Episode 4905： SCOTUS Listens To Oral Arguments On Trump's Tariffs
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Summary
The Supreme Court is weighing in on whether the President has the power to declare a national emergency, and whether Congress has the authority to take that power back. The White House argues that Congress has no authority to do so, and that only the President can do so.
Transcript
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In January of 2023, Congress voted to terminate one of the biggest IEBA emergencies ever, the COVID emergency, and the president went along with that.
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So what the statute reflects is there's going to be the ability for a sort of political consensus against a declared emergency.
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What happens if the president simply vetoes legislation to try to take these powers back?
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Well, he has the authority to veto legislation to terminate a national emergency, for example.
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I mean, he retains the powers in the background because IEBA is still on the books.
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But if he declares an emergency and Congress doesn't like it and passes a joint resolution, yes, he can absolutely veto that.
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Can't get this power back once it's handed it over to the president.
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It's a one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people's elected representatives.
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And the recent historical counterexample of Congress's termination of the COVID emergency demonstrates that the political oversight is meaningful.
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With the president's assent, in fact, you know.
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Once he lost it by a veto-proof majority in the Senate, I think the position, I think he realized.
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It takes a supermajority, veto-proof majority to get it back.
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The Supreme Court is considering that, and they might even be drawing a line here.
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The conservative majority has already done quite a bit to expand the authorities of the executive branch under President Trump.
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Applying near-blanket immunity for what they call official acts.
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Allowing the firing of heads of independent agencies.
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Limiting injunctions that would block President Trump's agenda, or any president's agenda for that matter.
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Allowing the president to cancel billions in funding allocated by Congress.
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But today, the justices seem skeptical over an emergency power that President Trump has made the central feature of his second term in office.
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The ability for a president to levy massive tariffs unilaterally when Congress has the power of the purse.
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They were asking for authority, essentially, to levy taxes.
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As Justice Kavanaugh said today, the Supreme Court needs to figure out what it means to regulate imports.
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According to the president and his legal team, that would mean including, or that would include, I should say, Katie, the imposition of tariffs.
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According to the challengers, that authority, essentially to tax, is reserved exclusively to the Congress.
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So, they did sound skeptical in places, certainly.
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I wonder what your expectation is for when they might rule on this.
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But this is something that Americans are dealing with every single day.
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But the Supreme Court, at the government's request, did fast-track this argument, Katie.
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And so, it makes sense to me that they would probably try and fast-track an opinion.
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Normally, when they hear cases in October and November and December, we can expect a decision, you know, next June.
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Because you say we shouldn't be concerned because this is foreign affairs and the president has inherent authority.
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And so, delegation off the books, more or less.
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And if that's true, what would prohibit Congress from just abdicating all responsibility to regulate foreign commerce, for that matter, declare war, to the president?
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What's the reason to accept the notion that Congress can hand off the power to declare war to the president?
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That would really be an abdication, not a delegation.
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I've covered the Federalist Society, which is kind of the lawyer's wing of the Republican Party for more than a decade now.
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And beginning in the Obama administration, they were very concerned about President Obama and later President Biden making aggressive assertions of executive power.
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The Federalist Society started to come up with new theories for how you could rein in presidential power.
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The one that they eventually settled on is this thing called the Major Questions Doctrine, which is the idea that when a president does something that's too ambitious, it has too much of an impact on our economy or too much political impact, that's not allowed.
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It doesn't matter if there's an existing statute that allows them to do it.
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They've got to go back and they've got to get a new law.
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And one question going into this oral argument was, now that we have a Republican president, would the justices actually follow this Major Questions Doctrine that they came up with to stop presidents like Biden and Obama, or would they give Trump an exemption to it?
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And Gorsuch, at least, seems to feel that the Major Questions Doctrine does apply to Donald Trump.
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Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts, also asked some questions, suggesting that he believed that it also applies to Republican presidents.
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I think that Thomas and Kavanaugh and Alito are probably going to vote with Trump in this case.
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But it looks like, at least amongst the Republican justices, they seem to be evenly split on whether or not this doctrine should apply to presidents of both parties.
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The solicitor general presented a strong case for the president's use of the IEPA, the emergency tariff powers that President Trump has used to balance trade, to negotiate with the Chinese on fentanyl, to secure rare earth magnets, to get the Indians to stop buying Russian oil.
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And, you know, the solicitor general made a fantastic case that the purpose of the tariffs is to rebalance global trade.
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And, you know, you and I know exactly what that looks like.
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On the other side, I thought that the plaintiffs almost embarrassed themselves.
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They clearly didn't understand foundational economics.
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They didn't understand the trade policy they were talking about.
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And I'm very optimistic, after listening to the questions at SCOTUS, that the IEPA ruling is going to come President Trump in this administration's way.
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
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You're just not going to get a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
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I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
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And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
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I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
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If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
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It's Wednesday, 5 November in the year of our Lord, 2025.
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About this time one year ago, we were starting to get the exit polls.
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The exit polls were coming out that talked about how the evening was going to progress
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to have got to about, I don't know, 10 o'clock, 1030, when we knew that President Trump was going to win re-election.
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I'll have more about that later in this hour on this sacred anniversary of the greatest political comeback in American history.
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But today also, let's get to the work of today.
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Remember, in the years in the wilderness, Project 2025, Russ Votes, CRA, Stephen Miller, America First Parties,
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Priority is also the team over at CPI, which I'll be addressing tonight, later, at one of their conferences.
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Everybody working on all of these aspects of the second term, right, which we were very confident
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we were going to have the political ground game and to get the low-propensity voters to turn people out.
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You had to have policies, unlike the first term, which kind of surprised us when we won, that we needed a depth of public policy,
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you know, public intellectuals, networks of people, subject matter experts, all of it.
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We worked for years and years and years, and that's kind of the catchphrase for that is Project 2025.
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The central beating heart of this was, as we call it, the unitary theory of the executive or Article 2,
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the vesting clause of Article 2, the maximization.
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He's the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer.
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You know, the appropriations bill is a ceiling, not a floor.
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As commander-in-chief, he has the inherent powers of the Constitution, particularly in emergencies,
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give him extraordinary powers to keep the nation safe, and then as chief law enforcement officer,
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extraordinary powers, particularly in emergency powers, to act in defense of the citizenry and the country.
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This gets down to the centrality of President Trump's make America great, America first,
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of changing the commercial relationships that have essentially ripped off the country
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and ripped off working people for decade and decade and decade, both political parties,
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no political parties, particularly at fault here, all of them neoliberal globalists.
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Today, for over three hours, historic, and we played about an hour live on the show,
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We will play this again, if not tonight, then tomorrow, after the show's over,
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Absolutely extraordinary hearing today, and I can tell you on Capitol Hill,
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and this is how much, you know, bringing jobs back and manufacturing jobs back,
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I have never seen, quite frankly, this was like Dodd's-level protest outside.
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Working-class people, younger people, some of the credential class,
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but clearly the messaging on tariffs, the messaging on trying to bring jobs back,
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has been twisted, right, because people think very, very differently than the folks in the show.
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I've asked David J. Lynch, author of an extraordinary book,
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The World's Worst Bet, how the globalization gamble went wrong.
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He's chief global economics correspondent for The Washington Post.
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David, you were actually in the gallery on this historic day.
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We've got a couple of minutes here still left in the segment.
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I'd like you just to put us in the room first, because I was actually mesmerized by the arguments
00:11:26.140
of both parties, particularly it just went on and on and on.
00:11:33.900
Well, Steve, if you were sitting alongside me, you would have been in what we call
00:11:39.600
obstructed view seating, so it was more of an auditory experience than much of a great
00:11:47.180
viewing experience. But that said, it was historic. You know, there was a real atmosphere
00:11:53.580
in the room. The questioning was quite serious and probing from all the justices, I think,
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and for all the attorneys. And it was, you know, it was like watching the legal equivalent of an
00:12:06.520
Ali Frazier fight. Both sides, I think, stumbled in places, and both sides made their cases to the
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best of their ability. I do think coming out of it, though, you know, the justices did appear,
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or a majority, I should say, did ask some pretty skeptical questions of the solicitor general,
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which makes me think the president's emergency tariff plans, anyway, might be in some trouble.
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Yeah, this is, you know, I pride myself as one of the things I did when I was in the White House.
00:12:40.060
There was a small five-man committee to kind of vet the first and second Supreme Court
00:12:47.440
justice appointment. And Gorsuch was the, was, we screened it down and presented the president
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with a number of alternatives, but Gorsuch was the one that we thought would be a great first pick.
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And Mike Davis, the vice lawyer we have on all the time, would clerk for him. So we're very fond of,
00:13:03.260
of Justice Gorsuch. And one of the reasons that he was so highly recommended is his intellectual
00:13:09.820
capacity and capabilities. He might have been the sharpest questioner. That's why we took a couple
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of clips at the, at the beginning. We've got about a minute. Let's focus on Gorsuch for just that
00:13:22.360
minute. He was, he was pretty skeptical, would you say? Absolutely. And he, uh, he asked a pretty
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probing question, um, asking, uh, if in the event of a, of a democratic, is, is that music coming on
00:13:42.600
your end, Steve, or is it on mine? Yeah, no, no, no, that's our exit. That's our exit music for the,
00:13:47.580
for the segment. You're, you're, you're, you're good. We, we give it some music in the background
00:13:51.840
when we end the segment to get some drama to it. How's that? I see. But no, I do think, I do think
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Gorsuch, uh, asked the, a key question, because if you accept the government's argument here,
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that president Trump has this sweeping authority to levy, uh, all sorts of emergency tariffs,
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you've got to ask yourself in 2029 or 2033 or whenever, what about a democratic president? What
00:14:16.260
about president Gavin Newsom declaring a national emergency about climate change? And this is what
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justice Gorsuch asked specifically about. Wouldn't this reading of the emergency economic powers act
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allow a democratic president to impose a 50% tax on imported cars and imported auto parts. And the
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solicitor general, uh, reluctantly concluded that it was very likely that would be the case.
00:14:40.460
David J. Lynch, the author of the book, the world's worst bet is with us. We're going to
00:14:48.200
take a short commercial break. We're going to return in the war room. Just a moment.
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On getter yet. No, what are you waiting for? It's free. It's uncensored. And it's where all the
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and be part of the new plan. Could the president impose a 50 percent tariff on gas powered cars and auto
00:16:57.440
parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change? It's very likely
00:17:04.320
that I can be done. Very likely. I think that has to be the logic of your view. Yeah. In other
00:17:09.040
words, this administration would say that's a hoax. It's not a real crisis, but I'm sure you would. Yes.
00:17:14.800
But that'd be a question for Congress under our interpretation, not for the courts. All right.
00:17:20.160
OK, David J. Lynch joins us right now. David, that was another dramatic moment in over a three hour and
00:17:27.200
folks should understand they don't they allocate sometimes an hour and a half for these things. But to go
00:17:31.200
three hours of intense, intense back and forth. And it was a it was incredible. If you want to learn
00:17:38.800
something about American history, global economics, the law, the Constitution, it was absolutely one of
00:17:44.800
those, you know, like an NFL playoff game. It was just extraordinary. Both lawyers and I realize Scott
00:17:50.480
Besson, our former contributor here and close friend colleague, said the about how the other side I,
00:17:57.120
I thought they did pretty good. I did. I thought they did pretty good. I thought that the solicitor,
00:18:02.320
you have to buy kind of the theory of the case, I guess. David J. Lynch, you've done this book,
00:18:08.080
talk about the rise and fall of globalization. And you say in the book, it turned out to be
00:18:14.400
particularly politically, maybe one of the worst bets ever on a global basis.
00:18:18.720
What? Why is it so controversial? What President Trump is trying to do in reverse that and reverse
00:18:26.880
it quickly, sir? Well, I think it's controversial because you get, as you say, competing theories
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of the case, the president's view is that just about everything that went wrong in U.S. manufacturing
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communities is the fault of free trade agreements that we started in the 1990s and pursued for for
00:18:48.320
some time thereafter. Mainstream economists, of course, will say, look, much of the manufacturing
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job loss was due to automation. That would have happened anyway, just like the automation we've seen
00:19:00.160
over the decades in farming. We can produce a lot more food today than we could 100 years ago
00:19:06.560
with a lot fewer people on the farms. Same is true in manufacturing. But of course, trade did have an
00:19:13.120
impact. And where particularly the opening to China or China's integration into the global trading
00:19:19.280
system really had an impact was on specific manufacturing communities and specific cohorts of
00:19:26.000
people, specific groups of people, those with the least education and the fewest skills. They really took
00:19:32.320
it in the chops. Political leaders, starting back with Bill Clinton and subsequently said,
00:19:38.000
don't worry, we're going to take care of those people. And where the gamble went wrong, where I
00:19:43.600
argue in the book that the bargain was not upheld, was that part never happened. The domestic policy
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response that there should have been to make sure that everybody could benefit from this global
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integration, which to some degree is unstoppable. It's just the way things are going. But we left people
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unprotected and they suffered as a consequence. And there was a political blowback from that, which leads
00:20:07.840
you to Donald Trump. And so, and what Trump is saying, it's so controversial, is he's calling
00:20:15.360
upon emergency powers. In fact, they're knitting together, like they're trading with the, I mean,
00:20:19.920
we saw the Solicitor General walk through kind of the process that he got there. You're knitting
00:20:24.240
together, trading with the enemies, with other underlying documents. Why is it so controversial
00:20:30.800
that he called, he's called this an emergency and said, hey, look at how I'm solving this.
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And I'm solving this by knitting together a number of different laws or regulation that
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exist out there, but haven't really been knitted together to make this argument that this, this,
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this is our solution to this emergency, which has stripped America of its industrial might.
00:20:52.800
Yeah, I think the controversy is that he's the first president to use this almost 50 year old law,
00:20:58.800
the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEPA is the acronym. He's the first president to
00:21:06.160
see in that law a power to impose tariffs. It's the standard law that presidents of both parties
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have used to impose financial sanctions and economic sanctions, like those we've put on Russia,
00:21:20.000
those we've put on some Chinese actors, the Iranians, et cetera, over the years. So that's part
00:21:26.080
of the controversy. The other part of the controversy is the president's identification of the trade deficit
00:21:33.040
as an emergency. We've, as you know, Steve, run an annual trade deficit every year since 1975 when I
00:21:40.400
was in high school. And so there are a lot of people who have pushed back on that and said, that's not
00:21:46.240
really the definition of an emergency. The administration's counter, as Scott Besson said in
00:21:52.560
the clip, was that 50 years of this have brought the U.S. economy to a quote unquote tipping point.
00:21:58.720
I don't think the administration has really elaborated on exactly how imminent that tipping
00:22:04.160
point is or how it would manifest itself. But the advantage of using IEPA is it does convey broad
00:22:13.520
and immediate powers on the president. So he could act without a lot of bureaucracy, without a lot of
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time wasting, and just come out on a given day and say, bang, tariff of X on goods from country Y,
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and we're done and dusted. The alternatives, which is what the administration might be forced to fall
00:22:31.720
back on, are other sections of U.S. trade law that are more cumbersome, but can ultimately get you to
00:22:38.780
the same place. But when you say cumbersome, so clearly today, Gorsuch asked a lot of pointed
00:22:45.720
questions, and he seemed a little skeptical, but you can never, you know, oral arguments are oral
00:22:49.520
arguments. They often cut very differently than what people said in the hearing. But the timing of
00:22:56.720
it got to be a big deal, right? The thinking of the timing of it, particularly for the analysts and
00:23:01.620
observers. Also, what happens if they come back and just say, you can't use this? I mean, how do you
00:23:08.400
unwind basically this whole commercial activity that President Trump's had for the last, since
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Liberation Day, which I think was 2 April of this year? Yes. And also about the timing. I think they
00:23:20.000
made a good point that this is one they normally hold to June. You normally hold these results till
00:23:25.740
June. But on this one and the one on the redistricting, because you've got primaries, you may have to come
00:23:34.780
up with answers to this in January, February? That seems to be the thinking. I mean, the court agreed to take
00:23:41.500
it up on an expedited basis, so the implication is the ruling will come on an expedited basis.
00:23:48.780
What will happen, you know, they, the government, have collected something like $90 billion
00:23:55.180
via these emergency tariffs. If the court were to invalidate all of them and order a refund to all of
00:24:02.700
the importers who've paid them, and that's not certain, the government would then be in a position of
00:24:09.980
having to set up some administrative procedure to make that happen. There's one sort of past example
00:24:17.420
of a case like this. It was something called the Harbor Maintenance Fund years and years ago. I won't
00:24:22.300
bore you with many of the details. But in that case, there was an administrative process set up,
00:24:29.980
and companies got their refunds, but it took a while. In this case, the five businesses that are direct
00:24:37.660
participants in these lawsuits that have been consolidated before the court, they would
00:24:42.860
definitely get a refund right away. Everybody else might have to apply through this bureaucratic
00:24:49.900
channel. That could take some time and be unpopular. But the other thing that would happen is the
00:24:56.940
administration, they're already working on this, would have a fallback strategy. If the court were to
00:25:02.460
invalidate all of them, I'm sure the president would very quickly come back and say, okay,
00:25:08.060
in light of that, I'm now going to take the following actions under Section 122 of the 1974
00:25:15.580
Trade Act or Section 338 of the trade law of 1930, and he would, I would assume, cobble together an
00:25:23.900
alternative framework that would get him, if not entirely what he has today in terms of the tariff
00:25:30.220
structure most of the way there. As you see it today, how do you think this thing plays out?
00:25:39.260
Well, you know, my time in the Supreme Court is limited, so I'm reluctant to venture much of a
00:25:45.580
guess. I would say my thinking on this has changed over the months. When the lawsuits were first filed,
00:25:53.660
I felt that the administration's argument was kind of a stretch, and I thought it was frankly sort of
00:26:01.420
a slam dunk for the petitioners. Then I actually read the administration's brief, and as is almost
00:26:10.460
always the case, you know, a good lawyer can make a good argument. And I came away from that thinking,
00:26:14.700
huh, well, you know, the administration does have an argument here. I'm not sure it's
00:26:18.540
ironclad, but it's well presented. And then I talked to some more trade attorneys, and they,
00:26:24.780
you know, these are specialists far more than I am. And they saw the ambiguity in the law and the
00:26:30.700
potential for it to go both ways. So I came in today feeling a little bit 50-50. The skepticism of
00:26:37.100
some of the questioning has left me at the end of the day inclined to think that the court, you know,
00:26:44.460
may be prepared to rule against the president at least to some degree. But as you say, trying to
00:26:50.140
read too much into oral arguments can be a mistake. David, can you just hang on for a second? We're
00:26:55.340
taking another short commercial break. I want to talk to you about the book and, and quite frankly,
00:26:59.580
how globalization underlies so much, you know, you can go from the election last night in, uh, in
00:27:05.980
Manhattan, uh, to much of what's happening around the country. People talk about the economy, jobs,
00:27:10.300
all of it. It still gets down to the basics of the global economy and what's happening. You said
00:27:15.260
just a few minutes ago, hey, the, the power of this idea of what's happening may, may, may be too
00:27:20.620
powerful to kind of stop or reverse. David J. Lynch, the global economic correspondent for the
00:27:26.220
Washington Post is with us. He was in the court today for historic, I think over three hours of oral
00:27:32.780
arguments, quite mesmerizing. Um, and of course, President Trump, it's central to his economic plan.
00:27:39.660
That's why Scott Vesson's been out working the TV, uh, channels. Birchgold.com. Go check out
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00:29:05.180
So, so much of like last night and the politics of our time are predicated upon the economic
00:29:10.620
realities of globalization. So, so David, uh, how has the book been received, particularly by the
00:29:15.980
business? I know our audience members that purchased the book the first, when the first time you're here,
00:29:21.660
I got tremendous feedback of people. Like I said, it's a, it's a very accessible way to begin to
00:29:27.100
understand a quite complex topic, right? And a topic that underpins so much of what's going on,
00:29:31.660
not just in the world's economy, in people's personal lives, but also in the politics of
00:29:36.860
the United States and quite frankly, the great powers. So how's the book been received?
00:29:42.220
Well, the reception has been good. There was a, uh, the Financial Times, uh, gave me a nice review of
00:29:47.820
a week or two ago and, uh, the Irish Times, the Irish finance minister, in fact, uh, reviewed the
00:29:53.820
book for the Irish Times and, and, uh, had very, uh, very complimentary things to say, which I
00:29:59.100
appreciated as a Irish American. Uh, and I'll be talking to Bloomberg, uh, next week. So, uh,
00:30:05.580
it's moving forward and selling, uh, selling well, which I'm gratified by, uh, could always have more
00:30:11.660
attention. Of course, you know, any, any authors out there in the marketplace peddling his book,
00:30:17.180
he can never have enough attention. Do you think that, um, particularly we see nice life last night
00:30:23.500
or what happened a year ago. And so much is tied to when people talk about globalization,
00:30:28.140
the jobs and manufacturing jobs moved away. And you saw today, particularly with the commentariat,
00:30:33.900
both, both on the left and the right, talking about these incredibly intense
00:30:39.180
arguments to the Supreme Court. And you see these justices who are obviously nine of the smartest
00:30:44.540
people in the legal profession, uh, in our country, wrestle with it. Do you think we've done a good job
00:30:50.700
of, uh, of actually helping people to understand what this, this great force that's out there called
00:30:57.420
globalization and the internal industrial logic of it and, and why, quite frankly, there have been winners
00:31:03.260
and losers. And if you don't, as you know, we are, we're hardcore populist and economic nationalists.
00:31:09.900
We, we believe in president Trump's tariff program. In fact, we are, you know, we, we even have ideas
00:31:15.580
of maybe even more extreme than that. Um, do you think though, the people have done a good job in
00:31:20.780
explaining this? So, so basic average citizens can have a meaningful conversation about it.
00:31:26.060
The short answer is no. And, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book and I, I did
00:31:31.980
want to make it. I'm glad you described it as accessible because I, I didn't set out to write
00:31:36.620
a book for economists or, or trade specialists. I, I, I tried to write a book for the average, uh,
00:31:44.540
curious and informed person who wants to try and understand what the hell's happened over the last 30
00:31:49.660
years or so. Um, because I, I think we have all these kinds of unresolved conflicts and questions
00:31:56.620
from the period that's, uh, described as the hyper globalization era. And I don't think we can,
00:32:03.100
I don't think we're going to be able to move forward, uh, and, and prosper for the next 30 years
00:32:08.540
if we don't understand what we got wrong about the past 30 years. And like so many debates in
00:32:15.180
Washington, you know, you've got folks in, in sort of two, two camps. There's, there's the people I
00:32:21.180
think of as the traditional, uh, pro trade liberalization folks who, you know, and this is
00:32:27.660
maybe only slightly a caricature, but think everything was done fine. Nothing was done wrong.
00:32:33.340
Anybody who disagrees is just a, uh, a troglodyte, a protectionist who doesn't get it. Uh, and then
00:32:40.380
the folks on the other side think everything about trade and globalization is a conspiracy
00:32:45.580
by the elites to screw the common man. And, you know, I, I personally don't think either one of
00:32:51.340
those views captures some of the nuance that's, that's necessary to figure out where we went wrong.
00:32:58.060
And to my mind, where we went wrong goes all the way back to the stuff Bill Clinton used to say in
00:33:03.820
the nineties, which was that, you know, and he saw it coming. I, and I think I describe him in the book
00:33:08.860
as kind of the godfather of American globalization, um, that there were going to be winners and losers.
00:33:15.580
And that was inevitable. Uh, you're, you're never going to have an economy that makes a hundred
00:33:19.340
percent of the people happy a hundred percent of the time, but recognizing that it's, it's your
00:33:25.260
responsibility as, as governing policymakers to develop, uh, programs and strategies and remedies
00:33:33.900
that will enable as many people as possible to weather the storm and to come out doing okay on
00:33:40.780
the other side. And I think it became too easy for, for folks in Washington. Uh, and I include myself
00:33:48.780
in this. I, I was not at all clairvoyant about these issues, uh, you know, 25 years ago. Uh, but it, it,
00:33:56.060
it's easy when you've never lost your job or never been out of work involuntarily when, when the only time you
00:34:02.380
have, uh, uh, when you're jobless is, you know, a sabbatical from a university job or you're in
00:34:08.780
between assignments at a central bank or a think tank, it's easy to sort of not really come to grips
00:34:16.380
with the human toll of joblessness. And having gone through it briefly myself a few years ago and just
00:34:22.860
tasted it for a brief moment in time, uh, you know, it's, it's something that people need to, uh,
00:34:30.380
need to understand and need to empathize with other folks in the economy about. And so again,
00:34:36.060
you know, we've, we've got, we can't go back in time and undo what's happened, but the so-called
00:34:41.420
China shock that hit us around the turn of the century and into the first decade of this century,
00:34:46.780
that's not going to be the last time the American worker is challenged by, uh, time of, of tumult and
00:34:53.660
upheaval. And artificial intelligence may well be the next punch that's thrown. We got to figure
00:35:00.060
The AI jobs apocalypse, which we talk about here, uh, a lot in the war room. Oh, David,
00:35:05.740
appreciate you for writing the book and taking the time, making it accessible to people coming
00:35:09.980
on the war room. We, we are proudly part of the troglodytes. We're part of the troglodytes
00:35:15.740
here. So we're trying to reverse a process that people say is irreversible, but we'll keep fighting.
00:35:20.940
Thank you. So what's your social media? Where do people go get the book and where they follow you
00:35:23.980
on social media? Uh, I'm everywhere. I'm on, uh, X and blue sky, uh, uh, at David J. Lynch. Um, uh,
00:35:32.780
I'm not much on Instagram. I'm on Tik TOK. I probably spend too much time on Tik TOK. My wife would say,
00:35:41.020
sir. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Thanks a lot, Steve. Appreciate it. So president Trump,
00:35:48.940
this gets back to look, I'm probably going to run out of time today. And so I have to carry some of
00:35:55.820
this over tomorrow. The, um, I think we've won 20 cases at the Supreme court or 21. I mean,
00:36:03.340
it's been pretty overwhelming. Mike Davis on here, they talked about Pam's kind of winning streak
00:36:07.980
there. It is all of this audience. Remember, let's go back and frame this. All of this is playing into
00:36:13.980
that the, um, power article two powers. And essentially the court has been saying,
00:36:22.700
the Roberts court has been saying, we're not the Warren court. Uh, we're not going to intercede or
00:36:28.620
interject our things into processes we think can be answered or remedied by a thing called politics.
00:36:36.860
We're not gonna get involved in politics. We're not a political institution. We're a legal institution.
00:36:41.660
So to date, president Trump has really had support. And let's go back, even, even for the immunity,
00:36:48.140
nine, nothing immunity. And remember Colorado of which Ludwig wrote, uh, oh, the Colorado,
00:36:53.580
you know, judges thing is magnificent. And it was nine Oh, uh, supporting a president Trump.
00:36:59.740
This may be the most important of all of all the others. There've been some monumentally
00:37:03.820
important ones. This may be because it's so absolutely central to president Trump's economic
00:37:08.380
program. I mean, he is trying to reverse. And I'll say this in David Lynch, David Lynch,
00:37:15.500
obviously, and he says at the beginning of the book, Hey, he was kind of a globalist. People didn't
00:37:19.180
even think about it this way. When they first started covering this topic, it was all going to be,
00:37:23.260
and I can tell you going to Harvard business school, same way. There was never any question
00:37:28.380
that this was going to add to the net value of the company, a country, and everybody's going to prosper.
00:37:32.700
And all this is going to be great is going to be more efficient, uh, you know, more economic, uh,
00:37:38.060
and those benefits would spread to everybody that turned out to be exactly the opposite. In fact,
00:37:43.740
the financial crisis of 2008 and the trade deficits and the trade deals that, that basically sucked out
00:37:51.580
America's manufacturing superpower and dispersed it to the world, particularly to China and other parts
00:37:58.700
of, uh, of Asia because of quite frankly, labor compare, you know, comparative advantage they
00:38:04.140
had in labor and environment and, you know, all sorts of things that, um, it didn't turn out.
00:38:10.940
President Trump is trying to reverse this. I think this is what folks should understand. He is trying
00:38:16.380
to reverse it and he's trying to do it as a shock to the system, as he is a disruptor, because there are
00:38:21.500
other ways to do this. They just take forever. President Trump's making the case, and we've talked
00:38:28.060
about trade deficit forever and Scott Besson's right. If you talk to the Wall Street crowd or
00:38:33.180
like we had these big fights with Gary Cohen in the first term, a trade deficit doesn't mean
00:38:36.540
this accounting function. That's not true. That's not true. The trade deficit, it has to be paid for.
00:38:43.660
That's one of the reasons that we don't produce anything and we have such enormous debt and people
00:38:48.220
have such an incredible personal debt. The trade deficit is an emergency. It has to be dealt with.
00:38:54.940
This is one of the key arguments, President Trump. He's trying to reverse these pro this
00:38:59.500
process of open borders and, you know, free trade, free trade and open borders have gone
00:39:06.540
so far to destroy this country. It sucked out the muscle of this country of our manufacturing
00:39:13.580
superpower. People actually make things in all the ecosystem that comes around it. When you have
00:39:19.020
manufacturing, there's all types of service industries around it. There's, you know,
00:39:23.100
there's all the social, uh, you know, restaurants and coffee shops and, and, and, and tailors and
00:39:29.580
all those things in the town that support the people that actually make these great wages
00:39:34.140
manufacturing. That was America at its peak. And we gave that away and people made money off it.
00:39:40.780
Uh, the corporatist, uh, the shareholders and Wall Street and the American people took it on the chin
00:39:48.140
brutally. And President Trump is trying to reverse this. And he's trying to do it quickly. He said,
00:39:53.740
this is emergency. We can't go on like this because people talk about it. Trump is action,
00:39:57.740
action, action. This is action. And it was dramatic. And quite frankly, it's radical.
00:40:04.860
And you saw today. And that's why the hearing took so long. These things were briefed.
00:40:09.260
Substantial read the briefing papers and I'll, I'll get Grace and Mo that will give you a link to go.
00:40:13.900
If you, if you're so interested, and I know some people are, or if you're in college or high school
00:40:18.780
and this, this, um, you know, strikes your fancy, it's an incredible topic to drill down on because
00:40:25.340
it's about the comparative, the comparative economic nature of nations. President Trump's
00:40:32.620
is a dramatic move and it was complicated. And that was laid out today. And you have guys like Gorsuch.
00:40:37.900
What I loved about this as a teaching moment and exercise is the complexity of the arguments,
00:40:44.220
the great questions that are asked and they bang, bang, bang off the top of the head. And those
00:40:48.140
lawyers, the solicitor general and counsel, uh, I guess for the plaintiffs, um, you know,
00:40:54.300
had to stand up there and you've got to cite the reference right there. You can't,
00:40:57.260
you can't tap dance around and they're, they're calling you out. And you saw a couple of times,
00:41:01.100
particularly Gorsuch kind of Gorsuch, Gorsuch, um, unrelenting logic. A couple of times I think
00:41:09.340
got the solicitor general that, you know, a little off guard, I think they came back fine. I'm not so
00:41:14.860
sure how important the oral arguments are in the first place, because I think so much of this is,
00:41:18.700
is in writing. That's one of the things that president Trump changed about, about selecting
00:41:25.340
Supreme Court justice. No more, no longer did he want to go on biography like Sandra Day O'Connor,
00:41:30.220
because that can always disappoint. No, no longer did he want to go to like state,
00:41:34.220
state judge like Souter, which was a New Hampshire just kind of payoff to the Sununus,
00:41:39.660
which turned out to be another disaster. Uh, he wanted written opinions and written opinions
00:41:45.260
over a period of time and showed the intellectual firepower and Gorsuch is one of the, you know,
00:41:51.260
is one of the, you know, rising stars, obviously on the court, but it brings a tremendous amount of
00:41:58.540
intellectual firepower and was quite engaged in this today and had some incredible questions.
00:42:03.260
Where do we stand? I know seemed a little skeptical in some of the questioning.
00:42:07.020
I do think they will come back since this went on a kind of a expedited, uh, hearing that I will think,
00:42:13.500
I do think that we're going to, we're going to hear back on this sometime shortly in the future,
00:42:17.260
because everything is predicated upon this, all the tariffs, uh, everything and bringing the,
00:42:23.980
the, the commitments to, to either pay the tariffs and or move manufacturing back over here.
00:42:29.260
A lot of it is inextricably tied to this, the ramifications on this and president Trump's
00:42:34.460
economic plan is I can't overstate how important it is. That's why you had the whole Supreme Court
00:42:41.260
area blocked off. You had a huge kind of protest outside to police everywhere,
00:42:47.100
three hours packed historic president Trump and his agenda short commercial break back in the
00:42:54.620
morning in a moment. What if he had the brightest mind in the war room delivering critical financial
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00:44:19.580
Okay. So we've, um, we've got a big one today. I think they're thinking over the way is, and I do
00:44:26.140
think you're seeing a, uh, you're going to see a pivot. I'm not so sure a pivot because they've
00:44:30.860
been working on domestic, but he's been spending so much time on international trying to stop the
00:44:34.780
third world war. Obviously last night's going to have an impact and people that are just kind
00:44:40.380
of giving this passive. Well, you know, don't worry. It's blue states. That's the hour is late here,
00:44:45.020
folks. We are burning daylight. We are burning daylight and they're not easy to fix it. Look,
00:44:51.660
those were races that you're probably in all hindsight, not going to win. Although Trump came
00:44:57.420
close in 24 and, uh, the gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey came close, came not, you know,
00:45:06.300
pretty close, caught up on Murphy a couple of years ago. It was the scale of the blowouts. I mean,
00:45:12.540
these are 10 and 15 point losses. You got to get, you got to get realistic here. It's not about blue
00:45:17.020
states. It's about you lost areas where you won in Virginia. And this is why Youngkin's finished
00:45:23.100
that in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Republican party is done for a generation.
00:45:27.500
The people stepping now are going to have to go back to basics and rebuild this thing.
00:45:32.140
And man, is it going to have implications? Uh, Virginia is going to go 10 one. And this is
00:45:36.700
why I'm hugely advocating. You got to drop a real lawsuit out in California and start going to court
00:45:42.860
and arguing that this thing was totally illegitimate and illegal. Just like on ma'am Donnie, you need to
00:45:49.420
do the pick and shovel work. And Hey, guess what? I think there might be some pick and shovel work
00:45:54.860
going on right now to find out if the Ugandan is also for last six years, an American. I highly doubt it.
00:46:04.140
If you absolutely apply the rules here, I highly doubt it. And in the situation like that, the guy
00:46:12.300
gave the speech last night, he threw down. Okay. I hear you. Tough guy. You got it. I hear you.
00:46:17.900
You're barking this and you're barking that. And you're telling Trump, I got four words for you. Turn
00:46:22.940
the volume up. Okay, brother. I hear you. Zoron. Zoron. Zoron. That look. What planet was that from?
00:46:36.380
I would argue the couch at Animal House, but hey, that's just me. The, um, but it's got to be combated.
00:46:44.220
It has to be combated. You can't take this passive approach. And Scott Pressler is a great guy.
00:46:49.820
We're doing a book with him. We think the world of Scott Pressler had done an amazing job of going
00:46:53.420
around. And this guy, you know, with very little help and resources, but that's not the answer.
00:46:59.180
First off, that's just sign them up. You got to get them out in low propensity voters.
00:47:03.500
You got to get out. And the way they get them out is have a guy named Donald J. Trump at the top of
00:47:07.980
the ticket, full stop. And when somebody shows me that they can solve for that part of the equation,
00:47:15.020
I'm all ears and all eyes, but I've seen it up close and personal now for, I don't know, a decade.
00:47:20.140
And I'm not buying. I'm just not buying it right now. We're in a revolution and we have to win. If we
00:47:26.060
don't win, the country's gone. The stakes could not be higher. It's very simple. This is a binary
00:47:31.260
function. This is black and white. We win and they lose. This is just like going against the evil empire
00:47:39.260
in the Soviet Union. But now it is here in the United States of America. This is not a foreign
00:47:43.900
threat. This is an internal threat. This is a clear and present danger of an enemy, all enemies,
00:47:50.460
foreign and domestic. Well, we got a couple, three foreign, but man, we got more than a couple,
00:47:54.540
three domestic, domestic enemies, full stop. And on stage last night in New York City, that was an enemy.
00:47:59.900
That was an enemy. Trevor Comstock, you're here, part of the leg of our coalition,
00:48:06.940
Make America Healthy Again. I don't think that we emphasized that enough in this election the
00:48:11.180
other night, but you do it every day at your company, this magnificent little company,
00:48:15.980
Sacred Human Health. What do you got for us this afternoon, sir?
00:48:19.740
Yeah, good to see you, Steve. So I just wanted to elaborate a little bit further on our flagship
00:48:23.980
product, which of course is our 100% grass-fed beef liver. And for those who don't know,
00:48:29.740
I just always like to make the simple analogy that beef liver is basically like nature's
00:48:34.300
multivitamin. So with it, you get a ton of vitamins and nutrients in a wide array of them,
00:48:39.740
such as vitamin A, B12, CoQ10, folate, zinc. The list goes on quite a bit. And then also,
00:48:47.180
as I had mentioned, you also get a lot of those vitamins and minerals that most people are deficient
00:48:51.260
in. So common things like choline, K2, selenium, and copper. So right there, it's a pretty powerful
00:48:57.420
product in itself. But of course, you know, a nice value add that people tend to rave about
00:49:03.820
is just the nice natural energy boost that they often get after taking it. So, you know,
00:49:08.620
basically instead of those quick energy highs that you sometimes get, if you take, you know,
00:49:12.780
too much caffeine or other general stimulants, the beef liver just adds a nice steady and natural
00:49:18.380
lift and helps you feel a bit more vibrant. So, and that's mainly just because you're getting the
00:49:24.060
the nutrients that your body actually needs to thrive on. So, like I said, it's a pretty powerful
00:49:29.180
product. And then on top of that, what's great about it is that aside from it being 100% grass-fed
00:49:34.780
and natural, the body can actually absorb these nutrients and retain them as opposed to just
00:49:39.220
flushing them out when, you know, you're oftentimes like maybe taking like a multivitamin that's
00:49:43.460
synthetic or has a lot of synthetic ingredients within it or just any other synthetic vitamin
00:49:49.020
in general for that matter. So again, right off the bat, you're kind of getting a much
00:49:53.800
better bang for your buck because your body can retain these nutrients and absorb them
00:49:58.200
much more efficiently. So it's an amazing product for overall health and vitality. I can't say enough
00:50:03.500
about it. I know the War Room Posse loves it. It's definitely their favorite and still our number
00:50:07.680
one product. So I definitely encourage people to check it out if they haven't already.
00:50:12.960
One last thing I want to, I know you got to bounce. If you have never taken something like this before,
00:50:17.960
because the lads or the younger, you know, folks in the audience, particularly young guys,
00:50:24.240
this got to be a thing a couple of years ago, you know, grass-fed beef liver. But for those that
00:50:29.280
have not, you know, or don't go to those podcasts, don't go to those websites, if you're totally
00:50:33.620
unfamiliar with any of this and you go to the website, what are the two or three most compelling
00:50:38.640
arguments if you're just a middle-aged person of why this can immediately not just give you energy
00:50:44.060
boost but do so much more for you? What is it, sir? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot I could go on for
00:50:49.520
that. Again, I just got to break it down to the fact that your body can actually absorb the nutrients
00:50:54.160
within the beef liver because it is a natural product. Whereas, you know, oftentimes if you're
00:50:58.460
taking these other like synthetic formulas or greens powders, they just have a ton of unnatural
00:51:03.320
ingredients which your body can't recognize. So that's why people retain the nutrients and then
00:51:06.900
they get that energy boost to go with it, which of course people love. But yeah, because it's a
00:51:12.240
natural product, your body recognizes it and utilizes it like it's supposed to.
00:51:18.740
Trevor Comstock, Sacred Human Health, part of the whole Make America Healthy Again movement.
00:51:26.180
Where do they go? One more time. Yeah, you can go to sacredhumanhealth.com and then you can use
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code WARROOM for 10% off. And yeah, we got you covered on all that. It's the one year anniversary
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of the greatest comeback in American political history. We're going to commemorate that all week
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here in the War Room. I'm going to be giving some remarks later this evening for Senator DeMint
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and Mark Meadows and the folks over at CPI, another one of these great foundational element
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institutions of the MAGA movement. That would be Make America Great. Once again, short break back in
00:52:06.780
the War Room for the second hour of the afternoon and evening edition.
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Okay, let's be honest. You never thought it would get this far. Maybe you missed the last
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