4/18/25: US Citizens Detained, Dem Meets With Abrego Garcia, Trump Attacks Powell & MORE!
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Friday show with Ryan and Emily. Just as a reminder for premium subscribers, this entire Friday show is available. But for those of you who are watching free on YouTube, if you want to watch the entire thing, you can go ahead and sign up at breakingpoints.com. If not, no worries at all. Just know that there is more content there behind the paywall. Just do us a favor. If you can like, subscribe and share this video and or this podcast. And so with that, let's kick it over to Ryan and Emily.

Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us on another exciting Friday show. Ryan, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How about yourself? Good. Happy Good Friday to everyone. We're missing Crystal and Sagar today. They'll be with us in spirit for sure. They helped come up with a lot of the things we're going to talk about today. So at least they will be with us through the elements that they have chosen. Yes, exactly. We're at their mercy here today.

Yes. Now, Ryan, I know that you have an update on one of our favorite guests, drop site writer Abu Bakr.

Yes, if people might have noticed this on social media, they haven't. They should go check out Abu Bakr's feed. After a long and agonizing decision and also then process, he has left Gaza. He'll have more to say about where he's going, what he's doing next. I can say that Jeremy is with him now.

The story of getting out is one that is harrowing. I think he'll want to tell it himself, so I don't want to take anything away from that. People should also remember this is his first time ever leaving Gaza. Setting aside the unbearable, unthinkable experience that he's had over the past 18 months, to leave Gaza...

for the first time in your life in your twenties and to see the world with those eyes for the first time is, must be just an unimaginable perspective. And it, and it will be, I think a fascinating one because he'll, he'll be seeing the world, you know, through, through that perspective. And I, and which would, I think will help us, you know, see that world in, in, in kind of a new way. If it was an agonizing decision that no human being should be forced to make to either, you know,

Stay with your family, stay with your people, stay committed to what you're doing and quite plausibly die of malnutrition or leave your family, leave your people and pursue the fight from elsewhere. It's a choice that I can't even imagine what it must be like to have had to wrestle with that. I'm thankful that he's safe right now.

Yeah, we're excited, I think, to be able to hear more from him about how harrowing exactly that journey was, Ryan. Looks like my camera just froze again.

There it is. Okay. So we have a lot to get through because the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia continued to be – there were developments throughout the day yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. But also, Ryan, there's a drop site scoop that we're actually going to start with about deportations and people having trouble with their –

ability to remain in the United States. We'll get into all of that. We're going to talk about some market updates. Elizabeth Warren actually did battle on CNBC yesterday. So we have some cool clips from that and more from Bernie and AOC's war on the Democratic Party or the Democratic Party's war on Bernie and AOC. And we'll be joined by the author of The Squad for that blog. That's, of course, Ryan Grimm. All right.

Ryan, I can put this drop side element up on the screen. This is a scoop that you guys got yesterday.

I would call this a Huffington Post level scoop in the sense that it wasn't ours. The terrific reporter Jackie Anos for the Florida Phoenix has been tracking this story. But what we used to do it so effectively at the Huffington Post, and which we still do.

which we still do with our social media feed is we'll try to elevate things that the rest of the national media is missing. And the media had missed this. The story is wild. And I guess it has a good ending at this point. Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, who was at the center of it, was eventually freed late yesterday. But effectively what happened, Florida passed a law

That says that if you bring an unauthorized alien into the state of Florida, you know, that is a state crime on top of it being a federal crime and a matter for ICE. And so this guy, Lopez Gomez, was driving from Georgia or he was in a passenger seat coming from Georgia to Florida. They got pulled over and he didn't speak English. And so they arrest him and hold him. Now, it turns out he was born in Georgia.

He, when he was one, he moved to Southern Mexico and basically grew up there. And he grew up speaking a Mayan language. I think it's called, people can correct me on that. It's a very common language in Guatemala and Southern Mexico. And obviously it has been spoken on this continent for, I guess, probably thousands of years at this point, which is

let's underscore the irony here of, you know, you're here, speak English. It's like, no, well, England is an island that's many thousands of miles away from here. This is a language that's been spoken here for thousands of years. Setting that aside, the cops are like confused by the situation at best. They arrest him. He gets his day in court and his mother shows up with his birth certificate and his social security card.

which, okay, Florida cops made a mistake, let the guy go. The Florida prosecutor insists on holding him and says that there is also an ICE order that he be held because now, you know,

Florida is cooperating with ICE on all of these matters. And the judge in the case, you know, she holds up the birth certificate. She holds it in the light. She's like, I see the watermark. This is an authentic birth certificate. This is an authentic Social Security card. This is an American citizen. But I'm a state judge, the prosecutor and ICER, insisting that this man continue to be held. And so I have no authority to release him. It was only then after there was a huge outcry and this incident kind of took on viral popularity.

velocity that they announced that they were going to be releasing him. Now, what if they had decided in that time to ship him to El Salvador? And then they could say, well, we made a mistake. It turns out that he is a citizen. This was an authentic birth certificate. That's our bad. We made a mistake. We acknowledge that we made a mistake, but who are we to

tell Bukele what to do with people that are in his custody. There is no gap in the legal logic that applies to Obrego Garcia, that they're applying to Obrego Garcia that wouldn't apply to this American citizen here. So hopefully this is the end of it for Lopez Gomez. But it's only April and they're already

you know, detained, you know, they already had detained an American citizen. And it'd be one thing it was a mistake and okay, sorry about this. Once they saw his birth certificate and social security card from his mother and they still insist, it's one thing is the judge is powerless. The prosecutor was not powerless. ICE was not powerless. They insisted on pushing through the evidence in front of their face that he was an American citizen and insisted on continuing to detain him. I guess the only upside is that

public pressure still means something like that. That's a hopeful sign. But I don't know. Did you see this circulating on the right or did this happen too quickly to resolve? No, I didn't see it circulating on the right at all. But before we get into actually, I think this is a good segue into the clip of Tim Burchett that we wanted to play, because before we get into Abrego Garcia,

And the dangers when you start treating American citizens in this way. I want to roll this interview from Tim Burchett, he's a Republican congressman, probably have seen him on CNN. He does that all the time. But this time he's on News Nation talking about what's going on in the United States.

whether or not American citizens, as the president has floated, should go to places like Seacott in El Salvador. So let me pull this up right now. And some are wondering, though, if it's a slippery slope. What's your reaction to President Trump suggesting that homegrown criminals could be sent to El Salvador next, American citizens?

They're criminals. They broke our laws. They need to suffer our punishment. I don't want Donald Trump teaching my daughter Sunday school class, but dadgum I like him in the White House because he understands the rule of law, I feel like, and America is sick of this stuff. Okay, so Ryan, Burchett basically said they're criminals, they should follow our laws. Did he listen to the question? Like, I don't...

That's what I was just going to say. But either way, it's. But I hope the question is, should Americans be sent to a dungeon in a foreign country? You would listen to the question. Well, yeah, but yeah, exactly. He did the sort of thing that Republican congressmen often do when asked about Donald Trump, which is just sort of deflect and move on to your sort of general talking point. I don't want him teaching my daughter Sunday school class, but, you know, he's right for the American people. And.

The reason I wanted to talk about this clip in that context, to your point, Ryan, an American citizen gets sent to El Salvador and lawyers can't get in touch. And it's up to Bacalli to bring people, unless we want to do like a military invasion of El Salvador. I mean, it's just the things that they're playing with here are so, they're just so disturbing. And one of the other reasons I want to talk about this, which is the, the,

Some people on the right's Bukele fetish is so weird. And I think that's not to say that he's Palestinian. That is Trump's favorite insult. Yeah, but it's not I mean, it's not inexplicable.

And it's not everyone, but it is so weird. Like we can take care. We have our own law enforcement. Do we not believe that we're on the right? Do we not believe that we're the greatest country in the world? Like, do we need to be outsourcing our law enforcement to El Salvador? Give me a break. Yeah. To me, it reflects a real contempt for.

um within a significant strain of the right for the american values and american capacity to handle our own problems i think i think you're right like and you even see it reflected slightly in jd vance's fighting with zed and everybody else on twitter over the last few days where he keeps throwing his hands up and saying what do you want us to do you know biden let in millions of people illegally what what do you want us to do it's like well

If you don't like the laws that are on the books, then take the campaign pledges that you made while you ran for office, take them to Congress and write new laws. Like you already, the Democrats already show and you're like, and then you hear push, oh, the Democrats won't vote for it. Well, then get rid of the filibuster if you want. You have, you have the votes.

Also, Democrats have shown they're willing to be utterly spineless and give you whatever you want on the question of immigration. You know, the Lake and Riley Act allows immigration authorities to go back and deport anybody who has been charged with a crime. Charged. Accused. That's it. Just charged. There. You don't even need to have due process. That's just process. All you have to do is write up a charge.

And Democrats rubber stamp that for you. So you're telling me with this weak little opposition party that Republicans can't find a way to use America's system of government to create the kind of process that they believe is a just way to respond to what they see as the injustice of Biden's immigration policy. Like if you don't, if you don't even think that you have the capacity to do that as a

governing majority and you have to outsource it to this tin pot dictator in El Salvador, don't you have some sense of shame? Like, don't you have any self-respect? Like, I find it a little bit emasculating, to be honest. Right. Yes. Republican congressmen that go to the prison and pose with like Bukele's prisoners. It's just awful. It is. It's really embarrassing. Yeah. Don't you? Do you have no dignity that this is like this is your thing?

Yeah, it's ridiculous. He looks good in sunglasses. Like, but is that your bar? He looks like he's like a theater kid when he's putting his sunglasses on. That's true. I was trying to be generous to him, but you're right. But in all seriousness, let's get into some of the Spook LA, Abrego Garcia stuff, because also it's just like,

What would the Trump administration is pejoratively referring to Zelensky as a dictator? I actually think there's some meat on those bones. You can make that argument pretty well. But Kelly walks around calling himself a dictator. Right. It's a cool dictator. Don't they call himself a cool dictator? World's coolest dictator. Yeah. Nobody, by the way, who's cool has ever called themselves cool. Just let's let's be clear about that. Before we go to Obrego Garcia, let's put it real quickly. This is.

This like lunatic thing that's going on in not just Pennsylvania, but you've got all these American citizens who are reporting and you've got their immigration attorneys vouching for the fact that these are all authentic. They're just like ISIS now spamming people, telling them to get out of the country, including a bunch of American citizens. This one here, Lisa Anderson, born in Pennsylvania.

you know, said that she's never had any interaction with immigration ever. And she got an email telling her like this doctor, like telling her, get out of the country. It would be, it would be ironic if ICE is profiling doctors, like assuming that if you're a doctor, you weren't born here in this country. Like what, what would that say about ICE's confidence in American born people here? Like, Oh, Oh, you're a doctor. You you're probably an immigrant.

I think if that's the situation where ISIS found itself, I think we have a lot bigger problems than the number of people that Biden led into the country. So Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat senator, obviously had a hell of a day yesterday. Let's get into some of that. So first, he

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...had been denied access into Secot. So that's the maximum security massive prison that, according to a Wall Street Journal report, I think that just came out yesterday, Bukele is planning to expand, basically double in size. The sourcing was basically Kristi Noem to the Wall Street Journal story saying that Bukele is planning. And really because already one in 57 Salvadorian citizens is...

locked up. It sounds like, and this is the dots that the Wall Street Journal connected, that's going to be

deportations, deportees from the United States. That's sort of the plan. The growth industry. Yeah. So if we are working with El Salvador to do that, so many more questions to be asked. We'll see how that develops. But Chris Van Hollen tried to get in yesterday because that's where Abreu Garcia is being held. And that did not go well for him. So then we got

No, we received actually this picture. Let me share this one. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This is a tweet from Bukele. Miraculously risen from the, quote, death camps and, quote, torture. Now sipping margaritas with Senator Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador. Ryan, reaction to this.

I mean, on the one hand, I think this is like Chris Van, you know, we live in a cynical age, but I think Chris Van Hollen deserves, you know, some serious credit, whether you agree with him or disagree with him. Like he, he,

saw what he believed to be an injustice that was being carried out against his constituent. And if you don't think that a resident counts as a constituent, you can count his wife, who is his constituent. And he went down to El Salvador to try to right that injustice. Van Hollen has an interesting backstory, what you would call deep state connected, both

both his mother and father worked in either the State Department or the CIA. Van Hollen himself was actually born in Pakistan while his parents were like stationed over there. He was a Senate Foreign Relations staffer before becoming a senator. And he and Peter Galbraith kind of famously snuck into northern Iraq after Saddam Hussein's 1991 kind of

attack on the Kurds. If people know the history of this, it was this kind of almost genocidal attack on an uprising in Northern Iraq, um, where he used, um, where he used weapons of mass destruction against them. And, uh, Van Hollen snuck into Northern Iraq through Syria, uh, through Turkey, I mean, and, uh, and secreted it out an enormous tranche of evidence to like

validate the claims that were being made that Saddam Hussein had done this and had used these chemical weapons against the Kurds, who people kept calling his own people. He gassed his own people. Kurds do not like it if you would call them Saddam Hussein's people. So this is a guy who has worked within the system and he's part of the system, but he's always been willing to take risks as well. And so I think the fact that

The fact that he pressured Bukele not just to meet him, but to get him out of the prison certainly undermines Bukele's and Trump's claim that he can't do that. What Bukele and Trump were leaning on was too bad. This is a this is a prison for terrorists. And, you know, you go in and you come out in a box like that's it. There's no way out. And, you know, you still have J.D. Vance online saying, look, the guy deserves to be deported, continuing to lie to

which is should he be held for life in a prison notorious for its unspeakable conditions, which is a different question than should somebody be deported from one country to another. What did you make of it? It feels like the right is almost kind of enjoying this, like that they think they're winning this. Well, I mean, so Chris Van Hollen, I think there's –

I think what he did was legitimately personally brave, like physically brave. But I think he is not walking the fine line between treating Abrego Garcia as a victim and a martyr. And I think Abrego Garcia is a victim of a bad policy by the Trump administration. I think the right is significantly downplaying how grave

of a quote-unquote mistake it was to just say, whoops, sorry, he had this withholding order. Literally, like Bukele said, whoopsie. Oh, he said that about the Venezuelan plane. That was about... Oh, that's right. He may have been... Abrigo Garcia actually may have been on the plane. He was probably on that plane, yeah, because he was part of that deportation, yeah. Yeah, he may have been on that plane. And...

Yeah. So anyway, all that is to say that is I mean, it is not just a minor error. That is a significant error. He had the withholding order. He was, you know, in a legal process with our country and was just sent somewhere. A court said that he could not be sent to the Trump administration, did nothing to rectify it and basically laughed the entire way.

that was a huge mistake. I think Van Hollen is creeping into, significantly creeping into martyr territory. I think politically, I'll get to the substance in a second. I think politically it looked pretty, I think the White House got them when they brought the mother of the woman who was, the girl who was killed in Maryland to the White House press briefing. I think that was really a brutal look for Van

Chris Van Hollen. I think you disagree. Right. And so the hit was that there was a murder victim in Maryland and Van Hollen had not called the mother. I have bad news about Maryland. A lot of people get murdered in Maryland. And it would be good if every senator called every parent of every murder victim. The strong implication from the White House there was that

Kilmar Albrego Garcia had killed this woman? No, no, no. What exactly is the point? The mom was saying you are exerting all of this effort to bring home this man who was in the country who crossed through the country illegally and was deportable, not deportable to El Salvador, but was deportable and you didn't devote enough attention to the problem that led to my

my daughter's death. That was the contention. I think that hits home with a lot of people. That's just the politics of it. The substance of it, yeah, I think Van Hollen is treating him more as a martyr than a victim, and I think he is a victim. But

because you're a victim doesn't mean you have to be sort of treated as someone who's like a martyr in and of itself. Now, that said, the Trump administration's position on this is absolutely insane and was also not good for the Trump administration. So it's not like everyone's a, it's not like there are any, I don't think there are any real winners here at the end of the day. And I think it is always difficult in

in politics um to stand up for a principle um if the if your case is not yes you know absolutely perfect yeah we have jesse waters talking about this did you see this clip right no let's oh i did i did see this you want to roll this and then we can talk about it yeah because you were just getting into um this argument that he starts making here here we go jesse jesse

You have to have a victim that is pure. You can't have a Floyd. You can't have a Smollett. You can't have a Garcia. Your example of victimhood has to be a sympathetic victim, not someone who beats his wife and traffics humans.

So his wife did get successfully get a temporary... Abrego Garcia's wife did successfully get a temporary restraining order with really awful allegations of violence towards her. But Ryan, to the point that you were making, when our courts are violated, it's unsympathetic victims that you sort of bring out the principled among lawmakers, elected officials, and the political class. Right, right. And...

For – by the way, on the domestic violence, his wife has since come out and said that she had previously been in a violent relationship and that she got into a fight with Kilmar. That did not turn violent at all. And –

In order to, and because of the trauma that she'd been through before, she kind of made up some of that stuff so that she could get a, have a restraining order, like ready to go in case she needed it. Like that's what she's, that's what she says now. The irony of Jesse Waters now being a believe all women, like a me too supporter.

Like he has finally found, he has finally found allegations against a man that he is like immediately willing to accept. Wow. What a coincidence that he's become this like me too champion. But yeah, you're right. Like when you're standing up for a principle, you have to stand up for it. Like no, no, no matter what. And even, even if, even if the person isn't perfect, but on the other hand,

It doesn't seem like he's that bad a guy, according to his wife. She should not have done that. You should not make up allegations. Maybe now she's saying that now. Either way, none of it means that the Trump administration should be allowed to ignore a court order and send somebody illegally to a terror dungeon, a torture dungeon. And that's what...

That's what somehow keeps getting missed in this conversation. Like, okay, look, J.D. Vance, nobody would – there would be some people complaining, but if you just deported him to El Salvador and you violated the court order about – that he can't go to El Salvador, but he were living with his parents in El Salvador and –

He was at some risk because of the gang. But then on the other hand, Bukele has probably crushed a lot of the gang that was intimidating him in the past. If that was the situation, it wouldn't be an international story. It would be the Trump administration ignoring a court order, which would be bad and which should be pushed back on and the courts should take that up as well. But it would not be captivating the imaginations of the world if he weren't in a dungeon where

The likes of which are just impossible to contemplate. Florescent lights 24 hours a day on a metal... You sleep on a metal sheet with no mattress. You're just fed beans and rice to eat by hand. Presumably, there's just violence at all hours because there's a decent number of violent people in there already and now they're all absolutely losing their minds in this situation.

Just absolutely horrifying and a place that nobody's expected to leave alive. If that's where he was sent and that keeps getting lost. Well, and, you know, again, if the Trump administration had deported him with like actual evidence,

in compliance with that withholding order or they had gotten the withholding order removed and Bukele accepted his own citizen and did what he wanted to do to his own citizen, it's totally different than us making a mistake and then allowing him to fester in the prison because they're saying, oh, we can't get Bukele to bring him back. At the same time, like the Bush administration used to rendition, you know, before it started torturing people on its own, it would

take people and send them to Egypt. And oftentimes there's evidence that CIA officials would go along with them and would be part of these or observing these interrogations. So they would take people and they'd send them to torture chambers in Egypt or Syria, actually, where they would be then tortured on behalf of the United States. Those were called extraordinary renditions was the term that Cheney came up with for them. It was decided that, no, you can't do that. Like, that's insane. Like, if you're doing that,

That that's not a get out of the Constitution free card. Like we still are against cruel and inhumane punishment. Like we're like that's that's that's unconstitutional. And there's no workaround that says, oh, well, we're going to outsource it. So if we knew so, if we were going to send him to El Salvador and knew that Bukele was going to torture him as a result, then we could not do that. What we could do is you could deport him to Mexico. Yeah, they absolutely could have done that.

All you have to do is call Mexico and ask. But the problem now is... But with J.D. Vance's point is, that's annoying. I don't want to have to do that. No, I mean, he has a... So...

That then results in us. And if you're Mexico, you're not the American court system. You don't know whether people who are being deported actually are gang members or aren't gang members. And so then you have the United States saying, hey, we'd like to dump some of these suspected gang members into Mexico because they were in our country illegally. They were deportable. They didn't have citizenship. And we are now trying to do, quote unquote, mass deportations because the Biden administration let a net

according to New York Times, 8 million people into the country over the course of three, four years. If you say to Mexico, we have to maybe just, you know, 500,000 over the course of the next four years. We don't know for sure. That is genuinely a really difficult thing to do. And this is where the Trump administration is going to hit an absolute brick wall. And I think they've already realized that they've hit the brick wall because now they're

And I say this as somebody who thinks that there is a significant problem here. And I don't know what mass deportation means because it doesn't have a number. But there are a lot of people in this country who I don't think some of them are decent and hardworking and don't deserve to live in the shadows without an answer on their citizenship for years and years. I don't think that's good for anybody. And so now they're in this situation where it's like,

you have all of these people from Venezuela. Marco Rubio, we like Venezuelans fleeing communism. That's like your whole thing. Cubans. What are you going to do with people who are in these situations? You can't send them to Venezuela. You can't send them back to Cuba. So what are you going to do? I think you're breaking up for a second, but I interviewed the

Venezuelan foreign minister a little while ago under the Biden administration. And he had said, or basically suggested that, look, if we can normalize relations with the United States again, lift these sanctions, get back to a normal way of doing business, we can take a ton of these sanctions.

Venezuelans back into Venezuela. The same would be true of Cuba. The same would be true of Haiti. Like we've destroyed these countries, created this mass exodus. And now we're like, oh, gee, there's nothing we can do with these people. The Venezuela point isn't a bad argument for Trump's perspective, because, you know, he loves being the historic deal breaker or the deal maker, not breaker, deal maker. And this idea of like,

a generational thaw in the relationship with Venezuela in order to accept, I mean, tons of Venezuelan migrants that he surely wants to sweep up in, quote, mass deportations. I don't know. He's not boxed in like a President Marco Rubio would be, but he certainly has Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State and people who see the issue like Rubio does surrounding him. And that's the very...

traditional Cold War conservative perspective on total that Ronald Reagan actually violated to criticism from a lot of people of total non-cooperation and like non-contact basically with these types of countries. And so if Trump breaks that in order to get his his migrants supported, that'll be interesting.

I don't see it happening, but I would love to be wrong. My favorite thing is to be wrong in a good direction. So let's see. I was going to say, I've told people who I know who work on some of these issues that it might not be a bad idea to talk to Trump about Cuba. Yeah. I mean, come on.

Yeah. Or I mean, they're just trying to create a failed state. That's the current the current policy is let's create a failed state and see what happens. He wants to do a Riviera in Gaza. Let me tell you, Donald Trump, what you could do with Havana. Yes, he can get his mob buddies over there. We can get the band back together. Last thing before we move on. This there's a new poll out that shows that the American people, like by a very, very wide margin,

are just not supportive of this idea that we should be deporting students on behalf of Israel, on behalf of like, you know, for the, for simply expressing support for Palestine. Yeah.

By a wide margin, 54 to 23% oppose deporting green card holders, 52 to 26% oppose deporting student visa holders. So that's a two to one margin with, you know, you've got a quarter of the people in the middle saying we're not sure. So it's, you know, there aren't a lot of issues in the U.S. that are two to one.

But this is one of them. And we do have one thing. Spring cleaning? Sure, if we have to. But we're way more into spring streaming. Finding something to watch shouldn't feel like a chore. So we let Xfinity's entertainment experts do all the heavy lifting. They drop hand-picked TV, movie, and music recommendations right into your social feed. New premieres, returning series, exclusive interviews, the top music playlist for My Heart Radio, and all the rest.

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And lastly as well, which is just that Donald Trump was asked about compliance with the courts yesterday and his presser with Georgia Maloney. So let's go ahead and take a listen. Will you take steps to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States and put him in front of a judge? Well, I'm not involved in it. I'm going to respond by saying you'll have to speak to the lawyers, the DOJ. I've heard many things about him and we'll have to find out what the truth is.

So, Ryan, the reason I thought that was useful just as we're closing out the segment is I was scrolling through Bukele's Twitter just now, and he's retweeting things saying that he confirmed that Abrego Garcia is staying in El Salvador. People may have seen the Bukele tweet saying he now has the privilege of staying in El Salvador. And on top of that, Bukele was tweeting things about how he's been trolling Democrats. And so it's like...

You just like Trump is now like excusing himself from the conversation and just, you know, what is the Taylor Swift line? I'd very much like to be excluded from this this narrative or this conversation. That's what he's he's doing. A couple of days ago, he was sitting in the exact same spot, very much wanting to be included in the conversation. Yeah. Trump famously respects the independence of the Department of Justice. And so he's not going to get involved in those affairs.

Well, let's go to another significant quote from that press conference as we move over to the markets. This is Donald Trump. A lot of news yesterday on the Fed front. So much to break down. Let's start with Trump being asked about Jerome Powell. He had a lot to say about Jerome Powell in this press conference yesterday where he was sitting beside Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Maloney. So here's Trump on Twitter.

He said that the termination of drone power will not come fast enough. He says he won't leave it in, even if you ask him to. Oh, he'll leave. If I ask him to, he'll be out of there. But I don't think he's doing the job. He's too late, always too late, a little slow, and I'm not happy with him. I let him know it, and...

Oh, if I want him out, he'll be out of there real fast. Believe me. Go ahead, please. Question. Yeah, question. All right, Ryan reaction. Yes. So the markets are, you know, sending a signal that if, if Trump, you know, forcibly removes the, the, the chairman of the fed that, that,

They would they would they would lose that much more confidence in the American economy. Like the U.S. economy is the envy of the world and it is the kind of place where people try to find safety and sanctuary because it is understood to be stable and to follow the rule of law.

Because it is hard around the world to find, like the Chinese Stock Exchange, for instance, would be doing a lot better relative to Chinese economic capacity if there was more faith from international investors that...

investments were safe and that rule of law was followed. So if, you know, he's already, you know, taken a huge hammer to the idea of the stability of the American economy. If he goes and, you know, throws out the Fed share in order to kind of prop up his tariff policy, what that would do is it would be another signal to Wall Street, which is currently kind of somewhere in

the stage of denial or anger about the tariff policy. Wall Street is still desperately hoping that this guy can't be serious. He's like in 90 days, please tell us he's not coming back and trying this again. And if he pushes out the Fed chair, that would be a signal that, oh, no, no, this guy is deadly serious. And he thinks that if he can just get control of the monetary flow, if he can mess with that spigot,

then his tariff policy is gonna have some real staying power. - Ryan, you're echoing Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. This is what's on the screen right here. This was a Politico story.

Besson has been privately underscoring that axing Powell would feed instability in the market, sources say, and Trump is also aware of the stakes. That means that though Trump is mad again at Powell, his job looks safe for now. Sorry to interrupt. I just you had Scott Besson sitting there very stiffly in the press conference as Donald Trump was making those comments. And Besson seems to be.

having a lot of his own perspectives taken very, very seriously. That's a lot of the reporting that Trump is leaning on Besson heavily right now, both Besson and Lutnick. Maybe it's like a good and bad angel on the shoulder type dynamic. But this is the argument that you were just making is apparently the argument his treasury secretary is making to him. Yeah. If I agree with Trump's treasury secretary, then...

It should maybe take a great treasury secretary. Yes. So let's, you know, he also defended his, I can pull this up here. Also defended his tariff policy to Maloney. Let me, let's get this answer. No tariffs are making us rich. We were losing a lot of money under Biden, trillions of dollars, trillions on trade.

And now that's that whole tide has turned. We're making a lot of money. We're taking a lot of money. Don't forget, we're taking in 25 percent on cars, 25 percent on steel, 25 percent on aluminum, 10 percent baseline. So the first estimates came came in well under what what Trump was expecting. Right. Apparently, 500 million dollars has been collected through the tariff policy so far, which is

It's just a complete pittance. It's just kind of laughable in the face of the amount of money that has moved and changed hands. We're talking about trillions of dollars. As he joked, Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion through some shady insider trading in one day.

So the entire American people have just gotten a fifth of that. Sounds like now we're really getting ripped off. Well, and in this grand cost benefit analysis, we're starting to get some examples of people

Actually, this is one man who posted an example of what the tariffs actually looked like. So he says, I got hit with my first, this is Aaron Rubin, my first 20% tariff out of China shipped before that jumped to 145%. I included the bill from CBP below. It's called the CN slash HKEO 20% duty. The product isn't worth selling with 145% tariff. So despite selling over 1 million of this SKU and my tiny e-com business and customers being fairly happy, I will be discontinuing this product.

product. And there's another example. This is Ryan Peterson. Two of our American customers devastated by the tariffs gave up and sold themselves to their Chinese factories in the last week. And he posted, I believe, an entire thread of examples. Yeah, thousands and millions of American small businesses, including many iconic brands, would go bankrupt this year if the tariff policies on China don't

change. He says the manufacturers in Vietnam and elsewhere can't be bothered with small batch production jobs typical of small businesses supply. It just keeps going down the line, basically explaining. He says when they die, it may actually be the final victory for the Chinese manufacturers. They scoop up brands that took decades to build through the blood, sweat, and tears of some of the most creative and entrepreneurial people in the world. American brand builders are second to none worldwide. Right. Yeah. The deal that we had

stitched out with China so far is that we had the IP, we came up with these ideas, we've got the executives working the nice cushy jobs, and we want to reduce our costs and bust our unions. And so we're going to ship the production over to China. And what Trump is going to do, he's not going to bring the manufacturing back

to the United States, what's going to happen is that the Chinese company that makes the thing was always a threat. Like that's the, the similarity throughout history is the kind of guards that organize themselves around an emperor or a president or a dictator. Like those guards are always the biggest risk of actually taking power because they're like, wait a minute, like why are we protecting this princeling? We could actually just

We're the ones with the weapons. Let's just take power. The parallel is in China. You had all these manufacturers who were like, these executives over in Los Angeles are not that smart. Like, okay, they came up with the name for this handbag, but we're the ones that make it. And all we have to figure out how to do is just sell it to people around the world. The deal was always that you're not going to do that.

We've got this arrangement that works for everybody. I mean, it doesn't work for the American workers necessarily, but this is the arrangement. Or the Chinese workers. Or, you know, gradually, you know, because of some equitable distribution, some more equitable distribution works better for them. You know, they had the fastest reduction in poverty in world history as a result of some of this. But now they're saying, you know what? Okay, fine.

You are putting your own companies out of business. So therefore, we're just going to do that last leg of it. And while this thing was making, let's say it was $100 million revenue, you were getting $80 million, we were getting $20 million. We like the idea of us getting $90 million and you getting $10 million.

as our kind of distribution network at the very end of the chain that we will own from beginning to end. So, yeah, we like this. We'll keep all the money. And the result will be a collapse in standard of living in the United States. Ryan, I don't know if you saw these charts that Derek Thompson put up. These are from, I think these are from the Philadelphia, or this one that's on the screen right now is from the New York Fed, a survey from the New York Fed.

the one that was just on the screen is from Philly Fed, but this is current and future general activity indexes. And you see a decline that is starting on a trajectory that almost looks similar. It looks like it's going in a similar trajectory to 2020 and COVID era. If we go back to this Philly Fed survey, you see differences in general business conditions, new orders and shipments between March and April. And again,

Ryan, I think the way that I'm looking at this is it is a long-term cost-benefit analysis that is guaranteed to have short-term pain. There is a possibility that there are long-term gains, but the biggest question is whether those long-term gains, if they come, outweigh the short-term and then, of course, the long-term losses. And so the White House has lists of deals it has with countries or new businesses that have agreed to

or new deals with businesses that have agreed to invest more in the country. But I mean, in the last couple of weeks, those are so far outweighed by the negatives in my estimation. Yeah, right. The long-term gains will go to the companies and the countries that can take advantage of this moment. And those at this point are Chinese companies and China. Like it boggles my mind that Trump somehow thinks that all of these companies that he is

deliberately driving out of business and into bankruptcy will somehow take advantage of his tariff policy and rebuild the American manufacturing capacity. Like that's like, he's wiping out the people who would do the thing he wants them to do. The ultimate irony, of course, is that if you look at the manufacturing, like numbers under the Biden administration, they were skyrocketing and it was through bipartisan industrial policy. Let's,

Let's keep Trump's tariffs in very targeted areas. And let's subsidize domestic manufacturing in the United States. Like, that's it. Like, that's what you do if you wanted to do this. Trump instead is like fighting against the subsidies, you know,

And then driving these companies that are driving this boom out of business. So how he thinks that they'll somehow come around and lead a long-term turnaround is at least beyond my capacity to think. Should we roll these clips of Elizabeth Warren doing battle on CNBC? I knew you would be excited about these. So here is the first one.

She seemed to be on for quite a long time. Oh, I'm sorry. This is a CNBC poll. That's actually worth looking at before we even roll into this. A new CNBC poll that found Trump's job approval 44-51. He's down 12 points on the economy, down 16 on tariffs, and down 23 points on inflation and cost of living. So even by CNBC's metrics, that's where this is for Trump. Here we go with Elizabeth Warren.

What evidence are you pointing to that this is a corrupt policy? Well, he right out in front announces a terror policy, says there are going to be no exceptions to that policy. And then he says, I talked to Tim Cook. Oh, really?

should maybe be talking to the companies that all of a sudden great deal available for tim cook tim cook who by the way put a million it's great deal available for americans who have to buy iphones no it is a great deal for one company but how many of the competitors now get hurt in fact i

I'd like to know what else goes on in this deal. Is it that Tim Cook and his interest in debt protection, but any of his competitors? I don't know. Do they get a higher interest rate? What happens to them? The corruption. And on the corruption, what evidence are you... Let's roll into the next clip here. As a reminder, so Congress gives the Fed the authority. Can the president...

terminate, not that he said he's going to do this, but can he terminate Powell's chairmanship earlier than his end in term? No.

Under no circumstance. Nope. So that's not a concern for you. Well, I thought we were talking about legally, right? But this is a president who has shown himself willing to violate laws. Everybody see goes, including willing to violate the constitution of the United States. So that obviously puts things a little more in play than we ever would have guessed. But I really want to make a pitch here for a second about the importance of Powell staying in his job. Look,

And it's unusual coming from you. You're very critical of him. I have tangled with him on a regular basis about both regulations and interest rates. But understand this. If Chairman Powell can be fired by the president of the United States, it will crash the markets in the United States.

The infrastructure that keeps this stock market strong and therefore a big part of our economy strong and therefore a big part of the world economy strong is the idea that the big pieces move independent of the politics, that somebody is making his, their, her best decisions about

economically and independently. We understand that if the New York Stock Exchange, if interest rates in the United States are subject to a president who just wants to wave his magic wand, this doesn't distinguish us then from any other two-bit dictatorship around the world. Ryan, go off, Queen. Well, I mean, she's right on that point, but I also kind of

understand a populist argument for why the Fed actually should be democratically controlled. Like this is, this is the people's reserve. This is the people's monetary policy. Now, I think that there needs to be a democratic system applied to it. So it's not because if you just allow the president without any input from, from Congress, then,

then he's going to just play games with the economy in the, you know, leading into every election. And that, that, that makes a mockery of, of, of democracy. Cause like if the goal is to have the Fed or be controlled by the will of the public,

but the will of the public is manipulated by the president's control of monetary policy, then you don't actually have that. Right. You're substituting Jerome Powell for Trump, who's at least democratically elected, but still has what Elizabeth Warren is saying, the underlying principle. He's using he's invoked emergency powers for these tariffs, for example, which is actually, again, in principle, sort of gets the argument that she's making about

the whims of a principle being able to dictate these like significant market changes, which is historically why investments in the United States were different than investments a lot of other places. Right. Yeah. Do we like being a global economic superpower or not? Like, do we like, you know, what all this really shows is that if we want to keep our position

As an economic superpower, we have to confront massive wealth and income inequality because it is making us crazy. Like the, the, it is, it is driving us like economically insane. And we're going to then commit economic suicide, which is what we're doing now. If we don't, if we don't turn, if we don't turn this around and that, that will,

put a dent in inequality in the sense that it will take, you know, some of these billionaires' wealth from like, you know, 500 billion down to 300 billion. But that doesn't change their lives and it doesn't make anybody, any of us feel any better.

So in the interest of sharing what we mentioned earlier, the White House's deals that they're pointing to here, I just pulled up a press release that they sent. I think this was from last week, but you can see they have all of these bullet points. JSW Steel announced will be adding jobs at its Ohio Steel plant. BMW is considering adding shifts to boost production at its South Carolina plant. And I did click through some of these last week when I got it, and some of them predated Liberation Day. So take that for what it is. But

Merck announced it will invest $8 billion in the U.S. over the next several years after opening a new billion-dollar North Carolina manufacturing. There are some of these examples, or there are all these examples, some of which are Paris Baguette announced a $160 billion investment, some of which are bigger than others, but

I think, Ryan, this is where I'm coming from in the sort of long-term cost-benefit analysis, like 30,000-foot vantage point. You look at all of these, and you can put side-by-side this, a list that's just as long, of things that have negative consequences post-liberation day. And so it's just to act as though this is definitively

I think definitively like good. I think the evidence points that it's I don't want to say it's definitively like over. It's ruined. This didn't do any good. But so far, I think it seems pretty clear that the bad through the uncertainty is outweighing the good. Right. And the question is, well, two questions. How many of these announcements are real and how many of them are just trying to get on Trump's good side to get exemptions?

from the future tariff policy, which is the problem with having just one guy control all the tariff policy. And the other is how many of these announcements that are real were impossible otherwise. Like we're a very big, powerful country with a huge market and a lot of incentives to offer people. If we wanted those companies to do what they're doing, invest in our country,

Like that, you know, that that was happening, that it was moving in that direction and we could keep doing it. And we and we and we should have like there is an industrial policy that uses targeted tariffs and subsidies and other economic incentives to move in that direction. Just go ahead and do it. Doesn't mean you have to bankrupt hundreds of thousands of small businesses along the way.

Uh, it's, I mean, so now that we're, what is this, the third week of Liberation Day? Um, what is your assessment, Ryan, of just this last week? I mean, he still seems committed to this, um, like, incorrect understanding of, of how he's going to, like, turn this thing around. Like, he, he does not seem to understand that China holds the cards and that the U.S. does have the capacity to commit economic suicide.

And he's walking us off that cliff. Well, he obviously maintains he's walking us off a... To the golden era. I was going to say, what he used the... Golden age. What looks like a cliff is actually a stairway to heaven. Yeah, well, it might be. It might be that. Well, maybe it'll...

Listen, I'm not as convinced that nothing good at all will come of this, but I think as time wears on, there's no industrial policy that's being coupled with this, no significant industrial policy that's being coupled with this. There is no certainty whatsoever.

on the horizon. It is just indefinite uncertainty, not just a week of uncertainty that's used as leverage to secure really obviously good deals. And we still, over the course of this week, have not gotten evidence of significantly good deals if 70, 75 countries are calling the White House up. And I'm sure some of them are because we do have, you

China has cards. We obviously have cards, too, because we have a massive market of consumers, a huge consumer market. So there's you know, there's a lot to be negotiated.

But I just – I mean obviously Maloney was here this week. I don't know how much progress was made, and the EU does want to cut a deal with us. But I've just haven't seen a lot of emergent evidence in this last week that those deals are really significant and being cut. Right, and because that's – the other thing is these deals could be cut without trying to blow up the world. Yeah. Like he –

I see all of his defenders talking as if the only way for the United States to get like Maloney on the phone is to first blow up the world. Like, again, have some self-respect. The United States of America, the most powerful country in the history of the world. You want a trade deal with the EU? You can do a trade deal with the EU. You don't have to.

throw a temper tantrum to get that, to get those calls. Like I see all his defenders saying, oh, his phone is ringing off the hook. He's the president of the United States. He can get anybody on the phone he wants. He didn't need to do this. He has significantly weakened his own negotiating position. I think there's an argument just to get Maloney on the phone or in the Oval Office. I think there's an argument that if the uncertainty had been that dramatic for a week and

That is actually significant leverage that signals you are like, this is Donald Trump not messing around and he's completely serious about doing what everyone thinks is crazy. He doesn't think it's crazy. And if he maintains it for a week, maybe he maintains it for two weeks.

Then, you know, you signal to people, it's always like foreign policy, like he's not, this is not him just throwing out different random ideas like taking Canada. It's not him like joking around about the 51st state, this is completely serious. But now we're just lingering into this.

90-day pause period of uncertainty on the reciprocal tariffs, and the water is so completely muddy. And so if you keep this up long enough, that uncertainty means people are going to choose to invest elsewhere. And it doesn't become, its value as leverage is overtaken by the cost of people needing certainty and choosing where they can get certainty. Yeah. And I just don't think that repeatedly, like banging yourself over the head with a hammer

is a way of showing that you're serious. Yeah. That shows you're a crazy person that is eventually going to knock yourself out. Well, I think you could show you're a crazy person, yeah, like briefly, and then you have to return from the abyss to actually get the deals. Just two hammer blows. Yes.

All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate you. If you're just listening to this on the free show, if you want to be able to see everything that Ryan and Emily discussed today, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com. All of our premium subscribers will have access to the full episode as well as AMAs with Crystal and I, more live streams, much, much more. We have a five day a week here show, which we're really excited. This is how that we're able to enable all of the costs that go into that. So we really appreciate you. Breakingpoints.com if you're able. We'll see you later.

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