean all of
us are going to lose. So that everything that we
buy will become more expensive and the variety of things
we buy will become more limited, so we already have
begun to source a lot of the stuff that comes
to America through Southeast Asia, India, Vietnam.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
I mentioned this to you last week.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
That's why the Vietnam thing made no sense to me,
because they provide so much to this country in the
way of everything from Nike tennis shoes to the sweaters
you'll wear at Christmas, and yet they are being slapped
with a forty six percent tariff because Trump doesn't really
understand this balance of trade and trade deficit concepts sufficiently,

(15:44):
so he doesn't really put these deficits in the right
category in the right column. You know, he's seeing them
as taxes and they're not. So again, his economics is crazy.
It's incoherent. And as I just run out the Vietnam thing,

(16:07):
you know, you'll never have Vietnam buying as much from
America as we buy from them. I mentioned this to
you last week because there's such a small country. How
could they possibly do it even if they had the money,
And by the way, they don't because they make seventy
dollars a month, so they couldn't buy the stuff from
the US anyway.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
So this is utterly absurd.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
Well, Trump is digging in his heels and he posted
in another post right before the stock markets opened this morning,
and he invented a word. He said, don't be weak,
don't be stupid, don't be a PanicIn which is apparently
a new party based on weak and stupid people. Be strong, courageous,
and patient, and greatness will be the result.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, give me the next one, please, Tony. This speaks
to the complete absurdity of the computation of these tariffs.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
To begin with.

Speaker 13 (17:00):
We're sitting there on the desk last night. Yeah, economists
can't make sense of it. Go ahead, I'll talk over
it a little bit at times, but don't stop for me.
President Trump says we're charging people half of what they
charge us. He puts up that now I'm going to
say famous poster board. And I'm looking at those tariffs

(17:21):
and I'm like, wait a second. I don't know the
tariffs like in encyclopedia, but I'm pretty sure European tariffs
are not thirty nine percent. I think I know that
countries like Switzerland have like almost no tariffs. In Singapore,
I think the European tariffs are like four percent, and
like where are these numbers coming from. I get off
set and I start getting emails from the economists and

(17:42):
the international trading experts I know, and they're like, what.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
The heck are those numbers? And nobody really.

Speaker 13 (17:48):
Understood where those numbers came from. I think David said,
like at five thirty or so, somebody who was not
in the international trade community because they couldn't understand it,
started doing the math and.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
It is so what Sarah was saying earlier.

Speaker 13 (18:02):
It's the trade deficit divide half of the trade deficit
divided by the imports. Now, let me show you a
comment from the White House on where this came from
White House official teleg reporters yesterday.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Quote.

Speaker 13 (18:16):
I want to emphasize here that these tariffs are customized
to each country, and the numbers have been calculated by
the Council of Economic Advisors.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Using very very well established.

Speaker 13 (18:27):
Methodologies from the international trade economic literature. So then I
started calling international trade economic experts and nobody ever heard
of this formula. Nobody has ever used this for women.
So I'm sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the
President kind of made this up as he went along.
He made up and I think what Sarah was saying,

(18:47):
was interesting. There was an anticipation, Okay, it was going
to be reciprocal. These are off the charts and nowhere
near what other countries charge us, and unfortunately it makes
us into one of the highest, maybe the highest tariff
country in at least the developed world a lot like
a lot of sort of developing countries.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah, so there you go. That's the if you will,
the pretzel logic associated with these tariffs. I just wanted
to give you kind of around the horn the way
things sit. I mean, you can obviously see the economic
damage on Wall Street. You can see the economic damage
in markets around the world. But as I mentioned to
you Friday, the biggest price that we'll be paid will

(19:28):
be right here in America. We will suffer. I'm talking
about the markets. I'm not even talking about our lives,
not talking about the price of goods. I'm not talking
about inflation, stagflation anything. If you just care about the market,
all you care about is Wall Street, your four oh
one K, your retirement funds, et cetera. We will see

(19:49):
our markets tank way worse than the rest of the world.
We are going to pay a huge price. He just
wants other leaders to beg and gravel ego in charge,
says Garantee. I made this point last week. Trump likes pronouncements,
he likes the show, he likes to be the boss,
and he is essentially running kind of a mobster White House,

(20:11):
so he wants world leaders to come to him. I think,
as Karen correctly points out, and ask for favors, ask
for exceptions. That is what's happening now. According to the
White House, fifty world leaders called over the weekend to
talk to Trump about exceptions. But you know, his buddy
Netan Yahoo in Israel dropped all tariffs on the US

(20:33):
and they weren't even so bad to begin with, and
still Israel is being tariffed. So you're dealing with, you know,
a mercurial personality, and you don't know that any deal
you make with him is going to last past the hour.
Five to ten years for our markets to recover, says
lack of Maka. Yeah, it's a I think it could be.

(20:53):
It could be even longer to repair the reputation of America.
I mean, I think there's a real cost here associated
with the fact that America's word are our treaties that exist,
our trade agreements that exist, they've really all been undermined
by this. So there's a tremendous price we pay, and

(21:14):
it will take more than five or ten years to
repair that reputation. There's a lot of reputational damage that
Trump has done. And the last thing I will say
economically is that he has deliberately weakened the dollars. So
he wants to weaken the dollar and this because that
makes American goods cheaper, and so that helps in the

(21:36):
back and forth of trade. But the weekend of the
American dollar actually begins to undermine further America's strength in
the world. So when you add reputation, weakening dollar, and
economy that's dropping like a stone, you begin to see
how America's place at the international table gets shrunk, and

(21:57):
it can really do damage for the future. And I
think you're looking at a timeline beyond a decade to
repair that if it's even something that you can repair.
Patterson Thomas Jason's billionaires will get richer, but everyone.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Else will suffer well.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Donald Trump has the Billionaire Boys Club as his cabinet.
They are almost to a person billionaires, and they were
on The Sunday Show circuit trying to explain this. I
played you the Best and Stuff on Friday, where he's
sort of mealy mouthed. Can't really. He's the Secretary of
the Treasury, he can't really. He knows what's going on.

(22:35):
Scott Besant knows what's happening. These people are not stupid,
but they're so cowed by Trump that they just have
to get out there and raw raw. And Lutnik is
perhaps the Department of Commerce head, he's perhaps the most embarrassing.
Play me the last little bit if you would, Tony,
and then I'll get to Gary Dietrich.

Speaker 14 (22:55):
So I would first say, what's extraordinary is they really
really thought that Donald Trump was going to be great
for the economy. They thought it was going to be
great for markets, and so many of them were sort
of blinded.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
By this, the idea that.

Speaker 14 (23:08):
Like so sick of the last four years spending so
much time talking about diversity and DEI. I'm sick of
being in a DEI war room talking about how we're
going to improve things in our company. Well, now those
same CEOs aren't in a DEI planning meeting. They're in
a tariff war room day in and day out. And
they're eating crow. And while they eat crow, they've lost

(23:30):
the ability to even stand up and speak out. And
I'll tell you all of you what's the most alarming,
and it's certainly alarming to foreign leaders, is that no
CEOs are standing up and speaking out. The fact that
we're not hearing from any of them shows that democracy
is lost. Why because Donald Trump will seek vengeance on them.
So in the same way the legal industry had to

(23:51):
bend the need and people are looking at them and
they're obviously saying barely anything. I'll ask Andrew, Andrew, what
made your CEOs? What bank leaders are on CNBC today
walking through the impact of these tariffs, And I'm guessing
you've got some, but not the biggest names in the
markets because they're too afraid to speak despite the fact
that we're facing the biggest economic ship policy shift that

(24:13):
could roil our markets and cause recession. How many of
them are on CNBC speaking You.

Speaker 10 (24:18):
Are one hundred percent right, You're one hundred percent right.
I said you're one hundred percent right. The only CEOs,
the only executives that are prepared to speak out right
now are people like a Bill Ackman, who your eating
his own crow and others who basically work for themselves.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
The big publicly traded.

Speaker 10 (24:37):
CEO companies that are run by CEOs do not want
to speak out. Will they get on the phone and
say this is crazy, Andrew, this is cuckoo for cocoa puffs?
Can you believe it? Are you going to stay on TV?
That is cuckoo for cocoa puffs? You should and here
we are. But they're not because they are scared. They
are fearful of what the repercussion on them is going
to be. And that's a lot of what we saw
or what the president was doing in the first couple

(25:00):
of weeks of his administration that frankly scared them into
being silent.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
That is actually a real fear.

Speaker 10 (25:06):
One other point I just want to make because it
an important one. As this negotiation plays out, in a way,
it's playing into the hands of our adversaries and of
the folks that you would want to make a deal
with if you could, which is to say that as
I was talking with leaders and folks around some of
the leaders of other countries this weekend, one of the
things they say is as the stock market in the

(25:28):
United States continues to fall, it's going to actually put
pressure on this administration, putting them in a better negotiating position.
And some of them, by the way, are just waiting
for the courts. Some of them are saying, let's just
see how the US courts deal with this first. Maybe
Congress is going to deal with this. So it's not
so clear that the longer this plays out, somehow the
negotiating the strength and the negotiating hand that the Trump

(25:50):
administration hand has get stronger. In fact, in many cases,
it make it weaker.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah, good stuff, thank you. I think that is true.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
You know, as America takes on water economically, and as
the roiling conversations around the economy begin to affect constituencies
on the GOP side, I think you're finding other countries,
I mean, in the international community seeing a week in America.

(26:19):
That's a fair point. And this is leaving aside a
lot of the other ways that America is being weakened
at the moment. But we'll get to a lot of that.
But I think that's a really good drill down in
a fairly short time on where we are.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
It is a.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Stubborn president who has come up with a twisted policy
that no one can really explain, including his own people,
that has led us to a place that will affect
American life.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
For the foreseeable future.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
It is interesting that the courts are pointed to because
there are challenges in court, even by Charles Koch about
the tariff liberties that Trump has taken and the declaration
of this emergency that's allowed him to pursue this tariff policy.

(27:09):
Normally a president wouldn't be allowed these kinds of broad
the breadth of judgment on tariffs, and then to impose
that policy. He could come up with a policy decision,
but then he would have to actually see Congress run
it into a policy and applicability. Right now, we're seeing

(27:32):
Trump basically take control as he has everything else under
an emergency flag that he's flying that is being challenged
in court, and it's even being challenged but in a
tepid way in Congress.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
More on this to in a moment. It is to
be continued.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
I see Gary waiting, which is something I don't want
him to do anymore.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
So let me Mark Thompson show.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, Gary Dietrich waiting, And I thought, oh my god,
I've got to shut up and get to a guy
who is terrific. So this guy is the political analyst
for iHeartRadio, also for the CBS television stations. Joins us
on Monday, our former colleague from KGO Radio in the
Bay Area.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
How about it for Gary Dietrich.

Speaker 15 (28:09):
Everyone, Good morning, Mark.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
I was talking to you everyone a few minutes ago
about what California might do because there are rumblings, with
California being the engine of economic strength, that it is
fifth biggest economy in the world, et cetera, that there
might be leverage that the state of California has to
make their own deals. Can you speak to where that

(28:33):
might stand, how viable that is? And yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 7 (28:37):
Well, Mark, here's here. There's so many things to touch
on this morning.

Speaker 15 (28:42):
I have two or three main ones. This is one
of them.

Speaker 12 (28:45):
You know.

Speaker 7 (28:45):
It's really interesting because Gavin Newsom last week said I'm
reaching out to heads of state other nations to cut
sort of he calls them separate deals or special disc
I don't even know how that would work mechanically, right,
how do you keep how do you cut a special deal?
And I mean, you know, federal tariffs are federal tariffs.

(29:07):
So I don't know how Gavin has any control over that.
It may be nothing more than a twenty twenty eight
attention grabber, but it's notable in that California, to your point,
Mark really sees itself and frankly in the private sector
is seen this way as well as its own special
market simply given the size of it. Right, And we've

(29:27):
known this for years about automobiles, about gasoline, about things
that are unique to California in terms of our regulations
and so forth. But now to sort of chart our
own course economically, that would be really interesting. Let's see
where it goes. But the mechanics of it yet unknown.
Gavin didn't weigh any of it out. He just sort

(29:48):
of threw that gauntlet down last week.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, it did seem weird to me. Also, like, I
don't know how that works just logistically. I mean, if
the Feds have the tariff in place, I don't know
how you make your own deal and you know, have
to be in addition to or whatever. So all right, now,
so that's the California component or what else is on
your radar through all of this?

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Oh what happened to Gary?

Speaker 2 (30:12):
I don't hear him all of a sudden, He's, uh,
you've muted, my there is go ahead.

Speaker 7 (30:17):
Oh no, Dad, I didn't do anything on my end,
so I don't.

Speaker 15 (30:19):
Okay, Hey, here's the deal. Over the weekend.

Speaker 7 (30:22):
The big political point I was thinking about was twofold ay.
I have never seen I don't know that in modern history.
I'm not maybe in all American history. Seriously, we can
cite a self imposed economic summer Colonna crisis, calamity, certainly
at least a gigantic read letter warning sign. You know,

(30:47):
most presidents inherit these problems or somehow they get created
by some sort of international crisis or whatever. But to
initiate it yourself, which is what the Trump administration has done, right,
I mean, it is quite remarkable because to watch what's
happened in the markets over the last week. No, your
point before I came on here about you know, where's

(31:09):
Wall Street going to come down?

Speaker 15 (31:11):
And all this? What about our.

Speaker 7 (31:12):
Allies, especially from a geopolitical standpoint, I mean, when you
have people like this, this is incredible. Mark a week
ago yesterday when China announced all of a sudden that
South Korea and Japan, the three of them were meeting
for the first time in five years. A week ago
to lock arms against the terror regime. Well, I mean

(31:34):
pushing two of our closest specific rim allies into the
arms of the Chinese. That's pretty strange, right. So there's
a lot of it that just seems like why would
you do this self?

Speaker 15 (31:45):
Impost?

Speaker 7 (31:46):
And then secondly, I don't know, and I have not
heard anybody asked the hard question, or at least it
hasn't gotten answered. Why would you do this? If you're
gonna do it, why would you do it before you
pass your major, gigantic human piece of legislation through the
House in the Senate that you say is absolutely vital
for your three top priorities, dealing with the border, getting

(32:09):
your tax cuts extended, and dealing with unleashing American energy.
I just don't know why you would create this kind
of a political battlefield before you would get that thing
out of Congress and get it signed. So those are
my two big takeaways from over the weekend. Mark that
I tell you their head scratchers to me.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Politically, well, it's a I love that you touched on
the last one because I'm going to pick up on that,
which is a legislative one. You know, in other words,
if you have a legislative agenda. Why would you want
to start a five alarm fire? And now your legislative
agenda could be troubled because people are going, who is
this guy? All of a sudden, he might have some
political stink on him, et cetera. So we're not quite

(32:49):
at that point, but we could get there real quick.
So now let me speak to that, because you do
hear that on the Sunday shows. I thought it was
so funny listening to these guys try to explain that.
They can't They can't even explain the policy. There is
no coherent even reasoning that explains the way in which
he came up with these tariffs and applied them to

(33:10):
every country on Earth. And by now it's you know,
even countries that are uninhabited, the penguins and all of that.
I mean, you realize how chaotic and absurd and lunatic
this whole thing is. Again these this is my feeling,
but I mean, even you have conceded, and you're a
more objective party than am I that this really doesn't
pass the smell test in any kind of a way

(33:31):
that makes sense. Okay, so you've you've started this situation,
but I'm listening to the Sunday shows, these guys can't
explain it. And then they say, but it'll all be
pay off with this huge tax cut from Middle America
and this tax cut that is going to make such
a difference. So this is what we need. These tariffs
will help enable this great tax cut, and then the

(33:52):
on shoring of all of these different businesses and America
in the future will become this robust economy. I'm thinking, dude,
this tax cut thing, it's really you know, you've said
the quiet part out loud.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
This is what this is all about.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
And I don't know, as you said, and I'm just
going to press you on this because you've sort of
hinted at it. I don't know what you can get
done after this, after you've set the economy ablaze. You
tell me what can actually happen politically for this administration.

Speaker 7 (34:26):
Well, let's just get to the raw vote counting politics
of this.

Speaker 15 (34:30):
Okay. Republicans picked up a couple of seats, as you know, in.

Speaker 7 (34:33):
Florida over the last week week and a half that
was important in the House. They've now got a seven
seat majority. They needed some more wiggle room, all right,
But they know how tight it is. I mean, Trump
withdrew his at least dephonic nomination for U M. Ambassador
because they think we might need her vote in the House.
All right, So I think I think this is precarious

(34:55):
political times. Okay, I'm just talking raw vote counting in
the House and the Senate to get this big package through.
And you've got a lot of you know, even in
California as well as other blue stakes, You've got some
purple House districts that are you know, high on the
Democrat's priority list, and those people are going to be
watching every single poll very carefully right to save their

(35:19):
House seat.

Speaker 15 (35:20):
And I've been saying this for weeks, Mark, but to.

Speaker 7 (35:23):
Me, you know, we're less than eighteen months now from
people getting real serious about turning in their absentee ballots
for the midterm, and that is going to be everything.
Let's make no mistake about it. If Trump loses the
House next year, it is game over for the last
half of his presidency. People in Washington know this, you know,
and it's there will be nothing you can get done.

(35:46):
Not to mention being on the defensive from every kind
of subpoena and investigation that you know would be coming.
So I think this is this whole teariff deal to
me is one of the most remarkable high stakes political
roll the dice I have ever seen.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Well, roll of the dice is a truly charitable way
to characterize it. Although I get it it is a
gamble and he is making this gamble, but it seems
so indisputably ill fated, you know. So I want to
get back though, to legislation in that environment that you

(36:23):
just describe. So if you now take that House lead
to which you've referred, and you have a fairly consolidated
area of support in Congress, I mean he's had that
at least in the first couple of months. I ask you,
do you see and this is again I know there's
no way for you to actually know this, but isn't

(36:45):
it I'll put it this way. Isn't there a way
to see that the political erosion that could come alongside
this economic catastrophe that he's created, that that political erosion
will be such that he won't get that tax cut passed.

Speaker 7 (37:02):
Well, that's quite possible, Mark. I mean, we saw a
number of US Senators last week side with Democrats and
just what they call a sense of a Senate resolution.
It doesn't carry any legislative weight, but saying hey, you
know what, mister President, we want you to pull back
those triffs on Canada. They focused on Canada. Republican senators

(37:22):
a small group of them voted with Democrats for that.
That was signage of what we're talking about. Mark, and
I think the problem, the more difficult problem from Mike
Johnson in the House and assuon the leader of the
Republicans of the Senate is you know when people get miffed,
when your members get miffed about it, maybe a side issue.
For example, you're trying to get the so called one

(37:43):
big beautiful bill pass in the House or in two
parts of the Senate. If these members say, look, I'm
only going to you know how this horse trading goes.
I'm only going to support the legislation if these negative
impacts on my district i e.

Speaker 15 (37:57):
Part of this tariff package are pulled back.

Speaker 7 (37:59):
Now you've got a problem, a problem that Johnson and
Dune cannot solve because.

Speaker 15 (38:03):
It was created by the president.

Speaker 7 (38:05):
Right, So unless he changes this tune, how are they
going to deliver those votes?

Speaker 15 (38:09):
This is what I'm talking about. I I just.

Speaker 7 (38:11):
I mean, from a raw politics standpoint, I think you
get the legislation passed first.

Speaker 15 (38:17):
They pretty much resigned themselves to the fact it's going
to be one bill. That's it. They're not looking at
legislation for next year.

Speaker 7 (38:24):
Election years, especially midterm years notoriously difficult to get major
legislation passed.

Speaker 15 (38:30):
So they're looking at this year.

Speaker 7 (38:31):
I mean, we're talking like the next nine months max.
They're talking next six months to get this bill passed.
And you know, not to beata, not to beata, you know,
the drum too hard. But I think it's going to
be more difficult by the way. I have to express
some measure of compassion for our penguin friends.

Speaker 15 (38:46):
I went.

Speaker 7 (38:48):
I went last week and saw that new movie, The
Penguin Lessons, which is quite poignant.

Speaker 15 (38:53):
If you have people haven't seen it. I went and
saw it.

Speaker 7 (38:55):
It's quite touching. But boy, I'll tay. If you want
a heart for the penguins, go see the movie.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Oh that's low.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, so applause for the penguins. I agree. Yeah, that's
really cool. Gary Dietrich with a big heart. I love
to see that. You know, these policies economically coexist with
these policies that have been quite aggressive when it comes
to deporting those in this country that have cle been
claimed to be violent gang members with ties to Venezuelan gangs,

(39:24):
et cetera. Now we learn at least three people didn't
have ties to gang, so it would seem and I'm
guessing that there is more. There's a Honestly, and again
this is coming from my perspective. I see the chaos
and the disorganization and the well I mean, there's the
incoherence of this administration, and I see it applied to

(39:44):
many different things, and so the deportation I think falls
in that same category. So in a way, I'm not surprised,
but I'm deeply disturbed that they have scooped up all
of these innocent people and sent them all all to
what is essentially worse than a super max prisoner in
El Salvador. My question to you is the pushback now
that the administration seems to be applying on the courts,

(40:07):
which the courts are demanding, Hey, you've got to bring
these people back. They were deported illegally. Now you're seeing
the Trump administration in the former Stephen Miller saying hey,
we can't we don't know how to they're gone now?
And why are the courts getting involved in this?

Speaker 3 (40:24):
Anyway? That's sort of a summary of where he is.
Can you speak to that?

Speaker 15 (40:27):
Well?

Speaker 7 (40:28):
What interestingly, and this doesn't come as any surprise, Mark,
with the bright spotlight now trained on tariffs particularly, you
notice this whole deportation issue is really taking a back seat.
I mean, there are people watching it. It certainly is
getting some traction, but I you know, for those who
would like to see this deportation trains slow down, it's

(40:51):
just difficult, more difficult now in my estimation, because people
are so fixated on the economy, right, and so this
is just kind of this thing sort of had this
and except inexorable quality of kind of how now, how.

Speaker 15 (41:05):
Do you slow down this freight trade.

Speaker 7 (41:07):
There's another part of it too that I think becomes
difficult for the average American, and that is following the
individual stories, you know, because we know that we know
that the polling early this year was strongly in support
Republicans and Democrats of a lot of these deportations, particularly
as you know, of the verified gang members Trendiagua and

(41:27):
people like that. And so I just don't know where
this is going to end up in terms of appetite
for taking this on, even in Congress, you know where
Democrats are making a lot of noise about this. You know,
they're firmly focused right now on this whole economic situation.
So I don't know, Mark, I don't know if there's
going to be reliefed beyond the courts at this point

(41:50):
in that arena.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
Yeah, I mean everything's taking a backseat to this. I mean,
you have this five alarm fire of the of the economy,
and I mean again by political arsonists. I mean, he
set the fire. It's not as though he inherited the fire.
And you're right, it's bumped everything to the back. So
this question of the deportation is one. Ukraine is another.

(42:11):
I mean, the entire question as to exactly where the
Ukraine negotiations sit that has you know, and by the way,
just because I mentioned Ukraine, it's interesting in the context
of the trade deal and these tariffs that are applied
in this haphazard way, Russia was completely accepted.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
There are no tariffs on Russia.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
And you'd say, well, that's because they're in a negotiation
right now and because they are involved in a war.
But Ukraine has had tariffs imposed upon it, So I mean,
the loyalties of this administration seem clear, even in the
way they're applying tariffs in that regard.

Speaker 15 (42:48):
Well, I would also throw.

Speaker 7 (42:49):
In there, let's put the Israeli Gaza conflict in that
same bucket, right, because Netanyahu is meeting with Trump today
in Washington. But it appears like we're gonna hear more
because they are going to do a little mini presser
from the Oval Office to two of them. But it
appears to be more dealing with and I'm sure they'll
be certainly talk of the Gauzes situation as well, but
a lot of this is about trying to grant some

(43:11):
reprieve to Israel over tariffs.

Speaker 12 (43:13):
Right.

Speaker 7 (43:14):
So again, even there, but those two conflicts, right, which
many people saw as the two trip wires for Trump
coming into office, Like wow, these are two things that
could really trip him off, right, I mean, trying to
get these two intractable, seemingly intractable problems solved, and right
now they've kind of also taken a back seat. So
I don't know, I mean, it has really gotten to

(43:35):
a place now where as we're talking about this morning,
as it happens in every election. The economy, Trump's all
no pun intended, right, and so until on unless there's
some settling of these waters. And watching stock indexes today,
it seems like maybe, yes, there's some dropping, but less
than there was Thursday and Friday, for example.

Speaker 15 (43:56):
So let's see where this goes.

Speaker 7 (43:57):
But certainly the Ukraine Russia crisis is not going away,
and frankly, absence some kind of a ceasefire this year,
it's going to be exceptionally difficult for the Ukrainians to
sustain that war unless unless the EU steps have be
even bigger to help them, particularly militarily.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
I should mention that I had mentioned in the first
half hour that the Israeli government dropped the tariffs on
American goods coming into Israel, and you'd think that would
be a reciprocal dropping of the tariffs on Israeli products.
There wasn't. The Trump administration again pals with net Nyahu.
They still have the same tariffs in place on Israel

(44:39):
that they had in place on Thursday. So uh, we'll
see what the net in Yahoo conversation. The last thing
I'll say about that, and I don't know if this
has been updated. Maybe Kim knows. But they canceled that
pressure that you're talking about. I saw that right before
we went on.

Speaker 15 (44:54):
Yeah, they canceled the big pressor they.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Were going to I see, okay, they were going.

Speaker 15 (44:58):
To do one of the large, you know, big room,
a couple hundred meeting.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
I see.

Speaker 15 (45:04):
They're still doing a pressure, but they're doing.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
It in the I get it. Okay.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
That way they can control the questioning a little bit more.
They can curate what they have to deal with a
little bit more. I'm about to dismiss the witness unless
you have something else, Gary, I'll let you go. And
thanks for the Penguin movie tip today. I thought that
was added value.

Speaker 7 (45:25):
Yeah, well, well again, let's stand tight with the Penguins.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
People, Gary Dietrich.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
You can find them on iHeart Radio across the spectrum
of the iHeartRadio stations, also on CBS Television network.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Gary Love talking to you, Thank you, my friends, a
great ye. Gary Dietri.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
By the way, of course, Gary is brought to you
every week on this show by Bill Campbell at Remax Gold.
If you're relocating into or from Northern California and need
a highly respected real estate professional, Bill Campbell is that
highly respected real estate professional. You can reach him at
Remax Gold, call or text him even five three oh

(46:04):
four four eight seventy four seventy four. Five to three
oh four four eight seventy four, seventy four. It's Bill
Campbell at Remax Gold. Right on the Mark Thompson Show.
What a lot we uh get to and got to.

(46:25):
I'm curious a Tony. I also mention this to you.
Maybe you can update it at some point. The voting
in Marx Madness, I mean, I know it's from the
sublime to the totally irrelevant. But to people on the show,
if you look here, it is wild idea is crushing.
Love it when you're angry right now, if you're just
joining us, we every March do Marx Madness alongside March Madness.

(46:52):
And it is a wild it's a wild idea. But
just you'll vote for that. Oh, you'll vote for when
you're angry. Yeah, so either wild idea, which wild idea?
But just or love it when you're angry. It looks
like it's gone down. It looks like a walkover eighty
percent to twenty percent. You can vote until midnight tonight

(47:12):
on that and we'll have a two more for you
in the minutes in the second hour of the show. So, now, Kim, yes,
were you at a protest this weekend? There were big
protests this weekend.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
They were tests everywhere. I had people sending me pictures
of their protests. They were marching in Alaska, and then
someone else sent me pictures of a pleasant hill, big
cities to little tiny towns, protests across America.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Well, we got a few of your emails. This crew,
the folks who watch and listen to the show were
out protesting. It was a big show of protest in many,
many ways. And I know that there was an impeachment
announcement at one of the rallies. Congressman Al Green, he's

(48:04):
a guy from Texas. He was the one who stood
up during President Trump's address to the Joint Session, and
he's going to introduce these, you know again, articles of impeachment.
I think that's performative. I just you know, you can't
even get a bill passed. You're not going to get
you know, you're not going to get any kind of

(48:24):
momentum behind the impeachment, nor will you get any sort
of real plan to remove a guy.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
I remember in this country, you have to.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
The impeachment is the first part, right, it's the trial,
and then you actually vote, and you'll need a two
thirds vote to remove a president from office. But it
speaks to sort of the vitriol that we saw. I
wonder if we can put up some of these pictures
from the rallies. I don't know if you've got them,
but if not, I just know that, I mean, look,

(48:55):
these rallies, as as Kim said, went from Washington to
Paris to around the globe. That wasn't just in this country,
and so it was an impressive show of frustration on
the part of Americans. And I suspect it's not the
end of frustrations, as there have been more and more

(49:16):
issues that this administration has been both on the wrong
side of and has created, I mean out of whole cloth.
The economic crisis that we're living in now and will
only get worse, is something that was a total creation
of this president. He inherited the best economy in the world. He,
despite all of his statements on the stump, inherited inflation

(49:39):
that was very manageable. I understand everything was a bit
more expensive, gas is more expensive, et cetera. But the
actual inflation numbers were fairly low. Now you're going to
see a tax. It's an import tax. We call them tariffs.
Tariffs is a name that was applied to these import

(50:00):
taxes long ago, and it's stuck, so they call them tariffs.
But it is a tax. It's an import tax because
it's a tax. We pay it. It's a tax on us,
those who are consuming. And we are the great consumer economy.
And as long as we're talking about economies, the one thing,
and I think I may have mentioned this to you

(50:21):
last week, the one thing that he completely discounts, this president,
is the fact that we're a service economy and he
only counts goods. So when he's talking about manufacturing, he
only sees, you know, cars coming off a factory line.
He only sees sneakers coming in from Vietnam. He doesn't

(50:42):
see the service economy, which is a robust service economy
that America has, financial services, these are things that have
led the world in service economy, such that other nations
now are trying to play catch up with our service economy.

(51:02):
So this is a real pivot that this nation made,
and we're not alone. A lot of developed nations are
making that pivot from an industrial economy to a service economy.
We've made it, and we've made it successfully. And so
again you can look at things and say, well, it's
a shame the middle class that used to work in

(51:23):
factories across America, they've been left out, they have. I
think that's a reasonable statement. In fact, you could even
say that NAFTA and a lot of these deals that
were made world trade deals that were made have off
short a lot of those jobs. But they're not coming back.
That's the sad reality. They're just not. The price of

(51:44):
labor in America is just too high. And so this
economy has to find ways in which the middle class
can be reinvigorated. But the way in which the middle
class can be reinvigorated is not associated with these kinds
of These are some of the picks from the protests
over the weekend. It's not associated with tariffs. And then

(52:05):
trying to onshore a lot of these industries. Most of
these industries are robotic dominated, so most of these assembly
line jobs wouldn't even go to actual people. That's if
you could build a plant in any kind of reasonable timeframe,
it might take you a decade to onshore a plant,
and then when you do, there are not enough jobs
associated with it to make a difference, because again, most

(52:29):
of these industrial jobs are now being automated. So the
number of the number of funny signs and clever signs
that showed up over the weekend was not small. It
was a big number of very clever, angry people who
showed up with signs across across America. But that's just

(52:52):
a little bit of an overview of where we are,
just to kind of stated bluntly, But I want to
take a quick coffee that call I wanted to take
a coffee?

Speaker 3 (53:02):
Can I just went here? Please?

Speaker 2 (53:10):
That's Coachella Valley Coffee. They are one of our sponsors.
They are our sponsor. Really, they have a small sponsorship
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(53:32):
best coffee on Earth. And I was drinking it and
saying that before they were even part of this show.
So I adore my Coachella Valley Coffee and and Kim
loves her Coachella Valley Tea.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Yeah, to the point where when the tariff list came out,
I was looking at you know, Brazil and Peru and
all the places the coffee came from to think, to
see is the price of coffee going to go up?
I don't know what's gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah, I know, I actually had the exact same question.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
We'll have to see.

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Speaker 3 (54:50):
Mark Thompson Show.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
I wanted to quickly get to and then I'll get
to David Sarota. I wanted to quickly get to any
comments that I needed to attend to with our eyes rise,
says or the five dollars super chat and thank you
for that. Tiny hands and his administration are chess playing pigeon.
They crap on the board, knock over all the pieces,

(55:13):
then strut and say they are winning. Yeah, well they
do have surrogates who are saying that they are winning. Mark,
you missed the genius of Donald Trump's strategy, says Luis
for the five dollars super chat, thank you destroy the
global economy equals by Greenland and Canada at bargain basement prices.
It's the tree three D chess, my friend. Yeah, you're right,

(55:36):
I did miss that. Pretty while I answered this question,
there's a Congress from Peter uh calling for impeachment. Do
you think it will get legs in the House, whether
it be enough Republican Congress that have the cohonas to
sign up.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
The answer is no and no. So that is that.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
But I mean, we, you know, we love that sort
of hopium. You know, the the anti Trump porn is
stuff like that, which is, oh my god, we're gonna
impeach him. We're gonna, you know, look at the look
at all the people in the streets people are angry
he doesn't have a chance.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Well, that's our own silo. Okay.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
I do think that he's taking on political water. Don't
don't get me wrong. I definitely believe that. In fact,
you heard Gary talk about that in part. But I
don't think that there's any reasonable expectation that there is
going to be impeachment proceeding with any legs.

Speaker 4 (56:27):
No, if most lawmakers are millionaires, which is true they are,
then wouldn't it be millionaires that are seeing their stock
stocks take a hit, And wouldn't they be then moved
to maybe sign on to some type of thing that
removes Trump, some impeachment.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
No, No, Xana Griffin. Signal gate must be kept in
the news and all those involved be jailed.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
It is treason us and they are traders.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
There is an investigation of signal gates. When everybody jumped
on signal, and it was not their first time, apparently
we know twenty times that they use signal to communicate
this insecure network, and of course the one that got
all the visibility when they had folded in mistakenly the
Atlantic editor. Some of those who were communicating were communicating

(57:20):
from Russia in official capacities they were in Russian government
buildings notorious for spying, so they had already likely infiltrated
that phone and were aware of everything going on. That
investigation does continue. I don't know if anything will come
of it. I suspect not, but at least it is

(57:41):
out there. But as we were mentioning with Gary, everything's
being bumped to the back burner by the five alarm fire,
which is the American economy. And it's a fire that
Donald Trump started. You know, a super smart guy is
Farid Zakaria, especially when it comes to international relations. And
he was on this weekend as he is is, and
he made a couple of comments. I can't run all

(58:03):
of it, but I wanted to run a little bit
for you to give you a flavor for his take
on it, because I think his take on it is
so spot on, and some of it you'll recognize because
we've been talking about it on the show. I think
since Trump has been taking power, but other stuff you
might find really eluciative.

Speaker 5 (58:21):
Go ahead, Tony, And yet Donald Trump has been convinced
that all these decades, as America has moved ahead, it
is actually in steep decline. His worldview seems to have
been set in the nineteen sixties, when, in his memory,
America was a great manufacturing power. Another piece of that
antique worldview is an overestimation of Moscow's power, which in

(58:45):
his mind apparently remains a towering economic player on the
world stage with whom he can do many important deals.
Russia bizarrely has been excluded from any new tariffs. The
reality of America as the dominant nation in the fastest
growing and most critical spheres of the global economy today,
technology and services, seems to mean nothing to him. His

(59:09):
tariffs have been calculated using a method closer to voodoo
than economics. Among many mistakes, they are based solely on
US trade deficits with countries in goods. That America runs
huge surpluses in services. Exporting software, software services, movies, music, law,

(59:29):
and banking to the world somehow doesn't count. More than
seventy five percent of the US economy is apparently intangible fluff.
Steel is the real deal. But while America is the
world's dominant power, it is not so strong that it
can act this irrationally. The world economy has grown of

(59:51):
a size and scope that it will find ways around
American protectionism, which is now among the world's most egregious.
Contrary to Trump's stubborn beliefs, the US was in fact
already somewhat protectionists, with tariff and non tariff trade barriers
greater than in sixty eight other countries. Now, with these

(01:00:12):
new tariffs, American protectionism is literally off the charts, with
higher rates than the smooth Holly ones of nineteen thirty
that exacerbated the Great Depression. In the short run, everyone
will suffer, but in the medium to long run, countries
will start trading around the United States. This movement has

(01:00:33):
already begun. Since Trump one in twenty sixteen, the US
has abandoned virtually all efforts to expand trade, but other
countries have picked up the slack. The European Union has
signed eight new trade deals and China has signed nine.
As Richer Sherma notes, of the ten fastest growing trade corridors,

(01:00:55):
five have one terminus in China, only two have a
terminus in the United States. Countries around the world need growth,
and that means trade. China will clearly be the big
winner in this new world economy because it will position
itself as the new center of trade. Add to this,
Trump's hostility toward America's closest allies, and you will likely

(01:01:17):
see Europe, Canada, and even some of America's Asian allies
find a way to work with China. Dal Trump's nostalgic
worldview is rooted even further back than the nineteen sixties.
He looks fondly on the late nineteenth century, when, as
he described this week, the US had only tariffs and
no income tax, and America was way stronger economically than

(01:01:41):
it has ever been compared to the rest of the world.
This history is nonsense. In nineteen hundred, the US was
around sixteen percent of the global economy by one measure.
It is now about twenty six percent of it. American
standards of living and health are much higher today. But
in acting out on his nostalgic fantasy, Donald Trump might

(01:02:03):
well end up dragging America back to what it was then,
a poorer country dominated by oligarchs and corruption, content to
swagger around in its backyard and bully its neighbors, but
marginal to the great currents of global economics and politics.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
There you go. I thought was great.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Some of it again, we've discussed on the show for
a while, But some of it I thought really sort
of made the point in such a compelling fashion.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
He's really a brilliant guy.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
Joy says, thanks to all for being voices of common sense,
well most of the time. Thank you, Joy Branson for
a ten dollars super chat I will play for you.
Then in a moment, the conversation I had with David Sarota,
and he's a brilliant investigative journalist with the Lever and

(01:02:55):
we'll talk a lot about this, but I did want
to tell you that we are a crowdfunded show and
some of you have really stepped up. These are tough
times for the show. There are a lot of reasons
for that, associated with stuff that we have no control over,
which is the algorithm and Google and YouTube, etc. That's
really our home court YouTube. And then we go out
as an audio podcast across Spotify, across iHeartRadio, across the

(01:03:18):
Apple Podcast. So those of you who really do make
this show happen, we scroll your names at the end
of every show because without you, we would not exist.
I say it over and over again. Tony updates the
list every month. So if you are a newcomer, thank
you for joining through Patreon and PayPal. Again, if you're
joining through Patreon, Join through the web, through our website,

(01:03:41):
even the Mark Thompsonshow dot com. Click Patreon or PayPal
and those links will take you to places where you
can contribute. If you are contributing through Patreon, don't go
through the Patreon app. That's all you have to because
they take a third that way. As long as you
didn't go through the Patreon app, you're fine. But many
of you have stepped up and helped keep this show
on the air. I really do appreciate that. Again, we

(01:04:04):
are completely crowdfunded. It's kind of a PBS NPR model.
So I give you the show for free across all
those platforms I mentioned. But the people who keep the
show on the air are our supporters through super chats
of course and superstickers, but also through the monthly contributions
through Patreon and PayPal. So thank you guys, very very

(01:04:24):
much for that. Now, my conversation with the Great David Sirota.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
The Mark Thompson Show.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
It was great.

Speaker 7 (01:04:38):
I love it.

Speaker 14 (01:04:41):
How would you have us?

Speaker 5 (01:04:42):
We could try ignoring you, sir.

Speaker 6 (01:04:46):
You cannot say you love your country?

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
Where am I?

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
We've smokers at stay at home and get baked right on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
It is such a pleasure to welcome this next guy.
I am such a fan. I've followed him for years.
I'm a paying supporter of all of his endeavors, and
I encourage you to do similarly. His independent journalism is
done now at the lever and if you subscribe and
you support, it, hits your inbox and it gives you
such great takes on the world, on the economy, on

(01:05:18):
American government, and perspectives that you just won't see anywhere else.
How about it for David Sarota everybody, Yeah, you know,
this post Liberation Day, I'm really happy to be talking
to you because I think you may be of all
people able to offer a perspective that I don't yet see. Meaning,

(01:05:44):
I think I do fall into the oh my god,
Trump is the mad King and now his madness is
going to be spilled all over this trade deal. I
don't see any redeeming qualities, but there are some cross
currents in it, and I feel like you, David Sarota,
might be a to point me toward them.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:06:01):
I mean, look, I think a lot of things can
be true. At the same time, I think the Trump
tariff policy is at some level it seems pretty haphazard,
seems pretty terrifying if you're worried about higher costs, which
I think most of us are. I think it's also
true that Donald Trump is the tariff policy is the

(01:06:25):
culmination of a backlash to the free trade orthodoxy that
originally really de industrialized the American heartland and caused mass pain,
suffering and economic devastation across this country.

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):
You mean like NAFTA type for example.

Speaker 6 (01:06:45):
Yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I'm old enough to
have worked on Capitol Hill during the passage of the
China PNTR deal, which is the original China trade deal
that lowered tariffs with China, brought China into the WTO
and at the time back then, this is nineteen ninety
nine two two thousand and one, at the time, there

(01:07:08):
were a lot of questions and fears that in doing
this it would lowering those tariff barriers, it would incentivize
corporations to pick up shop and leave the United States
to go to places like China to exploit cheaper labor,

(01:07:30):
no environmental standards, no human rights standards, etc.

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
Etc.

Speaker 6 (01:07:35):
In other words, for companies to lower their costs and
increase their profits by exploiting the authoritarian conditions of China,
and there were a lot of concerns about that, by
the way, on the left and the right, and in effect,
that's essentially what happened. That's what happened over the last
twenty five years or so. And same thing of companies

(01:07:59):
moving to to Mexico, essentially moving out of the United
States to exploit exploitable conditions. And I think that if
we're being honest about things, we have to understand that
that caused a ton of pain, it caused a ton
of agony, and it reshaped our politics. There was a

(01:08:19):
study recently that found that a core segment of America's
working class between the passage of NAFTA and eight years later,
that over those eight years, a core segment of the
working class bailed on the Democratic Party, that some of
the strongest Democratic congressional districts became some of the strongest

(01:08:40):
Republican congressional districts because NAFTA was perceived, it was very
elevated in the media, perceived to be a Clinton administration
democratic initiative. Now that's not exactly fair because it was
pushed by a Republican congress, etc.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
Etc.

Speaker 6 (01:08:53):
But the point is is that there was a lot
of justifiable anger out there, and Donald Trump, who at
one point flirted with running under ross Perot's party line
back in the two thousands, ross Perot was the guy
trying to sound the alarm about this. And so my
point is only that, yes, it's true that Donald Trump's

(01:09:15):
tariffs don't seem to be all that well thought out.
They're not targeted, they're not gradual, they seem to be
a power grab by him. They're probably going to destructively
exacerbate inflation. But we also have to understand that they're
not coming out of nowhere, and that the push for
a different trade policy comes out of genuine pain and

(01:09:38):
suffering that the free trade elites in politics foisted on
this country with really devastating effects.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
That's fascinating, and it's more speaking to the origin story
of the tariffs as opposed to kind of the situation now.
But it also connects so beautifully, David, with what you're
talking about, which is working class America feeling jobbed if
you're part in the expression by the trade policies of
the past.

Speaker 3 (01:10:09):
Yet I look.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
At Trump and I don't see a guy who really
cares about working Class America, although I understand that he
may see them as his constituency that propelled him to power.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Beyond that, I don't think he really cares.

Speaker 6 (01:10:24):
Yeah, I'm not sure he really cares either, but I
would say this, I do think he Look, I don't know.
Put it this way, I don't know what is genuine
with Donald Trump, right. I mean, it's hard to psychoanalyze
the person Donald Trump. I can say that when he
talks about how our existing trade policies have incentivized companies

(01:10:47):
to leave the United States, it is financially rewarded companies
that essentially do labor triage, environmental assuming, labor arbitrage, environmental arbitrage, etc.
Is exploiting bad conditions in other countries. I do think
that rings true, and I do think we should be

(01:11:09):
asking how do we bring companies and production of things
that we really do need to make in this country.
How do we bring that back to the United States. Now,
I'm not sure across the board, tariffs are really the
way to do that, and they're going to cause a
lot of pain in the short term. I think that

(01:11:29):
there's an argument that a stronger industrial policy is necessary,
where the government says in a coordinated fashion. This is
our price. We need to be making be able to
make certain things in this country that are vital to
national security, things like microchips, etc.

Speaker 3 (01:11:49):
Etc.

Speaker 6 (01:11:51):
There are ways to incentivize that. There are ways to
create the conditions for that that don't necessarily involve blood
across the board tariffs. I would also say this if
people are worried about how trade displaces certain jobs or
certain manufacturing that moves to other countries, we have not

(01:12:14):
done a good job as opposed to many other countries.
We have not done a good job of supporting workers
in transitioning to newer industries in other countries that are
exposed to more global trade than even we are. Countries
in Scandinavia and the like provide a real safety net
and support system for workers whose jobs are exposed to

(01:12:36):
those trade transitions, right. I mean put it this way.
If you're a worker in Sweden and you're working in
a factory that faces global trade competition and your job
gets outsourced or eliminated, you have a healthcare system that
provides good healthcare to you. You have a good retirement

(01:12:57):
system that provides retirement. Do you have a good job
retraining program that provides retraining, you have good unemployment benefits
and the like. I'm not saying that's a solution. But
part of the reason why trade, I think has exacerbated
this political divide in this country, is because when workers
are sold out by the existing corporate written trade policy,

(01:13:22):
they are left essentially to wither away. There's almost no
support system at all. I don't sense any commitment by
Donald Trump to create that kind of support system at all.
To your point, That's why I'm not sure Donald Trump
really does care about the working class. We're watching Donald
Trump and through the supposed Department of Government Efficiency, essentially

(01:13:45):
gout the very frail and already tattered social safety net
that exists for workers who are exposed to global trade.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Right now, Yeah, thank you. That was about to say,
you know, the safety net has left the building. I mean,
you've got this guy go in and just taking a
wrecking crew to everything. So even the minuscule support system
to which you've referred is is really pretty much gone.
So you know, let me, just because you mentioned that,
segue to that for a second and talk about what

(01:14:16):
is happening in government, and you know whether or not
Trump's vision of a government less America dovetails a bit
maybe with this trade stuff. And here's what I mean,
it does fall into an authoritarian, growing dictatorial muscle.

Speaker 3 (01:14:39):
He seems to want to flex.

Speaker 2 (01:14:42):
And I just wonder if and again I don't even
know that anything with him is so well thought out,
maybe instinct with him, but if these things don't just
all work toward that goal on site.

Speaker 3 (01:14:55):
Agree?

Speaker 6 (01:14:56):
And I think we have the first Trump administration to
look to when it comes to tariff as well. In
the first administration they put in place something like five
hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of tariffs on certain
Chinese goods and the like. And there was a process
of getting exemptions. Corporations, lobbyists could come to the Trump

(01:15:18):
administration and ask for exemptions, special favors essentially. And there
was a study that came out recently that showed a
link between companies and lobbyists that represented companies that donated
political money to the Republican apparatus and them being preferenced

(01:15:39):
for those exemptions. It was a kind of a smaller
version of what we could see happen now, which is
the King Trump, if you will, is now in a
position visa the tariffs to offer tariff exemptions to those suitors, companies,

(01:16:00):
obbyists who come and kiss the ring. Right, it is
in that sense a tool of power consolidation that you've
created another situation where to get If you're a company
and you want to you want to make a case
that you're you're going to be put out of business
because of the tariffs, you can pony up to the

(01:16:22):
king in hopes of trying to get a special exemption.
That's what I'm going to be looking at really closely
in the next coming months.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
Here.

Speaker 6 (01:16:32):
Now, I will say this, Trump has said that these
tariffs right now are across the board, right, I mean so,
so at least for now superficially, they're not talking about exemptions.
But if you really want to watch how this could
end up being an authoritarian power grab, it's important to
watch what happens coming up. Who's going to get the

(01:16:55):
special favors, who who is going to go kiss the ring?
And one more point on this is how Trump gets
to use that leverage with different economic and political players
to get what he wants.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Oh, that's interesting. Expand on that last part because that's
sort of intriguing. You're saying that he could have agenda
items that these various suitors as you describe them, could
take care of.

Speaker 6 (01:17:23):
I mean for sure. I mean, if you're a company,
I mean think about the media space or something like that.
If Trump doesn't want you doing something, if Trump wants
a better coverage, if Trump wants for his own family
a specific business transaction, and that potential business partner, that

(01:17:45):
entity on the other end is dealing with Trump's tariffs,
then Trump's tariffs become a negotiating tool for Trump to
get all sorts of things that he wants. And I
should mention part of this is exacerbated, of course, the
fact that Trump is essentially exercising this power unrestrained by Congress, right.

(01:18:08):
I mean, we're in a situation where in the past,
there have been situations where Congress had to approve different tariffs.
Congress had to say yes or no. Now we're in
a situation where the President just gets to wake up
one morning declare Liberation Day, say that there's an across
the board tariff affecting every American in the entire country.

(01:18:28):
But he also has the power to issue special exemptions
to get whatever he wants.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
Yeah, it's funny. We were talking today about this because
people are championing the Corey Booker record on the Center Floor,
which I thought really did punch through and you know,
was a way to in the minority seize at least
the news cycle on some level. And also the Wisconsin
Supreme Court win, which you know was in the face

(01:18:55):
of all that Musk money. So there's sort of this
germination of optimism in the Democrats and also in the left.
But it's funny, David, I don't see the seizing of
control that you just described. The idea that the executive can,
as you said, sort of wake up and impose tariffs,

(01:19:17):
roll back tariffs, scribble out some exemptions. However he wants
to do it, that really isn't his area of power.
And yet the power has been seated to him so
completely that I find us kind of just rolling over
for what are the authoritarian instincts and impulses of this guy?

(01:19:39):
And I ask you, as someone who does know Washington
so well, what's happening?

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):
Why the complete surrender like this?

Speaker 6 (01:19:46):
Well, look, it's actually a longer story than Donald Trump.
I mean, there's the whole idea of the unitary executive theory,
which is that this theory that was sort of sort
of built in the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighty
out of the same we did a whole podcast series
called Masterplan, which is about the rise of this new

(01:20:07):
conservative movement, and they sort of they sort of evoked,
really conjured this idea that the president is the singularly
the executive branch, that there is no real civil service,
that you really can't distinguish between the president and the
executive branch, really the president and the government as a whole.

(01:20:31):
And what's happened is is that that there have been
moments in which that doctrine has been enshrined in law. So,
I mean, you remember the Bush Cheney administration citing the
essentially the unitary executive to do all the sorts of
stuff it did in the so called War on Terror.
There have been presidents who use emergency powers. My point

(01:20:54):
is we're living through an era where the power, what
we once understood is legislave supremacy. The Congress really drives
the policy, the president merely executes the policy. That core
fundamental separation of powers situation that has been significantly eroded
to the point where presidents are more have been more

(01:21:16):
and more operating as elected kings. And I think there's
not a good It's really well understood. What is the
difference between an elected king and what is supposed to
be a president in the United States? And there is
a fundamental difference. An elected king an elected autocrat may
get elected, so there may be some small de democracy

(01:21:38):
at work there. There's actually an election we choose, but
an elected king, an elected monarch then has total and
complete power. Now that is not how the country was
set up or envisioned. The president is supposed to be
a co equal the executive branch, a co equal branch
with the Congress. But we look at the Congress today

(01:22:00):
and it's both by the way, the Congress's fault and
past congress's seeding power. So it's both the people who
are in Congress now, but it's also the power that
has been ceded to the executive branch by law now,
which is colluded to create this problem where yes, the
president can wake up and do all of these things.
And I would say this, it's a really important point here.

(01:22:23):
We lived through an era. I just I can't get
it out of my head. We lived through an era,
the Obama era, where Obama won a giant mandate, had
fifty nine and sixty Senate votes, huge congressional majorities, and
there was this argument that the Democrats and the president

(01:22:44):
just couldn't do anything, they didn't have the power to
do anything, and this idea resurfaced at times in the
Biden administration. I think the Biden administration did a lot
better job in a lot of ways on some of
these issues than the Obama administration, but you still heard, oh,
we can't do anything because of the Senate part elementarian,
Oh we can't do anything because that would be sort
of outside of the norms. Donald Trump is reminding, should

(01:23:09):
be reminding everybody that those arguments that were made against progressives,
the left, rank and file Democrats who wanted their party
to do things, that those arguments were nonsense. Donald Trump.
I disagree with almost everything Donald Trump has been doing
in terms of a power grab, etcetera, etcetera. But it's

(01:23:30):
a reminder that when Democrats are in power, they have
had the power to deliver and they have refused to
use that power. We are seeing an exercise of power
that exists, and I hope the next time, if there
is a next time, that the Democrats have power. Everybody

(01:23:51):
will remember that the president has a ton of power,
and everybody will not just be satisfied with nonsense like, oh,
the president really can't do anything, even if he supposedly
wants to. Donald Trump is reminding us of how much
power the executive currently has.

Speaker 3 (01:24:09):
Wow, that's such a great point.

Speaker 2 (01:24:12):
And I suppose there's this normalcy bias maybe that the
Democrats have that they sort of just want to they
want to get back to the parliamentary rules. In this case,
certainly you have someone in Trump and those around him
that have an utter disregard of the rules, disdained for
the rules and even for the law. But their view is, hey,

(01:24:35):
we're going to break it now. We're going to do
what we want to do, and then take us to court.
We'll see you there and maybe we'll work it out
in three or four or five years whatever I mean.

Speaker 6 (01:24:43):
I mean, look, that's exactly what they're doing. And I
think it's important to remember Donald Trump's party controls Congress,
So when Donald Trump is doing things by executive feat
outside of the separation of powers system, it's important to
understand that's a deliberate choice. Let me let me make

(01:25:07):
it more plain. If Donald Trump wants to do something,
he can go to his party in Congress and get
Congress to pass a law to do that, whether it's,
you know, eliminating the Department of Education, whether it's whatever
he wants to do. In choosing not to do that,
I think there's two admissions going on. One the much

(01:25:28):
more democratic entity of government right where there's four hundred
and thirty five different elections, where there's sort of the
people's branch of the government, the Congress, that his agenda,
perhaps he fears, cannot gain enough support inside of the
small D the most small d democratic entity in the government,

(01:25:51):
which is a reminder that his agenda then is really
out of step with what the public actually wants because
these Congress people have to go back and talk to
their constituents and get reelected every two years. That's one
thing to remember. But the second thing to remember is
that when he goes outside of that system, I think
they are deliberately trying to create new norms that say

(01:26:15):
that the president can do this. The president doesn't even
have to go to Congress. The president is an elected king,
and for the long term, I think that's the thing
that's among the things that's most scary normalizing the idea
that the president is not the executive branch, is not
a coequal branch of government, that the courts and the

(01:26:38):
Congress are essentially vestiges of an old system, they are
ceremonial at best, and that the president just gets to
do whatever they want. And that is I mean, that
really is terrifying.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
And that really is it seems the way it's being
played out. You're right, I mean, and it's interesting, you know, David,
I I see, no this is skipping way ahead in
the movie. Maybe, but I see no way in which
this guy is going to step down. I mean, or
these people are going to step down. They're really reluctant
to give up power. And so I see, I'm refreshed

(01:27:15):
that we even had an election in Wisconsin that seemed
to be somewhat legitimate. I believe that I shouldn't say somewhat,
but I mean the there's big money in it, which
is kind of to me always the somewhat. I mean,
it's just so sad that you know, we've become beholden
to this. But I guess what I'm worried about is
that this power grab could be complete and you even
in one of your responses in our conversation so far,

(01:27:36):
have said, you know, if there is you know if
he is, if he does step down, or you said
something about the you know it should another election happen, David,
I worry that, you know, again, it's skipping way ahead.
But I don't know that these guys aren't going to
find a way to retain power one way or the other.

Speaker 6 (01:27:52):
Well, I think the most compelling thing that I've seen
written is about this idea of competitive autocracy, competitive authoritarian
where I think our minds are sort of programmed to think,
you know, there's a binary, there's like a pure democracy,
and then there's like the Third Reich or like the

(01:28:14):
you know, some dictatorial hell escape from a sci fi movie.
I think we're I think the world is a little
bit more nuanced than that. I think what we're seeing
is what we've seen in other countries like Hungary, like
El Salvador, et cetera, et cetera, where there are elections,

(01:28:35):
the elections are competitive, but the incumbents who are in power,
the regime, if you will, is able to put its
thumb on the scale, use its control of the state
to put its thumb on the scale to kind of
tilt the playing field in that competitive in those competitive scenarios.

(01:28:59):
So again, it's not a total you know dictatorship or
you know dystopian dictatorship from a sci fi movie. But
it certainly is a much more authoritarian system than I
think we've gotten used to. And we've seen this in
countries in Latin America and the like, where there are

(01:29:20):
parts of the of the systems that are democratic, but
where there is real authoritarianism. And I think what that
reminds us of is that in order to regain power,
or really regain at least a balance of power, it
is going to require a constant and mass mobilization and

(01:29:43):
a better awareness that the opposition to this has to
be a lot stronger. I always use when I think
about the democrats, I always I tend to think of
it in the in terms of the Washington generals and
the Harlem globe trotter. If your goal is to defeat,

(01:30:03):
to actually defeat the Harlem globetrotters, you're not doing anyone
any favors by blindly cheering on the Washington generals, who
in many in many cases are in on the act
of losing to the Harlem globe trotters. If you want
to defeat the Harlem Globe trotters, you're probably gonna have

(01:30:26):
to demand a much better team than the Washington Generals
to challenge the Harlem Globe trotters. The metaphor only goes
so far. But I think you get my point.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
No, I think it's a really great parallel actually that.

Speaker 6 (01:30:40):
The Democrats, and to be honest and people, oh well,
maybe it should be a third party, et cetera. The
point is, whatever the opposition is has to be held
to a much higher set of standards and demands to
actually fight in this in this kind of situation, then

(01:31:00):
what that opposition has been asked of in the past.

Speaker 2 (01:31:04):
So in our last minute or so on that. Do
you look at what's happened so far with the minority Party,
the minority opposition, the paid opposition, however you see them
in the Washington General's parallel, Do you see them with
any real opportunities or is this crew just going to

(01:31:26):
roll over and play dead like they have in the past.
Do you think, in other words, they can be animated
by the sort of rising up in pressure popular pressure
that you're describing.

Speaker 6 (01:31:36):
Well, I'm I can be pessimistic and optimistic all at
the same time. I mean, let's use the Corey Booker example.
Corey Booker does this filibuster. It's not really a filibuster,
but it's something. It gets a lot of media attention,
kind of focuses in some nebulous way that there needs
to be a much more vigorous opposition. But if you

(01:31:57):
watch what actually so, that's I guess that's good. But
if you watch what actually happened, literally he says, he's
ending his speech, and moments later, the Republicans ask if
there is unanimous consent to allow the Senate to move
forward with considering the confirmation of another Donald Trump nominee,

(01:32:20):
this case the appointee to NATO, and there was unanimous
consent Booker, all the Democrats, none of them, none of
them objected. It's literally in the Congress record without objection.
It is so ordered, and it moves forward. My point
in bringing up this little anecdote is performative opposition is

(01:32:44):
not adequate to the moment. Performance is important at some level.
It's not nothing. It focuses attention, but that is not adequate.
What needs to be demanded is a real opposition that
if what Donald Trump is doing is as bad as
Corey Booker articulated, and I'm not picking on him only,

(01:33:05):
but if it is as bad as what Corey Booker articulated,
then the opposition needs to treat it as if it
is as bad and act accordingly. Shut down the Senate,
slow it down in a way that you actually have
the power to do in the way that we've seen
Republicans in the last few decades, right like, really actually

(01:33:28):
play hardball. Is it enough to stop everything bad that
Donald Trump is going to do? Almost certainly not. Is
it necessary to do to try to stop some of
the of the bad stuff? Absolutely, And my hope is
is that as more rank and file liberals, democrats, progressives

(01:33:51):
see what's going on, they will become much more demanding
of their democratic lawmakers, their Democratic reppersentatives to actually do things.
In other words, that the old excuses from the Democrats,
which have essentially sedated and anesthetized lots and lots of
liberals into saying, hey, they're just doing the best they can,

(01:34:13):
that those old excuses should no longer work anymore, and
that more and more kind of normy liberals, normy progresses,
people who aren't necessarily paying attention to politics all the time,
but who are nonetheless somewhat engaged that they don't accept
those excuses anymore, and they demand far more of their

(01:34:34):
lawmakers in mounting a real opposition and using what power
they have to put up that opposition.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
Well, this has been a shock to the system this
first two months. You'd think that this could motivate a
kind of activism that we haven't seen. And there's certainly
been an activism, David, wouldn't you say, I mean even
GOP activism. Many more people, for example, in the last
election shout up in the general than had before on
the GOP side, and they were first time voters.

Speaker 6 (01:35:00):
Look, that's why I'm somewhat optimistic here in terms of
not because of people lots of people coming out to
vote for Donald Trump, but because I do think we
are now finally in that moment where it's possible for
the rank and file of the Democratic Party to really
move the party into a real opposition mode. I mean,

(01:35:23):
I will admit to you I wrote a book back
in the late two thousands called The Uprising where I
basically said, listen, this is going to go one way
or the other. There's a lot of populist anger out there.
It's going to go one way or the other. And
it felt like this could be the moment. It was
at the end of the Bush administration, Barack Obama's running
for president. Is this the moment where the Democratic Party's
rank and file gets angry enough it it's party to

(01:35:44):
demand real results. The financial crisis happens, so it's perfectly
teed up for a kind of New Deal paradigm shift.
And without going all the way into it, but you know,
hope and change becomes more of the same, becomes bank
or bailouts, it becomes you know, weak findingnancial regulation, and
the Republicans seese on that discontent with that to create

(01:36:05):
the situation that we're now in. But I guess what
I'm saying is that I felt like this there's a
chance for enough anger amongst Democrats at the Democratic Party
to motivate the party into a real opposition stance would
create a paradigm shift. It didn't happen. The hope is
it will now happen. And I want to mention one

(01:36:27):
last thing. We have seen this happen in the past.
I mean the nineteen the New Deal era, the nineteen thirties,
nineteen forties, the nineteen sixties where there was enough foment
inside of the Democratic Party to force the party to
deliver and to put up a real opposition to conservative

(01:36:48):
authoritarianism and fascism. So we've been here before. I think
we're in this year in my lifetime where you know,
it should have happened in two thousand and eight, didn't
really happen. Hopefully there's another chance. It's probably a more
difficult situation because of what we've talked about Donald Trump's
thumb on the scale when it comes to democracy. But
hopefully this is the wake up call.

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
Yeah, uh boy, I'd love to see it. That'd be great,
great reporting. Always at the lever. We'll continue to show
you the love here and we hope he'll join us
again soon.

Speaker 6 (01:37:20):
Thank you so much, anytime, Thank you so much, really,
all the best of my friends.

Speaker 3 (01:37:23):
David set good stuff the Mark Thompson Show.

Speaker 13 (01:37:36):
Who's Mark Thompsons?

Speaker 1 (01:37:46):
When they rated marlogo, God didn't like that.

Speaker 3 (01:37:54):
Right on, everybody, Thank you for being here.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
By the way, I didn't mention it yet, but it
is free to you to uh small, to like a
button like a boss and smash it with your iron rod.

Speaker 3 (01:38:04):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:38:05):
Karen Dawn coming up will change gears and talk about
the world of animals in a moment. I did want
to mention the last thing about Trump, because he is
my lord and savior. I know the rest of you
are skeptical, but one of the ways he asserts his
lordship is on the golf course. That's right. He does

(01:38:26):
a lot of golfing. And wouldn't you if you were
the smartest person in the world, you don't need to
be in the office all the time. You knock off
little golfing and establish your supremacy.

Speaker 3 (01:38:38):
And that's what he did.

Speaker 2 (01:38:39):
I believe, Kim, who is the official golf reporter of
this show. Isn't it true that Donald Trump won a
golf tournament over the weekend.

Speaker 4 (01:38:49):
He's very proud that he won a golf tournament.

Speaker 3 (01:38:52):
Over as he should be. Kim. Don't give me your
sarcastic lib stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:38:56):
All right, Yeah, you know, sometimes you just have to
brag little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:39:00):
That's correct. Thank you, You know you.

Speaker 4 (01:39:03):
If you're not touting yourself, then who else is going
to tout you?

Speaker 3 (01:39:07):
Thank you fantastic? All right?

Speaker 2 (01:39:10):
So tell me what he was touting because I was
busy watching the five alarm fire, which is the world
economy tanking, and I didn't pay enough attention to the
golf course.

Speaker 4 (01:39:22):
Well, you see, as people were protesting in marches across
the country and after hours, markets were tanking. Over the weekend,
Trump was very excited about his golf tournament. Yeah, he had.
He flew down to Morrow Lago. On the way there,
you know, he was asked by reporters about the markets

(01:39:44):
and what would happen, and he said, it's very important
that the markets take the medicine.

Speaker 2 (01:39:49):
That we have to take our medicine. All right, Yeah,
so we're taking the medicine. And while we're taking the medicine,
he is, he's on the golf course.

Speaker 4 (01:39:58):
Okay, yeah, he's he's doing this golfing. And he did
it Saturday, and then he did it again on Sunday.

Speaker 3 (01:40:05):
And you got to get a couple of days in.

Speaker 4 (01:40:07):
Yeah, I got a golfing in because you know, if
you're going to go ahead and charge up the secret service,
right all the costume as well, get two days in.

Speaker 3 (01:40:17):
Sure, thank you. That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:40:18):
He's actually shaving the American taxpayer money, is what you're saying,
only right, right, right could have gotten to a different
golf course that would have cost us more.

Speaker 3 (01:40:27):
Okay, so let me just get this straight. Though. I
thought he did declare it was the go ahead that
he wanted tournament. Am I wrong about this?

Speaker 4 (01:40:35):
It was the Senior Club championship.

Speaker 3 (01:40:39):
Wow, all right, I love it. That's my president.

Speaker 4 (01:40:43):
It's a pretty big deal. Because people were lining both
sides of the the PGA drive and there were honking,
and there were people chanting slogans against him.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
All this out not the kind of love you want
as you approached the back nine.

Speaker 3 (01:40:59):
No, yeah, all right.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
Still he managed to take this.

Speaker 3 (01:41:04):
I mean you wonder, Oh he had to tune all
that out. You're saying he.

Speaker 4 (01:41:08):
Wins the tournament, But I wonder if anyone else was
going to win the tournament. I mean, who's gonna want
who's going to really try their hardest against Trump?

Speaker 13 (01:41:15):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:41:15):
I see you're saying it like that Putin thing where
they let him score eight goals in a game.

Speaker 3 (01:41:19):
Yeah, you're right, that may be.

Speaker 4 (01:41:23):
Need to be the other guy that won the tournament. No, no, no,
you don't want to be him.

Speaker 3 (01:41:27):
I didn't realize that.

Speaker 2 (01:41:28):
You're right, he had to focus through all of those
angry mob libster jerks who are protesting him in every way.
My god, well I am. I'm excited. That's my president.
And the only other thing. I'll just button it out
and to tell you that I'm very excited about his

(01:41:48):
birthday plans. I don't know if you are aware of this,
but President Trump has big plans for his birthday everyone,
which is the most important birthday.

Speaker 3 (01:41:58):
I put it up there.

Speaker 2 (01:42:00):
With Jesus' birthday in my book, but you can have
your own book, and you know, you can rate it
as you'd like.

Speaker 4 (01:42:05):
I don't know, Mark, Jesus didn't get a special parade.

Speaker 2 (01:42:08):
No, he did not, and he probably, you know, should
come back, as is the plan and is the talk
that he will come back, if he hasn't already in
the form of Donald Trump for this parade. The parade
is a huge parade. It is miles long, and it
will be on Donald Trump's birthday, and it will be
a parade of all military vehicles. It'll be a show

(01:42:31):
of military might. Isn't that right, Kim, Yeah, it'll be.

Speaker 4 (01:42:34):
He wants a military parade for his birthday. He asked
for this last time around.

Speaker 3 (01:42:39):
By the way.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
I've been asking for that since I was like five
years old, and I've never gotten even a tank to
show up. So, yeah, a military parade. It's his seventy
ninth birthday, So if you're looking to get him something,
you still have some time. When is the birthday.

Speaker 4 (01:42:55):
It's in June, early June, I believe.

Speaker 3 (01:42:58):
Yeah, he wants June fourteenth, which is the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the US Army, for the event.
And they'll march four miles from the Pentagon in Arlington,
Virginia to the White House. And I totally imagine what
it's going to be great with the Peter Navarro and

(01:43:18):
all of my favorite Fox and Friends people are going
to be there.

Speaker 2 (01:43:21):
They'll be cake, and it's going to be great. I
that's the invitation that I want.

Speaker 4 (01:43:26):
In his defense, I will say that his seventy ninth
birthday is coinciding with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of the formation of the United States Army. Yeah, of course,
see how this works out. No, I think it's great
army and a celebration of Trump a little bit of each.

Speaker 3 (01:43:44):
I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
I will try to get there if at all possible,
I now without any further delay, all though as you know,
I do enjoy delaying. It is one of the things
that digressions of life. I believe can be the richest
endeavors of life. But I will not delay further. The
first Monday of every month we like to check in

(01:44:07):
with Karen Dawn on the World of Animals and we
call it a Word about Animals.

Speaker 1 (01:44:13):
Now, a word.

Speaker 4 (01:44:18):
About animals.

Speaker 3 (01:44:23):
I'm a Mark Thompson show.

Speaker 2 (01:44:27):
And our guide through the world of animals is Karen Dawn.

Speaker 3 (01:44:30):
Hi, Karen.

Speaker 2 (01:44:32):
Dawn Watch, which is the daily animal world news watch.
You can finally have a very robust following on Facebook
and I subscribe so I get Karen's offerings in my inbox.
Tells you kind of what's happening in the way it's
being covered worldwide with issues that involve animals, small, big,
and everything in between.

Speaker 3 (01:44:52):
What's up today, Karen, Well.

Speaker 16 (01:44:55):
One of the main things Dawn Watch tries to do
is to encourage and I'm advocates to be in touch
with the media, and one of the things we do
is sent off letters to the editor and as well
as telling people on my list please write, I write
as well, and you know, the folks on your listened

(01:45:16):
to your podcast may be aware that the Los Angeles
Times has had a pretty major turnover of late, which
happened around the time they decided not to endorse Harris
and people were given a employees they were given the
right to leave if they wanted to.

Speaker 12 (01:45:35):
And for the.

Speaker 16 (01:45:36):
Animal world, that mattered in one way that we lost
a letters editor who we were mad about, crazy about
because he was so willing to share our letters that
share the animal's point of view on things. The good
news is we didn't know what was going to happen,
but last week under a different editor, and I'm not

(01:45:59):
sure who it is now and whether it's a permanent fixture,
but both Elaine livesey Facil and the inimitable Elaine livesey
Fascil incredible activists and I had letters published in the
Los Angeles Times in response to an article mentioning that
the salmon fishing season was going to be canceled again

(01:46:24):
in California because they are not enough fish. And Elaine
and I both had letters published, and not only the
thank you for sharing that, Tony. Not only did we
have letters published, but there were displayed such that we
got the headline, and their main headline about was about
animals and Tony, I don't know if you can scroll

(01:46:46):
that up slightly so that I can read it, because
I've forgotten exactly what.

Speaker 12 (01:46:50):
It was, but.

Speaker 16 (01:46:53):
The headline underneath the letters there, but it was it
is an obligation to undo our impact. And that was
what Elaine's letter talked about the fact that because of
things like climate change, and what I love about Elaine
is that she did a particular shout out about the
impact of big agriculture on the salmon, on the waterways,

(01:47:17):
and with water being diverted from the salmon spawning grounds
to the beef fields and the factory farms, and we
are putting the salmon population in major danger.

Speaker 15 (01:47:33):
Now.

Speaker 16 (01:47:34):
Of course that matters to the salmon fishing folk, and
it matters to all those folks who love to eat salmon.
But as an animal advocate, what I focused on in
my letter was that it matters most to the animals
who rely on salmon for their food, who cannot switch
to tofu and beans and homas and quinoa and all

(01:47:57):
the wonderful things that we can eat instead of eating salmon.

Speaker 12 (01:48:01):
So we have now seventy three.

Speaker 16 (01:48:06):
Orcas left in the Puget Sound area in the Pacific Northwest.
There were seventy five two years ago. They're extremely endangered.
They are starving for lack of chinook salmon. And I
sent Tony a New York Times article from a couple
of years ago, and I've provided a gift link to this,

(01:48:30):
which I hope you guys will include during my on
the segment of that goes up on YouTube.

Speaker 3 (01:48:38):
Yeah, we can put it underneath underneath your video.

Speaker 12 (01:48:40):
Here, because I sent a gift link.

Speaker 16 (01:48:43):
And if we can see the headline to that, Tony,
I don't know if you can scroll up so that
we can look at that and I can read that headline.

Speaker 12 (01:48:50):
Might have to put my glasses on unless you can.

Speaker 2 (01:48:53):
Starving orcas and the fate of Alaska's disappearing king salmon.

Speaker 3 (01:48:59):
Yeah, that's what you're talking about.

Speaker 12 (01:49:01):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 16 (01:49:02):
So it's the chinook salmon, it's the California. Our letters
were respond in response to the California salmon fishing season
being canceled because they just are not enough salmon. But
if folks think, oh, well, I can go buy Alaskan salmon,
yes you can, But what that article in The New

(01:49:23):
York Times is about is well, should we be fishing
salmon because we've got and.

Speaker 12 (01:49:28):
It's not only orcas who are dying.

Speaker 16 (01:49:30):
But people do tend to feel a lot for orcas,
so it's useful to mention we are losing them fast
because they've got no salmon to eat. So if for
health reasons you know you are moving away from beef
and red meat and onto salmon, I hope folks will
be aware that they are contributing to the losses of

(01:49:53):
species such as orcas. It's not just aucus thousands of penguins.

Speaker 12 (01:50:00):
Your previous mentioned.

Speaker 16 (01:50:02):
The guests mentioned the penguin, maybe thousands of them washed
up on South American shores a couple of years ago
with empty stomachs.

Speaker 12 (01:50:11):
I mean these.

Speaker 16 (01:50:13):
Sea mammals, see birds, all of them need fish to eat,
and we are draining the oceans and the waterways fast.
So again, when California mentions, hey, there's not enough salmon,
we're going to cancel a o salmon fishing season. While
it matters to us, it matters a lot more to

(01:50:33):
the animals who just don't have other choices.

Speaker 2 (01:50:35):
So let me just ask you though, as a follow up,
then Is it the overfishing that has led to this
or is it the general conditions of the ocean what
has led to this free fall in the population of
these fish.

Speaker 12 (01:50:48):
It's a mix.

Speaker 16 (01:50:49):
So when the Los Angeles Times covered it, it mentioned particularly,
you know that the we've got heat, the waterways are
heating up, and so that the spawning grounds are not.

Speaker 12 (01:51:01):
True.

Speaker 16 (01:51:02):
They're not good for the eggs and the eggs dyeing
and the hot waters. And then it is the diversion
of the waterways that are going to big agriculture to
farm meat, and so we are we have screwed up
the California waterways. But without doubt, overfishing has played a
massive role. And there was a movie called The End

(01:51:23):
of the Line, which I saw maybe a decade ago,
and I think still it's the most important movie perhaps
I ever saw. It just talks about that fact that
we are emptying the oceans, and when we empty the
oceans of all the fish, we empty them. And you know,
it's sad that people don't care about fish.

Speaker 12 (01:51:46):
And you know, a lot of us grew up with these.

Speaker 16 (01:51:49):
Myths that fish aren't sentient, and they have memories of
eleven seconds when it in fact, it's years.

Speaker 12 (01:51:55):
I mean, it's just been a myth.

Speaker 16 (01:51:59):
And I'd like to actually talk a lot another day
about fish and what we know about them now.

Speaker 12 (01:52:04):
But when we empty the oceans of fish, we are
destroying the oceans.

Speaker 16 (01:52:08):
As Paul Captain Paul Watson says, when the oceans die,
we die. And so that's what's going on, is that
we are eating far, far too many fish because there's
so many of us, and we are killing off. As
I said, the Southwestern the orcs in the around the

(01:52:30):
Puget Sound area and Seattle are down to seventy three
that's all.

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):
That's as you say, and you correctly point out, I
mean the fish populations are depended on by all of
these other species as well, So it's not just the orcs,
but I mean the orcers do tend to get the headlines.
As you say, we kind of feel connected to them, right, And.

Speaker 16 (01:52:49):
I wanted to mention, like the orcers eat chinook salmon
in particular, something else that is having a horrifying impact
on the oceans is the amiga three supplement. Business people
learned that amiga threes that are the reason salmon is

(01:53:09):
good for you is because it has omiga threes in it,
and so people started getting their amiga threes from supplements.
These are mostly made up of anchovies, and we are
decimating the oceans as we pull billions and billions of
anchovies out of them. Larger fish eat the anchovies, and
then the seals and the penguins and the other fish

(01:53:30):
eat those larger fish, and again we're just destroying the oceans.
For these amiga three supplements, there's a question as to
how much they actually help us or not. But something
I learned while researching thanking the monkey is that algae
has the same amiga threes that salmon has because the
salmon eat the algae they stored in their bodies.

Speaker 12 (01:53:53):
Then we eat the salmon.

Speaker 16 (01:53:56):
We can take out that middleman who the orcas and
other animals rely on the salmon by eating the algae ourselves.
So I, personally, I do still take amiga three subselequents,
but I take algae supplements. And if you just look
up vegan amiga three, that's what they're made of, and
it's the same stuff that is in salmon, but without

(01:54:17):
the salmons.

Speaker 2 (01:54:18):
Oh that's great, that's a great substitute. I love it,
you know, it's interesting. I was just remembering that there's
a book called What a Fish.

Speaker 12 (01:54:26):
Knows, Johnathan Malcolm's book.

Speaker 2 (01:54:29):
Exactly, and it's so terrific and if you want to
a visit with some of what Karen down is talking about,
What a Fish Knows really is a great book for that.
It you know, again, draws on the latest science. It's uh,
it gives you a sense of what fish are about

(01:54:50):
and you just have no idea till you check this
book out.

Speaker 3 (01:54:55):
So What a Fish Knows what it's called. I'd love
to get him on the show too.

Speaker 16 (01:54:58):
Sometimes the delight and I just want to mention, you know,
as I said, when I was growing up, I was
told they weren't sentient and they have memories of eleven
seconds and no, it actually shows out some of the
news tools and some of them mate for life. So
it's just completely different from everything we were taught. But
still the orcers do not have any choice but to
eat them, whereas we do. So it's something it's something

(01:55:21):
really important to think about with our fish oils and
our salmon passion, that we're just empting the oceans.

Speaker 2 (01:55:27):
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's a world that we
don't know because it is underwater. I mean, but I
mean the beauty, the mating rituals, the society. I mean,
it's all of these things, the sentience, the feelings, the
fear that I mean, they have it all, and there
is this thing that we do where we delude ourselves.

Speaker 3 (01:55:49):
Thank you for putting it up there.

Speaker 2 (01:55:50):
What a fish knows, Jonathan Balcolm, The inner lives of
our underwater cousins. Yeah, it's just love talking.

Speaker 16 (01:55:58):
About animals with you. I love how much you know
about these issues. Mark that it's wonderful.

Speaker 3 (01:56:03):
Well, they're so very important, so I am not yes, please.

Speaker 16 (01:56:09):
I love that the Penguin movie was mentioned to be
poor because we have another animal movie that has just
come out.

Speaker 12 (01:56:18):
And the Los Angeles Times has.

Speaker 16 (01:56:20):
Done a ravery review of The Friend, and I have
not here. I think Tony is about to put up
the hilarious looking photo from The Friend with Naomi Watts
walking this huge great Dane. I have not seen The
Friend yet. I can't wait to see it because I
read the book, which won all sorts of awards I'm

(01:56:40):
trying to remember for it won the Pulitzer or the
Book or one or the other.

Speaker 12 (01:56:44):
And it was one of a series.

Speaker 16 (01:56:46):
Of three a trilogy that Sigurd Nuns wrote, and the
first one, The Friend, about this woman who inherits a
great Dane from her her very best friend who just
took his own life. And the book is about her
relationship with this great Dane and it's hilarious and it's touching,

(01:57:10):
and I actually listened to it on tape and which
it was beautifully read. I get my books out of
the library and download the audio. But the Los Angeles
Times has raved about this movie, and I'm excited to
see it, and people are saying it's Naomi, What's best
work ever so, and I'm sure the dog has done

(01:57:30):
a beautiful acting job as well. I'm not generally a
big fan of animal actors, and there has occasionally been
times when Winkie, speaking of animal actors, my dog is
drinking here while I'm trying to talk to you. I
don't know if you can hear that when there have
been problems. But I think in general, dog actors do

(01:57:53):
much better than other animal actors do. And I have
a feeling that this dog is treated beautifully both on
set and off, and I'm excited to see the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
Well, the treatment of animals on sets is definitely improved
from the old days, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:58:05):
Find Karen Dawn across.

Speaker 2 (01:58:08):
The universe online, which you know, encompasses face, encompasses Facebook,
and encompasses just her website there it is dawnwatch dot com.
And I also think, as I say, that Facebook community
that you've built is really a big one. So again,
Dawn watches on Facebook as well. It's the Daily Animal

(01:58:30):
World News Watch and you can find her here first
Monday of every month. Karen, really appreciate your visits and
thank you.

Speaker 12 (01:58:37):
Great to see you. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:58:39):
You will Karen down everybody.

Speaker 14 (01:58:42):
Join the flock again next time for a word about animals.

Speaker 3 (01:58:47):
I'm a Mark Thompson show on everyone right on.

Speaker 2 (01:58:53):
Well, the little hand is on something and the big
hand is on something else.

Speaker 3 (01:58:58):
Do they do that still in school? Kim? Is everything
digital now? The kids still do it good?

Speaker 4 (01:59:02):
Okay, I still try to teach them how to read
a clock.

Speaker 3 (01:59:04):
Yeah, that is important. I think.

Speaker 2 (01:59:08):
Now we're at a fork in the road, as you
might imagine at this time, Tony, you can weigh in
on this as well. Tony's got like five other jobs
to go to. Maybe, yeah, I got I do the Angels,
and then I gotta do this Korean talk show. Then
I got to go do this other This is Tomali's
show that I do.

Speaker 3 (01:59:28):
I did. It's a show about Tomaly's. It's like, jeez, man,
really show.

Speaker 4 (01:59:32):
Let's listen to that.

Speaker 3 (01:59:33):
I appreciate that you can work us in. I have.
I have a focus and purpose right now. I have
a goal in mind and I will make it happen.

Speaker 2 (01:59:40):
All right, good, good good. But with this fork in
the road, do you want to do some turbo news
and get out or how do you want to do it?

Speaker 3 (01:59:49):
Kim? Oh, I'm how you think we're too late?

Speaker 4 (01:59:52):
I have I have a very quick one in there,
very quick.

Speaker 2 (01:59:56):
Okay, all right, so we'll do a quick quickie news
on the way out, and then I will take couple
of comments. I almost yellow carted somebody today, Oh wow,
and he's lucky I didn't. It was Mars and I
almost yellow carted Mars.

Speaker 3 (02:00:10):
I'll tell you why.

Speaker 2 (02:00:11):
I'll tell you why at the end of the newscast.
So turbo turbo, hurry, hurry, Kim's news in a turbo fashion,
and then I will offill you in and take a
couple of comments.

Speaker 3 (02:00:22):
Smart Thompson Show.

Speaker 4 (02:00:23):
Yes on The Mark Thompson Show. I'm Kim McAllister. This
report sponsored by Coachella Valleycoffee dot Com. It's been a
pretty volatile day, you could say, for US markets. On
Wall Street, they swung between big gains and losses, economists

(02:00:44):
calling it a tariff tantrum. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
sank fifteen hundred points lower before moving higher and then
regaining those losses. S and P five hundred and the
NASDAC have also been swinging wildly all over the place,
so it's been quite a day. The White House wants
the Supreme Court to stop a federal judge's deadline for

(02:01:05):
the return of a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Sunday,
a US district judge denied a Justice Department request for
a stay on her order to have Kilmar Abrego Garcia
returned to the United States. In court filings, the White
House attorneys have said Abrego Garcia was deported over an
administrative error, but they say they can't bring him back

(02:01:28):
due to him being in Salvadoran custody now. The judge's
deadline is set for midnight tonight. As Mark bentionined to
celebrate there's mister Garcia Abrego Garcia, as Mark mentioned. To
celebrate his birthday, President Trump is reportedly planning a military
parade through the nation's capital. Multiple reports say a parade
will happen through the streets of the nation's capital June fourteenth,

(02:01:52):
the president's seventy ninth birthday the army's two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary. The parade will be four miles long, headed
from the Pentagon to the White House. The federal government
revoking that show.

Speaker 3 (02:02:03):
That's four miles too short, Kim, I wish it was eighteen.
Oh yeah, I wish you were. I wish you were
sixteen miles every multiple of four.

Speaker 2 (02:02:11):
I want a big parade for my Lord and Savior
Donald Trump's wonderful birthday seventy nine years old.

Speaker 3 (02:02:18):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (02:02:19):
If you're gonna bring the tanks out, you might as
well roll them all as far.

Speaker 3 (02:02:23):
As thank you. Yeah, gass them up, and let's keep
this party going.

Speaker 4 (02:02:26):
Yeah. The federal government is revoking the visas of four
more Columbia University students. The Columbia Provo says the Trump
administration didn't notify them and that they were only in
forum due to proactive daily checks of a federal online
system of foreign born students data. This comes after the
legal status of several other Columbia students was revoked last month,

(02:02:49):
including pro Palestinian activists Mahmood Khalil and Youngseo Chung. Here
in the Bay Area, we're seeing the same thing Bayrie
University seeing their foreign students having their visas revoked because
of political activism. UC Berkeley officials say six students had
their F one visas revoked by the Department of Homeland
Security and were told to leave the country. This last week.

(02:03:12):
Stanford University officials said four students and two recent graduates
suffered a similar fate. The Los Angeles Dodgers are set
to visit the White House today to celebrate last year's
World Series win. The team expected to meet with Trump
before taking on the Washington Nationals later in the day.
The Dodgers reportedly made the decision to have the visit

(02:03:33):
with Trump the Dodgers players, So there you go. And lastly,
Tennis legend Billy Jean King has received a star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Speaker 3 (02:03:43):
Ah, that's great.

Speaker 4 (02:03:44):
It is the another first for King. She is now
the first woman to get a star in the Sports
Entertainment category. That category is pretty new, it's only four
years old. Announced in twenty twenty one. The first to
receive the honor former NFL starring current Good Morning America
host Michael Strahan. In twenty twenty three. The Carl Weathers,

(02:04:06):
who played for the San Diego Chargers but is best
known as Apollo Creed and the Rocky Movies is the second,
and King is honored for her work in the PBS
documentary series Groundbreaker.

Speaker 3 (02:04:17):
Okay, I'm sorry, so let me just get so.

Speaker 2 (02:04:18):
It's the others that you mentioned were athletes who also
got stars.

Speaker 3 (02:04:23):
Is at the point in the.

Speaker 4 (02:04:24):
Sports entertainment category?

Speaker 2 (02:04:26):
Okay, Carl Weathers and then Michael Strahan, right, and now
Billy gen King Gen King love it.

Speaker 3 (02:04:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:04:32):
This report is sponsored by Coachella Valley Coffee. It's a
little bit of heaven in your coffee cup. The coffee amazing,
the t chef's kiss, Coachella Valleycoffee dot Com. It is
fresh beans for the coffee, all organic from women own farms.
How do you not support that? And to top it
all off, the cherry on the Sunday you get your

(02:04:53):
ten percent exclusive Mark Thompson Show discount by typing in
in the code box mark T no spaces mark T
and you get your ten percent off Coachella Valleycoffee dot com.
I'm Kim McCallister. This is the Mark Thompson Show, The
Marks Show.

Speaker 2 (02:05:11):
Yes, everyone, thank you for being here. We're wrapping up
and appreciate everyone. Wherever you were watching, however you were
watching or listening, we appreciate you. Quickly, I'll take some comments.
Rich people are beneficiaries of the tax cuts. I assume
that's why they're being silent, says a Jana Luke, who
with a five almost six euro super Chatyana, I think

(02:05:37):
there are two reasons. First of all, they're not completely
being silent. But let me just quickly, in twenty seconds
or less, tell you that CEOs is mentioned in the
first half hour. CEOs are quiet because they're scared Donald
Trump can take all kinds of retribution and revenge on
big companies, publicly held companies. So CEOs have almost a
fiduciary responsibility to those stockholders, etc. To the public that

(02:06:00):
owns the company to kind of just take it and
shut up about it.

Speaker 3 (02:06:04):
So it's a weird.

Speaker 2 (02:06:05):
Place that CEOs find themselves, and that's part of the
rich people as you describe them. And then I think
there are also others who are in this crew that
are kind of waiting for the storm to pass. They
also don't want to arouse the ire of the king.
And the last thing I'll say is that again there
are rumblings the Wall Street is making noise about this

(02:06:27):
as well, and those are some rich people who are
included in all of that. The tech bros are losing
their mind over this. Joy Branson says, thanks to all
of your being voices of common sense. Well most of
the time. We read that earlier, and then thank you again.
Scroll is better than trolled, says Harry Magnan, Thank you
for two dollars super chat. Lucy McCallister, my favorite McAllister

(02:06:48):
with a twenty dollars super chat.

Speaker 3 (02:06:51):
We appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):
It's been tough times in the independent media world, and
good lord, what's he going to do for his eightieth birthday?

Speaker 3 (02:07:00):
From the bay.

Speaker 2 (02:07:04):
It is it's tough to top to seventy ninth, but
the eightieth probably be quite the party. Does the loser
of the drop not get played again? I don't want
to think that I will never hear them again. No,
they just don't go They still go into rotation. But
the loser of the drops. By the way, do we
play the drops that are going up against each other
this hour? I don't know if we even did. No,

(02:07:26):
I was going to ask, Oh my god, it's crazy.
I mean, this is really this is malpractice on this show.
What's happening right now? So this hour and this continues
for the next what twelve hours? So the voting till
midnight tonight West coast time, so three am on the

(02:07:49):
East coast. You can vote for.

Speaker 3 (02:07:52):
Either you just don't get it, yeah, Either either that
or I love it when you're angry. Okay again there,
you just don't.

Speaker 2 (02:08:01):
Get it, Yeah, you don't, or I love it when
you're angry.

Speaker 3 (02:08:04):
Okay, They're so good.

Speaker 2 (02:08:06):
Yeah, yes, no, just don't get it versus Oh no,
it's not that, is it?

Speaker 3 (02:08:13):
It's uh any bit a bit of weed? I'm sorry,
isn't an I screwed it up? Again?

Speaker 2 (02:08:20):
Speaking of my practice, it is you just.

Speaker 3 (02:08:25):
Don't get it, You don't that, or isn't anybody the
other one angry?

Speaker 2 (02:08:30):
I think is in the first one, right, isn't that level.
When you're angry is up against wild idea and lovel
when you're angry is losing by a lot to wild idea.

Speaker 3 (02:08:37):
So go back.

Speaker 2 (02:08:38):
It's either any bitty bit of yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:08:42):
Or you just don't care, just don't get it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:08:46):
Okay, So that's where we are. Blue Spark, thank you
for a five dollars supersticker, appreciate that. A big shout
out to you and everybody who supports us. And jane
O saying I rather tax dollars go to veterans benefits
than the Donald Trump's birthday. Karen says, oh geez, Trump
finally gets his fascist inspired military parade. I agree, I

(02:09:09):
think it's crazy. And then finally, Mars says, Mark talking,
Trump is talking to reporters live Mark, if you want
to hear the news direct instead of believing speculation like
from CNBC false news. Mars, I don't know how to
say this. I'm going to say it in a pleasant,

(02:09:30):
polite way, because that's my way.

Speaker 3 (02:09:32):
You are a troll.

Speaker 2 (02:09:34):
I tolerate you because I am the king of this broadcast,
and I tolerate trolls.

Speaker 3 (02:09:40):
It's a weakness of mine.

Speaker 2 (02:09:41):
I have been told by many that I tolerate way
too much in the chat, and you are an example
of way too much. And here's the part of your
And again I don't mind you being critical of me
at all. Like so when you say, if you want
to hear the news direct instead of believing speculation like
from CNBC false news, I've run nothing from CNBC that

(02:10:03):
isn't absolutely, indisputably corroborated. All right, So there is nothing
that I have run today from And I like CNBC
because they're a financial news network and so a lot
of the people they have on economists and other experts
in the financial markets really add to the conversation. That's
why I run them. If you think running Trump live

(02:10:25):
from the Oval Office helps any conversation, you're just I
don't think you really believe that. I think you'd just
like to troll me, So you're nuts. Donald Trump lies,
He lies continuously. You're not going to get anything but
more lies from taking his feed from the Oval Office live. Okay,
when he's got something to say, I'll run it. I

(02:10:45):
run a bunch of his stuff, and I'll continue to
run his Oval Office stuff if it's pertinent, if it's relevant.
But him just diluting the nation, and you among them.

Speaker 3 (02:10:56):
I get it. You're a maga guy. Great, fine, don't
troll me. I will throw you off of this platform.
I'm just at a place now where i'm you know,
I'm underslept, I'm irritated. I'm working hard to keep us
on the air, and I don't need an asshole on
here just kind of stirring the pot. Okay, I actually

(02:11:17):
like that you're in the platform and in the chat.
I don't mind that. I actually, as I say, I
like it.

Speaker 2 (02:11:23):
It's not even because I think it's important to have
like opposing views. But if you're just gonna troll me,
I just am gonna red card you, dude. I don't
need it, and I'm not in the mood for it anymore.
I work too hard to be trolled. Okay, so so
just stop it. I'm gonna ask you to respond substantively
to things. If you have something substantive to say, I
will respond to it. I think you can be funny. Also,

(02:11:45):
please stay in that space. If you come after us
with that bullshit, I will throw you off because I've
just had enough. I've really we work too hard for
me to endure this day after day.

Speaker 3 (02:11:57):
Okay, so that's where I am on that So good day, sir.

Speaker 2 (02:12:05):
All right, and with that, listen, can't we all join
the hands. I'm sorry I didn't. I know, I feel
bad for yelling at Mars.

Speaker 3 (02:12:15):
Listen to me.

Speaker 2 (02:12:15):
I don't want to hear you.

Speaker 3 (02:12:19):
Maybe I shouldn't, I mean, judge, Judy says it right.

Speaker 6 (02:12:22):
When you gave me a lot of money for having attitude,
that's right.

Speaker 3 (02:12:25):
Maybe I should make the big money with attitude. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:12:28):
Anyway, listen, this is what you get when we go
a little bit long.

Speaker 3 (02:12:32):
I just talk about it.

Speaker 4 (02:12:35):
After party.

Speaker 2 (02:12:36):
Yeah, I'm I'm you know, I'm hungry, right, Maybe I'm hungry?

Speaker 3 (02:12:42):
What do they call it? Yeah? Yeah, you're too nice?
Mark says rich.

Speaker 2 (02:12:48):
Maybe the after Party Live is going down with the
After Party Live host?

Speaker 3 (02:12:54):
Who is Kim?

Speaker 7 (02:12:55):
So do it lot?

Speaker 1 (02:12:56):
You all right? And I will do it lot?

Speaker 2 (02:12:58):
What is that Tony in the chat? A links from
the chat? Thank you Tony, Thank you everyone.

Speaker 3 (02:13:02):
Stevens for the Mark Johnson Show.

Speaker 2 (02:13:05):
Bye bye, uh tomorrow David K. Johnston and Moore until then,
Bye bye

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