And so I'm just kind of curious, like, um, uh what did what what how did you read the story of andor uh and and this rebellion

yeah that was the most interesting part of that interview actually is because like i was saying you know i work with a bunch of libertarians and i and i spend most of my time talking to other libertarians and everybody loved andor and it seemed almost like tony was kind of surprised by that too like and this was after we had already established that you know the idea of fitting this show into a left-right dichotomy is not the right way to think about it you already talked about that with the ross douthat interview and And how he really didn't like that idea.

And he was sort of surprised.

He actually put it back to me at one point.

He was like, wait a minute, what do libertarians see in this show? And I think it's a couple of things, right? But it's like there's a surveillance state that the empire is building that speaks to a lot of, I think, the post 9-11 surveillance operations that libertarians have opposed and spoken out about.

We get to see the kind of bureaucratic machinery of the empire.

And that's something that, again, I think libertarians are specifically attuned to the ways in which bureaucracies often exist to perpetuate themselves or to serve themselves or to serve political ends of the people in power and not necessarily to serve the you know health and safety purposes which which they sometimes you know are do accomplish those things but like that's that's the way that bureaucracies are often justified but then a lot of times they end up becoming tools of of the institutional power structures and we get to see some of that and and or we get to see the way it's kind of like a it's not quite a perfect parallel to the CIA or the FBI, but you get to see basically the empire's version of the Department of Homeland Security.

I hear what you're saying of like people individually coming together, but how do you square the idea of like, I guess like ask like, what would you see after all of these actions of the individual characters within the show? What comes next? Once they're out of the prison, yeah.

So does that mean the tariffs are over? It's done? Tell us what this, what this means.

Yeah, that's right.

So this, uh, this ruling dealt with the tariffs that Trump had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA.

That's most of the tariffs that Trump implemented last year, not quite all of them, but the vast majority of them, uh, that were implemented under two different national emergencies having to do with, uh, fentanyl coming into the country, and also this, uh, kind of c- cockamamie idea that trade deficits are somehow a national emergency.

Uh, the Supreme Court didn't actually deal with the question of whether any of this stuff counts as an emergency or not, because they didn't need to.

They overruled the tariffs on, uh, sort of two grounds: on statutory grounds and also on constitutional grounds.

We can get more into that if you want, but basically, the court said that, uh, the, the plain l- the plain reading of the statute of the IEEPA law says the president doesn't have the authority to impose tariffs.

Like, something that I, I think has sort of been lost in all of this, right? We're arguing about whether these, these, uh, tariffs are legal, but we're not really arguing about whether or not they're a good idea and why and what they're for, and this is the question I want to ask you, Eric: What is the justification? What is the argument that the people who want these tariffs in place, Donald Trump, uh, his lieutenants, what is the argument that they are making? What is their reason for wanting these tariffs in the first place at this point?

Yeah.

Uh, I want to think about this, uh, in the frame of, of chrif- of Christmas, though.

Sorry, can't talk now.

Uh, and I thought about, I think that the error that's being made here is the same error that a lot of people make when they read A Christmas Carol.

There's a... which I love, and so you're gonna listen to me talk about A Christmas Carol for a minute.

Uh, the lazy interpretation of A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge is this greedy capitalist and he has to learn to be more of a socialist, he has to learn to share his wealth, right? And it's actually kind of the exact opposite.

Like early in the story, you might remember, there's those two people who come to his office and they say like, "Will you give some money to help the poor?" And he has that famous line about like, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" Well, uh, oh, I was worried for a second, maybe they'd gone away.

... not to check for fraud, not to spend well, just to spend more to get additional federal funds.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like, it's...

And it's not just Trump.

This is, this is a shot at Trump, but it's not just a shot at Trump.

Because, uh, he may be like the Grand Poobah of the moron parade, right? But there's a long line of morons behind him, red morons and blue morons and, like, RFK Jr.

morons who don't really know what color they are.

And, and for anybody who wants to accomplish anything serious and substantial a- as a policy matter, you've got to look at other ways to do this.

We want Trump to just keep doing the few good things that he is doing, even if those good things are reversing his bad policies.

In some ways, is this maybe not just about woke, but about COVID, and about George Floyd, and just the summer of 2020, and all of that insanity and the way that it will not leave us alone, and we are still living in the world that was created by, you know, May through August of 2020, and all of the insanity that happened then?

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, right? Like any large event that, uh, that changes the course of history, you're gonna have consequences that you can't predict.

I mean, who would have thought that, uh, you'd go from, uh, from, uh, COVID, or, or George Floyd, or that whole mess, Tom Cotton writing a op-ed in The New York Times, to, uh, Bari Weiss running CBS News, and who knows, maybe CNN or, or whatever comes after this, right? There's all these consequences.

Um, I think, like, uh, it's kind of to Nick's point though, about like, it's, it's impossible to know whether she's gonna succeed at this, because it really is a very different job.

Uh, and it's a little bit like...

I, you know, I love sports, so I'll analogize this to sports.

It's a little bit like when you have great players that then, after their career, move into, you know, being managers or being, uh, front office people, or being announcers, right? Alex Rodriguez is a terrible baseball announcer.

... walking around on Friday and Saturday, like Friday afternoon, the bars were packed.

Oh.

...

the United States will, uh, keep the 15% tariff that Trump decided to put in place a few months ago, but we will promise not to raise any other tariffs higher than 15%.

So Europe was understandably quite concerned about the possibility of some very big tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

A lot of our pharmaceuticals come from Europe.

There's a lot of pharmaceutical companies based in, uh, in various places in Europe, The Netherlands and Germany, places like that.

Uh, and there's the possibility, the Trump administration hasn't gone down this road yet, but they keep hinting at the fact that there might be some very big tariffs on pharmaceuticals coming.

So good.

What happened and what does this mean for the economy?

Yeah, there were a number of deals announced last week at the last minute.

I don't know that we should consider any of them to be done deals.

We really haven't seen any of the fine print on any of those supposed, uh, deals.

But yeah, uh, we basically now have, you know, without getting too down into the, the weeds of all the different rates that were set on imports from different countries, you can more or less think about this as a 15% baseline tariff now on just about all imports from around the world, up from the 10% baseline that was set in April.

And then some higher tariffs on different places still based on a kind of nonsensical calculation that the White House did based on trade deficits, which is just silly.

Uh, but, uh, and then there's also this random 50% tariff on Brazil because the president is mad about some internal politics in Brazil.

This doesn't even cover impacts to non-revenue sports, Title IX, et cetera." Eric, our Eric, I know you have some thoughts on this.

But for this, uh, for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans used some gimmicks of their own here, and these gimmicks could backfire, right? Like you, you have said that some of the procedural stuff, especially with the Congressional Budget Office scoring, could lead to Medicare for All?

Yeah, I mean, in, in a backwards kind of way, I think it makes it easier for Democrats to pass Medicare for All.

Uh, Republicans came up with kind of the biggest budget gimmick of all, or at least the biggest one we've invented so far, uh, in passing this bill.

To understand how this works, you have to understand that they were using the reconciliation process to get this bill through the Senate.

And the reconciliation process is basically a magic loophole in the filibuster.

It means you can pass stuff through the Senate without the 60 vote threshold, which eliminates the ability of the minority to block the bill.

Uh, and of course, this bill passed the Senate in the slimmest possible way.

No.

Just e-... is there an argument on Trump's side that makes any kind of sense at all, that actually this won't raise the deficit?

Well, I mean, only if you are very selective about what you look at, which is what the White House is doing.

So here's the White House's argument.

The press secretary said the other day, this is a, almost a direct quote, "This bill provides $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings," and when you combine that with the tariff revenue that's coming in, uh, that means end-to-end, by the way, 3% growth that we're going to have, according to the White House's own projections.

That means we're going to cut the deficit by $8 trillion over the next 10 years.

That's the argument they're making.

Uh, and yes, if you look at exclusively those numbers and you math that math the way they're doing it, then I guess maybe you get to that conclusion.

... what do you have for us?