Will Trump's Second Term Promote Economic Populism? Matt Stoller On Cabinet Picks To Fight Corporate Power; Should Liberals Cut Off Pro-Trump Friends & Family?
Will Trump's cabinet picks fight corporate power and promote economic populism? Antitrust expert Matt Stoller joins System Update to weigh in on the next administration's approach to labor, unions, and more. PLUS: Should liberals cut off family members who voted for Trump?
----
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Matt Stoller's Reporting: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has watched Donald Trump for any period of time, especially during his first term, that his choices for cabinet secretaries and other key positions are a wild, haphazard hodgepodge of ideologies, political factions, and establishment popularity.
One can see this mishmash in many ways, perhaps none more telling than the fact that many of Trump's key appointees are causing Not even a slight amount of discomfort, let alone opposition among the US security state, the corporate media, and the Democratic Party.
Trump appointees such as Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, John Ratcliffe to head the CIA, Kristi Noem to lead Homeland Security, and a spate of other recent choices have even provoked support and applause among those normally intensely anti-Trump factions, probably none more so than their reaction to Rubio, which liberals and agencies in the three-letter world expressed as a great relief.
But then you have a group of appointees, equal importance, who are provoking the exact opposite response among the permanent DC class.
anger, disgust, betrayal, fury, condescending contempt, and most importantly of all, an all-out effort war, a war, a war to destroy their possible confirmation.
These people include Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, RFK Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, and before he was forced out, Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General.
What explains this vast disparity in reaction?
It's certainly not personality disputes.
Deeply unpleasant people are often approved for the most consequential jobs in Washington.
Instead, unlike the more popular choices among D.C., people known for being adherents to and reliable upholders of bipartisan D.C. dogma, the more maligned and attacked nominees have been so targeted precisely because they symbolize a desire to radically transform the institutions that Trump wants them to lead.
As well as to overturn or at least radically oppose the long-standing bipartisan DC dogma which drives them.
We've already devoted a fair amount of analytical attention to that conflict over these earlier national security choices, but over the past several days, from the end of that last week until today, Trump has unveiled an avalanche of new appointees, including key positions that will govern and most directly affect domestic and economic policies.
In many ways, we see very similar dynamics to the national security choices, not necessarily groups of them being attacked by the BTC machine, at least not yet, but people appointed to these key positions who hold radically different ideologies and policy worldviews as evidenced by their years of work before being selected to join Trump's administration.
That's but one example.
Donald Trump chose a secretary, a treasury secretary, who Elon Musk said in advance was nothing more than a status quo perpetuator, a hedge fund billionaire, who seems to have no original thought in his life beyond standard Republican dogma, and then his labor secretary, who is known as being one of the most singular pro-union, pro-worker, and anti-big business members of all of Congress.
Now, to me, this is classic Trump.
He dislikes being imprisoned by any one ideological piety and he particularly rebels against letting any one faction he oversees becoming too powerful.
He likes to give them something, take it away, pit groups against each other.
And he most certainly does not listen blindly to his aides or his cabinet secretaries as the parade of bitter departures in the first term attests.
So how power ends up being dispersed in the Trump presidency really remains to be seen.
So many people want to read into every nomination some kind of clear harbinger of what the Trump administration is to do.
And then on top of all these widespread, divergent appointments, remember we also have the wildcard that is J.D. Vance, who was selected as vice president, by far the most unfavored establishment choice of Trump's final list.
Still, while recognizing the limited value these choices have in revealing what is to come, they are far from meaningless.
After all, Trump did choose them.
And I think they foretell many likely policy conflicts on the horizon.
To help us understand many of these recent choices and what they represent for key domestic positions, As well as their impact on a wide range of issues from labor to antitrust to serving or undermining large corporate interests at the expense of the ordinary consumer, we will speak to a friend of our show,
Matt Stoller of the Economic Liberties Project, who is, in my view, one of the nation's most informed experts on the attempt to use antitrust law to chop up monopolistic power and protect consumer choices against centralized, unaccountable corporate control.
And then finally, time permitting, there has been this extremely disturbing trend among prominent liberal commentators who are still enraged and confounded by Trump's victory, mostly enraged, where they're encouraging Democrats and liberals to cut off their friendships and even their family connections,
their family members, with Trump voters on the ground that anyone who voted for Trump, whether it be their mother, their aunt, their cousin, their son, Must be an evil sociopathic and or at best indifferent person to the suffering of others.
There are a lot of evil in the world, but I honestly can't think of much that is worse than encouraging people to cut off ties with family members and lifelong friends.
There aren't many things worse than that.
After all, it is the core tactic of how a cult functions.
Earlier today, longtime progressive commentator of the Young Turks, Anna Kasparian, posted a video, a thoughtful video, of an experience that led her, somewhat recently, to realize how pernicious and misleading it is to assume the worst caricatures of those with different politics, even the dreaded Trump voter.
And I have my own similar experience about that, how I came to realize that these caricatures that were put in my head about what other people with different politics think was really untrue.
And I think the more we think about that, the healthier our politics are.
And I want to share my own experience as well.
Because constantly trying to divide people into these little tiny enclaves of demographic identity or political preference, Separating them all from one another and encouraging to hate anyone outside of that little group is as psychologically twisted as it is dangerous, and yet it's becoming increasingly pervasive.
So we want to spend a little time on this, time permitting.
Before we get to all of that, A few programming notes.
First of all, we're encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on...
Okay, you ready?
It's a little bit of a long list.
It works on your smart TV. It works on your telephone.
It works on your Xbox and other devices as well.
And once you download it, you can follow the programs you most like to watch here on the platform.
Which means if you activate notifications, which we hope you will, the minute any of those programs you most like to watch go live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by link.
You just click on the link, begin watching live.
It helps the live viewing numbers of every program and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble itself.
As another reminder, System Update is also available on podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here at Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, once we're done with our live show here at Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community where we have our live interactive after show.
Tonight being Tuesday, we're about to go do that once we conclude our show here.
There we take your questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions for future guests and shows.
That after show is available only for members of our Locals community.
So if you'd like to join, it gives you access to those after shows, to multiple interactive features we have on the platform.
It's the place where we publish a lot of original exclusive content we don't have a chance to show here.
We publish original exclusive articles there as well.
And most of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that platform.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
All right, before we begin with Matt, I just wanted to share a couple of new sponsors that are sponsoring our show.
We are very happy about that.
The first one is from Electric E-Bikes.
In times like these, health and mobility are more important than ever with rising costs in almost every aspect of life.
Finding an affordable way to stay active, to commute, or explore can feel like a real challenge.
That is where electric e-bikes come in.
Over the past four years, electric e-bikes has sold more than 400,000 e-bikes, helping Americans make the switch to electronic transportation without breaking the bank.
In fact, in 2023, more Americans turned to electric than major automakers like BMW, Ford, or Porsche for their electric needs.
Electric believes that staying active and saving money shouldn't be at odds.
Their flagship bike, the Electric XP, is one of the most popular electric vehicles in the country, helping thousands of people enjoy the outdoors, reduce their carbon footprint, and improve their health every single day.
And now, during their Black Friday sale, you can save up to $780 on select models.
With prices this reasonable, there's never been a better time to take control of your health and your mobility.
It's very simple to get started.
You visit electricbikes.com today and find out how you can bring more freedom and adventure and health into your life with electric e-bikes, whether you're an avid outdoorsman or someone who's simply trying to get back into the simple joy of exercising and riding a bike.
Head over to electricebikes.com to check out all of their amazing Black Friday deals.
That's electricebikes.com for America's largest e-bike producer.
Matt Stoller is so many things.
It's very hard to list.
I'm going to have to be very selective.
Otherwise, we're going to spend 45 minutes talking about who Matt is to begin with.
He is with the Economic Liberties Institute.
He is also the author of the Substack Big, which, as its name suggests, it focuses on antitrust violations and the way in which particularly big tech but other corporations as well become so big that they're unmanageable.
And he's the author of what I consider to be Certainly one of the definitive histories, if not the definitive history, on the history of antitrust and democracy, and particularly how it focuses on big tech.
The name of that book is Goliath, The Hundred-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
He's also a friend of the show and a friend of some of us here, including me.
Matt, it is great to see you tonight.
Thank you so much for taking the time to come on.
We appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So we have a lot to talk about.
So why don't we just dive right in?
There's a lot going on, obviously, since Trump's victory.
And a lot of these appointments are generating some really interesting analysis and big question marks, given how they're not exactly a model of cogency, which is what one would expect from Donald Trump.
Before we get into all of that, though, there's a lot of debate.
Every time there's a new nominee chosen to head a department to be a cabinet secretary, there's all this digging and understanding, oh, what does this mean?
Oh, look, this person's this.
That means the administration is going to be this.
Or, oh, this person's the opposite.
That means the administration will be that.
Given just Donald Trump in general, but also how Washington works, how reliable of an indicator do you think these nominations are when it comes to the question of what Donald Trump, sitting in the Oval Office, is going to decide and what his administration will be?
I mean, I think that they are an indication of the options that he's giving himself.
So he has certain instincts, but you need people who know the levers of government to pull, who know how to write executive orders or where the authorities are, or how to convince Congress to do things.
And Where he had people in positions to do that, he could do a lot.
And where he didn't, he would often be undermined, even if he wanted to go ahead and actually do a lot of stuff.
So one example would be when he rewrote NAFTA, right?
So the trade agreement between Mexico, the US, and Canada It was a very unpopular agreement.
He said, I want to rewrite it.
And he hired someone named Robert Lighthizer to be the head of the US Trade Representative, which is the part of government that manages trade or a lot of trade.
And Lighthizer is a very well respected trade lawyer and agreed with Donald Trump's instincts.
And so because of that, he was able to do a lot with tariffs and he was able to do a lot In terms of renegotiating NAFTA, and he was actually able to bring a bunch of Democratic votes to do that.
So that was an area where he was able to really restructure policy because he had someone who agreed with him and knew what he was doing.
I think there are other areas where that wasn't necessarily the case.
There was more kind of, you know, sort of, I guess, swampy people that subverted what he wanted to do, or maybe You know, gave him different options than what he ordinarily would have chosen.
So it's not to say that he always did the things that trade people or Hawks wanted to do.
It's just to say that if he wanted to go in that direction, he could.
So that's how I look at these guys.
Yeah, but, you know, I don't think that's the normal way that administrations are typically constructed, especially when it comes to cabinet secretaries.
You have a Democratic president.
They usually come out of the Democratic Party kind of machine that produces these sorts of people or from within the agencies.
Same with Republican administrations.
Typically, you can identify exactly who those kind of people are going to be.
I think there are a lot of those people inside the first Trump administration, and maybe that's the lesson that he learned.
But I was talking to Lee Fong late last week about RFK's appointment and all the animosity it's provoking.
And it's really ironic because RFK's principal focus is the critique that Our agencies in general, but our healthcare agencies and regulatory system in particular have been co-opted by industry.
They don't regulate industry.
Industry controls them through a whole revolving door and donors and all these other Weapons that Washington has developed, which is a long-standing left-wing critique, and yet we've never really had a HHS secretary who has gone in, not as an ancillary critique, but as a crusade for a long time and said, I want to end this regulatory capture by Big Pharma, by Big Food, by the health insurance companies.
And I was asking Lee about this.
It's so interesting that this is what the left has long wanted on the one hand.
And now they get it in the form of Trump and RFK. But on the other, the American right was indignant when Michelle Obama was just sort of using her platform to encourage people to exercise more and eat better food in schools.
And the argument was, how dare this nanny state?
Who is she to tell our kids what to eat?
And now you see this immense support Not for everything RFK stands for, but certainly for this.
And Lee said, well, this is one of the ways in which, in so many instances, Trump has kind of thrown a wrench into what had been these long-standing, ossified left versus right categories.
Is that something that you think is a valid...
I don't think it's even a praise or critique.
It's just kind of an analysis.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, it's hard to...
I don't know what to make of RFK Jr., but I think he's certainly not, you know, your standard pick for anything.
I mean, I'm definitely more of a, you know...
Yeah, there's a lot there that I'm intrigued by and skeptical of.
But one of the things that he said, right?
I mean, I'm not a...
I was not a huge fan of his.
But one of the things that he said is he wants to reexamine...
There's this process...
By which I think Medicare and certain government benefits pay out doctors.
I think it's Medicaid.
I think it's Medicaid.
You mean like their billing process?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the way that the American Medical Association essentially sets rates and sets ways that doctors can bill for different procedures.
And it is very much a cartel.
And it is government sort of sanctioned.
And Democrats have been Not all, but some Democrats have been fairly unhappy with it for quite some time because it's costly and often excludes people who can deliver care from doing it.
And RFK said he would, you know, he's looking at redoing those billing codes.
And I thought, hmm, that seems like a pretty good idea.
The American Medical Association doesn't actually have a lot of members, and it is weird that they have control over...
Important aspects of medical billing, considering that healthcare is, you know, it's 20% of the economy, and we spend twice as much here as we do anywhere else, as anyone else does in the world, and we get worse outcomes.
It's just more expensive.
So I thought that was really interesting, and I'm kind of curious to see where else he goes in terms of addressing, you know, the regulatory problems and the market power problems.
And, you know, so I'm intrigued.
Yeah, and I think it's important to say in RFK Jr.'s case that it's not like he just started talking about this three months ago in order to get this job.
This has been a crusade of him, of his for years, these kinds of critiques of how the executive branch and the regulatory industry function.
And I think the question is going to be...
You know, how far will he be able to go?
How far will other officials in the administration be able to go?
Who will limit them?
When will they get their way?
And that's why I think there's this kind of overemphasis on evaluating every choice.
Yeah, I mean, there there are reasons for skepticism as well.
Right.
I mean, he did.
There are there are, you know, I'm not I'm sort of a Democratic normie.
Right.
So I accept a lot of what the news tells me.
So maybe this stuff isn't true.
But what I hear, you know, I'm nervous about some of the anti-vax stuff.
Like, I'm glad we got rid of polio.
And, you know, I think fluoride in water is good.
Right.
Right.
But I don't know how much power he's going to have at HHS to change that.
So I'm I'm skeptical of like the part of the dynamic here is when you bring in people who are anti-establishment, they don't they have very different views.
And there's a kind of question.
So I'm sort of more in the establishment than not.
And there's a kind of question of, all right.
Well, if you're going to let that in, they're going to do things that you may not agree with that seem outlandish, but they're also going to maybe attack problems that no one else is willing to attack either.
And so I guess my hope, and it is a hope, I don't know, but I was pleased to see what he said about the American Medical Association, the billing codes.
But my hope is that he attacks those problems that everybody's been too afraid to deal with.
Well, I mean, he's, you know, as I said, been talking about them, and not in an ancillary way, but very vocally and frontally, and he continues to do so.
And I think, you know, we've seen presidents get elected swearing that they're going to implement policies, and they're not able to do so because various parts of the system's So whatever, you know, the worst view of the nominee is or the secretary is, doesn't mean that that's actually going to happen because we've seen with presidents so often how many different ways there are to impede them.
All right, let me ask you, because it's so interesting.
I also say one other thing about RFK, which whatever you think.
I do feel like you have some special credibility to object to the establishment if they're still keeping records secret about who assassinated your uncle.
So I do think there's some fair—if someone has a reason to be bitter and distrustful of the government, that guy does.
That's fair.
Yeah, I mean, I think we all kind of should be wondering, hey, these files are 62 years old.
But yeah, if it's like your actual uncle and then your father was killed three years later, also under not as mysterious circumstances, but still with a little confusion, I can definitely understand— Although his whole life was spent in the Democratic Party, I think what really radicalized him was a lot of the COVID stuff, a lot of the orthodoxies that were imposed, the censorship that went along with it, much of which turned out to be true.
And I guess the other thing about RFK is I think you can say what you want about him.
I've interviewed him.
I've talked to him.
I mean, he is a true believer.
He's not saying things to manipulate Political opinion or advance his own political career that he doesn't actually believe, which I always think is an asset.
All right, let me move on a little bit because one of the things I find so interesting is, you know, we've had this flurry of appointees, like to the cabinet, secretaries to leading various agencies, now to undersecretaries, and there's all this analysis being conducted about what it means Several months ago, four or five months ago, Trump made a pretty significant choice, which was the person who was going to be his running mate.
And there were a lot of names on that list that the establishment eagerly wanted him to choose, including Marco Rubio, who is now the Secretary of State.
And everybody's thrilled with that, from every Democrat to every person deep in the bowels of Langley.
But he chose J.D. Vance instead, who definitely has some heterodox ideas, both on foreign policy but especially domestic policy.
Obviously, it's a question of how much influence and power he'll wield, which I guess you can't really speculate any better than anybody else.
But in terms of some of those views, like why the Wall Street Journal page...
Editorial page was so indignant when Trump chose J.D. Vance.
Tell us a little bit about in your areas and related ones why he was received so poorly by those establishment factions.
Yeah, so Vance is, he's a really interesting figure because he's somebody who was your kind of standard libertarian corporate establishment guy and a true believer, not somebody who just thought this was a good way to get ahead.
And then he, you know, he served in the military in war and he went to a fancy law school after growing up.
You know, I think people know his background.
But he said he realized in Silicon Valley when he was a venture capitalist that companies that were doing seemed to be on the surface doing very well were uninvestable.
And that is because Google was going to kill them.
That's what he talked about.
He's like, it's just really weird that these certain companies that seemed to be doing well just couldn't You know, couldn't succeed because everybody knew, oh, the monopolist in the industry is one day just going to crush them.
And he said over time, he realized that America had a problem where we're not making things that we need to make.
And the traditional corporate establishment solutions of more, you know, tax cuts for corporations and deregulation, they're not necessarily always bad, but they were sort of besides the point.
And I think he went on a kind of journey where he Started to look at things like questions of market power and industrial policy and tariffs.
And, you know, he talks about it like people say, oh, he flip-flopped because in 2016 he didn't like Trump.
And then he decided he did like Trump and it's just careerism.
And I actually saw the development of his economic thinking at the same time.
So I think there was just a sincere way that he changed his mind.
And so when he became a senator and he became a senator with Donald Trump's help and endorsement, He got in there and he said, you know, we need to break up big tech with antitrust and we need to actually regulate railroads for safety purposes.
So that was the East Palestine disaster that was in his state.
He talked about cracking down on Wall Street banker bonuses when their banks fail, like the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco.
And there were just kind of like a host of areas where he broke from the traditional conservative orthodoxy.
And I think he has, I think like Josh Hawley, he has a kind of Teddy Roosevelt vibe might be the way to put it, like that kind of thinking.
It's conservative, it's right wing, but it's not, you know, what you would consider just sort of corporatist.
And I think that was really shocking and upsetting to a lot of the traditional Republican establishment when Trump picked him.
Yeah, and of course, Lena Kahn has been one of the most controversial picks of the Biden administration to lead the FTC. She's justified that controversy by taking a lot of aggressive action to break up monopolies.
And you have these Democratic...
is in charge of the Democratic Party, as well as a lot of Republican sort of just standard business people from like the Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Reagan-esque tradition that can't stand her, that thinks she's the root of all evil, that want her gone as soon as possible.
The Wall Street Journal page in particular hates her.
And yet, like Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance has made a lot of very vocal and public statements in support of Lena Kahn.
AS HAS MATT GATE.
Do you think this wing of the Republican Party still is kind of fringe and marginalized?
Or, given the fact that one of them is now the vice president, do you hold hope that in this administration they'll be able to maneuver more freely and gain more power?
You know, they're not marginalized.
They certainly matter.
I mean, J.D. Vance is vice president, and there are some senators and members that believe in what they're doing.
They're also, you know, the attorney general of Tennessee, very conservative Republican.
He's bringing antitrust lawsuits.
the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, he's got suits against seed and chemical monopolists and Google, he's got some privacy stuff.
And then, you know, so it's not, it's not marginal.
But I would say that those same people that really dislike Lena Kahn, the same people that really didn't want J.D. Vance to be chosen, and they're very powerful.
And they have a lot of allies.
I think the Trump administration just chose a director for his National Economic Council.
His name is, I think, Kevin Haslett.
And I suspect he's somebody who really is hostile to the anti-monopoly agenda.
And I think you'll see a number of people, particularly in the Commerce Department, in the Treasury Department, kind of across, you know, it's possible, Pam Bondi, who is going to be the Attorney General, you might see a substantial amount of hostility to the anti-monopoly agenda, even though there are parts of the Trump administration that do want to address market power by big companies and big tech.
Yeah, and you have Elon Musk in Silicon Valley who poured massive amounts of money into Trump's campaign, and they're certainly not big fans of antitrust.
I actually heard one of them the other day, not Musk, but someone in Silicon Valley talking about how nothing's been worse for business than the quote-unquote inability to make deals, meaning mergers of two gigantic conglomerates, to make a consumer choice even less, to make customer service almost non-existent because there's nowhere else for people to go.
Um...
But one of the things I think has been forgotten, I know you haven't obviously forgotten it, but I think about it a lot, is that there's this pending lawsuit that has been pursued by the Biden Justice Department, the antitrust division in particular, that's also been as aggressive as Lena Kahn, that has become, I guess you would agree, the greatest threat to Google's monopolistic power.
I think the government is now requesting a sell-off of Chrome as just one of the remedies for Google's loss.
And that lawsuit was not brought by the Biden administration.
It was initiated by the Trump administration and by the anti-Trump, the antitrust division there.
Can you shed a little bit of light on how that happened?
Like, how is it that people who wanted to break up big tech and Google ended up at key positions in the Trump Justice Department?
And do you have hope that that's going to happen again?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I'll just mention Musk really quickly.
He is extremely wealthy, obviously, but he's not necessarily opposed to antitrust.
I've seen him say things about Amazon, that it's a monopoly.
I've seen him talk about Facebook.
I mean, he's a little bit iconoclastic.
I think most of the executives and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are very hostile to To antitrust.
But there are some who see the breakup of, say, Google as something that might be good for their business.
And so there are some splits there.
But I guess...
Sorry, your question slipped.
How did these people...
Yeah, given that that has never been part of the Republican identity or policy platform before.
Right.
Yeah, so the Google case came because a number of reasons, but I think the big one is that the financial crisis kind of shattered the corporatist consensus, and that really didn't Show up on the Republican side until Donald Trump won.
And when he won in 2016, he won by attacking big business.
He attacked Apple.
He attacked Amazon.
He said Jeff Bezos has big monopoly problems and big antitrust problems.
And he attacked the Time Warner AT&T merger, which happened at the time.
Everybody was shocked that he did this.
You know, this was part of his tariff thing.
And then when he got in, he appointed an antitrust division chief named Macon Delrahim, who was pretty libertarian.
But who did bring the AT&T Time Warner case, which is the first big merger case of that type in 40 years.
But other than that, it didn't do much.
However, the Attorney General at the time, Bill Barr, He had been a Verizon lawyer and had done work, I believe, in the media industry as well.
And he understood the problem of Google's market power.
He also, you know, he had some background in this as well.
And he forced the antitrust division to bring a case against Google at the same time.
Congress was investigating big tech for antitrust violations, and there was this kind of wave of distrust over big tech that sort of started in the Democratic Party in 2016, 17, 18, maybe a little bit earlier, but then was manifested in policy in the Trump administration in 2020 when the DOJ brought that Google case.
The Trump FTC also brought the Facebook case.
And just to give you some context, The Department of Justice had not brought a monopolization case since Microsoft in 1998. They brought a very, very minor one.
But like anything important, they hadn't brought anything since 1998. So that's 22 years until Trump brought the Google case and the Facebook case.
And then the Biden administration really amped it up.
So they not only brought that Google case forward and won it, but they brought another case against Google On a different part of their business that was just heard this week, the final arguments.
They brought cases against Amazon, against Ticketmaster, against Apple, against all sorts of companies in the meatpacking industry, in the rental software industry.
I can go down the list, but they brought a ton of cases.
But they were really building off of what the Trump administration started.
And so there is an argument that if Trump wants to, he has a claim to say that this is his agenda and he's going to see it through.
Yeah, I mean, just that, you know, I feel like one of the things that I find really irritating about the Trump era mainstream discourse and media coverage is that There has been such an interesting realignment on at least some issues in the Republican and Democratic parties,
Trump in particular introducing into the Republican Party ideas that had always been taboo, at least for decades, but in lieu of like talking about that, there's all this like, you know, Russiagate hysteria and calling Trump a Nazi and a white supremacist.
And so there's been almost no attempt to try and grapple with what are obvious ideological departures.
I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but clearly that has been the case.
Let me ask you about something that I know almost next to nothing about.
People keep asking me, why don't you cover Trump's tariff proposal?
And I always say because there's probably...
You know, 99% of the people on Earth who know more about the macroeconomic effects of tariffs than I do, so I try very hard not to talk about things that I don't really have a specialty in.
But I know you do, or at least to some extent, I saw you saying the other day that, first of all, my view of tariffs, and this isn't an economic view, it's a political view, is that Trump likes to use policies to threaten As a means of extracting better agreements.
That's what he does on war.
We're going to bomb the shit out of you.
Here's John Bolton that's making the act next to me.
And that in his mind is what fosters more advantageous agreements.
So it seems like Trump to me is using tariffs as a negotiating ploy.
If it doesn't work, maybe he'll actually use them.
And I saw you say something that I found interesting in part because I didn't understand it but want to.
Which was that tariffs can have a sort of positive function as long as they're paired with more rigorous antitrust enforcement.
Why are those related?
Yeah, so tariffs are charges that you levy on imports.
And the idea is that you make it more advantageous to make things domestically by levying those charges on things that are imported or, you know, to import them from a different source.
Well, one of the problems with tariffs is that if you levy them, the assumption is that there's a competitive industry.
But if there's only one or two companies in an industry and you put a tariff on them, well, then those companies can either pass that cost along to consumers, they can use that cost as an excuse.
To increase prices even more than the cost of the tariff was.
I mean, we've seen that happen in a number of instances.
Or, if you do have aggressive competition, and that comes in part from antitrust, then companies will not be able to pass along the cost increase of those import intermediate charges.
And then they'll have to, you know, they'll just, their profit margins will go down.
And that's kind of the ideal scenario.
You force them to compete.
And then what often happens is they'll build domestic capacity and that's the effect of the tariff.
But if you don't force competition of the domestic producers, then what can often happen is the tariff becomes an excuse for them to raise consumer prices on those goods and other goods that aren't even related to the imported good, but consumers might get confused at.
So It's not that tariffs cause price increases because they actually don't cause price increases in consumers or they just cause some cost changes in how people manage their supply chains.
But they can be an excuse for price hikes on the end consumer if the government isn't attentive to the competitive dynamics in the industry.
So in other words, if there's one or two companies that are occupying a market, they can both increase their prices without concern and then blame tariffs.
But if you have six or seven different companies or more, they don't have to increase prices.
They can undercut the price of their competitors because, in fact, tariffs aren't really the reason you have to raise prices to that extent.
Yeah, let me give you an example.
So the Trump administration put tariffs on washing machines in 2018. And then the price of washing machines went up and a lot of economists said, oh, look at that.
Tariffs cause price increases.
But, you know, Canada was importing the same washing machines and they didn't put tariffs on them, but the prices went up there too.
So, you know, it's not really, it wasn't really the tariff that drove the prices.
They just wanted more money because it was a small group of, there's an oligopoly, a small group of companies making washing machines.
But even more than that...
At the same time, there were no tariffs on dryers, right?
But they raised prices on dryers, too, because they assumed, well, consumers will think that the same inflationary thing that hit washing machines also hit dryers.
And it was really just a profit grab.
Now, ultimately, because there were a few companies in the industry and they do compete, even though they don't compete that vigorously, A bunch of them built factories in the US and then did compete the end consumer price down.
But what we see repeatedly with things like supply chain shocks in COVID or tariffs or other moments of these kinds of shocks is companies that have pricing power We'll just say, oh, this thing happened.
Therefore, I have to raise prices, even if the price hike is unrelated.
And, you know, why wouldn't you do that if your company and you're trying to make money and, you know, lots of other companies you see are doing the same thing.
So that that is, I think, the risk that Trump might face if he puts tariffs on but doesn't have an aggressive antitrust regime.
Let me ask about this labor secretary choice because I find it super interesting and we have a little bit of time left.
I don't know why I say that.
It's just like a talk show cliche.
I have no idea how much time you have, but I'll say we have a little bit of time left and in the little bit of time we have, I want to cover a couple of things that I don't want to let you go without asking.
So after choosing several different kind of very standard, hardcore hedge fund managers, people right off Wall Street, and we'll see what their impact is, Trump chose as the Secretary of Labor, someone backed by the Teamsters Union.
She was a one-term congresswoman from Oregon.
She just lost a very close race in this last election.
Yeah.
Lori Chavez de Remer, and one of the things she was was one of the lead sponsors of the PRO Act, which is a longtime Republican bugaboo.
It makes it easier for unions to form at workplaces and therefore this right-to-work ideology that Republicans have long believed in.
It's really the enemy of that.
It makes unionizing much easier.
And one of the people who cheered this choice and who was already working, I guess, with her or in conjunction with others to try and make a more palatable to Republican pro-act legislation possible is Josh Hawley.
And I want to ask you about both of them because one of the things that just has always irritated me so much is if you say, especially to a liberal audience, that someone like J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley have economically populous views and you give examples, You'll automatically hear, oh, you're so naive.
Obviously, they don't really have those.
They're just pretending to, as if there's a bunch of political benefits to being in a red state and pretending to be an economic populist.
And of course, Josh Hawley has actually done things, like he stood at Bernie Sanders' side when no one else would, to filibuster the COVID relief package until it had direct payments to Americans and got $600.
That's when Trump beat it and wanted $2,000.
But there's been a lot of...
Actual and then, of course, antitrust.
Josh Hawley has been very good on it as well.
I guess the cynical view here about this labor choice, which is out of place with every Republican administration, certainly for as long as I've been alive, I guess, is that it was just kind of a gift to the Teamsters Union.
Sean O'Brien, the Teamsters president, went and spoke of the RNC the first time in decades that has happened.
But Every analysis says that working class voters were crucial to the Trump victory, and if you look at any map, clearly they were.
How do you see the prospect of, especially given the support of people like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, that this is not just symbolic, she's going to be blocked by more powerful pro-business elements, but that this could actually be some tangible pro-worker, pro-union benefits from the Trump administration?
You know, I don't know the answer to that.
I think the more important agency is the National Labor Relations Board, just purely for growing unions.
That's the one that is sort of the quasi-court system over...
When you form a union, you vote, and the NLRB manages that whole process.
They manage and enforce labor violations.
The Labor Department is very important.
They have a lot of regulatory authority.
They have some enforcement authority.
They actually do a lot in finance as well.
So it's not to say that it's not a big deal.
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, the problem and it's just it's interesting.
It's across the whole coalition.
The Republican Party is a multiracial working class coalition married to this very traditional big business lobbying apparatus married to Donald Trump.
And it's super weird.
And I think everybody's trying to figure out how to make it work, if it can work.
And then at the same time, Democrats and people like me are trying to say, how do we improve the country by working with this, whatever this is, but also picking it apart for partisan gain?
So this is like a very weird situation.
And I think unions Are a good illustration of the problem because, you know, unions are the one place where you have large groups of workers that are organized and can convey what they need.
And they can, you know, they can train workers.
It's the only institution that's really set up for ordinary people in the workplace.
It's not, they're not very big relative to the country.
The number of workers covered by a union, I don't know, six, seven percent.
It used to be a lot bigger.
It used to be a lot bigger, but they've done a good job kind of crushing them.
Yeah, it used to be a lot bigger.
And the Republicans mostly, although the Democrats helped, but the Republicans really, I think, crushed labor unions.
But the argument I think I hear from my Republican friends about labor unions is, look, we're totally fine with having more people organized in unions, but we just don't like the fact that when unions organize, they just kind of support Democrats no matter what.
Which is why there was so much genuine upset that the team's president, Sean O'Brien, went and spoke to the Republican convention because unions are supposed to be like gay groups, like abortion groups, like gun control groups, barely thinly disguised advocacy groups that are really arms of the Democratic Party.
And Sean O'Brien was one of the first to abandon that, especially because his rank and file wanted Trump.
I think the rank and file did want Trump.
I would say the Democrats have a legitimate gripe insofar as the Teamsters' pension was insolvent.
And Biden fought really hard to fund that pension and did.
And it passed with only Democratic votes.
And that was a really significant ask from the Teamsters.
And so they felt betrayal.
This wasn't a case of where the Democrats betrayed the Teamsters.
And then the Teamsters, you know, turned around and gave them, you know, gave them what they deserved.
This was a case where the Democrats did deliver some stuff to the Teamsters.
They didn't.
I mean, the Teamsters main goal or one of their main goals is to organize Amazon and is to organize Uber, which is one of the reasons the Teamsters were also really big fans of Lena Kahn.
And in the meeting, the endorsement meeting with Kamala Harris, they actually asked Harris to retain Lena Kahn and Harris wouldn't commit to it.
And so that was one of the reasons they didn't they didn't go for for the Democrats, because they didn't necessarily trust that they would be able to have support in organizing Amazon and organizing Uber.
But at any rate, there I don't want to this isn't like a Democrats being completely unreasonable thing here.
But Sean O'Brien was responding to his members who were supportive of Trump.
So that is one dynamic.
But there were splits within the union.
And there were also, I think, legitimate arguments from the Democrats.
But I will say this.
If Donald Trump figures out how to—I mean, his view—my understanding of how he thinks is that he doesn't think there's a zero-sum game.
He thinks that business is going to do great, the stock market is going to do great, and workers are going to do great.
And that's Donald Trump's America.
Everyone is going to make money.
If he delivers on that, and I think there are reasons that he won't be able to deliver, I think he's going to have to choose among different stakeholders.
But if he is able to deliver on that, and he is able to build out a framework for organized labor that isn't necessarily as partisan Democrat as it was, I do think that the realignment that we saw in 2024 becomes permanent.
On the other hand, if he does go with, say, his Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, or his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, I think is his name, or his NEC chair, or a lot of the people that he's picking, or most of the Republican Senate and House,
if he does go with them, and they really are just kind of normie establishment Republicans, if he doesn't find a way to break from them, then I think it's possible that this is just temporary, that the Democrats come back in 2026, 2028. And in many ways, like Obama in 2008, you know, could have realigned the country, but instead kind of rebuilt the Republican Party by engaging in bailouts and various kind of gross policies.
Trump could do this.
You know, Trump is in the position that Obama was then, and he could realign the country, or he could just help the Democrats rebuild by doing a bad job.
Right.
And you were talking about poor tariffs and the possibility that if other measures don't accompany it, you could just have spiraling inflation, which was a major factor, obviously, in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' loss.
I have one last question, but before I get there, I just want to press you a little bit on that, which is...
The first administration that I was really able to kind of understand and pay attention to ideologically because I was old enough was the Reagan administration.
You know, I was 13 in 1980 so I was able to kind of through my formative years and then law school understand the Reagan administration's approach to things and of course what Ronald Reagan did so successfully Was he sold this bullshit fairy tale that if you're a worker,
if you're struggling, if you're barely hanging on to the middle class, you should be the first ones cheering for Tax cuts on the wealthy, tax cuts on corporations, more pro-corporate policies because a rising tide lifts all boats.
And if everybody, if our economy is doing better, you're going to get lifted up as well.
And I feel like Trump is dogmatic about very few things including that.
And I think he understands that A big part of his appeal was to workers themselves.
And I personally can't see Trump suddenly falling captive to any one part of his administration because that's what he likes to do is pick different groups against each other.
And he has kind of a political instinct.
So if I had to guess, I would say he would try and do the more hybrid thing that you just suggested, like give something to corporations that they want, that they funded his campaign for.
They have representatives demanding it.
But then also do things for workers explicitly that would always have been unwelcomed in the Republican Party.
Can you see that view based on Trump's personality and governing style?
I could.
And I think, you know, the rumor of the person who's going to run the trade division, Jameson Greer, is that they're a populist and you have this labor secretary who's a populist.
It's too bad Matt Gaetz was knocked out, just in terms of economic populism.
And I don't think Pam Bondi is really going to break from the traditional corporate frame of the Republicans.
I could be wrong.
I think it's possible that Trump does what you suggest that he, you know, what you suggest he would.
But based on what I see broadly, I think there are some opportunities in healthcare, maybe some parts of labor.
But by and large, this looks pretty Wall Street heavy.
One of the nice things about Trump is he does fire people, right?
But he wants a stock market to be high and to keep going higher, and he also wants workers to do well.
If it's true that you can do both of those things, then he's going to do great.
But one of the dynamics that I see is that the reason the stock market's been doing so well is because corporate profits are at record highs.
And that is actually because the labor share of income is down.
I think a lot of people are used to getting nickel and dimed by different fees on everyday products.
Prices have been going up.
And that is actually going to the bottom line of a lot of these big businesses.
And if Trump doesn't do something about that, I think that what you're going to see is a continuation of some of the things that people really hated about the Biden administration.
And Biden didn't do enough about, which is attacking this high profit share.
But then if Trump does do something about that, I think the stock market is going to go down and he's not going to like that.
So I think he's really in a bind and they're going to have to figure their way out of that if they're going to, you know, really realign the country.
Yeah, it'll be interesting.
I think Trump has a—he's never an intellectual per se, but he has, I think, a much more instinctive understanding of how government works, of how politics works.
He has a more professional team surrounding him.
They themselves are constructed.
Not to have just one view, they feed to him.
They're in conflict all the time.
So we'll see how that goes.
All right, let me ask you this last question, which I know is your absolute favorite topic to talk about.
I hope you can stay calm, which is that— One of your main critiques forever has been the excessive and very toxic influence of Obama world in the Democratic Party.
You have many, many critiques of the Obama administration.
There you go.
Look at how excited you are.
It was preceded by a face of disgust and nausea.
I thought you were going to actually throw up in front of the camera.
So we're starting to hear stories about the influence of the Obama campaign and sort of the people who orbit it.
Had in the Kamala Harris campaign, including, as I guess you would expect, her brother-in-law, Tony West, who was the general counsel of Uber.
And you sort of saw this attempt to be populist in the beginning of the Kamala Harris campaign when they were talking about price gouging and price controls.
And then suddenly, all of that disappeared and it became a much more just like vaguely centrist, safe issue.
Conservative in the compartmental and emotional sense.
What do you think is the ongoing influence of the Obama circle in the Democratic Party and how does that manifest?
Yeah, it's a great question.
First, I want to go back to something about Trump, because I think it's important.
What I'm looking for, the key tell, will be how does he negotiate on taxes?
Because the Trump tax cuts expire.
And are they going to go for the corporate tax cuts?
Or are they going to go for a different approach to taxes where they can get a bunch of stuff for ordinary people?
And that's kind of what I'm looking at.
He promised a bunch of that on the trail.
You know, no tax on tips.
So we'll see.
That's what I'm looking to.
And there are reasons to imagine he could go either way.
But on to the question that I'm just so glad you asked.
I know you are.
I gave you that as a present for coming on during Thanksgiving week.
So it was more for you than me.
Can we put some Lin-Manuel Miranda on the background?
I'll have the Hamilton soundtrack for you next time.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I actually remembered the other day that that horrific music was a direct part of the Obama era.
Of course, the only thing it could have been a part of.
We could just complain about Hamilton for the rest of the show.
That would be fine.
Just do a deep dive on the evils of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I would love that.
Yeah, that's right.
Whatever.
All right.
We're not going to go there.
Focus.
Got to focus.
So...
Yeah, I mean, look, the Obama administration, I think, was the tail end of the transformation of the Democratic Party from a party of working people to a party of the rich.
And a lot of the, you know, identity frameworks that I think have really were corrupting, you know, that killed the more populous parts of the civil rights movement, you know, those manifested in the Obama era In an extreme way,
and then they spun off a whole set of institutions and networks and political operatives who have a specific way of doing business, and they think of the Democratic Party kind of the way that the Libertarians thought of the Republican Party, which is as their vehicle to impose a kind of aristocratic framework with a slightly different flavor of it than the old school Republicans did.
And that's, I think, what you saw with a lot of the people that Kamala Harris brought in, you know, Tony West from Uber and David Plouffe, who was, you know, I don't know how many clients he had, but like, He had to get rid of TikTok, but he could keep the rest of them.
I think he helped set up Mark Zuckerberg's foundation.
And then just a ton of the Pod Save America guys and that whole network of people.
And I think Obama himself was somewhat part of the thinking.
He's always part of that thinking.
And they really said, our model here is to raise money from really rich people.
And to put really rich people out front, because we think that, you know, if the American people are concerned about the economy, they will trust really rich people.
Like Mark Cuban would be, you know, she kept doing events with him.
And he kept saying, we need to get rid of tariffs.
We need to, you know, do more deregulation and, you know, the things that you would expect to hear from somebody.
I mean, he actually, you know, was taking money from Google at the time.
I mean, he...
There were even promises that she and Waltz had made that were populist in nature, and he would openly say in interviews, they're not going to really do that.
I don't believe they're going to do that.
If they were going to do that, I wouldn't support them.
Of course they're lying about that.
Yeah, no.
And I think that's that was sort of the dynamic that was so disturbing.
I mean, the fulcrum for me was when a bunch of billionaire donors said she's got to get rid of Lena Khan.
And then there was this fight for months about whether she was going to get rid of Lena Khan or not.
And she you know, their campaign said, oh, we don't want to have to start saying what we'll do with Lena Khan, because if we say that, you know, then we'll have to they'll be asked about every person in the administration.
And we don't want to do personnel right now.
Which was just like obvious processed garbage from Democrats addicted to processed garbage.
And so that was, you know, you can just sort of see that it really drained the Democratic Party and that campaign out of vitality.
And I think there are a lot of Democrats that are pretty mad about it.
But, you know, and it did cause a bunch of healthy things.
I think the collapse of ethnic grievance politics, simply because voters, right, just just said, we're going to vote a number of of black and class voters, a number of, you know, you look at every demographic group, but Latinos, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, like actually everyone but white people swung to Trump.
And that, I think, is causing real soul searching and white women, white women in particular.
Yeah.
White women.
Well, yeah, I mean, at the same time, I think there is a, you know, I'm a Democrat, these people are in my party, and I'm really despondent in a lot of ways, because they just have terrible ideas about what our society should look like, and they have terrible political instincts.
I kind of just want them and Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney to go off and sort of form their own party because they are not the majority of the Democratic Party.
Maybe that's just me telling myself that because I want to believe.
But that is my view.
But I guess what I just...
These people, it's fundamentally not...
People like me and people like them shouldn't be in the same party.
And I think in the next 10 years, whoever sorts out this realignment, that's just the way it's going to wind up.
But I don't know if that's going to be the Republicans.
I don't know if it's going to be the Democrats.
I'm not as confident in Trump, obviously, as a lot of his supporters are.
But it just doesn't feel like this is a stable political situation.
Yeah, look, I think whatever you want to say about Trump, good and bad, and there's both that to say about him, I do think you cannot deny that there's been a transformative political moment in the climate, in the realignment already.
Yeah, most important figure...
Yeah, most important political figures.
Easily this century, since Reagan or whatever you can say.
And I think there's been some realignment.
And I think depending on how this, obviously this massive migration of voters that the Democratic Party has owned lock, stock and barrel for decades, going and voting for Trump is indicative of that enough.
And I think he has a real opportunity in the second administration to make this an enduring change.
As you said, if he just gives Wall Street everything he wants and tariffs skyrocket prices and workers are screwed even more, it's probably going to be they're all going to come back to the Democrats in 2026 for the same reason they rejected Biden.
But if he really, and I think Trump is a politically heterodox guy.
And if he sort of stays on top of things, not in a micromanaged way, but just kind of a bird's eye way of not letting any one faction be dominant through kind of sabotaging him and undermining him, I do think there's a...
I'm not saying it's going to happen and it won't shock me if it doesn't, but there's a real potential to rearrange the electorate in a way that I consider very positive so that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol and David Frum are in the same party as a lot of these Democrats.
And on some level to me, especially if they don't change, that is the place that they belong, unfortunately.
Well, I mean, one can always hope that they are part of no party.
Or that they end up in The Hague.
All right, Matt.
Well, it was always great to see you, especially this weekend.
Have a great Thanksgiving to you and your family, and we will be talking to you shortly.
Yeah, you too.
All right, have a good evening.
In a world where our digital lives are under constant threat, it's more important than ever to take control of your own security.
That's where Ledger comes in.
Ledger has been the leading name in hardware wallets for 10 years, trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital assets.
Their new device, Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, are a game changer with secure touchscreen that makes managing your crypto and logins easier and safer than ever.
With Ledger, you're not just buying a wallet, you're investing in your own digital sovereignty.
Protect your crypto from hackers and scammers and take control of your financial future.
Plus, the Ledger security key apps offer a powerful alternative to traditional passwords, giving you an extra layer of protection for all of your online accounts.
And this Black Friday, you can take advantage of Ledger's incredible deals.
You can buy a Ledger Flex and get $70 of Bitcoin or save up to 40% on selected Ledger Nano wallets and accessories.
Secure your digital future today and buy your Ledger device at ledger.com.
Take charge of your digital future with Ledger.
Offer is valid from November 21st until December 5th while supplies last.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
Obviously, we did not get to that second segment that we were hoping to get to about this new discourse encouraging people to break up families and cut off relationships with friends over political differences, but I actually have a lot to say on that.
So unless some unexpected news event happens tomorrow, we will move that to tomorrow night, especially since it'll be our last show before the Thanksgiving holiday, and then it'll give people time to watch that.
But otherwise, our show for this evening is concluded.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after they first appear live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major broadcasting platforms.
And if you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, and we have our live interactive after show.
Tonight being Tuesday, we are about to go and do exactly that.
That after show is available to take your questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions for future guests and shows.
The after show is available solely for members of our local community.
So if you'd like to join, which gives you access to those after shows, to multiple interactive features that we have on the platform, it's the place that we put a lot of original exclusive content, interviews, video packages that we don't have time to broadcast here.
We put transcripts, professionalized transcripts of every show we do here.
We put them there the next day.
But most of all, it's the community on which we rely to support.
