Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton discuss how little coverage the Hands Off! protests got this weekend before diving into the intentional nosedive the markets have taken after Trump's buffoonery of a math equation levied tariffs across the world. And they finish with the Supreme Court's decision to get in the way of the court case to return an innocent man from the El Salvador gulag he was mistakenly sent to by this administration.
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The thumbs up and the thumbs down is a good question.
I think I'm still thumbs down on all these things.
I'm too big thumbs down.
We've got so much to talk about today.
We have so many developments, so many moving parts here.
Before we get going, a reminder, every one of our shows at this point is so jam-packed.
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And you might not understand the context.
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Nick, we are going to unfortunately have to get into a decent amount of fuckery from both Donald Trump and the attack on the economy, as well as the administration trying to continue to shred the Constitution.
But, you know, I made an executive choice when I was putting together today's show.
And I said, you know what we're going to start with?
We're going to start with these protests.
And over this weekend, in over a thousand locations across the country, Millions, with an M. Millions of Americans.
In Boston alone, they nearly had 100,000 people show up.
Over a million Americans participated in what has been now referred to as the hands-off protests around the country, protesting Donald Trump, protesting Elon Musk, protesting the oligarchical coup and all of the ongoing damage.
Nick, this was a pretty big event.
And I keep track of these things because I'm an organizer, and also I look for signals in terms of what's happening in our political culture and sort of ecosystem.
This felt very large, and it felt like the evolution of something that you and I have been paying attention to over the last few months.
Yeah, I went to the one in L.A. that was downtown, and I would say there was 10,000 people there.
Yeah, there is something about it that even though I remember having a conversation with my son, in fact, about how these things don't matter.
Which is kind of troubling for someone young in their teens to be so cynical to think that they don't actually have an effect.
When they do have an effect, even in the sense of my psyche, and to be around people who are all like-minded and understand what's going on, that social aspect of it, believe it or not, is rewarding.
And we also know that Trump heard it, and we know that Trump saw it, and he responded to this.
So that is another big part of the reason why everyone was doing it.
So I want to start with the larger sort of untold story here, which is, if you actually look at America over the past 10 years, right, which is the, we're in this weird little era right now, this little decade, decade of troubles, if you will.
Nick, we have seen the largest protest movement in the history of the United States of America with the BLM protest in 2020.
Just an absolute explosion.
And, you know, I don't know that I have to give context for that for everyone, but just in case, like, that was not just about BLM.
That was not just about police brutality.
That was a moment in time with the pandemic in which we recognized that.
The American leadership and political system had betrayed us and were more than happy to push us into the maw of a generational disease.
And on top of that, we had dealt with decades of neoliberal austerity and the erosion of democracy.
It rose up and it grew.
And then eventually there was a moment where there was like a little bit of gestures from the Democratic Party, you know, some things that supposedly they were on the side of the people.
And then they just went ahead and threw them under the bus.
Here we have another situation.
Do you know how hard it is to get a protest going in over a thousand cities?
Oh, I can only imagine.
Although, you know, with the internet, I'm sure it's...
I mean, it's easier with social media, but I will tell you as someone who has regular discussions with organizers of these protests, this is massive work.
Because you can, I mean, like, you could throw a protest tomorrow in 2,000 cities, 3,000 cities.
You have to have people show up.
I don't know.
In local markets, they got coverage.
Local news at least talked about it because it was a big happening in these cities and places.
But national news got completely swallowed up by talking about the economy, which is somewhat understandable.
But at the same time, Nick, this absolutely just stood heads and shoulders over anything the Tea Party ever put together.
And if you remember the Tea Party, you couldn't turn on the television, and it wasn't just Fox News.
You had one corporate news media that was in league with the people who were running the Tea Party, but it was everybody talking about it.
It was the biggest thing that was being discussed back in 2010.
What we have here is the beginnings of a grassroots movement.
And what you brought up, that social aspect of it, seeing other people who feel the way that you feel in a way that maybe sometimes it's hard to express, particularly because of a lack of vocabulary or a feeling of isolation, it's contagious.
Seeing other people being with other people and feeling powerful with other people, it tends to have an effect.
And that's what I told my son, too.
I said, you know, this doesn't have to be an effect on politicians and any kind of policy that they're going to make.
It can easily just spread.
And then at the grassroots level, more and more people want to become involved.
And for sure, there was a glaring absence of coverage in national media.
It was very striking, even just cursorily looking on Saturday or Sunday to see how it was being covered.
And that's frustrating.
Are we getting to the point where everything's just so cynical?
Oh, another protest.
I don't know.
Obviously, the people in charge of those places have to deem that it's newsworthy.
I suspect that the more consistent these things get and the ease with which we were able to just do it, it doesn't take very much effort to see what time it starts.
I want to point out something that goes along with what you said in terms of that feeling.
I need people to understand that this isn't just about Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
It's not.
It's not just about Doge.
This is about the fact that the American people are tired as hell of the political status quo.
And I would say that this is also a response to the failure by the Democratic Party to actually be an opposition party.
So on one hand, Nick, if the Democratic Party stood up while this coup and while this authoritarian overreach was going on, if they stood up and said, we want protest in thousands of cities this weekend, I think people would have shown up for that.
Correct? Like, I think that they would have listened to the Democrats and done that.
Yeah. Okay.
If the Democrats would have responded to this with a bunch of gestures like they usually do, don't you think that there's a real possibility that these protests might not have happened?
Even if they were hollow gestures, if there would have been the illusion of an opposition party, do you think that the American people would have gone out in the millions?
Or do you think that they would have been like, okay, the Democrats have this and it's okay?
Oh, you know what?
I'm not sure.
What do you think?
I do not think they would have happened had the Democrats even offered up the illusion of hollow leadership.
I think that this is a message and it's very, very clear.
And here is my takeaway from it, Nick.
First, there's an opening for leadership right now.
People are desperate for it.
People want it.
They need it.
People are starting to feel connected.
They're starting to feel motivated.
They're meeting others.
And listen, if you went to one of these protests, doubtlessly, you probably received a flyer from somebody.
You might have signed an email list.
Who knows, right?
You are building connections and organizations.
You need to take that and run with it in your community, in your workplaces.
But here's the bigger question, Nick, and this is the thing that I am focused on the most.
What can we shift to?
It's not enough to get Trump out.
It's not enough to get Musk out.
It's not enough to go back to the status quo.
What can we do with this?
Democracy being activated and people being aware of small-D democratic energy, it leads to things.
And I think what's been exposed is that the status quo doesn't work and that we need other solutions.
And if we are able to stay with this and to continue to build it, I think that we have a chance at building something better.
of building something that is light years ahead of what we have had for the past few decades.
And I don't know if you got a sense of that, but when you are with a crowd and when you're at one of these protests and you're speaking with one voice and you're feeling the people around you and you see you're not alone and you're not powerless, Not only does it invigorate you, it becomes addictive.
You suddenly start to understand that people can come together and that they can enact their will.
And I'll be honest, I don't think after the past decade, much less the past few decades, that people are going to just see Trump or Musk get out of there and suddenly be okay with it.
I think they understand that something different needs to happen at this point.
Yeah, for sure.
What's interesting, I thought, was the speakers in LA were, you know, relatively underwhelming.
The presentation wasn't great in a way that, how hard would it have been for Adam Schiff?
Or any of the big names in California and the bluest of blue states and bluest of bluest cities across the country to come and speak.
And that was an opportunity completely wasted.
Now, it's possible that at the grassroots level they didn't want that because they didn't want to overshadow the grassroots part of this movement, but I don't know.
That's an opportunity that they really can't let pass by.
This is a chance to galvanize more and use their talking about getting more coverage for that.
Again, it just kind of boggles my mind.
I'm trying to even think, looking at the coverage across the country, I don't know if we saw any nationally elected federal officials or politicians speaking at any of them.
Did you hear?
You know, I paid attention to it.
I didn't see any.
I'll say that with a carte blanche.
I don't know.
I might have missed something, but no, I did not see a very strong uppercase D Democratic show up.
Strange, right?
I mean, Nick, we have spent years now analyzing and reacting to this party, and they are conservative by nature, and they might not want to be out in that.
And like you said, and I think it's accurate, they might not have been welcome.
At this point, we have to understand who our allies are and who they aren't.
Right. Well, then, okay, good.
Then there's an opportunity for someone somewhere in these cities on a local level to grasp that microphone and to grasp that platform.
Can I say one last thing on that?
We reported last week on the Cory Booker record speech, right?
One thing that drives me crazy in all this, and we've seen Bernie Sanders and AOC, and certainly Jasmine Crockett has not been shy about decrying what's going on.
A system of politics, it depends.
We've talked about shame and honor and sort of decorum.
We've talked about that ad nauseum.
It's also the way that our system is set up with the co-equal branches of government and the way that they're supposed to interact.
There's an expected level of ambition.
You know, like people who want to be able to sort of recognize currents.
And one of the things that has shocked me in all of this is the lack of ambition.
From Democrats.
Like, people who could make their name at this point.
You know, I talked about it with Booker and how my sources said that this was as much about breaking Strom Thurmond's record and, you know, raising hell when it came to Donald Trump as it was somehow or another moving up to Senate Democrat leadership.
So where are the people who are recognizing the moment and how many of them are being kept home because, again, they're afraid of fundraising.
They're afraid of losing donors.
But you would expect...
That with something like this growing, that there would be some type of an ambition that would at least animate some of these people.
I mean, I wonder, like, when you get a chief of staff, if you just become a new, you know, congressperson, let's just say, like, are they trained to have, like, the most basic and most conservative...
Are they trained to suck shit?
Basically, yes.
Like, you think that somebody out of the box would kind of realize this and understand that there's a huge...
Opening here, that's the whole key here, is you've got to look at where there are inefficiencies and attack those.
And it's mind-boggling because it would be so easy to do that, especially in the red meat areas of the country where there wouldn't be welcome, you know, and they don't have to be worried about what the crowd would say or do.
In fact, it would probably be a lightning rod for them to spurn onto something else.
You're right.
I can't believe it's because they don't want to appear.
Too ambitious, right?
That just seems silly, right?
They've already ran for office.
It's clear what they want to do.
So I can't believe anyone would say that, oh, I can't show up there because I don't want to look like I'm taking advantage.
I don't understand.
But hopefully enough people are listening to this and that they have that kind of influence and can kind of change that.
Because we need it.
We need some people to be out there more and leading like they are supposed to be doing.
I will say one last thought on this, Nick, which is...
Everything that we have seen in terms of how modern politics works, in terms of how organizing and managing the base and appealing to the base, and now what we're talking about here and what happened with BLM.
I have one takeaway, and I am becoming increasingly certain of it, which is that of the status quo rank and file politicians of our modern era, what scares them more than anything else is small d democracy.
Everything from how our elections work, how the appeals work, how just political wrangling works, it speaks to me that what they're very afraid of is an energized electorate.
And not just an energized electorate, but an energized electorate that expects things.
Right? Like, you are either going to do this job, or we have news for you, which is we'll find somebody else to do that job.
Let me add on to that, though, because I think the other fear is what BLM has become as it's been smeared by the right, right?
A lot of terms that used to really stand for noble things get dragged through the mud, and then all of a sudden nobody wants to be associated with it and stuff like that.
Dude, it scared the Democrats so much that like an old Looney Tunes cartoon, they all stood up and ran so fast that all their kentaclaws were left hanging in the air.
Yeah. Yeah, because think about it.
BLM now represents looting, rioting.
It's not a process of riot.
Well, CRT and Marxism because they allowed the Republican Party to do it.
Yeah, and also, you know, because it was advocating for people of color, all of a sudden it just becomes those people.
I mean, like, it really, you know, and that's horrible.
A, it's horrible and should never have been allowed to happen, right?
And here we are now where no one will bring up BLM.
I don't think anybody running ever again will say, I was so proud to march with BLM in 2020 and take a knee and make my stand.
I think we will.
I think we'll say that, and our listeners will say that.
I don't think the politicians will, because they allowed the Republican Party, and again, BLM had actual asks, which was to reinvest in programs in cities and communities.
And the Democrats were like, oh, you want something?
I don't know about that.
No. Right?
Because you have to stand with it.
Yeah. So, speaking of things that are energizing people, Nick, we have to check in on the economy.
It's doing great, everybody.
Massive, massive losses since Liberation Day last week.
We had two days that were back-to-back, two of the worst days in the modern history of the stock market.
10% of wealth was wiped out.
The S&P is inching near a bear market.
The world markets are an absolute wreck.
Goldman Sachs Which brings me back to what I said at the beginning of this term and before this term, which is a recession might be the best case scenario.
We have seen this thing vacillate quickly.
We'll talk about some of the other sort of minutia that's taken place with it.
But Nick, what was it like for you watching the American economy basically be set on fire and wondering when the circuit breakers were going to flip over?
Well, you know, it's funny.
I'm old enough to remember Black Monday in 1987, right around my birthday, and the pall that it cast for a long time over just like society.
And so, you know, All weekend long, we're looking at all the indications.
By the way, I've now turned into a Republican because I'm going to tell you, geez, Jared, it really isn't as bad as we thought it was going to be today as we're recording this midday on Monday.
We dropped a thousand.
They're a little under a thousand points today.
Oh, only a thousand?
Oh, okay.
Cool. We're in business, folks.
Now, FYI, the two-day drop we saw last week on Thursday and Friday, that two-day drop is like top five all-time drops we've ever seen.
And, you know, this is not over, as we've seen that China is now going to retaliate more.
And then I think that the United States is going to retaliate again on top of that.
So I think the biggest issue we have...
Is that we're dealing with a party and a leader of a party who's maybe the biggest mental flaw that they have is they can never admit that they're wrong.
That's a chunk of it because, you know, we are starting to see, you know, I'm going to do something, Nick.
Are you ready?
Yeah. I want you to take your hands.
I don't know if you've got arms on that chair.
Put them on the desk.
Put your feet on the ground.
If people are driving, just...
Don't freak out.
You know who I'm going to give credit to very quickly?
No. I'm going to give credit to Raphael Theodore Cruz.
And here's the reason why.
Cruz was asked about this, and he said, well, this is a gamble, and if it doesn't pay off, it's going to be a bloodbath.
This is the guy who couldn't be bothered to, like, Trump basically said that his wife was a dog, and he was like, I'll phone bank for you.
Who said that his dad killed JFK?
He's like, how can I help you?
He came out and at least admitted that if this thing doesn't work the way that Trump and the people around him say it will, that it's going to be very, very bad.
The other issue with it is not just that they can't admit that they're wrong in terms of they're afraid to do it.
They're in a cult.
They're zealots.
And the people who are doing this, and that's the other issue with it, Nick, they have all kinds of different reasons for doing it.
Some people want to destroy the economy.
Some people want to create this new authoritarian ethnostate, you name it.
And as this stuff is happening, it's almost impossible to try and move away from it.
And what you just said about how it's not as bad as it could be today, there's an element of this that we need to take a look at.
And for anybody who isn't a political sicko and they have other things to do, there was a weird moment today.
And we're recording this on Monday, April 7th.
And it happened because there was a bit of the fake news, Nick.
And so over on X, the everything app, a rumor started going viral that Trump had said that he was going to pause tariffs because of what was happening with the economy for 90 days.
So this goes viral.
And then immediately the market reacts.
Here is a clip from Fox Business.
For people who are watching this on YouTube, you will see to the left, you will see the market reacting to the realization that this wasn't true and it was total bullshit.
It's all in the red.
It's all in free fall.
This temporary reset had just been exposed for what it is.
Here's Fox Business.
Just listen to the tone of these people as they're trying to explain things.
But the White House was watching that performance and they called in and said, hey, that is fake news.
We have confirmation from the White House that there is no plan to pause on tariffs.
So... I have a couple of points here, Nick, and I want to interweave them very quickly.
He might not have ever seen this before, but do you know when else you saw things like this?
Back in the good old days, the 1920s in particular, the 1929 collapse that led to the Great Depression.
I think a lot of people think when they consider and imagine what that was like in terms of the stock market, they think of it like a ski slope.
Right? Like an advanced level ski slope, just straight down.
But it goes up and it goes down and it's a really bumpy ride as it goes down.
And a large part of it has to do with rumors.
And a lot of, and this is a hard thing to think about as a person.
My 401k is there, right?
Like, I mean, a lot of us, a lot of pensions, a lot of businesses, like this entire thing could blow up because we are wired to a bomb.
is the truth.
And the idea that things can spook it and move it that are just hearsay, and now, this thing on X, Nick- X is wired for misinformation.
It prioritizes it.
It amplifies it.
At any given moment, rumors and hearsay can cause some sort of a run or a panic, like the type of videos you see out of people getting caught up in stampedes.
This thing is really, really dire in that way.
Right. And, you know, luckily, well, not luckily, but it did adjust relatively quickly for that.
And that's what we have to expect going forward.
Yep. And it's gross.
The guy that reported it on Exit said he heard it in Reuters, and Reuters might have just completely misunderstood what the quote that Trump said was, which was, we're not going to.
It doesn't help when you have bad communicators and bad faith communicators in the White House during a time like this.
And then you're also furiously, at the quickest possible moment, posting whatever you can post.
You know, before you don't want to get anyone else to beat you for it, right?
So you mix that all toxically together and you're going to get this.
It is impressive, though, that a tweet could do that, right, to the markets.
Now you have to wonder about all of Trump's tweets because at varying times we've seen, since he's been in office since 2016 and 2017, you know, there are moments we've all thought...
This is bullshit what he's doing, and he's probably trading on it.
He's probably trying to enrich himself by doing this.
They've got to fix this.
This is not a great way to build an economy, I'm telling you.
Some would say it's the exact opposite of the way to build an economy.
It's actually the way to demolish one.
I just want to say that One of the things, if you actually look at history and you actually know history and you pay attention to the history of capitalism, I talk about this all the time.
It's booms and busts, right?
It's up and it's down.
And then you create these guardrails to keep it from doing that because unchecked, unfettered capitalism will always destroy itself, which is what's happening right now.
This was so...
Nick, I've been screaming about this for as long as you and I have known each other that this was coming.
And so...
You have to learn from history and recognize, what did we do?
We have lashed ourselves as a society to a ticking time bomb.
And really, when you look at this, and you have somebody like Trump who comes in and does this and doesn't give a shit what's going to happen to actual people, and doesn't have good faith and doesn't have empathy, all of a sudden you create a situation where everything that you thought reality was, and why did the market react like this?
Because everyone with a stake in this is like, what in the hell are you doing?
They're still in denial about what's happening here and why it's happening, and they keep expecting him to wake up suddenly and change course.
And that's not who he is.
That's not what these people are doing.
And people are still...
That's the scary thing for me, Nick, is that we saw two of the worst days in the history of the stock market, and it's still buttressed by denial.
You know what I mean?
It's still people who are in because they don't necessarily understand or are able to fully fathom what it is that's happening.
Sure. I mean, look how desperate they were to get any kind of news.
You saw a 2,000 point jump in about half an hour.
Based on Cat Turd 15. Not even the real Cat Turd.
Yeah. I mean, if that's not an indication, I don't know what it is that Trump needs to do something differently here with all his campaign promises.
Because he keeps trying to ride the wave of saying, we said this.
We told you we were going to do this.
But they also told us we would have so much winning and the market would be up.
And if we, oh, he also said if Harris won, then the market would tank and crash.
Now, this a little bit reminds me of when I was coaching at some point basketball.
And I would say to the kids, if we could design an offense where you get a layup on every possession, would you want to run that offense?
And they all would shook their head and said, no.
And we would be like, what is happening here?
And it's a similar mindset, right?
Because in reality, what the market should be is 100 years of like, 10% growth or 5% growth year over year.
The most boring thing imaginable.
Yeah, because then everybody can participate and everybody can dip whatever they have their savings in that and get a nice 4% return year over year, whatever it is.
And then over enough time, they'd have something that they could retire on and it would be stable.
That would be great.
Nobody wants that.
And I suppose what would limit is you wouldn't have as many...
Multi-billionaires, right?
Because you can't go a huge margin on that.
But it would be so much better of a place.
Things would work, I would think.
And people would not be starving.
And kids would not go hungry.
And they'd be able to be taught.
Everything, in my mind, is improved when you don't have these big busts like this.
Nick, that's a lot of hopeful thinking.
But I can tell you, looking at the history of capitalism, there is no circumstance in which anybody agrees to that.
Like, that's the terrible problem, is that this doesn't work.
And we should have learned our lesson in 2008.
2008 should have been the moment where Barack Obama and the people around him who had political courage and will said, we're not doing this anymore.
And now, maybe we'll learn our lesson.
4% growth for 100 straight years annually would be to some people, you're limiting income.
Oh, that's tyranny, Nick!
Yeah. There's a reason why the New Deal was deconstructed.
It's tyranny, even though we had just come off the worst economic disaster of all time.
That's the thing that really pisses me off about America and capitalism.
We just saw it!
We just saw it 17 years ago.
And none of the lessons were learned whatsoever.
None. You don't believe that this is Trump's way of getting the 10-year Treasury bill rate to go down so they can refinance all this debt and save all this money?
I don't think that Donald Trump has any one explanation for why he thinks this is happening.
I think it changes constantly, and I think it intermingles.
I do not think this man is well.
The people behind him know why they're doing this, but Donald Trump, which, by the way, let's cut to the old president of the United States of America, and let's see what he has to say about the fact that he is currently melting down the market.
Is there pain in the market at some point?
You're unwilling to tolerate this idea of a Trump put?
Is there a threshold?
I think your question is so stupid.
I don't want anything to go down.
But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.
And we have such a horrible...
We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen.
They took our businesses.
They took our money.
They took our jobs.
They moved it to Mexico.
They moved it to Canada.
They moved a lot of it to China.
And it's not sustainable.
We're not going to do it.
Now we have hundreds of billions of dollars that's pouring into our country on a monthly basis.
It's already started because they put tariffs on it.
And eventually it's going to straighten out and our country will be solid and strong again.
That's fun.
Nick, can I take you back in history just a little bit and tell you a little story?
Do we have the wavy lines?
Yeah, we got the Wayne's World wavy lines.
This is back in the far-off ancient...
I can't imagine anybody...
The 1990s.
And this was after the fall of the Soviet Union and another president who didn't really know what was going on at the time.
His name was Boris Yeltsin.
His problems were a little bit different than Donald Trump, I think, in terms of why he didn't know what was going on.
It had to do with vodka, for anybody keeping track.
And immediately after the Soviet Union fell, Nick, all the people who are doing what is happening, who are doing what...
We're seeing now, they got so excited because one of the largest possible markets and resource markets in the world just opened up from complete state-level control.
And they got all horned up, all these neoliberals, and they went over to what used to be the Soviet Union, and they started slicing and dicing the resources.
They needed to lower the standard of living.
They saw a hell of amount of wealth to be made.
This is how the oligarchs got created.
This is also how Vladimir Putin got put in position in part because of the United States of America.
It's an ongoing cycle.
Here's a quote from Mr.
Yeltsin during that time.
Are you ready, Nick, as he was ushering in shock therapy and neoliberalism?
Duh. That's very funny.
That's very good.
That's very good.
Quote, Russia is gravely ill and the economy is sick.
And you know what you need to give it?
You need to give it some medicine.
It's going to hurt for a little while, but I promise it's going to get better.
This is just the next evolution of neoliberalism, except for now, it's not in another country, it's not over here.
The full force and brunt of it, which is about lowering the standard of living, creating an oligarchical class that controls resources and labor, it's happening in the United States of America.
Yeah, just a spoonful of sugar, Jared.
Yeah, just makes it go down.
Which reminds me of a sign I saw over the weekend, which I feel like I should share.
I don't know if you were on the Discord while I was wringing my hands trying to come up with a good sign.
I ultimately came up with the Turd Reich, which I thought was pretty good.
People liked it.
But the one I heard, my favorite, was Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS.
It's good.
It kind of covers everything, and it's got a nice ring to it from Mary Poppins.
Anyhow, yes, medicine.
Surgery, right?
All these different kind of terms we're using for this.
All in the name of, hey, you're going to have to deal with this for a while.
So the question now is, what is a while?
Are we willing to put up with this?
Is there a possibility, Jared, that like, yeah, all of a sudden, all the revenue coming in from tariffs really does make up for whatever we're not getting from wealth and corporations and taxes.
Maybe it will work.
Now I'm at the point now where I'm like, I don't know.
No. I'm sorry.
No. No.
I think what we're looking at is possibly in the next couple of weeks or maybe month, we're going to see the announcement of a Project Warp Speed type program to goose domestic production.
I think that's exactly where it's coming, in creating the sort of shacks where people are going to die and be exploited next to their children, and automation's going to run.
I think that is the next time.
And he's going to try and goose the economy with that.
And it'll be interesting to see whether or not it works.
Meanwhile, we have this coming up, which shows you exactly how out of the loop so many of the people around Trump are.
The markets lost more than $6 trillion in value.
Was this disruption always part of the plan, Mr. Secretary?
Look, Chris, markets are...
Organic, the animals, and you never know what the reaction's going to be.
One thing that I can tell you, as the Treasury Secretary, what I've been very impressed with is the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday, and everything is working very smoothly, so the American people take great comfort in that.
All right, I just got interrupted for a second.
This is Treasury Secretary Scott Besson.
He's literally saying that, hey, we should be really happy because a lot of people were trading a lot and the computers didn't melt down on Friday.
Isn't that great?
That's what he's trying to say.
Did you ever think that you would miss Mnuchin?
Ugh. Did you ever think for a second that you'd be like, my kingdom for Mnuchin?
Yeah, yeah, because you can tell already the guy is grasping for any straw he can come up with that would paint this in any light where he doesn't get fired by Trump by saying anything that could be construed as negative.
Let's just address this real quick.
In terms of the market reaction, look, we get these short-term market reactions from time to time.
the market consistently underestimates Donald Trump.
I remember that in 2016, the night President Trump won, That's the biggest lie I've ever heard anybody...
It's an incredible lie.
It did not crash when he took office.
Yeah, do you remember when we were all selling pencils?
Because Trump won the 2016 election.
That's incredible.
That's such incredible.
He was going to be the most pro-business president in over a century, maybe in the history of the country.
And we went on to very high after-inflation returns for the next four years.
Oh, my goodness gracious.
CEOs, corporations, and fund traders, Nick, they're breaking open heads and feasting on the goo inside right now.
He calls this a market reaction.
For the next four years.
Because COVID hits and the economy cratered the last year.
So, you know, this dear leader stuff is really concerning.
And this guy is just, he is as idiotic as I've heard anybody talk here in this administration right now.
And, you know, everybody wants to tout him as being this.
I mean, he was just an investor.
By the way, you know where he came from, right?
Scott Besant was Soros, the Soros company.
And I have no idea, well, I do know now, how he wasn't tainted by that to the degree where he would never get to sniff anything like this, right?
They love the fact that, I mean, Correct me if I'm wrong, but like...
Don't you think that the Republican Party and Trump would say, well, here's a gay man, an outwardly gay man.
We're going to be able to put him in here, and he's going to do everything we say, and that's going to give us cover to make us look like we're all woke, or not woke, but we're all inclusive in our tent.
Well, I mean, it's always sort of, again, I almost said checkers, but it's more like chess.
It's very much who gets in a Trump administration is who answers the phone.
Right? Or who is like a Linda McMahon who is just going to be happy to have the title and isn't particularly interested in doing anything or being engaged.
I think Besson is, like, he was probably voted most likely to follow a trail of candy off a ravine.
Like, I mean, this is high-level shit.
Literally look at one of the most historic stock market collapses that we have ever seen.
And to treat it like this, like this guy, I almost want to talk to Besant and just say very quietly, you're in danger.
Blink twice if you need an escape route.
So speaking of escape routes, we are seeing a horde of GOP senators.
Rand Paul.
Again, credit where credit is due.
It's just like, this is nuts, and we should not be doing this.
A lot of GOP senators are going across the aisle to work with the Democrats to try and yank and pull tariff power away from the presidency and back to Congress.
The White House has already promised to veto this if it ever reaches Trump's desk.
It is good to see that people can get motivated when people fuck with their money.
Sure. And I was looking at this, because you know when the president got this amount of power to impose tariffs?
Oh, man, that's a good trivia question.
Yeah, 1934, during the Depression, they gave FDR the right to do this, because they were in, you know, they're where we're going, right, now.
And they never, the president's never really relinquished it, but it never was a big deal, because we had...
Adults. Well, to be frank, it was a big deal, but it was a big deal in waiting.
That's a large part of what we talk about this, which is you keep giving power to the president and you keep hoping, worst case scenario, you get George W. Bush.
That's the hope.
Right? That's the absolute worst case scenario.
But of course, a D-list pseudo-celebrity who's an absolute maniac and black hole of emotional intelligence and intelligence in general, that's when shit really hits the fan.
Yeah. I mean, again, let's remember, his fever dream of having equal trade between every country in the world, like, you know, what are we going to...
We don't make coffee, right?
So if we're trading with Brazil for coffee, we can't make that match.
Bananas. All the things that we don't grow, we don't do, we can't match that back and forth.
It's always going to be out of whack.
But we all benefit from each other.
So yes, the idea that a normal president would be able to assign tariffs, especially with normal math and not whatever the fuck they're doing, seemed to be reasonable, I suppose, at the time.
What's more mind-numbing to me is that, yeah, great, take control back the way we had it and have it under law, and then this asshole is going to somehow be able to veto that.
That is the problem.
This is Dick Cheney's wet dream, right?
This is what he's been waiting for since Nixon got thrown out of office in the 70s.
That's exactly right.
That's where the groundwork was laid.
And I just want to underline something, Nick, which is...
All of these people, whether it's GOP senators, Democratic senators, our media, CEOs like JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, who for all intents and purposes, all of these CEOs have been leaking to anybody who will talk to them right now.
We've been very concerned.
We just felt like we couldn't say anything.
What motivates them to say something, Nick?
It's when he fucks with the money.
That's it.
It's not when people are disappeared.
It's not when he's rewiring the internet works of the federal government.
It's not when he's destroying social safety programs.
That's not enough.
What matters is when he fucks with the money.
When he fucks with their money.
Their money.
Very much.
They couldn't give a crap if poor people have to pay more at the pump or at the grocery store.
Grocery. That's an interesting word.
But when you start messing with their accounts and their 401ks and all that and their investments, yes, now we got to...
Now it's a problem.
Impeachment. You know, if he keeps this up and he plunges into recession...
Don't be surprised if impeachment might even come up.
It might come up.
How many would you need to get the process going at this point in Congress?
Not many from the Republican side.
It would have to come from the House.
The vast majority of Republican House members, they're lucky they don't choke on their tongue hour to hour.
These are just absolute zealots.
I don't see that necessarily happening.
One thing that you and I have talked about as this presidency is unfurled, You fuck with intelligence, you fuck with the military, and now you're fucking with the money.
Things happen.
And I don't think that there's been enough discussion of that, but I just want to say right now, things happen.
And that's capital T, capital H. Things happen.
Nobody should.
Nobody should.
So, Nick, speaking of people being disappeared, this little nugget came to us from the people over at 60 Minutes who are still doing investigative work.
This is 60 Minutes talking about the people that we've been discussing who have been deported.
Well, I don't want to say deported, who have been disappeared to El Salvador.
The Trump administration has yet to release the identities of the Venezuelan men it sent to El Salvador last month.
We obtained internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information.
We cross-referenced that with domestic and international court filings, news reports, and arrest records whenever we could find them.
At least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records, here in the United States or abroad.
The vast majority are for nonviolent offenses like theft, shoplifting, and trespassing.
About a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault, and kidnapping.
For 3% of those deported, it is unclear whether a criminal record exists.
Nick, what was that meatloaf hit song, One Out of Four Ain't Bad?
That's a hit song from him?
If he's not singing about the dashboard and whatnot, I don't think I'm going to.
It's two out of three.
One out of four.
They got one out of four on this one and sent them to a nightmare, hellish, dystopian prison.
But 75% of those who were sent there do not have criminal records.
Go figure.
And we talked about this for months leading into this.
This is a real problem.
Problem. This makes me as sad as I could be reading about anything.
We've seen this movie, right?
We've seen the guy who was improperly imprisoned and the peril that you are in in a situation for someone like that.
And again, the notion that they're not here legally is one thing.
And then the notion that they're going to be sent to a prison like this is a whole other thing that puts the government and Trump in a...
He should be in jail.
Yeah. He should be in jail.
By the way, this is where Marco Rubio is going to end up in jail for this, right?
I'm glad very quickly before we talk about this story and expand on it.
Nick, I do think, and this goes along with the protest movement and what's happening, I do think...
It's necessary for people to start wrapping their heads around the idea that this shouldn't just be like getting Trump out of power, getting Musk out of power, the oligarchs out of power.
These people need to go to jail.
They need to go to jail.
And people need to stop wringing their hands around this.
They belong in jail or they deserve worse.
Period. That's it.
I mean, you look at something like this, there's no other conclusion to come to.
Absolutely. So the case should be against Donald Trump for doing this, and it should get to the Supreme Court, and then when they have to consider whether he's got absolute immunity for something like this, they can finally say this is not an official duty when you violate the law that's explicitly written.
So to do this in the way they're doing it, but again, they're just going to palm this off on Marco Rubio eventually, and anybody underneath him.
That's what they set it up for, and they'll hide behind that immunity, and they're not going to stop.
I mean, we now just saw that a The court ordered them to return a guy who clearly was an administrative mistake that they admitted in court by tonight.
And suddenly the Supreme Court comes in and says, you know what, you don't have to do that just yet.
Yeah, and that's Kilmer Armando Obrego, who was sent there, like the administration admits it was a mistake.
The president of El Salvador is just trolling everybody.
Now the Trump administration is saying that if federal judge Paul Ginas was allowed to do this, is allowed to bring somebody who has legal protections and permanent status in the United States back from a hellish prison that they send him to unlawfully, that that would allow the courts to interfere.
Because they sent this guy over here.
It is, again, it's just this whack-a-mole strategy that they've created.
And I want to say to people, on one hand, you need to be concerned about this because if they can do this to Armando...
If they can do this to anybody.
Also, we're hearing about the story from Sackett's Harbor in New York where Ice disappeared a mother and her three kids, including an eight-year-old.
They finally have reappeared after God knows what they went through.
Not only does that make it possible for them to do it to you, but from a basic human level, we need to understand that this being done to anybody is completely unacceptable.
And this should have been a red line.
The economy is bad, and do not get me wrong, and I'm glad that people are out protesting, and I'm glad that people are taking the economy seriously, but there have been so many red lines that this administration has stepped over.
And this one, that should have been the moment, whether it was Mahmoud Khalil or any of the other students who got disappeared, any of the protections they got, the extortion racket that's been handled by this administration, you name it.
Everything that they have done at this point, every single day, every passing hour, is another red line that should have been the tripwire where people said enough is enough.
Oh, and if I'm not mistaken, that woman's kids, you know, who were very, very young, were handcuffed.
Eight years old.
Yeah. And so it's writing.
I just want to read what the judge wrote in this case for Kilmar Garcia.
The judge wrote, The U.S. government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process.
The government's contention otherwise and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene are unconscionable.
And, you know, unfortunately, she's hiding behind a little bit of lawyerese and judge speak, where they need to call them out even more viciously than they're doing here.
I mean, that is pretty, for a judge to say that, it's pretty crazy.
But we need better language that really, really explains what's going on here.
Fascism, those are the key words that need to start being spoken here.
So, Nick, let's boil this down a little bit.
Let's zoom in a little bit.
If a judge had learned that a sheriff with malicious intent had disappeared somebody without any due process, and then the sheriff admitted that they did it and showed absolutely no regret, Not only would that person, if they were able to be found, if they were alive, would they be freed, but investigations would commence immediately on the person who did that.
You cannot have a nation That allows a president to do these types of things.
And I don't care.
I don't give a shit what the Supreme Court said.
I don't care how we're supposed to treat the president who is almost expected to commit war crimes and crimes all the time.
This is not a way that anything can actually function.
And having a person lifted up to this type of a position with that type of immunity, it's poison.
It destroys a country.
And it only means that things like this are not just possible.
It means that they're inevitable.
For sure.
And we saw that.
We saw Joe Arpaio do this in Arizona, where he was sentenced for inhumane treatment of, well, actually, they think they found him in contempt of court, but it was in relation to him with the inhumane treatment of migrants here.
So somebody needs to do something about that and utilize the courts.
And again, as we drift further and further into fascism and authoritarianism, the fear of the courts or the power of the courts is being diminished rapidly.
And that's where we're going to find out whether the Supreme Court is going to enforce this.
And that's what I'm curious to find out.
They want a reply from the plaintiff, the plaintiff's lawyer by tomorrow so that they can do something.
And then the idea being that within the week, the guy is returned.
But for the United States lawyers to say, whoops, we can't do anything about it.
We can't control El Salvador now.
What do you want us to do about it is ridiculous.
To reiterate, it all rests on Amy Coney Barrett.
And if that Doesn't send chills up and down your spine.
Like where Amy Coney Barrett lands on something is the hinge vote in the Supreme Court.
It should make it very, very clear.
And Nick, I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this because I look at it and I could very well see a situation where the Supreme Court says, you know what, like this has gone too far.
Here's one thing that you can't do.
If they say that you can, is that going to set a precedent?
Right? Like, if they go ahead and say that, well, you know, this is a logistical loophole, they can do whatever they want.
It's off to the races.
Or are they going to do the chicken shit thing that they have been known to do in the modern era, which is this is a ruling that only applies to this situation, right?
So there are so many ways.
I hate that we're looking at this, and this is the side effect of letting the Republican Party steal the Supreme Court.
We would be having such a different experience of this presidency if they had not been allowed to steal the Supreme Court.
Absolutely. And you can imagine, we already heard Trump on that plane say that he had no problem sending citizens to prison in El Salvador.
And I think they're going to try and couch it like, well, he meant violent criminal citizens out of there.
So? But how often are they going to F that up and end up sending somebody?
How many times do innocent people get sentenced to prison?
All the time it happens, right?
Well, and you shouldn't be sending American citizens.
I don't care what they do.
I really don't give a shit what they do.
They can do the worst thing in the world.
They don't need to then be sent to some sort of dystopian prison in another country.
Right. And then, you know, in their fever dream, oh, don't worry, 10 years from now when we start doing this, we're going to have the safest streets, the cleanest, whatever, and it'll be so great for society.
Meanwhile, no one will want to leave the fucking house.
No! Fear of looking someone the wrong way and getting accused.
That's what happens.
And every time you do that kind of thing, people start turning you in and making stuff up because they want something from you.
And it turns into dystopian.
So we need more protests.
We need something.
We need more.
Save us, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
You are our only hope.
I think she might.
I think she might be on the right side of this, honestly.
I hate...
That we even have to discuss that.
I know.
I know.
Like, for real, that is, it is so, oh, it drives me nuts that that's literally the state of things.
Amy Coney Barrett, everyone.
Cool. All right.
Well, we will be covering these stories, I'm sure, and more when we come back on Friday with The Weekender.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast, gain full access to those episodes, and support the show.
Keep us editorially independent, ad-free.
It's the only reason we're able to do this show the way that we do it, and we appreciate your faith.
All right, everybody.
If you need us before then, over on Blue Sky, you can find Nick at Nick Houseman.
