Filed with 60.3.7 Economics · Related: Political Philosophy (MOC) · Business MOC

✅ Arguments For Trump’s Tariff Policies (mostly from Batya Ungar-Sargon)

Batya’s Other Arguments

🇺🇸 Economic Strategy

1. Massive Manufacturing Investment

• Batya claims Trump attracted $1.5 trillion in manufacturing investments in just 100 days.
• This, she argues, is proof that his aggressive use of tariffs and executive power has reversed decades of manufacturing decline caused by globalization.
  2. Tariffs as a Multi-Purpose Tool
• Trump is using tariffs not just for trade leverage, but for:
  • National security (cutting China out of supply chains)
  • Economic rebalancing (reshoring production)
  • Debt reduction (via tariff-generated revenue)
  • Stimulating domestic industry (especially in semiconductors, steel, etc.)
    3. Restoring Balance in Trade
• The U.S. previously had zero tariffs while others imposed heavy tariffs on American goods. Trump’s moves have, according to Batya, ended this imbalance.
• Result: Allies are now “relieved” to only face 10% tariffs, which she views as a win.

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🧑‍🏭 American Workforce & Class Focus

4. Focus on the Working Class

• Batya praises Trump for prioritizing “forgotten men and women” over elite or Wall Street interests.
• She sees him as uniquely taking on “the enemies of the American people,” including credentialed elites, media, and global capital.
  5. Dignity of Labor
• She defends factory work and manual labor as dignified and essential, contrasting this with elite disdain for such jobs.
• Rejects the idea that automation and AI will fully replace human labor in factories, citing China as proof that “burly men” still make cars.
  6. Ending the H-1B Visa Glut
• Batya blames an overreliance on foreign tech labor for the U.S.’s lack of high-skill manufacturing capacity.
• She credits Trump with reducing H-1B visa abuse to open opportunities for Americans in STEM fields.

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🏛️ Immigration and Law Enforcement

7. Border Control Success

• Trump has, in Batya’s view, successfully closed the southern border in under 100 days, a feat neither party managed in decades.
  8. Deportations as Sovereignty
• Batya defends deporting foreign students tied to anti-Israel activism or visa fraud, arguing Americans overwhelmingly support such policies.
• She asserts the administration is distinguishing between citizen rights and non-citizen privileges, which she believes elites ignore.
  9. Due Process and Enforcement
• In the Kilmar Garcia case, Batya supports Trump despite the administrative deportation error, arguing the man had due process and deserved removal for domestic violence and alleged gang ties.

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🎓 Higher Education Reform

10. Attacking Elite Universities

• Batya supports Trump’s moves to strip funding or tax-exempt status from institutions like Harvard and Columbia for failing to curb anti-Semitism or ideological extremism.
• She claims the blowback from elite institutions shows just how captured they are by the left and how out of touch they are with ordinary Americans.

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🌍 Foreign Policy

11. Ukraine and Realignment

• Batya claims Trump is pushing for a pragmatic end to the Ukraine war based on pre-2022 status quo (Russia keeps Donbas and Crimea; Ukraine stays out of NATO).
• She speculates Trump sees Russia as a potential counterweight to China, which guides his diplomacy.
  12. Iran and Peace First
• She supports Trump’s approach to try a new Iran nuclear deal—only if it’s stronger than JCPOA—and praises his aversion to war.
• Argues Trump’s foreign policy prioritizes U.S. interests first, not just those of allies like Israel.

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🎯 Overall Framing

• Batya sees Trump’s presidency as a “counterrevolution” against DEI, globalization, progressive elites, and economic decay.
• She views Trump as unapologetically realigning American power toward national interest, sovereignty, and dignity for working people.

Counter-Arguments

1. Rebalancing Trade

Claim: Tariffs correct long-standing trade imbalances by imposing reciprocal duties.
Counter-Arguments:

• Misunderstanding Trade Deficits: Economists argue that trade deficits are not inherently harmful and often reflect a country’s strong investment climate. Tariffs aimed at eliminating trade deficits can disrupt beneficial economic relationships. (Tariffs in the second Trump administration - Wikipedia)

• Global Economic Disruption: The implementation of widespread tariffs has led to retaliatory measures from trading partners, disrupting global supply chains and increasing costs for consumers and businesses.

• David Solomon (Goldman Sachs CEO): Warned that the uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs is negatively impacting U.S. economic growth, leading CEOs to delay investments and tighten budgets.

• Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase CEO): Stated that the sweeping tariffs will likely lead to defaults by borrowers and a recession, indicating that the approach may harm the U.S. economy more than it helps. ​New York Post

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2. Reshoring Manufacturing

Claim: Tariffs have attracted $1.5 trillion in domestic manufacturing investment, reducing reliance on China.
Counter-Arguments:

• Limited Impact on Manufacturing Jobs: While some investments have occurred, economists note that tariffs have not led to a significant increase in manufacturing employment. Factors such as automation and higher domestic production costs limit job growth. (Trump’s Tariff Agenda Bets on Americans Giving Up Cheap Goods)

• Investment Uncertainty: The unpredictability of tariff policies creates an unstable environment for long-term investments, deterring companies from committing to domestic manufacturing projects. (Could Trump’s Tariffs Revive Manufacturing in the U.S.?)

• National Association of Manufacturers (NAM): Expressed concern that the high costs of new tariffs threaten investment, jobs, and supply chains, potentially undermining America’s manufacturing leadership.

• Bjørn Gulden (Adidas CEO): Highlighted that the U.S. lacks the necessary facilities for athletic footwear manufacturing, making it challenging to shift production domestically despite tariffs. ​NAMFinancial Times

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3. National Security

Claim: Tariffs reduce dependence on foreign nations for critical goods, enhancing national security.
Counter-Arguments:

• Counterproductive Measures: Economists caution that tariffs can backfire by increasing costs for domestic industries that rely on imported components, potentially weakening national security industries. (Trump’s National Security Tariffs | Council on Foreign Relations)

• Retaliation Risks: Tariffs may provoke retaliatory actions from other countries, leading to trade wars that can harm the very industries they aim to protect.

• Ken Fisher (Fisher Investments Founder): Criticized the tariffs as “arrogantly extreme,” suggesting that they may not effectively address national security concerns and could lead to market volatility.

• Stanley Druckenmiller (Billionaire Investor): Opposed tariffs exceeding 10%, viewing them as a consumption tax that could invite retaliatory actions and provoke economic risks. ​Yahoo FinanceNew York Post

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4. Populist Appeal

Claim: Working-class Americans support tariffs as they prioritize domestic industry over low prices.
Counter-Arguments:

• Disproportionate Impact on Low-Income Households: Tariffs often lead to higher prices on consumer goods, disproportionately affecting low-income families who spend a larger portion of their income on such goods.

• Job Losses in Other Sectors: While tariffs may protect certain industries, they can lead to job losses in others, such as agriculture and services, due to retaliatory tariffs and decreased export opportunities.

• National Retail Federation (NRF): Warned that the tariffs will have a disproportionate impact on local communities and be particularly harmful to small retailers, leading to higher costs for American families.

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Stated that the broad tariffs are effectively a tax increase on American consumers and businesses, potentially leading to job losses and economic hardship. ​National Retail Federation | NRF

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5. Tariffs as Multi-Tool

Claim: Tariffs serve multiple purposes, including economic stimulus and geopolitical leverage.
Counter-Arguments:

• Economic Uncertainty: The use of tariffs as a multi-purpose tool introduces uncertainty into the economy, making it difficult for businesses to plan and invest.

• Ineffectiveness in Achieving Goals: Economists argue that tariffs have not effectively achieved their intended goals, such as significant trade concessions or reshoring of industries, and instead have led to economic disruptions.

• Richard Branson (Virgin Group Founder): Criticized Trump’s tariffs as “erratic,” stating that such decisions have financially harmed the global economy and created uncertainty for businesses.

• Bill Ackman (Pershing Square Capital Management CEO): Described the tariff approach as an “economic nuclear war,” urging for a 90-day pause to prevent further damage to the economy. ​Business InsiderAxios

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6. Forced Negotiations

Claim: Tariffs compel other countries to negotiate fairer trade deals.
Counter-Arguments:

• Strained International Relations: Rather than fostering negotiations, tariffs have strained relationships with key allies and trading partners, leading to retaliatory measures and decreased cooperation. (On China and Russia, Trump’s tactics appear to fall flat)

• Limited Success in Trade Agreements: There is limited evidence that tariffs have resulted in more favorable trade agreements for the U.S., with many negotiations stalling or leading to minimal concessions. (‘Strategic uncertainty’ looms over Trump trade talks as ex-commerce chief warns not to ‘over-negotiate’)

• David Solomon (Goldman Sachs CEO): Emphasized the need for clearer trade policy to stabilize markets and revive mergers and acquisitions activity, suggesting that the current tariff strategy creates uncertainty rather than productive negotiations.

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Argued that the tariffs are not leading to effective negotiations but are instead raising prices and upending supply chains. ​New York Post

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7. Cultural Realignment

Claim: Tariffs are part of a broader movement to reject globalization and support American workers.
Counter-Arguments:

• Economic Nationalism Risks: Economists warn that using tariffs as a tool for cultural realignment can lead to economic nationalism, which may isolate the U.S. from global markets and reduce competitiveness.

• Long-Term Economic Harm: Prioritizing cultural objectives over economic efficiency can result in policies that harm the overall economy, leading to decreased growth and innovation.

• Richard Branson (Virgin Group Founder): Accused Trump of “doing so much damage” to the world, stating that his policies have been “awful for everyone,” including the working class.

• National Retail Federation (NRF): Highlighted that the tariffs will have a disproportionate impact on local communities and be particularly harmful to small retailers, which are integral to the working-class economy. ​Richard Branson accuses Trump of ‘doing so much damage’ to the world | Richard Branson | The Guardian

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❌ Arguments Against Trump’s Tariff Policies (mostly from Brianna Wu)

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🧠 Key Themes and Tensions

• “National Project” vs. “Economic Logic”
  Batya frames tariffs as necessary sacrifices for American sovereignty and dignity. Brianna sees them as economically incoherent, and symbolic rather than productive.

• “Working-Class Uplift” vs. “Global Market Reality”
  Batya claims the working class supports the pain for long-term gain. Brianna argues that the economy is more globally intertwined and high-tech dependent than Batya admits.

• “Tool for Leverage” vs. “Weaponized Uncertainty”
  Batya: tariffs = leverage across sectors.
  Brianna: tariffs = chaos, not a focused policy tool.

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📈 Economists Supporting Trump’s Tariffs

While the majority of economists express skepticism about broad tariffs, some have articulated support or partial endorsement, particularly when tariffs are targeted or used strategically.

1. Lou Basenese on Fox Business
   Title: Economic expert reveals the ‘reality’ behind Trump’s tariff plan
   Summary: Lou Basenese discusses the potential benefits of Trump’s tariff plan, suggesting it could lead to improved wage growth and U.S. production.
   Link: Fox Business Video
2. Fox Business Panel Discussion
   Title: Trump tariffs will ‘improve’ wage growth and US production, economists predict
   Summary: A panel of economists on Fox Business predicts that Trump’s tariffs will enhance wage growth and bolster U.S. production.
   Link: Fox Business Video
3. Scott Bessent’s Remarks
   Title: Bessent: No supply chain shocks ahead from tariffs
   Summary: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addresses concerns about supply chain disruptions due to tariffs, suggesting that proactive measures have mitigated potential issues.
   Link: Axios

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📉 Economists Opposing Trump’s Tariffs

Economists

1. Paul Krugman’s Analysis
   Title: The problem with Trump’s tariffs isn’t the tariffs themselves, Paul Krugman says
   Summary: Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argues that the unpredictability of Trump’s tariffs creates significant economic uncertainty, deterring investment and potentially leading to a recession.
   Link: Business Insider
2. David C. Datelle’s Critique
   Title: Letter: Trump’s tariffs are a grave mistake
   Summary: Former U.S. Senate economist David C. Datelle warns that Trump’s tariffs could cost millions of jobs and significantly increase household expenses.
   Link: CT Insider
3. S&P Global Survey Findings
   Title: Trade wars feed inflation, slow economy and depress business confidence, S&P finds
   Summary: An S&P Global survey indicates that widespread tariffs have led to increased costs, slowed economic growth, and reduced business confidence.
   Link: MarketWatch
4. Reuters Economists Poll
   Title: Risk of global economic recession surges on US tariff shockwaves: Reuters poll
   Summary: A Reuters poll reveals that a majority of economists view Trump’s tariffs as increasing the risk of a global recession.
   Link: Reuters
5. Harvard Economists’ Perspective
   Title: ‘Inconsistent with Basic Economics’: Harvard Economics Baffled by Trump’s Tariff Policy
   Summary: Harvard economists express confusion and concern over the rationale and potential consequences of Trump’s tariff policies.
   Link: The Harvard Crimson
6. The Economist’s Editorial
   Title: President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc
   Summary: The Economist criticizes Trump’s tariffs as a profound and unnecessary economic error with potential for lasting damage.
   Link: The Economist
7. Penn Wharton Budget Model Report
   Title: The Economic Effects of President Trump’s Tariffs
   Summary: The report projects that Trump’s tariffs could reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%, with significant lifetime losses for middle-income households.
   Link: Penn Wharton Budget Model
8. Vox Analysis on Working-Class Impact
   Title: Trump’s tariffs hurt the working class. Why are some unions on board?
   Summary: Vox explores how Trump’s tariffs negatively affect the working class, despite some union support.
   Link: Vox

💼 CEOs & Business Leaders

1. David Solomon – CEO, Goldman Sachs

Warned that Trump’s tariffs are creating uncertainty, causing CEOs to delay investments and tighten budgets. Goldman Sachs downgraded U.S. growth forecasts and raised recession risks due to the trade war. (Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon warns Trump’s tariffs are forcing CEOs ‘to tighten their belts’)

2. Hans Vestberg – CEO, Verizon

Stated that tariffs on Chinese imports could lead to higher smartphone prices for consumers, as increased costs would be passed on. (Verizon, AT&T CEOs Say Tariffs May Lead to Smartphone Price Hikes)

3. John Stankey – CEO, AT&T

Echoed concerns about smartphone price hikes due to tariffs, indicating that customers would bear the brunt of potential handset price increases. (Verizon, AT&T CEOs Say Tariffs May Lead to Smartphone Price Hikes)

4. Bjørn Gulden – CEO, Adidas

Warned that new U.S. tariffs would raise costs for Adidas products, as the company cannot manufacture athletic footwear in the U.S. and relies on imports from countries like Vietnam. (Adidas warns Trump tariffs will mean higher trainer prices)

5. Executives from Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, JetBlue, General Motors, UPS

These companies have expressed concerns over the impact of tariffs on their operations, citing increased costs, supply chain disruptions, and the need to reassess financial forecasts. (Major companies face a difficult task in estimating the impact of tariffs on their business)

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💰 Billionaires & Investors

6. Jamie Dimon – CEO, JPMorgan Chase

In his annual shareholder letter, Dimon warned that Trump’s tariffs would likely increase inflation and raise the probability of a recession. (Jamie Dimon, major Wall Street figures issue warnings … - CBS News)

7. Elon Musk – CEO, Tesla and SpaceX

Criticized Trump’s tariffs as a “huge policy mistake” and engaged in a public dispute with trade advisor Peter Navarro over the economic impact of the tariffs. (Billionaires—Including Elon Musk—Speak Out Against Trump’s Tariffs)

8. Bill Ackman – CEO, Pershing Square Capital Management

Called for a 90-day “time out” on tariffs, warning that the trade war could lead to a “self-induced economic nuclear winter” and erode business confidence. (Bill Ackman calls for 90-day ‘time out’ on tariffs, or risk ‘self-induced …)

9. Ken Fisher – Founder, Fisher Investments

Described Trump’s tariff plan as “stupid, wrong, arrogantly extreme,” criticizing the approach as detrimental to the economy. (Billionaires—Including Elon Musk—Speak Out Against Trump’s Tariffs)

10. Stanley Druckenmiller – Billionaire Investor

Expressed opposition to tariffs exceeding 10%, stating that such measures could harm the economy and consumer spending. (‘Economic nuclear war’: Some billionaires criticize Trump’s tariffs)

11. Richard Branson – Founder, Virgin Group

Labeled Trump’s tariffs as “erratic and unpredictable,” warning that they could destabilize global business and harm both large corporations and small enterprises. (Billionaire Richard Branson’s take on Trump’s ‘erratic’ tariffs)

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🏛️ Business Organizations

12. U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Opposed Trump’s tariffs, arguing that they harm businesses, workers, and consumers by increasing costs and creating uncertainty. (United States Chamber of Commerce)

13. National Retail Federation

Warned that the tariffs would cause anxiety and uncertainty for American businesses and consumers, emphasizing that U.S. importers bear the initial financial burden. (Liberation Day tariffs)

14. National Association of Manufacturers

Expressed concern that the scale of the tariffs threatens jobs, supply chains, and investment, potentially undermining America’s manufacturing leadership. (Liberation Day tariffs)

📍 Regional & Sectoral Voices

15. Kentucky State Officials

Despite the state’s previous support for Trump, officials have emerged as vocal critics of the new tariffs, citing negative impacts on Kentucky’s economy. (Amid ongoing debate over tariffs, state of Kentucky emerges as leading — and unconventional — voice of opposition)

16. Orange County Business Leaders

Local business leaders in California, including Cheryl Osborn of Casco Contractors and Robert Farnsworth of Sonnet Technologies, have spoken out against the consequences of Trump’s tariff policies for businesses and consumers. (ICYMI: Rep. Dave Min, Orange County Business Leaders Speak Out …)

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Transcript from Free Press Podcast

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From The Free Press, this is Honestly and I’m Bari Weiss. Today marks President Trump’s 100th day in office. And what are we to make of this dizzying first 100 days?

As my friend and former colleague at The New York Times, Bret Stephens, put it, I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disastrous first 100 days of any presidency in American history. All of the wounds are self-inflicted. Indeed, even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters are struggling to understand and support a lot of his policy actions.

As Rod Dreher wrote for The Free Press last week, MAGA tempts the same sorry fate that conservatives like me suffered over the Iraq War. Do we hate our enemies, Rod writes, more than we love liberty, more than we care about prudence and”

“common sense? If the cost of victory is trashing the jobs and the businesses of ordinary Americans with a reckless and unstable tariff policy, abusing the Constitution, pointlessly sabotaging America’s allies, and replacing a domestic woke left system with a woke right one, well, then MAGA risks destroying itself.

But on the other hand, there are people like Victor Davis Hanson, a historian who sees Trump as waging an existential and necessary counterrevolution in Washington, a cultural, social, political, military, and economic shakeup to see if he could reboot the country. In other words, writes Hanson, each day he is trying to stage a counterrevolution against the prior left-wing, neo-socialist, DEI, and green revolutions of the Obama-Biden years. That’s a mouthful.

So the other thing Victor Davis Hanson says is simply this, it is nothing less than a return to sanity. Suffice it to say, the reaction to Trump’s 100 days is a very, very stark split screen. To unpack all of this today, I have two honestly favorites, Free Press columnist and Donald Trump fan Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Democratic strategist and Free Press contributor Brianna Wu.

I ask Batya and Brianna about Trump’s war on”
“globalized trade, his war on elite campuses, his war against illegal immigration, and also his stance on wars in Ukraine and Gaza. We also debate if Trump’s actions are what his base really wanted. Most importantly, I think, I ask about the reach of his power and the lengths he is willing to go to achieve his goals.

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Thank you for having me.

Well, it’s been a hundred”

“days of Donald Trump’s second term, and we’re here because I want to do a little bit of a retrospective with two people that I think have quite different perspectives on this presidency so far. But before we get into the individual issues, I want you to just give me the grade. How is Donald Trump doing?

Number grade or letter grade? It’s up to you. Brianna, let’s start with you.

I got to be honest, I’d say it’s a D minus, largely based on the economy and this tariff situation. It’s been a disaster. I don’t think it’s a good way to get the policy that we want.

There are some good things I could say about his presidency so far, but it’s a much shorter list.

Batya?

A plus plus.

Come on, go against type a little. Okay, give us a sense of why.

I think Donald Trump has reset the expectations of the American people for what we can expect from a president. First of all, he has just done so much. The sheer effectiveness of how he has used executive orders in order to fulfill campaign promises, the rate at which he has gone, just the”

“sheer volume that he has accomplished, I think is staggering.

And for me specifically, and I think for a lot of people, has reshaped what we think we can expect from a president. I think that it is very clear that he is laser focused on the American working class. The spectacle of him taking on Wall Street on behalf of the forgotten men and women of the heartland will stay with me forever, and I think for a lot of people as well.

And the contrast that that set with previous Democratic administrations, I think has really kind of put the nail in the coffin of the Democrats’ pretensions that they can talk the working class game while walking the over credentialed college elite on policy. And just from immigration to the tariffs, to the universities, to getting rid of these criminals, to controlling the border. I mean, taking on the enemies of the American people one by one and refusing to allow the consensus of the liberal mainstream media that hates him to in any way impact the agenda, it’s just a plus plus, Bari, I gotta say.

Wow, all right, Batya, you gave me a lot to”

“work with there. Let’s start with trade because I think on certain issues that we’ll discuss in this conversation, I want to talk about the core areas like immigration, beating back the federal bureaucracy, arguably with Doge. There’s a question of whether or not that’s window dressing or really, really getting to the heart of the problem.

The law, which I think is a huge issue. I think though, Batya, you mentioned the economy as part of your A plus plus grade. And I think that’s one area where you in particular, but also the Trump administration, has gotten far and away the most pushback.

And not just from Wall Street or from elites, but from ordinary small business owners who rely on reliability at the very least. Forgetting where they get their goods from, whether it’s China or Canada or Mexico or anything else. But they rely on the ability to know what’s coming around the bend.

And I think if there’s one word that has typified Trump on the question of tariffs and protectionism, it has been the word uncertainty. Earlier in April, Donald Trump slapped massive tariffs on 90 countries, both allies and adversaries alike. And then”

“there was a kind of internal civil war in his administration between Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, kind of messaging that this was only a tool, this was an attempt to get parties to the table in order to renegotiate it.

And then on the other side, a singular economist, let’s describe him that way, Peter Navarro, who said, no, no, no, this is not a negotiating tactic. Trump is never going to back down. We actually want these tariffs to be in place.

Well, then, lo and behold, and we can maybe disagree about this, Trump did back down. He opened this 90-day negotiation window for all countries except for China. And we’re in that window right now.

And there’s sort of, you know, the markets are up or down. People are happy or unhappy, depending on the little dribs and drabs of information that are coming out from this administration. Scott Bessent made news a few days ago where he was speaking at a JP Morgan conference and indicated that we were going to kind of walk things back with China.

Markets were up. Anyway, lots of kind of back and forth on that issue. Before we”

“talk about the effect that it’s had on the working class and on ordinary Americans, I want to just sort of like touch grass with the two of you.

Has all of this been a kind of four dimensional chess game on the part of the president? Or has this been a miscalculation? So, miscalculation or master act?

Brianna, let’s start with you.

So, I’m sorry. I don’t think Trump has a master plan on this. I think Donald Trump is someone who very consistently, since even the 80s and 90s, has had this idea in his mind about tariffs.

Every single credible economist out there has tried to talk him out of this. And, you know, it’s not a plan for fixing the economy. Like, Batya, I agree with you.

If you’re talking about making an American economy where we create more things, we have more, like, domestic production at home, particularly in the high-tech sector, I’m 100% with you. This is why I supported the Chips Act so aggressively. What we’re not seeing from the Trump administration is a rational, logical plan to get domestic production back home.

And I actually want to ask you a really”

“direct question. With Trump’s plan, yes, he’s making things more expensive, but it doesn’t create any of the factory capacity to actually get these things done. It does not create jobs.

It does not bring tooling. It does not bring the expertise that we need to compete in the high-tech sector, expertise that China has particularly. What it actually does is make the goods that we would need, the base goods, the things that we would need to buff up our manufacturing, it makes that so expensive that we actually can’t compete on any front.

How does this actually get us to the point where we can actually start producing things at home? Real investment in domestic and production is going to look a lot more like the Chips Act and a lot less like just throwing tariffs on everything willy-nilly. He doesn’t have a plan and I wish you could just say that.

Batya, does he have a plan?

Well, so none of that is actually accurate. He’s already attracted $1.5 trillion in manufacturing investment to the United States in the first 100 days. So if that was all he had done, like, it would have been”

“enough just to do that, getting all of these massive corporations, which under any other conditions would never, ever, ever have agreed to spend this kind of money when they could get such a better deal from going with the slave labor in China.

He of course has a deal. Bari, we are at a situation where the world is relieved to have a 10 percent tariff on the United States. You understand what happened in the last 100 days.

They went from the United States being the patsies of the world, having zero tariffs, but the tariffs on every other country, on us. So this horrific imbalance that resulted in the downward mobility of working class Americans, the offshoring of our manufacturing base, our reliance on our greatest adversary for the things we would need to fight them. And he took from that situation.

And now we have a situation where the rest of the world is coming to the table to make deals to cut China out of the supply chain, and are relieved that the tariff to the United States now is at 10 percent, generating billions of dollars of revenue. So to act like that didn’t”

“happen, of course that happened. Now, was that intentional?

I don’t know. He had five people with five different approaches to tariffs because Trump sees tariffs as a mechanism that can achieve many, many things that, by the way, all three of us would agree are unbelievably important things. So he’s doing it, using them to do this, he’s using them to do this, he’s using them to do this, and everybody’s acting like because he’s using them in order to do multiple things, he’s not succeeding at any of them.

And I just think that that’s kind of a ridiculous way to look at it. I think we all agree that the trade deficit is unfair, that the debt we’re in is unsustainable, that our national security cannot sustain itself when we rely on our adversary for the things we would need to fight them. We, I think, all think, as Brianna just admitted, we want to reshore manufacturing.

I think we all think that, well, probably a lot of us could agree that at some level, we were due for some quantitative easing. The stock market was very inflated after a long period. And I think that we”

“could all agree that there are certain industries that absolutely we have to have a market share on and we don’t.

But, Batya, I think if the president had come out and said, guys, look, one of the core lessons of COVID and one of the core lessons of the past 20 years has been that we should absolutely not rely on an adversary like China for essential things. Chips has come up in this conversation, but also the creation of weaponry, the creation of ships, certainly essential medicines that we were short on during COVID, antibiotics. Therefore, I am going to set in place an X percent tariff on China to incentivize and make sure that those essential products are made here in America.

But I’m not going to start a trade war with allies like Canada and Mexico for no apparent reason. I’m not going to do, you know, start. I mean, the best example is that island that is populated only by puffins and pegwins that is, you know, slapped also with a tariff.

I’m blanking on the name of the island. The point is, I think directionally on that issue and frankly on a lot of”

“others, if the president had done something narrowly aimed at national security and China and essential goods, a lot of people would have been absolutely thrilled. I think it would have been a consensus issue.

If you’re a small business owner.

I’m sorry, Bari. That’s just not true. We look at the way people treated him in the first administration when he did exactly that.

And they undermined him at every turn. Nobody reshored manufacturing. And by the way, China and Mexico, Canada and Mexico are back doors into our economy.

He’s not starting a trade war with our allies. He’s trying to say to them, you cannot allow China to circumvent all of the tariffs that he put on them very narrowly, like you wanted Bari in the first administration. And they just circumvented it because there’s, because of the USMCA, like he had to go bigger than that.

And by the way, nobody would have been satisfied with that if he had done it in this very meticulous, careful way. Because he had to take on everybody in order to do this. And I think that that’s what you’re seeing right now, is Wall Street throwing a fit”

“because people who will never not be rich cannot stand the idea that they have to share some of that prosperity with their fellow Americans.

I think that’s really the whole story at the end of the day.

Well, Batya, I was just going to say, I really hear you, I want to be respectful here. But we’re attacking a part of the problem that makes no sense. You can, Tim Cook had a fantastic, Tim Cook of Apple had a fantastic interview this week.

He was talking about why he doesn’t build things like iPhones, Macbooks, all this in the United States. It’s not like the expense of it. It’s not a money issue, it’s an education issue.

It’s the fact we literally do not produce people here in the United States with the skills to produce high-tech manufacturing. One area of technology I am super interested in is AI and robotics. They regularly have events in China where they’re filling up stadiums of people that understand this technology and work with it.

We’ve got three or four people showing up to these events. They’re Americans. We just are not producing these people.

Hold on. Let me finish”

“. Let me finish.

Let me finish, Batya. Let me finish, Batya. So my point is we’re attacking the wrong part of the problem.

This is not a money issue. This is not a price issue. The first issue is it’s an education issue.

We’ve got to start incentivizing Americans to go into different specialties if we want to have more domestic production. And the truth is we are not producing those people. We’re not going to get jobs Americans can go to if we literally do not have the education for people to get those jobs.

So it’s got to be a five-year plan. It’s got to be a ten-year plan. We are doing this in ways that make no sense.

I was going to say you literally just signed an executive order to educate Americans to work in AI. The reason we don’t have workers to work in these industries is because of another problem that Democrats love, which is a glut of H-1B visas. We import cheap labor to do the jobs of the future.

I agree with you. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of automation in these new manufacturing plants. That’s great”

“There’s going to be great conditions. That’s great. We don’t want people working in sweatshops.

These aren’t going to be sweatshops. But the reason we don’t have a ready-made American workforce for this is because of the immigration policy we have had, in which 75% of people who work in STEM or work in Silicon Valley are on H-1B visas, are foreign born. So we gave even those good jobs to people who are not Americans, which Trump is also addressing.

So it’s like there’s all these complaints from people who totally agree with what he’s trying to do but won’t admit that, or I don’t know if people are not like paying attention to the fact that he is addressing this problem from so many different angles. Like it does seem to have been lost on people that he has attracted $1.5 trillion in manufacturing investments. And like he is doing it all at once, and if he had only picked one thing, it never would have happened, which we know because for 40 years it didn’t happen.

I guess I want to, and then we’ll get to immigration, I promise. I just want to push back”

“on this idea, Batya, that you are most passionately articulating.

I’m going to relax.

No, no, no. It’s great. Articulating not just here, but all over news.

You’ve somehow extracted more than 24 hours in a day to appear on CNN and Fox and MSNBC at the same time.

That’s what happens when you’re the only person willing to defend tariffs.

Okay. But what I want, I really do just want to push back on this one aspect, which is that this only hurts Wall Street and it only hurts the rich. Rod Dreher had a really excellent essay in the Free Press a few days ago, where it’s just one anecdote, but it’s one of so many that I’ve heard, including from people I know.

And he talks about a friend of his who is a huge Trump supporter, who voted for him. And after Liberation Day, saw her business totally decimated and perhaps destroyed because she relies on the importation of raw materials from Latin America, which overnight cost almost 40% more. There’s millions of people like this in America, small business owners, who rely on, like it or hate it, the globalized economy, who all of a”

“sudden saw their prices rising by sometimes 50%.

I want to address this.

It is hurting ordinary Americans. And I would just really want to push back on that and have you address it.

Okay. It’s a very important question. First of all, you know, people keep saying, the working class is going to bear the brunt of the price hikes, that the tariffs are inflationary.

That’s not what inflation is. Okay. It’s not inflation when an iPhone, which is a luxury good, starts to cost more for the elites who can afford to have a new iPhone every year.

That’s not the same as when gas and groceries become unaffordable. When we think about working class Americans bearing the brunt of something, you have to ask yourself, what are these people consuming, that they have to consume, that are not a luxury item? That stuff is actually getting cheaper.

Gas is getting cheaper and food is getting cheaper. The idea that all price hikes are the same as the inflation that we just got through with Biden is just total nonsense. I have heard Barry from so many working class people, thousands of people write to me and say”

“, I know things are going to get a little bit more expensive, but you know what, they have to.

Because this is unsustainable, we’ve sold out our future to China, and something has to happen, and I am willing to pay more for that. If you have created a business that relied on a business model that down the road meant that your neighbors can never afford a home because they don’t have a college degree, that is not sustainable. And I feel very sorry for people who did build those businesses.

But you know what, like, we are more than consumers as Americans. We are citizens of a nation. We are citizens of an electorate, and we owe something to the common good.

And that is what we are seeing right now is the market reorienting itself around the idea of what does American prosperity, not my prosperity, but American prosperity look like. And I think it is very hard for an elite that has gotten used to getting rich off the backs of the working class to fundamentally understand that.

But I just think that that is betraying a lack of understanding just of how intertwined the economy”

“is and how markets work. If I’m running this, I’m the CEO of Home Depot, let’s say, and I employ, someone can look this up, tens of thousands of Americans at Home Depot. And all of a sudden, the wood that I import from, I don’t know, where does wood come from?

Brianna, you will know this question.

Bari, there’s a lot of lumber in the United States, which is why Trump thinks that it’s a very important avenue for steel, aluminum, lumber, semiconductor chips, pharmaceuticals. These are things that you cannot have national security if you do not produce.

I’m not saying there’s not a lot of trees to cut down in America.

No, but that’s just not true. In the last administration, Trump put a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum. It got more expensive for four months, and then it came right back down to where it was.

Because when you have a healthy capitalistic society within the United States, those prices will even out.

Batya, you’re saying working class Americans, maybe not in the short term, but overall are going to be better off and be more satisfying paying higher prices because they know that they’re”

“participating what? In a national project, in the common good? Because that will be the result, higher prices.

It’s not for everything. I don’t think everything… You can’t talk about these things in the aggregate.

Food, we produce 75% of the food that we consume. There is no reason that having these tariffs would somehow make food more expensive. It’ll make it cheaper because China is going to be consuming less of it.

Right? Like there’s gas, right? Right now, we have gas prices that are going down.

Obviously, you know, that some parts of the economy are not going to be impacted in the same way as others. I am saying that I don’t care if an iPhone costs more money because it is a luxury good. I am saying working class people have a very healthy understanding of the common good.

There are some things that they are willing to pay more for, like toys. We all buy too many toys and too much crap from China. And there are some things that I think the economists are just totally wrong and inventing this very generalizable narrative because they are part of the class, just like Wall Street”

“that has benefited very much from the downward mobility and the disinheritance of the working class.

Okay, Brianna, jump in and then I will ask one more question on the economy, which could take up the whole hour. Go on.

Batya, respectfully, you are talking on both sides here, respectfully. You are trying to have it both ways. You cannot dismiss this high-tech argument as an iPhone that you buy every single year and you can’t try to sell this policy saying our national security is on the line.

We don’t get national security from growing potatoes or cutting down wood. We get our national security from producing extremely high-tech electronics, of which we have no capacity whatsoever to produce in this country. I’m going to say it again, we do not have people at all that can do this at scale to do it in this country.

We just don’t. If we want to start making those people, and I want us to, it’s going to be a 15-year project and probably involve giving people a lot of free college. You can’t complain about the visas bringing people into the country when that’s exactly what we”

“would have to do if these factors existed, which they don’t.

You’re trying to have it both ways. Trump is doing a plan that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a good goal, but he’s doing it in a way that’s just crazy, and you’re too smart to not see this.

I can’t believe you don’t see this.

I think that there have been many different, often conflicting messages coming out of this White House about what the ultimate end goal is, and it’s led to a lot of hilarious memes for those of us who spend a lot of time on Twitter of very overweight Americans stitching together Nike shoes while sweating, and it’s a hilarious image.

Barry, those were put out by the CCP. You know that, right? The liberals sharing that are doing propaganda for the CCP.

I just have to point that out. Sorry, go on.

Okay. But anyway, but the point still stands, which is, you know, are we trying? Neil Ferguson had a line in an essay that he wrote for us, which was just stuck with me, which is, times arrow does not move backward.

The idea that we are going to go back”

“to an era of, you know, industrialization, factories here at home, especially when we’re on the cusp of AI, where there are factories in China. I just read about this dark factories where the lights are off because there’s literally no humans doing the jobs. And yet you have an administration that’s talking like we’re sort of going back to the 1950s.

Like, which is it? Because it’s very hard for me to square the idea that we’re going to kind of go back in time to this halcyon age where we made everything here in America, which sounds great, at the very moment where brilliant machines are able to do so much of the work for us and indeed already are. So Batya, you’re someone that is giving an A++ for this vision.

Give us a sense of what the actual vision is. If Trump’s ideal vision is fulfilled, what does the American economy look like 10 or 20 years from now? Are we all working in GM factories or what?

I have to say, I don’t think it’s an accident that people who hate Trump’s economic agenda were sharing a CCP meme making fun of, by the way”

“their own workers, right? Like, the implication was that their workers work in sweatshops, right?

No, but it was people that also support the president. Chamath from All In was sharing it. A lot of people were sharing it just because it was such an incongruous image.

Here’s the thing. To me, Americans are going to be working in sweatshops. We’re going back to the 1950s.

This is all driven by just like utter contempt for people who work with their hands for a living. The example I keep coming back to is, probably the three of us would not want to be a proctologist. I can’t think of a job I would want to have less than that.

But we don’t think that that is a shameful, degraded job even though it involves behaviors that we would not want to engage in. The reason for that is because they are paid very well. I think that there is this sense that people in the elites who have an education, who work with their brains for their living or with language, who have multiple credentials and worship credentialism, that somehow working in a factory is degrading or being a janitor”

“is degrading.

These are not degrading jobs. There is no work on God’s green earth that is more degrading than other work. It is the conditions that make work degrading that you cannot afford to feed your family, despite working really hard, that your job is unsafe and nobody cares enough about you as an employee to protect your body at this job, that you are not paid well, that you cannot retire in dignity when you’re aching bones give up, that you can’t have access to health care despite the service that you are doing to your community.

These are the things that make jobs degrading, which is why manufacturing work has always been considered really good jobs, not because the act of putting together cars is less degrading than putting together sneakers, but because they paid better and they had better conditions, and they had a better retirement, and they gave people dignity. I think that the whole narrative that it is shameful or bad, or that Americans don’t want to work in factories, which are going to look like sweatshops like back in the 50s, is just a projection of people who have gotten used to working”

“behind a laptop, who are themselves too lazy to actually work with their hands for a living, and who have allowed themselves this narrative that nobody would want to do that because they created an economy in which it makes sense to them that being a janitor should pay so much less than being a proctologist.

I just think it’s not degrading so much that the jobs are disappearing. Those kinds of jobs are disappearing because of technological advances.

That is just not, you look at China, I’m sorry, like the majority of the factories are not with the lights off being done by robots. We do want innovation. We want the factories of America to have a lot of AI.

But you need people who can operate that stuff. You need people who can operate those machines. You need people who can work there.

Cars in America and cars in China are still being made by burly men. And that’s a good thing.

This is where I feel so frustrated, Batya, because I’m an engineer and I spent a decade doing tech reporting. I understand the things we need for those factories you’re talking about. And we have no”

“capacity to do it.

You can talk about like dignity for factory workers. Where are we going to get the tooling? Where are we going to get the raw materials to do it?

Where are we going to? Here’s a little microphone right here. It’s got tiny little micro screws inside of it.

There’s specialists in China that can change a screw a half a millimeter on an assembly line like within a few hours. We don’t make people like that that can do this. So there’s like a huge, I agree with your goal.

This is what’s so frustrating. I want to get to domestic manufacturing, but the stuff we’re doing to get there makes no sense if you know what the hell you’re talking about and Trump doesn’t.

More with Batya Ungar-Sargon and Brianna Wu after the break. Stay with us.

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Okay, we’re not going to solve our disagreements here on the economy, so let’s go to another totally non-controversial area, which is higher education. And I think this is an interesting one because I don’t think any of us would disagree that American universities, especially the most prestigious ones, have betrayed, talk about betrayal, talk about degradation, have betrayed their mission, which is the pursuit of truth, and have allowed the flourishing of an extraordinarily toxic world view that has contempt for the West, contempt for America, and contempt for Jews. So this is a unique subject where I think the three of us see that topic in the same way.

The question is, is Trump’s strategy toward combating that effective or not effective? He has basically gone to some of the schools with the worst reputations. Columbia was first, now he set its sights on Harvard.

And just as he’s sort of gone after a big law, some have caved, some have not. Columbia has sort of rolled over. Harvard is fighting back”

“with this lawsuit.

And the question is, is Trump in the main directionally right in what he’s trying to do to clean up American universities? Brianna, let’s start with you, because I actually don’t know where you fall on this one.

I know, me neither. I was just going to say, I can’t predict what Brianna is going to say. I’m so excited to hear what she says.

So I got to tell y’all, I gave a speech today. I gave a lecture at a university here in Israel, and it was a very different experience than giving a talk at an American university. Everyone in that class was down with NatSec.

Everyone there agreed identity politics was a problem. It was a really strange week. It was weird talking to people on the left that were very clear headed about a lot of things.

So look, when it comes to Trump in this issue, Batya, this is where I give you guys some prompts. I think that coming in like a wrecking ball, the advantage of Trump is he has no Fs to give on any of this. And he will do some things that piss everyone off on”

“the right and left and shake up the culture.

That’s not to say I agree with every bit of it, but I think it’s actually good to put people on the defensive and get colleges back to thinking about actually teaching again. And just one more thing. I did an event down in Nashville just a few weeks ago.

I was there with the Chancellor of Vanderbilt, and he was talking about how his college is not having these same problems because they’ve stayed on mission. And I think that this is an excellent wake up call for American universities to really stop focusing on all these things that don’t make sense and to actually protect their Jewish students. I think it’s his dad on with it directionally.

Batya?

Straight into my veins!

I could not love this more. The idea that the Democrats think it’s a good idea to white night for Harvard. It’s almost as funny as them white nighting for this Kilmar Garcia, who I know we’re going to talk about, but it’s like, wow, who cares about Harvard?

I’m thrilled.

Let me be the one to make an unlikely argument for Harvard. Anyone who knows me”

“knows that Columbia was like my villain origin story. It is where I was first called all the bad words that I’ve spent the past 20 years of my life being called in public and where I encountered a world view that told me as a liberal gay woman Jewish who always thought of myself as liberal and progressive, all of a sudden I was being told that I wasn’t allowed into the tent because of my views on Israel and frankly on America in retrospect.

So in any case, there’s no love lost between me and the Ivy League. Let’s just say that. But when you actually look at the kinds of programs that are going to suffer if the White House sticks with stripping Harvard, let’s say, of its tax-exempt status, it’s not like the gender studies department or the anthro department at Harvard.

It’s scientific research overwhelmingly that benefits from government largesse and its long-term studies on diseases like diabetes and breast cancer and all kinds of things where we really still rely on these institutions of higher education. That’s the reality, even for those of us who directionally like the idea of some of”

“these schools getting punched in the face by this White House. How do you guys grapple with that?

I think that’s a really fair point, Bari. And to be clear, my comments are more about the culture stuff that’s going on, particularly about the refusal of these colleges to protect Jews, for whatever reason. But I think people that really understand medical research understand that a lot of these schools just simply hire the faculty that we need to do the research for next generation drug development.

This is where my husband works in this field. The consequences of these studies being cut, you’re not hurting someone that thinks they’re 64 genders and wants them to be on a form. You’re hurting the experts in researching mRNA vaccines and things like that.

You’re hurting people to understand how to build delivery systems for new drugs. This is really, really important research. I think, again, you’re going to see a pattern with my comments here today, which is I support some of the goals that Trump has.

I think that he goes about getting them in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think you make America safer”

“by cutting off our ability to innovate in research.

The administration, their justification for a lot of these actions is broadly to combat anti-Semitism on campus. All of us here agree that anti-Semitism on campus is flourishing. And if there were any other group that had been singled out for bullying, everything from bullying to physical assault, as has been the case on a lot of these campuses, it would have been shut down immediately.

But obviously, there’s an exception when it comes to the Jewish community. But there’s many smart people who see that picture in the way that we do and say, the administration is sort of exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism. And I’ll put it another way, even if the administration is sincere in that aim, is going to inadvertently create a backlash because it looks like they are betraying core values, let’s say, of academic freedom, of free speech on campuses for this other secondary goal.

And that ultimately, everyone’s going to suffer from that. I hope I’ve articulated that position properly. Batya, what do you say to that argument?

I think American views are really lost. Like, someone comes along and says”

“it’s not okay to treat your children this way. And they’re like, oh no, this is going to be bad for us.

Oh no, people are going to like us even less now. Like, it’s so sad to me. I want to respond to the earlier point though about what’s going to be defunded.

You know, Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. And when it heard that Trump was going to take away the two billion we give them, their response was, well, then we’re going to kill our puppies. It was so insane.

Like, they could actually be funding these programs themselves. They create patents based on the findings here that we, the public, paid for, so that we don’t even get, like, an unfiltered direct access to the research that we paid for because then it goes behind this patent. A lot of the ways in which the projects that are funded get funded is that they have to go through these boards and the boards are so unbelievably on the side of the left.

They do not fund things that they see as being somehow not part of the program. So the whole system, like, the whole”

“scientific system is deeply embedded in the problems that we all agree on. And so I just think, you know, what Trump was asking for as a result, like, you know, he was saying basically, if you don’t stop doing things that I think we can all agree are against the mission of Harvard, you’re going to pay a $2 billion tax on that.

And the things that they were asking for were like, totally reasonable, like, for example, no more importing students who hate America and hate the Jews. Like, what a weird thing for Harvard to be like, no way, Jose, we will never stop doing that, right? Or my favorite one was they demanded that all of the professors submit to a plagiarism check.

And Barry, I think that’s the real reason Harvard went to war, because they knew that a lot of their professors and a lot of their administrators were not going to survive a plagiarism check. And so they decided, you know what, we’re going to act like this is some noble thing. But like, that was the administration’s starting position.

They could have said, you know what, we’ll do these things because these”

“are reasonable and we’re not going to do these things. Like I think the thing where the administration says you have to bring in a third party to investigate the ideological bent of, you know, that it should be somehow balanced. Like that, I was like, you know what, I could do without that one.

I would be comfortable with Harvard saying, we have to push back on that. But there were so many things in there that were like totally obvious. And for them to say like, no, we refuse every single one.

We refuse to give the public anything in exchange for this money. I just think it’s so laughable and I hope they keep fighting. Harvard, keep fighting.

I cannot wait to see the discovery. I cannot wait to see you get in the gutter, get in the gutter because that’s where you belong.

Wow.

Part of the story of what’s going on on campus very much intersects with another lightning rod issue of this first 100 days and that is this administration’s approach to immigration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that America has revoked at least 300 visas of foreign students, but we know”

“the names of a few of these students that have captured national, I would say even international attention. Perhaps the most famous would be Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, who’s married to an American whose wife recently gave birth to their child, and who was denied the right to be present with his wife as she was giving birth, which seemed to a lot of people, even though sympathetic, I would say, directionally to where Trump is going to be pretty appalled by that.

Let’s just talk for a minute about those deportations. There’s a Turkish woman in Boston. More recently, there was a second student at Columbia.

People can go. We’ve written lots about these specific students in The Free Press, but the image, I would say, of a young woman, I think she was 20 years old, a Turkish student here on a foreign visa, getting nabbed on the street by ICE agents, I think was quite chilling or alarming to many, many people. What do you guys make of a specific one of the pictures, any of those?

What do you guys make of those policies? Is that smart strategically? Because, and I’ll just add one thing”

“here, the Trump administration has basically successfully closed the border in under 100 days.

If I were in charge of comms for them or policy, that’s all I would be focused on. But instead, what many Americans, even those, I would say broadly sympathetic to where Trump is going on immigration, are talking about are these handful of foreign students that perhaps they feel have been the victim of some kind of overreach. Batya, let’s start with you on this one.

I really disagree, Barry. I think most Americans are thrilled with immigration writ large. Trump is the only area where he still has a solid lead in opinion polls.

The idea that someone affiliated with those campus protests, which had like 90 percent disapproval from the American people, that they would be losing sleep over that, I just think is, elites on Twitter are upset about it, but I think the average American is not. I think the way that they handled it, especially with the Mahmoud Khalil one, was pretty smart because they held back the most damning evidence against him until all of the Democrats had done their whole Jesuit Mahmoud Khalil. Then we found out that”

“he had lied on his visa application, that he had worked for UNRWA, which the Biden administration defunded because it is part of a terrorist organization known as Hamas.

I really don’t think people are losing sleep over this. I personally, I think the Turkish girl, if the only thing she did was write the op-ed, I would oppose her deportation. I’m waiting to see if they have more on that.

But a lot of this stuff is not about speech for the administration, it’s about immigration. They are fundamentally insisting that there is a difference between an American citizen and a non-citizen. And a lot of what is controversial with the elites boils down to that because from the point of view of the elites, they keep making this argument that like, well, first they come for, you know, Kilmar Garcia and then they’re going to come for you.

No, first they came for the non-citizens and it ended there. And honestly, Bari, 56% of Americans, this was a CNN poll, want every single illegal immigrant deported, every single one, millions of people, 56%. And that is up from 38% in 2015.

So Trump’s winning that”

“But the students that we’re talking about, they weren’t illegal.

They were here. No, no. They were here on visas or green cards.

But I’m saying, oh, that, the spectacles they have made, which have been big because the media talks about them a lot, have not dented Trump’s approval on immigration. They just are not seen as a top priority for most Americans. They are not seen as enough of a threat to our rights to make people rethink their support for the president on the subject of immigration.

So I do think he’s winning this topic. And they, you know, like they’re to me, I think that they are very much in the same category as Kilmar Garcia, which is people who, you know, did something most Americans are kind of like, eh, you know, I’m not really sure.

All we know about what the Turkish woman student, the Turkish foreign student did at Tufts was right in our bed.

That’s what I’m saying. From my point of view, as someone who’s obviously like very on board with all of this, on board with deporting Mahmoud Khalil, I don’t think that’s about free speech at all. That was”

“the one that if there is not more evidence presented, the op-ed wasn’t even really, I think it was about supporting BDS, which is obviously protected speech, whether you’re an immigrant or non-immigrant.

So that would be the one that I would take out of the group. But again, Barry, I just don’t think that most Americans care that much about this.

Because there’s something though that feels mafia-like about the way this administration behaves, going around to different white shoe law firms and saying, you know, pay up, essentially, or you know, nice little law firm you have there. And this rounding up students on the street felt a little bit of a piece with that. Brianna, do you want to jump in?

Well, I fully agree with you, Barry. So I want to give you a little preview. You know, I spent the last week in Israel.

I’ve got another two weeks here. If I was like pro-national security and pro-thinking about protecting our country from radical political elements before, boy, am I going to come back even more for that. So, you know, Mr. Khalil, you know, if you’re here in this”

“country and you’re trying to, you know, literally work with groups that result in a college being taken over violently and people getting hurt, I don’t want those people in my country.

I don’t, I love that Trump is being hard on people like him. At the same time, you know, I think if someone is writing an op-ed, if someone is literally just a researcher and writes an op-ed that is just very critical of Israel, in my view, that’s a free speech issue. And, you know, it’s like, I think, this is where I think this critique of Trump that he’s using anti-Semitism as a weapon to pursue some policies that are actually very extreme, I think this is where it has salience.

I think, you know, being here in Israel, this is a society that is really struggling with how to keep these core values while not also keeping the people safe. And I think we are also struggling with this in America. Just one quick story.

Today I went into a college campus. I had to go through a security gate. I had to have my bag checked just to go on a”

“college campus and give a lecture.

I’ve never seen that. I took a picture, some architecture. I had a security guard come over to me and tell me not to take a picture of a building because it could alert Hamas terrorists to where the cameras were.

Like, this is a society that is really struggling with this idea. How do we keep our core values but also keep ourselves safe? And I think we have that same struggle in America.

I think we should get rid of the really bad actors, the ones that are associated with fringe groups, the ones that are here to disrupt our democracy and our society. But I don’t think that means throwing every single person out on a green card just because they don’t support Israel the way the three of us do. I think there’s a better calculus we can do that stays true to our values.

I don’t think we have to shred the Constitution to keep Jews safe.

Okay, let’s go from talking about these specific students to talking about the bigger picture, which is not generally people here with green cards or student visas, but undocumented people that are”

“in this country. There have been about 250 migrants who have been sent, and everyone knows about this, to this mega prison in El Salvador. And this has led to, without getting into the legal weeds, a big back and forth between the courts and the Trump administration.

And broadly speaking, the judges have ordered two migrants to be returned to the US. And we can get into the legal weeds of what facilitate versus effectuating a return means, but let’s leave it to the side. The broad, I want to stick to kind of the broad meaning of this.

People on the left that I respect, like Ezra Klein, are calling some of these deportations, disappearing people, the kind of thing that authoritarian countries do. Do you guys think that that argument has any merit? Brianna, let’s start with you.

I mean, I don’t, I understand that clerical mistakes happen and people get sent away that maybe should not have been sent away. I understand that happens. What I can’t forgive Trump for is not complying with the courts and not just going and following due process.

That’s really shocking to me. I don’t think I would use language”

“as strong as disappearing people, but I think it’s very troubling. I think the evidence for some of these people that have been deported, I don’t see it in a way that convinces me.

And I say that as someone who will grudgingly say Trump has done something for the Democrats that will probably be helpful for us. He’s solved this immigration problem, this crisis at the border. He’s cleaned up a mess that we have been unwilling to, and now the Republicans will be less able to hammer us over the head on it.

I’m thankful for a lot of this, but I think I would be inclined to agree with Thesra Klein on this, Barry. I think, again, it’s the same motif. I agree with some of Trump’s goals here, but the way he is doing it is so reckless and so sloppy and shows such a disregard for the rule of law and our higher values.

I think reasonable people are concerned about the way he’s gone about this.

I think the most famous case by far, and who knows maybe by tomorrow there will be another, is a man named Kilmar Garcia, who Batya mentioned earlier”

“in this conversation. I’m going to try and just summarize his case. He was a man who was in the US illegally.

He was not charged with a crime. He was accused of involvement in the MS-13 gang, and the merits of whether or not that’s true are still being debated. There’s a lot of discussion about hand tattoos.

I’ll let people Google it. His wife had accused him of domestic violence. But the big takeaway is that he had US court protection against being deported to El Salvador.

And the Trump administration sent him there anyway, seemingly because of an administrative error, which they admitted to. And now he’s stuck there. Batya, make the case for me that that is part of your A++ grade.

Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?

I’m not kidding you at all.

Like, Bari, you would want to live next to that guy?

Batya, Batya, Batya, but the point is we’re a nation of laws and process, and they admitted he was sent by mistake. There’s lots of us that could live next to a bad guy that’s here legally or illegally. The point is that they admitted that they had deported”

“him mistakenly.

They deported him to the wrong place, yeah.

But I’m just saying the system is only as good as it treats its worst offenders. Convince me that this was a net positive for the Trump administration.

Well, it was a net positive for the United States of America that that wife-beater gangbanger no longer lives here. I think we all agree about that, right? You don’t want to live next to him, right?

I have no idea if he’s a gangbanger.

Okay. Do you want to live next door to someone whose wife accused him on multiple occasions of beating the crap out of her, including when she was holding their child? You don’t, Bari.

So you should not sentence another American to have to live next door to that guy, right?

But I guess I just don’t see that.

Yeah. They made an administrative error. They sent him to the wrong country.

So the question is, what happens now? So the Supreme Court ordered them to facilitate his retort. He will never live in America again.

If they go through this very expensive process of getting him back here, it will only be to find another”

“country stupid enough to take him. So they will either be forced to do that by the Supreme Court or not. For now, they use the word facilitate.

But he is an El Salvadorian man in El Salvador. It is now up to Bukele whether he sends him back or not, and he’s not doing it. So this is not like a constitutional crisis, you know.

I’m not saying it, I’m not saying it. Well, here’s what to me, to me what is beside the point is whether or not we like this guy or don’t like this guy.

That’s the argument I’m making is when you say that, what you’re effectively doing is sentencing another American to have to live next to him. When you yourself would never do that, you would never want to be near this person ever. And that’s the problem with the way that the elites talk about these things like, yeah, they made an administrative error.

Nobody disagrees with that. He should have been sent to Guatemala or whatever, but he was sent there. And the question is like, what are we as Americans now obligated to do to get an El Salvadorian citizen”

“out of El Salvador in order to send him somewhere else?

And like, that will be decided. The Supreme Court will decide how much effort and how much money we Americans have to pay so that this guy who already got a ton of due process, who committed deportable offenses and was never deported, by the way, hitting your wife is a deportable offense, being suspected of human trafficking, deportable offense. So we were let down as Americans by the immigration system, which failed to get this guy the hell out of this country so that I and you and poor working class people don’t have to live next to him.

So we were failed by the due process that he already got. And the question is, how much now do we have to pay for the administrative error that sent him to the wrong country? And that question will be decided by the Supreme Court.

Do you feel a little bit like an alien when you’re watching other people get very worked up about a deportation case like this?

I don’t because I know this is how most Americans feel. I feel so joyous that I can bring you”

“the view from outside of like, you know, the Asila Corridor. Go to the bar, Bari.

Talk to people at the bar. They’re going to think it’s insane that anyone cares about this person when Ben Holden is out there being like, you know, with his weepy voice standing next to the woman who was beaten by the guy. And he goes and shakes the hand that smacked the wife while she was holding their child.

It’s so disgusting. And yet they somehow he sees this as like a heroic act.

But I just really want to push back on the idea that this is like an Asila Corridor concern. And just more broadly, the idea that issues can be divided up that way. You know, the National Review is hardly like a squishy progressive magazine.

It’s probably the lead.

But it is very Asila Corridor, very.

Here’s the lead of the piece. The court fight over Kilmar Garcia is a most unusual one. And that no one denies the government violated the law in deporting him.

I think all Americans, poor, not poor, Asila, not poor, care about the law.

Yes.

But you can say.

But that headline is”

“very misleading because it is designed to make it sound like they broke the law in deporting him. They did not. They broke the law in sending him specifically to El Salvador.

There are thousands of other places they could have very easily sent him. But that headline is designed to mislead because it is designed to give this impression by a publication that does not like Trump very much, that he has somehow violated the law.

Well, I think actually just to make your argument for you, I think the stronger argument would actually be this. If we want to talk about rule breaking and law violating, let’s look at the fact that 11 million people are in this country illegally. Whose fault is that?

And the fact that the Trump administration is trying to clean up that illegality, you know, like, are we going to blame them for doing that? They didn’t create the problem. Like I actually think that is the strongest possible pro-Trump argument when it comes to this issue.

I mean, and Batya, you know, one of the things is people who are politically… Our job is to understand politics. Our job is to”

“help the American people, like, understand politics.

I’m with you that we should be listening to normal Americans on things, but we can also bring in a higher level of understanding what the actual problem is. The reason the court cases are backed up, and this is something both the right and the left have done, is we’ve not appropriated the funds and money that we need to expand our immigration courts in this country. You can dismissively call it an administrative process, which a lot of progressives are doing.

You know, I call it following the law. And I think all of us as Americans should want the law to be followed, and for us to go through and follow these processes here. Make sure everyone can get their due process.

And if Trump were really serious about moving through these cases more quickly, with getting the bad people out of the country, and getting people that have genuine errors, making sure they can stay here and keep being productive citizens, the first thing we would do is double, quadruple, like quintuple the number of immigration courts and judges we have. In my state of Massachusetts, we regularly send”

“our judges down to the Texas border to help with the case logs down there. So it’s like there are ways to deal with this problem that get these bad people out of our country, which again, I 100% support Trump doing, that doesn’t shred the Constitution.

But there’s another reason that our immigration courts are backlogged, and it’s because 20 million people committed felonies. And as their first act in this country, they broke the law. And like the mass taking away of agency from these people, like there’s something about that that I just find really like, like I think that that is something that’s like endemic to how Democrats see the immigration problem because they fundamentally believe that these people should have a right to be here.

And people on the right often say, oh, it’s because they want them to be voters. I don’t buy that. I don’t think it’s about like diluting the American vote.

But it is a huge slap in the face of this country. And they have agency and they made decisions. And that decision was an illegal decision.

And the people of this country have the right to say, We voted”

“for Trump because we wanted him to rectify that problem, which was endorsed by a whole democratic administration. And I think that’s what we’re seeing.

I fully agree with you. I will tell you all day long, Democrats have completely blown it on this. I think it’s probably one of the top three reasons we lost this election.

I agree with you. And you will never see a single word on Twitter of me defending, applying due process to someone who’s in this country illegally. I don’t want them here.

I agree with you. But I think the way we get them out of the country matters if we want to keep our national character. And I think following due process, and I think the president respecting the court system, I think that matters.

I don’t want to lose what makes us American just because, like, Democrats, particularly, and Republicans, too, have done an incredibly poor job on our immigration system. There are ways to do this that make sense.

I will just say he got a lot of due process. He had an order of deportation, so he was supposed to be deported. They made an administrative mistake and”

“sent him to the wrong country, which happens to be a country that he is a citizen of.

He is now subject to the due process of El Salvador. And you know, that’s just…

Okay, just last thing on that. Trump could ask Bukele to send him back. Why is he not doing that?

I don’t want him to. I’m sorry. Like, I just…

Yeah, he could. He could spend tens of thousands of dollars getting this person back here, so a judge can then say, all right, find him another place to go, and we can con another country, that he’s not a citizen enough to take him. This alleged wife beater, gang banger, human trafficker.

I really just like, you know, citizenship is supposed to mean something. And that is why it is so offensive that there are so many people here who are not citizens. And I just think this guy got so much due process already, which was in his favor.

Like, the Democrats have this thing where they like to call it due process when it works in the criminal’s favor, but then it’s not due process when it works against them. Like, he got”

“a lot of time in front of immigration judges who decided he needed to be sent away. And the idea of like, we’re in a deficit, we don’t have any money, like, we’re going to waste money on this to assuage the, you know, the Van Hollens of the world.

It’s a five second phone call and not to beat a dead horse, but like, when a court issues a protection, I want to live in a country where that is respected.

Bari, why don’t you want to live in a country where when a court issues a deportation order, that is respected? Because he had a deportation order and no one cared.

It’s not either or, it can be both.

He could still be deported.

Yeah, that’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to spend $100,000 flying him back here, sitting him in front of an immigration court. The immigration court is going to say he has to be deported.

That’s going to be appealed. We’re going to spend all this money and then we’re going to find some God forsaken place to take him. That is going to happen because the Supreme Court is going to demand it”

“So it’s all going to happen.

But isn’t that a good thing? Don’t you want to live in a country where that is the case?

You’re asking me if I could spend $100,000 on that or on something else. I have a thousand charities that I support that I would rather give that money to. It’s such a weight.

But the money is secondary. It’s about the process we abide by in the country. And I don’t think anyone who’s really sincere would feel comfortable just being sanguine about the idea that a person can be protected by a court order, he gets deported to the wrong country, and it doesn’t really matter because it’ll cost $100,000.

But he is a citizen of that country. But let me rephrase this. If the Supreme Court changes the word facility to expedite or effectuate, I will 100 percent want him to be returned because I want the Supreme Court’s orders to be followed whether or not I agree with them.

I just think there’s a reason they chose the word facilitate, but we’ll see.

Okay, let’s talk about foreign policy, an issue that I know the three of us care a lot”

“about. Let’s start with Russia and Ukraine. A lot has happened there in the first 100 days.

I don’t think I will ever forget watching the Zelensky-J.D. Vance Trump meeting for as long as I live. More recently, there’s this incredibly epic photo taken of Zelensky and Trump in the Vatican clearly discussing something serious.

But the TLDR here is that the United States has put forward a ceasefire proposal for the war in Ukraine. American and European critics see it as pro-Russian. Trump in this deal appears to be ready to formally recognize Russia’s occupation of several parts of Ukraine.

Ukraine in this deal would be prevented from joining NATO. Russia would get significant sanctions relief. There’s a lot of other aspects to the deal, but that’s sort of the top line of it.

And the White House insists that it’s ready to walk away if a deal isn’t reached soon, in other words, if Zelensky kind of doesn’t come to the table. What do each of you make of this deal and more broadly of Trump’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine war? Brianna, let’s start with you.

I’m not going to make Batya happy with this”

“but his actions on this literally make me question if he’s a Russian asset. It is bizarre. I cannot explain it.

I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t understand how abandoning Ukraine is in our national security interest. Just top to bottom, this makes no sense.

I think the left has a blind spot on why Israel matters for national security, and I think the right has a blind spot for why Ukraine matters for our national security, allowing a strong man to destabilize NATO and keep expanding. It is a threat to democracy. Just like Israel is on the front line, Ukraine is on the front line against Russia, I think we should support them.

I’ve been tremendously disappointed with Trump’s actions on this.

Batya? I’m going to say what I’ve been saying since the war started in 2022. The war is going to end along the status quo from when it began.

So it’s going to end with the Donbas as, at the time it was an independent republic of Donetsk and Luhansk. There was a civil war there, but now it’s part of Russia. Crimea will be declared part of Russia and Ukraine will be not part”

“of NATO.

That has been the ask from the Russians from before the invasion and ever since. I think that that’s effectively how it’s going to end up. I do think Trump has a bigger, I don’t have any reporting on this, but it’s my feeling that Trump sees Russia as a potential ally in the fight against China, an untapped resource in fighting our actual greatest foe.

And that part of the negotiation, I think, is aimed towards rethinking how we think about just this kind of unipolar world. But I think in the meantime, he’s been doing his best to get both parties to the table around what he considers to be a reasonable settlement, which I think at the end of the day, is going to be the status quo when the war began.

The other thing that’s being negotiated right now in another part of the world, in another chaotic, uncertain part of the world, is Iran. And the question of whether or not Trump is going to enter into another nuclear deal of a kind like the one that he scuttled in the first administration that Obama had stood up, it was called the JCPOA”

“He’s outsourced the negotiation of that deal, not to his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but to his real estate development buddy Steve Witkoff, who is overseeing that and increasingly overseeing Russia.

He’s kind of like our Secretary of State, it’s very strange. What do you all feel about what the administration is doing vis-à-vis Iran? And Brianna, I want to put that to you first, because we’re having this conversation while you’re sitting in Tel Aviv, and wondering, of course, what you’ve heard on that issue over the past few days.

Well, I mean, first of all, it’s really interesting. I don’t think I’ve talked to… I’ve talked to plenty of more liberal Jews here in Israel that have reservations about Trump, but I haven’t talked to a single person.

It doesn’t deeply appreciate his support of this country. And again, this has been a huge tactical mistake from the Democrats. So yeah, I had a dinner with Emily Schrader, a good friend, at a luncheon yesterday.

And yeah, we’re completely in alignment here. I think that the IRGC is clearly, I think that if we had regime change there, it would be very good for American”

“geopolitical interests. I think Israel has shown a lot of these countries propped up by Iran are a lot weaker than I think we’ve assumed for a long time.

So if the Trump administration is putting maximal pressure on them, I think that’s a good thing. I think whatever we can do to end their meddling across the board one way or another, I support, I think they’re far weaker. And I think just because Iraq went badly over 20 years ago, that doesn’t mean everything we do with Iran is a bad idea.

So again, do I think Trump is necessarily the person to do this? No, but I think it’s certainly a positive action.

Batya?

It’s funny, Barry, because I was thinking like, am I going to be the only person who supported the first Iran deal, who’s now going to get to support the second one? But you probably opposed the first one, and now you’re going to get to oppose the second one. We’re probably the only people who are going to have the same position that we had the first time around.

OK, so make the case that a deal is a good thing.

It”

“depends what deal, of course. The idea that Donald Trump doesn’t have Israel’s best interests at heart is ridiculous. I think Israelis were surprised when Netanyahu came here and asked him to give them cover to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites to be told no.

But our interests as Americans, they’re very often aligned with Israel, but they’re not identical. And I think that we have to think about, from Trump’s point of view, he loves Israel. He thinks that it is a huge strategic asset in the region.

I think he has emotional relationship with Israel as well. But he’s going to put what he sees as America and American interests first. And in this case, he will never, ever engage in a kind of hot war, hot war situation, hot war authorization, unless he’s first tried the carrot before the stick.

I think that’s just his mentality. Donald Trump hates war. I don’t think people should underestimate how impacted he was by the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how deeply it impacted his worldview.

I think it’s very clear that he’s very upset about the death toll in Russia and Ukraine. I mean, they clearly shown him”

“pictures that haunt him. And he’s just going to try first to get a good deal.

And we have to watch and see what does that look like? What are the parameters of the deal? It’s not going to be the same as the first one, that’s for sure.

But we have to think about as Americans, like where do we want to be expending our energy? What is in our best interests right now? And if he can get a great deal, of course, that’s preferable to a hot war.

Of course. The question is, you know, what kind of deal it will look like, and if it’s a deal that allows Iran the capacity to achieve nuclear breakout and the kind of nuclear arms race that will set off in the Middle East, I think that’s a more dangerous world, of course, not just for Israel, but for everybody.

Yeah, definitely. It has to be a good deal. And I think he thinks it will be a good deal.

And he has said that if it is not a good deal, somebody asked him, will Netanyahu drag you into war? And he said, if it is a bad”

“deal, he is not going to have to drag me. I am going to be leading the pack.

Bari, another thing I was thinking about, I am sure you were tickled by this as well, was there is one group of people that was harder hit by Trump nixing the Israel plan to bomb the nuclear sites than Israel. And it was, of course, all of the people on the far left and the far right who think that American foreign policy is dictated by the Jews, right? Like, there is this meme, right?

That’s like evolved. It’s like cropping up on the right now that somehow like those dastardly Jews in Israel control the levers of power and the foreign policy of America. When the truth is the exact opposite, every time the Israel lobby has felt that there was an existential threat on the table, like the Iran deal, and pulled out all the stops the way that APEC did at that point, they failed, they lost, and things went in the other direction.

You just cannot look at American foreign policy and come away with this ridiculous Israel lobby theory. But certainly…

In part, that’s because the”

“so-called Israel lobby has gotten a tremendous amount of airtime, and we don’t talk very much about things like, I don’t know, the Qatari lobby, and a lot of the China lobby. We had a fascinating story today in The Free Press about the billions of dollars over the past four years. The past four years in foreign donations to elite American universities has dwarfed the amount over the past 40 years, $29 billion since 2021, including from hostile countries like Qatar and China.

It’s kind of an unbelievable and undercover story. But that is a conversation for another day. I want to just get us to a closer here.

The past few weeks, I would say, have been a little bit of a turning point. I’ll probably never get Batya to move away from her A++ position, but the polls tell a little bit of a different story. This has been the first time over the past few weeks that Trump’s base is wavering a little bit.

His approval rating is around 41 or 42 percent. And just for reference, Joe Biden’s was at 59 percent this same time in his first term. 17 point difference.

That’s kind”

“of undeniable, especially if we’re looking to the voice of the everyman, Batya, as captured in polling. What do you make of that, Batya? Do you think that the base is turning on Trump?

I don’t think the base is. I think the base is pretty thrilled. You know, things are, there’s, we’re going through a difficult time, certainly, although the stock market has almost completely recovered all of the losses from the, from the early tariffs announcements.

So that’s good. But I think we’re in a process. I don’t think anybody thought this was going to be easy.

Accomplishing the goals that we all believe need to be accomplished was going to involve some sort of pain. I wonder if those polls will look very different in three months and six months in a year. But maybe they won’t.

And maybe people are going to fall on the side of, you know, this wasn’t worth it or whatever. Let’s continue our precipitous pathway into decline and into the sunset and that will be okay too.

I have a different assessment. And I say this. The Republicans were elected in in many parts because progressives and Democrats have overplayed our”

“cultural hand.

And I have a warning for the Republicans. I think that the way that Trump has acted in these first hundred days is really reminding people of all the worst tendencies of the conservative movement, which is it can just be I don’t know what to call it except the woke right. You know, you have a certain viewpoint and you’re insisting the rest of the world see it through your logic and it is arrogant and it doesn’t respect things like due process and it kind of it’s just very destructive and it’s not interested in subtlety.

I think unfortunately the reason the poll numbers are where they are is because Trump is reminding people why we don’t like people like that. So I don’t think this is going to continue. I see no indication that the Republicans are going to act with a little bit more humility in this moment.

The good news is everything I’m seeing from inside the Democratic Party shows we’re not interested in learning any lessons either. So we’re in for more of the same. Can’t wait.

All right. Quick one before we’re off. If you had to bet candidates in 2028”

“, who will they be?

It’s going to be Gavin Newsom, obviously.

Newsom versus?

JD Vance, probably.

Batya?

I’m going to go out on the limb here and say it’s going to be Josh Shapiro versus Marco Rubio.

Okay. Let’s go online and start the betting. Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, thank you both so much.

It’s been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Bri.”

From Honestly with Bari Weiss: 100 Days of Donald Trump, Apr 29, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honestly-with-bari-weiss/id1570872415?i=1000705380808&r=4668
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