Right.

Yeah, there are a couple of things there.

One is, you know, Democrats are not really repudiating the stances.

They're trying to kind of get away with it by laughing.

And why won't that work? Two reasons.

One is that some Democrats don't really seem to have left that era behind.

So there are plenty of examples of that Democrats are furnishing this campaign of people who are endorsing ideas like, you know, defunding the police, you know, very prominently The woman nominated to Congress who beat an incumbent in New York, Dara Elisa Avila-Chevalier, refused to say whether or not she would even prosecute someone for murder.

you know

Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed." Is, is the key difference the fact that- Taxes are high and they think that they can sort of concentrate the cost of this on a small group of people, or is, is it something else?

Uh, yeah.

No, I, I think the, I think the tax problem is specific to the Scandinavia comparison but, you know, rent freezes are something that almost no economist agrees is a good idea.

Uh, what happens when you set prices below what the market will sustain, you cause shortages, and you see that already in New York.

Um, there is a lot of rent control in New York.

There's a lot of rent silva- stabilization in New York.

That has not made prices lower.

So why can't people similarly sort of innovate with something in government or try, just try?

Right.

Yeah, that I worry about, the extent to which, you know, favoritism within MAGA matters for business.

And that's why I think a lot of America's business leaders have just – it's kind of rational, again, in the short run to say, okay, if I accommodate this guy, maybe my business doesn't get whacked.

That's basically how every – every country is thinking about trump however university is thinking about trump law firm okay let's just let's just try not to stick our heads too high up um and and hope it all it all goes away and and maybe it will uh maybe you know trump is succeeded by by a democrat or a non kind of um mega republican i don't know um but that's that's a calculation that everyone is making but i think even still the fact that the department of justice um has been reformed in this way just causes people to think that, you know, law is not applied equally.

The way that, you know, the president is administering grants to universities and to states and saying, you know, if you're in my camp, you get the rewards.

And if you don't, then you're cut out.

The way that the president's sons and his firms and, you know, Steve Witkoff's son and their firms, doing rather well um and kind of openly right they're kind of happily announcing that oh we have this defense contract and oh we um you know this rare earth company that we um uh joined the board of now has a department of defense uh sorry department of war uh contract now isn't that great you know i mean there's no hiding that and you know my parents are from pakistan they're very familiar with that way of thinking.

So why don't you tell us about that?

Like a lot of developed democracies are getting older and older and older.

older.So there, there are a lot of contemporary similarities.

I mean, Europe has very, very similar, uh, dynamics as we do where we had a, you know, a, a baby boom, and now the baby boom is getting older, and we have pension systems that were also...

So, you know, a lot of things happened in the last 100 years, right? People started living longer.

They started having fewer kids.

We set up these welfare states.

Um, great.

So to that point, if older people hold the most power and money, and they're holding onto that power and money, and they're using that power and money to keep each other in power, and no one wants to go against them, how do we change this? Because, uh, to your point, it's, it can't last, and it doesn't feel good for the future of the country.

How did Britain's response deviate from the United States here? so

the global financial crisis hit the uk quite hard because it had concentrated a lot of its economy into financial services into london and and that bet had worked out pretty well for it so during the 90s it was surging economically it was improving relative to the united states And, you know, it seemed like things were going well.

You know, labor had changed under Tony Blair and had become more comfortable with capitalists.

You know, Peter Mandelson, who was, you know, kind of infamous now for being the ambassador of the U.S. who lost his job.

But he was quite an important labor politician at the time, quite important to Tony Blair's rise.

And there's a memorable quote of his.

which which kind of set the stage for for labor at the time which was that he said that he was intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich that was that was the labor position at the time and and of course the conservatives were still in their thatcherite era so anyway this seemed like a good a good bet but we have the financial crisis that hits incredibly hard and so the idea that london could surge but you can make up for the fact that you know the rest of england and scotland center was not doing as well by redistributing the profits that that compact didn't work anymore So, you know, afterwards, one thing that the UK did that differed from other countries was what we call austerity.

People are doing do-it-yourself

Um, talk about the president's economic woes and how-Long lasting they might be, la- uh, meaning into the fall, into the election season.

Um, yeah, I mean, the fact that the oil is not flowing, um, will be a problem.

You know, you can't just restart these refineries in the Gulf like that.

They take a while to come back online.

It's unclear even if they will.

Um, America's exposed to international markets, so Asia is gonna be affected a lot mo- sooner than America because of their dependency on Gulf oil.

Europe will as well.

And Theresa, do you remember any period in American history in which a Secretary of Defense has argued that the greatest enemy facing the United States... is mem- are members of the opposing party?

It's, it's, it's painful, but, um, but, but really, really glaringly true.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for having me.

Um, I think there are three reasons that what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic is so much different to what's happening here.

Uh, the first is that, you know, Keir Starmer was not in a good position before all of this.

Uh, he was particularly unpopular, and this has come as just another scandal among, uh, many reversals and, and, and, and background issues.

But the second, to go to the point of the piece, is that in the UK, scandals are different there.

I mean, w- w- what is, what is the view of America from the UK?

Okay, so what's actually in this bill?

So the One Big Beautiful Bill, as you can tell from the name, does a lot of things, and we can't go through them all in detail.

It's 1,000 pages of legislation which most people who pass it haven haven't even read fully, but I can give you a few of the highlights.

The big one, of course, is the extension of tax cuts.

These are going to be deficit-financed.

This bill is going to add about four trillion or three trillion, depending on how you count, to the deficit over the next 10 years, and that's because it's keeping the 2017 tax cuts that Trump passed at the start of his first term in place for the next 10 years.

It tries to make up some of that cost by cutting green subsidies, especially those passed by Joe Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act a few years ago.

bill.And how will all that sit with Trump's MAGA base?

What, what, what can you tell us about the latest standoff, the latest argument between Harvard and the administration?

Well, the, the importance of this is, is very, very large for Harvard.

Um, about 27% of its total enrollment, uh, are foreign students.

Uh, a lot of those students had already been accepted, some were in the middle of their, uh, degree programs, um, and the administration had tried to, uh, rescind their ability to continue studying at the university, rescind the ability of Harvard to admit new international students, um, as well.

That's part of a, um, kind of all-encompassing war against the university.

So, um, the administration cut off all federal funding, uh, to the university in retaliation for, um, antisemitism on campus.

It says it's enforcing the Civil Rights Act, uh, extremely aggressively.

Can you tell us what's the latest that we know about this?

What would that mean?

So, that would allow the president to federalize the National Guard, it would allow him to deploy, uh, military, uh, uh, on US soil, which is usually prohibited by separate law, uh, that was also passed in the 19th century.

Um-The Insurrection Act has been used by presidents, but it's generally quite sparing, um, you know, in response to riots in cities, um, or John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower used it to force, um, uh, states to desegregate their educational facilities.

So, this would be something remarkable.

It hasn't been used since George H.W. Bush.

Uh, it would further harden, uh, the president's belief that we see expressed in all of these cases that America is not just dealing with e- a problem of illegal immigration, but that this constitutes an invasion by a hostile foreign power of some kind, um, and it would greatly expand his ability to use the military to- to enact his will.

That's, that's Harvard on offense, letting the public know what's gonna be lost when the Trump administration cuts off funding.

Yeah.