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00:00:00.000Well folks, tons happening in the news.
00:00:02.000The Trump administration going after Harvard.
00:00:05.000Nayib Bukele from El Salvador stops by the Oval Office and the latest in the trade war.
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00:00:37.000All righty, so the big story over the course of the last couple of days that the United States government has now frozen billions of dollars in funding to Harvard.
00:00:46.000The reason for this is because Harvard refuses to go along with the federal government's demands.
00:00:50.000That it abide by the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
00:00:53.000The Civil Rights Act dictates that universities and any business that actually receives federal funding must abide by anti-discrimination law.
00:01:02.000Now, you cannot like some aspects of the Civil Rights Act, its attempts to intrude into the private sphere, for example.
00:01:08.000But the Civil Rights Act is in fact the Civil Rights Act.
00:01:11.000And the fact is that if a university had facilitated anti-black racism to the extent that Harvard University has facilitated Now, we can also be real about the politics of this situation,
00:01:27.000which is that federal funding should not be going to these universities anyway.
00:01:30.000So how much money does Harvard actually get from the federal government?
00:01:32.000I asked our sponsors over at Perplexity exactly how much money does Harvard University receive on an annualized basis from the federal government.
00:01:39.000They said Harvard University receives substantial funding from the federal government each year primarily to support its research activities.
00:01:45.000In fiscal year 2024, Harvard received approximately $686 million from a federal agency.
00:01:50.000This amount constituted about 68% of the university's total sponsored research revenue and accounted for roughly 11% of its overall operating revenue, which is a lot of money.
00:02:01.000I mean, that's a lot of money that they are receiving.
00:02:03.000Most of it goes to various science outlets like Harvard Medical School or the School of Public Health, but it also does go to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
00:02:13.000The Department of Health and Human Services is the largest federal funding.
00:02:16.000They provide $520 million in fiscal year 2024.
00:02:46.000There's no reason your taxpayer dollars should be going to fund Harvard in the first place.
00:02:50.000And maybe that's the overall fight that we actually should be having.
00:02:53.000But that's a fight that has to be had in Congress as opposed to inside the executive branch.
00:02:57.000The executive branch is now making the claim that Harvard University should have its funding removed because it is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
00:03:04.000Harvard, for its part, says it is now going to resist the Trump administration's demands to change its governance structure over campus anti-Semitism.
00:03:11.000And so the government then responded by announcing a $2.26 billion freeze of Harvard's multi-year grants and contracts.
00:03:19.000That's according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:03:20.000Harvard President Alan Garber put out a statement complaining about the federal government and suggesting the federal government was wrong for involving itself in this way.
00:03:32.000How dare the federal government actually attach strings to the things it has always attached to strings to?
00:03:37.000However, President Alan Garber said the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.
00:03:42.000The Trump administration said the school's response, quote, reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges.
00:03:49.000That federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.
00:03:58.000Most of the demands concerned how the university operates.
00:04:01.000The government was asking for a comprehensive mask ban, as well as changes to governance, leadership and admissions, and an end to diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI program.
00:04:09.000DEI programs are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
00:04:11.000There's no question that DEI, which is predicated on the false notion that inequality of outcome by group must be due to discrimination and therefore must be rectified by reverse discrimination, that that is in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
00:04:24.000It's certainly in violation of Supreme Court standards with regard to affirmative action.
00:04:28.000As far as things like a comprehensive mask ban, the idea there is that you don't want people who have shown up to campus on student visas.
00:04:39.000The government is also demanding necessary changes be made to address bias, improve viewpoint diversity, and end ideological capture, fueling anti-Semitic harassment, according to the Task Force's letter.
00:04:53.000Lawyers for the university said Harvard has made and will continue to make lasting and robust structural policy and programmatic changes to ensure the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment, but the task force is making demands, quote, in contravention of the First Amendment.
00:05:05.000And say that they are ignoring due process.
00:05:08.000Now, again, this will all get played out in the courts, presumably.
00:05:11.000But the idea that Harvard University is somehow owed federal money is absurd.
00:05:17.000There is no reason that the Trump administration should not be able to attach strings to money that it is sending out the door to a university with a $53 billion endowment.
00:05:26.000You know, it's an easy way for Harvard to continue its policy of independence from the federal government, to be independent of the federal government.
00:05:34.000Don't get in bed with the government if you don't want to get screwed.
00:05:37.000It tends to be a pretty good way of approaching life.
00:05:40.000The faculty put out a statement on Friday saying, quote, that the federal government's actions overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech.
00:05:52.000Well, no, actually, they're just saying that if you engage in anti-Semitism, then that is in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
00:05:58.000It's funny to watch all these universities that for years were willing to expel students for saying that boys were not girls.
00:06:06.000I was there when they went after Lawrence Summers, who at the time was the president of Harvard University.
00:06:09.000They got angry at him because he made the mere suggestion that perhaps the lack of women in scientific institutions might be due to the fact that women are less interested in scientific pursuits overall as opposed to men, and also that the ends of the bell curve with regard to scientific performance on tests tend to be heavily male.
00:06:26.000He was ousted from his position for that.
00:06:29.000So don't give me your free speech concerns.
00:06:32.000When you guys have been cracking down on free speech yourselves for a long time, at the very least, if you want to say that free speech doesn't apply, they're a private university, all right, then you have to be a private university.
00:06:52.000Harvard professor Nicholas Bowie says this is authoritarian.
00:06:55.000No, what seems authoritarian to me is you seizing my taxpayer money, shoving it in your giant endowment, and then cramming down a bunch of left-wing agitprop on your tens of thousands of students.
00:07:04.000What the president of the United States is demanding of universities is nothing short of authoritarian.
00:07:12.000There's a quote on the building of the Department of Justice where law ends, tyranny begins.
00:07:18.000And tyranny, frankly, is the only word to describe what the Trump administration is doing with respect to universities.
00:07:28.000How is it tyranny to say you don't get federal dollars if you violate the Civil Rights Act?
00:07:31.000The Trump Task Force on Anti-Semitism has been investigating Harvard among other universities because, again, during the gigantic anti-Semitic protests that erupted last year after October 7th, and many of them were, in fact, openly anti-Semitic.
00:07:58.000And he has many stories to tell about what happened at Harvard University while he was there.
00:08:02.000The idea that Harvard did not violate the Civil Rights Act is ridiculous.
00:08:06.000Now, does that mean that every demand that the Trump administration is making is going to get upheld in court?
00:08:09.000No, I'm sure that some of those demands will be held to be extraneous to the Civil Rights Act complaints the Trump administration is voicing on Harvard.
00:08:16.000However, Harvard does not have any moral grounds to stand on when they insist that everyone else pay the bills at an incredibly rich university.
00:08:25.000So they can continue pushing whatever nonsense it is they are pushing.
00:08:29.000Well, the Trump administration is looking for places to cut fat.
00:08:31.000Well, you should be cutting fat from, you know, your cell phone company.
00:08:35.000PureTalk is the cell phone company I use for business every day.
00:08:38.000They are cutting the fat from the wireless industry.
00:10:09.000Their licensed experts are with you every step of the way, answering questions, handling paperwork, advocating for you, seeing the coverage you need, and get back to living your life.
00:10:15.00040% of people wish they'd gotten life insurance earlier.
00:10:43.000Okay, meanwhile, in other sort of hot legal fights, yesterday, Nayib Bukele, who's the head of El Salvador, stopped by the Oval Office with President Trump and they were talking about a very controversial case surrounding a man named Kilmer Armando Abrego Garcia.
00:10:59.000That person is a Salvadoran national who lived illegally in the United States.
00:11:04.000And he was adjudicated as credibly accused, not just of being an illegal immigrant, but of being a member of MS-13 by a variety of courts.
00:11:11.000That doesn't mean they found that he was, in fact, a member of MS-13.
00:11:14.000They were saying that there was credible evidence that suggested that he might be a member of MS-13 and the executive branch has the ability to deport him.
00:11:21.000Then, there was a withholding order that was put on him because he made a claim that if he were deported specifically to El Salvador, that he would be killed.
00:11:30.000Well, the Trump administration then deported him.
00:11:33.000In court, they claimed in their filings that they'd made a mistake in deporting him.
00:11:36.000They admitted they'd made a mistake in deporting him.
00:11:38.000Not because he shouldn't be deported, but because they didn't realize that the withholding order was still good and they had to go through the process.
00:11:54.000That the process by which he was deported was flawed.
00:11:57.000And the Supreme Court suggested that a lower court clarify its directive with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.
00:12:06.000And they said the U.S. government had to, quote, facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody.
00:12:10.000So, the question legally here rests on what it means to facilitate his return from El Salvador.
00:12:20.000Again, this is not about him ending up in the United States.
00:12:23.000So, yesterday, in the Oval Office, large-scale controversy broke out because...
00:12:30.000Bukele is the head of the prison that is holding this particular Salvadoran national.
00:12:35.000He is doing so under the terms, by the way, of an agreement between the United States and El Salvador.
00:12:42.000As Andrew McCarthy over at National Review points out, there's actually an agreement between the U.S. government and El Salvador.
00:12:51.000It's for temporary detention for a period of one year.
00:12:54.000By the conclusion of that period, the United States is supposed to make a final decision on the detainees' long-term dispositions.
00:12:59.000The idea here is that the United States still does have some level of control over the detainees that we are sending there because there's still supposed to be some sort of final disposition of those people.
00:13:32.000And in 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court, ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country.
00:13:45.000Okay, so that's not quite what they ruled.
00:13:48.000They ruled that he was credibly accused of being a member of MS-13 and that the executive branch had the ability to deport him.
00:13:53.000So that part of what she is saying is true.
00:13:55.000Stephen Miller, as always, makes the most credible case for what the administration is doing.
00:14:00.000Stephen is obviously incredibly articulate and very hard on this issue.
00:14:05.000With respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador.
00:14:09.000So it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point.
00:14:19.000Okay, now, it's true he's a Salvadoran citizen.
00:14:21.000The question is whether he went through due process in the United States before we deport him.
00:14:25.000This is a separate issue from whether we should deport him.
00:14:27.000The answer is, presumably, we should deport him, and the Trump administration does have the power to deport him.
00:14:31.000The question is whether he went through the due process to which pretty much everybody in America is actually, oh, it's not the same due process.
00:14:38.000If you're not a citizen, the process is different than if you are a citizen, for example.
00:14:42.000For his part, Bukele, who is a strong ally to President Trump, particularly on immigration and crime.
00:14:48.000He says he's not going to return the prisoner.
00:15:10.000of course, that's a bit of a red herring.
00:15:11.000The reality is that the United States is not actually going to request that Bukele smuggle him back into the United States.
00:15:17.000The question is whether, under the Supreme Court's ruling, we have to facilitate his return so that he can be adjudicated, not here legally, and then he gets sent out of the country.
00:15:25.000And so, facilitation might mean that we request it of Bukele.
00:15:28.000The idea we have no control over the people that we're shipping down to this prison in El Salvador is obviously not particularly true.
00:15:35.000And nobody is paying El Salvador right now some $6 million for the current arrangement.
00:15:41.000So, again, this is an interesting legal issue.
00:15:44.000As far as a moral issue, The fact is that this is a loser for Democrats.
00:15:49.000People do not want to see MS-13 members in the United States.
00:15:51.000And if the idea is that he didn't get his day in court, I mean, his case went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
00:15:57.000If the idea is that he must be returned so that he can have a one-day hearing and then deported again, I don't think that's something most Americans are going to lose sleep over one way or another.
00:16:05.000President Trump, however, he says, because President Trump is always going to go to the limit, he says the homegrowns are next.
00:16:17.000We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking that are absolute monsters.
00:16:34.000I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay?
00:16:42.000Okay, now again, the president continues to say he's going to abide by the laws here.
00:16:46.000He's not going to just willy-nilly pick American citizens up and throw them in a Salvadoran prison.
00:16:50.000This, of course, has driven the left insane because whenever President Trump says something like this, even though he is caveating it 10 times that he's going to look at the legality, they immediately jump to he's going to start rounding people up off the street and sending them to Salvadoran prisons.
00:17:03.000Meanwhile, the administration continues to be extremely strong in pursuing means for the deportation of non-American citizens who are here for no reason other than to agitate.
00:17:53.000This morning, I received the news of the martyrdom of my cousin, my derby companion, my brother and my love, Masra Suleiman Masharka, after a clash with the traitors in his force, who tried to assassinate him along with his companions, the resistance team, Musam Khazam and Arafat al-Amer.
00:18:05.000It didn't work until the planes entered.
00:18:15.000And the media are finding a way to defend him too.
00:18:17.000Because as always, our politics is kind of the stupidest form of our politics.
00:18:21.000We should want people who are un-American not to be here in the United States.
00:18:25.000Also, we do have to follow the due process for all of that.
00:18:27.000And I think President Trump agrees with that.
00:18:30.000Although we will have to see how this case of the Salvadoran citizen plays out.
00:18:35.000And meanwhile, The stock markets continue to be unsure about what to do given the current tariff war.
00:18:40.000Every day brings a new surprise in the tariff war.
00:18:44.000Stocks rose yesterday, more than 300 points.
00:18:47.000Stock futures were down a little bit today.
00:18:50.000The reason, again, was because it is totally unclear what is coming next in the trade war.
00:18:55.000So on Friday night, President Trump drove a hole through the middle of his tariff regime.
00:19:00.000I had suggested for a couple of weeks this was going to happen.
00:19:02.000I believe I said it on the All In podcast.
00:19:04.000I believe I also said it on this podcast.
00:19:05.000The most likely scenario was that President Trump was going to realize the dire economic impact this was going to have on core American industries, and he was going to have to start making significant exceptions to his own tariff rules.
00:19:16.000Now again, I think that before we get into the details of what exactly President Trump is trying to do, we have to try to figure out exactly the general goal.
00:19:23.000So it is pretty clear at this point that President Trump wants to box in the Chinese, which again, is a goal with which I wholeheartedly agree.
00:19:29.000We talked about this at length with former representative Mike Gallagher, now of Palantir, talking about what we could do to box in the Chinese with regard to the markets.
00:19:37.000Because obviously they're stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of RIP every single year.
00:19:41.000They're growing their military at exorbitant rates.
00:19:43.000They're flexing their muscles in the South China Sea.
00:19:46.000They're building connections all over the world, ranging from Africa to the Middle East to Latin America and all the rest.
00:20:03.000You have to have allies on board because if China just increases its trade with everybody else, then you get in macro scale basically what's happened with Russia during the Ukraine war, where there's an attempt to cut Russia off from the world economic system.
00:20:16.000Russia formed greater alliances economically with places like Russia and even places that are sort of oriented between the United States and Russia, like India, and they've been able to economically survive.
00:20:26.000So you really have to box everybody in.
00:20:27.000It's really, really important to box China in by having a bunch of allies around.
00:20:33.000Number two, you have to make sure that your own supply lines are durable.
00:20:37.000That China can't break your supply lines.
00:20:39.000Because China has certain things that they can do to really hurt the United States economy and put us on the wrong foot with regard to even things like military readiness.
00:20:46.000So that means we need alternative supply lines with regard to everything from semiconductors to rare earth minerals.
00:20:55.000And then step number three is you would actually have to gradually increase the tariffs so that you don't destroy American businesses in the process.
00:21:05.000There are a lot of people who I've been talking to, business people, who have, after 30 years, 40 years of working with the Chinese, they were hit overnight with a 145% tariff.
00:21:14.000Many of those businesses are likely to go under because there is no actual replacement supply chain.
00:21:19.000For those businesses at this point, prices are likely to skyrocket, demand is likely to then fall, and then you are likely to see an actual economic recession if that sort of thing was to continue.
00:21:43.000The United States was charging an effective 2.7% tariff on the rest of the world.
00:21:46.000That would have included China before all of this.
00:21:49.000And now it's 10% on everybody who's not China and 145% on China.
00:21:52.000So that's a pretty radical escalation.
00:21:54.000And so now it seems that they're trying to walk their way back into what would look like a good tariff policy.
00:22:00.000The question is whether they're going to be able to effectively do that.
00:22:04.000So on Friday night, President Trump created exemptions for semiconductors and iPhones.
00:22:09.000This led to a late afternoon spike in the stock markets on Friday, and it led to mild gains on the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday.
00:22:17.000Now everybody is unsure of what comes next exactly.
00:22:20.000According to Newsweek, President Trump's reciprocal tariffs as of a Friday night update spares smartphones, computers, and other electronic products that have been expected to face steep duties under sweeping new levies, particularly those targeting Chinese imports.
00:22:33.000Now again, some of this looks like favoritism.
00:22:36.000It looks like some of the big companies that President Trump has been working closely with, companies like Apple or NVIDIA, that those particular companies got carved out specific to them.
00:22:46.000And this is one of the problems when you have tariff policies that are not specifically calibrated.
00:22:50.000What you end up with is that the people with the best lobbyists get the exemptions and everybody else gets screwed.
00:22:55.000So the small business owner who doesn't have lobbyists in Washington pledging to spend $100 billion in America, those people are going to get totally jacked by the tariffs.
00:23:04.000Whereas if you are a big company, then you're going to be able to go to the Trump administration and get a carve-out.
00:23:11.000It's also true that it's going to take longer than just a few months to reshore Crucial industries like, for example, semiconducting manufacturer.
00:23:19.000If you're a semiconducting manufacturing facility, that's going to take you 5, 10, maybe 15 years to build in the right way, particularly in the United States where it's very, very difficult to build.
00:23:29.000What you really need is radical deregulation inside the United States making it easier to build.
00:23:34.000The exemption list includes the products the U.S. heavily relies on for overseas production with limited domestic manufacturing capacity and high consumer demand.
00:23:45.000Administration rolled that out Friday night, and everybody said, OK, well, maybe this is the start of a loosening or recalibration.
00:23:51.000And then on Sunday, President Trump put out a statement saying, no, no, no, no, you're misunderstanding me.
00:23:56.000Nobody gets off the hook, which is weird because Apple and NVIDIA seem to get off the hook.
00:24:00.000He said nobody is getting off the hook for the unfair trade balances and non-monetary tariff barriers that other countries have used against us, especially not China, which by far treats us the worst.
00:24:08.000There is no tariff exception announced on Friday.
00:24:10.000These products are subject to the existing 20% fentanyl tariffs.
00:24:13.000They're just moving to a different tariff bucket.
00:24:15.000The fake news knows this, but it's refusing to report it.
00:24:17.000We're taking a look at semiconductors and the whole electronics supply chain in the upcoming national security tariff investigations.
00:24:23.000What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States and that we will not be held hostage by other countries, especially hostile trading nations like China, which will do everything within its power to disrespect the American people.
00:24:32.000We also cannot let them continue to abuse us on trade like they have for decades.
00:24:37.000The golden age of America, which includes the upcoming tax and regulation cuts, a substantial amount of which was just approved by the House and Senate, will mean more and better paying jobs, making products in our nation and treating other countries, in particular China, the same way they have treated us.
00:24:48.000The bottom line is that our country will be bigger, better, stronger than ever before.
00:24:53.000Now, again, it is not totally clear what President Trump means by the idea that this is going to fall into a different tariff bucket.
00:25:02.000Presumably, he means that these will be covered.
00:25:05.000By 232 tariffs, which are basically investigations into product manipulation, essentially.
00:25:16.000Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows for sectoral tariffs.
00:25:24.000Basically, you start an investigation into importing, and you see whether it's being manipulated, and then you can do tariffs under that provision.
00:25:33.000He's saying that we need an investigation.
00:25:34.000The truth is we actually don't need an investigation with regard to the import of semiconductors.
00:25:39.000We know a lot about that particular area of the supply line.
00:25:42.000It looks more like an excuse to hold off on the worst impact of what the tariffs would be if we were to actually include electronics products, semiconductors, iPhone manufacturer, and all the rest in the tariffs.
00:25:56.000So mixed messages coming from the administration on this particular point.
00:26:00.000Howard Lutnick is the Commerce Secretary.
00:26:18.000The president's going to do it for pharmaceuticals and he is going to do it for semiconductors.
00:26:22.000So all those products are going to come under semiconductors and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reassured.
00:26:32.000We'll get into more of this in a moment.
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00:28:33.000Okay, meanwhile, Peter Navarro, who again should not be inside the administration since he doesn't know what he's talking about on trade and has single-handedly helped crater international bond markets, for example, he says that there are no exceptions to the tariff regime, which is weird because there's a giant exception to the tariff regime,
00:29:20.000Meanwhile, Stephen Miller laid out the best case for why the administration was doing what he's doing.
00:29:25.000Again, Miller is the best expositor of what the administration is thinking.
00:29:29.000When the tariff rate went up to the full rate of 125 on top of the 20, it was necessary to publish a more detailed list from Customs and Border Protection explaining the rates and how they're applied.
00:29:47.000And these particular components are being put through a separate process controlled by the Department of Commerce, which is the 232.
00:29:53.000So this is a sophisticated, elegant, detailed plan to deal with Chinese economic aggression against the United States.
00:30:01.000Okay, I wish it were more sophisticated and elegant and explicable because the reality is that the markets have no idea what's coming next or what exactly is going on, and that's being reflected in the bond markets as well as the stock market.
00:30:11.000As the Wall Street Journal editorial board says, what happened and what's the real policy?
00:30:15.000Perhaps Mr. Trump didn't like the reporting.
00:30:17.000The tech giants like Apple and Tim Cook were getting exceptions.
00:30:19.000Other winners in the CBP notice would be Dell Technologies' Michael Dell, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and the executives and shareholders of Hewlett-Packard and TSMC.
00:30:29.000These exemptions would be good news for consumers who are otherwise facing much higher prices for smartphones that are a staple of modern life.
00:30:34.000But after President Trump's broadside, tech companies and electronics firms are left wondering exactly who is going to get a reprieve.
00:30:40.000And what it's going to look like, frankly, is a bidding process.
00:30:43.000Immediately after receiving this reprieve, unveiled plans to produce new Made in America supercomputers powering AI in the United States, claiming $500 billion spending on AI in the United States.
00:30:56.000Now, do I think those two things are disconnected?
00:30:58.000I think that what you are seeing is major companies basically coming to the Trump administration and saying, if we pledge that we're going to spend X number of dollars in the American economy, can we get an exemption from the tariffs for the moment?
00:31:08.000That's what it looks like, which is why.
00:31:10.000Tariffs provide for political chaos, and they also provide a heavy dose of lobbying.
00:31:15.000The lobbyists are going to do real well when you have regulations that basically can be relieved with one stroke of the pen.
00:31:22.000Apple apparently is also studying potentially bringing some iPhone production into the United States.
00:31:27.000Or Apple could produce an ultra-expensive version of the phone that have lower mass market appeal, sort of like the Mac Pro that was assembled in the United States during the first Trump administration.
00:31:36.000President Trump is now saying that he wants to extend exemptions into, wait for it, the auto industry.
00:32:23.000But then we should be explaining that that's exactly what is happening here.
00:32:25.000Here's President Trump considering a pause on auto tariffs now.
00:32:28.000I'm looking at something to help some of the car companies where they're switching to parts that were made in Canada, Mexico, and other places.
00:32:37.000And they need a little bit of time because they're going to make them here.
00:32:43.000So I'm talking about things like that.
00:32:47.000Okay, so again, cutting holes in the middle of this tariff regime.
00:32:51.000I've been saying this for a couple of weeks, really since President Trump announced it.
00:32:54.000This was the most likely outcome, is that he was going to have to back away.
00:32:57.000From the strongest parts of the tariffs because they were not well calibrated or well adjusted.
00:33:01.000And hopefully this is a better form of these things.
00:33:04.000That is sort of the glass half full version of what's going on with the tariffs.
00:33:08.000The glass half empty says that basically the administration laid out a set of tariff priorities that were uncalibrated and now is rushing to try and fix them as best it can.
00:33:19.000And basically they're spackling over many of the cracks in the edifice in order to prevent complete collapse of the global international trading system.
00:33:27.000The reality is that many of the theories upon which the Trump administration is predicating itself here may in fact be mistaken.
00:33:34.000So for example, the idea that when you erect tariffs, a bunch of companies are going to come reshore in the United States.
00:33:39.000The question is whether they're actually going to do that.
00:33:42.000According to a new CNBC supply chain survey, if China loses some manufacturing as a result of President Trump's tariffs, the U.S. manufacturing sector is not going to be the place where people reshore.
00:33:51.000People aren't going to reshore from China to the United States.
00:33:54.000They're going to reshore from China to, say, Vietnam.
00:33:56.000Over half of those surveyed said cost was the top reason for saying they would not be reshoring production.
00:34:01.00021% of their top reason was the challenge of finding skilled labor.
00:34:05.000The Trump administration is promising tax cuts for companies that bring back manufacturing.
00:34:08.000The survey found taxes 14% lower in companies' ranking of factors that impact manufacturers' site decision-making.
00:34:16.000Taken together, the majority of respondents estimated the price tag of building a new domestic supply chain would be at least double current costs, or more likely be more than double.
00:34:25.000Instead of moving supply chains back to the United States, according to 61%, again, these are people who are manufacturers, they said it would be more cost-effective to relocate supply chains to lower-tariffed countries.
00:34:34.000So you will get people moving away from China to Vietnam.
00:34:37.000Moving from China to Vietnam would be great, so long as we actually are negotiating trade agreements with these other various countries to cut off the Chinese.
00:34:44.000The question, of course, is whether, in fact, those other countries will cut off the Chinese or whether they will continue to trade with both sides.
00:34:52.000So, this raises the question, of course, as to whether the countries we are attempting to cut deals with on trade are actually going to move away from China, because those are two different questions.
00:35:01.000It is clear that President Trump wants to negotiate what he calls better deals with a variety of these countries, and maybe we'll get some of them.
00:35:08.000Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, there's a rule inside the administration, by the way.
00:35:12.000Every time Peter Navarro appears on the television, the stock market goes down.
00:35:15.000Every time Scott Besant appears on the television, the stock market goes up, which is why President Trump should listen to Scott Besant.
00:35:20.000And not Peter Navarro or Howard Lutnick on this sort of stuff.
00:35:22.000Scott Besson has been out there saying that we are moving fast to do deals.
00:35:26.000We are moving quickly with many of our most important trading partners.
00:36:00.000And the fact is that we've been contacted by virtually every country on Earth.
00:36:04.000And I talk to Jameson Greer many times a day.
00:36:08.000And I think that the count of actual offers is north of 10 a little bit right now.
00:36:13.000And so I was being cautious with it when I said 10 earlier today.
00:36:17.000Now, if you want to understand what's going on in this trade war, you have to also understand what's going on on the other side of the chess table.
00:36:23.000So the United States is making moves, and China's not sitting still.
00:36:26.000If, as I said, the goal of the United States in coordinating off China and boxing them in, if the goal is, one, activate your allies and make sure that they're not trading with China.
00:36:36.000Two, make sure that you have reshored key industries such that you're not reliant on Chinese exports.
00:36:45.000And three, you really have to build up your military.
00:36:47.000What China wants is to counteract those things.
00:36:50.000So what they are going to attempt to do, presumably, is to make friends with all of the people that we are attempting to militarize against them.
00:36:57.000The bad news for the Trump administration is it seems like that actually is happening quite quickly.
00:37:01.000And the reason for that is, again, the original approach here, which should have been, let's be great friends with all of our friends.
00:37:07.000Let's be really bad enemies to our enemies.
00:37:10.000Instead, it was like, what if I just run around the room slapping everybody in the face with this rubber chicken?
00:37:17.000Now, it may reverse back into something that looks like a better plan, but in the meantime, that sort of attitude is leading other countries to say, well, you know, maybe we'll triangulate.
00:37:24.000Maybe we'll take a better deal from the U.S., and maybe we'll also continue to trade with the Chinese.
00:37:30.000What's the U.S. exactly going to do about that?
00:37:32.000Unless the U.S. is willing to place secondary sanctions on the EU or something for trading with the Chinese, which would just drive the EU deeper into the heart of the Chinese sphere.
00:37:41.000As the Wall Street Journal pointed out over the weekend, U.S. allies are sitting out Trump's trade war with China.
00:37:47.000Some 70 countries currently negotiating tariff relief with the United States should approach China as a group together with Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said last week.
00:37:55.000But the problem is many European and Asian partners aren't sure to what extent they're still allied with Washington.
00:38:00.000Trump's initial Liberation Day order after all slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies.
00:38:06.000The shock from this attack partially reversed only as a result of the U.S. market route with additional exemptions quietly adopted on Friday.
00:38:13.000has added to months of concerns about how much Trump's America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world.
00:38:18.000Again, if the idea is that China is our geopolitical enemy, we need to box them in.
00:38:21.000You don't want to slap around the people who you're considering your allies.
00:38:25.000It is thus no surprise to see Vietnam, which is one of the states that the Trump administration originally slapped with a 46% tariff and then walked it back all the way down to 10%.
00:38:33.000Vietnam is now making common cause with, wait for it, China.
00:38:36.000They're trying to triangulate between the United States and China.
00:38:39.000According to the Washington Post, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called on Southeast Asian countries Monday to join him in resisting President Trump's unilateralism and protectionism, part of his effort to present Beijing as a more reliable ally and trading partner.
00:38:50.000So again, this is what you would do if you were the leader of China.
00:38:52.000You would try to escape the box being created by the Trump administration by making alliances or at least trade relationships with all the people that Trump is trying to alienate you from.
00:39:03.000He got a very, very warm welcome, apparently.
00:39:06.000His strategy aims to expand China's friends and trading partners in the region to better insulate itself against Trump's tariffs.
00:39:11.000It also is part of China's efforts to unseat the United States as the preeminent superpower in the region and establish a world order more in line with Beijing's interests.
00:39:20.000Xi wrote an editorial for the official newspaper of Vietnam's Communist Party saying, So again, China is doing all the things you would expect them to do.
00:39:34.000That includes, by the way, Pressing its finger directly in the wound that is America's supply line.
00:39:40.000So, for example, China, as I said they would last week, not that I told you so, but I totally told you so.
00:39:45.000This is the benefit of listening to the show as you're a couple of days ahead of the news.
00:39:49.000China is now stopping its shipping of some heavy rare earth metals and magnets, critical to US production of everything from cell phones to fighter jets, as their trade war simmers, according to the New York Post.
00:39:58.000Effective April 3rd, China is no longer exporting seven heavy rare earth metals processed exclusively in China.
00:40:05.000as well as heavy rare earth magnets, of which about 90% of the world's supply are also synthesized on Beijing's territory.
00:40:11.000The export halt applies to all countries, but access to elements like dysprosium and yttrium is critical to U.S. industry, especially in tech, electric vehicle, aircraft, and defense sectors, according to Drew Horn, who served as the top U.S. official on strategic minerals and energy supply chain development under President Trump the first time around.
00:40:29.000The EV, auto space, everything from cell phones, defense key components, space travel.
00:40:34.000China, he said, has essentially created an all-powerful monopoly with them, which, again, is the reason why the United States, for example, should be drawing closer to, wait for it, Canada, because Canada does have access to some of these critical rare-earth minerals.
00:40:45.000So instead of alienating and slapping around the Canadians, we should have been trying to draw closer to them to make sure that our supply lines were actually reshored.
00:40:53.000Horn said the Chinese have been threatening this because they do have that leverage to basically cut us off and cut the world off, which essentially cuts us off through all sorts of different means, and now they're doing it.
00:41:01.000So again, Beijing is doing exactly the thing that you would expect them to do.
00:41:04.000Beijing is also trying to cut off American companies from doing business in China, including Boeing.
00:41:10.000According to Channel News Asia, China has now told its airlines to stop taking deliveries of jets from American aviation giant Boeing.
00:41:19.000Apparently, China is also ordering airlines to halt deliveries of Boeing planes.
00:41:23.000Beijing has told its carriers to suspend purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from U.S. companies.
00:41:27.000So China is, in fact, pretty good at manufacture, right?
00:41:31.000Basically, we took all of the service sector and China took a large swath of the manufacturing sector.
00:41:36.000And so China is now attempting to damage the United States.
00:41:39.000And they can do damage to the United States, which is why you actually have to have a plan for what you want this trade war to look like, how you want it to go.
00:41:47.000Meanwhile, there are significant problems in the bond market.
00:41:51.000The reality is that the U.S. 10-year Treasury Yield Index has been climbing sky high.
00:41:56.000People are moving out of bonds, which shows lack of faith in the American market.
00:42:00.000Meanwhile, the price of spot gold is going up because, again, people don't know where to put their money, and so they're figuring that precious metals is a pretty good place to put it.
00:42:07.000If you're worried about the dollar, if you're worried about bonds, if you're worried about stocks, where exactly do you put your money?
00:42:13.000The United States, meanwhile, the trade representative, Jamison Greer, he's saying that China didn't have to retaliate, which is like, I'm sorry, that if you don't like what China did in response, maybe you shouldn't have put your pawn there.
00:42:27.000Honestly, if you're playing chess, you can't blame the other side for taking your pawn if you put it in a vulnerable position.
00:42:32.000The only reason we're really in this position right now is because China chose to retaliate
00:42:54.000But why would they not retaliate considering you slapped them with a 145% tariff and made clear to the rest of the world that you wish to go to trade war with them?
00:43:02.000And there are better ways of approaching this and worse ways.
00:43:04.000As I say, I agree with the overall global strategy that Trump is pursuing.
00:43:08.000The question is, what are the tactics you use to achieve the strategy?
00:43:12.000The idea for a war can be correct, but if you pursue it in the wrong way, you can still lose the war.
00:43:18.000And meanwhile, speaking of areas where the Trump administration foreign policy is riding a race.
00:43:25.000I have to say, the Trump administration continues to deploy Steve Witkoff as though he is some sort of negotiating savant.
00:43:31.000And I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that Steve Witkoff is a negotiating savant.
00:43:35.000Steve Witkoff is a business person who has now been thrust into an arena in foreign policy he knows literally nothing about, and he continues to show it pretty much every time he appears on television or talks about it.
00:43:46.000This is the same Steve Witkoff, the special envoy.
00:43:49.000President Trump has appointed him special envoy to Russia-Ukraine.
00:43:51.000And when it comes to Russia-Ukraine, I should point out, That literally nothing has happened with Russia-Ukraine.
00:43:55.000Russia, over the weekend, fired missiles into Ukraine again, killed some 34 people, including civilians, because Russia doesn't care about killing civilians, like, at all, at all.
00:44:06.000And Steve Witkoff pressured Zelensky to come to the table.
00:44:09.000Zelensky, because President Trump and J.D. Vance basically yelled at him, came to the table and said, we're willing to do a ceasefire now, and Russia has done zero things.
00:44:26.000Now, President Trump seems fed up with Putin, as well he should be.
00:44:29.000Now, President Trump's peace through strength foreign policy is not being well served by Steve Whitcoff, who appears to have no capacity whatsoever to actually threaten the use of the fist.
00:44:37.000Instead, it's all velvet glove and no fist, which is definitely not the way that Trump has historically approached foreign policy.
00:44:43.000Here's President Trump yesterday blaming Vladimir Putin predominantly for the war in Ukraine and then Biden and Zelensky.
00:44:50.000And most importantly, you have millions of people dead.
00:44:53.000Millions of people dead because of three people.
00:45:20.000Well, now Witkoff is saying that he had a meeting on April 11th in St. Petersburg.
00:45:25.000He said it was a compelling meeting and that Putin had shown a willingness to work toward a permanent peace.
00:45:29.000But he said it took a while for us to get to that point.
00:45:31.000He said this peace deal is about these so-called five territories, but there's so much more to it.
00:45:35.000I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very important for the world at large.
00:45:39.000OK, suffice it to say, I do not trust Steve Witkoff's judgment when it comes to cutting deals, because so far the deals that he has cut have been effectively useless.
00:45:49.000Was the deal to release some of the Israeli hostages from Hamas very early on.
00:45:53.000And frankly, that deal was maybe the mediocre deal I have seen.
00:46:00.000Everything else that Wyckoff is doing, he says that there's a broader aim behind the talk, suggesting economic cooperation could help stabilize relations between the U.S. and Russia.
00:46:08.000He said, I see the possibility of reshaping the Russian-United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities that gives real stability to the region too.
00:46:46.000Speaking of which, Meanwhile, Whitcoff is saying stupid things with regard to Iran as well.
00:46:51.000So President Trump, again, he trusts Steve Whitcoff on a personal level, I take it, but I have yet to see why Whitcoff should be trusted with matters of foreign policy of which he understands pretty much nothing.
00:47:21.000This is not what Trump did during term one.
00:47:23.000Trump has used extreme measures in order to contain and destroy the Iranian economy to bring the Iranians to the table.
00:47:30.000The skies over Iran are clear right now.
00:47:32.000Never has the United States had more leverage.
00:47:35.000Never has the West had more leverage over Iran.
00:47:37.000And yet he's deploying Steve Whitcoff to apparently make offers that sound exactly like Barack Obama's cowardly, ridiculous offer that ended up as the This is not a threat on my part now.
00:48:20.000And you do not need to run, as they claim, a civil nuclear program where you're enriching past 3.67%.
00:48:28.000So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization.
00:48:39.000That includes missiles, the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.
00:48:49.000Okay, so just to point out here, the original demand by the Trump administration was total denuclearization.
00:48:54.000That means no fissile material in Iran, because it turns out it's actually quite easy to spin up fissile material from 3.67%, which was the Obama-era limitation, to 60%.
00:49:40.000And by the way, as in, if we are going to reopen the world's economy to Iran, they don't get to use that to fund terror regimes all over the region.
00:49:48.000That was the problem during the JCPOA.
00:49:50.000John Kerry openly admitted that all the money we allowed back into Iran was then used for missile development and terror support all over the Middle East, which eventually led to a multi-front war over the course of the last year and a half.
00:50:56.000These were productive talks yesterday.
00:50:58.000I don't want to get ahead of our skis.
00:51:00.000Steve Whitcoff does a fantastic job, but it was a good step, and they're going to go at it again on Saturday.
00:51:05.000But he's also dead serious that if we can't figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb.
00:51:15.000I mean, that is the person who should be talking about this, not Steve Whitcoff, apparently.
00:51:20.000I mean, again, maybe Wyckoff changes his tune.
00:51:24.000I will say that it was Wyckoff's aide who originally proposed a hostage deal so bad that it would have forced Israel to give up literally all the Palestinian murderers that they are currently holding in prison in exchange for one tranche of hostages, leaving all the other hostages to die.
00:51:40.000So I've yet to see Wyckoff's expertise.
00:51:42.000Maybe it will display itself sometime in the near future.
00:51:44.000It would be nice to see that at some point.
00:51:46.000Meanwhile, in other news, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.
00:51:50.000The governor's mansion was torched over the weekend in a really, really scary attack.
00:51:56.000Josh Shapiro, of course, is a Democrat.
00:51:58.000He said that he, his wife, their four kids, two dogs, and another family had celebrated the Jewish holiday of Passover at the residence on Saturday.
00:52:04.000They were awakened by state troopers pounding on their door at 2 a.m. on Sunday.
00:52:08.000Apparently, a man scaled an iron security fence in the middle of the night, eluded police, broke into the Pennsylvania governor's mansion.
00:52:13.000He then set fire that left significant damage and forced Shapiro, his family and guests to evacuate the building.
00:52:18.000The man who was arrested will face charges of attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson, and aggravated assault.
00:52:25.000I mean, that's probably the best descriptor of him at this point.
00:52:30.000It's not clear exactly what his political motivations were.
00:52:34.000We are entering an era in which political violence is now being widely approved by an enormous number of people, up to and including Taylor Lorenz, who used to report for the Washington Post.
00:52:44.000Over the weekend, she was asked about her obsession with Luigi Mangione.
00:52:49.000Murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO who's been treated as a hero by dullards like Taylor Lorenz, immoral dullards like Taylor Lorenz.
00:52:57.000Here she was on CNN praising Luigi Mangione for murdering an American for the crime of running a business.
00:53:06.000It's hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand murderers of all sorts.
00:55:26.000And this is why it's very important for the Trump administration to succeed in its agenda and not be bogged down by distractions because what's coming around the corner is an AOC truck.
00:55:36.000If the Trump administration fails in its actual agenda, what comes around the corner is a left-wing populism led by whomever Bernie taps on the shoulder.
00:55:43.000Speaking of Coachella, my producers, because this is their job, they have now decided to torture me with some of the outfits from Coachella.
00:55:52.000Again, remember, these are the proletariat, the proles, that Bernie is saying need to rise up and destroy the bourgeois.
00:56:01.000So, some of these outfits at Coachella.
00:56:04.000By the way, Bernie was introducing a singer named Claro.
00:56:09.000I promise you that Bernie has the same idea who Claro is that I do, meaning none.
00:56:14.000But he was introducing Claro, so that happened.
00:57:36.000And Dylan Mulvaney wearing, apparently, a pink teddy, which is great.
00:57:41.000And then you had James Charles show up.
00:57:45.000I will admit I do not know who James Charles is, nor did I care until this very moment.
00:57:50.000Apparently, James Charles is an American YouTuber and makeup artist who is a man who likes to dress up as a woman, I suppose, or dress like a woman.
00:57:58.000And so he's wearing, apparently, like a J-Lo outfit from 1997.
00:58:04.000And then posing in front of a white picket fence.
01:00:53.000I'm so glad that, by the way, all these outfits, I'm sure, cost a fortune.
01:00:56.000So, maybe Bernie should eat those rich people first.
01:00:58.000As long as we're going to eat the rich, maybe Bernie should go after those people first.
01:01:01.000I feel like that would be a good look for Bernie.
01:01:03.000That's an actual populism that I can, at least emotionally, Meanwhile, speaking of very rich people doing very stupid things, Blue Origin sent a rocket to space containing a bunch of semi-famous women.
01:01:19.000The semi-famous women were apparently Katy Perry, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, ex-NASA engineer Aisha Bao, and film producer Carrie Ann Flynn.
01:01:34.000They became the first all-woman crew to visit space.
01:03:02.000So a few things happening at once there.
01:03:04.000And apparently, she then said, Katy Perry was singing to people, what a wonderful world.
01:03:11.000And, you know, again, no jokes about people floating off into space.
01:03:14.000First of all, great premise for a film, right, is that you send all these people to space and then they lose connection with Earth and somebody has to go save them.
01:03:21.000Presumably, Bruce Willis and a team of all men to go save them.
01:03:54.000Seriously. Apparently, Lauren Sanchez said that it only got her more fired up.
01:03:59.000She said, I'd love to have them come to Blue Origin and see the thousands of employees that don't just work here, but they put their heart and soul into this vehicle.
01:04:04.000I mean, I agree with that, but guess what?
01:04:23.000Everything in human life starts as a luxury good and then eventually becomes a common thing for normal humans.
01:04:29.000The way that you actually spin up a company like Blue Origin to the point where normies can fly to space is first a bunch of people who are really rich pay a lot of money to go to space and then other companies start getting into it and then you have competition and the price goes down.
01:04:40.000This is true for literally every product you have in your life.
01:04:43.000Rich people used to be the only people with cell phones and if you had just yelled at them for buying the cell phones you would not have a cell phone today.
01:04:48.000So I'm not angry at these people for being rich and then buying a flight or being put on a flight.