Will Reciprocal Tariffs work?
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reciprocal tariffs. I think President Trump did a fantastic job expressing this very important and very critical part of what these tariffs are as reciprocal. Because as he described, there are countries where the U.S. tariff on a specific good from that country is like 2.5%. The tariff they put on our goods is like 75%. That's not fair.

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Tell Congress end the Biden pill penalty. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Just a catching strays over here. You're in for a hell of a show. Keep the faith, hold the line and own the libs. It's time for our main.

Well, we are Liberation Day plus one here in the nation's capital. Welcome to the back to the Ruthless Variety program. I'm Josh Holmes, along with comfortably smug Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook, left to right across your radio dial. We're going to dive deeply into terror.

The way the Trump administration has framed this, what we think is sort of the underlying things that people are trying to accomplish here, know that there's a lot of nervousness, particularly in the corporate sector, about what all this means. There's some market imbalance that, of course, all the critics are going to point to. We're going to put all of that in context for you.

and discuss it at some great length. So if you want to learn a little something, do it. But we're going to have some yucks while we do. The second thing we're going to talk about, Tuesday had some big elections. You don't typically get those on the first day of April, but we do. A couple of special elections in Florida, which it just goes, you know, 20 million raised by Democrats to try to take out two Republican-held seats of Democrats.

members of Congress, one Matt Gaetz and one Waltz, Mike Waltz. They came up shy on those after a lot of sound and fury about how they were going to take those things over. And then there was a big one in Wisconsin where we did come up short. And we're going to talk about the significance of that because we're not going to do the rose-colored glasses thing. We're going to give you some real analysis of people who've done this for a long time. Some say, many people are saying it's what we do best.

Yeah, some people are saying it's just a vegetable component. Yeah. You know? And you never know what you're going to get out of the Ruthless Friday program. Yes. Maybe you get some, you know, something off talking points.

Yes. Some people have... You can't just lie to people. You certainly cannot. This is going to be a great episode. It is. It is. It's going to be a great episode. We're going to do all that with some variety, including a Hack Madness update, which Schmug is thrilled to be able to provide. It's the final four? Final four. We are past the latest date. It is the final four, folks. The final four. And then we have a fantastic guest for you, Senator McCormick.

Senator from a great state of Pennsylvania. He's been in here two or three times. Absolutely terrific new member of the United States Senate. This is one of the smarter guys that you'll find anywhere on earth, let alone under the dome at the Capitol. A wide range of things. He's got a great personality, too. Some yucks are going to be involved in that, too. No question about it. All of that coming up for you. But we're going to start with the tariffs. Listen.

Liberation Day, as the way the Trump administration has framed it, is, according to Fox News, who's quoted the White House here, will go down as one of the most important days in modern American history, the White House has said. President Donald Trump declared Wednesday it will serve as the nation's Liberation Day as is anticipated to enact trade policies emphasizing his America First mission. Mm-hmm.

Worth noting, he discussed this throughout the course of the campaign. Right. This is not a mystery to the American people. It's not the typical thing that you get from an administration when they walk in and they're like, oh, yeah, we didn't talk about this component of our agenda. We're going to do that. I hope everybody's OK with it. They discussed it at great length.

Furthermore, he did a lot of this in the first four years. I'm glad you raised that because there's so much dishonesty out there from the mainstream media. And I do think there's value in revisiting what happened when he was president the first time. And he did some tariffs. I just want to read a few headlines for you guys. This one from Fox Business. Trump trade policies to lift steel worker pay.

Here's another one. Give me a time frame for all of these. This is like 2018. Okay. Okay, here's CNN. Tariffs prompt U.S. Steel to restart work on Alabama Mill. That is in CNN. Good story. Here's a paper close to your heart, Josh. Minnesota Star Tribune. Oh, the old Red Star. Yeah.

Iron range jobs and exports bounce back with the help of Trump tariffs. Yes. Yeah. So there is a track record of success here that this president ironed in in his first term. And I don't have any reason to think that it'll be different this time. Can I say to this is a very critical thing?

reciprocal tariffs. I think President Trump did a fantastic job expressing this very important and very critical part of what these tariffs are as reciprocal. Because as he described, there are countries where the U.S. tariff on a specific good from that country is like 2.5%.

the tariff they put on our goods is like 75%. That's not fair. - I thought it was really smart that Trump went up there during that press conference and he had the chart. - Yeah. - Right? Like we're not talking in abstract terms or we're just gonna go ahead and put a tariff on the world.

It was, hey, go ahead and take a look at what the world's been doing to us. Exactly. People don't know this. All they get is from the mainstream press who's like, oh, it's going to be terrible, blah, blah, blah. They don't know the actual facts because the mainstream press will never tell you the facts. And that's the thing. And that's why I really want to stress reciprocal because the argument that the mainstream media has put out there and the information that they've bombarded the public with is that like –

boy, Canada are our great friends who would just be like, bring in all American goods. They just want to trade with us. Yeah. They would never tell the truth about how other countries have these massive tariffs on our goods. And this has been happening for decades. It's not just a random occurrence that American factories shut down. Reciprocal tariffs is what they deserve. If you're going to try to dock America, you'll get docked. And all it will lead to is they're going to realize, okay, we can't play these people anymore. Right.

One of the people in this administration who I think did the best job of explaining the history of all of this was Howard Lutnick. Yeah. During the campaign. Went on CNBC. Yeah.

And told viewers, I learned something from this interview. You know, rarely you do. There's not much new information. But he was basically saying, like, this trade imbalance, the imbalance of tariffs is all a through line from a Marshall Plan in a post-World War II America.

when there was a significant, not only obligation at some level, but an American interest, both from a commerce standpoint and a national security standpoint, to ensure that places in the world, Germany, namely, everything in the region of Europe, and then Japan and elsewhere, were able to rebuild and able to reconstitute an economy

They could service the people because you just have a destitute, bombed out place that inevitably would have destability, would create more problems over the long run. And so, you know, Marshall Plan was part of that. And there were these tariffs in place that try to encourage manufacturing all these things that you could import into the world's largest new economy, which is America, in order to get them rolling. Mm hmm.

That's such important context. Really important. And over 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years, it worked. And all of these economies started to come back. They started to reconstitute. Governments that were interested in doing business with the United States, appreciative of the United States, appreciative of the market force that the United States had. But somewhere between then and 50 years later...

You still have those things in place. And of course, if you're going to go to a world leader and say, can we revisit these kind of things? They're going to take a look at a couple of things. One, they're going to understand that any sort of revisitation has a impact on their own economic situation where they got a free ride and there is a destabilization effect. So they're not going to be interested in that conversation. Second, they're going to look at your own political free will here.

And say, can that person actually force me to revisit this? And for 50 years, the answer is no. And part of the reason the answer was no is because so much of American politics is a derivation of how people feel about the economy. And how people feel about the economy, whether or not you're invested in the stock market or not,

the downturn of the market itself gives people a sense of fear. Go back to just modern times. For those of you who are a little bit older, like 1986. For those of you who are in our generation, 2008, 2009, 2020 briefly. Those are moments where everybody's sort of panicked. Not that they're

everybody's invested in the stock market. When we see all of that, you understand that there is an economic ramification that hits your household at some point.

And so there's been a tendency for administrations never to do anything that rocks the boat because the one thing that markets like the best is stability and certainty. This is almost like another manifestation of kicking the can down the road. Like, yeah, I mean, we know that the time has passed for us to have to help stimulate the economies of these allies post-World War II, but

But I don't want to rock the boat because if numbers start going down, let's just kick the can down the road. It's great insulation to even good friends around the world, allies in the United States, to know that we – I'm not sure I'm ever going to have to revisit this because the political wherewithal in doing so could be a real hazard for anybody who's in a democratically elected system of government. Right, and I think there's a very high likelihood that today when you go about your daily life, some Democrat you encounter is going to –

tack what President Trump is doing. And so we want to arm you with this. Did you know that just last year, Joe Biden did tariffs on China? And here's what his Treasury secretary said about those tariffs. Quote,

I don't believe that American consumers will see any meaningful increase in the prices that they face. This is what Democrats said last year when Joe Biden had tariffs. So don't let your Democrat friends tell you the opposite today. So...

Look, I don't want to give the impression that we are like a pro-tariff isolationist crowd. I mean, you guys can speak for yourselves. I know I'm not. I think it's a blunt instrument that, frankly, a global economy operates with some sort of free trade and open markets and ability to sell outside of the borders of the United States because, frankly, the only way you grow is

It's the only way you can grow an economy is if you're exporting things that you make here in the United States and reaping the benefit within it. So I'm not that. This is the way I kind of tried to put it on Brett Baer's show, One Special Report, the other night. You know, in your neighborhood, if your neighbor was stealing 20% of your shit every day and your neighborhood's looking at all of this and,

You not rocking the boat and going up to their door and say, what the hell are you doing stealing 20% of your shit would make for a much more stable neighborhood environment. Everybody would appreciate the camaraderie of you not making this a problem.

They would. And they react as though, you know, there's no problem. Right? Even the fact that 20% of your shit's being stolen. So, like, Canada, Mexico, the whole Western Hemisphere, it's like, don't rock the boat. We're in your neighborhood here. Like, let's not discuss this whole thing. We don't want uncomfortable HOA meetings. But

But the reality, yeah. No, but seriously. But seriously. I mean, everyone knows. Defund the HOA. But if you look at it from your own neighborhood standpoint, there's no way you'd ever stand for that. Right. Chevron's latest deep water development, Anchor, is powered by innovation. This breakthrough technology helps enable us to safely produce oil and natural gas at greater pressures, setting a new industry benchmark.

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we should stop doing difficult things policy-wise in this administration because it's going to make Wall Street uncomfortable. I just don't think that. And I believe in free trade too, but I think like the era of COVID changed my thinking on this in so many ways in that there are things that are in the national security interest of this country to be able to do ourselves. They just are. Yeah. I mean, for example, medical treatment programs,

should we should figure out an insourcing way right to handle and i just don't think we should like mortgage the future of the american worker for an uptick in the gdp i just i just don't think and that's the fundamental that's the fundamental like we just can't be held hostage by what wall street thinks is the most important thing and that stops us from doing important things and that is

you know, the reciprocity of these tariffs that force people back to the bargaining table for us to be able to sell our goods to the rest of the world. It's crazy. I guess, can I just pivot this for one second? Outside of the policy discussion, which I think has been great here thus far, to the political side of this, and I've worried about this a little bit, is like I go back to, you mentioned the financial crisis and Barack Obama becomes president.

And people are super pissed at Wall Street and they're super pissed about the recession and the housing crisis and all this sort of things. I worry in the political context with the tariffs and all of this sort of stuff. Are we overeating our mandate?

to the American voter. Like that the American voter said, I don't know, let's close down this border. Let's deport all these people that Joe Biden let in. We didn't need to realign the global economy. Yeah, I'm just throwing that out there because I worry about that. It's like, are we making the same mistake the Democrats did after a huge election in 08 where they were like,

yeah, we're going to remake a fifth of the American economy, Obamacare. You know what I'm saying? Like something that people didn't really vote for in 2008. I think that's – look, that's a very valid concern.

I think there's a couple of things that mitigate that in comparison to like an Obamacare, for example. And like Barack Obama didn't campaign on taking your health care away, which is ultimately what Obamacare did. Reformatted, redid. Yeah.

Donald Trump had four years explaining exactly what he intended to do on the tariff. He's been doing it since 1980. And then he spent four years running for president afterwards, telling you exactly what his view on that is. And then now here we are. And it also is. And this is the second point that is relevant. I grew up in a political environment where the Democrat, the base of the Democratic Party,

made this argument. Yeah. This was the argument that like the Sherrod Browns. I was just going to say what would happen in Minnesota is the same as Ohio. Yeah. And like the Northern, you know, the iron, iron range, iron range part of Minnesota. We picked up a congressional district there because of this sort of, this is, so I think there is an expectation at some level with that message that we're going to do.

on this. I think if you ignore it at some level, it doesn't work. If you're going to do it, you got to kind of do it at the front end because there's going to be these bumps in the road and the market hates the instability of it.

But to your point about like that's no way to run a railroad here is like whether or not Wall Street is comfortable. Yeah. These are smart people. They'll figure it out. They're going to figure it out one way or another. Whole lot of companies have just gone marching to the Oval Office over the last two months to say, hey, good news. We're bringing 20,000 new jobs back to the United States. That's one way to settle it.

Another way to settle it, which I've seen now on three separate occasions, four separate occasions, that I think is going to be the most important part of the reciprocal part that you're talking about, which is a very different way of talking about this, this time around, fairly novel with the Trump administration, is you've now forced these people to have the discussion for the first time in modern history since the Marshall Plan.

where they have to make a discussion, have to have an internal debate about whether or not they are reliant enough on an American economy to have a negotiation about what a fair deal looks like. Because up till now, they never had to have the conversation. They're like, they'll never force us to do this shit. We won't do it. Yeah, we'll tariff your stuff at 150%. You can tariff us at 6%. And what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

Like, are you really going to have that conversation so your market gets all imbalanced and the American people are all outraged? And the answer was always no. But this guy said, yes, like, we're going to have that conversation. My guess is that there is a number of countries. We've already seen Canada. We'll play a clip of that after we come back from the break of people saying, OK, this is the way we approached it because we actually didn't think you were going to do it. But now that we're having the conversation, eh, no.

We have more to talk about here. And that, like, this is how we should approach it thing bleeds into Wall Street and stuff. Like, I talked to some financial advisors this morning because I was just sort of curious. I called around to people to see, like, get their take on this and, like, how is, you know, Wall Street absorbing this today, you know, with all this. And...

What was very interesting, and this should maybe be obvious, is like Wall Street or like the Mercantile Exchange in Chicago, it's still just people. It's still just people. And the environment in which they reside, liberal cities, does inform a lot of their logic of how this will go down. Yeah.

So I guess what I would say is like, don't get shaky on it. If like, if we're going to do it, let's do it. Yeah. If we're going to do it, let's do it. Cause there's no way to halfway do this. If you're going to try to reset a global economy as it pertains to American trade, you're going to have to see it through. Yeah. Which I get the impression that's what they're doing. But I think another important distinction between this and the initial way that Donald Trump,

Sold this is what you were talking about, Smug. It's the reciprocal nature of it. I mean, when they first came in, they had Peter Navarro and others who are big proponents of tariffs. Tariffs are going to make a lot of money. They're the only way to do things. Like we love tariffs. We love tariffs.

And you never got to the point where you turn the corner is like, well, we love tariffs unless they want to deal. And the reciprocal point of this is the distinction between what Donald Trump has talked about and what is happening now. And we've seen play out on four separate occasions. Such a good point in that. Look, you're not going to tariff people to tariff people.

You're going to tariff people to try to get a fair deal and have a first negotiation on behalf of the American worker that we've had since. A very long time. World War II. Right. And I'm sympathetic to that argument. Now, if you just continue, I am not sympathetic to the idea that tariffs make a bunch of money and they're good for for America. I don't I just don't think that's true.

But if the fear of what an American tariff does to your own economy makes you come back to the table to give those American workers a fair deal, that I buy. That I buy. Well said. I think that's – I think – anyway. So what's the global reaction to all of this stuff?

That will tell you more about the direction this is headed than anything you're going to read in The New York Times or The Washington Post or anything that's like, oh, Wall Street says, Democrats say. So therefore, you know, catastrophe is upon us. Canada, which, as you recall, had a fairly fulsome rejoinder.

when we first started talking about the trade imbalance between Canada and the United States, and said that they were going to shut off the lights, essentially, in the northern part of this country, in places where they provided energy, because, of course, that's transient in that neck of the woods. And they were literally going to shut it down. They're so mad they're going to shut it down and force this guy to just sort of cave. It's not a great strategy for Donald Trump. No. It's just not.

Now, it sounds a little different. Clip one, please, Spaghet. Let's sit down and discuss this because it's just going to hurt American jobs. I can't stress it enough.

And, you know, again, he believes he's supporting Americans. He said he was going to create jobs, create wealth, reduce inflation. It's worked the total opposite. But do you think it's fair that you have tariffs on a whole number of products? That's right. And we'd be willing to take those off tomorrow if he took all the tariffs off. Oh, look at that. How about that? Wait a minute. So that's Doug Ford, who's the premier of Ontario.

who came out and said he was going to shut the lights off in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, like places on the northern border because he was so pissed off about the mere suggestion that we were even talking about tariff policy. He's asked whether or not the tariffs that he applies to us would go away if you could have a negotiation about that, and he says...

Indeed. And good for Sorkin for pointing it out. He's like, but you've got tariffs on the U.S. because that's what it's all about. Yeah, that's exactly what you expect from Canada is backing down. They're America's hat, okay? And so when America is ready to take— I feel like you're making it harder. Yeah. I'm not. When America's ready— Take the W, Ashby. When America's ready to take their hat off, they put it on the rack, you know? Like, obviously.

Ontario, for crying out loud, the best baseball player, Joe Carter, whoever played in Toronto. He's from Oklahoma. The Maple Leafs haven't won a Stanley Cup since the 60s. We don't need to take anything from this guy. And finally, we have a president who's willing to look at him eye to eye and be like, get out of here, pal.

I'm in charge. Look, this is an important part of what you see happening. There are guys who four weeks ago said we're going to shut your lights off and give you the middle finger. Right. Today, would you take your tariffs off? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we do that. We do that. No problem.

It was like a passing. It was like a throwaway sentence. Exactly. Well, when Donald Trump marches up, as you saw yesterday in a press conference with a big billboard at the top, it says reciprocal. Yep. Reciprocal. Huge. Right. It goes to your point about like, is it terrorists for the sake of doing a tariff or is it a tariff for the sake of getting our other countries to react the way they're supposed to reshuffle the power dynamic and around the world?

and what Trump is doing is actually executing on that. Yeah, it's like the...

It's like the saying, name and shame. Yeah. Name and shame. And like, that's what he did. And like, he folded immediately when confronted with the fact that Canada also has all these tariffs. They immediately fold. It's just, we've just given, and this is what I love about Donald Trump, is like, there is so much low-hanging fruit where America's gotten screwed around this country. You know, like the Panama situation is one of them where like, he points out these just obvious things for whatever reason, the morass of

of politics in America we've never really cared about. And we should fucking care. We should care because it makes a tangible difference. I mean, look, for those of you who didn't grow up in the Midwest, there's an awful lot of factories that folks like us grew up with that shuttered. And the reason they shuttered is because they're a hell of a lot cheaper to make those goods overseas and ship them back in. And corporate America is agnostic to that. They are responsible to their shareholders. They are not ideological.

They're not interested in anything other than providing shareholder value and increasing the breadth of their product. That's it. And like don't get hung up on like the morality of it. That's what free market economics is about. But if you create a condition where they have to care about it, like this one, well –

It makes it easier to bring those jobs back home. Right. And that is the historical relevance to this discussion is you've got a whole bunch of people are saying, OK, we're going to bring jobs back home because this is a discussion that we don't want to be a part of. But we're fundamentally an American company. And then you have allies like in this case, Canada was like, all right, we'll revisit for the first time since World War Two, this trade imbalance that we've had. OK, that's great. What are our other allies? Israel.

Yeah. Israel, according to the J Post, removes all remaining tariffs on U.S. imports. All.

All. Like you might ask yourself, why is it that Israel, who's like very dependent upon security from the United States and international diplomacy from the United States, would ever have a tariff on an American good? That would be a good question. And the answer is because nobody's fucking ever said anything. Nobody's cared. Can I tell you a funny story about this? Yeah. So I actually have some experience with this. When I was working over there in that election in 2015 and I came back home.

for Valentine's Day to see my then girlfriend, now my wife. Everyone on the Netanyahu campaign, that was the campaign I was working on, tried to get me to buy them an iPhone. Because... Wow. To buy them an iPhone. Because they couldn't get one? They wanted to give me cash. So it's not...

You don't have to pay it. You don't have to pay it. Yeah. They were like, all right, I will give you cash when you get back to the United States if you buy me an iPhone and smuggle, essentially smuggle it back into Israel. Of course, I did not do that. Yeah, but that goes to that point. But the color there is how badly people wanted America's goods in...

And those sorts of imbalances create this crazy situation where someone was like trying to hand me $800, you know, when I go back to America to buy an iPhone here in the United States and bring it back with me when I came back onto the campaign. How funny is that? It's amazing. I mean, you see, like, even in New York, like you go to the Apple store on 5th. Yeah. You'll see people like,

from China or wherever, they're just like buying them by the boatload because that country has put such tariffs on American goods that it's like they can come back with a boatload of them that they buy here because they don't have to pay the tariff that China's put on America. Exactly. And they're just moving it from a cart. Yeah. We're talking, they're going suitcases full.

Yeah, it's really something. Now, look, this is something to watch, right? Because these negotiations will start and we'll have a discussion. Some of it will resolve itself. How quickly it resolves itself is going to be entirely downstream of where the economic condition finds itself. We reserve the right to just monitor this as it goes, because I think there is there. There are pieces of this that are part of a broader economic agenda that includes tax reform that Congress has to deal with.

where you're resetting an economic environment in this country that's driven in large part over the last four years on false economic conditions, overspending by a federal government that's just like flushing cash. It's the reason why you have inflation. It's the reason why the markets have not had a dip despite the fact that consumer confidence had a problem. And we see wage growth stagnate and all of those things. It's

it's artificial. Yeah. Part, this is part in parcel of a larger plan that you don't turn the Titanic overnight. Uh,

But we'll try to reconstitute a market-based economy in a way that works for the middle class in this country. That was sort of my point before the break on are we overeating our mandate? I just don't think tariffs or reciprocal tariffs and all of this sort of thing is enough. I think it's part of this larger plan that has to get done. It just has to get done. If you did one without the other, we're talking about potential disaster. That's a memo to you in Congress who are thinking about like because there's one

one or two vote majority that you're going to like finagle around for your little pet project. And there's an army of lobbyists downtown that are trying to get you to do that, to withhold your vote until you get this nonsense. Get it done, dude. Get it done. There's no time for that. We have no time for that. So that is our question of the day on this segment. After you've heard all of this, will reciprocal tariffs work? Will they work? A lot of different opinions on that. I mean, look, I've got a lot of good friends who have

fundamentally different view of all of this than I do. And they explain it quite eloquently. I imagine that all of you do too. You see it from your own neighborhoods and from your own communities, maybe your own businesses. And I'd love to know more about that. So like and subscribe to the Ruthless Variety Program.

Put those comments in. We'll read them all, and we'll give you a little taste of that next Tuesday. And when we come back, we're going to get to our question of the day from last Thursday, which is like, what is the wildest thing that you've heard about Doge and Elon that is just like fundamentally untrue? And these are hilarious. We'll get to it right after this.

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Okay, well, we left you on Tuesday. We had a good question for you. We had a big topic of conversation about Doge, Elon. What's the dumbest shit that you've heard? You know, what's the best thing that they've presented that sort of stuck with you? We threw it open to you all, and not surprisingly, incredibly smart takes. To do this, we already start with a voice. And what we always say is like and subscribe if you wish to opine. First comment comes from Hurlson.

And Hurlson writes, the most bonkers thing I saw was someone bitching about the Nazi Elon Tesla car and they were driving a Volkswagen. Incredible. When I told them that VW was literally, quote, the people's car from the Hitler regime, they said, oh, shut up, liar. Oh, it's so good. It's literally called Volkswagen. The car of the Volk.

You fucking idiot. Oh, you dumb bastards. You can't beat our audience. That's the best, dude. You can't beat them. It's so good. All right, comment two, Dunks. This is Kristen Thomas. Kristen writes, crazy doge MAGA cuts. My neighbor told me that social security checks are being cut by 65% next month. What?

Thinking that would be a bigger story than Signalgate, even in my crazy right-wing media sources. Oh, my God. What a perfect example. It's hilarious. This is what the information silos, these crazy people. We say it all the time. We do. All right. What do we got from comment three? It's from Lisa McGuff.

Long time minion. Lisa McGuff. Most bonkers take I've heard about Elon slash Doge was someone saying that Elon will have Trump default on government bonds because they have to come up with the trillion dollar savings they promised and they aren't going to find enough waste or fraud so they'll completely...

Tank the economy to come up with the savings. Oh, my God. Just absurd. Love you guys. Keep owning the libs. My commute feels so much shorter on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thank you, Lisa. Great take, Lisa. That's exactly the kind of thing that you do. I mean, can you imagine? I imagine all of these things, you know, it could be your neighbor saying something crazy, but they're always like the FWD, FWD, FWD version of the old email chain that your grandparents used.

their parents got. Yeah. You know? Yeah. If you don't forward this email about Elon Musk ruining our economy, yeah, you're going to die. You got to, you got to afford seven people or, or, or Elon Musk wins. Oh, it's so good. All right. So we're going to get to a little bit of more of a serious topic. We preface this by saying Tuesday was a big day for special elections. Florida had two congressional elections, which had an imminent impact. Uh,

on whether or not you were going to get the economic agenda that the Trump administration has outlined. And that has everything to do with the very slim majority that they have in the House of Representatives. Democrats talked a big game. They raised $20 million to try to knock off two seats that were held by Republicans that were vacated. And, you know, I think the last 30 days of it anyway, papers were filled with the idea that Republicans are going to lose at least one of these things. Mm-hmm.

Turns out both were 15 point affairs, sort of sleepy. So Democrats have to figure out basically how to reconstitute that argument after they told everybody they could shock the world and win these things. And they were like, well, it wasn't the margin by which we've lost it to six term incumbents the previous cycle.

Okay. Win's a win. Loss is a loss. I think Florida is pretty self-explanatory, but it does tie into the larger issue that we're going to talk about with Wisconsin Supreme Court. We talked about this. We had some folks who were on the ground who came in and discussed it. We know that Elon and his team spent an inordinate amount of time and resources there trying to turn out folks.

And in the end of the day, there was a Supreme Court race in 2023 that had exactly the same margin that we had in 2025. Now, obviously, that wasn't a precursor for either Wisconsin or the nation in 2024. But...

There was resources invested here. It was a nationalized deal. Democrats have gotten pretty good at nationalizing Supreme Court races in Wisconsin, of all things, which is like...

Yeah. Feels small ball, if not for their ability in the state of Wisconsin to redraw congressional district lines and things like that, which is why it has national impact. They've done this and they've done it successfully. They've now done it twice in a row. And honestly, during my lifetime, they've done it more times than they haven't. They've been pretty good at this. So you look at it from two perspectives. One, it's kind of a status quo situation.

where the last election was no precursor whatsoever on Republican success in a general election in 2024. On the other hand, there's this other piece of the Trump coalition that should give every Republican some pause.

And that the truth is like we don't just give you everything you want to hear on this program. The truth is every midterm and off your election, Republicans have had an extremely difficult time reconstituting a Trump coalition. If his name's not on the ballot, extremely difficult.

whether it was 18, 22, and all of these various special elections and local elections, Republicans have had problems with it. Democrats want to say it's all an indictment of Trump, and that's not true. Republicans want to say, well, you know, these are low turnout things. They're hard for us to historically compete on. That's also not true. We've done pretty well on a lot of these things historically.

I remember a Scott Brown race in January of 2010. Oh, yeah. Where he won in Massachusetts, a state that no Republican ever carries. And then we followed up by winning a Senate race in Illinois with Mark Kirk. Yeah. You know? It also preceded a 15-seat pickup in the United States Senate over the next two cycles, a

A 69-seat pickup in the House of Representatives over the next two cycles. Yes. I like that. I like that you pointed that out. That's good. We've got to have an edge here. Numbers matter. Numbers matter. 69 is one of them. Anyway, the point is you can read into these things. You don't necessarily have to read into these things. But if you're a Republican and you look at that –

The message that Donald Trump has sold the electorate writ large, whether you're Republican, Democrat or independent, has worked two out of three times. It has worked to extraordinary success. And he's brought the Republican down ticket with him as he's done it. Two of the three times, actually, 18, 22 and all these various specials. It's not he it hasn't.

Somebody else selling his message otherwise has not worked for Republicans. Now you can say a whole bunch of things, but we've done some in-depth stuff that we've talked to you all before about why that might be the case. Let's just throw it open and see what you all think about this. Well, because it is kind of like flipping the conventional wisdom because for so long it was almost like a rule of thumb, like –

It's a midterm. Republicans are going to dominate. This was like the conventional thinking like 10, 12 years ago. Special elections like, oh boy, Republicans. Because we did 10, 14 domination. Yeah. And it used to be also the same mindset that like, well, low turnout is great for Republicans. But

That has shifted. As the Republican Party, as the Trump coalition has changed from the coalition that we had that was winning in midterms. More of a Bush coalition, sort of your lack of a better term, it's a country club Republican suburban-based base of support during not only general elections for presidential, but general elections for midterms. Those coalitions have different propensities. So you have a

huge turn up among rural voters for Trump who would be low propensity voters in midterms, but they show up in presidential elections and helped Trump get that W. Yeah, I guess what I would say is I think it's the talking heads. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Great song. We have nine years now, I think, of proof of this issue is like when we have traded the

you know, suburban voters who turn out 80, 80, 90% in the midterm for rural working class voters who turn out at a 50, 57%. Yeah. That's about the average in a, in a midterm. It's going to be difficult. It's just always going to be difficult. And if you've listened to the show for a number of years, and I know for a lot of new people, welcome to this conversation, but this has been an issue and we have highlighted it numerous times is that like,

If Donald Trump is going to be successful, it can't be that he's successful for 18 months. He has four years to change America. And that means that coalition that elected him has to also turn out in this midterm. And if it doesn't, it's really going to put a hamper on his ability to deliver his entire agenda. Not to mention, look, I don't want to rain on the whole parade of what it is that we're doing now. But last time they had power in either house, they impeached him twice. Yeah. Right.

Right. I don't think for a second that that's not what they want to do again. If they had their hands on the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, like they would.

They would. That's what they want to do. And they came up with a phone call that he made to Ukraine last time as the precursor to impeachment here. So it doesn't take a lot of ingenuity on the Democratic side to run that play. That's what they want to do. I think the larger political piece of this is, is it possible? Honestly, I can tell you I don't know because –

I think there were errors. In 22, there were bad candidates. There was bad management. And that, I think, is the primary reason why Republicans weren't able to overperform expectations for taking over both chambers in the House and Senate and adding seats to that map. Because typically you don't do well with an unpopular president and a horrible economy.

But we didn't do well. But we had candidates that couldn't win statewide elections. And that takes some management. That's some infrastructure stuff. That thing can change. If that was all it was, I wouldn't be worried about it. But you look back at 18, I don't think we had that problem. In fact, we picked up seats in the United States Senate because we had good seats that were open and took advantage of those. We lost historical numbers in the House of Representatives and overall down ticket state legislative stuff wasn't great for us.

And so the question is, what can you do differently to ensure that a Trump message

permeates beyond him on the ballot himself. We know that this is the best political athlete of our lifetimes. This is a guy who can make an argument to camera that people like, they believe, they trust, and they want him there. And they want his team there. And they're ready to go put everything. It's happened two of the last three times. I mean, no one has ever seen this. We will never see anything like this.

like this again in our lifetimes, this phenomenon of like over the course of over a year, the opposition party is trying to put this guy in jail. They try to kill him live on stage and he gets elected president again. Like no one's seen that in their lifetime. In 18, there were people who would make the argument, well, you know, the reason why Republicans underperformed in that midterm is there was too much daylight between Donald Trump and

and congressional Republicans. We don't actually have that problem anymore. I mean, if you look at the United States Senate, it's confirmed his cabinet in the fastest clip since like 2000. You know, we averted a government shutdown past Donald Trump's budget in the House. Like, there is no daylight between congressional Republicans and Donald Trump. So you can't really make the argument that, well, you know, we're going to underperform in some of these special elections or these midterm elections because there's some daylight between Donald Trump's agenda and what Republicans are doing. And that's really the problem. That's not the problem.

Not anymore. The problem is those low propensity Trump voters only have turned out for Donald Trump that we need to turn out in this midterm. And that really is the problem that needs to be solved. They turned out in 16. They turned out in 20. They turned out in 24. They did not turn out in any of those specials or midterms. And my recommendation to every outside group or people doing field work or get out the vote, absentee by mail or early vote or any of these sorts of things is

is he also had, you got to reconfigure your understanding of the electorate to reflect what Donald Trump did in 2024. It was the podcast election. It was reaching people in different places and culture outside of politics. If,

If you're going to motivate these people to turn out into a midterm, you damn well better go back to that space. Yeah. You damn well have to find them outside of politics, out of political news and motivate them. Give them a reason. It's not going to be the same playbook. Again, it's not going to be a million SMS messages about how important it is you turn out because these people don't do that unless for Donald Trump. So convince them that there's something in their culture, in their lives that are at stake.

That's the only way we're going to change this. I think that's a good point. Smash, do you have anything? No, I don't really have anything to add to that. I think what you guys are saying is exactly right on. We have to focus on that if we want to win.

win. You have to meet the voters where they are. And we've seen it work. The only other piece that I will say, and I think Trump actually did a pretty good job of this. I mean, he added new pieces of the coalition like, you know, massive increases in African-American turnout, massive increases in Hispanic shirivo. That was terrific. Maha moms, that kind of thing. And that works for Trump. We've not seen that work for everybody. You've got to continue that work. But it's an all of the above proposition because it

The thing that we've come back to and talked about is the historical midterm turnout of a base Republican electorate in the early 2000s was made up of a whole bunch of people who had a 76% capability of showing up in a midterm election. We traded that out for 57%, as you said. Mm-hmm.

We have spent an awful lot of money, and I don't think it's for a lack of work, particularly in this Wisconsin Supreme Court race where you had the Elon turnout machine that was so successful in 24. Yeah, press there, up there. Doing the same thing in Wisconsin, but losing by the exact same margin. I don't think it's for a lack of effort.

You have to negate the margins with the 76 as a hedge against not being able to make your 57 in 80. You have to do it. And I know that, like, you know, you'll get from some folks within the base of this party, it's the old party. We've renovated all this stuff. We're doing something. Well, people are people. Votes are votes. And if you've given a population...

No reason to support what it is that you're doing, but even worse, giving them a reason to hate you. They're still turning out at 76. Right. They're still turning out. They're just not voting for you. They're just not voting for you.

So you've got to look at that a little bit more critically from these campaigns point of view. I think there's a million ways to do it. I think there's nothing about the Trump agenda that is not entirely complimentary to be able to make a case to that. But you might have to make it differently. Right. You know, you might have to make it different. Listen, I agree. And I have a feeling that this is a conversation that will continue forever.

over and over again over the next year and a half. Yeah, because what works for Donald Trump, he is a unicorn. This is the best showman that this country has ever seen. This is like special, special stuff. You I don't care how talented you are. You're not that you're not that.

You know, you're not a universally known famous person for starters. For second, you don't just instinctively have a grasp like Donald Trump does. You got to figure it out. And that's fine. It's doable. But everybody's got to be eyes wide open about it.

Anyway, that's our rundown on that. Hack Madness, there are some special brackets. That's right, folks. Thank you all for voting. The numbers keep going up for how many people vote in each round. We just finished the elitist eight, as I like to call it. And I mean, this is shaping up to be one hell of a final four that we have. So the first one we want to go over is can I get that graphic one up?

This was Nicole Wallace versus Rachel Maddow. That's pretty close. This is showing you that these are now, you know, you've got the best of the best facing off against each other. I mean, it's so good. Nicole Wallace at 56.8%, Maddow at 43.2%. Wallace is in the final four. Mm-hmm.

Amazing. What else do we have? So graphic two, please. Could we get that? We have Jake Tapper. Wow. Stelter goes down, folks. Well, the Cinderella story is over. His big comeback lasted to the elitist eight. Yeah. But ultimately came up a little short. Honestly, he's happy to be just working again. So, you know, good for him on that.

And, you know, people are finally recognizing Tapper for the hack that he is. And also for him, like, jumping on board that book that's like, wow, Biden, he was a zombie. He'll say that and get a book deal after Biden's loss. But while he was running, everyone knows Tapper's a hypocrite. So that, for me, explains the surge. Graphic 3 is a special one. Can we get that one?

Folks, that's Margaret Brennan just demolishing the Champions League. Guys, this was something we talked about on day one. She had a special season, a special formula going. Shit.

She has not let up. It's 80 or above, no matter who she faces. Dude, you think of the greatest in history, Llewell Cinder, the Fab Five, Christian Laettner. Margaret Brennan is better than all of them. We are witnessing history, and I just want everybody to take a moment and watch and understand what they're living through. Yeah, I mean, 80%...

Yeah, it's wild. Incredible. And the last matchup we had was Anna Navarro and Joy Reid. And folks, of course, Joy Reid, I think, took that one. So we've got Nicole. It's a body of work advancement. Yeah. Yeah. And it could be her last year since she was let go. So Joy Reid's making a run for it while she can. That's the final four, folks. You're going to have Nicole Wallace facing off against Joy Reid. When can people vote?

The Final Four starts on Monday, correct, in NCAA? So that's when the Final Four in Hack Madness is going to go up. Again, vote on my Twitter.

On my profile on X, that's at Comfortably Smug, and you're going to have Margaret Brennan going against Jake Tapper. That's the final four right there. I love it. I love it. We've got a new little thing that we're trying to do here on the program. Yeah, I think it's about time. You know, there's so many great moments that happen on Twitter through the week, and what I would really like for us to do is pick a goat of the week, somebody who's stood out and made a big difference in some way that's caught everybody's attention. Yeah.

And I have a nominee for this week's Go to the Week. What do you got? Jim Banks. I saw this. I don't know if you guys caught that. Yeah, you saw it, Josh. You guys caught this video of Jim Banks absolutely owning this lib, trying to like jump ugly on him. I don't know if we have this video. Do we have, can we play clip two? Hi, I was a worker at HHS. I was fired illegally on February 14th. There are many people who are not getting social service benefits

programs especially people with disabilities are you going to do anything to stop what's happening you probably deserved it i deserved it wow yeah that's great to hear why did i deserve it because you seem like a clown and the timing of the elevator door is everything it's everything you just can't beat it can i just say okay to get owned like that

And then put the footage up of it? Why would this dude put it online of like, I just got owned by Jim Banks, folks? Because the reason why is because they're living in the politics of the past. Like, they really do believe if they put up some found footage shit, like it's Blair Witch Project, and they can, you know, basically bully Republicans in doing what they want. I just think that the world has fundamentally changed. I think the moment that it actually happened...

was Kavanaugh. Yeah, I agree. I think it was Kavanaugh. I agree. We're not playing those games anymore. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, no, I mean, look, these guys, fundamentally, this is a guy who you would have sympathy for in a normal world who lost his job, except for the fact that people who lose their jobs, whether they find it unjust or not...

Start about the work of trying to get another job, trying to take care of their family, whatever. This dude gets a camcorder and rolls out to Capitol Hill and accosts senators. By the way, there's an executive action, nothing to do with the legislative branch, and begins trying to embarrass people with questions that are absolutely absurd. Like the way he framed it, illegally fired. First of all, there's no such thing as that.

That doesn't exist. Illegally fired is not a vocabulary sentence that we have in America. But it also explains the mindset. He's like, I'm entitled to that job. The taxpayers, they should be giving me the money. This is the currency of the realm when it comes to the left. It's just emotional blackmail.

None of it is actually true. That's exactly right. And Jim Banks, United States Senator from the state of Indiana, fired back with a tweet in graphic number four. He said, I have no sympathy for left-wing activists who have been let go from overpaid positions that should have never existed. I do have sympathy for hardworking Hoosiers whose tax dollars have been wasted on bankrolling these positions. There it is.

Goat of the Week. Beautiful frame. That's exactly right. Beautiful frame. That's why the Goat of the Week. That's right. Jim Banks from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Goat of the Week. Excellent. Listen, if you've listened to any of our interviews,

views. Listen to this one. Dave McCormick, Senator from Pennsylvania, you've heard him here a few times. We always have a good time. We always have some laughs. We find him to be amongst the most insightful people that you can listen to. His lessons in leadership and commentary on tariffs and everything, you got to listen to because you're going to be at a deficit of knowledge that is available to you right now if you don't. Dave McCormick.

Listen, this guy has been not only a tremendous candidate, a tremendous success throughout his entire life. He's a good friend of the program. I think you've been here like three times now, maybe more. An honor every time. We're going to have to get him a jacket, Wolf. Yeah. You're in the jacket. We're starting to get out jackets for people who come back enough and enough. But the only reason that we have him back is because he's got insightful skills.

analysis about the world at large and has a good idea not only about how things are done in Washington, what he's up to, but also just leadership. And you got a book. I want to talk about that in a minute. Dave McCormick, how are you? Hey, good to be with you. I'm great. Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys. How is the Senate treating you? So far, so good. Honestly, I mean, the thing about it, I know we'll tell a lot of jokes in this thing, but the thing that I want to say is

I really feel like it's a privilege. I honestly do. When I stand in that chamber, you guys all know it well. It's tiny. You look up at those marble statues. Isn't that the thing that strikes you? Tiny. I felt the same way about when the State of the Union is happening. You're like, God, is this small? I thought it was a stadium. Exactly. And the Senate chamber is even smaller. And you walk out and you see Thomas Jefferson and you see Abraham Lincoln, you see Ronald Reagan. And so to be...

the senator from Pennsylvania at any moment is a big deal because there's only been about 1,000 elected senators in history. I'm the 54th from Pennsylvania. I'm the 9th in history from West Point. But then to be the senator for Pennsylvania at this moment? So much going on. Oh, man.

So I feel honored to be there, and I'm learning a lot and trying to keep up. We've got some plum committee assignments, too. Yeah. I'm on foreign relations and the chairman of the subcommittee in the Middle East and counterterrorism. I'm on energy, which was my first choice, and I'm chairman of the subcommittee on energy. And then I'm on banking, which has everything to do with affordable housing and capital, availability of capital for small businesses. Okay.

And then I'm on the committee on aging because we got a lot of aging population. You had to have one basketball player.

Listen, those aging people vote too. No, no. I'm almost kidding. But, I mean, the rest of those committee assignments, they don't give those away. Like, you know, I mean, there's a couple of us at least that worked in the leadership offices where you'd kind of, you know, you'd put these things together and then you'd come to a realization about mid-December after you see who is elected and what your membership looks like where you're like,

Who can actually do this job? Right. Well, that's the point I was going to make. There aren't too many new guys who show up with the expertise you bring to the chamber. I mean, what you've done in your career has delivered so much for Pennsylvania, delivered so much for America.

And, I mean, I got to think that everybody stops talking when you open your mouth and they want to hear what you have to say. Not in my house. I got six daughters. And my wife, who you know. So when I open my mouth, they say shut up. In the Senate. We all do that. You know how that feels. But, listen, I mean, I feel like I bring some things to the table. But, man, I'm learning. And in good ways and bad. The way...

We conduct business. I mean, it's so... Just give me an example. You'll know what this is like. For the first 12 weeks now, I've been mostly showing up to things on time. Yeah.

I'm the first guy there every time. I mean, nobody's on time. It's like the most ridiculous thing. And the path to actually getting anything done, and we're in the majority. But the path, just the other night, the 24 hours Cory Booker. I'm literally presiding. I'll tell you a funny story about that in a minute. But I'm presiding over the Senate.

From 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., you know, watching Corey talk about Social Security. And, you know, just this is a hell of a way. There's a debate. It's a hell of a way to get things done. But let me tell you a funny story. You guys will get a kick out of this because you know the Senate. But because you're the junior guy. Yeah.

you get the worst assignments for presiding. So about two weeks ago, around the Voterama, I had the 6:00 a.m. slot, then I had the 9:00 p.m. slot, and the 9:00 p.m. slot was just when all the action was happening. It was like 10 votes in a row, I'm presiding, everybody's in the chamber, I got the gavel, order, order, you know? All over C-SPAN, all over CNN. So I got back to my hotel room that night, and my phone rings. My dad's 87, mom's 85.

My dad says, we saw you on CNN. Did you get promoted? President of the Senate. Isn't that the funniest thing about parents? It's like you can literally be a United States Senator and they're like, you're not doing enough. You need a promotion. But they said, did you get promoted? And I said, no, no, dad. It's like the shit assignment. Like you don't want to get this. And you don't want that slide. And my mom pipes in.

with the confidence and only mother kept, she says, they wouldn't put you up there unless you were doing very well. So good. So good. I don't know about Pennsylvania, but my mom and dad think I'm killing it. You know, if you're 95th or above in seniority with a pulse, that's your job. Exactly.

No, it's great. Listen, you've been doing absolutely terrific work. We follow what you do and what your staff does more closely than most because we know your background. We know you personally. We know that you have some understanding about not only markets, but...

All kinds of range of things that in your resume, and we've covered it before, I mean, it's like 10 miles long. Serving in the military, then in the private sector. And then I guess you also have expertise in aging. Unfortunately, more than I'd like. There's some of that, too. So I'm curious. Look, this is an incredibly consequential time, as you have said.

And there's an element of sort of realigning the American economy and everything. You've heard what President Trump had to say about Liberation Day and his idea of reciprocal tariffs.

Clearly, as this airs, there's going to be a lot of different opinions about that. I just want your take on where we sit with all of it. Well, it starts for me. I grew up in this rural Pennsylvania in Bloomsburg. In my town, when I was a kid in high school, was the McGee Carpet Mill, 2,000 workers. Today, the family farm is right outside that town. There's 200 workers.

So when I was growing up, most of the kids in high school, their folks were involved with the mill or involved in some way. What's happened to America, rural America, the manufacturing base and so forth, is the consequence of wide open free trade policies, which 20 years ago I was much more supportive of. The 500 stops I did on the campaign trail over the last year, 2024,

you basically see this sense that for most Americans, the economy is not working. So in Pennsylvania, 60% of Pennsylvanians live paycheck to paycheck.

If you have a transmission that goes down, it's like an existential event. Housing last year alone went up by 11%. Inflation was up by 22% over the three years, and wages didn't keep up. So this is the part of America that was clamoring for change. We've got to change. This is the America that primarily voted for President Trump. This is the America that primarily voted for me. It's a coalition of...

That is at least unlike any in recent years in Pennsylvania. So in my case, both President Trump and I won more than 20 percent of African-Americans, more than 40 percent of Hispanics, two thirds of the trade unions at the national level. They endorsed Casey. They endorsed Harris on the ground. The rank and file. They supported me and President Trump. The reason I start with that.

is that's who we have to be focused on, I think, both as a political matter, but as a substantive matter. Because for them, the American dream that I've been the beneficiary of, Dina, all of you, that's not available for them. So that's where I'm coming from, from a policy perspective. So that's the first thing I want to say. And it also speaks to, look, when you do realignments in American politics, it

It has to be for a reason. It's not easy to get huge numbers of people like trade unions to shift out of 50-year patterns of voting for one party. To do that, they have to know that you're going to do something different. It's a change mandate. Yeah. It's a change mandate. And it comes from – I want to give President Trump all the –

credit in the world for seeing it and laying out a vision, but it also is a byproduct of failure. It's a failure of both parties. It's a failure of the old Republican Party to address that. And it's certainly a failure of the Democratic Party, which has truly become just in the last, certainly decade, the party of the elite, focused on a set of issues that are out of touch with at least most Pennsylvanians where I have expertise. So that's the first framing I'm going to say. Who are we working for? That's the first thing. Second thing,

I was a CEO of a couple different companies. The thing you hate most if you're a CEO is uncertainty. It's the thing you hate most. And so that's what's framing what's going on right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. But let's start with where there's certainty.

If you're a business person, if you're a consumer, here's what we have certainty on. We have certainty on we're going to have the biggest deregulatory effort since Ronald Reagan. I remember when he was elected in 1980. Since that time where you had a huge growth splurt because of deregulation. Huge. Number two –

We are going to pursue energy dominance. It's hugely important for Pennsylvania, unlocking energy, deregulation, permitting reform. That's coming. Also a national security issue. National security issue, and that's a huge wind in our sails. Third thing, we've already had President Trump's announced another company. There's multiple trillions of new investment.

Foreign direct investment coming to the United States. It's Apple investing, it's Taiwan Semiconductor, it's Saudi Arabia. Huge inflow of capital. Big deal, trillions. And the fourth thing is we're going to get an extension, I think a permanent extension of the tax cut. So we're not going to raise taxes, which would have happened under the Democrats. So if you're a business person, those are the four wins at your sale. And then the concern is the uncertainty around tariffs, which we now see a lot more. And tariffs that are reciprocal...

in pursuit of giving a fair shake

to American workers are going to be affected. Yeah, I want to nail down on that and then we can move on. Look, I think there's a tremendous difference between how the Trump administration in the first four years sort of framed the tariff discussion about, well, this is good, we'll make a lot of money basically taxing international trade and how they're framing it now and what we've seen over the last couple of months and how they're dealing with different countries who have this sort of thing looming and they're talking reciprocal.

And they're laying out to the American people about basically since World War II we've had these massive imbalances in our tariffs as opposed to what they're tariffing upon us. And the idea of some sort of fairness clearly is never going to happen if you don't force them to have it. Am I reading too much into that? This is like we're talking negotiations for the first time in 80 years here. Absolutely. Absolutely.

No, absolutely. Well, first of all, the fairness principle is NATO, defense spending, it's trade, it's investment. There's fairness across the board. But in the trade realm, we intentionally, it was in America's interest post-World War II to help rebuild Europe, rebuild Japan. We gave the best deal in the world. We basically said, rebuild your economy and have access, unfettered access to the American economy. Then over time, that solidified into

particularly in the Republican Party, which free trade is good for you no matter what the other side does. Yeah. Right? Because you're going to get cheaper goods and they'll eventually see the error of their ways. And they never did. They never did. China continued to screw us with subsidies, with lowering the cost of capital, with non-tariff barriers, with intellectual property theft. The Europeans, huge tariffs. I was at the famous dinner. Yeah.

with Trudeau and Mar-a-Lago. And Trudeau sat there right across the table and said, Mr. President, we don't have tariffs. And I studied this a little bit and I said, what are you talking about? I mean, what are you talking about? Like my state, Pennsylvania, has a huge dairy industry. We can't sell a quart of milk in Canada. What are you talking about? So we have not gotten a fair deal. And the effort to get a fair deal, I agree with. The important thing with the tariffs, and I haven't studied this closely, I've seen the initial chart,

You're trying to either create fairness by slapping a tariff on that's commensurate with what the other side is doing, or you're trying to get them to eliminate their barriers. In an ideal world, everybody lowers their tariffs, lowers their tariffs, and you're in an open, fair relationship. So the important thing is that the people on the other side understand what they need to do to –

Get the tariffs lowered. And is it a currency problem? Are they manipulating the currency? Are they subsidizing like they do in China? There's huge government subsidies for the steel industry, as an example. Do they actually have a tariff? Are they blocking entry for U.S. beef into Japan? What is the thing you're trying to solve? That's what I think the next step in this will be. That's fascinating. Phyllis? Yeah, I mean, I think the point that you were just making is the right one. And there are so many people in this country who actually have –

no idea the level of tariffs other countries are charging on us. And hearing President Trump just tick through the list of this country's charging us X, this country's charging us Y, it's illuminating to people because nobody's ever been told until now. You wouldn't know. Right. You wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. And so the reciprocal nature of what he's trying to do, I think, is it's revolutionary. Yeah. I agree with you. I agree with you. And listen, the other thing I would say is

Just being around this long enough, I served in the Treasury and the President Bush administration. Think of the U.S. economy as an aircraft carrier. You've got a bunch of dials, right? You've got to dial on regulation. You've got to dial on government spending. You've got to dial on –

on foreign investment. You got to dial on interest rates that the Fed has. You got to dial on tariffs. So what we want to do is get the aircraft carrier zeroed in on a path where it's starting to pick up speed. And some of those things may slow growth a little bit. So the tariffs, President Trump said they're going to be a little bumpy.

We're not exactly sure what the impact is going to be. He's very forthright about that. But you've got the other dials that are moving in the right direction. And listen, he's a business guy. So if there's some second or third-order consequence that wasn't fully envisioned, which there may very well be, he'll adjust. Yeah, right.

Like let's not be ideological about this. We want the economy to grow. We want to do good things for U.S. workers. So the point is to point due north with a little less rudder. Exactly. Right. Exactly. No, I get it. Listen, I have not seen that world the same way over a period of time, but I've come around on this. I understand what they're trying to accomplish. Right.

Part of doing that, however, is something you're also an expert on basically since you were like a football player in high school, which is just leadership. And you wrote a book that you and your wife that I find absolutely fascinating. Let me grab a copy of this. Who believed in you? And I just I want to know the concept behind.

You have incredible voices, most accomplished Americans. What a lineup. You can really put together a team, huh? You've got a good lineup, yeah. It's wild to me. I mean, look, you're connected more than anybody else, but...

Give me the concept and how you – Yeah, it didn't start as a book. And the book's been written for a couple years. So what happened was during COVID, we had our six kids with us. We have six daughters, 24 to 18. They were younger then, obviously. What a blessing. And they weren't able to see their coaches, their teachers. They were just – we were all disconnected from human connectivity.

Dean and I started to talk about how a couple mentors had changed our lives. In my case, it was a high school football coach. He was like – I was a benchwarmer in my sophomore year. The coach got fired. A new coach came in. He watched all the films, and I'd come in in the fourth quarter when we were losing big or winning big. And he saw something in me, and he pulled me aside. He said, listen, you got a shot.

He made me the co-captain my junior year. Changed my life. I ended up being an all-state football player. It got me into West Point. It was like a critical pivot point for Dina. It was Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the senator, who saw her. She was a waitress in Austin, Texas, working in a restaurant, working in the state senate and going to school at University of Texas. Kay Bailey said, why don't you come to Washington and be an intern and get an opportunity?

Those kinds of mentorship relationships can literally change everything. So we had that in our mind and we started to talk to some of our friends who were very successful people. There's generals in here, captains of industry. There's Brian Grazier who won the Oscar for Beautiful Mind. There's David Chang who was the famous chef. There's Tory Burch. There's Sarah Huckabee. There's Wes Moore. Not political at all. Just, hey, who believed in you? Who changed your life? And the stories...

are just incredible. And so the book is not about the famous people. The book is about the people you've never heard of who made the famous people famous. And it's trying to reinforce the power of mentoring. I'll say one more word, which is the idea we're donating all the proceeds to veterans groups and mentorship groups.

But the idea of this is to get every one of us, and I hope you guys will do this, who believed in you, right? Number one. Number two, have you said thanks? Because you're talking to these people that are, you know, bigger than ever, sometimes big egos, and it almost brings them to tears sometimes when they say, you know what? I never said thanks. They never knew how much they meant to me. And then the third question is, what are you doing?

to pay it forward. What are you doing to help somebody find their purpose and make a difference? Because by doing that, you can literally change that person's life, change your community, change the world by those people, that next generation leading us forward. Oh, it's fascinating. Yeah. Right? I mean, we all have our own stories and our own sort of pathways where there are pivotal moments like that. It doesn't matter if you're

you know, these people who've like conquered the world or whether you're just a successful part of your community, it all goes back to a central root of we, you believed in yourself. Right. Yeah. It's a great concept. That's why I wanted to ask you about the framework of it, because you have to be a certain point in your life. And I think you ran for public office at an absolutely perfect time in your life where you can have that perspective. Yeah.

Yeah, and the thing – we were on Mark Levin the other night, and Mark Levin, as you know, is like – he's a hardcore voice, conservative, pushing the strong conservative agenda. And he stopped and he said this is – at the end of the day, when you're looking back on your life, you're going to look back on the relationships that mattered most where you made the biggest difference. And so the book's –

it's kind of meant to be something bigger than the moment. And it's almost spiritual about how we can each contribute. And one of the key lessons here, referring back to my race, is the first race is that everybody, the titans of the universe, they've all failed. Failure is part of success. In fact, I'd argue that failure is a thing that happens before success because failure is key to learning. And mentors...

are often the people that help you take the risk and help you dust yourselves off when you failed. And so helping people have the confidence to jump into the arena, if it's political life or business or whatever it is,

is a big part of a big part of mentorship. Yeah. It's huge. You know, and on this show, we always talk about just a bevy of people who have influenced us in media. And some of them we know better than others. You know, there's this guy who some people may have heard of Rush Limbaugh, who some of us interacted with a little bit personally, but never to the

mentorship level, but we like to say that his blood runs through our microphones and his song is in our soul. We absolutely adore the guy and everything that he did in his career, whether he knew it or not, laid the foundation for people like us to try our best to

to imitate what he's doing or what he did, you know? And so I think, I think this topic is so important in society. It's, it's, it's about, you know, cause you don't, you're working every day, you're putting in every, everything you have. You don't necessarily think about who's younger than you and what's going to happen when they're coming up. And almost so much of it is about taking the risk. Yeah. Right. As you said, right. You know, I mean, life, life is complicated.

But at some point, you've got – if you're going to be truly successful like the people you have in this book, there's got to be a moment there where somebody inspires you to take a risk that you wouldn't ordinarily take on your own. Yeah, no doubt. And in a funny twist of fate, Dean and I had a number of interviews with people beyond the book. And so Clay Travis, who has Rush's spot. Clay and Buck have Rush's spot and said some version of the same thing and how –

Rush, as well as others, has sort of inspired him. And Byron Donalds talks about, early in his business career, a woman who saw some real promise in him. So it's very rare that someone didn't help you become you. And the thing we're trying to create here is intentionality around all of us.

to both be great mentors, but also as a gift to our children to try to encourage them to find mentors that help them. Some of the mentors in the book are parents, but at least we found it's hard to be a great mentor as a parent because... Because you get your own stuff. Yeah, and it sounds different. The feedback, the tough love, it sounds different coming from someone who's not

in your immediate family. So somebody you can really be vulnerable with, someone who shares your values, someone who is going to devote the time, and someone who's going to give you the confidence. Those are the four building blocks.

of a strong mentorship relationship. Yeah. Well, listen, you, you didn't just bring us the books though. You also brought the beer. I did bring the beer and I want to drink it. So I need you to tell me about it. So I have been to this, uh, I have been to this brewery. This is iron city, which is the, it's the key, uh, beer in Western Pennsylvania is beloved. There's iron city and iron city light. I brought the, I brought the whole milk version for, uh, for you guys. And, uh,

And I want to show you this because this was my best day in the Senate since I came. When I was on the campaign trail, I was in Butler.

uh, the day of the shooting, man. And I was up on the stage actually in prison. So I literally missed being right in the line of, of the bullet by a minute. And right before that rally, I met with Mark Fogle's mother. She's 95. So did president Trump. We both promised her that, you know, the moment, uh, we got in office, we do our best. Yeah. And, um,

And she came and visited Dina and me in Pittsburgh. She sat on our couch. She cried and said, I don't think I'm ever going to see my son again. So I joined the Senate. President Trump's obviously elected. Marco Rubio comes before my committee. My first question is, what are we going to do about Mark Fogel? What are we doing? He said, we're working on it.

I mean, this is the funniest thing. So we've sort of internally joked about this, about how everything you touch turns to gold. Right. The guys in the Senate for like all of two weeks, three weeks. And then next thing you know, the priority that you talked about during the campaign trail where you sat down, like it's happening. And obviously President Trump and his administration deserve enormous amount of credit. But he's sitting there and he's like, yeah, no, I guess we got it done.

It's a little Forrest Gump-like. I accept this. I accept the dumb luck associated with it. But so 22 days in, Mark gets released. And President Trump kindly invites us to the White House when he arrives. And so I'd never met him. I had talked to his mom. Obviously, she had come to our house in Squirrel Hill. So he walks in.

He walks in the White House. He says – and I say, I'm Dave McCormick, and Dino's there with me. And he says, Mr. Squirrel Hill, my mom told me about visiting both of you. It was – gave me hope. And Chris Deluzio, who's the congressman from Pittsburgh, right outside of Pittsburgh, a Democrat and a Navy man, but I'm not holding that against him. Either one had the good wisdom to bring Iron City Light with him.

And handed Mark a bottle. Nice. And so Mark, this is Mark in the Oval Office. Man, what a great story. Not the Oval Office, but the White House, rather. And it was really, honestly, my best day. It's so cool. And then to talk to his mom and to talk to him. And there were so many great things about it, which is you see all this effort come to fruition. But it was also for him to be back. Yeah.

to know America stood with him. I mean, it was really quite touching. It's such a great story because when Obama was president, we all remember when Brittany Griner was brought back and Mark Fogel was just sitting there by himself like, hey, wait a minute, I'm a teacher. What am I, chopped liver? Sorry I can't dunk. Right. And then Trump gets in and you're working for it and he comes back. It was a triumph. It was such a great moment for our country. President Trump, Witkoff, Marco, I mean, it was a

huge team effort. They, they led the charge. It was, it was a great to be smart. It's so great. Listen, Pennsylvania, you made a hell of a choice. We're going to be watching everything you're up to because it's not only with heart, it's with purpose and you actually have a resume and a background to be able to do it smartly. Uh, I mean this sincerely, we watch your stuff in a different way than we watch everybody else's stuff because we,

We feel like it's kind of a precursor. Is it because of a Zockowitz? Let's spend a minute. Talking about his chief of staff. Yeah, let's spend a minute. He's trying not to be as, but- All of us feel like we've worked for a Zockowitz at some point. But the thing that is the lesson of life, and this is the lesson over and over again, is if you can surround yourself with people who are

You're incredibly capable and better than you. You will succeed. It's the theory of the show. Right. Honestly. This is it. And so in business, that was in the military. And so one of the great blessings is Mark agreeing to join the effort with me. We're both the same age. We both want to give back. Did you have like blackness?

- Did you do a blackmail on him? - No, apparently, but maybe Dina did. Dina's known him for 25 years and we had dinner and we're asking what a good chief of staff would look like. - You did the Dick Cheney move? - Yeah, we did the Dick Cheney. - He did it. - I'll do the Dick Cheney. - He didn't do it. I would say he did not do the Dick Cheney. We did the Dick Cheney move. So we then went back to the hotel room and I said, "Is there any chance you think," she goes, "Long shot."

but I'll ask him. And so I called him and he said, well, let me think about it. And God bless. Two weeks later, he said he was going to join the effort. And there is nothing better than to walk down the hall in the, in the, on Congress. And people say, you won that one. Good job. And they said, you hired Mike. Oh my God.

God, I can't believe it. It's a much bigger thing than actually winning the Senate seat in Pennsylvania. But blessed to have Mark and a great team. Dave McCormick, an absolute gentleman. Somebody who's in this for all the right reasons. A lot of lessons of leadership. Watch this guy, folks. Just watch what he does. I'm telling you, you're going to learn a lot about what the future looks like. Appreciate you coming by. Thank you, guys. Thanks for making this work. Good to see you all.

Man, I just absolutely love that guy. He's so smart. He does such a good job for Pennsylvania. They're so lucky to have his point of view representing them in the Senate, and we're lucky that we could have him on the show today. He's a pal, friend of the program. I mean, I paused right there. I mean, I'm going to go back and see the video of it, but when he said...

Have you said thank you to that person? I was like, I have not. I got a phone call to make. I thought about it deeply. Yeah. Like it's still, it's sort of, it like affects me. Yeah. It was like a pay it forward sort of mentality to life that I really appreciate. Yeah. Talk about a guy who got into this line of work exactly the right time in life with perspective. Yeah.

And for the right reasons, clearly. Yeah. It's so good. Thank you to Dave McCormick, your entire staff, for making this happen. Fellas, I think we did it. I think so. Absolute banger of an episode. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Remember, like and subscribe to the YouTube if you have not yet already. Thank you so much to Senator McCormick.

Thank you to the minions voting in Hack Madness. Go to my profile and vote. So until next time, minions, keep the faith. Hold the line and own the libs. We'll see you Tuesday. Stay ruthless.

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