3/14/25: Dems RAGE at Schumer, Markets TANK, Firings BLOCKED, Putin REACTS to Ceasefire
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Good morning, everybody. Happy Friday. Ryan Grimm. Great to see you, my friend. Nice to see you, Crystal. Emily is going to jump on here when she is ready. But there are many things to discuss this morning. Once again, very hard to whittle down a quote unquote mini show for today. But we've got breaking news with regard to the Democrats cave with regard to the Republican CR budget situation. So a lot of fallout.

from that one. We've got a bunch of new developments with regard to Ukraine. Yesterday, the stock market ended in correction territory, so continued chaos and tumult there. And then we had some really significant court decisions as well with regard to Doge in particular. Multiple federal judges ruling that those probationary

employees have to be rehired. But Ryan, since we don't have Emily here yet, we can start with the Dem on Dem conversation. That's right. So just a little bit of backstory, and I'm sorry that this gets into like annoyingly technical inside the beltway kind of stuff. But the government is going to shut down tonight at midnight if they don't pass some sort of funding. Right.

Republicans made a bet effectively that Democrats would cave and go along with whatever funding resolution that Republicans put together. So they put together a partisan proposal that does things like raise defense spending, lower all kinds of domestic spending priorities, reduce

Ryan is intimately familiar with the details of how they're screwing over the D.C. public school system and D.C. city government. There's a provision in there that protects Republicans from having to ever take a vote on Trump's tariff program, which is increasingly, you know, totally unpopular. It also just hands to Trump and Elon the ability to basically do whatever they want, which, let's be honest, they already are. But this sort of codifies that.

that they would have a blank check and be able to... J.D. Vance actually told the Republican caucus that, we've already got plans for how we're not even going to follow this budget plan. We're just going to do whatever we want. So, Ryan, I'll get your reaction before I play some of the fallout here. But the other piece that's really important here is...

Republicans control the White House. They control the Senate. They control the House. This is one of the few times when they actually need Democrats for anything in order to keep the government open because they need to get that 60 vote threshold in the Senate. So they need seven or eight Dems. Probably Rand Paul is going to vote against this, which means they need eight Dems to vote with them to end a filibuster to be able to vote on this budget resolution. So it's one of the few moments where

When Democrats have leverage, Democrats in the House all hung together. Hakeem Jeffries, to his credit, whipped against this Republican budget bill. Everybody except for one in the Democratic caucus voted against it. The Republicans had a similarly partisan. It was sort of like a lockstep party line vote. The Republicans control the House, so it passes through the House and it gets to the Senate.

Chuck Schumer was making some noises like maybe he was going to fight. Maybe this would be the place where he took a stand. And ultimately, yesterday evening, as many people would have anticipated, he decides that he's going to cave. So first of all, Ryan, is there anything that you would add or clarify about that setup of where we are as of this morning? No, that's about right. Yeah. And the Democrats met for a very long and what we were told testy lunch meeting.

They always have their Tuesday lunches, and this one went extra long with some Democrats arguing, look, we believe that this is an unconstitutional power grab and an effort to destroy the government and hand it over to billionaires. Chris Murphy, as we'll play later, publicly said just that much. So in the meeting, a bunch of Democrats said that. This doesn't make sense. We have been out here saying,

that this is unconstitutional what they are doing, and it's a threat to our democracy. And now we're just going to rubber stamp it, which will then give our imprimatur to it. We'll say this is now a bipartisan effort. And there was this whole gimmick that Schumer was trying to do where let's vote to move forward on the bill so that we're not filibustering it, but then we'll vote against it when it's on the Senate floor. Right.

And nobody's fooled by that anymore. So yeah, that's essentially it. And I don't want to be too provincial, but they're taking $1.1 billion out of the D.C. operating budget, $200 million out of the D.C. public schools budget, starting immediately, like over the next year. That's just an absolutely extraordinary amount of money. And D.C. gets federal money because it is not a state. So the federal government insists on basically having control over the city,

And I can't imagine what that's going to mean for city services broadly, but in the schools in particular, they're already –

facing layoffs and shortages and high class sizes and dilapidated buildings. And D.C. has long gotten a raw deal because it costs a lot to host the federal government in your city. Yes. You cannot tax an embassy, you cannot tax a federal building, and you cannot tax a nonprofit.

What is Washington made up of? Embassies, nonprofits and government buildings. And so there's very little tax base. So the deal is the federal government comes in and backstops some of that, not as much as they should, but some of it. And I think it shows how little ability Republicans have to actually do anything structural about the federal deficit. If the only way that they can achieve some savings is taking it from poor kids in Washington, D.C.,

Right. Like that, that's not, that's not a game changer for you. It might make you happy for some twisted reason because you're sick.

But it doesn't actually do anything about the federal deficit. We're talking about this. The analysis of this is that over 10 years, this would reduce the federal budget deficit by $7 billion. And part of that is because they cut $20 billion from the IRS, which they estimate, and I think they underestimate, will add $40 billion because there'll be $60 billion in extra cheating.

that we don't collect as a result of this. I think it'll be a lot more, but let's say that that's right. So out of the 7 billion they're saving over 10 years, a billion of it is coming out of Washington DC's budget for the next year. That's cowardly. It's not impressive and it's not a structural solution.

to what they think is a structural problem. Although it's hard to take them seriously that they really think that this is a structural problem when they're set to give away trillions in tax cuts to rich people. So if you really were concerned about the debt and the deficit. It's hundreds of millions for weapons, billions for weapons. Like all these different weapons programs are, are, are,

or singled out a billion for this carrier, you know, hundreds of millions for these jets, hundreds of millions for these subs. Like, get out of here. You're not serious. Yeah. So there's something really interesting and unusual happening in this Democratic Party debate, inter-debate though, which is that

So Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both notably from New York, we'll come back to that, sort of led the charge to try to convince their fellow Democratic senators to cave. And Schumer, of course, is the minority leader. So he's the one that makes the announcement, guys, I'm voting for cloture. I'm voting for this CR. I am compelling enough of my Democratic colleagues to join me that we're going to give Republicans the votes that they need to be able to pass this thing through. And

instantly, there is absolute fury at Schumer, not just from, you know, the AOC types, but really across the board, including fury that showed up immediately on MSNBC, which of course is normally their role is just a rubber stamp, whatever it is that the Democrats decide. So let me go ahead and pull up also noteworthy. This is, you know, Aaron Ruppar that that

clipped this, another sort of centrist, vote blue, reliable Democratic type, and typical of or really emblematic of how wide and broad the fury at this cave really is within the whole of the Democratic Party. So let's go ahead and take a listen to this. The one thing they have leveraged is in the Senate where you need a filibuster-proof majority on a cloture vote. Yeah.

that there's essentially an unconstitutional assault on the government right now. And I think you would agree with that. There is. An assault on the constitutional right. These guys are the worst, and we've got to fight them every step of the way. As we say in Brooklyn, Chris, every effing step of the way. But look, Russ Vogue is already telling people, but he's telling people on the floor, we are not even going to listen to this CR. This is a people paper that we will impound and rip up the moment it's passed. If that's the case...

How is voting for cloture not essentially an imprimatur on the very same assault on the constitutional order? They're already, even without this CR, they're already doing it. Right. Okay? They are going to, they did it to the Department of Education. But I can tell you, I've been through shutdowns before. It's not that this CR is good. It's not that voting for it is good. It's horrible. But the alternative is worse. How?

And in addition, Chris Hayes also made a good point with him, which is, hey, the people who would be most impacted by a shutdown are the federal government employees themselves.

Their union said, don't vote for this. So how how can you justify, you know, caving in the situation and voting along with the Republicans and handing them even more unchecked power? And then, by the way, after his first guest is Chuck Schumer, the very next guest on Chris Hayes is Bernie Sanders, who is out there making the case for why this is a horrific move for the Democratic Party. Right. In that clip, you guys can go back and watch it again. You have Hayes like audibly scoffing and laughing.

At the Senate majority leader. Like that's where the Democratic Party is at this point. Just can't – they can't be taken seriously. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And it's not just –

that he made this decision in this moment. By the way, this vote is going to happen at some point today. And yeah, we expect it to go this way, but they are still under a lot of pressure from their constituents to, you know, to go ahead and block this. Yeah, maybe Schumer fails to cave. Yeah, I mean, he could fail to cave. You never know what's going to ultimately happen. But I mean, this has been the thing that has been really wild. And we've been sending each other, you know, Will Stancil, who's like the prototypical moderate candidate

sort of anti-left Democrat who is posting, you have to, these people are worthless. They're the reason that the country is in the place that it is today. We need to primary all of them. It's like, whoa, who is this guy? You've got Neera Tanden out there retweeting Bernie Sanders clips. And then, you know, I'll show you in a moment some news articles about how even some of the like

Swing district Democrats who went out on a limb, in their view, to vote to block this in the House, they're ready to write checks to AOC to primary Chuck Schumer.

So this is the this is, in my opinion, Ryan, you cover this more closely than I do. This is the biggest rebellion I've ever seen within the Democratic Party because it isn't a progressive rebellion. It truly is the base moderate Democrats, you know, standard issue, normie Democratic opposition.

base voters who are absolutely furious at the lack of fight and the lack of planning here. Because as I was going to say before, it's not just that he caved. It's also that there was no messaging. There was no demand that was made. There was no plan. And we've known for months. I mean, we've been talking about since Trump was elected that there was going to be this shutdown fight. And this would be a place where Democrats could use some leverage and take a stand. And yet

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that's the key point that they never articulated a message. Therefore, they have no demand here. So if they imagine that they did that, that enough Democrats grow a spine here and they do block cloture today and we get a government shutdown, then the media will come to Democrats and say, OK, what do you want?

What's like, what's your demand? Right. You don't like this budget. Like what's your, what's your counteroffer? What are you, what are you demanding that Republicans do right now? All they kind of have is, well, this whole thing is an unconstitutional power grab. It's like, okay, well, what do you want now? What they, if, if they were serious about that messaging, they could say, we're, we're going to put into law, you know, that any reductions in force, you know, done to, you

federal, you know, federal workforces must be done through congressional with a congressional approval. Like that could be the thing that they would demand or any, any restructuring of the, of the government must be done through Congress. And then that would require getting 60 votes in the Senate. And so there'd be, and then you could, and you could ask as Americans, like,

You could see the virtue in that. Like, okay, we think that the federal government is too big and it's disorganized and there's a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse. Let's find it. Let's figure it out. Let's figure out how we can fund investigations into the waste and fraud. Let's see where we can streamline things. But they don't want to – they're not doing that. They're just – they don't have anything. So I think that's – I think Schumer understood that they didn't have a step two there. And I also think that Schumer –

But he's part of the reason why they didn't have his step two. He's the reason. He's the reason. Yeah, he's the guy. That was his job. Like you were the one who was supposed to come up with that step two. To him, he likes the get out of the way strategy. Stock market is crashing. Trump's approval rating is crashing. Get out of the way. It's like a communist revolutionary strategy. Like, you know, allow things to...

To collapse and heighten the contradictions. And then we'll get the revolution. Is that what's going on? Yes. Well, this was the James Carville. I mean, this is what he said, basically, like roll over and play dead and let them destroy everything. I mean, Emma Vigeland noted, and I think that there may be something to this, that the two Democrats who led the charge to cave here are the two Democratic senators from New York.

Meanwhile, you know, we're going to cover later in the show markets and chaos. Certainly a government shutdown would not be good for, you know, their portfolios and their bottom line. So it's also certainly possible that, you know, Wall Street got to them and basically like, you can't do this. This is going to be too bad for us. And, you know, that's,

the core constituency, both for Kirsten Gillibrand and for Chuck Schumer. Let me go ahead and play AOC here on CNN, who was, you know, really she really has led the charge, I would say, in terms of trying to bolster Democrats and trying to encourage them to have a spine in this situation. And she also got asked the question about whether she would challenge Chuck Schumer. I'm not sure if that's in this thought or not, but let's go ahead and take a look at what we've got here.

Vote. You think that's wrong? I believe that's a tremendous mistake. Why? I think, well, first and foremost...

The American people, if anyone has held a town hall or has seen what has been happening in town halls, American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual federal agencies across the board. This continuing resolution codifies much of this chaos that Elon Musk is

is wreaking havoc on the federal government. It codifies many of those changes. It sacrifices and completely eliminates congressional authority in order to review these impulsive Trump tariffs that he's switching on and off. And on top of that, for folks who are concerned about effectiveness in government, this is

This Republican extreme spending bill removes all of the guardrails and all of the accountability measures to ensure that money is being spent in the way that Congress has directed for it to be spent. This turns the federal government into a slush fund for Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It sacrifices congressional authority, and it is deeply partisan. And so to me, it is almost unthinkable why...

Senate Democrats would vote to hand the few pieces of leverage that we have away for free when we've been sent here to protect Social Security, protect Medicaid and protect Medicare. So he goes on to say, hey, you know, would you challenge Chuck Schumer? She, of course, dodges that. But that is apparently a live issue now, Ryan. I'm going to let you speak to that. I'm going to put the dog out so she stops barking. I'll be right back.

Yeah, and we could put it up in a minute. There was some reporting from Leesburg, Virginia, which is where Democrats are holding their annual kind of policy retreat. These House Democrats go. It's a bunch of members of Congress, lobbyists and reporters go to huddle for a couple of days, set their strategy. And AOC was interviewed by reporters out there.

And that's where she was also getting pressed on whether or not she was going to challenge Schumer with members of Congress who were at that retreat saying, look, I'm a centrist. They wouldn't put their names to it, cowards that they are. They'd say, I'm a centrist, but I am ready to write a check to AOC right here at this retreat if she will jump in the race against Chuck Schumer. It's interesting because Chuck Schumer felt an enormous amount of

about AOC primarying him in 2020, right after, or 2022, I guess. Is that when he was up? 2022? So I guess he's not up until 2028. So maybe he feels like

He has time to let this kind of... That this will not be a thing by then. I think they also... I don't think they've fully adjusted to the reality where Neera Tanden and Will Stancil are hating them. They're used to some level of minor, quashable, ignorable rebellion from the left flank of the Democratic Party. And I'm still seeing articles that are written that are like, the left is mad. It's like...

Yes, the left is mad, but that's actually not what's important here. What's noteworthy is that normal resistance Dems are disgusted with Democratic leadership. And what that leads to, it's an open question. But this is the most Tea Party-like –

that the Democratic Party has ever been in their disgust with their own leadership, their discontent chant, disenchantment with their own media and their desire to, you know, to challenge some of these people and get them out of there if they're not willing to fight. And one critique of the of this will Stancil approach is.

He comes from the kind of centrist school of fight-harder Democrats. Right. And so they always want to fight harder, and now he's ramping it up to 11, and they need to fight harder. But because he is so reluctant to embrace genuine left politics –

It's like, well, fight harder for what? And he's like, well, fight harder against Democrats. So that means they should have pressed their charges against Trump faster. They should have impeached him harder. Like...

Classic. Rather than like, you know, an actual substantive critique. Yeah. No, and that is certainly true. There's no doubt about it. Like, you know, the, I was talking to Sagar about this yesterday, the Brian Tyler Cohen's

The Midas touch is becoming a little bit more ideological, I would say, in a progressive direction. But really the core of their critique is just stand up, fight harder, resist Trump more effectively. And, you know, you said this was a fascist threat. The fascist threat has arrived. And now you're just like laying down and capitulating. And so that is the core of their critique. What's noteworthy, though, is that the people who are by and large,

And satisfying that desire to see people who have a strategy and are putting up a fight are people like AOC, are people like Bernie. Most of the people who are demonstrating a backbone and putting up a fight in this moment happen to be on the progressive left.

So, you know, that's what's sort of interesting in this moment is like, yeah, I don't think it's particularly ideological. And yet the people who are there raising up as heroes at this point are the AOCs and the Bernies of the world. So, for example, with this, you know, centrist rebellion and them being like AOC, we challenge Schumer. It's not because they're

excited about Medicare for all. It's for this reason and also for these particular House Democrats. They feel like they were, they say here, feel like they walked the plank in the words of one member. They voted almost unanimously against the budget measure only to watch Senate Democrats seemingly give it the green light, complete meltdown, complete and utter meltdown on all text chains. A senior House Democrat said people are furious that

Some rank and file members floated the idea of angrily marching onto the Senate floor in protest. Others are talking openly about supporting primary challenges to senators who vote for the GOP spending bill. And even, you know, for AOC herself, who came in, of course, defeating a longtime establishment member and

started off with that protest outside of Nancy Pelosi's office. I mean, you literally wrote the book on her evolution. She has much more embraced the tactic of let me see what I can get on front, you know, on the inside. So for her to come out swinging against democratic leadership, even for her is a break from the way that she's been operating the bulk of the time that she's been in the house. Right. And, you know, if you think back, you know, throughout history, like who was in the French underground resistance, you know, in Nazi occupied France? Yeah.

It was leftists. It was communists. It was socialists. The centrists became part of Vichy France. They collaborated with the incoming government. And that was the case with resistance to fascism all over the world. And that's why you had socialists so popular for decades after World War II, all around the world, not just Europe, but everywhere else where there was fascism and authoritarianism.

whether in Vietnam, wherever it was, these socialists and communists like the hardcore left that went underground, stuck to their principles and fought and died for their country. And if you were not active in that, you know, you were considered a traitor for decades after after World War Two. And and.

So the rhetoric now is the same. Like, obviously, we do not have Nazi occupied United States, but the rhetoric coming from Democrats is the same. And they feel like they're under siege. And so they're turning to people who are actually willing to fight for something. Now, what happened?

is that because the socialists and communists fought for something, they were then given a hearing for their actual policy ideas after they came to power. So right now, all they want from AOC and Bernie is this energy. They like the fight. Will they start listening to them on a policy level next? Is that step two of this party evolution? I don't know. And there's enormous...

corporate and billionaire counterweight against that happening. Of course. Yeah. At least it opens up the possibility. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, given your coverage of the Democratic Party and these fights, you know, going back years, you

Do you see similarities with the Tea Party rebellion? Do you think we're going to see primary fights against some of these members who are deemed, you know, insufficiently like insufficiently strong against Trump in this moment? It is funny them talking about marching on the Senate because that's literally what a couple of Tea Party members did. Tea Party kept passing.

you know, repeals of Medicare and cuts to government spending. And the Senate would just immediately dispatch with it and go back to kind of business as usual. So they went down to the Senate physically and stood in the, stood in the Senate chamber and were like, you know, they're like, what do we have to do here? And they were, people were like, who are you guys and why are you here? And kind of ushered them out. Now those guys control the party. So there, there definitely are some similarities between,

Seeing Hayes shift or laugh, not shift, but laugh in Schubert's face. In Schubert's face, yeah. The Tea Party without Fox News would not have existed. It needs a giant media megaphone to change what the party rank and file understands as where they're supposed to be. Yeah. So if you get a shift from MSNBC and say the New York Times and CNN, then yeah, you could see...

The party shift. I mean, you also do have massive growth of these Midas Touch, Brian Tyler Cohen, Kyle's channel, like all of these liberal to progressive left channels.

That are blowing up in size and are taking this posture of, you know, you've got to fight. So you have that as a megaphone too. But yeah, if you have, even if you're just covering this fight on MSNBC, that would be different than, and you genuinely have, you know, like Hayes had on Chuck Schumer and then he immediately has on Bernie Sanders. Even if you're doing that. Right.

It's profoundly different from the way MSNBC has operated as just like whatever Democratic leadership says, we are backing that full stop. Other views are not even going to be like tolerated or represented here. Yeah. And if Schumer gets what he wants, which is the bottom falling out of the Trump administration, he may not end up getting credit for it. People are going to remember that he facilitated it.

And so somebody like a Chris Murphy or a shots or somebody like that might come in and take over the mantle from him. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are saying, Hey, let's get Chris Murphy as a Senate minority leader and get this guy on here, which is, which is interesting. And Murphy is definitely one who's like sort of stepped up and understood actually, you know, new media also, he's always recording these straight to camera. Like here's how I'm thinking about things. And here's why I'm approaching it this way that I think has garnered him a lot of trust with the democratic base and,

Let's go ahead and move on to what was going on in the markets yesterday. I haven't checked. They're open now. I haven't checked to see exactly what's going on. I know futures were up this morning. Don't look. Don't look. Don't look.

I know futures are up this morning, but this is what things have been looking like. This is from Heather Long at The Washington Post. S&P 500 tumbled into a correction today. 10% drop from its prior high on February 19th. Trump's comments today, quote, I'm not going to bet at all on tariffs, have exacerbated fears and frustrations with his economic plans. Today's losses, S&P 500 minus 1.4, Dow minus 1.3, Nasdaq minus 2. And you can see

what that looks like on the chart here since starting in November going till now. Now, the stock market has been on a sort of long and mostly unbroken upward march. But this is, I saw, I actually think I have this. This is one of the fastest drops that we've seen in 100 years. Joe Weisenthal says there are a lot of Trump-aligned voices telling people to calm down, sell-offs happen. And

And it's true. People tend to regret panicking. But this is one of the fastest sell-offs of the last century while the president pursues a policy that virtually no economist will defend. And, you know, Ryan, you were raising alarms about – and I saw Johns Hopkins is now laying off 2,000 workers. So in addition to – the tariffs get a lot of attention on Wall Street, understandable, especially because –

Trump is they're on, they're off, they're back on. This part's on. This part's coming back on in April. I mean, it really is all over the place and hard to make a co. I mean, it's impossible for any literally anyone to make a coherent case of exactly what he's up to or why he's up.

up to it and why they're saying, oh, there's no pain, no gain is what Tommy Tuberville said. The Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that a recession would be, quote unquote, worth it. And the question remains, worth it for what? What is it that we're supposed to accept suffering on? What is the goal that we're supposed to accept suffering on behalf of? But in addition to the tariffs, you have this mass austerity program with the federal government that is going to reverberate

much outside of just DC and Virginia. Hey, how's it going? She's getting plugged in. I love when I pop in and you guys are in the middle. We're talking about the markets. We already got through the democratic catastrophe. So we didn't want to hear what you had to say about that.

I'm more curious what you guys think, to be honest, anyway. But I was just saying that, you know, in addition to the tariffs causing market turmoil, you also have this austerity program with the federal government, which is one example of how that will have a massively larger effect than just what Elon is doing in D.C. Johns Hopkins just announced they're laying off 2000 plus workers because of some of the funding freezes and uncertainty around, you know, research and science issues.

So, you know, Ryan, what do you kind of make of the state of the economy and this market movement in particular? A caveat on the Hopkins layoffs, I think about 1,500 of those were overseas, directly related to USAID cuts. Oh, really? I didn't realize that. Because Hopkins does a lot of – so USAID was funding a bunch of –

research, scientific research, which again, soft power stuff, and we don't know the details of exactly what they were doing. So it's about 400 or 500 here in the US that are getting laid off. But yes, hiring freezes all over the place. And what you're hearing from Wall Street is we knew there would be what Wall Street calls anti-growth policies, which would be tariffs, but we thought that they would couple them

they would temper them and couple them with pro-growth policies. And what Wall Street calls, I'm not endorsing these views, but Wall Street calls pro-growth policies, basically tax cuts. Tax cuts for them. Yeah. And so, so far they're like, Hmm, we're getting a lot more anti-growth policies than we are getting at this point, pro-growth policies. And I think they would, might even be happier if the quote unquote anti-growth policies were coherent. Like, okay, what, like what, what is your tariff policy?

And why are you doing it? Because then they can try to figure out how they're going to invest. You know, Wall Street is where capital gets allocated. And, you know, some of it's absurd. Like, oh, we're putting tariffs on Canadian wood. Then they're like, well, we can't really put capital into growing more trees in the U.S. Like we're growing the trees we can grow. That's it. But what they can do is then go to Siberia and try to buy more of that crappy softer wood from Siberia made with North Korean slave labor. Right.

But at least then they can plan that out. So right now, they're just kind of confused and waiting. And so that's going to tamp down investment and growth. And I just checked the talk. So we're filming this. It's 945. Yeah. And they got to bounce in the morning. I think all these traders keep wanting to time the bottom. Right. Like, is this the bottom yet? Let me get in. So far, everybody who has bought the dip –

has gotten washed out by the end of the day. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, because Trump continues, Emily, to say things like this. Here he is talking about Canada. And this, I think, is the clip, too, where he says, you know, the tariffs are definitely going on. I'm not changing. Let's take a listen. No, I'm not. Look, we've been ripped off for years and we're not going to be ripped off anymore. Now, I'm not going to bend at all. Aluminum or steel or cars, we're not going to bend. We've been ripped off as a country for many, many years. We've

been subjected to costs that we shouldn't be subjected to. In the case of Canada, we're spending $200 billion a year to subsidize Canada. I love Canada. I love the people of Canada. I have many friends in Canada. The great one, Wayne Gretzky, the great one. We have many people in Canada that are good friends of mine, but

You know, the United States can't subsidize a country for $200 billion a year. We don't need their cars. We don't need their energy. We don't need their lumber. We don't need anything that they get. We do it because we want to be helpful. But it comes a point when you just can't do that. You have to run your own country.

So that's kind of the pitch he's making today, at least, about why tariffs on Canada in particular make sense and what really caused kind of the market massive drop there later in the day. Where's those comments that, no, we're not going to bend at all because they have certain tariffs already in place and then a much broader set of tariffs set to go into place on April 2nd, the reciprocal tariffs, plus supposedly going back to the 25% across the board tariffs with Canada and Mexico at that point. So that's kind of where we are at.

Yeah. And I continue to think the only way to make any sense in Trump's mind of what's happening is that to the point about people trying to figure out what the bottom is here. He doesn't want anybody to be able to figure that out. And I don't.

particularly think that's the most effective way to bring jobs back to the United States and to prosecute these politically. So I don't think it's the most defensible approach. I think his logic is that he genuinely does not want anybody to know what

when he is going to stop, I think he does have plans to, I don't think he goes through for a long time with all of this. I just, I think he's way too sensitive to the market. So I think if this starts to be sustained, you'll start to see, I mean, I think we've already seen some of it, some like kind of more targeted approaches, but I think his strategy is genuinely leaving everybody, including his own top staff,

Yeah. Out of the loop on what his personal plans are to like sort of wave the wand at any given moment. Yeah. There was a moment there, Ryan, I didn't quite get to it, where he he sort of acknowledges that that borders are just arbitrary lines. Yeah.

drawn, you know, so based open borders, Trump. Okay. So here's a thread. Not to harp too much on this, but that his point on the, his point on the lumber, he brought the lumber up again. Right. What do you mean? What do you mean? We don't need their lumber.

Like we don't have enough here.

And so you're just exacerbating that. And, you know, we've been covering it. You guys know on this show relentlessly how housing is just such a core issue, creating this sense of precarity and sense of frustration and inability to get ahead and achieve this sort of like stable life. And yeah, you're you are actively increasing one of the main inputs.

And there's other construction materials at play here as well coming from Canada too, not to mention 80% of our fertilizer from Canada. Like, yeah, actually we do kind of need that stuff. Right. That's where the fertilizer is. Like you could produce a lot of phosphorus and fertilizer out of Florida, but that would require ripping up a lot of the communities there. And also lumber is better the farther north that it grows. So we could get cheaper, better lumber from Canada, but

Or we could get more expensive, crappier lumber from Russia. And what he's pushing us is towards Siberian lumber. So we're going to pay 20, 30, 40% more for materials. For worse materials. And maybe the American people would do that if you were like, here's why we're doing that. Yeah, that's the problem. But there is no why to it.

Right. And, and I mean, hard to like really sell people on a vision of we should be like, you know, getting more into the tree growing and fertilizer making business when all our national forests.

And that wood isn't as good as the wood way up in the north. And then we don't have natural forests anymore. Is that the plan? Right. Exactly. Exactly. I wanted to quickly go through this thread because I thought it had some interesting pieces. And then we can move on to the next topic. You can either go to Ukraine or we can go to the –

court decisions, but I was just going to say, sorry, I was going to say super quick point is that if you have, if you telegraph a clear plan, if you want to reshore some like lumber, for example, you're, you're helping people make that bet on certain States or certain strategies for us lumber or us manufacturing or whatever. But if people don't know, maybe they're just going to bet elsewhere where it seems more stable. So anyway,

Yeah, that's that's exactly right. Like, you know, if the chaos makes it impossible for anyone to actually bet on, like reshoring anything because you just you just don't know. So here's here's a timeline of the trade war. And they write ramped up into February 1st. Market peaked on the 19th, even as more tariffs went live in early March. The real turning point was March 6th. That's when Trump said he's not watching the stock market.

So that's been sort of the story of this market movement is Trump's words really causing these cycles of crashes. Dip buyers have been crushed in this downturn. This is something you mentioned before, Ryan. S&P has not seen a back-to-back gains for 15 consecutive trading days, longest streak since April 2024. Also the fifth longest stretch since the 20th.

2020 pandemic market uncertainty is at its highest since 2020 current drawdown in the magnificent seven. Now this is something we've been talking a lot about and it creates tremendous risk in terms of our economy and certainly our stock market. You know, these seven stocks make up a huge percentage of,

of our stock market and most of the growth that we've been seeing has been tied to these stocks. Tesla has led the sell-off here, fifth down 50%, crazy. Nvidia down, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple all taking significant losses. So that's the Magnificent Seven. Hedge funds sold global stocks at their fastest pace in four years.

So the hedge funds are, you know, selling off. And I think those institutional sales are part of what is leading the significant decline. He says this is the fastest drop of such magnitude since 2020. Also, this chart comparison of Trump 1.0, this green line versus Trump 2.0.

That's how things are looking currently down 8% since January 20th, which exceeds any drawdown seen in Trump's 1.0 first year. Clearly been a shift in Trump's approach. Furthermore, sentiment has shifted in the complete opposite direction. The survey now has a bearish reading 59.2%.

You've also got the U.S. lagging global markets. So again, an indication like as if you needed any, that this is something that's really specific to the particular policies that are being pursued here in the U.S. of A and not reflective of some larger global phenomenon. And then here's one last thing that's interesting too, is that there was some good inflation data this week that seemed to indicate, okay, inflation is coming down, moving in the right direction. I will say there are some caveats to that.

Number one being that this was a measure of inflation prior to most of the tariffs being put into place. So still a lot of question marks about what that impact will ultimately be. But they say, you know, even with those numbers coming in better than expected, you know,

they're still continued to that really didn't change the game or make people you know put people more at ease in terms of this um this sell-off in the economic position and you know i've seen all kinds of measures of uh you know possibility of recession on the rise actually can pull up jp morgan had this very like dramatic statement um i'll find that while you guys emily why don't you go ahead and reflect on some of those comments from that thread well i mean we're

Again, I think it's just the same type of thing that like I'm generally I think there's actually some real meat to how Trump has approached this when it's compared with how it was approached by Biden or how it would have been approached by some type of like middle of the line Republican establishment Republican. But I think that's just like it was frustrating is that there's a better way to do all of this that would have managed to

some of the fallout. So that to me is just like a lack of, it's sort of a lack of clarity. You don't have to telegraph everything. You don't have to, you know, give, you know,

You don't have to try to game the markets one way or the other. Oh, there's that beautiful quote. The most beautiful quote. You got to read this, Crystal. Yeah, so this is a note from JP Morgan's analyst. And we can get Ryan's reaction to that. 50 days of gray. Well, that was fast. Also, the reconciliation bill and a swan song for NATO. Here's the interesting thing about the stock market.

It cannot be indicted, arrested or deported. It cannot be intimidated, threatened or bullied. It has no gender, ethnicity or religion. It cannot be fired, furloughed or defunded. It cannot be primaried before the next midterm elections and it cannot be seized, nationalized or invaded. It is the ultimate voting machine reflecting prospects for earnings growth, stability, liquidity, inflation, taxation and predictable rule of law. So this is the Wall Streeters very much in their feelings on this one for sure.

Like all the unconstitutional power grab, the defunding of Medicaid, like the destruction of the CFPB. Like they're all about all of that. But when you mess with the stock market, that's where we that's where we draw the line to the barricades. That's incredible stuff. You guys want to go to Ukraine or the the court cases next? We could do either one. Dealer's choice.

All right, we'll pull up. I've got the I've got some Ukraine stuff here. So you guys know Zelensky agreed to a U.S. proposal for a 30 day ceasefire. So we're kind of waiting on response from Putin as to how he would receive this. And he received it in a very Putin like way, you know, rejecting it and saying,

asking for conditions which you know are probably are totally unacceptable to ukraine probably unacceptable to the us as well but framing it as like yeah i'm open to that as long as you do everything that i want you to do um here are his comments let me go ahead and pull this up i'm not sure i haven't listened to this hopefully this is dubbed we'll find out we'll find out together here in real time

We agree with the propositions to stop hostilities, but we proceed from the fact that such ceasefire should be such that would lead to permanent peace and remove the initial original causes of the crisis. We agree... So there you go.

Um, the details as far as, you know, the, the conditions that led to the crisis, you know, some of the things that they floated outside of just the state and from Putin is like all these regions that we took, we want to keep them. Not only do we not want Ukraine and NATO, which, you know, that one is pretty obvious. We don't want any foreign soldiers like European peacekeepers or anyone else, um,

to be in Ukraine. Ukraine has to be fully demilitarized, et cetera. So, I mean, Ryan, how do you, how are you reading this response? The Trump administration is trying to spin it as hopeful. Zelensky is very much like, I told you guys, like, you can't deal with this dude, really. And so how did you read this exchange? Yeah. He also talked about the Ukrainian soldiers who were in the Kursk region and apparently about 500 of them, that this does seem to be confirmed, about 500 Ukrainian soldiers surrendered.

There are many more Ukrainians who are occupying the Kursk region of Russia. And according to Putin, Russia has those folks surrounded. Ukraine says that that's not the case, that he's bluffing. And so what Putin is saying here is, if we do a ceasefire, what about these guys? I don't want to do a ceasefire here.

with these Ukrainian soldiers on Russian territory, which is kind of an ironic thing for him to complain about, given that he wants a ceasefire with Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory. So he says, who decides whether or not along this 2,000-mile front somebody has broken the ceasefire? What do we do with those soldiers? So those are actual questions that could be answered. It does seem like he's buying for time, perhaps to try to

you know, kind of push the Ukrainians completely out of Kursk so that when there is a ceasefire, he has lost no territory and he has only gained territory. Um,

and he, you know, he also floated that he, he's ready to do a call with Donald Trump. Yep. Which I thought was interesting. Call him Donald Trump, not the American president. Oh, is that what I didn't know that? Yeah. Interesting. Um, um, uh, another thing is as we, as we talked about actually, um, when you and I co-hosted this week, uh,

You know, you have to ask yourself, well, what incentive does Russia have at this point for a ceasefire? And that gets to what Ryan is saying about, you know, Kursk in particular, but they feel like the a 30 day ceasefire would only benefit Ukraine and allow them to sort of regroup and rearm and reassess, et cetera. And, you know, I don't think that they're probably wrong about that.

Unless a 30-day ceasefire does involve significant territorial concessions on Ukraine's behalf. One of the interesting things about Kursk, I hadn't thought about it this way, but I talked to George Beebe of the Quincy Institute earlier this week, and he was saying he thinks what's happening in Kursk right now is actually a sign of potentially Russia...

trying to get through or get to negotiations seriously more quickly because as soon as you sort of get Kursk out of the way for them, they'll... And so maybe it is like... I forget if it was you or Ryan who said maybe buying time. That's actually possible that in a way it seems totally counterintuitive because it looks like they're making significant advancements on the battlefield. But...

it takes Kursk off the table for them so long as they do that in a way that makes the deal work. They can take it to the Russian public and come away from the negotiations looking like they were on top. So it's a reading that I hadn't thought of, actually, that I found pretty interesting. That is interesting. I wanted to play this sound. This is Andrew Napolitano, who has been pushing for –

He has kind of, you know, kind of the like unorthodox view with regard to Ukraine. He's been pushing for peace, et cetera. He just is back from interviewing Lavrov in Moscow. And he says he doesn't think Russia has any interest in a ceasefire. Let's take a listen to that. When this is over, he came over to me and we just chatted almost like you and I are without the cameras on us at all. And I did say to him.

does President Putin have any interest in a ceasefire at this time? Now, this was a day before Secretary of State Rubio announced that Ukraine had agreed to the ceasefire. He looked at me and he said, why would we do that now? Wow. Because they believe that they're within inches of consummating their goals in the war. Oh, my God.

And that actually dovetails, maybe surprisingly. His assessment is the same as what U.S. intel agencies are telling The Washington Post right here. This is Putin still intends Ukraine domination. U.S. intelligence reports say while offering a cautious assessment on ceasefire chances, spy agencies say Russian leader is determined to hold sway over Ukraine.

Kyiv. This is, you know, a source to classified U.S. intel reports, including one earlier this month, cast doubt on Putin's willingness to end the war against Ukraine, assessing the Russian president is not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating his Western neighbor, according to people familiar with the analysis. Ryan, what did you make in particular of this, you know, leak to the strategic leak to The Washington Post? Right. Whenever whenever there's an intel leak to The Washington Post, you have to ask

okay, why did the CIA leak this? And in this case, I think it would be to, you know, send, try to message to Trump, like the same thing that Napolitano was saying that I know that we, Hey, we know you want a peace deal, but Putin really doesn't want one right now. You know, there, you know, there, there may have been a much better deal on the table in March of 2022, uh,

The Biden administration and the UK and NATO insisted that Ukraine fight on instead. And now they're at a place where they, as, as Trump said in the white house, you have no cards. Yeah. So you're appealing to the goodwill of Vladimir Putin. Just right. Good luck with that. I think, you know, what Putin could do and I think understands he could do is focus his energy on getting the Ukrainians out of the Kursk region and

And then say, okay, I'm done. Like everything we have is ours. And you keep fighting if you want. And if you keep fighting, we'll keep fighting. But if not, we're going to keep this territory. And then they will all, they will by definition kind of, you know, politically dominate. You'd have a rump, like hard right Ukrainian resistance government left. Yeah. But without NATO, you know, funding and with, you know, 20% of its, you know, country gone and with,

you know, the difficulties of reconstruction, you could imagine, you know, Russia having, you know, having successfully kind of neutered the threat on their border. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What do you think of that, Emily? I mean, in some ways, I think it's increasingly clear that the Biden administration pursued the worst possible strategy. Like I have actually become more sympathetic to the people who were like, you got to give them everything because what what they did instead is give them just enough to create this sort of stalemate situation. Yes. Draw this war to the last Ukrainian. You know, they obviously the greatest failure was blocking the peace deal that, you know, was on the table early on. Not that there were any guarantees there either, but there was a

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. And it's one of the weird things about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance's meeting with Zelensky is that Zelensky is a very, very good candidate.

Joe Biden were ideologically simpatico. Like they're, they had the exact same ideology of how Ukraine should be seen by NATO countries as an essential buffer state that should essentially, and I'm putting it in my words, not the way they would say it, be used, um, as, you know, a, a,

weapon is the wrong word, but as a buffer. And Ukraine should be treated that way by NATO, almost in this colonial way. And Trump and Vance don't believe that's in America's best interests, but they're the ones now tasked with disentangling the United States from the situation and helping, at least in theory, helping Ukraine recover.

stop the slaughter. And so it's a really strange position to have an administration that disagrees with decades of the foreign policy consensus that they're now trying to exit from. And the leader of the country that you're trying to negotiate with

Yeah.

does that mean ultimately Ukraine ends up losing territory that would have retained a couple of years back because of the hubris of the Biden administration and NATO leaders in Europe? Probably. I mean, it probably will. I think there's a lot of political peril here, too, that I'm not sure the right tends to fully appreciate because, you know, the view on the right has become quite preeminent that like, you know, that we need to

Pull all the military aid from Ukraine. You know, I need to make a deal regardless of what that takes and how much territory Putin is allowed to acquire, like whatever it takes. And, you know, it's a view, frankly, I'm sympathetic to. But when you look at the recent polling with regard to Trump.

There is actually a lot of discontent with the way he's handled the Russian Ukraine war with the people did not like the Oval Office blow up at Zelensky. And there's still a lot of not among Republicans so much, but among independents and among Democrats and among some Republicans. Actually, there's still a lot of like Russia's the bad guys. Ukraine are the good guys.

This is our ally. This is our boomers vote. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, we've seen this before. It's not exactly the same as Afghanistan, obviously, because we were in there for so long and because our troops were involved. But, you know, people wanted out of Afghanistan. But then once we got out of Afghanistan, it was the most devastating thing to Joe Biden's presidency. I mean, we talk a lot about the economy and certainly about the genocide in Gaza. But in terms of just the drop in approval rating.

ending the war that people wanted to be ended was the thing that was most devastating to his approval rating, Ryan, of his entire term. Right. And I guess you could imagine now these aren't American forces, but you could imagine scenes of chaos if things completely fall apart. It's just it's an admission of American failure. And voters don't like that. Voters don't like that. You know, it's like, OK, well, what have we been funding all these? Like, what have we

It looks like American weakness.

And that's in a lot of ways it is American weakness. I mean, frankly, and I think, you know, voters really don't enjoy having to reckon with that. Even if you, you know, like it's really not Trump helped to create the conditions of this war. But obviously it's the Biden administration that owns this policy. But if he's the one that brings it to the end and forces that reckoning with the reality that this was a massive American failure, voters may well punish him for that. Yeah.

Voters, I think in America, sort of back the blue globally. They like the United States being seen as the policeman and it's in right, like online right circles where I spend a lot of time. It's easy to get to lose sight of the fact that the American people are not with

the, I guess, broader project of the online right. Like they're probably with the new right, the sort of Vance ideology on different things. Like, you know, you can zoom in on the question particularly of spending more money on Ukraine and not closing the border. Like that was exactly why they designed that Senate bill that way.

So, you know, it's easy to mistake those things for agreement with the broader project of disentangling from being the policeman of the world. And the person who understands this, interestingly enough, is Donald Trump, because that's what he's sort of doing with Greenland and Panama. And he knows...

That that's his voters are like fine to see Greenland like people on the right. They're like, yeah, we're going to boss Greenland around because we're the United States of America. And that's it's just easy to mistake one for the other. Yeah. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I do think that if he got a long term ceasefire that he would be rewarded for that. Yes. But domestically from voters.

I do think people – if he could get out of it somewhat cleanly, even if there are significant concessions made, nobody can name the regions of Ukraine that we're fighting over. Nobody really cares. I think that people would like to see the money stop going over there, especially the resentment towards that heats up when –

Things are – when the economy is going poorly at home. Yeah. So you wrap that up, I think you would be rewarded. So the more he destroys the economy here at home, the better his Ukraine policy. The more he has to wrap that up, yeah. The more his Ukraine policy will –

All right. Let's go ahead and get to these couple of court decisions before we wrap up here, because these were pretty significant ones. Yesterday, we got from this Judge Alsup, who I'd never heard of before, but apparently is like very well respected in judicial circles. I don't know whatever that means. Anyway, he said that he issued a preliminary injunction on Trump's firing of federal workers in probationary periods, including some of the largest agencies, the Veterans Affairs, USDA, Department of Defense.

Department of Education, Department of Interior, Treasury must reinstate all fired probationary employees effective immediately. Eric Katz here from GovExec says this will impact the vast majority of those fired. Rough math, about 24,000 employees just won their jobs back. Story here with more details from what he describes as a fairly explosive hearing this morning. So including some language from this judge that these firings were sham,

firings. And in particular pointing to, you know, the way they did this, which really is just, you know, it, it,

you had a lot of workers who were getting perfect performance reports and may have been even up for promotions or just got promoted, you know, and that's why they were on in their probationary period. And the justification they used is they sent out these mass emails that said you're being fired for poor performance, regardless of who the employees were. And so this judge was like, we see what you're doing here. Like, obviously these people were who, you know, some of them were performing well and you just said poor performance. So you could get away with firing with mass firing Ryan and,

all of these employees that happen to be under this probationary status. And oh, by the way, Office of Personnel Management, like you don't get to do this. The individual agencies have control over their own HR personnel. Even in this ruling though, which was like fairly sweeping, there's a warning though that like if they do go through each individual agency and do what's called a reduction in force and do it through the proper channels, like they're allowed to do that. Yeah, unfortunately for these workers,

You know, what he's ultimately describing is sort of a technicality. Like he's saying you lied and you did this illegally. Like there are laws in place, federal laws in place that apply to the executive and your theory of the unitary executive where the president can just, you know, do whatever he wants. It does not fly. And here are here is how you have to reduce the number of employees that you have and say the Veterans Affairs Department.

It's laid out very clearly. Follow these rules and you can do it. That's what he's telling the government. What the government did is they had OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, fire every probationary employee, send them boilerplate letters saying you're fired for cause because you're doing a bad job. And his argument is A, okay.

OPM does not have the ability to fire somebody at, say, the VA. And B, you're lying because you don't know if this person is doing well or not. So then the administration came back and said, well, it wasn't actually OPM that did the firing. It was the agencies. OPM was just offering this kind of vague suggestion. And they even put an affidavit in from the acting director of OPM saying that that was the truth, that he had nothing to do with these firings.

So the judge said, all right, cool. Bring this guy in for a deposition. I want to hear him cross examined. And then the administration withdrew his affidavit. He said, nevermind. And that's when he, that's when he lost it on him. He's like, I think you're lying. He's like, you're presenting an affidavit. And then when I ask you to back it up by bringing him in for a deposition at any time of his convenience, you pull it back. It's like, I, and he used the word lying. He's like, I think you're lying to me.

And the other side had affidavits from the agencies saying OPM ordered us to fire these people and we disagree that they were poorly performing. So it's an open and shut case that they lied and didn't follow the procedure. Problem for the workers is they can just do it again and follow the actual procedures themselves.

And they're going to release that process very soon. And I think it's going to be a bloodbath for federal workers. Maybe some of these will keep their jobs and they'll go after more senior people or whatever, but a lot of people are still going to lose their jobs.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think this is definitely temporary and it's really unfortunate for the tens of thousands of people caught up in it. But it's an interesting, I guess, test of how Doge was making some of these decisions, which, you know, Doge was originally conceived of as an outside organization.

advisory committee, basically, that would look at these things and then submit recommendations to the agencies rather than making these decisions on its own and coercing the agencies to comply with the decisions that they've come to. And when Doge took over USDS,

There was just like a complete confusion about what its authority actually was. Probably that's a problem with Elon Musk coming in and being confused about what the authority actually was. Not confused, maybe like willfully disinterested in the actual mechanism of power. You know, we're going to do this anyway, goes the thinking. But the probationary status has come to be

a fascinating question for people involved in Doge because a lot of the people they've since learned who were on probationary status were the people that they would want to keep

like as a category because it was people who newly wanted to be a part of the government. So it went from being a really easy slab of fat to cut to actually, well, if you think some of these agencies should continue existing, albeit in a much smaller form, if you use the quote scalpel instead of what did Trump say? The ax, the hatchet. Yeah. The hatchet. Then in fact, the people that sort of got booted first were,

would probably be the people that you would scalpel in. I think that's going to happen at defense. I think a lot of these probationary folks at defense are probably going to end up being okay. But at the other places that, I mean, they're trying to get rid of so many people that I agree with Ryan. You know, if you're at ag or something like that, you'll probably still get axed maybe even next week.

I didn't even think about that, Emily, that like some of the people who just just joined were like Trump won. Doge is coming. Let's go. And when I joined the government and do my public service and yeah, if you're a person who like, I mean, you know, probationary lasts for a significant period of time. And as Ryan's point on it, it includes some people who just got promoted, been working in the government a long time, but, or who have just switched agencies or moved or whatever. But yeah, it didn't occur to me that if you're someone who saw Donald Trump's election, you

And then was like, now's the time when I'm going to work in government service.

you probably are someone who is more aligned with this administration than the people who are not on probationary status, not to mention, you know, veterans and veteran spouses were more likely to be on probationary status as well. Or you're just an ambitious young person. Like that's like not, that hasn't been shaped and molded by the quote administrative state over the course of decades. Like a lot of the non probationaries. Yeah, true. There was one more federal judge ordered a stop to mass firings in federal agencies. It

except Pentagon, OPM, and NARA, saying the so-called reductions in force broke the law. Employees purportedly terminated are returned to government employ. So a similar decision here. I think this one was, this is a separate, even more sweeping order than the one issued by Judge Alsop, he says, earlier today for terminated probationary employees, but it is only a two-week reprieve.

until further litigation takes place. And, you know, this is the write-up here. Federal judges order the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers across a huge swath of the federal government. The second judge to order sweeping relief today and reject the mass firings as illegal. So, you know, you have...

A lot of times when these cases are going to court, the challengers are winning. But number one, oftentimes they're a temporary reprieve. And number two, oftentimes, you know, they've moved 30 steps ahead while you were fighting on this ground.

And so, you know, it just feels like trying to mitigate the damage. I talked to the co-president of Public Citizen yesterday who was involved in a bunch of these lawsuits, and that was the way he described it. He's like, yeah, the court system is really not set up to handle this sort of like full on flood the zone assault.

And so you are definitionally just trying to, like, you know, from his perspective and mine, contain the damage and try to have something left to rebuild from once these people are ultimately done. So, you know, that's kind of the status of where things are with regards to the courts. There was one other piece that I don't know if you guys want to weigh in on, but I saw Trump is pushing for his re-election.

ending of birthright citizenship to go to SCOTUS and have them weigh in on at least part of that. So that was the other big legal decision yesterday. And that's one that's been, I think, engineered in the conservative movement. And there's significant disagreement about this in the conservative movement. But in sort of like Stephen Miller circles, that's something that was discussed

intentionally germinated and designed to be tested in the Supreme Court the way that they ended up doing it. It's sort of the reverse of the probationary employee thing. They set this up very intentionally to be tested in the courts because they think they can, with the Supreme Court, they think they can prevail and significantly change the way we approach birthright citizenship through an EO.

Which would overturn a lot of precedent and also just like the very like, you know, plain meaning, English language meaning of the way that the words are written in the Constitution, which, you know, for a lot of originalists, you would think that that would be a problem, but I'm not sure. So the idea here would be if an American citizen participated in a campus protest, that if they had naturalized citizenship,

Or if their parents were not born in the United States, but they were. So where would you deport them to? So let's say somebody is born here in the United States. One of their parents is Mexican. One of their parents is Canadian. They protest against Israel, which you can't protest against Israel in the United States. They get detained, flown to Louisiana, have their citizenship stripped. Now they're back down to a green card. They have the green card stripped.

Then where do you send them? Canada, Mexico? Like what's the international waters? Yeah. International water. Yeah. Peter Thiel's like utopian center to one of these libertarian crypto zones. Like what is what's the end game here for an American citizen who protests against Israel in a way that, you know, Donald Trump finds offensive? Like what do they do with them?

Well, I think that question applies also to people, I mean, whether or not they're protesting, who are the kind of, quote unquote, anchor baby test case. But at least some of those, but if they're not anchor, so, quote unquote, anchor baby means they were born here in the United States. Somebody like Mahmoud Khalil, he was born in a refugee camp in Syria and he has Algerian citizenship.

So I could imagine, okay, we're going to deport him to Algeria because he has citizenship there. Like if that's what they're going to do. But if you're born in the United States, you're a United States citizen and you have no citizenship anywhere else. Has the Stephen Miller crowd thought about this? Well, it also requires cooperation of other countries. I'm curious how other countries don't have birthright citizenship the way that we do. Right, Algeria might be like, no, we're not participating in this thing. Right.

Yeah. I mean, it's a practical question that I have zero answer to. The answer, Ryan, is they don't really care. Just not here. Yeah, but they're going to have to figure it out. Is they just going to keep them indefinitely in Guantanamo? They can just send them to Gitmo. Yeah, that's the plan, right? There's like 50 beds there. Good luck. Yeah. They could be hundreds, maybe even thousands. I think George H.W. Bush had thousands there at one point.

The plan is 30,000 is their goal. Whether they can accomplish that or not is another question. Apparently the few hundred that they had originally sent to Gitmo, they've now sent elsewhere, either deported them or brought them back actually to the U.S. to DHS facilities here. So in any case, lots of work out there. They definitely don't see that as a successful experiment. Yeah.

Well, I think it got them the headlines that they want. It got them a freak out that they want, and I think that was probably most of the goal there, to be honest with you. Well, yeah, and I think actually I shouldn't even be so glib about it because I do think that's part of – I actually think that did have a deterrent effect based on some of the reporting I've seen from Mexico and Central America where reporters are just talking to migrants about why they're turning around, and there has been significant –

a number of people like literally getting through the Darien gap and turning, turning back around because the, the risk calculation has changed significantly. So yeah, I probably shouldn't have been flipping about that. I think it did to some extent accomplish,

Yeah, border crossings has plummeted.

Yeah, no doubt about that. No doubt about that. All right, guys. Anything else before we let you guys go and get on with your day? No, I just want to say your hair looks amazing today. Exceptionally good. Thank you. You know, I literally did nothing to it this morning. I actually just like woke up and...

was just like this it was kind of a miracle i don't know what happened you woke up like this my hair did anyway the rest of me not so much ryan put more effort into his hair than crystal ryan looks great i have to say i feel a little schlubby here i'm i got my like elizabeth theranos situation going here i was like you know and ryan's sick

Yeah. And he's putting in all this, all this appearance effort. Ryan, go rest, get better, take care of your kiddos. Emily, great to see you as always. People should go look this up. But speaking of our, speaking of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia university sent out an email to a lot of people, a lot of its members just now ish saying that there were DHS thugs. I would not, I don't know what the term they used for them was.

In residences with warrants last night, looking for more people to grab and deport, said they failed to find anybody. But they let the community know that there were warrants served for more arrests and deportations. So they're ramping this up.

There's also an allegation from a student leader at Columbia that the Columbia Board of Trustees was involved in sticking DHS on Mahmoud Khalil specifically. So, like I said, it's an allegation. It's not fully reported on or confirmed. But, you know, if you're asking yourself, why did they pick this one dude? I mean, there's some on the trustees who would, you know, because the trustees are...

There's some of them on there who would probably have motivation to do that. It would be down for that. Yeah. I mean, especially given, you know, I mean, I know you've been searching around. Um, Murtaza has been searching around like looking, okay, well, what did he actually say? And I can promise you, like Ryan and I have both said more radical things on this program than anything that's been like held there that they've been able to find that he said. Don't I know it? Yeah. So, um,

Well, I just want to say this is actually goes to a theory that I have, which is the administration was led down a rosier path or a path that was less rosy than they thought it was by people at Columbia who Columbia has had experience.

this incredible mobilization since these original protests and the encampment of alumni who are like terrified of what they see as rising anti-Semitism at Columbia and furious with Columbia for the way that it's

handled the encampments and the protests and everything. And I think that the administration was listening to people who have been intensely emotionally invested in this for like over a year who had cases that they thought were so strong. Like Khalil is a really good one. The administration clearly did not

realize that he wasn't on some student visa. And it seems like they were told that he was. And they acted really quickly based on this is just a theory. I don't have any reporting to back this up, but just putting the pieces together. I think they were really significantly misled by people who thought that they had clear cut

legal slam dunk cases, told the administration that, and the administration didn't necessarily do the due diligence that it should have because of the intensity of the cases that have been presented to them by people who have been working on this at Columbia. That theory makes sense because if DHS...

was the one who told the administration, let's go get Mahmoud Khalil, DHS would check its system. Like, FYI, he's a permanent legal resident. We can use this obscure law. When we leave, we can get him out. They would know because they have the data. If the rumor mill of the angry Columbia case

trustees or whoever, well, they had been tweeting about Trump or like this guy's a student. This guy's on a student visa. I saw it on Twitter. And according to Elon Musk, you are better off if you get your news from X, then let's say if you're DHS, you search the actual immigration records. And so, yeah, they went in on tweets and then found out that he that they were wrong. And now they might set this like horrific precedent by accident. Yeah.

Well, and but on the other hand, now that they are set to set to lay down this horrific precedent, they don't seem too worried about that. You know, I mean, they're leaning into it. Sagar asked Caroline Levitt at the podium about it. She was perfectly happy to answer. Like, I think maybe they feel like, oh, it works out because we get to lay out the most maximalist case and then all these student visa ones.

Like those are easy. That's nothing after we've been able to strip the, you know, the, the green card status and deport someone who was a legal permanent resident. And, um, you know, I mean, even the fact that like you guys did great work looking at up this Instagram post, um,

that all these right-wingers were hanging their hat on of him saying he wanted to destroy Western imperialism. You're like the number one, that wasn't even his Instagram. It's some group. He may not have even seen this Instagram post. And this is what you're like,

This is what you're making your case with. And it's really kind of the only specific language example I've seen anyone use with regard to him. And it's this Instagram post that he didn't even directly have anything to do with. It's actually kind of annoying because I think there's zero to do with any of the posts.

It's kind of annoying because I think there are genuinely – you guys disagree with me on this. Sagar and I probably do agree on this. I think there actually are cases of people who are here on student visas who clearly viscerally hate America and probably violated some laws over the course of civil disobedience. And there are cases that would have made this –

much, much stronger than the Khalil case. And it's like, this is, I mean, I think it's indefensible. It's just completely stupid. So it's, that's, I find that very irritating. Yeah. If you're on a student visa and you commit a crime, like they have the power to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I would be, you know, arguing against it morally, but I wouldn't be able to argue against it legally. And I don't think you would find anyone on the right really who objected to that. Very few voices would really object to that. And now you have, you know, some right wing influence. I don't want to overstate it, but there is some schism on the right over this action by the administration. And it's just so clearly is a violation of First Amendment rights because the only thing he's not charged with a crime. They've made it clear that they're not responsible

Deporting him or trying to deport him Based on allegations of criminal behavior Just Marco Rubio's assessment That his speech His political speech Is this devastating blow to U.S. foreign policy priorities National security Yeah exactly One last anecdote In 2002 when I was doing a bunch of Anti-Iraq war organizing I was at University of Maryland There were a bunch of Chinese students on student visas And they wanted to help

But they were like, if we get in any trouble, like we will be out of here tomorrow. Yeah. So we would meet at 4 a.m. to go put the wax, you know, you like dip your posters in wax and then put them up on the flyers and to announce the rallies and stuff. So students have always understood that, and particularly ones that grew up in China would have a much more visceral understanding of what a police state looks like. So yeah, it's different than for a green card holder. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, could have been assumed to be different for a green card holder, but apparently not. Which if they didn't know he was a green card holder. Yeah. Yeah. We'll find out in court. All right, guys. Thank you so much as always. And to everybody out there, have a wonderful weekend. If anything crazy happens today, like for example, if Democrats fail to buckle, as Ryan put it earlier, and shock us all, maybe we'll do an update later in the day. But otherwise, Sagar and I will see you guys on Monday. Have a great day.

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