President Trump's aggressive trade war, featuring a 125% tariff on Chinese imports, sparks internal conflict between Elon Musk and Peter Navarro while risking political capital. Critics warn this chaos mirrors the Afghanistan withdrawal mishandling, yet supporters view it as necessary to counter China's dominance. The discussion analyzes whether public advisor sparring signifies instability or healthy democracy, noting Democrats' failure to acknowledge policy errors. Ultimately, the segment speculates Trump could restore the economy to pre-pandemic levels by year-end, securing peace in the Middle East and Ukraine while leveraging technocrats to create 10 to 15 million high-tech jobs despite automation challenges. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trump's Trade Execution00:10:52
China is very explicit over the long run.
They want to take us out.
Not, to me, dissimilar to what happened to President Biden and the Afghanistan withdrawal.
It's not the idea, it's how he's executed it.
We hold all the cards.
We're the richest country in the world.
We have been a fabulous economy.
Everybody wants to sell to our consumers.
The hysteria will start acting in reverse.
People will say, oh my God, look at these stocks.
When he gets the big enchilada, a big, a big offer, that will sell well in the four years of the Biden presidency.
Why was the mainstream media reluctant to go much, much harder on what everyone was seeing with their own eyes?
Look, we were subtle.
There was this reluctance to draw the conclusion.
He represents the vast majority of Democrats wallowing in their wokeism in their DEI politics.
They still learn nothing.
There's a lot going on in President Trump's world.
A new temporary 90-day reprieve on tariffs in many countries, but certainly not for China.
The president's just hit China with a massive 125% on its imports, responding to China's tariff of 84% introduced earlier today.
So the all-out trade war is on.
MAGA is quarreling.
Economies are seething.
Markets are reeling one way and the other.
For the time being at least, the president remains unscathed.
He's ripping up the rule book, and most voters like it.
This is interesting.
So Trump's presidential power is too much, the right amount, too little.
Well, 47% say too much, but then you get 36% who say the right amount.
Then you get 17% who say too little.
So you're essentially dealing with a majority of the American public, 53%, who do not say that Trump has too much power.
They either say he has too little power or the right amount of power.
So the idea, that argument that Donald Trump is quote-unquote a king, that I don't think holds with the American people.
It does hold maybe with 47%, but with the majority of folks, they believe Donald Trump's doing something completely differently, and they don't believe he has too much power.
And the executive orders he signed certainly suggests he's no lame duck.
He is, as I said at the beginning, a soaring eagle.
Well, a big part of that, of course, is the way Trump is framing his presidency.
Just as he campaigned, it's a war between him and a failing establishment.
I'm proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers.
The president who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street, who protects the middle class, not the political class, and who defends America, not trade cheaters all over the globe.
They're trade cheaters.
They cheated on us.
They cheated with tariffs on us.
They stole our money.
They stole our jobs.
Well, that message has united MAGA, but not the method.
Elon Musk said that trade advisor Peter Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks before apologizing to the bricks.
Navarro called Musk a car assembler who should stay in his lane.
The White House has no problem.
It welcomes all debate.
These are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs.
Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue.
And you guys should all be very grateful that we have the most transparent administration in history.
And I think it also speaks to the president's willingness to hear from all sides.
Well, maybe there is something in that.
President Biden gave 36 press conferences in four years.
Trump seems to do 36 every week.
And while advisors point the finger at each other over the means of making America great again, Democrats are still pointing the finger at voters.
A felon who is more interested in loyalty, who's more interested in retribution, who's more interested in grift than in democracy.
And we chose a felon because we didn't want to elect a black woman.
Well, the tariffs are a big gamble with high stakes.
And as I've said several times, I don't know if it will work.
What definitely won't work is continuing to say half of Americans are racist bigots.
Democrats are fuming over President Trump's great power, but they're a big part of the reason that he has it again.
To debate all this and more, I'm joined by Chuck Todd, host of the Chuck Toddcast, Jamal Bowman, the former Democrat congressman for New York, Matt Schlatt, the chairman of CPAC, and Lindy Leed, the former fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Chuck Todd, welcome to Uncensored, making your debut.
Congratulations on breaking out into this brave new world, which I think you'll find very gentle.
Yeah.
Of course, of course.
It's great to see you, Chuck.
Look, you've been in Washington a long time.
You've seen it all before.
I don't think any of us have ever seen anything quite like what is happening here.
I've got to be honest, I just don't know if it could work.
I mean, I'm keeping an open mind, as I do with all things, Trump, that if you get away from the often incendiary rhetoric and the kind of brutal methodology, is there a method to the madness?
I'm looking at the markets this morning.
You've got a full-blown trade war now between the United States and China, but the market's gone up on this news, which suggests to me that maybe even on Wall Street, they're thinking, well, maybe it is time we had a gloves-off war over trade.
Well, I don't know if it's going to work either.
History says it's unlikely to work.
And I think the real challenge for President Trump is not, it's not what he's trying to do.
What he's trying to do is popular, right?
Bring back manufacturing, bring back more, you know, Americans should make more things in America.
That is a unifying idea.
But the way he's gone about it, I think has both been politically damaging to himself.
And then obviously it could be catastrophic to the economy.
You know, it's not to me dissimilar to what happened to President Biden and the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The idea of getting out of Afghanistan, that was universally popular, right?
That had 60, 70%, yes, get out.
How he got out became a test of his competency, or frankly, incompetency of his administration.
And when you look at how President Trump has done this, there's a good op-ed in the New York Times today, Owen Cass, who's a defender of the larger idea of what President Trump is doing, but simply seems to be sort of at his wit's end at sort of how he's trying to do it.
You know, politically, he should have done his tax cut first and sort of essentially gradually increased and gradually talked about how he was going to do his tariffs.
You do a little bit at a time, three months at a time, see who comes to the table.
You give business a chance to absorb the new rules.
And there is sort of, you can create some certainty in the business community.
The way he's done it, I think he's jeopardized his political support in Congress, even among his fellow Republicans, and he's jeopardized the competency that I think many business leaders assumed he had with the economy.
They looked at Trump 1 and thought, hey, that wasn't so bad.
Now, I would look at it and say, well, he's got an entirely different slate of advisors surrounding him this time than he had in 1.0.
You know, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, those guys were free marketers.
They were free traders.
There were a lot of free traders in his administration in Trump 1.0.
Those folks don't exist in Trump 2.0.
So I do think he's put himself and has put his party in massive political jeopardy by how he's gone about it.
It's not the idea, it's how he's executed it.
Well, Matt Schlatt, that's a really interesting point Chuck makes because we played a CNN clip earlier them talking about a poll which showed that the majority of Americans are comfortable with the level of power that Donald Trump has, which might be a surprise to many people on the left, for example, who think he's completely out of control, he's a king and so on.
So there's clear that the American people at the moment believe actually it's okay that he has this amount of power.
But how he's utilizing it is clearly causing him a lot of personal poll rating damage.
Because another CNN poll I saw this morning showed that over the tariff issue, his support is definitely plummeting.
And it is a massive roll of the dice.
Whatever side you're on, whichever way you look at this, nobody has ever tried to launch a global trade war.
He would dispute the word war, but I think most people would say that's what we're now in.
A global trade war between the United States and everybody else, with China in particular responding against fire with fire.
So the two things can be right.
People might be comfortable that the president has this power to do this, but the way he's executing this is eating up his political capital.
And again, I look, I don't know if it's going to work.
If it does, then he'll turn out to be a genius who played the ultimate blunt weapon and it worked.
If it doesn't work, conversely, he could be in serious political trouble.
And the Republicans heading into the midterms might get one hell of a beating there and then another big beating in the next election.
In other words, the stakes are incredibly high here.
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Yeah, so that's been the theme of my last decade, Piers, has been, how can you be supporting Trump?
Investing in America Now00:15:40
You're going to get destroyed in the midterms.
How can you support Trump?
He's going to lose the American people.
How can you support Trump?
He's going to be the least popular president in our history.
And what's turned out to be over the course of the last eight years is he's actually turned into be one of the most consequential presidents in our history.
And there's a couple of things that you have to realize, which is this trade war is going on already.
He's just decided to engage it.
So there was this acceptance by Democrats and Republicans, free traders, as we were, as Chuck just described them.
You know, I would quibble with that, but let's just say this.
We were okay with America paying for everything.
We were okay with American companies paying high tariffs and us having relatively low tariffs because we were so big and we were so successful and we dominated the economy and we dominated the globe.
And then over time, the American middle class got hollowed out and the American people soured on this idea of globalism and they soured on this idea that there was an upside to getting cheap t-shirts and cheap underwear when you couldn't work at the plant anymore.
You couldn't find a job.
And what you were told by a lot of people is that's okay.
You'll get retrained and you'll become a computer technician.
And that hasn't worked out so great for everyone.
The other war that we woken up to is the idea that we're in a global war with China, whether we want to accept that or not.
They are all over this globe.
They have become the globe's banker.
They're creating all the infrastructure on all these continents.
I see this with all the travels we do with CPAC.
And China is very explicit over the long run.
They want to take us out.
And the fact that they make almost all of our medicine and almost all the key things that we use to get by in our daily existence needs to be reexamined if we understand that the one making everything is the one who militarily and economically wants to take America out.
The final lesson we've learned is Donald Trump doesn't do things because he has to do them, which is what Republican presidents usually do.
They don't do anything until they actually are forced to do something.
He's doing like 300, 350 things that he doesn't really necessarily need to do in terms of the schedule, but he's doing them because he feels like America is going to lose its edge unless we have some corrections in these areas, including on trade.
Okay.
Jamal Bowman, I mean, Kevin O'Leary doesn't think Trump's going nearly hard enough.
He launched a searing attack on China's economic war, as he phrased it, against particularly the United States.
And he said this.
104% tariffs in China are not enough.
I'm advocating 400%.
I do business in China.
They don't play by the rules.
They've been in the WTO for decades.
They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades.
They cheat, they steal, they steal IP.
I can't litigate in their courts.
They take product, technology, they steal it, they manufacture it, sell it back here.
Never has an administration.
They can stand 400% tariffs.
What would they cheat on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field?
Now, Jamal, you know, people might say, well, that's outrageous and so on, but he's not a fool, Kevin O'Leary.
He's a very successful guy.
And he believes that what Trump is doing is not only right, but not aggressive enough that you've got to take the war to China because they've been waging an economic war for a sustained period of time now.
And it will eventually potentially put them above the United States.
I mean, for me, the simple question is, how is this trade war?
How are these tariffs going to help the American people?
And when I say the American people, I mean the working class American people.
Is this going to help bring down the cost of child care, the cost of groceries, the cost of utilities?
Is this going to help create millions of jobs here in America and create a federal jobs guarantee?
That's what Trump is saying.
That's what his supporters are saying.
But I would love to hear more about what the actual plan is.
What is the best case scenario?
What is the moderate scenario?
And what is the worst case scenario?
Right now, markets are inconsistent.
And that inconsistency is not good for the American economy overall.
But quite honestly, where I am in Yonkers, New York, where I represented the Bronx, places like Mount Vernon, working class, historically red line communities, whether the market is up or down, it is bad for working class people.
And so Mr. O'Leary, Trump, people like that who already have incredible wealth and resources, they have these conversations in a way that's disconnected from the American people.
You know what you do to beat China?
You invest in your own country and in your own communities and the communities where I've represented have been neglected by both our U.S. government and the private sector.
The private sector has been more focused on enriching itself than it has the American people.
And my worry is, is this going to lead to the further concentration of power and wealth for the one-tenth of 1%? wherever it lands, while the majority of the American people continue to struggle.
That's my worry.
That's my concern.
And I have not heard anything from the Trump administration.
I see no leadership from Congress on either side of the aisle as it relates to our economic power and strength and health and well-being going forward.
Okay, Linda Lee, one of the interesting things I think about all this is the way that Trump's own top team are at loggerheads with each other very publicly.
And I'm talking particularly about Elon Musk and Peter Navarro.
So you've got Musk, who seemed to be Trump's right-hand guy on all things economic and Doge and so on.
And you've got Navarro, who's one of his top trade advisors.
And they're openly abusing each other and attacking each other.
And it's clear that they have a fundamental disagreement over whether tariffs could work.
You know, Elon Musk looks at this as a business guy running huge businesses, which are currently taking a hell of a beating.
Very difficult to make Tesla cars at affordable prices, given how many parts they source from outside America, if the tariffs make it prohibitive to do so.
So he has, you know, on the one hand, he's trying to cut waste.
On the other hand, he's trying to save his own businesses.
Navarro, completely different.
You know, he's all in with all this.
I can't remember a time where you've seen senior people in an administration so early into a presidency publicly having this kind of slanging match.
I mean, I got to say, I find it quite healthy.
You know, I don't really like the concept of collective responsibility where everyone pretends they all agree with each other.
But what we're seeing are the kind of inner conversations all playing out in public, a bit like we saw with Trump and JD Vance and President Zelensky.
You know, it is very transparent, but what do you think of it?
Is this healthy or not?
Pierce, I love it.
Frankly, this puts the lie to the fact, you know, what Democrats are saying, that Trump is a king.
You think a king would allow dissension within the ranks?
I don't think so.
So I'm actually really happy to see this spilling out into the public.
And I think Retardo, which is the phrase that Elon used, is actually pretty clever.
And I want to say last time, Pierce, you questioned my loyalty.
I want to say one thing, though.
I lost like 25% of my net worth in the last couple of weeks because I am so heavy on the NASDAQ and tech stocks.
Yet I am willing to give Trump a chance.
It's only been four and a half trading days.
So I'm willing to see how this is going to play out.
And frankly, as Caroline Levitt just said a few hours ago, Trump has a steel of spine, has a spine of steel.
I'm sorry.
So let's just see who's going to blink first.
And at the end of the day, it's going to come down to China and the United States.
It's really about these two countries.
He's slapping tariffs everywhere to make sure that China has nowhere to go, to make sure that they can't have any loopholes.
But we'll just see what happens because obviously the status quo isn't working.
We're seeing so many cities around the country being completely decimated.
And maybe this will lead companies to reshort, perhaps and reindustrialize.
Perhaps this is, in fact, the medicine that we need.
But again, we also have to mention that we have increasingly financialized our economy.
And Wall Street doesn't necessarily reflect Main Street.
And most Trump supporters, a lot of them don't own stocks.
So they're not feeling the pain.
But I am really glad that you mentioned that Elon is dissenting.
Bill Ackman, for instance, is also speaking up.
This is a good sign.
It's a sign of a healthy democracy.
So all the Democrats out there marching and saying, you know, during their hands-off protests saying that Trump is a monarch, a king, that's absolutely not true because I grew up in a, I was born in an authoritarian regime.
And you better believe that no one is allowed.
No one is allowed at the danger of death to speak out against Xi Jinping.
Okay.
Well, look, stay with me, panel, because I'm going to have a quick chat now with somebody very directly concerned with the tariffs.
That's the owner of Marlin Steelwire in Baltimore, Drew Greenblank.
Drew, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Look, there's a lot of business people freaking out about what's going on here because they're seeing a massive assault on their profits potentially, massive assault on the stock price of their companies and so on.
Where do you sit with this?
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No more excuses.
You have to stay the course.
Now is a wonderful opportunity to invest in America.
Now is going to be a glorious future being created right now for the American worker.
We're going to give tremendous paths to get from being impoverished into the middle class.
These are opportunities that we didn't have for decades.
All of a sudden, we're going to be leveling the playing field.
This was not an opportunity a couple days ago.
Right now, we have all kinds of disconnects where we make baskets in Baltimore, Maryland using American steel, and we try to export it to Germany.
And the German government charges $129.25 for tariffs.
But if a German competitor ships the same exact basket back to America, the customs duty by the Americans is $1.25.
This is so unfair to the American worker.
We're leveling the playing field.
We're making it fair.
This is the time.
We have to understand that, yeah, t-shirts are going to cost a couple more bucks from Vietnam.
I'm all right with that.
What's more important is that $80,000, $90,000 jobs, $100,000 jobs with health insurance and 401k matches are very commonplace all throughout America because there's so many new job opportunities.
What if it doesn't work, Drew?
I mean, I admire.
Right.
I mean, look, I admire your optimism.
And you talked through a very good example there in your world in relation to what happens with Germany on tariffs.
And that does, on the face of it, obviously appear completely unfair to the United States and the United States workers.
But there are other areas where America has the edge over other countries, is what the argument goes.
And to take a sledgehammer on tariffs in the way that Donald Trump is doing, many people think is overly reckless.
And we're seeing the effect on the markets.
Now, the markets can behave like lemmings on the top of a cliff.
You know, they can run either way.
And I'm fully aware of that.
And I own stocks and I see what happens up and down all the time on just a whim or a tweet or whatever it may be.
But what if this overall policy, which I think most people kind of agree with Trump, that too much stuff has been outsourced outside of America.
Manufacturing has been allowed to sort of grind not to a halt, but certainly to a much bigger halt than it used to be in America.
And if you want to stand up for American workers, well, now's the time to do it, particularly with automated AI coming with robots and so on.
This is the time to stand up for human workers.
I get all that.
But what if the scale of what Trump is doing leads to a genuine economic recession, if not depression around the world?
Because if that happens, then none of the good stuff you're talking about will happen.
In fact, the opposite will happen.
People will have their savings destroyed and their lives destroyed.
50% of Americans don't own OneStock.
Millions, tens of millions of Americans don't have $250 in their checking account for an emergency war chest fund.
Okay.
We have to create paths and avenues for these people to get into the middle class, to be able to buy a car, buy a home, get into the American dream.
I reject that we're going into an economic tailspin.
It's the opposite.
It's going to be very good for us.
We're going to get all kinds of trade deals.
We hold all the cards.
We're the richest country in the world.
We have a fabulous economy.
Everybody wants to sell to our consumers.
It's an extraordinary opportunity for us to negotiate and get fair deals for the American worker.
It's a unique proposition right now.
These countries, I think it's 50, 70 countries I've lost track that are offering 0% tariffs with America.
We're talking about Taiwan.
We're talking about Cambodia.
We're talking about Vietnam.
These guys are lining up to cut deals with America.
It's fabulous.
It's going to give us an opportunity to recreate a strong, thriving middle class.
By the way, the Chinese just totally shut down shipping masks to America during COVID.
They shut down shipping IV poles to America during COVID.
They are not our friends, okay?
We have to build our own manufacturing infrastructure so that we're self-reliant, we're capable of making what we need to make, pharmaceuticals, et cetera, so that nobody could push us around as a nation.
We have a huge economy.
We hold all the cards.
It's time for a reset so that we're fair to our impoverished neighbors, give them an opportunity to thrive in this economy and prosper, not just the 1%, not just the 10%.
Recreating the Middle Class00:04:41
Let's give everybody a shot.
Drew, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate that.
Let's go back to the panel.
I mean, Chuck, here's my kind of overview again about this, which is the establishment way of doing things in terms of the economy has led to America being $37 trillion in debt.
Some I can't even imagine how big that is.
I can't even write it down.
I wouldn't know how many noughts you need.
You know, Elon Musk has warned for a long time that America's heading potentially to bankruptcy if this carries on.
So somebody has to give.
And again, I come back to the overriding view I have of what Trump's trying to achieve.
And I think you kind of agree that the top line goal is probably correct.
It's how they're doing it.
But there you've got a top American business guy who couldn't sound more enthusiastic about this and who sees the big picture as being the promised land.
Look, again, I get the goal.
And I think the goal is not the issue, but it's sort of like it reminds me, you know, over 100 years ago, the block of ice industry was going away thanks to the creation of refrigeration.
But at some point, you couldn't protect the block of ice workers, right?
There was just not going to be the demand for that.
And so, you know, some of these tactics feel as if it's an attempt to sort of go back to an era that I don't think is ever going to exist.
I don't know if you can stop.
progress from around the world.
And then here's the other issue that I think we don't fully appreciate with what freer trade has meant for the globe, right?
More people are out of poverty than ever before.
There is more bottom, you know, there's no doubt we have income inequality in this country, and yet we've also been able to get people out of poverty.
More people around the world have gotten out of poverty.
What does free trade also bring you?
Less chance of war, right?
The last time we had high tariffs, we had a pretty big war on the continent of Europe.
So I think there's a lot of risk here in giving up some soft power.
You talk about our debt, but in some ways our debt was also our power, right?
Because it invited so much foreign investment into this country as well.
And the more we had of that, in some ways, the more secure we actually were and are.
And so I think what we don't, and I understand why a lot of people don't see that, sometimes it's hard to see until it's gone.
And that is one of my great concerns is that if China is truly the target here, I'm not sure we should go after every single ally that we have on a trade war in order to get China.
I understand the concern about China finding third-party countries to essentially cheat and do all those things.
I get the tactical, I guess, strategy behind it.
But I think it's, again, it's high risk because we're essentially making some enemies out of allies, whether it's Canada, whether it's the EU, or frankly, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea.
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Free Title History Report00:08:51
Okay, Matt Strap, let's just change tax slightly because while all this is going on, the Democrats continue, it seems to me, to self-implode.
They should be reveling in what's happening, but instead, there's a lot of infighting.
There's a lot of weird posturing by people who I don't think are electable in a million light years, announcing themselves as the kind of de facto new leaders of the party.
And we'll come to that in a moment.
But first of all, there's also the ongoing narrative by a large number of people on the left, which I think just shows they haven't got the memo that you can't just keep lazily playing the race card, the Nazi card, the they're all a bunch of loons card.
And this is a Princeton professor who basically implied that everyone who voted Trump is a racist.
Take a look.
We chose a felon who is more interested in loyalty, who's more interested in retribution, who's more interested in grift than in democracy.
And we chose a felon because we didn't want to elect a black woman.
I mean, the thing about, that says so many things to me.
I'll come to you in a moment, Lindy.
But the thing it says to me is one of the reasons that Trump won.
I mean, there were lots of reasons.
One, obviously, the economy.
Secondly, immigration, illegal immigration out of control.
He's fixed that.
The economy, we'll wait and see how this all plays out.
But the third thing, I think, was this whole issue of wokeism, DEI, all that kind of stuff, which I think a lot of Americans just got sick and tired of being lectured to and hectored to.
But there was also this constant attempt to brand everyone who voted for Trump a racist or a Nazi or whatever it may be.
And they're still doing it.
And this is a professor of a top university in the country.
What does that tell you about the state of the Democrats right now?
Well, it probably isn't fair to hold the Democratic Party responsible for every nutty thing that a professor says in this on our university campuses.
That being said, I do think that's a theme.
You know, when Republicans have been humiliated in national elections, it starts with an acknowledgement to the voter.
We've heard you, okay?
We got the message.
We were either wrong on something or we didn't take into account how important an issue was to you.
And what I see from the Democrats, maybe I take Gavin Newsome out of this, is a failure to first acknowledge the fact that they got shellacked in an election with some crazy laws around the state on mail-in ballots that still advantage them in a lot of states like California.
And they were shellacked on very core things.
And Pierce, I would say it's not uncommon for a Republican to be elected to the presidency because they're going to do a better job in the economy.
That's usually the number one reason we get elected or because there's a huge security question.
You want a strong military.
But this whole question of the open border and woke, that was the part that was such a condemnation, a new type of condemnation on this Democratic Party, which, let's face it, has embraced socialism.
They've embraced these leftist tactics.
And America is a much more centrist country than that.
And America is.
There's no question.
We all have our own stories about how we got to this country.
We're a country that's mostly made up of people that came from other places.
And I think what makes your point more than anything else is that it was minority voters.
It was black voters.
It was Hispanic voters.
It was Asian voters.
It was gay voters.
It was all of these people that are supposed to be in these categories that the Democratic Party is supposedly saying they're fighting for, who became exhausted over this idea that those characteristics of their life were more important than other characteristics of their life.
Like, were they qualified for the job?
Are they qualified to get into that university?
Is America a rotten place?
At the end of the day, Americans are actually proud of their country.
We like our founding.
We like our founding fathers and founding mothers.
And we have a great story to tell about how the individual is sovereign and not the government and not the king.
And somehow the Democratic Party embraced this idea that America was 16, 19.
Remember that all foolishness that occurred?
That America is a fundamentally, intrinsically racist country that can't heal its wounds.
Every country had slavery all over the world.
America was the only country that turned it into self-hate for centuries.
Lindy, I think you said, I don't want to misquote you, but I think you said this guy that your professor.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Hang on, Jamal.
I'm just going to come to you.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
I can see you.
I can see you waiting to get in, Jamal.
But Lindy did, I think, say that this guy was your professor.
He is the ultimate DEI hire.
It's an embarrassment to Princeton University, and I'm still an elected officer there.
I'm embarrassed that we share the same university, frankly.
He's been like this for years.
This isn't just a one-off.
And Matt, I also want to say, just putting everything aside, I've been highly critical of you in the past.
I want to apologize.
No, ands, ifs, or buts.
I'm sorry.
Everything that you said, I completely agree with.
And I'm just sorry.
You were right.
And you were nicer to the Democrats than I would have been.
He's not just a one-off or an exception.
What Eddie Glade just said, that professor, he represents the vast majority of Democrats who are still wallowing in their wokeism, in their DEI politics.
The former DNC chair that just stepped down, Jamie Harrison, who continues to attack me almost on a weekly basis, he said that we need to double down on identity politics.
It's just so shameful that they still haven't learned the lesson.
They still learn nothing from the 2024 election.
Let me give you an example.
I hosted Biden on May 1st, 2024.
It was supposed to be a normal event.
But because I was Asian American, they made it all about identity politics, not bothering to ask if I wanted that or not.
They brought a lion dance to my event with President Biden.
That's not my culture.
I grew up in this country.
My culture is Brittany Spears.
I have no connection with lion dances or any of that sort of stuff.
I don't even know what the year of the animal thing is.
I would have to Google if you asked me when Chinese New Year is.
I have no idea.
So they force this identity politics nonsense on you against our will and then wonder why they keep losing elections.
All right, but Lindy, if you're issuing public apologies, would you like?
Well, look, Lindy, I appreciate the candor and the apology to Matt.
I'm sure he's very grateful.
Do you want to apologize?
Public apologies.
Well, no, I'll just say, look, we've had this conversation before, but I think it's a valid question to ask you.
Given you were feeling all this at the time, why did you carry on so enthusiastically supporting and promoting the Democrats into the election, both Biden and then Kamala Harris?
I mean, would you like to apologize for getting all that wrong as well?
I have apologized, and I was wrong.
I absolutely was wrong.
It's so hard to come out of the cult.
And five years ago, I tried to come out of it.
And guess what happened?
AOC canceled me.
She shamed me.
And I remember crying so hard, the blood vessels underneath my eyes broke.
And then they removed me from my treasurer position.
So I learned my lesson and I'm not allowed to speak out.
And so I stayed quiet for a number of years, but I just couldn't anymore.
This party is insane to this day.
They've learned nothing.
And that's why the tent keeps shrinking.
And they push me out.
They call me a cunt, whatever, and a chink, you know, a slut whore all day long.
And then they wonder why I leave.
They threaten my parents.
And then they get mad that I leave the party.
How do you stay in an abusive relationship like that?
Would you tell a woman to stay in an abusive relationship because they happen to start out that way?
I just, I stopped fundraising for her in September because I saw the lunacy and I saw that she was also just a terrible candidate.
I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but then she hid from the media for an entire month.
And, you know, I speak to her on a normal, on a one-on-one basis, and she's not an idiot.
Every time she goes on stage, her brain just completely melts.
Okay, Jamal, you've been putting a number of well, well, yeah, of course.
Jamal's been putting a number of increasingly entertaining expressions throughout all this.
So, Jamal, your chance to respond.
I mean, my big question for you is: what on earth is happening to the Democrats?
Because actually, amid all the more jocular stuff about them, the Democrats as a party, to see the approval rating now in the early 20s, record low approval now for the Democrats.
What is going so horribly wrong?
And why are people not getting the memo about a lot of the reasons that people are citing for why they no longer feel any resonance with the Democrats?
Democratic Party Misunderstandings00:08:54
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So, I'll speak specifically to the Democrats in a moment, but I think the entire establishment, Republicans and Democrats, private sector and public sector, have failed the American people for decades.
So, I want to put that on the table and I want to circle back to that.
But, yes, in terms of the Democratic Party in particular, the Democratic Party has a reputation, and I agree with it, for not fighting hard enough for the American people and not showing a strong enough backbone as it relates to the issues the American people care about.
So, to the point of Donald Trump, Donald Trump, whether you agree with him or not, continues to present himself as a strong leader and a strong fighter.
I don't agree with his policies, but the American people, those who voted for him, believe he is representing strength.
And, you know, America is not going to take it anymore.
And you cannot bully me or push me around.
We're going to push you around.
That's what these tariffs are all about.
The Democratic Party is more concerned with getting the right answers on the tests and being correct as it relates to the fine print than they are at fighting, taking off the gloves and fighting.
And so, I, when I was in Congress, continued to try to encourage my colleagues to fight more.
Wherever that led us, just at least show that you're fighting.
And specifically, as it relates to the working class in this country, I think the party has become more concerned with college-educated consultants and data than it has the regular single mom struggling with two or three kids right here in Yonkers in the Bronx.
Having said that, the Republican Party isn't any better.
They're actually much worse.
I mean, we're talking a lot about, you know, Trump's tariffs and how he sank the market, you know, for a few days.
What about disappearing legal residents of our country without due process?
What about the Trump administration ignoring the rule of law, ignoring the courts, and not bringing back mistakenly detained individuals who were sent to the El Salvador prison?
As an African American, I also want to say this.
It's really important for America to embrace and learn about its full history, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because I think it helps us to be a better nation.
And so when we see and when I see attacks on universities for DEI, on school districts for DEI and the withholding of funds, I don't think that makes us stronger.
I think it makes us weaker, both in the present and short term, but also in the long term.
We have to embrace all of who we are, and we haven't fully done that.
And both parties have been a hot mess as it relates to meeting the needs of the American people.
I couldn't disagree with you.
All right, Chuck, you wanted to jump in there?
Can I?
Hang on, Linda.
Yeah, I'm trying to jump in on this because there's been a, you know, I think one of the fundamental misunderstandings of sort of where the two parties are here a little bit, I think the problem in the Democratic Party is they've had three straight Democratic nominees that were selected for the party, for the voters.
The voters didn't really have a full say, whether it was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's decision to sort of endorse her and chase a whole bunch of people out of the race in 2016.
Joe Biden was sort of anointed with COVID and Clyburn in South Carolina.
And of course, Kamala Harris was anointed to the nomination.
Now, look at Donald Trump.
The party elites tried everything they could to stop Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, but the voters prevailed.
Many of the party elites were a little bit nervous about Trump again, but the voters prevailed.
I do think one of the reasons why the Republicans look healthier right now is that they had a big fight.
It was very public.
Donald Trump's side won, and he's got sort of real, you know, essentially real leadership of his party.
The Democratic Party hasn't had a fight since 08, right?
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had a fight, very public fight, and it made the party healthier.
I think the Democrats' biggest problem right now is they're trying too hard to be unified.
They're trying too hard to be strategic, all these things, right?
Rather than have it out a little bit, should the party go further to the left?
Should the party be a little more centrist like the Bill Clinton era?
You know how Bill Clinton ended up president for two terms?
He got in a fight with the Jesse Jackson wing of the party in 1990 and 91, and it elevated him.
It didn't diminish the party.
So I do think the Democrats in particular here, they got to have a public fight.
They got to be willing to criticize each other.
It's actually healthy.
When you look at what Trump did to the Republican Party, it's uncomfortable.
I got a lot of Republican friends who hate the outcome, but it was fought.
It was, everybody had their say.
Yeah.
And look, you've been one of the leading light.
Hang on, Joel.
Hang on, everyone.
I just want to talk to you about the mainstream media, as Trump puts it, the legacy media in the four years of the Biden presidency.
Specifically, because, look, I'm a Brit, and I was living a lot of the time in the UK, but I was firing off very angry.
I read them the other day, angry columns about the cognitive state of Joe Biden and his physical and cognitive ability to be president of the United States and just wondering why on earth this was being allowed to continue.
But why was the mainstream media so reluctant, it seemed to me, to go much, much harder on what everyone was seeing with their own eyes?
Well, look, I sit here and I'll defend a little bit of this in that I would argue the reason people were able to come to their own conclusion on Joe Biden is because of the media coverage.
You know, look, we were subtle.
He's using the back staircase.
He's not using the front staircase.
Hey, he's not doing any interviews.
So there was this reluctance to draw the conclusion to say, is he not doing this?
And that I agree with.
That was held back, held back a lot.
I would argue it was also held back a lot back in the late 80s when it was clear Ronald Reagan wasn't necessarily running everything in the White House.
Whether you want to call it decorum, whatever you want to call it, look, there were plenty members of the media.
I remember David Ignatius in the Washington Post, plenty of individual people questioning whether he should run.
I certainly questioned whether he should run.
You didn't understand, you know, there were some of that.
But I understand the argument about the collective on that front.
The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden, right?
That it was some sort of zero-sum game.
And I think this has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done.
For instance, advocating for deplatforming Donald Trump after January 6th.
Look, I think January 6th was atrocious.
It was awful.
All those things.
But to deplatform him, we're America.
Defend the First Amendment.
I'm going to defend the First Amendment when Donald Trump's trying to kick members out of the press, but you got to defend his First Amendment right to also talk.
And I think that was also, I would argue, a mainstream media mistake.
It looks more obvious today, because what did he do?
He built his own information ecosystem.
And now traditional media is doing what?
Showing up on YouTube, right?
Traditional media doesn't have the influence it did anymore because it shoved, it got along with this deplatforming exercise, which I think fundamentally was, I didn't get it then.
I was not one of those who said I wouldn't put a January 6 or a D certifier on the shows.
I thought, why would you do that?
Closing the Border Debate00:11:23
I've interviewed the president of Iran.
I got no problem interviewing a member of Congress who chose not to certify the election.
I never understood that logic when you think about the First Amendment of our Constitution.
Yeah, completely agree, Chuck.
Great to have you on Uncensored for the first time.
Thank you all to my panel.
I greatly appreciate it speaking to all of you at a very interesting time for America.
Well, I'm joined now by Victor Davis Hansen, the historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, for his verdict on the tariffs and their fallout.
Victor, great to have you back on Uncensored.
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I've been keen to talk to you because I don't think my brain is fully equipped enough in all things economics to really get my head around whether this can work or not.
What's your gut feeling about what is happening here?
Well, I mean, we're in a high-stakes poker game, and Donald Trump has identified 70 nations that feel that it's essential to get into the U.S. market, and then they know that they've been running surpluses, or they have asymmetrical tariffs, or they have what I'd call stealthy tariffs, artificial health or security concerns that are really tariffs or taxes, et cetera.
So nobody wants to be left out when the music.
It's musical chairs.
So Trump's strategy is that he's going to get one or two big countries, and I think it will not be China.
It'll be a foil against China.
Maybe Japan, maybe Europe.
And then they'll come and other people will think, I've got to come or I'm going to be shut out of the market.
My only worry about it is that all the American people follow him on the word reciprocity and zero tariffs.
So if Australia is running a surplus, even though they kind of tweak our beef and are not quite fair, it's not going to sell to the public to put an automatic tariff on them.
But when he sticks to reciprocal or zero tariffs in the first round, he wins the public opinion.
And then he can come back and say, well, there were insidious tariffs, and I got the trade surplus down from a trillion to 200 billion.
But, you know, Europe has the VAT tax.
And so he can discuss all those complexities.
But he's getting, if he says that he's going to put a tariff on a country that wants zero tariffs or is running a deficit with us, that doesn't sell as well.
And I think they know it.
And there's kind of some detention in there.
But I would say something very quickly.
We've had 50 consecutive years of trade deficits.
And now we're running a trillion dollars.
Our free trade partners in North America, Mexico is running a $171 billion trade deficit.
It gets $63 billion in remittances that go back from people here, mostly illegally.
It's getting another $20 billion from cartel opiate and fentanyl sales.
Canada, who's our best friend, is only paying $1.37 on their defense GDP ratio, and they're running $63 billion.
And yet, Trump understands he's got to get along with him.
So what I'm getting at is all these countries know what they're doing.
And all the economists, the Wall Street Journal economists, are saying, well, trade deficits don't matter and everything.
But when you talk to these people and you say, well, all the economists in the United States say trade deficits are either good or irrelevant.
Why don't you run one then?
And we'll be the surplus, the stupid people, and you be the smart people and run trade deficits.
Nobody thinks that's compelling.
So we've got all the economists up here saying trade deficits are irrelevant or they're going to hurt us.
But we have all the other countries' economists saying, well, we don't want to do what you do.
And then the second thing is we've got 10% of the people in the country that own 93% of the market capitalization of the country and 50% have 1%.
And they're looking at other indicators.
They're looking at 93,000 jobs that we didn't expect over estimates in March.
They're looking at the March inflation rate, which was annualized at 2.6.
They're looking at lower oil prices.
And they're not in the same panic as the they understand that stocks are absolutely important for the health of the country, but they're not as hysterical or frenzied as this 10% that have lost their minds.
How long, Victor, has Trump got to make this work?
Because the approval rating for him over tariffs is turning dramatically the wrong way.
Looking at a poll I saw this morning.
So people were broadly supportive, majority last month.
They're now not.
And that number is going down quickly.
How long does Trump have, do you think, to demonstrate that this is going to work?
I think he needs, he's got about a week or two weeks to get a, as I said earlier, a big party to agree.
Once one big party says, you know what, let's go to zero tariffs or we're going to reduce our trade surplus by 50%, something like that, at Japan or South Korea, then I think you're going to see movement.
And then the hysteria will start acting in reverse.
People will say, oh my God, look at these stocks.
This is a great time to buy, given all the other indicators.
And then they look at Trump's first term.
They said, this guy is the guy that went dismantled Dodd-Frank.
This is the guy we went up 65%.
So he's more favorable to the stock market than the alternative.
But he's got it.
I think what he's trying to do, Piers, he's trying to get it all, everything, excise tax.
And I tend to think maybe the Elon Musk or some of the senators, if they are, I think, advising him, first round, get it down to zero or parity.
It's a great thing.
We might get at not everything, but we can work on that.
And I think it's going to work.
But when he gets the big enchilada, a big offer, I think he should, and it's zero or parity.
That will sell well politically and on as well.
Yeah, I think that's right.
The other question, I guess, is whether the dream that Trump has to revitalize America as a manufacturing powerhouse in the way that it used to be, perhaps, is he living in a slight cloud cuckoo land in the sense that we are heading very quickly through AI into a far more automated world.
I mean, Elon Musk, I spoke to him last summer about the Optimus program he's running of, you know, these humanoid robots.
And he thinks everyone's going to have one.
I think by 2040, some will have five, 10, 15 of these things.
That's billions of robots running around doing what humans do.
If you extrapolate that to factories, for example, is the idea of humans in factories manufacturing stuff for America first, is that a fanciful notion given the way the world is moving to a more automated place?
No, I don't think so.
I think actually counterintuitive, I think that's what he's counting on because he looks at he's closed the border.
There's not going to be 10,000 illegal aliens coming in again.
Our fertility rate is not as bad as Europe.
It's gone down to 1.65.
So we're a static, if not declining, population.
All these economists have these ratios for every billion dollars or so many million jobs, 10 billion, you know, a million jobs.
But I don't believe we've got seven or eight trillion dollars in commitment, but maybe two or three already.
And that would represent 10 or 15 million new jobs.
So I think the idea is that if you train the workforce and you rely heavily on automation, even with the present diminished workforce, and the unemployment rate's only 4%, 4.5, you can be as effective and high-tech.
I don't think he's calling for a bunch just to all line up and put things on an assembly, you know, just make widgets, and that's going to pay him $30 an hour.
I think he's thinking, we've got the best technology.
I've got Silicon Valley.
I've even got people like Bezos and Zuckerberg, David Sachs.
These are like the war production board of World War II, Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford.
They're really, I don't agree with them politically, but they're patriotic and they want to make America.
And I think that's kind of a unique idea for somebody to enlist all these technocrats.
Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely riveting to watch all this.
If you were a betting man, where are we going to be at the end of the year?
I mean, I wrote a piece recently saying that I could easily see a situation where Trump gets the U.S. economy purring again in the way that he did before the pandemic hit in his first term.
And he could end up getting peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
I still think that could all happen.
But conversely, none of that could happen.
Well, I think I tend to agree with you.
I look at all of a sudden the Red Sea for the first time in four years is starting to be navigable again.
Iran is kind of selling out the Houthis.
They don't want anything to do with them.
Hezbollah is inert.
Looks like there's going to be something in Israel versus Iran, but whatever it is, Iran has lost its clout.
I don't think we're going to see any more Afghanistan humiliations.
For the first time in three years, we're not saying we're going to give Ukraine until the end or whatever it takes.
We're talking about let's end this with a reasonable ceasefire.
The border is not going to open up again.
We're not going to have billions of dollars of social welfare cost.
And when you look at the jobs report, the inflation report, we're pumping oil.
We're starting to, you know, we're really going full blast.
So I tend to believe that if he gets over this bump, and I think he will, we're going to see something like the pre-COVID, the, I don't know, November 2019 economy.
When you go back and look at that data, it was really something.
I think it might even be better.
He's got a lot of people who are very bright working.
It's not like I was very worried about the first term.
And either there were people who shouldn't have been there based on their resumes.
They were kind of crazy, the Scaramucci's, the Omarosa, those type of people.
Or he had people who were just completely not on the same page, whether it was John Bolton or Rex Tillertson or people like that.
These people are very good and they agree with him.
They're force multipliers of his initiative.
Victor, as always, brilliant to talk to.
Thank you very much indeed for coming back on Uncensored.
Thank you.
Crazy Staff Choices00:00:24
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