3/12/25: Trump Sec Says Recession 'Worth It', WH Tesla Showroom, Zelensky Ceasefire & MORE!
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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We are sadly not joined by Ryan Grimm or Sagar Anetti, although there will be plenty of Sagar Anetti in today's show because he got some questions at the White House briefing yesterday, as he talked about on the channel. But Crystal is in, and I am so excited. Crystal, thanks for being here. It's

Always my pleasure. Ryan home with some sick kiddos, but we are hoping, he said, if things are chill at home and like relatively, you know, peaceful, he's going to join us later in the show for an update on Mahmoud Khalil and there are like a million things that we have in the show today. I was looking at the lineup, Emily, literally any one of these blocks could have led the show. No, seriously. Yeah, normally there's some stuff that's clearly like, oh, we're interested in it, but we recognize it's not all that important and you try to put the most important things at the front of the show.

literally any of these blocks I think could have gone first because each one of them is extremely consequential. It is a whole show of a blocks and the news cycle just keeps changing. Crystal, we were talking about how yesterday we had to rework the show like several different times because yesterday's news cycle, I mean, we,

many such cases, right? There have been a lot of crazy news cycles, but yesterday was one of the crazier ones. So we're going to start by talking about the tariffs, which was a roller coaster yesterday. We have some new footage of Howard Lutnick answering questions. We have some footage of Sager getting questions in a White House briefing and some updates on where the tariffs stand right now. Jeff Stein is going to join us.

to talk even more about the tariff policy particularly. We're going to start talking about Wall Street and tariffs and all of that, but then Jeff is going to be in the show. We're excited to have him with us to go through how particularly the tariffs are being viewed around the world and how they're affecting or how the Trump administration is approaching them. Then, Crystal, late yesterday we learned the Education Department was taking its first step towards shutting down by laying off 50%, 50%,

50% of its staff. So we are going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how the House of Representatives actually passed a spending bill to avert a government shutdown and is now in the hands of the Senate and leaves Democrats with a sort of interesting question on their hands as they head into the second half of this week. Ryan will hopefully join us for a conversation about Mahmoud Khalil. Sagar was able to ask the White House about that at the briefing yesterday, so we have footage.

And we have new updates from Dropsite and other sources. And then we will be talking about another massive story, another A Block. Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz walked out of a marathon meeting with their Ukrainian counterpoints—counterparts, if there's a Ukrainian counterpoints. I would love to see that, but counterparts—

with a ceasefire proposal that they sent over to Russia. Steve Witkoff is headed for a meeting with Vladimir Putin this week. So now that we have the run of show laid out, everyone can see, man, what a time to be alive. Crystal, let's start with the economy and this incredible snippet of a new interview that Howard Lutnick gave. This is A-Zero. Watch this.

Will these policies be worth it if they lead to a recession, even a short-term recession? These policies are the most important thing America has ever had. So it is worth it? It is worth it. A, I don't think the only reason there could possibly be a recession is because of the Biden nonsense that we had to live with.

Okay, so JPMorgan Goldman Sachs are now putting the likelihood of a recession around 40-60, so 40% likelihood of a recession. And you have massively wealthy people like Howard Lutnick, obviously Commerce Secretary there, saying,

a recession would be worth it. Crystal, this is just to pause on this clip before we get to Sagar's question at the White House. It's the messaging, the optics, just on the surface level. You have a bunch of billionaires walking around saying, don't worry about it, it's worth it. It's worth it. And it's worth it for what exactly?

Like, that's the other piece is I'm not sure that they've really explained what all of us, all of, like, regular Americans out there are meant to be sacrificing in...

in service of is the other piece of it, which is what we've talked about with the tariff policy, where Trump has had like 18 different explanations for why we're putting on tariffs, including making Canada the 51st state, something that was not proposed on the campaign trail and no one voted for, but, you know, suddenly is a major priority in U.S. policy and you're supposed to suffer in order to make this happen. Like,

It's insane. And, you know, there's a few things with regard to Lutnick here that are important to point out as well. I sent you guys this article yesterday from Politico. Apparently, Trump aides are preparing to throw Howard Lutnick under the bus for the, you know, poor economic numbers and poor economic political standing of Trump. In fact, there's a new CNN poll out that has him at his

lowest numbers ever in terms of how people feel he's handling the economy. I mean, obviously, this has been a traditional area of strength for Trump. It is arguably the core reason why people decided to reelect him as president of the United States. And now he is profoundly underwater there. His approval rating has slipped, you know, decidedly negative, at least in terms of the CNN poll, significant movement there for Trump. Elon even more profoundly unpopular with the American public. And so, you know,

People are positioning, are preparing to throw Lutnick under the bus and say, oh, this guy is doing crazy stuff. He's saying crazy things. And, you know, a clip like this where he's like, yeah, recession, I think that's probably worth it. That certainly adds to their arsenal of what they'll use. But, you know, it's never Trump's fault. It's always got to be someone else's fault if things are going sideways. Yeah.

That's always an interesting line for the White House to walk, taking credit for the effects of the tariffs when they see them as positive, bringing jobs back to Indiana, for example, with the Honda Civic situation, or then making Howard Letnick shoulder the blame when things go south. Let's listen to this question that Sagar got in at yesterday's briefing. Here he is talking to Caroline Levitt.

Today, we have Sargar Anetti, who is the host of Breaking Points, a popular political YouTube news and podcast show. - I really appreciate you having me, Caroline. A couple questions for you, if I may. First is first on the stock market. So currently it's the 25th anniversary

today of the dot-com bubble crash. There's a lot of concern for a lot of Americans right now about the state of the economy. President Trump has refused to rule out a recession. Secretary Lutnick, however, has told us there will not be one. So can the White House just tell and assure Americans today that there's not going to be a recession? Well, there's a lot to unpack there. So let me start by saying that, first of all, when it comes to the stock market, the numbers that we see today, the numbers we saw yesterday, the numbers we will see tomorrow are a snapshot of a moment in time.

And as President Trump has said, and I'm here to echo the remarks of this president of this White House, we are in a period of economic transition. We are in a period of transition from the mess that was created under Joe Biden in the previous administration.

So, yeah, Crystal, that's really the new messaging is this is a period of, quote, economic transition. And again, it's one thing to have Trump making that case. It's another thing to have Howard Letnick and, you know, non-Trump. Trump is such a singular figure. But to have other billionaires running around making that case, it's clearly the best that they've landed on, though.

Yeah. And I'm curious from your perspective, Emily, I mean, I think people were willing to give Trump a bit of a grace period. You know, he came in hot, did a whole lot of stuff. All right, let's see where all of this goes. You know, we're now 50 days into the administration. And I don't think that it is going to I don't think people are going to buy that this is all Biden's fault because because

because Trump has made so many moves, he has really taken ownership of everything that happens in the country, including what happens in the country economically. So I know they want to say like, oh, this is all Biden's fault. And so we've got to clean up his mess, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm sure his base will buy that, but I don't think that that rationale is going to land very effectively, much beyond his sort of like hardcore supporters. Because like I said, because he has taken so much action, you know, on the one hand, people sort of liked that sense of like, oh, things are happening. But now that things have turned and you're looking at recession and you're looking at days on days of stock market crisis,

crashing and consumer confidence is down. We're actually going to get an inflation reading today that, you know, a lot of people are anticipating. We'll see what happens there as well. But now that things are turning south, I think he is going to shoulder the blame because he's in charge and he really has, you know, sort of taken hold of this thing in a way that's pretty undeniable.

It's interesting because, yeah, there's such a—the style is part of the substance here. Obviously, for Trump, he's trying to keep things completely unpredictable. We talked about this, actually, after his joint address last week. Like, part of the plan here is so that nobody, even close analysts of this who watch—

have any idea what you're doing because that takes it to China and Canada and Mexico, and they have no idea what you're doing. And that's really the only way Trump thinks, you know, the 51st state thing, for example, like he's really needling them. But that's also ends up being part of the substance when it comes to the market. So there was an interesting story in Reuters yesterday going around and actually talking to folks in Wisconsin and manufacturing in Wisconsin who would be

affected by the tariffs. And we've seen this with farmers as well, Midwest, soy and all those different products in Trump's first term that were affected by tariffs then continue to be affected by the Biden tariffs. You often hear, and it seems that you're still hearing, some patience with

Trump's policies because there was an expectation that they would be radical, that they would be hard to predict, that they would be significant. And so people sort of prepared in advance. That's what Reuters was talking to some of these manufacturing and agriculture people about. They expected to not know what to expect.

And so they had already started looking into their supply chain and all of that. But the question is, you know, when does that truly wear off? And I—Crystal, when Donald Trump—

he's tethered himself so closely to the market during his campaign and looking back on his first presidency that it may ultimately be one of the things that screws him in terms of the public perception. He's really going to have to find more cases like the Honda Civic. He's really going to have to find, like,

just all of these examples of jobs like flooding back to the United States to make the case that we're in a, quote, transition period in a way that successfully persuades voters who are looking at their portfolios or in their communities and going, oh,

Oh my gosh. Yeah, well, he's tied himself historically over the course of his career and certainly over the course of his first presidency to the markets. He's also in this presidency tied himself to Elon, who is increasingly profoundly unpopular and doesn't have some of the, I mean, Trump has like magic powers when it comes to his political standing. We all know he can do things and say things, get away with things that literally no one else in history has ever done.

Elon doesn't have quite those same powers. Now, Elon has his own powers. Obviously, he's got his own base and following and cult of personality. And in a certain way, he is a similar sort of branding genius to...

in the same way that Trump is, just with a different kind of a flavor. But Elon doesn't have that same political Teflon that Trump does. Now, I think early on, the thought was that Elon could serve as a kind of a heat shield. So as he's making all of these dramatic cuts,

and imposing this radical austerity on the federal government, including in things that are really popular, like, for example, public education is really popular. Are we talking about that? Social security, really popular. Airplanes, supermarkets,

safely landing, really popular, you know. They thought, I think, that Elon could sort of shoulder, take the blame and, you know, serve as his heat shield, as this sort of protective barrier. But the flip side of that is because Elon is taking on so much water without having that Teflon coating,

that Trump seems to, that it actually could have an increasingly negative impact directly on Trump and weigh him down in a way that he hasn't been weighed down in the past. I want to skip ahead and then we'll come back to the CNBC side. If we could put A3 up on the screen, 'cause I thought this was interesting. This is from JL Partners. They do these word clouds, which are always fun, asking, and they ask people, "What is Trump's biggest screw up so far?" And tariffs jumps right off the page.

You know, even at their most popular, and by the way, tariffs spelled incorrectly two different ways also ranks up there pretty closely. Keep this up on the screen, though, for a second, just so people can take a look and really digest this. You know, tariffs even...

when Trump was doing his best job pitching them during the campaign and saying, this is what's going to bring jobs back, and people are thinking about tariffs on China in particular, which is the most positive territory for tariffs. People are less favorable towards tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Even at that point, they were kind of a 50-50 proposition. Now, when you've had this, they're on, they're off, it's Canada, it's fentanyl, it's...

No, it's we're going to make him the 51st state. It's everything. No, it's half of the goods. No, we're taking them off again. At this point, I think it is one of the biggest liabilities. And he can't certainly can't blame Elon for that one. But if you look at the next.

next level of what people say are like his biggest screw ups, you've got a bunch of things related to Elon. You've got Musk, Elon firing Doge federal workers. So if you kind of put all those together, you can see those are the two dueling pieces that people are most upset about with regard to Trump and the way that he has approached the government so far.

Super, super interesting. I would have been the person who spelled tariffs wrong on the word cloud. Let's jump back to the CNBC. No judgment. No judgment. Let's jump back to the CNBC. Just thought that crystal tease because this is how the tariff whirlwind where basically Trump is...

And different advisors who are talking to the media are saying different things. I mean, over the course of one day yesterday, there were different lines about how the tariffs were being implemented, what level of targeting was happening, and then what level of targeting wasn't happening with which country. So here's how CNBC reacted. Let's roll A2. I'm going to say this at risk of my job, Kelly, but what President Trump is doing is insane.

It is absolutely insane. It is about the eighth reason we've had for the tariffs. And now he's saying he's putting 50 percent tariffs on Canada unless they agree to become the 51st state.

That is insane. There is just no other way of describing it. And the trouble, Kelly, is that it shows there are no bounds around President Trump. This is very different from the first administration where there were people around him who seemed to, I don't know what the word is, but smooth over some of the edges now.

And the other thing that's not talked about, Kelly, is what's going on within the administration in terms of how they're treating the Constitution and laws. I think all of that is bad for the attraction of capital. And the gentleman from Bridgewater is 100 percent right. We need massive amounts of capital if we want to have fund our deficits, pay for the things we want to pay for, sell our bonds and have high stock prices. And it seems as if this administration is doing everything it can to chase foreign capital away. Yeah.

Okay, I like how he says the gentleman from Bridgewater is absolutely correct.

Like they're in Congress. I was just thinking, it's funny to me how these guys think because he's like, you know, his wild violations of the Constitution, what really matters here is this is bad for capital. Like everything just runs through good for profit motive, bad for profit motive. And he's come to the conclusion that like, you know, completely tearing up the Constitution might be bad for capital attraction. So that's his issue with it. The other part I found kind of funny is that he said at the risk of losing his job, like

why would this cause you to risk your job? But anyway, the main point here being, first of all, just, you know, how aggressive he is there and how much he thinks this policy is totally insane, which obviously I agree with. And I think many people at this point agree with. But I think it also reminds us that this is something we can talk more to Jeff Stein about, that

these guys really didn't take Trump seriously on the campaign trail when he was repeatedly like, no, I'm really into tariffs. I'm going to put on a lot of tariffs. They're going to be across the board tariffs. Tariffs is the most beautiful word in the English language. And they were like, yeah, that part I don't think he's really serious about. We think he just means it when he talks about giving us tax cuts and deregulating everything. And that part we're excited about. So that's what we're going to focus on. So I think now you have a

realization setting in, which is partly reflected in the way that the, you know, the market has been crashing. I do think I looked and the futures were up this morning, but the way that the market has responded thus far, which has been, you know, terrible for the first 50 days here of the Trump administration, I do think it is a sort of setting in of reality for these guys of like, oh shit, this dude was actually serious about the stuff that he was saying. Yeah.

Yeah, I wanted to actually on that note take out this quote from a CNN article I'm reading right now. This is from Ross Mayfield who's an investment strategist at Baird. He says, quote, there's a tolerance for pain that maybe some investors hadn't priced in related to the Trump administration's tolerance for pain is what he's referring to.

to there because you're seeing Donald Trump say, for example, markets are going to go up and they're going to go down. But you know what? We have to rebuild our country. And then obviously Howard Letnick, as we mentioned earlier, and Caroline Levitt, as Saga got her on the record about all of that.

CNN continues to say we haven't gotten into some of these hard numbers yet, but the S&P 500 dipped about, it closed about 9.3% down from that February record high yesterday. All three major indexes dropped after Trump doubled down earlier in the day yesterday. But by the afternoon, CNN writes markets had paired some lessons as officials from both the U.S. and Canada said they would meet this week to de-escalate tensions and renegotiate trade policy. Crystal, it's quite interesting, though, that's giving anybody some hope

because it's now like Trump negotiating over the 51st state with Canadian negotiators. So I actually don't know how much can come out of those meetings at this point. Canada, I...

I had forgotten this, but Canada has a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Like they're not at all, many people are aware of this, they're not at all averse to their own tariff agenda. So maybe that's a bargaining chip for the Trump administration going forward. But I don't know what room... Well, I think they'd be pretty happy about Canada having those tariffs on Chinese EVs.

That part they're probably favorable towards, yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. But just that Canada uses tariffs as its own type of industrial policy. And I think you'll see some of that probably as they sit down at the table and talk through some of these things. But I don't know. I mean, it's genuinely hard to know. We were talking about this earlier, what Trump wants.

wants from Canada. Canada doesn't know. Trump's advisors don't seem to know what he wants from Canada at this point. My best guess is that he wants companies who do business in Canada to not know what his end goal is so that they end up betting on the United States rather than betting on Canada. I think that's the read that's most likely, but it's really hard to know.

Yeah, I mean, this is what I want to talk to Jeff Stein about and see what his best read of the situation are, because I've seen like 18 different theories floated, including that they just like the market chaos, because if you're an insider and you can predict where when to buy the dip and when he's going to make a new announcement about tariffs that spikes the market, you could be in a pretty profitable position.

position. So yeah, I want to talk to Jeff about what he thinks is actually going on here. Not that I think that, I mean, if anyone could figure it out, it would be Jeff, but I'm not sure that anyone, including maybe Trump, really knows what he's up to here.

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Yeah, so let's actually move on to this Tesla commercial that happened at the White House yesterday because we have the video. This is going to be A4 to the control room. Trump was—

doing a, he was talking to reporters actually, next to Elon Musk, next to little ex Elon Musk's son. And they had all kinds of Teslas outside of the White House parked on the driveway. And Trump made a little bit of an announcement so we could go ahead and roll A4. I bought for a very special young woman. Do you know? I'm sure you've never heard of her kind.

And she's a great golfer, and she puts the clubs in the back, and I guess it's a very safe deal. She loves it. And I actually bought one about a year ago.

And she loves it. And it's very safe. It's very strong, heavy. It's all steel, stainless steel. But the cars themselves. So what is this one, Mila? That's the Model Y. That's the Model Y. So I have a lot of information to put into price. Yeah. I want to make a good deal here. You know, I do notice this. They have one.

which is $35,000, which is pretty low. What does that mean? -You think you buying a Tesla will boost Tesla sales and boost their stock? -Well, I hope it does. Look, look. -Was that your goal by doing this? -I care about one thing. When somebody's a great patriot, they shouldn't be hurt. He's a great patriot. He didn't know me from Adam until we met a little bit when I was in my first term, but he came out, he endorsed me very strongly.

So when somebody's a great patriot, they shouldn't get hurt is like what I'm going to say to a cop if they complain that I'm violating like open container laws.

If somebody is a patriot, if somebody is a patriot, they should not be hurt, officer. Crystal, this was somewhat extraordinary. I think you've seen presidents, I'm thinking of Obama in particular, with social media, highlight great American companies, perceived great American companies before bringing the Teslas onto the White House lawn.

talking about how much of a genius Elon Musk was. That was an interesting move that just seems unnecessary. I don't actually even understand what the point of that conversation was. Well, I mean, the point is that Tesla's stock

is particularly in the toilet. They're down 50% from their high in December. Sales are plummeting around the world. In Europe, they're down like 50%. You know, in addition to Elon just being a completely toxic character, especially for your average EV buyer, they also have a stale product line. They also have increased competition for China. So the company is truly struggling. And then you've got, you know, Elon, who not only put a quarter of a

billion into Trump's campaign. But just yesterday, after this whole, you know, sales pitch on the White House lawn, turning it into like a car lot, after that, we learn, oh, and Elon just happened to have right now at this moment offered to put another $100 million into Trump-aligned PACs.

So, you know, when you ask what's different between this and let's say, you know, Joe Biden went to the Ford factory and drove one of their EV Lightning F-150s, what's different? Show me the Ford CEO who gave him a quarter of a billion dollars and is now putting another $100 million in.

into his campaign coffers. That's what's really different. Not to mention, of course, Elon himself having this insanely powerful position in government where he really is deciding who stays, who goes, what happens, what's a priority and funneling contracts into his own companies while he's at it.

defenestrating the regulatory environment so that none of them can investigate his many, you know, alleged abuses of our regulatory system, including we just had yet another SpaceX rocket that blew up. So that's what makes this just so insanely nakedly corrupt is you literally have the president filming an ad on the White House lawn for his largest by far campaign contributor.

And it just, to me, I don't understand what's in it for Donald Trump to be this, and I know you have an answer to this, Crystal, but to be this gratuitous and to be this just completely fawning, drooling over Elon Musk and Tesla. We can actually put A7 on the screen, skip ahead here. Trump was, I don't want to say caught, because I don't think he was trying to hide it, but he had some talking points.

points in his hand as he was discussing the Teslas, where he had all of the prices listed out, sort of like you're doing a sales pitch. The sales pitch notes, that's what it is. Yeah. So yeah. And it's just, it does, you know, make you truly wonder. I mean, $100 million, it's kind of sad because that's less than half of what Elon Musk infused into Trump's campaign in the late stages, which is just the amount of money that he's able to just throw around. It's

It's stunning. But it does just like—for Trump to go to that length to sell electric vehicles, I mean, we're not even talking about—we know he loves Caterpillar. We know he loves the fun trucks and the big toys.

But it just—this isn't that. These are like electric vehicles. These are not—Trump has himself come around on electric vehicles because of Elon Musk. But to go to all of the effort that they went to yesterday, it just—

You really, it does make you wonder. It's so out of character, I think, for Trump that it really makes you wonder, so to speak. Buying EVs to own the Libs is a pretty funny development, you know? Not even just buying them, but like obsessing, fawning over them as such amazing products. Sean Hannity too. Sean Hannity doing the same thing. He was running some promotion on his show and whatever. Like it is,

really preposterous and frankly humiliating. I mean, I also think it's sort of pathetic for Elon that he's gotten to this point with Tesla where he's got to like beg the president for favors and to buy one and tout his product, et cetera. And Elon has been aggressively using X as well to promote like people who are

posting on social media that they bought a Tesla to support Elon and how great Tesla is, etc. He's been using his platform a lot to do that because, I mean, I think the company genuinely is in trouble. I also think their stock price has long been, like, wildly overvalued. You know, there was an expectation, not unreasonable, after...

Trump was elected, and of course, Elon has this prominent position, that that would be really beneficial for the company. But I think what wasn't priced in, to use the Wall Street lingo, is the fact that Elon would become this incredibly, increasingly toxic figure for their primary customer base.

And so, you know, most people, like, they're not trying to make a political statement with their car. And now having a Tesla has become a political statement and, like, a divisive one. So, yeah, that's going to turn off a significant portion of your likely consumer base, especially since it's mostly libs who buy Teslas.

So it's a major problem. But, you know, I can't get over the corruption aspect of this and how out in the open it all is. Like, literally the day he does the sales pitch, you announce you're doing this $100 million cash infusion. Like...

I mean, the Biden crime family couldn't dream, right? Pelosi and insider trading couldn't dream of this level of just naked pay for play that everyone's just like, yeah, that's just Trump. That's just what he does. The state has really taken on characteristics of both

a sort of clientelism, which is just this very transactional government where it's like, you know, patronage and you do for me and I'm going to do for you. I'm going to reward my friends. I'm going to screw over my enemies and overt oligarchy. I mean, the fact that Elon is the richest person on the planet and Trump has stocked his cabinet with billionaires and you've got Bezos and Zuckerberg and everybody else rushing in to be part of that favored oligarch class.

I mean, I think those are sort of the two competing frameworks you should use to understand the choices that are being made here and the way Trump has decided to run his run the country this time. And, you know, it's very consistent with if you're a CEO of a company, of a big company, and you're used to try to kind of, you know, both being that transactional person and also being sort of like the king of this corporate empire.

You can see how it appeals to him to run the country in exactly the same way. And this time, that is precisely what is happening because any of the checks in the guardrails that existed, any of the genuine resistance to him that existed in the first term is just completely either melted away or they have taken affirmative steps to make sure that those guardrails do not hold this time around.

I actually think if I were a Tesla investor, it would make me nervous that Musk is so close to the government. He was always close to the government, but is this close to the government? Because I think that just engenders a sense of complacency that would, I mean, you end up getting so many favors that it's, yeah, and we've talked about that before, is like it's not, it doesn't create better products. So we have to, before we move on from this block of

and get to Jeff Crystal, roll this clip of Peter Doocy from Fox News getting a great question in at this little gaggle on the White House lawn yesterday. This is A6. - While there are some folks who will see this clip at home and they are struggling with their retirement accounts down at the moment, uncertainty about work ahead,

Well, I think they're going to do great. I think we're our country had to do this. We had to go and do this. They've taken away other countries have taken away our business. They've taken away our jobs. I did it initially very strongly against, as you know, China and some others in the first term.

And it was a very successful term. We had no inflation. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. So, Crystal, again, Trump can get away with it. You know, at least we've seen that so far. And there's no sign that that pattern is going to stop when it comes to him as this very singular figure in American politics. But he surrounded himself with other billionaires, essentially, and particularly with Elon Musk. And I think it

so long as they're doing the messaging, going to be harder and harder to say things like, yeah, you know, we're buying new cars and we're waiting out this transition period in the economy. So we just need you to be sort of patient with us billionaires.

Yeah, it's worth it. The recession is worth it, in the words to return to, you know, Howard Lutnick at the beginning of the show. And yeah, I got to hand it to Peter Doocy. That was a great question and a really apt question. As much as I loved Sargar's, Annette's questions yesterday in the briefing room, Peter Doocy also had a really great one too. He was like, you know, it's kind of like an off,

but also very legit. He was like, "Sure, nobody around here is short in the stock market." You know, gesturing towards this theory that's out there of like, you know, with you generating all of these wild swings in the market, hey, if you're an insider and you know what's gonna happen, you could really be in position to profit off of this. And, you know, this White House has done away with inspectors generals. They've rolled back some of the ethics programs

provisions for the White House that were in place during the Biden administration. They engage in activities like selling Teslas on the White House lawn while Elon Musk is funneling another $100 million into Trump-aligned PACs. CEOs are paying $5 million to

for the honor of being able to have a dinner with Trump. And again, that goes into like Trump aligned PACs so that they can make their case directly in this sort of like oligarchic or clientelist way to the king and receive his favor. And this is the way business is being done with Elon and Doge as well, where if you're a Republican senator, not actually a member of the house, but a Republican senator, you have Elon's personal phone number. And if there's a project in your district,

that gets cut that is causing you problems, you can call him and you can petition the king for, you know, a favor and for special relief. If you are not in his political favor, which means every Democrat, you know, whether you're in a red state or a blue state or your state, whatever, um,

then you don't have that same opportunity to petition the king and get the painful cuts to your constituents rolled back, even though many of those constituents will also be Republicans who voted for Donald Trump. Well, let's bring Jeff Stein in to drill down even deeper on this question that is rocking the economy.

This is Ashley Akedani from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. If you could lose 10.4 pounds in one month, would you try? Well, with Future Health, you can. Find out if weight loss meds are right for you in just three minutes at tryfh.com. That is tryfh.com. Tryfh.com.

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We're excited to be joined now by Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein, who has been all over this story. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. As we start, I want to get your reaction to this clip. I'm sure you've seen it by now, but of Donald Trump on the White House lawn yesterday, all those Teslas behind him, Elon Musk by his side, responding to a question about Doug Ford. Let's go ahead and roll B1. Already Canada, and I respect very much, as you know, there's a very strong man in Canada who

He said he was going to charge a surcharge or a tariff on electricity coming into our country. He has called and he said he's not going to do that. He's not going to do that. And it would have been a very bad thing if he did. And he's not going to do that, so I respect that. But we were just informed that he's not going to do that.

So that's Trump referring to Ontario, Doug Ford of Ontario. And Jeff, I think that is, you know, I don't know what actually happened there. Maybe you have a better idea of what actually happened between Trump and Doug Ford, a very strong man, as Trump says. But I guess it speaks to the complicated interpersonal dynamics that are affecting the tariffs overall as Trump negotiates with Canadian leaders. So do you have any insight into what went down?

I don't have the specific timeline on that call. We know for sure that the Canadians had threatened not just to raise the price of electricity for roughly a million Americans, but to actually shut it off.

And, you know, what the administration announced yesterday was that the doubling of the steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump had proposed from 25 to 50 percent, which would have been really,

really bad for Canada. One of the top Canadian exports to the U.S. is steel. And had that gone into effect, it would have probably, you know, invited the retaliation that Ford was alluding to. So it's a little hard to know exactly what the sequence was of this. And not to make excuses for my reporting gaps, but this is playing off, playing out across

dozens, if not hundreds of countries right now trying to avoid the import duties, the massive, you know, tariff taxes that Trump is imposing. And what I guess what reading between the lines, it seems what happened was the Trump people had been back channeling that this 25 to 50 percent hike in steel and aluminum was likely. And that came off yesterday back to 25 percent.

around the time that Trump announced that Canada was not going to retaliate on American electricity users in those northern states. But the degree to which this can just fly off the handle at any moment is pretty unnerving, especially if you're someone who needs Canadian-provided electricity.

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, you know, to kind of bring people up to speed, yesterday there was this back and forth between Trump and the Canadians. At the end of the day, Trump decided to roll back the things that had been threatened, but there are still other tariffs that are going into effect today. I mean, there are a lot of theories, Jeff, out there about

what the hell Trump is up to. Like, is this really about re-industrializing the country? Because the approach doesn't really make sense for that. It's definitely not really about fentanyl. Like, I think we can all see through that's kind of ridiculous given the very small amounts of that drug that come from Canada. There have been some theories about how this is an attempt to actually do some sort of controlled demolition of the economy, both to keep inflation down and also to trigger...

interest rates being lowered so that a refinance on the Treasury debt will be more affordable. Trudeau certainly thinks that Trump is serious about using economic warfare to annex some or all of Canada. I've seen some other sort of like 8-D chess type theories out there. Then there's more sort of like Nithip,

the various theories, like they just want to use these market spikes to insider trade and people are profiting off of it, or they want to trigger a recession because guess what? Coming out of recessions, usually the rich people get even richer, the banks get even bigger. And given that the government is being run, you know, effectively as like an oligarchy, maybe that's the end goal here is they actually want to generate a recession. Like, have you been able to come up with what is your theory of the case of what he's actually up to here with all of this?

Yeah. I mean, as a reporter, we sort of have the traffic and the facts we have. And while we should look very carefully to answer some of those questions that you're posing, I mean, is there insider trading going on? Are Trump's allies or family profiting from the wild swings in the market that he seems to be just himself controlling? Who knows if the DOJ is even investigating those carefully? Hmm.

While we have to take those issues seriously, I think it's worth saying that, you know, Trump has been very clear for over a year now that he sees tariffs as able to do several different things. These things are intention. He's sort of the most generous possible interpretation we can give him, I think, is that he views these goals, these separate goals for tariff policy as sort of

all worthwhile, but maybe not all worthwhile simultaneously, or maybe some can be accomplished and others can't, and that's okay. So just to back up and try to explain this a little more clearly, Trump has said, I think,

really, really importantly to understanding Trump's motives that from his perspective, the U.S. is getting screwed by the existing state of trade barriers where they believe with some reason we can get into why this is more complicated than they say, but that other countries have far higher import duties on our exports than we do on theirs. So that's clearly a goal, I think. But there's also the goal of

can we raise revenue? Because we know that the Republicans are trying to pass $4 trillion in tax cuts. And Trump is not wrong that if you impose massive taxes on every import coming to the U.S., even though it would be devastating for a lot of poor Americans who depend on imports for cheap food and other necessities, it could raise a lot of money. Now, these two things

don't mesh together. Either the tariffs are a vehicle to lower import duties, in which case you reach a deal where the U.S. tariffs come off, or they're a tool to raise lots of revenue to pay for the tax cuts, and in which case they stay on. It cannot be both. And so be as generous as I can be as possible to Trump. There is just an incompatibility here. Maybe what he's thinking is, if I do this,

and it doesn't work, at least we get the revenue. And if I do this and then they lower the trade barriers on our exports, I'll take that win instead. That's the most reasonable assumption I think you could possibly make being as generous as possible to the president. For all the reasons you're alluding to, Crystal, there's been a lot of questions about how even with the president's own goal, this doesn't make sense because the

Right. Like he says, 25 percent tariff on on on Mexico, let's say on all goods. And then like three hours later, it's like, no, it's not on. It's off. It's on. It's a blah, blah, blah. And that is incompatible with this idea of we're going to impose these tariffs to bring domestic manufacturing and production and factories back to the US. I've talked to a number of business leaders, executive CEOs in the last few days who have said, look, like if Trump just said like this is the tariff policy.

Even if we didn't like it, even if we thought it was too high, we could do something around it. But it's not just that they don't know if the tariffs are going to come off. They also don't know if the tariffs are going to stay on. So the uncertainty in both directions is crippling. I know that was a rambling answer, but hopefully it gives you some sense of where I'm seeing this. Yeah, it's actually...

so, so helpful. And let's run through a couple of elements that relate to what Jeff just said. If we put the CNBC tariff sheet on the screen, this is B2. This is about just what happened yesterday. The headline is sort of amusing. Trump will not impose 50% Canadian steel aluminum tariffs tomorrow, says top

trade advisor. And this is a quote from Peter Navarro to CNBC yesterday afternoon. And CNBC writes, quote, the reversal came six hours after Trump announced his plan to double import duties on the Canadian metals in response to Ontario's decision to slap a 25 percent tax on

on electricity exports to the U.S. And then if we put B3 up on the screen, this is more news about Canada. Canada files to sell USD bonds size undisclosed. That's again from yesterday. And finally, I want to put this Truth Social post from Trump on the screen, which is B4, which sees Trump asking, why would our

country allow another country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use electricity, all caps, that so affects the life of innocent people as a bargaining chip and threat? They will pay a financial price for this so big that it will be

be read about in history books for many years to come. And I know Crystal wants to make a point about some of the decisions in Gaza on that. But before we do, Jeff, I want to get your reaction to just how we see different things coming from different people in the administration.

The president is saying one thing. Peter Navarro is then talking to CNBC and saying something. There's this update that seems to contradict what's happening, according to the president. So I wonder just your sense from people who work on these issues in the White House. Is that intentional? I mean, is it intentionally haphazard? Because that speaks to whether or not the uncertainty is itself intentional.

intentional. And, you know, you just kind of got into whether that would make sense for the end goal of the Trump administration. But I'm wondering, you know, if it seems like they are purposefully causing confusion or if there's genuinely a lot of confusion and there's nothing strategic about it.

I mean, I think if there is intentional confusion, it's going on between Trump's ears. Like it's it's not something that the advisers, according to the people I've talked to, like the people close to Trump are not excited about looking like, you know, fools might be an overstatement, but looking uninformed on national television shows.

Almost every day having their exact utterances immediately contradicted by their boss whose views they're supposed to be reflecting. But I think as we're seeing not just here, but across almost every issue, Trump is like

You know, I won twice. The media hit me with everything. They tried to put me in jail or whatever. You know, the Democrats, whatever conspiracy theories he has about that. And so he's unbowed and he's doing what he wants to do. And he seems...

You know, wholly unperturbed by the stock market, his approval ratings, his own advisors, America's closest allies, the fate of the American economy writ large. Like none of these things seem to be really enough to move him. And that leaves us in kind of a scary place, I think. Hmm.

You know, I wanted to get your opinion, Jeff, on whether that piece of information about Canada doing a sale of U.S. bonds, which is not an unusual thing to do, but a lot of people kind of were interested in the fact that that was happening. And this also comes with the Liberals in Canada have just elected a new leader as the new prime minister, Mark Carney, who is himself a former central banker,

both of Canada and actually of England as Brexit was going on. So I wonder if you could reflect a little bit just specifically on that development and more broadly on having Mark Carney in charge in Canada now and how that could impact the way that they respond. Well, I mean, I actually haven't seen that until you showed it. I think it reflects a really interesting question, though, which is, is the sort of Trump

fusillade, all-out attack on all of our global trading partners going to change the way the world views the safety and security of the U.S. dollar as the world's sort of reserve currency and sort of, you know, the way that treasuries over the last 40, 50 years have served as the backstop, the trusted sort of foundation of the global financial system. And, you know,

It is not inconceivable at all to me. And I don't know what the provenance of that tweet, but I should figure that out. But it's not at all inconceivable. I did check it out, but it was accurate. Yeah. I know that was a random account, but it is accurate. My only point there is that the U.S. has an enormous fiscal imbalance relative to most countries. And that deficit allows us to fund social services companies

Not in the way that the Nordics do, but greater than our very, very, very low tax revenue allow us to do. And the U.S. is able to do that because we are able to lend money on global capital markets pretty cheaply, like much more cheaply than any other comparable market.

country in the entire world. We have sort of this golden goose that allows us to print money and we can debate whether that money is used well, but it has been a foundational feature of the American economy for 30, 40 years. And the idea that

that that is at risk now is a very scary thing because other countries as it could follow suit and stop buying U.S. debt, which could cause sort of the premiums that the U.S. has to offer on its debt to get investors to buy it to spike. And that would be

something that would trigger a rise in borrowing costs that could lead to a crisis for the U.S. government very quickly. And it's something that we're tracking because it's a vulnerability as Trump sort of lashes out against the whole world simultaneously right now. Yeah, because one of the theories that I've seen is that, you know, normally in times of instability,

there's a flight to into US bonds, like that sort of like, you know, the bedrock gold standard of stability, as we're still sort of the global hegemon. And so when Canada, which now, you know, Mark Carney, again, central banker as their leader, like, you know, we're actually going to do the opposite of that we're going to sell, we're going to take at this moment to sell US bonds, it's very possible people are reading too much into it. But it was an indication to me of like, this

This may not go the way that you think it's going to because the country gets, the world gets a say in how they respond as well. And, you know, we are in this moment where there's a geopolitical rebalancing. And, you know, I think some of the moves for the Trump administration certainly are, you

aggressively trying to reshape that geopolitical balance in the way that they want it to appear. And so that's why I thought that that was really noteworthy. And like you said, a potential warning sign. I mean, what do we mostly use that surplus and that incredible quote-unquote golden goose to do? It's to have a gigantic military and then to have the social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid that are really important to people. And I do think that is one of the profound risks

of this moment, that and just, you know, the de-dollarization, like moving away from the dollar as the global reserve currency.

There's a great article in Compact, I don't know if either of you read it, basically about the emergent ideological belief among like the Howard Latinx, who's by the way a big backer of stablecoin, that Trump's approach to crypto is now actually, he's been sort of converted to the ideological school that crypto is something that boosts the dollar because stablecoin is pinned

one to one to the US dollar. Therefore, all of this is actually sort of galaxy brain helpful to the United States. I don't know, Jeff, like what do you make of everything that Crystal just said? Check the price of Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that tweet you put up is incredible, right? Like, why would we trust the Canadians to sell us electricity? And I don't know. I mean,

The 2024 presidential election, like I covered it, it was not about animus towards Canada. Trump was not running on destroying Ontario and encouraging Americans to boo the Canadian national anthem at hockey games. This is like, I think...

fundamentally weird. I think this is not what Trump campaigned on at all. And the fact that he seems to think or believe, or at least be willing to try to get Americans psyched to like want to fight Canada. Is that a winning message for Republicans in 2026? Is that like, is there a groundswell of people throughout the country who are like,

I've always hated Canada and like, yeah, why, why do we let them sell us electricity? Like it's, it's, it's bizarre, isn't it? Like, I hope I'm not overstepping that, but like, where does this even come from? This animus towards Canada? There, there are some legitimate debates about various tariffs that they have on our dairy or whatever. But like,

but the, the, the extrapolation of that to, we are going to destroy the Canadian economy and take their land is like, uh, like, what are we even talking about here? Like, it's like reminds me of playing like a, a video game or something where he's just trying to expand the board. It's also incoherent because it's like, we can't stand Canada. Canada is a terrible country, but also we want it. Give us the 51st day. Right. Well, it,

Crystal, speaking of that tweet, we wanted to put B5 up on the screen or that Truth Social post. I should say this is from The Times. Israel turns off Gaza electricity to force hostage release, which I think, Crystal, you were saying is quite an interesting juxtaposition with the Truth Social post of Donald Trump saying, can you imagine Canada's stooping so low as to use electricity that so affects the lives of innocent people as a bargaining chip and a threat?

Yeah, just, I mean, you know, I'm making the obvious point about hypocrisy here and how there are no principles involved, right? It's all just whatever Trump wants to do in the moment. But, I mean, there's a couple things to pick up on on your point, Jeff, is like, I guess one way to read Trump's animus towards Canada is, you know, he's long hated Trudeau. Trudeau's this kind of like Obama-like figure. Now the liberals are led by this other, like, sort of, you know, liberal technocrat type figure.

He hates these certain European leaders also that he feels like are part of this democratic liberal order that look down their nose at him. So one of the ways to read this is just like this sort of like personal grievance and animus, which does seem to be an animating force for Trump. But then the other way to read it is in this broader context of, you know, he really is doing this sort of like throwback thing.

colonial or at least, you know, brazen empire building territory acquisition plan. If you take seriously the we want to make Canada the 51st state, or at least we want to change the boundaries. We want Greenland. We want Panama. We want Gaza. We're just going to go and take the things that we want. We're going to go back to the Monroe Doctrine where we're going to throw our weight around. This is our backyard, et cetera. So, you know, and maybe it's some of both.

But that's kind of how I read it is that this is part and parcel with that return to an older style of direct imperialism. That isn't like the USAID, we're going to use our soft power or the Chinese model of like the Belt and Road Initiative. It's like, no, we're actually going to take your land and mine your minerals and let our oligarchs like buy up the pieces of your country that are going to be valuable to them.

That's such a great point, Crystal. The way I think about it is that it's like simultaneously contingent and structural. I think about this a lot in the context of sort of what Musk is doing in the government, because on the one hand, it's clearly true that the Trump movement and Trump personally personifies an ideological problem.

attack on the nonpartisan career civil service that Republicans have come to view with a great deal of suspicion and animus over the last many years. That is a structural sort of force in American politics, which Trump is in the process of codifying and implementing. At the same time,

Musk is sort of just one guy who, by all sorts of somewhat random reasons, ended up being a very sort of close ally of this president specifically. And through what certainly appears to be sort of contingent factors of place and time and what's going through one guy's head, ended up being put in charge of

this effort that he's now sort of distinctively supercharged with his own, you know, fingerprints in a way that is genuinely different, I think, than what the standard bog Republican would have done to the federal government in a second Trump term anyway, right? Like, Musk is doing that differently than he would have, than Trump would have if Musk had never come around. And so, yeah, I think you're describing it well, where it's simultaneously, like,

these underlying structural factors that may even supersede Trump in many ways. Like there was an interesting piece over the weekend by a conservative writer whose name I'm forgetting, sort of about how we might be in this sort of

We had this post-World War II era where our entire politics was defined by sort of this liberal international order viewed as with its sort of most important goal to avoid the sort of territorial acquisitiveness that Hitler defined. I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler. I'm just saying that the world order that was built after World War II seems to be crumbling, and maybe that's not even a Trump-specific or Trump-dependent phenomenon, but

But the fact that Trump is executing it has given it sort of a Trump distinctive, and as to your point about individuals, a Trump distinctive flavor and approach.

Hmm. That's so interesting, Jeff. Thank you for coming on to break this down. It was like, just, you must've been, uh, like just on a swivel all day yesterday when you're reporting, it was such a roller coaster. Um, so thank you for helping the rest of us catch up to speed. No, thanks guys. I appreciate it. Thank you.

This is Ashley Akedani from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. If you could lose 10.4 pounds in one month, would you try? Well, with Future Health, you can. Find out if weight loss meds are right for you in just three minutes at tryfh.com. That is tryfh.com. Tryfh.com.

Results may vary based on start weight and adherence to diet, exercise, and program goals. Database on independent studies sponsored by Future Health. Future Health is not a healthcare services provider. Meds are prescribed at provider's discretion. Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? Can I go in and she's eating my lunch? Or if hypnotism is real? You will use this suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control. What's inside a black hole?

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News broke late yesterday from friend of the show, Shelby Talcott of Semaphore, that the Education Department had taken its first giant leap towards totally shuttering during the Trump administration. We can put C1 up on the screen. Shelby reported, per person familiar, a, quote, reduction in forced notices for the Education Department are expected to go out today at 6 p.m. Nearly half of the department is expected to be shut down.

Now, if we put C2B up on the screen, this came shortly after that scoop from Shelby. She got the report. She confirmed the report that these notices had gone out. All education department offices in D.C. will be closed tomorrow. No reason beyond, quote, for security reasons. And workers were instructed to leave by 6 p.m.

p.m. today, Shelby reported per a source. She also later reported that the Education Department has confirmed a quote reduction in force that will impact nearly 50 percent of its workforce. Staffers will be placed on administrative leave beginning March 21st. So it's not as though the education department

education department is half as full today, this morning, as people are going into the office. It's that they are starting to scale down over the course of the next couple of weeks. And that is, again, a 50 percent, 50 percent reduction of force at schools.

the Department of Education. And Crystal, like you said earlier in the show, all of these blocks could basically have been in a block. This is obviously very significant news. And I want to get your reaction to this clip of Education Secretary recently confirmed Linda McMahon on Laura Ingraham's show last night, confirming again, this is the first step

on the road to a quote total shutdown. Let's roll this next element. First, welcome to the show because you haven't been on in studio with me before. Now, is this the first step on the road to a total shutdown?

Yes, actually it is, because that was the president's mandate, his directive to me, clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat. And that's not to say that a lot of the folks, you know, it's a humanitarian thing to a lot of the folks that are there.

You know, they're out of a job. But we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people and the good people to make sure that the outward facing programs, the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress, all of that are being met. And none of that's going to fall through the cracks. So there it is, Crystal. It's happening, to quote the Ron Paul meme.

Yeah, I mean, it's happening so long as federal courts don't intervene and block. I mean, certainly you can't dismantle the entire education department without an act of Congress. And even these massive cuts, I think will certainly face court challenges. But, you know, to zoom out here, and Emily, you can speak to this as well. You know, this is a longtime conservative movement priority. I think really going back to the era of

the federal government being directly involved in desegregating schools and the fights over busing. The Department of Education has sort of had a target on its back for much of its history from the right because of those interventions, which by the way, the times when the federal government has been most involved

in public school education are actually some of the times when we've seen some of the best results, especially in terms of black students and white students' test scores being more equivalent. You know, back in the 70s in particular, when the federal government was super involved, you saw massive increases in terms of the scores of black test students.

You've seen more controversially in the George W. Bush era, the Republican Party sort of like laid down their arms against the Department of Education, took a different tack, decided to be aggressive in terms of pushing sort of like, you know, increased test standards. This was the era of the bipartisan no child left.

behind, Obama continued somewhat in that direction. Then there was a bit of a backlash against, you know, oh, we're testing students too much, we need to pull back. And so it's interesting because right now, while the Department of Education is being, you know, attacked and gutted in this way, it's one of the times when it's been less involved

in local public school life than it has been at different parts of its history. You know, I think the other way to look at this and then we can get into more specifically, like what does the Department of Education even do? What does most of its funding and personnel go towards?

But, you know, conservatives have also long had a political project to push students away from public schools towards private schools, towards charter schools, you know, towards voucher systems, towards homeschooling. And I certainly think that the energy around that was increased significantly by the

you know, local reactions and the federal reaction, but specifically the local reactions to COVID and all the school shutdowns and, you know, all of the conversation about book bannings and all of those sorts of things. So I think this is, you know, right in line with that era

right in Project 2025, longtime conservative ideological project. And before I get into sort of like the categories of what the education department actually does, I'd just love for you to, you know, reflect as a conservative how you would situate these moves within the Department of Education.

Yeah, and your point about the history of the Education Department is really important because I think that was Carter in 1979. Under the Carter administration, I think the Education Department comes in and Reagan campaigns on getting rid of the Education Department. So it's kind of interesting because I feel like actually a lot of conservatives would say, we want to go back to the education system of the 1970s before so much of this became centralized in Washington, D.C. And this is, of all of the

departments that the right wants to eliminate in this like Doge fantasy. This is the one where I think they have the most particular plan as to how to do it. So the explanation would be a lot of the things that the education department does, and we're going to see this in the next element, will still happen.

they will just be managed on the state level. Same thing with, so like civil rights, for example, they want to meld that into the Justice Department. So it's not as though some of these things won't continue to happen. It's just that they'll be administered on the state level. But, and this is a huge but, that obviously is dependent on the off-ramp being executed immediately.

competently and efficiently, to borrow the phrase from Doge. So I think one way to see this is as though you're doing like a life-saving surgery. And you're like, okay, I think this surgery has to happen. That doesn't mean there isn't a significant...

there's a significant chance that it could go very wrong if you take some incorrect steps. I say that as someone, as a conservative who thinks a lot of this should probably go back to the states. I think the plan to house some of this civil rights stuff under the Department of Justice, which is perfectly equipped to handle it, I think that's all great. But if you don't handle

the surgery in a competent way, then you're in big trouble. You can make the situation, you can essentially make the situation even worse to continue playing out that metaphor. So we could go ahead and put this up on the screen, C4. Crystal, this is a chart that you pulled

of the largest spending categories in the Department of Education. So you see a huge chunk of that is federal student aid, so loans and Pell Grants. K through 12 education comes in at second, and then early childhood education, a very distant third. Career and technical education, civil rights and school safety are the lowest category. So Crystal, can you talk to us a little bit about how you see the future of the Education Department in the context of what that spending looks like as of right now?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there, again, I think it's important to keep the broader ideological goals in mind, which is, um, number one, I mean, this also fits with the later block about Mahmoud Khalil in that there is, um, an ideological war also against higher education, you know, and they're using this sort of like pro-Palestine movement as a cudgel to hobble, uh,

universities and, you know, 60 universities have received letters. So they love the civil rights division of the education department when they're weaponizing it to hurt universities and to, you know, go after students who were part of the pro-Palestine movement. But so, you know, that's part of the ideological project is like this sense of, oh, universities are turning out all of these like liberal lefties. We don't like that.

So we want to hurt these universities. We'll use whatever pretext we can. And so the efforts to Trump has already rolled back some of the student loan relief that has been put into place previously. And certainly this you can see from that chart, you know, the number one category of spending is actually things like Pell Grants, which make

college more affordable for poor students. You know, I think that's a part of the priority. And then I think the other priority is, listen, we're just not really big on public education in general. We think kids should be homeschooled. We think they should have vouchers and go to private schools. We think they should go to charter schools, et cetera. And so there's been a, you know, a long time also attack on the public education system. I will say, you know, there's some recent historical warnings against

aggressively attacking the public school system. In particular, the 2018 teacher strike wave,

which was mostly concentrated in red states. And there's a good reason for that. It's because, you know, those states were more rural. And the more rural the area, the more central the public school is to the community. You know, these are, first of all, the teachers and the administrators will be some of the most important people in the community. It will be one of the most important centers of community. I don't remember if it was you or Ryan who was talking about the fact that, like, as church has declined as the pillar of community, and again, this is part of what the right doesn't like about the school,

As churches declined, school has become like the sort of central meeting place and gathering point for community and way to be active and involved in community. And so if you are attacking that and people feel like this really important pillar is being, you know, is being stripped back, is

being, is really being attacked by the federal government. There is going to be a negative reaction to that and not just from, you know, liberals in cities. In fact, you know, there'll be some of the people who suffer the least from this because they have the most options in terms of other school choices available to them. You know, in a small town, all you've got is the public school, that's it, or homeschool. And for, you know, if you're both parents are working, whatever, that's just not really a feasible option for you. So,

I do think there's a lot of political warnings here, but there is no doubt this is a longtime conservative priority. It, to your point, Emily, laid out in Project 2025, which Trump insisted he had nothing to do with and didn't want anything to do with, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, we all knew that was a lie the whole time. And now they're acting on that. And

I think the only thing that could stop them is potentially a court decision that said, hey, like these funds have been appropriated. You have to spend them. And by the way, you can't just destroy an entire agency without going to Congress since this is like a congressionally authorized agency and you cannot just take the power of the purse for yourself and do whatever you want like you're a king.

Yeah, and I'd argue that the community focus, especially in rural areas, is potentially an upside here in that you would have state governments who are more responsive to localized concerns or even like paired back to city-level governments that are more responsive to localized concerns than the federal government. I think that's been a problem in different cases. But to your point and to the like return to the surgery metaphor,

that can obviously go wrong in ways that are politically disastrous for the administration. There's no question about that. And you flagged this, this is C5, this Politico article about USAID. And USAID is really the momentum or that's really where the right

in the Trump administration is getting its momentum from still because they felt like they politically prosecuted that case successfully for closing USAID. Now Politico is reporting that an official has told staffers, quote, shred and burn your documents. That's the Politico headline. And so it is sort of interesting that the USAID case is seen as this sort of positive case study for how these people

political attempts to shut down institutions that have existed for a long time that Americans are sort of used to even if they don't think about them very often. When USAID, for example, Elon Musk said, well, we made the mistake with Ebola funding and people are still upset about how PEPFAR was handled. So these things are enormously fragile. And I think that was part of the reason for Project 2025, interestingly enough, was that they sort of didn't want

haphazard approaches to difficult questions. They wanted to use what was seen as a once-in-a-generation opportunity with political capital and will to start enacting these conservative fantasy lists, like Christmas lists, wish items.

And they wanted it to be done very carefully. And to look at USAID as an example, you know, it makes you wonder what will come out of paring back the Department of Education that will create political obstacles to going about the entire project. I mean, I obviously think USAID should...

be dramatically scaled back and should be a better-run organization, and also that they shouldn't have been quite as careless with some of the funding as they were. But then when you're talking about the education department, I think the stakes are even higher because it's much, much closer to home for your average voter, your average American.

Yeah. And, you know, the education department, in addition to funding things like Pell Grants, which is really important for, you know, lower income students to be able to go to college,

In terms of the local public school system, they're primarily involved, number one, in poor school districts where you have a disproportionate number of kids who are eligible for free and reduced lunch. So if you meet this designation, you get additional funding from the federal government. That's really significant in states. Actually, it's most significant if you look by the numbers, it's more significant in red states than in blue states. A lot of southern states.

where this Title I funding is really important. The other place where federal government funding becomes extremely important is for students with disabilities. And that's a wide range of those sorts of services that public schools are required to be able to provide, everything from speech therapy to sort of more intensive interventions. And that funding also is distributed from the federal government and obviously is really, really critical to millions upon millions

of families in this country. I have kids who went through speech therapy and, you know, have benefited from these programs and many families across the country do. So when you start messing with those sorts of things, yeah, you're gonna, you know, this is not politically popular. Like if you ask people, should you spend more or less money on education, you're gonna get a resounding,

response, say 70%, that say we should be spending more money actually on education, not less.

And so, you know, if this could really be one of the things that touches communities, especially rural communities, especially in poor states, you know, across the country, including many red states. I mean, again, we saw with the teacher strike wave that that was places like West Virginia, places like Kentucky, places like Arizona actually was another place. Oklahoma had a significant movement as well. These were a lot of red states.

where there was a huge backlash because the public school was important to them. So I think you're right, Emily, if it can be sold as like, now your local government is going to have more control and your funding is going to stay the same, maybe they can sell that politically. But if there starts to be a sense of like, oh, our schools are going to be under-resourced now because of this attack,

I think that hits very different than perhaps conservatives are expecting. Yeah, it's a really interesting point. Crystal, let's move on to the big news out of Congress, where the massive shutdown spending bill or the spending bill to avert the shutdown, I should say, passed last night by a thin margin.

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Well, continuing the theme of the show, every block is an a block today. And certainly one of those significant stories was the house of representatives managing to pass a spending bill at one of those famous continuing resolutions, infamous, actually, I should say, um, uh, by a margin of two 17 to two 13, they pulled one Democrat over and one Republican was a no vote. I'll let you guess who it was. It was Thomas Massey. Uh, you probably, uh,

You probably knew that, though, because if you saw Sager at the White House yesterday, he got in a question about some of the attacks from Chris LaCivita, Trump's former campaign manager, and Trump himself on Thomas Massey. This was before that continuing resolution actually ended up passing. Massey held firm. He did not negotiate with Republican leadership. So let's take a listen to how the White House responded.

President Trump came out today in a primary challenge against Congressman Thomas Massey. Congressman Massey's been a supporter of Doge. He's been a supporter of Make America Healthy Again. What kind of message is this White House sending against a congressman who's sticking up for principles that he's long held in the chamber and voting against continuing resolution and spending?

I think the president has made it very clear that he believes it's critical for conservatives and Republicans and frankly all members of Congress to get behind this continuing resolution to keep the government funded. The president wants to continue the momentum that he has built over the last 51 days. In order to keep the government funded, we got to keep moving with these deportations. And he believes that everybody needs to get on board with this bill.

Okay, well, everybody did not get on board with the bill, but almost everybody did. The question then is kicked to the Senate, which has until Friday to avert a government shutdown. The deal here is to kick funding to September, kick the funding battle to September. And what Donald Trump actually did was bring in members of the House Freedom Caucus, like Chip Roy, to

the early stages of this negotiation. And so Roy made the pitch to other Freedom Caucus members. And Massey isn't a Freedom Caucus member. He's just adjacent to the Freedom Caucus. It's all very confusing. But what Chip Roy was arguing is that let Doge find all kinds of easy sort of budget vetoes. You know, you can just sort of start slashing all of the spending. Give Doge the space over the next several months to find cuts and

And then, you know, have this fight over adding to the national debt in September when there's more political capital because Doge will have found all of this. You will have avoided the shutdown. We can put the next element up on the screen. J.D. Vance's message when he was he's become a big supporter.

not entirely unexpected because he just came out of the Senate, but he's been a big go-between from the White House to Capitol Hill. And what he was saying is the House Republicans will take the blame if it comes to a shutdown. Sort of amusing because that's always been something the Freedom Caucus guys have said, sure, we would love to take the blame for a shutdown.

and it's now also what Democrats are dealing with because they now have the ball in their court. You can put the next element up on the screen. This is Jake Sherman on the margin. We mentioned this earlier. It was 217 or 213. And Jared Golden, he's of Maine, was the only Democrat who voted yes. Thomas Massey, obviously, was the only Republican who voted no. So, Crystal, now this is maybe the first

shutdown battle, I can remember where it did really, I think it does really look to the public like the ball is in the Democrats' court. And it's a fascinating dynamic because a lot of Republicans in their own resistance era to Obama and Biden have said there's political capital in going to the brink of a shutdown or actually going through with a short shutdown itself. And now we're seeing some demands on that.

for Democrats to play brinksmanship with a potential government shutdown. Yeah, I mean, the difference is, of course, that Republicans hate government and Democrats, in theory, like government. So it creates, you know, more ideological tensions for Democrats than it does for Republicans. But I can tell you the base of the Democratic Party, liberals, lefties, whoever, they want their leaders to push to the brink on this. And I'll tell you why. I mean, what you explained is exactly right.

are pitching this, and I think accurately so, as basically a free license for Doge to do what it wants to do. And what Democrat, outside of John Fetterman, wants to...

you know, wants to give a green light to this slash and burn destruction of the federal government, including social security, including veterans affairs, including the department of education, et cetera. And so that's the way Hakeem Jeffries, who is again, an incredibly weak leader was able to hold together all of his caucus save for Jared Golden is basically like, you vote for this. You are co-signing Doge. That's what you're doing. And it's,

Democratic Party, you know, very united against Elon and the attacks on Social Security, the attacks on, you know, potential attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, etc.,

So Republicans are betting that because they did not even try to negotiate the CR with Democrats, they just negotiated amongst themselves. They're betting on Democrats blinking in the Senate. And they might. But I will say that Fetterman is the only one who has really come out and indicated he'll vote for this. They need to get seven. Even some like more moderate members, people like Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have expressed support.

hesitation at voting for this particular CR. And maybe that's because they're from Virginia and that's a state that obviously there's lots of federal government workers, et cetera. But that is kind of an indication of where more of the moderate members may be headed in the Senate. So I don't know. Republicans, like I said, are thinking that Democrats, because they're committed to the government, are going to go weak-kneed here. And that usually is a safe bet.

But I'm not sure in this case. Schumer has played it pretty coy. You know, Jeffries came out and was like, we're going to whip no. And we talked about that previously. Um,

Schumer has said, like, I'm going to wait and see what happens in the House before I really weigh in here. Well, now we know what happened in the House. So the ball is, in a sense, in Senate Democrats' court. That being said, I think J.D. Vance is 100 percent correct that if the government shuts down, it's going to be blamed on Republicans because Republicans control everything. So, like, who else are you going to blame when Republicans are in control of the

House, the Senate and the White House. Unless Democrats really lean into owning the blame. And this is something that I think the media often gets wrong with shutdown politics is conflating goals for the base with goals for the broader public. And the broader public does not like shutdowns. They're never excited about a shutdown. It feels like chaos and it feels sort of reckless and childish. But on the other hand,

the Republican base, because this hasn't really come up much for the Democratic base, but I think it's true of both bases, they do like shut down politics. They find it to be actually like invigorating to everything you just said, Crystal, is like showing a damn spine and using the leverage that you have. And in this case, Democrats have a significant amount

of leverage. So what we might end up seeing is one of those really short shutdowns over the weekend, actually. It could be something that is very, very temporary and Democrats lean in, rally the base and say, we're not opening back up the government until we get this, this, this, and they get part of it and can claim a partial victory with their own base who desperately wants them to show a spine and is showing up at town halls, is showing up at events with people like Chris Murphy, for example, is protesting at Tesla dealerships.

So the shutdown lessons for Republicans have been that's always a shot in the arm with the base. And Democrats now, Rand Paul is not voting yes. So that's where the seven number comes from of Democrats. Democrats have a real opportunity to learn from a lesson Republicans have taken over the last 10 or so years about shutdown politics. I am super curious to see how this proceeds.

Yeah. Well, and the last thing I'll say about this is part of what has informed Republican approach to shutdown politics is that they've been more fearful of primary challenges from their right than, you know, most of these members, including most senators, are in, you know, relatively like safe red or blue districts slash states.

And so they're constantly looking over their shoulder at like, who's the, you know, more radical or more Trumpy or more whatever person who could come out of the woodwork and challenge me from the right. Democrats have not had as much of that same dynamic. Obviously, there were some, you know, high profile Justice Democrats wins AOC taking out Joe Crowley. But by and large, they haven't really felt like they are threatened significantly from their left.

And that is what could be changing. Now, I don't think that they've adjusted their politics to reckon with the fact that it's no longer just like, you know, progressives and lefties who are critical of Democratic leadership, that this is the mainstream liberal Democratic normie dem movement.

voter position is to be disgusted with Democratic leadership and their total lack of fight. I don't think that they've really incorporated that into their view of the world. They still see it as this fringe annoying group that they can just feel free to disregard, as evidenced by the way that some of these quote-unquote leaders have approached this particular era. But I do think that that

reality has changed significantly and should change their calculus, whether it does or not is another matter. Now, I will say a bunch of these people, I mean, all of them are having their offices flooded with calls from the liberal base that wants them to fight, wants them to challenge Trump and Elon more aggressively. You know, any of them that have done town halls, it's not just Bernie who's getting huge crowds.

Any politician who shows up are garnering huge crowds to come and either support them or yell at them or encourage them on the Democratic Party side to put up more of a fight. So they're certainly receiving that message, whether or not they're going to adjust their approach to reflect that energy among the Democratic base is an open question.

So risk averse. It really is the open. I like this to me is maybe a litmus test for Democrats in this new like wilderness era that they're in after Trump won post-lawfare, post-2020 loss. You know, can Democrats finally be forced into a less risk aversed life?

The last thing I wanted to mention, Crystal, is the step-by-step. This is Bradley J. of Breitbart kind of charted this out after Chip Roy was talking to Steve Bannon. He said the plan really is to pass the clean CR, which they did. Elon continues finding waste, fraud, and abuse.

Three, Russ Vogt will formulate those findings into a plan. And then four, Trump will use the impoundment power to enact savings. So their new theory of the impoundment—it's not a new theory, but the unitary executive theory that they are completely enacting and testing in the courts right now about impoundment and the president's ability to just say we're not spending this congressionally appropriated money is—

was a huge, huge factor in convincing the Chip Roy's to go along with a plan that, you know, doesn't play the same kind of debt politics or maybe subverts the typical Freedom Caucus line on debt politics because now they have someone who's willing to be that unitary executive. Finally, Crystal, the other thing for Democrats that's a little complicated this time around is with the shutdown, they're currently trying to defend federal workers

And federal workers are always, you know, sort of the political football in a shutdown and the agencies are always a political football in the shutdown. So that definitely complicates their calculus as to how far they push this on Friday into Saturday and Sunday.

I don't doubt that what you're saying is correct about Doge helping make this an easier pill to swallow for the chip roys of the world, but I don't think that's really what's going on. I think what's really going on is Elon's billions and the fact that he said, hey, if you don't do what we want you to do and what the president asked you to do or I asked you to do, I'm going to primary you and I'm going to put...

however much money I need to put to make sure that you are defeated. And then you've got Trump out there and Chris LaCivita making a test case of Thomas Massey and, you know, threatening him, who's a very popular figure with a lot of the Republican base and certainly popular in his district as well. So, you know, you're really going after someone who's quite prominent. So it's like, oh, if even Thomas Massey is going to be put in their sights, anyone really can be. And so that's why I think that the...

Elon and Trump

era of MAGA has crushed the remaining rebellion among the Tea Party, like the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party outside of Thomas Massey and Rand Paul are probably the only ones who are really willing to dissent. It's kind of interesting they're both from Kentucky because Kentucky is not actually that libertarian of a state, but whatever. That's a side note. But I think that they have ended effectively the Tea Party rebellion era of Republican politics just through the sheer force of

Cult of personality, the megaphone that is X, and Elon being the richest man on the planet. Yeah, I mean, that is absolutely a factor. There's no question about it. Sort of a sort of Damocles. Crystal, let's go ahead and get to Ryan Grimm, who we're delighted to have join us this morning.

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We're so happy to be joined now by Ryan Grimm. You may have heard of him. Ryan, thank you for joining us. I know you have a quarantine zone in your house right now, so we appreciate it. It is. It is quite something. Yeah, I was just I was just as I was just mentioning, we've got you haven't really lived until, you know, your wife's getting chemo and two of your kids get flu right before that.

Oh, okay. This is going to be a tight wire act. So yeah, she's not even in the house. She went to a friend's house after getting it. Truly father of the year. There's no competition. Well, I mean, there's fewer people in the house now, so. The silver lining is the rest of life is going to seem really easy after this. That's right. You're going to be like, I can't believe that this was like a problem before. Yeah.

Just coasting downhill from here. Great point. Well, let's start because we wanted to have you come and talk to us about some updates in this incredibly important case of Mahmoud Khalil. But let's start with Sagar's question at the White House briefing yesterday. Sagar was able to get one question in about this situation. So we can go ahead and roll E1 here. Sagar at yesterday's White House press briefing talking to Press Secretary Caroline Lovett.

Does the administration believe that it needs to charge a green card holder with a crime to be eligible for deportation? Well, in fact, Secretary Rubio reserves the right to revoke the visa of Mahmoud Khalil. And I'm glad you brought this up. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State has the right to revoke

a green card or a visa for individuals who serve or are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America. And Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation's finest universities and colleges.

and he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists who have killed innocent men, women, and children. This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted

college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda. So the legal question here is actually really interesting. There is a, I would say, overly broad

law that the administration is citing that does allow the Secretary of State to exercise discretion here. And the administration confirmed, actually to the Free Press a couple of days ago now, that this is not because Khalil broke any law. They're very much not arguing that he broke any law. They're arguing that they have the discretion

to toss people, legal permanent residents, out of the country if they are essentially violating or they're undermining America's national security by protesting and doing other sort of acts like that. So Ryan, just give us your reaction to Levitt's answer in the context of everything we've seen. Fairly messy sort of attempt to explain all of this from the administration.

Yeah, I'm glad Sagar pinned her down on that because now we understand that the administration is, like you said, making the claim that they don't need to charge a green card holder. And there are probably a lot of green card holders. That means you're a lawful permanent resident. You're on the pathway to citizenship next. Next, you take your test if you want to. But if you're in that status, lawful permanent resident, that Rubio...

can kick you out without any due process, without charging you with a crime, without even an administrative process kind of inside of the State Department, that if he decides that you are a threat to national security, he can get rid of you. The argument that they are making is that combating anti-Semitism is a foreign policy priority of the United States and that having somebody who's anti-Semitic

in the United States undermines the U.S. ability to pursue its fight against anti-Semitism. So you could also imagine if Democrats said that, as they did, that climate change is a national security threat and that foreign policy is organized around combating climate change, that anybody who's here, who's a permanent resident, who doesn't approve of

of the Biden administration's climate policy is therefore a threat to climate policy. Or protests it and hands out anti-climate denying posters, whatever it is, yeah. Or if you, yeah, if they said that, look, January 6th was an insurrection and the Proud Boys are domestic terrorists and that then anybody who says anything about the 2020 election is therefore supporting domestic terrorists and if they're a permanent resident,

then they can be expelled. You know, you're right that there is this law in the books that could be read to grant the Secretary of State this authority. We've been around for 250 years. That history has been dark at times. There are an awful lot of ugly laws and draconian laws on our books that we understand today are in complete and obvious conflict with the Constitution.

And this is one of them. So we'll see, though, whether or not the court ends up agreeing with that. There's supposed to there'll be a hearing late this morning between the council and the government. I mean, you can just imagine the freak out if the shoot was on the other foot as you're laying out, Ryan. Like, let's say that Biden declared that combating racism is

anti-Black racism was a foreign policy priority. And let's say maybe Elon Musk still was a permanent resident and not a citizen. You're like, white South Africans, sorry, you got to go. Steve Bannon says you're the most racist people on the face of the planet. So that's it for you. And you've defended these people who say that they are racist. Like that one doggy dog kid who said,

Like I'm, I was a proud racist before being racist was cool and they defended him. So, okay. Now are you all terrorists because you're all like in contravention of this U S policy against racism? Like that would be absurd, but that's certainly the precedent they're setting up.

So let me go ahead and get your reaction to Trump during his Tesla sales pitch on the White House lawn situation. Got asked a question about this as well and indicated that Mahmoud Khalil would be the first of many. Let's take a listen to that. I think we ought to get them all out of the country. They're troublemakers. They're agitators. They don't love our country. We ought to get them the hell out. I think that guy, we ought to get him. I heard his statements, too. They were plenty bad.

and I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country. His statements were plenty bad. So, I mean, just again, this isn't about a crime. This is about things that he said that the administration doesn't like. And this alleged Hamas material, which is so bad, Caroline Levin couldn't even bring it into the briefing room to share with us just how terrible this propaganda he was distributing or affiliated with was.

But, you know, there was... What seems to have unfolded here, and this is your reporting as well as other outlets, is that when they went to pick up to arrest Khalil, they thought he was there on a student visa. And then he and his wife were like, he's a green card. Like, he's a permanent resident. And they're like...

Don't care, we're taking him anyway. And so the theory was basically like the administration kind of bungled this and they overreached, went far beyond what they had intended to. But they're certainly not backing away from it. Instead, they're using this as a justification to go even further and say, yeah, that's right. Student visa, green card holder. If we don't want you here, if Secretary Rubio decides that you're an anti-Semite, that's it, you're gone.

Yeah, and what's wild, and we reported this at Dropsite, that Elvin Hernandez was the ICE agent who had the conversation, particularly with Amy Greer, who is Mahmoud Khalil's attorney. Elvin Hernandez was the 2019 guest attorney.

at the State of the Union of President Trump. Interesting coincidence if it is that. But yes, he told her, we're picking him up because we're revoking his student visa. And she told him he's a permanent resident, he has a green card. And his response, according to the court filing, was, oh, well, we're revoking that too. So yeah, clearly it's like, you know, they called an audible and we may end up getting this extraordinary rollback in civil liberties,

over incompetence, over a failure to just go in their own database and check whether or not he was on a student visa or whether he was on a green card. Because once you're on a green card, you do have more protections.

Then when you're here on a student visa, student visa, you really or other kinds of visas, you really can be sent back out of the country with with with very little rationale or in some cases, no rationale at all. But once you're a legal permanent resident, the paperwork is that you that all green card holders get is very clear. You have to be convicted of a crime to be expelled. They don't mention this like obscure thing.

You know, you're you're endorsing terrorism thing. But by the way, one one detail on that on that Hamas propaganda that they said he was distributing. We don't actually know if he was handing it out or it was being handed out in the same building where he was. But aside from that, the law on this, as it's been decided by courts, has always been that it's actually OK to support terrorism.

illegal things, support terrorism, even you can support drug trafficking, whatever, as long as you're doing it as speech independently of the criminal activity. And so like to take the most extreme example, you could say that I support Al Qaeda's right to behead people or whatever. Like you can say that legally, that's protected speech. What you can't do is coordinate with Al Qaeda

in order to push forward that propaganda. That's when it becomes material support for terrorism. There's no claim that Hamas, while it was fending off this assault, was also on the side advising campus protesters. And the history of the Palestinian movement inside Gaza and the West Bank suggests that they've never really done that. There's been criticism of them for their absolute lack of outreach to

them, the PLO and others. And so even if it is the case that he was distributing this material, which doesn't seem to be the case, it would be okay. Because obviously it's, we quote Hamas regularly in news reports. There's nothing wrong with doing that as long as we're not coordinating and materially supporting them. Well,

Well, Emily, I don't know, maybe what's the name of the Trump negotiator who went and was talking directly to Hamas as he's materially supporting terrorism as well? I mean, you know, it is a funny time for them to be pressing this case at a time when they're also making, I think, the correct point that, you know, you've got to talk to these people and you've got to deal with them. And his words, you know, you may find out that they don't have horns coming out of their head. Maybe they're maybe they're good guys.

The flyers in question, there's one of them that says something like crush Zionism and it's a boot coming down the star of David. But there are two others. And that one, by the way, is very explicitly anti-Zionist and not explicitly anti-Semitic as, you know, the administration is implying. But of course, House Republicans and

Some Democrats passed a bill that said recently anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. So there's that overly broad question as well. But the other two flyers are legitimately—they look very, very bad, that if you have someone who is on a student visa who is handing out these types of flyers, you ask, well, how is somebody on a student visa—

this opposed to the like, I think one of the things said that the charter of the group that Khalil is a part of says something like they want to crash Western imperialism. So it's like, well, OK, that that that appeared to be like an Instagram, like it's a quote from somebody else, like some author said this and somebody who handles their social media page made it one of their like little Instagram things. So I don't know if the organization like

actually endorses that. We advocate for the abolition of Western civilization. But if they did, that's a pretty far left kind of thing to say. It is. It is. It's protective speech, but I actually do think in principle there's a legitimate American interest in bringing people or giving visas to people who actually are displaying an interest in improving the United States and contributing to the United States and all of that. But

But I say that with the caveat that this is not a student visa. They think they—I think they thought they had a layup test case here with a student visa where they could make this argument. And we still don't have any pictures, video, that I'm aware of at least, of Khalil himself

distributing this information and saying, for example, support Hamas. You know, he was the one flyer is like a explanation. It's like Hamas's explanation of why they executed, as they say, Al-Aqsa flood on October 7th. And there's all kinds of context

Hypothetically, whether or not you think, whether or not it looks like Khalil was engaged in this hypothetical scenario, but there's all types of context where you would say we should study Hamas's explanation for what they did for the terror that they wreaked. There's one that says something like sometimes you need a flood. That was one of the other flyers, which is actually, I think that was pretty disgusting. But we don't actually know. The administration hasn't connected the dots.

as to whether or not he was endorsing these views and handing out these flyers. We just see the flyers. They're not really prosecuting this case very well. Right, because they're doing it backwards. And there is a lot of speculation also that they are ginning up this controversy in order to satisfy...

the pro-Israel universe here in the United States to soften them up to then ram through a long-term truce and prisoner exchange that Israel will heavily object to. And that is a fairly standard kind of Trumpian move to do something like outrageous and bellicose in a symbolic way.

to draw out a lot of anger and then cut the other way. You've seen it with Ukraine-Russia dynamic repeatedly. So we'll see, which would suggest that they don't really take anything they're saying seriously, that it's just kind of anti-Palestinian,

hostility just manifest for the purpose of just throwing red meat to the pro-Israel lobby in order to then screw them over a couple weeks from now.

I mean, I think that's possible. I think also there's some rumblings in the base that like the mass deportation hasn't been as mass deportation as the, you know, as was promised. So this is, you know, a good example that you don't you don't they don't get the mass deportation. So they get the spectacle of low look. We're sending people to Guantanamo and the military planes and all of that sort of stuff.

Then you also have, I mean, you know, Trump just is, I think has authoritarian instincts and is, likes the sense of power of just being able to do what he wants with who he wants, whatever he wants. He sees these pro-Palestine groups as being lefties that, lefty activists that he hates anyway. So he gets to crush an enemy. And,

And he sees universities writ large as like, you know, training breeding grounds for lefties, Marxists and socialists and, you know, and liberals and people who vote against him. And so, you know, as part and parcel of this, this comes at the same time that they just summarily stripped $400 million in funding from Columbia. 60 universities have gotten letters.

nationwide, you know, including University of Virginia, where I went, public schools, you know, private universities in red states and blue states, et cetera, saying basically you're next unless you can prove that you did everything we want on anti-Semitism, which if you read the letter, like there's no way anyone could ever actually prove that they satisfied whatever it is that the administration is looking for. So yeah, and I also think that they feel like

And I've seen a lot of conservatives say this, like, oh, here's Democrats fighting again on an 80-20 issue, which I'm not sure that they're right about that polling, because I do think that people have a reaction against, you know, assaults on free speech, etc. It depends on how you frame it. But I think that they also see it as a political winner because they can say, oh, this guy's pro-Humas. Why are you supporting people who are pro-terrorist, etc.? So I think there's a whole bunch of reasons that.

cut toward in the direction of why the Trump administration would, you know, take this course. And none of that is to excuse it, though, because ultimately the impact of this, you know, authoritarian crushing of speech, I think, you know, comparable to things that we saw with like McCarthyist Red Scare type of tactics, if not even more aggressive, that impact is very, very real and can't just be sort of waved away as like, oh, well, Trump's just using this as like a negotiating tactic.

McCarthy was right.

are listed as having affected as like going to the encampment, like visiting it. Like that's it. They're not trying to claim anything more beyond that. It's already having a chilling effect. There was a story that came into us just maybe a week ago. Some employees from a company that wanted to speak out about what was going on in there. After this happened, they're saying, you know what, actually, let's wait on this. I don't think we can speak out right now.

And that is that's the goal here to chill the ability of people to expose wrongdoing and to speak out. I want to get your both of your take on how Democrats are handling this, because you guys were both sort of just talking about what type of maybe trap Republicans think they're putting Democrats in. So let's put E6 up on the screen. This is a response from Chuck's senator, Chuck E.

Schumer, who said, I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports and have made my criticism of the anti-Semitic actions at Columbia loudly known. Mr. Khalil is also a legal permanent resident here, and his wife, who's eight months pregnant, is an American citizen. But he said, this is a matter for the university to pursue, and I have encouraged them to be much more robust in how they combat anti-Semitism and remain a—and

maintain a harassment-free campus that protects the safety and security of Jewish and other students. That is really lukewarm. He calls on DHS to articulate the case against Khalil, basically. So both of you, maybe just starting with Ryan, what is your reaction to the way Schumer handled this? He got a lot of criticism for, you know, leading with, you know, I abhor his speech rather than

free speech must be protected, particularly for speech that you abhor. Because that's the whole point, right? We're not here to defend the speech of people we agree with and who are saying very civil, milquetoast things like that. Nobody needs to defend that. You can say that in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. What you have to defend is the stuff that makes you tug at your collar a little bit and say, oh, wow. Mm-hmm.

You can really say that? I guess you can. I guess we have free speech here. Meanwhile, the Republicans are happy to elevate the Senate Judiciary Committee that just straight up said free Mahmoud Khalil. So like the Democrats, you know, just lose everywhere, you know, because from the Republican perspective, they see Democrats as unapologetically, unconditionally standing up for a Hamas supporter.

From the left, they see Schumer equivocating and like denouncing him before he gets around to defending him. So, you know, you can kind of see from the Republican perspective why they think that they have a winning political moment here, even if what they're doing is unraveling what generations of Americans have fought for for 250 years to uphold. Yeah, they might have a couple of good weeks here.

Yeah, I mean, I think it remains to be seen because it also does play into the accurate image of Trump as this just like authoritarian who throws his weight around and criminalizes speech and, you know, is total hypocrite. They ran on like, oh, we're going to be the free speech people and then immediately like, and we're going to jail you for saying things that we didn't like at a rally. But, yeah.

Chris Murphy, who has been pretty good in Trump 2.0, put out a good statement that led Ryan, like you said, with the bottom line. It doesn't really matter what he said and how you feel about it. That's not the point. The point is that we have free speech.

And I don't think it's that hard to message that. You know, the problem with Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom are the weakest, most pathetic leaders I have ever seen in my life, and both need to resign in my personal humble opinion, is the first thing you do is validate their frame. What's the Republican frame? He's an anti-Semite and a terrorist supporter. And the first words out of your mouth are to basically be like, they're right about him. Like, this is the...

idiot, like this is the idiocy of the Democratic Party in general. I mean, they did the same thing with immigration in the last election cycle. And I get immigration, tough issue, et cetera, et cetera. But they thought they really had Republicans when they passed their own like hawkish border bill. Like, look, we're the real border hawks.

No, you just gave credence to their framing of the world. You just helped to bolster the way that they view and they pitch immigration as the number one problem and, you know, anarchy at the border and a flood and an invasion and blah, blah, blah. Like that's what you're leading with.

So, no, I think it's foolish. I don't think it helps them politically. I think that the base of the Democratic Party, like talk about misreading the moment between those two dudes and then Gavin Newsom running around, you know, giving massages to Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage and next Steve Bannon, etc.,

The base wants you to fight and be adversarial and push like a different frame of the world, not just constantly validate right wing frames. And that's what Chuck Schumer, in addition to just being like weak and lame and taking 80 million years to even get to the freaking point, which is part of the problem, too. You lead with validating their frame. You capitulate in the first paragraphs and then you're done.

Yeah, and Schumer knows full well that a huge number of the protesters in that encampment were Jewish students themselves. That's right. So many so they would have they have seders every weekend. We can roll E7 actually as Ryan makes this point. Yeah, and

Of course, it's true that there are a non-trivial number of Jewish students at Columbia University who feel like criticism of Israel or calling the attack on Gaza a genocide is anti-Semitic and makes them feel unsafe and is unpleasant and all those things. Those are genuine feelings. That doesn't change the fact that

There are so many Jewish students who disagree with them and are right there in the encampments. One of the few people who has acknowledged that in our politics is Donald Trump. He was on a did an interview with Hugh Hewitt. And I think at the moment, Trump was particularly mad at Jewish voters because he was seeing polls that were showing that they were still voting for Democrats. Even as he says, I gave them Jerusalem, I gave them the Golan Heights and they're still voting for Democrats.

And he was complaining about the campus protests. And he says, Hugh, you know, like a lot of those kids out there are Jewish kids. You do realize that, right? And he was like, yes, yes, there's there are a few outliers. He's like, no, no, there's a lot of them out there. You know, Trump meant it as an insult. But but Trump, like, understands that. And so does Schumer. And everybody who has looked at this understands it.

And yet here we get this claim that it's anti-Semitic, despite if you listen to what Mahmoud Khalil would say on CNN and elsewhere, he would always say the liberation of the Jewish people and the liberation of the Palestinian people are entwined. Like we can only go forward in peace together to a place of equality and dignity, which is not Hamas rhetoric at all, by the way. Yet that was what he was saying.

And the last point I'll make on this is if it is the foreign policy priority of the U.S. to stop the spread of anti-Semitism, we are doing an absolutely dreadful job of it. Yeah, Rubio should be deported if that's... Absolutely the case. Because that's the other thing is like, you know, the left is very careful. I think you may have made this point, somebody made this point recently. The left tends to be very careful to separate Israel from...

from the Jewish people. And, you know, symbolic gatherings, such as the one that we just showed, of Jewish students who are anti-Zionist helps to prove that point. And that's part of why Jewish organizations who are anti-Zionist have been at the forefront of the pro-Palestine movement to make that point.

The right constantly, led by Bibi Netanyahu, conflates the two. And Biden conflated the two. And Trump conflates the two. I mean, it's, you know, if you support Israel, you support Jews. And if you don't support Israel, you hate Jews. Well, guess what? When Israel is out there cutting off electricity to a trapped population, trying to starve them and dehydrate them,

You don't think that that is going to contribute to a spread of anti-Semitism here and around the world when you're the one conflating? Yeah, conflating Israel and all Jewish people. And the right also refuses to make any distinction between Hamas, civilians in Gaza, and campus protesters. Like anybody who is critical of Israel's conduct in the war is just pro-Hamas, flat, flat out, no effort whatsoever to make any distinction. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a significant problem. Khalil is scheduled to appear in court today. We should add the battle is raging over where his case will be heard, whether in Louisiana or. Is counsel scheduled to appear? We've been trying to track flights out of that Louisiana prison. I don't think he's going to be there, but we'll see. ABC News says he's scheduled to appear in court as of this morning. But I hope I very much hope he's there.

Yeah, we will see. So that's the story to watch today. Ryan, thank you so much for taking a slice of your very busy morning to help explain this to us. You got it. Good luck to you and to your kiddos and certainly to your wife. Appreciate it. Thank you for filling in. Much appreciated.

Oh, anytime. Continuing today's theme of every block being an A block. Once again, Crystal, we got news late in the day yesterday after Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz left a meeting with Ukrainian negotiators that actually they had reached an agreement to send a ceasefire proposal over to Moscow. Let's take a listen to Rubio after he got out of that meeting in Saudi Arabia.

Today, we made an offer that the Ukrainians have accepted, which is to enter into a ceasefire and into immediate negotiations to end this conflict in a way that's enduring and sustainable and accounts for their interests, their security, their ability to prosper as a nation. I want to personally thank, we both want to thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, His Majesty, for hosting us, for making this possible. They've been instrumental in this process, and we're very grateful to them for hosting us here today. And hopefully we'll take this offer now to the Russians.

And we hope that they'll say yes, that they'll say yes to peace. The ball is now in their court. But again, the president's objective here is, number one, above everything else, he wants the war to end. And I think today Ukraine has taken a concrete step in that regard. We hope the Russians will reciprocate.

So let's dig in a little bit more to this deal, but first start with F2, which is Steve Witkoff, who is actually going to Russia once again this week, saying that Zelensky did apologize to Donald Trump in a letter after that explosive argument during an Oval Office meeting. That's how the Hill put it. And Witkoff said Monday on Fox News that Zelensky sent a letter to the president. He apologized for that whole incident that happened in the Oval Office. So there you see Trump got his much-desired apology out.

of Zelensky apparently in that letter. But if we put F3 on the screen, the Associated Press sort of broke down a bit about what is in the agreement. A couple of things worth paying attention to. The mineral deal, or at least what did Trump say, the concept of a plan? There's a concept of a plan for the mineral deal as part of the agreement. For the raw earths.

Yes, the raw earth, the rare earth minerals, the U.S. getting basically a 50 percent stake in the raw earth minerals of Ukraine. It would be a 30-day ceasefire, as Matthew Lee writes here, that is pending, obviously, the Kremlin's agreement to this, pending Putin's agreement to this. But that's basically what they were able to come up with. Now, the territory and the borders is a massive obstacle.

open question that we don't have answered based on what happened yesterday, but very significant that after that Oval Office blow up, you know, Trump came out with this threat of sanctions towards Russia. He got his apology from Zelensky. And now you have this agreement. Actually, they put out a joint statement, Rubio and his Ukrainian counterpart.

parts put out a joint statement together, which is, it sounds like a silly like beltway thing, but it's sort of remarkable again, after the Oval Office blow up and the fallout throughout Europe and the ripple effect that had throughout the world that Ukraine and the United States put out that statement together saying they had come up with this 30-day ceasefire plan. Now, Witkoff is expected to actually meet with

Putin this week. Witkoff obviously also was able to secure the release of Mark Fogel through negotiations with Russia and was part of the initial ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Crystal, what do you think is going to happen in the next couple of days?

I mean, I have no idea. I'm not sure, like, I'm not sure what's in it for Russia to accept this deal at this point. And, you know, this is one of the things that they have to figure out is like,

you know, not to validate like Putin's thinking or his grievances or like his justification for what is at the end of the day, like a completely illegal and outrageous invasion that's been incredibly deep stabilizing for the entire globe and certainly for Europe. But you do have to understand if you're going to strike some sort of a deal that is going to be in any way lasting,

what he sees as having been the provocations that led to this so that you do avoid a situation. This was kind of what Zelensky was trying to say in the Oval Office of like, you can't just trust this dude. Like if he could go back on his word at any time...

So you actually have to do something to secure some measure of what he sees as his interests. And, you know, it's very likely that whatever that is continues to be unacceptable to the U.S., even under a Trump administration. So I think it's still very unclear. You know, I...

I predicted after the Oval Office blow up that it was more theater than would result in like true fallout or shift in the Trump administration's approach. And I think that that has proved to be correct. Ultimately, you know, they've restarted the intelligence sharing, they're shipping weapons again, they're working on their raw minerals deal, like the plan moves forward according to pace. But

I wanted to share with you, because it seems sort of astute and some pieces of it already seem to be coming true, a prediction from a Russian analyst that Michael Tracy had put out on his Twitter feed. He said that U.S. President Donald Trump's bid to secure a ceasefire along Ukraine's battle lines is going to fail. The American plan to stop the war ignores Russia's security concerns, disregards the root causes. Meanwhile, Moscow's conditions for peace outlined by Putin in 2024 remain unacceptable to Washington as they would effectively mean Kiev's capitulation and the West's strategic defeat.

He predicts that the fighting will basically sort of like

continue indefinitely. Trump will levy additional sanctions. As you said, he's already moving in that direction. They'll probably ramp down the amount of aid that flows to Ukraine and the Europeans will try to step up and see if they can sort of fill that gap. On the battlefield, he predicts the tide will continue to shift in Russia's favor. Russian forces are expected to push Ukraine out of key regions. Ukraine will mobilize younger and experienced recruits to try to slow Russia's advances.

There will be border incursions or symbolic strikes deep into Russian territory in an attempt to demoralize the Russian population. But ultimately, you know, the battlefield dynamics will shift towards Russia. And then they say domestically, the U.S. and its allies may push for elections in Ukraine, hoping to replace Zelensky, whose term expired already. That political reshuffling might temporarily strengthen Kiev's leadership, will not address the underlying challenges of economic collapse and deteriorating living conditions for ordinary Ukrainians. And so...

listen, who knows what's going to happen, but I thought that was a fairly prescient analysis of how things may well play out where there's this attempt to strike a deal. There are conditions on Putin's side that continue to be unacceptable even to the Trump administration where Putin doesn't have a lot of incentive to do a deal right now because he can read the writing on the wall at,

that a war of attrition increasingly benefits him and the Russian position will continue to strengthen vis-a-vis the war. And so things just kind of continue to grind on indefinitely, I think continues to be a very plausible possibility of where this thing ultimately heads.

And they've obviously been trading missiles and drones over the course of the last couple of days, and significantly so Ukraine into Russia. But the other thing to remember, obviously, is Kursk is going to be a huge piece of leverage from Ukraine as they talk about what

belongs to whom in this ceasefire negotiation. These things are so unpredictable from the Trump administration. Obviously, we know that. I don't even need to say it aloud, basically. But you just really never know what Trump and Steve Witkoff end up walking out of a negotiation with because they're not—

They don't see themselves as being restricted by sort of the usual orthodoxies and conventions of these types of conversations, and certainly not with Russia. They're willing to talk to Russia in ways that most conventional politicians, whether they're Republican or Democrat, are not interested in doing. So, man, this will be an interesting one to watch over the next couple of days as Witkoff heads to Moscow, Crystal. Yes, indeed.

All right. Well, it was a pleasure to have you here. And we got Crystal and a little bit of Ryan. So it was really the best of both worlds. And we were basically joined in spirit by Sagar because we played like three clips of him. So it was sort of like the whole gang was here. By Sargar and Nettie, I think is what she said. Yes.

Yes. Well, it was great to see the White House put him in the new media seat. Obviously, Sagar is an experienced seasoned White House reporter. So to have him back in that routine was fantastic. Well, and he brought some honor to the new media chair, which has been not the most honorable seat ever.

since its advent. So I was glad to see him asking some real questions there. And getting three questions to at the very top, it's incredibly influential, those positions, and being able to get the administration on the record on those things.

Yeah, people don't realize when you get the first questions, that means you're beating the networks to the punch. And the networks like to ask questions that are perfectly calibrated for TV clips. You know, it's one of those things you can't unsee once you figure out that's what they're doing. So to have the early questions that the networks absolutely despise it because they were used to being in that position and it sends them down the list. You know, they have to go to their like

10th question that they came into the briefing with instead of the first and second one that gets them the really juicy clip. So Sacher definitely did us proud and, you know, did proud of the theory, at least the theory of having the new media seat. So we were glad to be able to react to some of his questions today. And Crystal, thank you just for being here. It's always a delight to do the show with you. And it was a lot of fun.

Yes, my pleasure. Always fun. I always enjoy it. And I'll be back in again. So guys, sorry if you're sick of me, but I'll be back again for a normal show with Sagar tomorrow. So we will see you guys then. See you then. BreakingPoints.com for premium membership. We will be back with more tomorrow.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co-host Mark Seale's best-selling book of the same title. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire,

Did you know that 70% of people get hired at companies where they already have a connection? I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's Editor-at-Large for Jobs and Career Development. And on my podcast, Get Hired, I bring you all the information you need to, well, get hired.

Landing a job may be tough, but Get Hired is here for you every step of the way with advice on resumes, networking, negotiation, and so much more. Listen to Get Hired with Andrew Seaman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.