220. The Truth Behind Trump’s $5000 Midterm Bribe

Trump's plan to give every American $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms is dead on arrival. We'll get into why and discuss whether this is a blatant attempt to buy votes or an empty promise from a man who fears he's going to lose. And it's official, we are in a trade war, with Canada, their retaliatory tariffs have come into effect and Trump has hit back threatening to ban certain Canadian imports. This is bad, not just for the economies of Canada and the US, but for the politics and Trump's prospects in the midterms. This episode is brought to you by Yitoro. A tariff of spending plan, a regulatory change, it can all start just as the first line of a speech. But it sets in motion things that can reach far beyond Washington and unfold for years to come. The market has moved on expectations, not just events, investors are constantly weighing what a decision could mean for companies, sectors and the wider economy. So Yitoro is an investing platform where you can access a wide range of markets and explore how political and economic developments can affect them. You could also learn from the global community of investors and see how people around the world are interpreting the same news. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. But plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie. Welcome to the rest is politics US, I'm Katty Kahn today. I'm joined by our friend, the co-host of Prof. G Market's podcast Ed Elson, Ed, thank you for coming back. Thank you for having me. Good to be here. I'm so glad we didn't scare you away last time. I know that you had to run off to the Alps for a quick holiday after you did it. Exactly. That's not exactly why. No, it was excellent. I'm glad to be back and I'm glad to see that you and Anthony have been on stage. I was looking at photos of Rest is Fest, which looks incredible. Yeah. So congratulations on that. Thank you. It was really fun. Live show. Yeah. How was that? It was great. The live shows went great. It took part in a quiz like a game show quiz with all of the other rest is podcasts and we didn't win. You didn't win. We didn't win. In fact, we didn't even come close to winning, but I think we were robbed, actually. We are lobbying now. It's a bit like FIFA. We're kind of lobbying the judges to see if we can get an override. I'll keep you posted on that one. Let me know how that goes. I mean, I've had some experience with live events because we did a live tour for our show. I know. So, stop was in New York and we had two incredible guests. The first guest was Hillary Clinton, which people were very excited about. The second guest was, even more exciting, Scaramucci, and he made headlines for us in that live tour. So, a lot of people loved him. He's very good on stage. I hate to tell you this. He's not quite so good at trivial knowledge quizzes, especially when it's British pop culture, which I think was part of the reason we were robbed and we could have tried to pay off the judges. And talking of paying off people, I wanted to ask you what you made of Donald Trump's promise at this weird kind of midterm Republican convention that they're holding down in Texas. And this promise that he's made to give every voter $5,000 if the Republicans win in the midterms. This image of Kevin Warsh, kind of listening to this vaguely in the background like an old fashioned radio and he's got it on in the background and he hears this and suddenly drops his plate and his jaw drops to the floor as well. And there's a clattering as he kind of, you know, fume comes out of his ears. There is Donald Trump threatening to blow up the deficit even further as his economics team and his new Fed chair is desperately trying to think, how can I bring down inflation rates? So, what's going on? Well, I think the first thing that he would probably think if he has his head screwed on straight, the first reaction he would have to that announcement is that it's just a gigantic lie once again. Because let's just be clear, Trump has made these promises multiple times during his second term as president. Remember, he promised a $5,000 doge dividend, which never came through. He promised a $2,000 tariff dividend because of all of the money we were going to bring him for the tariff, which of course, we then had to refund and we sent it all back to corporations, more than $100 billion worth of tariffs back to corporations. So Walmart got nearly $3 billion, Apple got more than $2 billion. That was after they had raised prices, which was ultimately attacks on consumers, i.e. the American people. So, the cost of the tariff goes to the American people, but the benefits of the refund goes to the corporations? Exactly. But that's after he promises that the benefits of the tariffs will go to the American people with the $2,000 tariff dividend, which never happened. There was also the $1,000 dividend that we were going to get from the savings of the expiring ACA subsidies, which was, of course, just gutting health care in America, making it more expensive for American households to get health care. That didn't happen either. So he's promised to send out these dividends, these checks, this free money promise multiple times and it never actually comes through. So this is the same thing again. He's promising $5,000 if the Republicans win the House and the Senate, which is one, a lie to its illegal, and three, it's just another example of what a complete joke this president has become at this point. And to me, this is kind of the nail in the coffin. I think it's just a huge red flag if anyone still takes him seriously. There are so many things that we could talk about, but this is just so beyond the pale, especially as you say, having also made it his whole platform to balance the budget and then exploding on the deficit to nearly $2 trillion in fact might even be more than that this year. I could go on, I'm sort of beyond words at this. So it's interesting, I mean, a couple of things that strike me. One, I think I grew with you. There is not a good track record of Donald Trump making these promises, whether it's around health care subsidies ending, whether it's around tariff refunds, whether it's around doge payments, and then actually delivering on them. It did happen, of course, once and that was during COVID and in retrospect, quite a lot of analysis was done on the number of percentage points that those COVID checks that had Donald Trump's name on them and that he actually signed and were very popular after COVID and obviously it was an economic crunch and lots of people had lost their jobs and we didn't know how long this was going to last for and it was a crisis and people got those $1,200 checks. And it did then, of course, produce a spike in inflation which this administration and the Federal Reserve and Scott Besson are all now trying to grapple with and we can get to the kind of politics of why he does this and why he stood up there in Texas and said this and maybe it's because they've really got just not very many other cards to play and so you try with a blatant bribe and the kind of polling on this is interesting, we can get into that. But in your world ed and you speak to people in the markets a lot and kind of hard headed investors on Wall Street, when they hear something like this, what do they make of it? Because all the people I speak to tend to be kind of Republicans and Democrats in the political world and I'm just wondering what people in the financial world, what investors make of a statement like that, of a promise like that that they know is not going to happen but which is so counter effective in dealing with America's economic problems anyway. Yeah, I think for a while at the beginning, you heard a lot of excuses or a lot of, it's not that big of a deal, he's just kind of, he's kind of funny, he's just saying stuff. But ultimately it's about American businesses, he's the pro-business president and everything's fine. I think that we saw that reflected in the stock market, there was obviously the giant hiccup of the original tariffs where everyone went, oh my god, maybe this guy is truly off his rocket, he's truly insane. And then he started to walk things back when he saw the market's reaction and then the stock market slowly went up and I think there was a period of time there where investors were like, I think it's fine. I think he's just going to protect my interest, he's going to protect American corporations, American companies and everything will be good. In the past month, I would say, we started to see investors realize just how crazy he is and it hasn't been the equity investors, the investors in the stock market that have been saying this has been the investors in the bond markets and the bond investors are a slightly more sensitive bunch because I talked to Katie Martin from the Financial Times about this. What they're looking for as a bond investor is they're thinking about all the things that could go wrong. By nature, a little bit more pessimistic and they're a little bit more wary of the mistakes that we make. That's different from a stock investor who's thinking about all of the ways in which the world could go right. So, they're granted a bit more sensitive. But we have seen an unbelievable sell-off in the bond markets over the past few weeks. You've seen the 30-year trend. a yield climbing back above 5.3%, the 10-year yield closed at 4.83%, which is the highest number since 2023. And the reason they're so worried about this is because it has become abundantly clear over the past few weeks that this administration, that this White House, doesn't seem to care at all about one inflation and two debt because we have done nothing to resolve the fact that oil is now at more than $100 a barrel, the price of Brent Crude, which is going to trickle down into the prices throughout the economy. It's going to be a real problem for inflation. Meanwhile, you have the president saying that, actually, no, we need to lower interest rates, despite the fact that we are actually battling an inflation crisis right now, showing that he doesn't believe we'll seem to care that this is actually an issue. And then you have the fact that we continue to issue unsustainable, totally reckless, irresponsible debt, we're up to $40 trillion in total national debt. And meanwhile, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary's response to that, is I think that it's a problem that yields are too high. And so what am I going to do? I'm going to spend more money to buy even more bonds to try to bring yields back down. And what happens yields keep going up after he spends $6 billion. They didn't believe it. That's why I think this is an interesting thing that the president has done, because okay, you might think $5,000 to every voter, it's not going to happen. It might be even as you suggest illegal. There isn't actually any money in art for this. So it makes it different from that tariff dividend that he spoke about. I think the total cost would be $1.3 trillion if he were to do it, which is maybe, you know, a drop in the ocean, but still, I mean, $1.3 trillion between friends, what's that? But it's still not nothing, right? But it's the signal of unseriousness around policy. I mean, you've got that combined with the crazy memes around Canada, and we're going to talk about Canada, you know, after the break. But you've, there is generally, I think, a growing awareness of either a lack of competence. And I actually think Kevin Washington, Scott Besson, no better, particularly Kevin Washington, I know better than Scott Besson, but this is not serious American government policy to just suddenly say, we're going to buy votes. I mean, that's banana republic stuff. This is the stuff of, you know, I grew up all over the world in countries where people actually did literally try to buy votes from people. And I've lived and worked in countries as a reporter where people, I've seen people try hand out wards of cash to get people to come to the polling station. This is not far off that. And it just makes the, the rot in the system combined with the kind of lack of competence and a lack of seriousness. And I was wondering if that is also why you've got people in the kind of bomb market thinking, hold on a second of the grown-ups in charge here. Yeah, because as you say, we've seen this before. This has happened in plenty of societies throughout history. You get a corrupt guy in charge because he's charismatic and sort of magnanimous and talks a big game. And then suddenly you realize that he's a fraudster. And in many ways he's a criminal. And then suddenly the rot starts to begin in your nation from the top down. And we're seeing all of the telltale signs of what that administration would be. I mean, yeah, bribing people in order to vote for you. We could talk about the, the US Mint producing a gold coin with Trump's face on it. I mean, that's something that very few sitting political leaders have ever done in history. But there are a few of them, and I can name some of them. Some of them have been Saddam Hussein, Moama Gaddafi, Francisco Franco, Kim Il Sung. There have been plenty of leaders who have done this kind of thing. There have been plenty of leaders who have decided that what I'm, what am I going to do in order to enrich myself? I'm going to completely gut the regulatory agencies, the, the, the police essentially in my government. And in this case, it's the police that go after white collar crime. So I'm going to go cut the DOJ head count by 4,000. I'm going to bring white collar crime prosecutions to a record low. I'm going to cut the SEC head count by 15%. I'm going to reduce enforcement actions by 30%. I'm going to cut monetary settlements in half. I mean, we're seeing all of the things that you see when a corrupt leader is in charge. And so as smart as Scott Bessent might be, and as smart as he might have been doing his trades with Stanley Druckenmiller back in the day. And yes, he was a successful investor and a successful trader. The reality is he is still running cover for a corrupt president who is with every day losing his mind. And so to me, I can't, I can't use, he's smart as an excuse. It goes beyond it at this point. Talk about the legality. And I really like, kind of the whole concept of kind of rule of law and what is legal is not legal is being tested in America at the moment. And we are, see, I still maintain the courts are doing their job. They are there acting as the most essential backstop against, you know, all of the attempts to expand presidential power in a way that courts keep repeatedly calling illegal. And democratic senators have told me repeatedly, look, we've brought, you know, hundreds of cases against the White House during the course of the last year and a half. And we are winning 70 to 80% of them, depending on which courts are ruling, but they are winning them vast majority because the courts are ruling, no, this is legal. This is not legal. But when it comes to something like this, which sounds like a blatant bribe. And I said earlier, well, it doesn't have tariff offset money against it. Is this legal? If it had money offset against this, is this something that a president could do? You said at the beginning, it's illegal. Talk me a little bit through the legality of this and why it may be a very clear case of it being illegal. From my understanding, it's not legal to bribe US voters in order to vote for you. There are still sunny days out there, right? Still good times. So that is my understanding. Now, I think what usually happens with these cases when Trump does something that is illegal is that he gets his cabinet together and they figure out, okay, how can we get around this? How can we make this happen? How the way? That's what they try to do with the tariffs, but to the Supreme Court's credit. The Supreme Court said, no, this is illegal. This doesn't make sense. You don't have the right to use emergency powers here to put a tax on the American people, which is what this is. So what do we, what do we have? The tariffs were ruled off. $100 billion in refunds. We've got about $66 billion more to go. And as I said, that'll all go back to the companies who paid those tariffs, but it's not going to go back to the US citizens for whom the tariffs were ultimately trickled down to. So I think it could probably be another case of that where they have a long legal battle. Ultimately, the courts rule, no, you can't do this. And then Trump tries to find some other way around it. I don't think that he will actually pursue this because I think it is, it is so stupid and so antithetical to everything that the Republican party stands for. I mean, talk about fiscal conservatism. $1.3 trillion. So you said drop in a bucket. That's a big number, to be honest. I mean, $2 trillion deficit is where we're at, which is incredible. This would explode it to three. I mean, if he were to actually do this, the crisis that you would see in the bond markets as investors truly grapple with the fact that this runaway train of debt and deficits and therefore inflation, that it's never going away. I mean, it would be, it would be incredible. We'd see just a huge blow up. So I doubt that it would ever actually happen. But to me, the most important thing is the fact that he's willing to say it. Yeah. Exactly. And somebody in the White House said to him, yes, Mr. President, why don't you go and stand on that stage and make a promise of $5,000 to every voter of the Republicans went. By the way, American voters are not stupid. They did watch what happened in 2025 when there was that tariff version of this of $2,000. And on that, the polling was interesting. 71% of voters liked the idea, of course. But only 37% actually believed the government would deliver it on that. And only half of Republicans believed the government was going to deliver on it. But maybe you only just need a few people to believe the government is going to give you $5,000 to persuade them to go to the polls. And this idea just has to live until November the 4th, the day after the election. And perhaps it changes a few votes somewhere or it motivates a few people to get into the poll. And you've got a very cynical promise that is never going to materialize. But perhaps somebody in the White House political office, James Blair's office thinks, oh, well, maybe this will work. I thought it was really interesting. I think they're just more broadly on this whole Trump appellusa thing, which seems to have been very badly planned because it coincides with the first two days of American football on television and the new football season. So I don't think many people were watching. It also coincides with the first anniversary of the killing of Charlie Kirk. And so you've got turning points USA basically boycotting the whole thing, not sending people there and saying, we are going to focus on our own programming and making it very clear that they're not happy about this whole midterm rally mini convention thing happening in the first place. But if you are a Republican in a tight seat at the moment, and there are not very many of those tight seats, but let's say you are a Republican in a competitive district. And you need money to try and help you win. If you do not show up this week at Trump Drampa Paloza down. down in Texas and listen to the president and cheer the president, somebody is going to take note of it when they decide who to give the money to, right? So it's always follow the money. And the irony of all of that is it's the people in the tight seats, which tend to be the more moderate seats, who are the most in need of distancing themselves from Donald Trump. Exactly. So you've got people like Congressman Mike Lawler, a fairly moderate Republican from New York area who won his seat in a fairly democratic neighborhood of New York, but won anyway because he is a pretty much a centrist. He has had to go down to Texas for two days to cheer the president because otherwise he's not going to have access to all of Trump's $400 million that he's sitting on. And so he's actually Trump is putting control of Congress in even more jeopardy by making these moderate Republicans sit there and cozy up to him. When that it's the last thing they really want to be doing to win their districts. Exactly. I mean, the whole thing politically just makes no sense to me. I mean, can you see a reason for this? Well, he wants to make this whole thing about him because he has it in his head that everyone still loves him. And by the way, there were plenty of Republicans who skipped this event, who are running for reelection. And so as you point out, I mean, there could be other consequences down the line. And just to your point about how poorly run this is, they are actually offering free tickets to this convention to fill the seats. So this was not a successful event. I don't think most people actually know that it's even happening. Like I just just to clarify for a listeners, like Trump is doing this convention for the midterms to like get everyone excited and make it a television event. And he's speaking, he spoke last night, he's going to speak again, he's trying to just rile everyone up. But to your point, it's a very bad idea to make the midterms about you to make it the midterms about Trump because Trump's approval rating is in the toilet right now. I mean, Reuters poll has him at 33%. It's an all time low for him. You must am host hasn't even lower. So I mean, the American people are fed up with Trump. If the midterms are a referendum on Trump, then the Republicans are going to lose very, very badly. And we already see this in the polling numbers where the Dems have an 85% chance of winning the House, at least on the prediction markets. For the Senate, it's kind of a toss up, but going, you know, a few months ago, people assume that it was a lock for the Republicans in the Senate. That's no longer the case because of how toxic Trump has become because of all of his terrible decisions from the terrorists, which did not work an increased inflation by a full percentage point. Two, of course, the Iran war, which is still going on. We're actually entering month seven at this point. We're coming up on 200 days of the Iran war. The thing that they said was going to last a couple of weeks as we record this, we're on day 194. So we're going into a direction that everyone understands was the fault of the president. And that's a very rare situation. Like a lot of times a president, you know, presidents, of course, make mistakes. And usually what happens is there are some external exogenous event that happens and they react poorly to it. Like, you know, you could look at COVID as an example, whether you think Biden handled it well or he handled it badly. The reality is that happened and then Biden had to deal with the situation. Right. Trump has invented these problems. He invented the tariff inflation. He invented this war. So he has to separate himself from these elections, but he cannot do it because it's too much ego. It's too much pride. And he's just, I, I think he's going to, I think he's going to tank it for them. I think that's why a person close to the White House told Politica's playbook, the quiet part out loud saying my only hope is that no one watches it since it's competing with NFL opening gains. No one knows about it. No enthusiasm. It's during football, only DC people care when you have somebody close to the White House saying, I hope no one watches it. I think that tells you all that you need to know about it. Okay, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about Canada. And what impact are those tariffs actually going to have on the midterm races? This episode is brought to you by the Financial Times. Look at it. The Financial Times journalism provides trusted inside analysis and perspective to help you see the whole story and truly understand the issues that matter. I just want to show you something here, Caddy. Every day, every day on my iPad, I pull that up. That's the digital edition of the Financial Times. I've been a financial time subscriber, both digitally, and I'm talking the salmon paper, Caddy, because I'm old since 2000. That's correct, 26 years of dedicated loyalty to the Financial Times. You get it all in the FT. It's a very objective paper and it's lots of fun to read. It makes you smarter. For the why, Financial Times listeners of the rest is politics. US can save over 40% on an annual digital subscription to the Financial Times by visiting FT.com/trippus. Meet new grippies setting missed from Mavily New York. Jelly Miss technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new, grippy setting missed from Mavily New York. Welcome back to the rest is politics US with me and Ed Elson. Anthony is away today. He's on assignment. That's what we call it in the very important, self-important television news business. He's can't be here because he's on assignment. We have no idea what being on assignment means. He's driving his Lamborghini around the Hamptons. That's what's happening. Yeah, I hope it means he's in grease or something nice. On a boat, that's what I'm hoping. Okay, guys, before we talk about Canada and tariffs, if you would like to get tickets to come to see Anthony and me on tour in the US, we can't wait to see you. There are a few tickets left. Go to the rest is politics us.com. We're coming to a city near you to talk about all things midterms and take your questions. Of course, we can't wait to meet you. I wanted Ed to get your thoughts on specifically the economic, because you're so good on the economics. To get your thoughts on the impact that these tariffs were having, and particularly on those Midwest and States, which could be the key states to whether the Senate flips to the Democrats. Talk a little bit about what's happened over the last few days in terms of this tariff or heating up. Anthony and I had both when this initially came about. We had both thought that it would be resolved fast and they would be back at the negotiating table. We thought maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a month, but the signals this week are not good for that. We do seem to be in much more of a full blown war now with the Canadians retaliating. Are you getting signs that this is wrapping up or are you getting signs that this is ratcheting up? Ratcheting up, I don't think this is wrapping up anytime soon. I can get to why I think that. Just the context on what happened to just remind everyone how we got here. Of course, we've had this on again, off again, tariff relationship with Canada over the past year. We had the Trump's threats to make Canada the 51st state of America. This is an ongoing thing, and basically during the summer, they tried to have trade talks to try to figure this out and come to some sort of resolution, and those trade talks broke down. The reason that they broke down is because Canada felt that they were making too many concessions for America, and America was making cracking down on things that didn't seem reasonable. As Connie said, he thought that America asked too much and offered too little. It wasn't just about the tariffs. There was the one thing which is that Canada wanted a guarantee that these tariffs couldn't just be unilaterally raised again, and they didn't get that guarantee. But it was a lot more than that. Trump also wanted to restrict their ability to negotiate trade agreements with other nations, and Canada couldn't accept that. They needed to have economic sovereignty over their own nation. There were even cultural issues. Trump wanted to change Canada's rules around their cultural subsidies, specifically their protections around French language content, which is very important to the Canadians. Canada couldn't accept that either, and Connie spoke directly about that. The trade talks broke down, and Canada says, "No, this isn't work for us." Then, of course, Trump imposes the 50% tariffs on Canadian goods, which came out to around $20 billion worth of goods, and then Canada's response says, "Okay, we'll do this right back to you." Now, the question of course, as you point out, how big of an issue is this really? Canada exports hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods, and so when you add up the amount that this actually affects, it comes out to around 4% of their exports, and that's expected to reduce their GDP by 0.3%. That's something. It's material, but I don't think it's that material. I don't think it's that big of a deal, and in addition, if they can't find buyers in the US, then they always have the option of finding buyers elsewhere, and, of course, they found that buyer in Europe. And now they are negotiating a trade agreement with Europe and the next week, they will announce those details. So, for me, the economic consequences are actually quite small for Canada. The most important thing is the political consequences, because this is the greatest thing to happen to Malkkarni's career and we can get to that in the moment, but I'll get your reactions. Let's talk about the antipathy that a lot of Americans and those, particularly those front line states, because I think I had erroneously thought, well, trade is global, whether you're trading with a partner in Europe or China, it doesn't make that much difference, but I think the one thing that the Canada story over the last few weeks has really shown us is that, yes, trade is global, but it's also local. And so, you've got these front line straights who feel they have good relationships with Canada, who send things backwards and forwards, it's easy to trade across that border. You're not having to send things very far. You've also then got Canadian tourists, I mean, famously, there's the story in ABC, I think of a Canadian tourist who comes and they come and they buy honey in Maine and, well, now there's no Canadian tourists. And so, the guy's kind of struggling to sell his honey because he used to sell Canadians. And then I had a Democratic congresswoman, Debbie Dingell from Michigan, send me a photograph earlier this week, a couple of photos of a U.S. Labor Day parade where union workers have made signs in this parade and they're all holding up and there's a big red maple leaf and the signs are saying we stand in solidarity with our Canadian brothers and sisters and Canadian workers. I mean, it's extraordinary. It's incredible. There they are saying we stand with our neighbor and it's not just that they like Canada. This is not being done because, wow, you know, Canada's our friend. It's also being done out of economic self-interest because those tariffs, you're right. It's not a huge amount of money perhaps in terms of Canada's GDP and certainly not in terms of America's GDP, but it hits some states more than others, right? And the Canadians are making no bones about this. You've got them quite openly saying now that their retaliation map reads like a targeting list of this cycle, Senate races. It's Michigan. It's Ohio. It's Iowa, a North Carolina and they're all exposed and the mechanisms seem to differ state by state and the industries seem to be a bit of a state by state. But the Canadians aren't hiding this anymore. Yes. They seem to be saying we're going to go after your midterm states. So tell me a little bit about which states are being affected and how? Yeah. So this is an example of Mark Coney being such an incredible negotiator and understanding where the leverage actually lies because yeah, to your point on a national scale, it actually doesn't matter that much to him because he can go pursue this deal with Europe plus his polling numbers are now at 70% before this all happened. He was at 55%. So he's now at an all-time high in Canada. This is the greatest thing to have happened to him because everyone is rallying behind him because he's the little guy getting bullied by the high school bully and Trump and he's retaliating and it's working. One of the reasons why it's working is as you say he is targeting swing states. He's targeting producers in states where the races are quite close or where there is some strong Republican support. So they're putting 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum and iron and two of the biggest states that manufacture those materials are Michigan and Indiana. They're also putting these tariffs on motor cycles and there's a big Harley Davidson plant in Pennsylvania that's going to be exposed. So the biggest loses is you say Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Those are local communities where they're going to see the direct impacts of what happens when Trump launches this trade war with no real contingency plan and no real protections for the Americans that it might affect. But at the same time, I also do think that it's not just out of self-interest. I think Americans genuinely feel for the Canadians. I think they genuinely feel that Trump is the bad guy. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I was being a little harsh that yeah, I think you're right. They genuinely don't like these tariffs and they don't understand why are we in a tariff war. And again, if you're on one of those frontline states, just geographically, you're closer to Canada. Exactly. You know Canadians. Canadians come to visit you. You've gone to visit. You can quote Sarah Palin. You can see Canada from many of those states. And Ohio sends nearly a third of all its goods exported to Canada. Yeah. This proportionately impacted by tariffs being imposed by the Canadians. Michigan, New 50% levees, as you say, 4,000 auto parts jobs have already been lost. Iowa tariffs on agricultural equipment. Well, that's the home of John Deere. John Deere tractors are also now going to be impacted by those Canadian tariffs. There just doesn't seem to be any support. You've now even got Republicans coming out, Susan Collins has said it on X, has said it again in an open letter saying we have to get back to the negotiating table because Maine, they managed to carve out fisheries where lobster, as I was told by Senator King of Maine, look, you produce a lobster in Maine, it gets processed in Canada. If we tariff it then, that's another 25% on the cost of that lobster as it gets sent back for American consumers, they've actually managed to carve out fisheries, but they haven't carved out lumber and paper. So Maine also impacted, so given all of that, do you think, and you said you sounded pretty pessimistic at the beginning about the prospect of negotiations, but I'm looking at all of these numbers and digging into the states that are impacted. I just don't see why they wouldn't get back to the negotiation table. I mean, why wouldn't Howard Lucknick and Jameson Greer, who's in charge of kind of the tariff policy? Why wouldn't they be saying to Donald Trump, you know, please, Mr. Trump, this is going to hurt our chances of holding the Senate. And if the Senate flips, then that's going to be a problem for you. Because they'll get fired, because Trump doesn't want to hear that. And this is the, this is the giant incompetence of this administration. I mean, of course, the correct answer is to get back to the negotiating table. The correct answer was to not launch this thing in the first place. I mean, they didn't have the leverage that they thought that they had. They didn't negotiate it correctly. And now they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. And yeah, I agree, like the correct answer is to go to the president, say, hey, we should probably get back to the negotiating table here, we should probably figure this out. But Trump doesn't want to do that because he doesn't ever want to admit defeat. And to do that would to be to admit defeat. I mean, we can see this in the way that he talks in that speech he gave at the convention last night. He was going on about how affordability was basically a hoax that was invented by the Democrats, like the Democrats keep on going on about this thing called affordability. No one cares about that. No one's interested in that. That's not the case. Everyone in America is worried about affordability. People are extremely anxious about inflation and prices. But the facts genuinely don't matter to him anymore. So I don't see any reason to believe that that's going to be enough to sway him into backing down and then saying, okay, like maybe I'll make some concessions for Mark Carney, unless there is some way that they can spin it into Trump came out on top. But that's going to be so difficult when you look at the polling numbers where Americans oppose these candidates, two to one, more than two to one, nearly four times more Americans say the trade war with Canada is America's faults, not Canada's. We could even get into the Lake Ontario controversy changing it to Lake America. But again, Americans overwhelmingly do not support that. He's on the wrong side of all of these issues. But to admit that is something that he cannot do. He learned that from Roy Cohn. We know all about that. I just think, you know, when you've got UAW workers marching under the Canadian flag on America's Labor Day in Dearborn, Michigan, you have a real political problem brewing. Before we go, I want to take it back to all of those people that you talk to on Wall Street because they know this is a problem. They know that, for example, Canada currently supplies almost half of all American nickel imports and America has no processing facilities for that nickel anyway and so it all has to get processed in Canada. So even if they were going to go and source it from some other country, they wouldn't be able to process it, they've got to send it to Canada to get processed that has a direct impact on the aerospace industry, on the defence and technology industry. So you've got all of these businesses that are being impacted, whether it's agricultural parts, lumber industries, aerospace industries, automobile industries, of course, furniture industries. You've got industries right across America that are being impacted. Let's leave aside for a second whether they're in frontline senate seats for the midterm races, but you've got all of these industries being affected by this trade war. Why aren't the heads of those industries calling up the White House 24/7 and saying you are hurting us with this trade war? Why aren't your friends on Wall Street who you speak to saying this is a disaster for American manufacturing? This isn't helping us. This isn't doing the things, this is not helping. Take it to the bottom line. Why isn't this not going to help our share price in the long term? This is not going to help our profits in the long term. Where is the business community and why isn't it raising its voice? I get that politicians are afraid and feel they have to go down to Texas and cozy up to Donald Trump because they want access to his $400 million. But why aren't the business community not speaking up more forcefully about this? been one of my big questions over the past year and a half, especially when it comes to tariffs, is why wouldn't you, as a business leader, as a CEO, speak up about this, and essentially have a spine. And this is the question I've been asking about America for a long time, is why doesn't anyone seem to have a spine? It's quite a profound problem. It's not just in business, it's in our political leadership as well. The business community is sitting there with shareholders that are going to get pissed at them and declining profits because of this, right? Exactly. So I think that if you were to take a stand against this, that your shareholders would be rewarded. That is my personal view. They don't think that. They think that what they need to do under this administration is engage in the bootlaking, engage in the asker saying, because they have seen examples where favorable government contracts and government treatment has been afforded to companies and to leaders who come to the White House and present gold trophies to the president. So their belief is that if we play ball with him, then he will be nice to us. He will give us favorable regulation. And they might have a point there because we've seen examples of it before. I mean, that's basically, this was the argument with Apple where Trump wanted to massively crack down on Apple and mess with their supply chains. Jim Cook goes and hands him the golden Apple trophy. And then Trump says, OK, I'm going to go easy on you now. And that did turn out to be the correct move for Apple shareholders. Apple has been crushing it. I mean, it's not just because of the relationship with the president. I mean, the AI story is massive as well. And that is like a big piece of what's really happening in the stock market right now. But I think that that is ultimately what they believe. It's not worth it to meddle with the president because he's the guy with the power and he decides that he doesn't like you, then it's possible that he could make your life a living hell. So I think that is what they're worried about. I would just add that on the stock market, these tariffs, they're so on and off and they're so unstable that it's actually very hard to make a real trade out of anything. And it's very hard to make actual business decisions. So I don't think that actually many people are saying, I'm going to short this company because they're too exposed to the tariffs or I'm going to go along on this company because they have, they stand to benefit because I think a lot of investors look at what's happening to the tariffs and they say, yeah, but it could be called back tomorrow or it could go be put back on the next day. So I can't actually make any investment decisions for the long term, other than maybe trading on a day-to-day basis speculating on what the stock might do tomorrow or the next day. But I do think that investors are desensitized to the issue. So in a lot of ways, I don't think that this necessarily matters to them. Compared to AI and what that might do structurally to businesses, I mean, this just pales in comparison. And as you say, it is so chaotic and it's kind of a pay-to-play world at the moment. Edelson, thank you so much for joining us again. I hope you'll come back. We'd love to. Thank you. Thank all of you. And of course, do listen to our members only episode. We did speak about economics and we spoke particularly about who America borrows from and why O so much. We looked at whether the next president will use Trump's playbook to exploit power and and to need justified why he is still a Republican. Sign up at the rest of politicsus.com if you'd like to listen to that episode. And to our question and answers in our mini-series every week. Ed, thank you very much. Thanks, guys. And we'll see you next week. Can't wait for the live tour. I will be there. [MUSIC] Imagine setting your makeup. Then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabel in New York. 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