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Trump's 100 day report card, with Matt Welch
3 Playsin 4 hours
Despite the media's love of a 100 day report card, it's usually far too early to judge the effectiveness of a new leader. That's not the case in Trump world. He has moved at a dizzying pace, with mixed results.
To assess the start of the second Trump presidency, Will is joined by the editor at large of Reason magazine, and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast, Matt Welch.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Read Reason here.
Listen to The Fifth Column here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will' Podcast
00:00:20
Speaker
and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Evaluating Presidential Achievements: FDR to Trump
00:00:27
Speaker
The idea of measuring a president's achievements in their first 100 days goes back to FDR in 1933,
00:00:35
Speaker
when he implemented a flurry of measures in order to try and drag the United States out of the Great Depression. Since then, it's almost been a bit of a joke. Surely you can't really assess the merits of the presidency in a 100-day period.
00:00:52
Speaker
That doesn't apply in the world of Donald Trump, where I think, having seen what we've seen in the last 100 days and the speed at which we have seen change, for better and for worse,
00:01:03
Speaker
100 days is more than enough time to start getting out the red pen and making some evaluations. I am delighted to be able to do that with Matt Welsh, editor-at-large of Reason Magazine and co-host of the wildly successful Fifth Column podcast.
Trump vs. FDR: A Comparison of Executive Actions
00:01:19
Speaker
Matt, thank you so much beright for being with us.
00:01:21
Speaker
Thank you ah very much for having me. And the FDR comp is the one I think we're thinking about. There is a ah a frequently invoked phrase about FDR about bold, persistent experimentation. And I think that's what we're seeing with the Trump administration, too.
00:01:37
Speaker
Why don't we pull on that thread a bit further? Because I'm sure some progressives would be horrified at the notion of Donald Trump being compared to FDR. But do you think there is a comparison to be made there?
00:01:48
Speaker
Sure. i'm FDR sought to reshape or extend the power of the executive branch which had already been goosed 30 years prior to him coming to to office by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in particular.
00:02:04
Speaker
ah We didn't have a really strong presidential system before that. They really started it. But at the advent of the Great Depression, ah fdr really, really wanted to enable the executive. He tried to pack the Supreme Court.
00:02:16
Speaker
He rushed through a series of pretty far-reaching bills stretching into the economy in ways and economic a life in America in ways that no one really had contemplated previously.
00:02:28
Speaker
Knowing full well that he was going to set up all kinds of battles with the courts, his ah attitude was like, bring it on. Let's see what they can do about it. And he ah tried to basically wage a battle against them. So did it in the name of of crisis, yes, there was more of a crisis then than we have now, but also a kind of a reshaping and reordering of American life. And part of Trump's idea here, and I think sometimes people do not give him credit for having ideas just because they disagree with him or they find him boorish or whatever,
00:02:58
Speaker
And I find him borsh and disagreeable, to be clear, but he has an idea. He really thinks that America's been ripped off all this time by the world and that the kind of global trading system, the post-World War II global order,
00:03:14
Speaker
If it worked for America in the past, it doesn't now.
Trump's Economic Ideologies and Global Trade
00:03:16
Speaker
And so he's going to break us from that and create this new thing that he thinks is going to lead to prosperity. I think he thinks that wrongly, but it's a theory. It's an ethos. And so part of this is, is yes, knowing that he's breaking stuff.
00:03:31
Speaker
on purpose. And that is very FDR-like. And he wants, at the end of this, America to look indelibly different. We will not be the same country as it was before. And I think no matter if he succeeds or fails, in some ways, he will be correct in that.
00:03:44
Speaker
It's an interesting insight. And it's one that I'm torn on. I'm speaking to you from a country where it is led by a man who doesn't have real conviction, who doesn't have a guiding ideology or ethos.
00:03:56
Speaker
I am the citizen of a country who is led by a man who, again, doesn't have conviction, doesn't have an ethos, doesn't have a guiding principle. I agree with you. I think there is there is some sort of guiding principle or guiding ideology there. He's been talking about tariffs since the 1980s.
00:04:11
Speaker
But it's quite something else when that guiding ideology, at least when it comes to economics, is something that you don't necessarily agree with. So I'm torn. Before we get to b subject by subject marks that we'll go through, it what surprised you about this first 100 days and then perhaps what hasn't surprised you?
00:04:29
Speaker
ah I've heard variations on this theme a lot from people. I expected there to be a lot of action and chaos with tariffs, and I expected there to be a lot of action and chaos with immigration, because those are the issues that he cares about the most, and he has the most latitude the executive position.
00:04:49
Speaker
executive branch has been given more and he's stretching out more latitude to do those things. So not really surprised. I guess the scope of DOES, the Department of Government Efficiency, misnamed, I think it should be the Department of Government Disruption, because it's kind of more what Elon Musk and his 19-year-olds have been doing, just sort of like Oh, this is the system. Let's unplug it and replug it back in and see what happens.
00:05:14
Speaker
I think that the scope of it, even though it has been for most libertarians, and that's the sort of tribe that I hang out with, not really tribe, but gang of horrible cats. You know, for people who really have wanted to cut the size of government for a really long time, Doge can be easily seen as a disappointment and a chaotic one at that.
Cultural and Ideological Shifts in the Trump Era
00:05:32
Speaker
But there's some element. I didn't expect USAID to just be euthanized. That wasn't really on my bingo card. So that went much further Then I expected some of the other stuff. i I kind of expected it to be like this, but there's so much of it that you always have the physical impression of kind of being on your heels and that you forget the volume of it. I mean, there was a volume of news in his first administration as well that then became the Mueller report and Russiagate or whatever the hell people were calling it back then.
00:06:03
Speaker
Some of that was news of his own creation and impetus in some of it was the reaction to him. i think there's more now. He is is more effective at doing things, but getting or like of creating realities than he was last time around.
00:06:19
Speaker
But I also expected that to be the case, too, because he'd had some practice and there's a whole superstructure of of conservatives or whatever they're calling themselves these days in Washington who've been thinking on the problem of how can we get his agenda more lubricated i in the future. So they had four years to think about this. So I expected that. it's i So I guess it's at the doge more than anything else.
00:06:40
Speaker
The amount of news that that threw off, particularly in the first like half of these hundred days, it seems to have slowed down a bit since then. I am also one of those horrible libertarian caps that you mentioned.
00:06:51
Speaker
And as a libertarian in the Trump era, it can be quite disconcerting because I imagine broadly we're on the same page. and A lot of the cultural changes and the vibe shift are wonderful.
00:07:03
Speaker
And yet at the same time, no one can say that that the economic policies and the protectionist measures such as tariffs are anything other than antithetical to classical economic liberalism. And so you're almost in this awkward in-between period and you have both Marga and the left both hating you at the same time.
00:07:23
Speaker
And in an age where politics increasingly is becoming more like following a sporting team and more and more people don't really follow principles as much as just they blindly follow their team, it's an uncomfortable position to be in at times. How do you reflect on being the awkward child in the middle as a libertarian?
00:07:40
Speaker
So you're correct in the basic diagnosis. The only twist I would put it for myself being a 56-year-old grown-ass man is that I don't care what people think of me. It's been a long time since that that ship was in the port.
00:07:53
Speaker
So yeah I'm used to being ah treated with a certain amount of hostility, disdain or whatever, or indifference because my project has never been about being attached to
Assessment of Trump's Government Policies
00:08:05
Speaker
power. I'm you know, a political journalist, I'm sort of, I'm critiquing power and I expect to be in the minority at any given point.
00:08:13
Speaker
I'm always grateful when, you know, more people come around to our view on issues where, you Reason Magazine, which is my primary employer, was lonely, you know, like 1974, we were plumping for gay marriage. That was not a popular position and legalizing marijuana and other things like that. So, and occasionally,
00:08:30
Speaker
you know, Reagan revolution, Thatcher revolution, things start coming our way and an economic liberalization. So that's fine. But i i the general default I expect is to be treated with hostility with those who are playing with power.
00:08:45
Speaker
And i welcome it. Bring it on. ah It's nice to hear a journalist say that. Sadly, there are too many journalists who would not take that same attitude. Let's go back to the administrative state. what if If we are looking at this subject as being draining the swamp, reducing the size of government, and as a result, reducing government spending, what mark are you giving the doge efforts from Donald Trump and Elon Musk?
00:09:08
Speaker
ah for reducing the size of government, a good solid D minus. Like it's, it doesn't really matter. The ah the thing to watch always with an administration and the Congress that he is working with is just what they actually pass.
00:09:21
Speaker
So Doge, for example, got rid of the Department of Education or the, so they said, that seems interesting. That's something that I've wanted to happen since it was started under Jimmy Carter. But then the continuing resolution, the emergency sort of bill that they pushed through, oh, we're going to just spend this for six more months.
00:09:39
Speaker
funds it at the same level. So ye shall know him by his works. Can I interrupt you there? Just because some people who are listening in the UK or Australia, for example, would hear defund the Department of Education and maybe take an inference that you are just getting rid of public education full stop.
00:09:54
Speaker
That's not the case. How does that work? What's the implications of defunding the Department of Education? So the Department of Education was started in the late 1970s or maybe 1980 under Jimmy Carter at the time. And it ah the in the the United States, education, K through 12 especially, but also most college education, is handled at the state and local level and governed at the state and local level, usually financed by property taxes, which is not a perfect way of doing it, but it's local and so it's responsive to local concerns. And that governance is very strong like that. The Department of Education...
00:10:27
Speaker
is usually spends about $40 billion dollars a year, which is kind of a rounding error in the state's The average amount that state governments spend on K-12 education is about 25% of their budgets. It's a huge, huge expense. So the federal government puts a little bit, and they usually do that in a carrot and stick type of way to try to tweak educational approaches on the margins.
00:10:55
Speaker
Usually that's always really unpopular. George W. Bush had this big no child left behind thing, and teachers rebelled against that on the local level. the states are The federal government also has an interest in getting providing extra funding for kids with disabilities to and other types of disadvantaged students.
00:11:12
Speaker
And you don't need a Department of Education to oversee that money. If you believe that is a good expenditure, and I'm fine with believing that's a good expenditure, it can just be sent. You can send a check. You don't have to have whole department. Since the creation of the Federal Department of Education,
00:11:28
Speaker
There has been no measurable impact at all on performance of schools and testing that ah we are spending goes up continuously and in a pretty straight line or a diagonal line upwards ah that's unbroken. And the performance is a flat line and has been for a long time. So there's no evidence that it's helping. That's
Critique of Governance and Economic Policies
00:11:46
Speaker
the spirit of why someone like me doesn't like that since we have historically, we're supposed to have a smaller federal government and state and local governments are supposed to take care of what is not a national issue.
00:11:57
Speaker
So that is part of this is an old timey belief at this point, because on a daily basis, you will see today, for example, Donald Trump said that he's going to issue an executive order.
00:12:08
Speaker
making sure that every trucker can pass an English language proficiency exam. There are decades worth of fights in Washington, D.C. on the conservative and Republican side that wanted to make sure the federal government did not tell states and localities what to do with their issuances of driver's license.
00:12:25
Speaker
We get a little bit tetchy about this in America. We don't have a national ID. for example, and we're not expected to show papers, that too is also beginning to change as soon as next month. And that's pretty bad. It that predates Trump, that whole process.
00:12:39
Speaker
But so that's that's the of the backdrop of like why I'm happy with the Federal Department of Education going away. All that said, what Musk did in his disruptive way is just sort of said, oh, we're ending this.
00:12:50
Speaker
And then everyone got nervous and people who work at the Department of Education didn't go to work and they didn't know what was going on. And yet now they're still being funded. So it's more like ah and it's it's a chaotic way to go at something that might otherwise be a result that I would like. The best way to have that happen, of course, is that the same ah body that created the Department of Education, which was the Congress, the legislature, would say, OK, we don't want this anymore. We're getting rid of it. That's not how anything is being done in United States national federal ah government governance right now.
00:13:23
Speaker
It's all the president's waving ah a magic wand. That is a less permanent way of governing. And you can't, it just means whoever wins the presidency dictates all kinds of things about national life. And and from my point of view, that's a bad way to go.
00:13:40
Speaker
want to pick up on that element of chaos that you mentioned. There's two schools of thought here. So one school of thought says that but really there's been no significant reform in Washington for a long time.
00:13:53
Speaker
The chaos is a necessary prerequisite in order to get stuff done. You need to be able to, there will inevitably be that element of chaos. And obviously there is another school of thought that says, well, it is important to have responsible government and there are implications to chaos, particularly when it comes to markets, when you're implementing, for example, economic policy in a chaotic environment. way.
00:14:14
Speaker
Where do you sit with respect to those two schools of thought? As basic ah principle, and again, this is where I oftentimes end up in ah an extreme minority, but I think sometimes there's an intuition that people have. But I don't think that the ends justify the means.
00:14:29
Speaker
I think that's actually one of the most important principles in life and in politics and in governance. And so many of my conflicts and disagreements with Trump and the circle around him who are trying to do things, picking fights with Harvard University, for example, and trying to tell them how they should diversify, politically diversify their faculty, which they should politically diversify their faculty.
00:14:51
Speaker
But the means is that the federal government is telling a private institution how it should hire. It's creating affirmative action for conservatives ah to replace affirmative action for traditionally underrepresented minorities.
00:15:02
Speaker
How about neither is kind of what where I stand about that. I am very sympathetic to the the line that chaos is the only way to get anything done.
00:15:13
Speaker
When people, the Christopher Rufos of the world, who's education, culture war kind of activist, He all argues with my type of people, the classical liberals, all the time.
00:15:25
Speaker
And I'm sympathetic to his argument. His basic thing is like, yes, you process liberals, you classical liberals. You want to do this all like hoity-toity the right way. And then nothing ever gets done.
00:15:35
Speaker
And these institutions get captured by the left, which in many ways they have. I mean, in academia especially, but not only. And so you have to use the sort of blunt instrument of government to kind of break it up because the other side basically has been doing that in a de facto way all these times.
00:15:51
Speaker
He's even gone a bit further than that, hasn't he? He's basically said that the right needs to take a Gramscian approach. They need to adopt the tactics of the illiberal left in order to get to their ends.
00:16:04
Speaker
This is where you he started getting into this conversation about the woke right as well. It is interesting how he's basically said we need, he's been very open. We need, in order to have our own long march through the institutions, take on that sort of Gramsci and illiberalism in order to get to, um I guess, a more liberal place.
00:16:23
Speaker
And, you know, as Steve Martin once said to a heckler, I remember my first beer. LAUGHTER You know, this this temptation has been with us since time immemorial. And and in the American system, which is a two-party system, the pendulum just swings. I remember, this is not that long ago, during the Obama era, everyone on the right, including my late friend Andrew Breitbart, was always talking about the Saul Alinsky-like tactics of the left.
00:16:49
Speaker
They wanted to... present Barack Hussein Obama as someone who was schooled by these people with affiliation with the Weather Underground, violent radical group in the 60s and 70s, and that Nsala Alinsky was sort of a strategic spiritual godfather for some of them, and that he was sort of the
Analysis of Partisan Tactics and Fiscal Reform Avoidance
00:17:06
Speaker
product. Hussein Barack, Hussein Obama, was the flowering of their ideas so that they smuggled this radical inside. I think with a little bit of time and sobriety,
00:17:17
Speaker
Obama doesn't turn out to be that radical. And i think there was some sort of just sort of a general-based kind of fear-mongering about that. But what you saw in that moment was a lot of conservatives studied rules for radicals, Saul Alinsky's classic book, and started adopting some of the tenets of their own because they're like, that's how they fight.
00:17:37
Speaker
So now we're going to fight like this. And the flip side absolutely happens. um The best analog that I can think of is George Soros, who is still alive somehow in his 90s. And ah he'd long been on the sidelines of direct political activity. He'd been financing foundations in Central Europe and elsewhere and working on, you know, ah single issues like marijuana legalization or the death penalty or whatever. But he didn't want to get involved in politics. But George W. Bush radicalized him. And so he's like, you know what?
00:18:05
Speaker
Even though he, you know, self um identifies as kind of a philosopher in training and has highfalutin ideas. He's the open society is based on Karl Popper Open Society Institute.
00:18:17
Speaker
He says, well, I'm gonna have to get in the muck of politics. So what I need to do is create mirror institutions to the ones that are on the right. So Media Matters for America is a mirror institution for in his mind of Fox News and things like fair, fair and accuracy and reporting.
00:18:33
Speaker
So we have to like track those people just like they track us. We need to do this, maybe start a liberal or radio network that didn't really work out, but ah start using these types of mirror institutions. And what happens in every single one of these cases including the case that came after Soros, which is the Koch brothers, who have a similar life trajectory as Soros, but on the right, they also got into politics because they were alarmed by Barack Obama.
00:18:56
Speaker
But it makes everybody dumber, long story short. And it makes people make compromises with power and intellect along the way. So that is a huge part of the problem, but it's a pattern that repeats and repeats and repeats.
00:19:09
Speaker
And sadly, The response to Trump the first time around from Democrats was to absolutely put their hands over their ears when exposed to libertarian, civil libertarian, and more overt libertarian ah arguments of like, hey, you know what? If you don't like the guy, the erratic single person making all this policy, here's an idea.
00:19:32
Speaker
Maybe he he has less power. Maybe you assert legislative power for the first time in a generation. Maybe do this. Maybe pass a law. That ties a president's hands about this and that and the other. They didn't do any of that. And Biden as president continued to expand executive power, as every president tends to do, especially in the 21st century.
00:19:51
Speaker
And so now here we are. So, yes, Chris Ruffo is is ah embracing openly illiberal means. And he's treating me like ah the controlled opposition to the extent that he thinks about me or my tribe at all.
00:20:04
Speaker
and And, you know, it must be thrilling to be near power and to have some influence on how that power is wielded to smite down your enemies. But I think that keeps us in the rut that we've been in in American politics since around 2015.
00:20:19
Speaker
I want to move from the administrative state to the economy. And I think I've got a bridge to get us there. And that is, there are several people, I've heard Johnny Goldberg make this argument, i've heard Charlie Cook make this argument, to say that Doge really is low picking at low-hanging fruit as a smokescreen to divert attention away from the fact that serious fiscal policy, serious fiscal reform is not even being attempted.
00:20:43
Speaker
Now, the Democrats won't get go near and benefits and entitlements, and Trump made it very clear that he won't either. And anyone with any real grasp of the incredibly serious, scary deficit and structural economic problems that the US faces would know that the only real way that you solve that problem is by sorting the problem of entitlements.
00:21:04
Speaker
Do you think that Doge really is just that smokescreen and then perhaps use that as a run-in to discuss why we are so reticent to continue or just to continue to let this sort of spending go out of control?
00:21:16
Speaker
Not just in the US, s across the West, mind you. The ah the my objection to the smokescreen argument is that that assumes a sort of intentionality behind it. Like ah we're doing this to hide that.
00:21:27
Speaker
I'm not sure what the intentionality is. And I kind of don't want to know. Like like but people like does Trump really mean it? Does Elon Musk really mean it? I don't i like ah just what are they doing as opposed to to what they mean? I think Trump means it on tariffs, as you mentioned before, and on immigration and the rest is kind of up for grabs.
00:21:44
Speaker
You're absolutely right in that our long-term fiscal picture is atrocious. It's been one of the most easily predicted, long predicted, slowly unfolding calamities in my lifetime.
00:21:58
Speaker
I... spend too much time pouring over old State of the Union addresses for weird reasons. And at some point, I unearthed that every single State of the Union address between 1997 and 2013, so about 17 in a row, all mentioned the problem of reforming entitlements and long-term health for Social Security and how the math just can't add up over time. You have to change it or else we're heading to a collapse. what that collapse is,
00:22:26
Speaker
is that by law, once the trust fund is down to a certain level, the the amount that's paid to my father, who is 80, oh, what year are we in? Six years old, if he if he survives much longer, will be cut by 24% overnight.
00:22:41
Speaker
That day right now is estimated to be eight years from now. And probably by the end of this year, it'll be estimated as seven or maybe even six years from now because we keep running up $1.8 trillion on the end.
00:22:53
Speaker
dollar annual deficits on top of the $36.4 trillion, or that's what it was when I checked out it last week. So it's probably more than that debt that we're paying and and refinancing at a time when the world is losing faith in the American dollar, in the American financial system, and American bonds, which is not a great time. So we have to refinance $28 trillion dollars of debt within the next four years.
00:23:14
Speaker
Whoops. At a time when it's going to be more expensive for us to do that. And Donald Trump's done nothing about this. He actually made a very strong point when he first started escalating down into our lives in 2015 of picking a fight with those Republicans who would ever say anything about that physical problem.
00:23:33
Speaker
So Paul Ryan most notoriously, but others. He's like, no, we're going to protect everything for our seniors. Stop talking about this. It's mean. We're to we're going we're not going to touch this. It's very similar, you know, as you know, to sort of national front type of politics in Western Europe, a sort of welfare state.
00:23:51
Speaker
anti-immigration concern. It's an interesting mix. I didn't think that in my lifetime that we would see that in America, but we we are now. it's ah It's a very real thing. This twins with the rise ah Bernie Sanders on the left, democratic socialism, and kind of, you know, they call it modern modern monetary theory, but it's just basically, you know, it's magic wandism of it of its own. Like we can just have as much debt as we want. It doesn't really matter.
00:24:14
Speaker
ah You know, anyone talking about social security is just trying to rip off our seniors and let's go. and There's never been a more serious sober term for such a stupid concept, I think, in human history as modern monetary theory. ah It's pretty amazing. Well, I mean, the Peter Navarro says, hold my beer, you know, coming up all kinds of ideas of his own. But so the twin rise and I really see them as part as like even lashed together of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
00:24:42
Speaker
That had a ah large effect on the normie wing of the Democratic Party. Right. ah Barack Obama stopped talking about it when he was first so coming into office. He gave an interview with The Washington Post in January of 2009 saying, I refuse to kick the can down the road on entitlements.
00:24:57
Speaker
It's going to stop on my watch. And he worked on it, actually. That was part of what a lot of the fights in Washington were like in those first early Tea Party years. It was about debt ceiling negotiations and and like we have to have people on a commission to finally tackle this thing. Everyone just stopped around 2014.
00:25:16
Speaker
And when they all stopped and, you know part of it, the Trump's calculation, and he said it out loud as he does sometimes, was like, I'm not going to be around when the shit hits the fan. So like, who cares?
00:25:28
Speaker
And the thing is, at least he's honest. I think that's how pretty much every Western politician thinks about debt and deficit at the moment. They just don't say it out loud. Yeah. And i he points for honesty and, as always, points for entertainment value, which he always provides some, but ah demerits for we're careening even faster towards that catastrophe. So he's doing nothing to curb the size and scope of government.
00:25:50
Speaker
He did nothing in his first term. In his first three and a half years, the the The price of government rose faster than in Barack Obama's eight. That's pretty interesting. This is, I say, three and a half because then COVID happened and we just went so with ah government spending, ratcheted up and it hasn't come back down since then.
00:26:10
Speaker
He doesn't care about that. At some point, there will be a day of reckoning when politicians will all have to care about that. Presumably, they will be looking to us small, dwindling few who've been working on these issues for decades.
00:26:25
Speaker
And but they're going to be in a really, really bad, bad place. So I criticized Trump really hard in his first term because he did nothing about this. We were this is before covid.
00:26:36
Speaker
We were like on year nine or something of a bull market. And we didn't use any low unemployment. The economy looked really, really good. And we didn't use any of that to address the definitely around the corner fiscal
Tariff Policies and Economic Contradictions
00:26:51
Speaker
catastrophe. So now it's it's it almost exponentially worse given COVID and Biden and now Trump too.
00:26:59
Speaker
Okay, I don't even need to ask you an F for fiscal policy. Let's move to tariffs that part of the of economic policy. And I'll, again, being a libertarian, This is difficult, but I will try and steel man the arguments.
00:27:12
Speaker
And there are two arguments that I can see. Sadly, you hear two of both of them from the administration and they're actually contradictory. So one is that we are going to re-industrialize America, bring back the Rust Belt.
00:27:24
Speaker
And the other is, well, this is all for 4D chess and really we're secretly hoping for a world of free trade and this is what's going to bring people to the negotiating table in a way that we haven't been able to do in in in recent times.
00:27:39
Speaker
Again, anyone who stops and thinks about that will realize that they are completely incompatible objectives. Yes. Is there any merit to either of them? So if you were going to take the, in my point of view, best case scenario that we are using all of this as a way to actually cut tariffs and non-tariff barriers even lower than before.
00:28:01
Speaker
There's no evidence to show that. There's a few people around Trump would like that to happen because that helps them in their own to look in the mirror in the morning. And because they, were you know, they're just trying to influence him in ah what they see as a positive direction.
00:28:13
Speaker
I don't think there's anything in his past to indicate that. What gives the lie of all of that is that, i mean, it's our policy with, I don't know, Australia? and We have a trade surplus with Australia and free trade agreements. And like, why were we thinking about ah putting a 10% tariff on everything?
00:28:32
Speaker
It doesn't make any sense at all. It just doesn't. because You can't wrap your brain around it. And also, if your other goal, and I'd say there's three or four possible goals with it, but one of them definitely is like, we want to isolate China. We want to cut China off from the rest of the world.
00:28:47
Speaker
Do you piss off Australia? Does that, is that helpful in the China thing? Do you piss off Vietnam and Japan? Does that help with what you're isolating China?
00:28:58
Speaker
Also the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump ran vociferously against and pulled us out of, was very explicitly supposed to be a trade agreement that isolated China. That's the word.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah. So like there isn't a lot of strategery about the China isolation aspect of it. but And there isn't, you know, we're picking gratuitous fights, really gratuitous fights, especially with Canada.
00:29:23
Speaker
The alienated are like our closest neighbor for reasons that are kind of hard to to fathom right now. And he's doing it on a daily basis, doing the 51st state thing again today and and bragging about how he's affected the election there.
00:29:38
Speaker
Well, like that that's the thing that really pisses me off more than anything else is that you are going to get a continuation of a government that absolutely does not deserve to be voted back at the expense of someone who I think is probably the most talented conservative politician in the world today.
00:29:56
Speaker
It really, really annoys me. ah It is, yeah it's astonishing. I, there's, I've seen some analysis that we can't put it all on Trump. And of course we shouldn't. Canadians can do what they want.
00:30:07
Speaker
But Pierre Polivare, whose name I'll botch, don't care. It does, ah at least from a distance, look like an incredibly talented politician. And also the kind of person that, I mean, if you, if you pretend to like Javier Millet, know, it was a bit crazy, but, but also my God, he's engaged what it looks like preliminarily a miracle In Argentina, you should want more people like that in the world. but I'm not sure that Trump really cares about that. I think he wants more people like Victor Orban.
00:30:33
Speaker
Victor Orban doesn't have a lot in common with Javier Malé, really, if you think about it at all. So the steel manning, the best that I can come up with is that he's trying to reshore industry in America. um He thinks that tariffs make America rich and that trade deficits make them poor.
00:30:54
Speaker
This is economically illiterate, but he thinks it and believes it. If there was significant reshoring, especially tariffs, ah strategically important, nationally important, especially for defense, things that suddenly we started of doing in America.
00:31:09
Speaker
And if you could lure the 7 million men, working age men who have into the workforce who've been out of it and haven't been trying to get jobs, then I might start saying, well, maybe he was onto something.
00:31:21
Speaker
I see zero reason to believe any of that is going to happen. And And the fact is all the reporting that I've seen suggests that all the people who have, you know, three different ideas about what the tariffs are supposed to be for, they're all trying to compete for Trump's sort of affection or direction or ratification.
00:31:39
Speaker
He basically said yes to all of them at once. Yes, we're just trying to get rid of all tariffs. ah Yes, we think that tariffs themselves are great. It's the most beautiful word in the English language. Yes, we're isolating China. yes we're creating all of this.
00:31:51
Speaker
And he's not too worried about the incoherence between those goals. And he clearly loves and relishes and has talked about it in interviews this week with being in the center of all of these deals. Well, they're just all going to come to me And I'm going to be like the bargain hunter.
00:32:07
Speaker
He is making economic policy, world economic policy as one man, as the dealmaker in the middle of it all. And there used to be a pretty strong American gene that was and felt a sense of revulsion at that kind of monarchical ideas. We don't want one mad king to make policy. There should be a little bit more deliberation than all of that.
Trump's Influence on Leadership and Governance
00:32:29
Speaker
But right now, such as the developments of Trumpism and just also Americans near power who like want to use it to smite their enemies, that that's kind of where we're at.
00:32:40
Speaker
And look, and I'm very aware of that instinct against monarchy, which has run through the American psyche since 1776. And it really is an unbelievable testament to the power of Donald Trump's charisma to the power of Donald Trump's influence over a particular section of America, that he can, in the space of 10 years, change that instinct for not the majority, but for ah considerable amount of Americans.
00:33:12
Speaker
It is an extraordinary political phenomena, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics. Yeah, he's um he's a generational um talent. his He has redirected where America was going. But as I mentioned at the top, FDR has a starring role in this.
00:33:28
Speaker
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson also have a starring role in this. And then George W. Bush. I think they were the... for Maine people to sort of ratchet up the power of the presidency.
00:33:39
Speaker
After our kind of 90s, Bill Clinton, we're sort of reducing the size of government. The era of big government is over, he said famously. We're you know having some something of a peace dividend.
00:33:50
Speaker
There were a lot of theorists around George W. Bush, in particular Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom who were senior in the Richard Nixon administration at the end of that. They see that the reforms that were passed by Congress to trim the sales of the executive branch in 1974 and five, they saw those as failures.
00:34:08
Speaker
And then they saw nine eleven as an opportunity to restore the executive branch kind of supremacy in our little triangle of of power here in America.
00:34:18
Speaker
and so We were trending that way anyways. And then Trump put this very populist, I am the people's champion. I am going to speak to whole swaths of America that the political i ah elites have either ignored or tried ham-handedly to pander to and don't have any natural ah connection to.
00:34:39
Speaker
i have a lot of respect for him for ah for reaching out to audiences in ways that people hadn't done in a really long time. It's just a shame from my point of view that he's doing that in the name of policies that are going to make them poor.
00:34:53
Speaker
Let's move to democracy. I think it warrants its own subject, given that this was the main attack line from the Democrats against Donald Trump over the entirety of Biden's presidency.
00:35:06
Speaker
If we're going to give an F saying that democracy in America is over, And an A saying things have never been more transparent and democratic. Where are you ranking Donald Trump on democracy?
00:35:19
Speaker
It's a strange word, as you know, and Americans get hung up on it. And so I will interpret our usage here to be, to mean kind of the institutions of American Republican Democratic kind of power, separation of powers therein, the rule of law that's created around those things.
00:35:39
Speaker
It's kind of basically what we all mean by this weird, complicated word. Trump has been acting probably... 23% worse on that than I anticipated. my My anticipations weren't that high to begin with. But the eagerness with which he has treated showdowns with the judiciary system, the ah the sort of egging on that he's done of his allies to, including Elon Musk, to say, oh, we need to impeach justices.
00:36:09
Speaker
They literally arrested the judge, although the details of the case seem murky and maybe she was guilty of something or at least, ah you know, reasonable suspicion. But they're picking fights. The judiciary told them, don't deport this dude to that country. and they're like, cool, we'll deport him to a really shitty prison in that country.
00:36:29
Speaker
And then we'll just thumb our noses at you when you ah express anger in a series of judicial decisions about it. So there's another classic end justifies the means i topic, isn't it?
00:36:40
Speaker
This is a bad guy. He shouldn't be in an America. So the end result is we got him out of America problem solved. And there are a lot of people who are sympathetic to that. But one reason why my grade on the, not necessarily of ah Trump's own performance, but on like the overall state of alarm one should feel.
00:36:59
Speaker
was talking to your countryman, George Zipps, the other day about this. saw that he yeah he managed to sneak his way in just before me. Sorry about that. it's ah I blame him. But Josh was, you know, trying to get my sense of alarm at things. And I am alarmed by ah Trump's behavior and by the people around him, the sort of enablers in these particular, like, fights, the...
00:37:21
Speaker
cavalier attitude towards due process. Certainly, you know, Marco Rubio out there deporting hundreds and probably pretty soon thousands of people who are here on student visas or other more temporary visas based on things that they say, based on what they wrote for their student newspaper. Are you kidding me?
00:37:39
Speaker
ah You know, people are are being deported kind of spirited away to nasty authoritarian prisons based on their tattoos. All of it is real bad. Like it is, holy cow, that's bad for me.
00:37:53
Speaker
But my level of optimism about this, I have some, which is that this stuff ain't popular. Donald Trump has worse ratings right now than he ever did really in his first administration before. He's underwater on the economy in a way that he hasn't been.
00:38:06
Speaker
He's underwater on deportations, right? Immigration and enforcement was supposed to be his strong suit, and it he generally has been and the kind of ah broad application of the idea of it. This surely has to be considered a stunning success, doesn't it? Surely.
00:38:21
Speaker
It does, and it does not, because by 80% margins, generally speaking, 80 to 20, Americans say to the president, should or even needs to follow the the decisions by the Supreme Court, even if he disagrees with them.
00:38:36
Speaker
Americans don't like the flouting of the rule of law in the name of doing the thing that they otherwise want to do. Americans all want every single one, except for like two people who I know, want to deport all violent criminals out of the country who are here
Immigration Policies Under Trump: Successes and Challenges
00:38:51
Speaker
illegally. It's not hard. It's like, yes, deport those now, please.
00:38:54
Speaker
Something like 90% of the people that we've spirited away to the horrible prison in El Salvador had had no criminal records aside from their illegal status. That's troubling. Americans like, cool, let's get, you know, Donald Trump has been talking about, you know, they're not sending us their best. They're sending us their rapists stuff since July or June of 2015.
00:39:14
Speaker
And he said it so much that he's given this sort of impression that the modal immigrant or the modal illegal immigrant is, you know, a monster for a transnational Salvadoran gang or Nicaraguan gang or something.
00:39:27
Speaker
Not the case. You would think that they would spend their energy going through the jails and going through the prisons and checking immigration status and and emphasizing those people first. Instead, we're seeing two-year-old cancer patients because their mom eyes and are are illegal immigrants. We're seeing in some cases...
00:39:48
Speaker
People asked for their papers in Arizona who were perfectly legal U.S. citizens, but they were suspected of not being and then spirited away and to jail for prison for 10 days or more. this is None of this stuff is normal. Americans don't like that stuff, it turns out.
00:40:02
Speaker
So he is betting that scary tattoos... The fact that we absolutely want violent criminals the hell out of here will be enough to make people look the other way on due process.
00:40:14
Speaker
But I think the polling suggests otherwise. And that polling is going to start ah weighing down around the necks of Republicans who are in Congress. They are terrified of him.
00:40:26
Speaker
They haven't had any kind of spy nor Democrats for the most part in Congress for a long time. Congress, I was reading Dan McLaughlin at National Review had a great line today. It's like, We should, you know the legislative branch is just basically a green room.
00:40:39
Speaker
It's a place where you practice your your television hits. It's not where you actually do any real business. It's mean and it's true. So, but even those supine beasts in Congress are have to run for re-election next year.
00:40:54
Speaker
And they're... going to face a wipeout if things continue to trend in this direction. And due process is part of that. He is now underwater on immigration. I never thought I would see the day that that would happen, despite the fact that the border is under way more control than it has been, arguably in 25 years, if not more, which is something that Americans wanted and felt like they were voting for.
00:41:15
Speaker
They didn't feel like they were voting to break up families, to deport families. people who have jobs to deport people who have U.S. citizen families. Those things are always really unpopular to do that. We want the criminals out. We want the people who broke a law or overstayed a visa but have otherwise joined society to not be prioritized in that and then, you know, perhaps eventually normalized in some way.
00:41:41
Speaker
Well, have pointed out that this immigration topic, there are two strands to it. There is getting rid of people. There's the deportation side. Then there's stopping people from coming in. I'm trying to find ways in the interests of balance to bump up his grade point average on actually that limb of protecting the border.
00:41:57
Speaker
Surely we can give him an A for that. That's something which has been, from what I can see from afar, staggering success compared to the Biden administration. He has done that. Getting there, and again, I recognize that libertarians have weird weird ideas that not everyone agrees with.
00:42:11
Speaker
um But like part of that is we're cutting off the refugee intake system. I'd like to think that America is a home for refugees. It has been historically.
00:42:22
Speaker
Biden administration had issued a half a million visas to people coming from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and some other damn place, four countries, because that was the main those were the main sources of illegal immigration trying to come across the border for a long time. So he said, okay, look, if you pass a security background chat and you get sponsored by someone here, generally a family member, but that they have to be fiscally responsible for you for two years. Then you can come here on a temporary kind of work visa and and and have status. I don't remember it's a work visa, but I presume it is.
00:42:55
Speaker
But you can you can stay here as part of that if you go through, you know, this line. And they're like, cool. So that cut down by offering more legal immigration. It cut down illegal immigration, which is something that libertarians have been arguing for for a long time.
00:43:11
Speaker
that you want both of those things, not just to say that no foreigner can ever come here. ah Trump stopped that, reversed that. So those people who thought they were going to be here legally, suddenly we're going to have ah half a million people who have illegal status, who had changed. No, you know, most many Americans will not weep at that.
00:43:29
Speaker
I think that's a bad way to go about that process and that what you're going to eventually do when they and other people don't have legal ways in that there's once again going to be pressure at whatever points that there can be
Cultural Shifts and Free Speech in Trump's America
00:43:44
Speaker
to come in. So, yes, he has ah the border is so much less chaotic.
00:43:48
Speaker
You know I live in New York where there's more than 100,000 immigrant refugees who just sort of washed up and were to every single neighborhood in ways that stressed out a lot of people and and definitely sort of deteriorated some conditions here.
00:44:02
Speaker
ah That ending is not not going to make people sad at all, but just some process parts of that or some overall results of America no longer even just being any kind of, you know, ah receptor for people fleeing horrific communist poverty that that makes me sad. So I can't give a full A for that.
00:44:20
Speaker
i'll I'll give a B something. Let's turn to what is a ah pretty vague and nebulous bucket. Let's turn to the culture. We've heard a lot about the vibe shift. A lot of people on the right have felt like that their speech has been stifled, that they've been oppressed by a liberal establishment that has pushed upon them woke ideology. And that's been seen in gender ideology. It's been seen in you know all manner of different cultural excesses.
00:44:50
Speaker
And suddenly we can say, retard again. Suddenly plastic straws are back. Suddenly it's morning again in America when it comes to when it comes to the right starting to to get on the front foot in the culture wars.
00:45:04
Speaker
How do you assess Donald Trump's impact on the broader American culture in that respect? So for me, this was the single greatest effect of the election.
00:45:16
Speaker
And it was even a little bit surprising. you know I knew a lot of people who were ah excited for Trump because they saw him as a repudiation of either woke culture or just the yeah you know open censoriousness of Biden, particularly involving all things COVID and It's just really amazing to this day how much jawboning and, you know, just being on the White House podium and singling out Joe Rogan for like, you know, why why aren't you firing him, Spotify, kind of thing. Like on a daily basis, it was insane what was happening.
00:45:49
Speaker
And it still hasn't. received as much criticism as it deserved. I knew all that going in, but there was this exhale. You could hear it the day after the election. And I was like, wow, that's interesting.
00:46:00
Speaker
It might've even felt a little bit myself, but I don't really feel like anyone's telling me I can't talk. But it's the Justine Bateman story, like, right? You know, ah the actress and filmmaker, she's like, I was walking on eggshells for four years or eight years even, but I no longer am.
00:46:13
Speaker
And I love it. And I thought, great, that's a great thing for the culture. I like it when people feel like they can speak more freely. That's just, what are we even all doing here? For me, that is that is such an authentic, intrinsic part of the American culture, and that that was being aggressed, transgressed for as long as it has been. It's been bad. Some of that has been governmental, like like I mentioned before.
00:46:37
Speaker
Some of that's been very much in the culture, been a ah journalistic institutions, been in Hollywood. You know, the summer of 2020, the George Floyd COVID summer here was insane. People were like being fired for not having the right ah shade of black and their black box on their Instagram page in solidarity to George Floyd or something. It was crazy.
00:46:58
Speaker
So all of that was pretty good. And then on the first day in office, Trump signed an executive order banning the federal government from censoring people like, OK, yeah you got me there.
00:47:09
Speaker
All right. So it seemed like that was going to be great. um I also knew from experience with Donald Trump that there was no way it would last. And man, there's no way it's allowed. I mean, he's suing. Who isn't he suing in the media right now? there He is applying all kinds of pressure on media companies using the administration's ah considerable leeway to weigh in on mergers.
00:47:34
Speaker
He's authorizing the head of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, which should be disbanded anyways. But he he's encouraging him to open investigations on people who whose editing he doesn't like.
00:47:45
Speaker
It's crazy. Marco Rubio, as aforementioned, is combing through the social media posts and and newspaper columns from idiot 20-year-old college sophomores if they're on student visas to see whether what they write is in conflict with advancing American foreign policy, which is all statutorily you need to do.
00:48:03
Speaker
according to the very odious, in my opinion, 1952 Immigration Nationalization Act. So all that's super bad for free speech. The Trump administration is attacking law firms. You've done too much business with Democrats. So either apologize or now start doing more business Republicans or else.
00:48:20
Speaker
And a lot of them are like, okay, he's going after various universities. All of that, according to people who I follow very closely, who've been great in very fair and bipartisan ways about free speech forever, they are up in arms about this. Listen to your civil libertarians. You know, people at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression at FIRE, people at Reason Magazine, people like Jacob Mchengama, you know, wrote a really chilling piece in The Dispatch a few days ago.
00:48:48
Speaker
under the provocative headline, a new McCarthyism. But he sort of talked about like as a foreigner who lives here, free speech was his thing. He would would always use it as a cudgel against his fellow Europeans back home. Like you guys need to stop with all this censoriousness back there. You should go for a more American model.
00:49:08
Speaker
And now he's got people telling him, like, you better watch what you say. What are we doing? So the cultural vibe chip was great. It was bigger than I expected. And it had this sort of sense of release about it.
00:49:20
Speaker
Trump is part of that story. the You know, his political coalition is rougher and rowdier and funnier and kind of in some ways more diverse, I think. the Democratic coalition.
00:49:32
Speaker
It's just something that you should kind of just observe at rallies or at the Republican National Convention. And also, he's terrible on free speech, it turns out. And so that is going to cause some souring in the culture. And he's also just, you know, it's redundant at this point, but he's a coarse figure. He's a coarse and divisive figure who talks nastily about whole swaths of the country that he's supposed to govern. and And I don't think that's necessarily helping the national character, even though we can all say retard now again.
00:50:02
Speaker
To show. ah Okay, we've got five minutes to assess and solve the world's problems. Let's turn to foreign policy. Give me your whistle-stop tour of his approach both to... Okay, let's let's maybe break it down a tad.
00:50:14
Speaker
Let's go Ukraine and and Russia. Some would say that Biden was committing to a never-ending war, spending more and more American bunt money And the reality is that the lines haven't moved in in ah in Ukraine for years now.
Trump's Foreign Policy: Ukraine and Russia
00:50:28
Speaker
There is no way that Russia is going to ah lose this war as a nuclear armed power that can't afford to lose. Trump is being realistic by cozying up to Putin, and he is more likely to be able to get to an outcome.
00:50:40
Speaker
Obviously, we've also heard the alternatives to that argument. How do you assess his approach to ah to Russia and Ukraine? I am someone who sympathized greatly for the Ukrainian cause, who um sees Russia as an almost uniquely bad actor in the family of nations. And so those are my sympathies going into this.
00:51:02
Speaker
Trump, I think, is and the Trump administration, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, others have... behaved in naive ways, in dishonorable ways, sometimes singling out Zelensky for criticism and then sort of being light with Vladimir Putin is just kind of morally obtuse.
00:51:22
Speaker
And at the same time, their blunderbuss way of going about wherever they're going about, which is kind of nowhere, right? Like Russia hasn't agreed with anything. There hasn't been anything useful really happened. Trump is now saying, expressing impatience with Vladimir Putin and telling to stop Stop, Vladimir, on Twitter.
00:51:41
Speaker
So there's all that. But I think the final destination of the Ukraine-Russian war right now, or at least this phase of it, is that the is the United States detaches from the problem and the European Union takes responsibility for the problem.
00:51:56
Speaker
whether Europe is ever going to back its stern words and finger pointing with actually taking responsibility for it, whether Macron has those kind of big boy pants,
00:52:09
Speaker
And no one's gotten rich betting on any of that ever happening. I have my doubts. I have my doubts too. And they they lack the industrial capacity, among other things. Like, you know, we are the umbrella, the military umbrella of the West and have been for a long time. We have all this capacity.
00:52:25
Speaker
And whether I like it or not, we're tired of it and we want other people to do it. So in his blunderbuss way that makes me feel ashamed um just as a citizen, He's speeding up the process of a place that Europeans should have gone to eight years ago, 30 years ago, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
00:52:45
Speaker
Europe should be taking more responsibility for its affairs. It'll be up to Ukraine to decide how long it wants to fight against a nuclear armed power. I know peep it's fashionable among the Trumpites to say there's no chance of Ukraine winning.
00:52:57
Speaker
That has been said about people protect, it' you know, overmatched David armies fighting against and invading Goliath in many places that ended up surprising people. So I don't think Donald Trump's been great, but also I think that directionally we're heading towards a place that we should have gone to somehow.
Overall Assessment of Trump's Presidency
00:53:14
Speaker
as that means and ends theme rearing its head again. yeah We will have to get to Israel and Palestine in our next conversation, Matt, because I do want to get you to try and tie this muddled picture together for me.
00:53:27
Speaker
How do you assess Donald Trump's first 100 days in aggregate and then look forward forward look forward for me? How do you see the Trump presidency moving forward towards 2028? right that last that long.
00:53:41
Speaker
Well, some people would say it may last longer than that. It might well. i I don't bet against him at this point or the people who surround him. I have not enjoyed this presidency and and I don't enjoy any presidency. I should have said a way up top that like, you know, one of the longstanding book projects that I've had in the back my mind is a children's book called Every President is Terrible.
00:54:03
Speaker
Just going one by one, explaining why they terrible. That's kind of my point of view. I sort of- Just knock that idealism out of the movie. George Washington, on. yeah line You want to know about the slavery thing? It's worse than you think.
00:54:16
Speaker
Whiskey rebellion. you But yeah, knock the idealism out, but also like inject a little bit of realism to the project. So I don't have my hair on fire about Donald Trump. He is doing on his administration is doing terrible things on tariffs and on due process that are affecting individual human lives in a negative way.
00:54:36
Speaker
That's bad. ah So people who share my broad sense of beliefs that we get up and go to work and see what we can do. And I have some faith right now that there are some American instincts that are going to re-rear their heads here as we are ah are entering the 250th anniversary of our independence and the fight for it. and that war started literally like 250 years ago last week and You know, ah watching all of ah the old documentaries, reading the books, seeing the different conceptions of American liberty, it was so fundamentally anti-rule of one man.
00:55:20
Speaker
And I think that Trump is wrong to think that he can continue to sort of ram down as one man unpopular and deleterious policies that are contrary to the American character for any length of time.
00:55:33
Speaker
At some point, there's going to be an American public that will stop that from happening long before that the actual ah political representatives of either party ah prove themselves to be useful.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:55:45
Speaker
So, yeah, it's it's it's bad. And I think that we will survive and we will come out different and and interesting in ways that my feeble brain cannot predict.
00:55:58
Speaker
Well, we will have to get you, assuming there's no revolution beforehand, we'll have to get you back on for that 2026, 250th year anniversary to discuss the American project and how it is evolving.
00:56:08
Speaker
Matt, thank you so much for coming on. The Fifth Column is such a wonderful podcast. I'm a devout listener. Regular listeners will know as well that we had Nick Gillespie from Reason on a few weeks ago, and he was fabulous. Reason's great.
00:56:20
Speaker
Links to both are in the show notes. Keep doing what you're doing, mate, and thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Will. Really appreciate it.