Libertarianism and the MAGA Agenda: A Complex Alliance

During the 2024 presidential election, a contingent of libertarians cast strategic, often reluctant votes for Donald Trump, arguing he was the lesser of two evils. Among them: Reason's own Liz Wolfe and J.D. Tuccille, alongside comedian and Part of the Problem host Dave Smith. Each thinks a Kamala Harris administration would have been more troubling, citing concerns about censorship, economic illiteracy, and cultural authoritarianism. More than 100 days into Trump's second presidency it's time to start asking: do you regret your vote?

Reason's Zach Weissmueller, a non-voter, moderates a conversation on Trump's second term thus far. From the erosion of due process in immigration enforcement and the failure of the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency initiative, to aggressive tariffs and erratic foreign policy gambits, Smith, Wolfe, and Tuccille dissect the trade-offs they anticipated versus what's actually happened.

This episode was recorded on May 8, 2025.

Sources Referenced:

• Just Asking Questions with Dave Smith, David Stockman, and Jacob Grier: Who is the lesser evil?
• Just Asking Questions with Rand Paul: Why I oppose Trump's tariffs
• Just Asking Questions with Vivek Ramaswamy: Will MAGA become libertarian, nationalist, or both?
• Just Asking Questions with Batya Ungar-Sargon: The Case for MAGA Leftism
• "What I Learned From Paleoism," by Lew Rockwell
• "Milton Friedman's Warning to DOGE," by Zach Weissmueller
• Bari Weiss's discussed tweet

Chapters

• 00:00 Coming up…
• 00:42 Do you regret voting for Trump?
• 06:00 Counterfactuals and the Kamala Harris presidency
• 12:50 The problem with voting shaming and libertarian nuance
• 20:30 Immigration, deportations, and rule of law concerns
• 28:55 Is Trump undermining due process?
• 36:50 Tariffs, economic nationalism, and free trade debate
• 50:45 Globalization vs. protectionism: What's hurting the middle class?
• 59:40 The decline of affordability in America
• 01:11:00 Reflections on DOGE, bureaucracy, and missed opportunities
• 01:15:00 Trump's foreign policy: Ukraine, Iran, and Israel
• 01:20:00 Final reflections: best and worst of Trump's second term so far

Transcript:

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.

Zach Weissmueller: Do you regret your Trump vote? Just asking questions. We're a little over 100 days into the second Trump administration. Though it kind of feels like more as the president came in hot with an arsenal of executive orders reshaping the immigration system, the federal bureaucracy and the global economy. You might recall that Trump made an explicit appeal to libertarians to vote for him showing up at the Libertarian Party Convention tomake his pitch. Many libertarians feeling queasy about a Kamala Harris presidency and underwhelmed by the state of the Libertarian Party decided to give Trump 2.0 a try. We've got three of them here today, including my co-host Liz Wolf and another of my Reason colleagues J.D. Tuccille. Dave Smith, host of Part of the Problem podcast, also joins us. I think it's fair to describe them all as reluctant Trump voters who had some serious reservations about various aspects of his agenda and maybe his character, but felt that the other options were worse. And so this seems like a good time to just reflect on how things are going so far from a libertarian perspective. Good to see all of you.

Liz Wolfe:  I see you too much.

Zach Weissmueller:  Yeah, yeah, you can just keep it to yourself. You each voted for Trump for slightly different reasons. So let's start there. First, Dave, we had you on before the election to talk about this a little bit, which we will link to that episode. And you told us at the time that "I might be casting the most unenthusiastic vote in the history of voting." But your reasoning was that it was purely a vote against Kamala Harris. Let's roll the tape to see exactly why you thought she deserved to lose at the time. 

Dave Smith:(CLIP) I've never seen anything like the Kamala Harris campaign. There's not even anything else you could compare it to where on every level it doesn't exist. Like there's nothing. She didn't win a primary. She ran for president four years ago and didn't make it to Iowa. She's walked away from every single position that she was running on four years ago without explaining why. "That was five years ago. Ha ha ha ha". That's it. But oh, by the way, she's the sitting vice president. Is she running on the current administration? No. And why not? Because I'm not Joe Biden. Hey, like, it's just nothing there. And to watch her, you know, what really did it for me was this rehabilitate the Cheney's that I just was like, what are we what are we doing here? And to me, for you know for everything the Democrats have done over the last really eight years. Um, starting with framing the sitting president for, uh, treason for these claims that he was a Russian spy, which were totally all, they produce nothing. Then they were the, um, the party of lockdowns and, uh mandates, which, okay, the Republicans were bad on too, but no question. They kind of branded themselves that then they were all in on this disastrous war in Ukraine, which has done nothing except get hundreds of thousands of people killed. And then they're gonna essentially coup the president of the United States of America who they had spent four years pretending was not in severe mental decline and and now to run somebody who's just nothing who's going around campaigning with Liz Cheney is just enough for me that you deserve to lose forever. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Okay, so about 100 or so days in, and kind of imagine, I guess, the counterfactual Kamala Harris presidency. How are you feeling about things, Dave? 

 Dave Smith:  I'm, uh, I enjoy talking to you guys much more from home than a hotel room. That's my reflection on that. Man, I hate being in hotels all the time. Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, running the counterfactual Kamala Harris, I think is a little bit difficult, um, because I don't know, you know what, it's hard to say exactly what her presidency would have been. Like my, uh my default assumption is that it would have I don't think it would have just been a continuation of the Biden administration. I think it wouldn't have been a ramp up. And I think we also talked about on that show that one of my major motivations for supporting Trump was that I thought it would really be a death blow to the corporate media and it would be kind of like the coronation. Like this had kind of already happened, but it made it official that the alternative internet world is the mainstream and that the corporate media is dead. And, and I, I got into arguments with this, but like with some people who I think are very smart, who I respect very much. Um, I remember arguing with Robby Soave.

Zach Weissmueller:  Believe it or not, that's his real name, folks. 

Dave Smith:  Robby was basically saying, which he had a fair argument for, he was like, well, look, like the first time Donald Trump won, it actually drove the ratings up for the corporate media. And my thought was that it's not going to work this time. And I thought so much of that was driven by the Russiagate stuff. And post Russiogate being exposed, and post the entire COVID narrative falling apart, I just think they had no more bullets left in the chamber. Like there was nothing they could say. That's going to actually get people to want to tune in and listen. So for now, if I'm running the counterfactual, if Kamala Harris had won. In many ways, I think that would have signaled that no, actually, the corporate media still does matter more. And that even though Donald Trump, even though Joe Rogan and Theo Von and all these guys had Trump on, that didn't move the needle as much. And so almost completely aside from the politics of it, just like on a cultural level, I think this is a lot of why so much of the woke insanity has totally receded. It's just kind of like, oh, they lost this epic battle therefore we recognize the side that's won. Almost every Democrat, I shouldn't say almost, there's a sliver of them who still want to cling to it, but almost every Democrat now recognizes that's like, oh we can't push this radical cultural agenda anymore, it's gonna cost us elections. And so for that you know, and for the reasons I laid out there, I do, I, I still feel that way. Um, I think that, you know, the Donald Trump first hundred days have been, you know like a clown show in a lot of ways, there's been some really terrible policies, um, and there's been some good ones too. But at this point, I'm not feeling like, Oh, I regret my vote. I'd, I'd still at this point, you would say, Oh thank God we dodged the bullet of Kamala Harris. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Any reactions to that, JD or Liz, this idea that Trump was, it had to be done because there had to be a repudiation of the kind of gatekeepers that ushered us through COVID. And that is a major upside of Trump 2.0. 

J.D. Tuccille:  Yeah, I mean, there's an element of David's thinking of what I did. I think I described at the time my first ambiguous exploration and reason for voting for Trump, but then I openly wrote for National Post that I was voting for him, but I said I was engaged in damage control and. 

Zach Weissmueller:  I've got your reasoning right here, you said Trump, scumbag though he is, could be less bad than the empty vessel for the control freaks around her that is Kamala Harris. 

J.D. Tuccille:  Yeah and uh… That was my attitude then. Now is the Trump 2.0 presidency perhaps a little shittier than even I anticipated yes it is uh… I can't say I regret it i knew it was a gamble at the time. I thought the choices we face were actually awful uh… I liked Chase Oliver as a candidate for the Libertarian Party was uh… Shambolic is still shambolic and rebuilding so I uh… By cut through the dice and said you know what at least if we disrupt what what is a and by administration Kamala Harris administration that is heavily integrated with the permanent government the civil service with the political class with the elite, if we disrupt that a little bit maybe we can at least get a different variety a less organized variety of all hold us for a little while and and break up what has been a bad experience with the Biden/Harris uh you know presidency uh nothing either of them were in control i don't think i think the aids around works just as much the decision-making power. So, do I regret it? I don't really regret it. I'm also not happy about my vote. It just was what it was in an effort to exercise damage, to engage in damage control in a bad situation. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Can I ask you about one other aspect of your reasoning for voting for him? You said you were kind of standing in solidarity with your wife who felt that the left's anti-Semitism was just getting out of control. How do you feel on that front? Because there's definitely been a pivot towards combating anti-semitism, but from a libertarian perspective, it's kind of manifested in these. Crackdowns on speech on campus and even, you know, pulling visas and green cards from people for engaging in protest activities, what are your reflections on that particular point? 

J.D. Tuccille:  Yeah, I mean, I was and am concerned about the antisemitic turn of the Democratic Party. I'm not pleased with how the Trump administration enacts even its good ideas, but the way I look at it is that we were given a choice between a nativist, economically illiterate authoritarian political party, the Republicans, and an antisemitic, economically, you know, illiterate totalitarian political party which is the Democrats. And I'm deeply concerned about antisemitism. They're really, my wife is an observant Jew. I mean, you know, that's a matter of concern for me. And there are two places in the world now that are probably safe for Jews to live. And that's the United States and Israel. You know, Jews are kind of running out of places where they can live and openly, you know, observe their faith and be visibly Jewish. Uh… Even Canada uh… Is going through a major turmoil and an open and accidentally some business tax on jewish schools and synagogues so uh… That is a major concern now is the Trump administration going about this the right way. Well I'm not gonna lose too much sleep about pulling money away from Harvard University, Columbia University depriving any of the uh… Universities of government money uh… Do I think that people ought to be busted just for writing an op-ed? No, I absolutely don't think that's the case, even if it's horrendous out there. Expressing hateful ideas. But a lot of this stuff crosses that line, like what we saw at Columbia University yesterday in the library, when two security guards were driven away in ambulances after there was a quasi-riot in the library on a pro-Hamas protest. So yeah, this is definitely part of my reasoning, is that I'm troubled by the anti-Semitic turn of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Which is I think still dominant now, even though the Democratic Party is going through what Republicans won through say five or eight years ago, which is kind of a re-examination of what it stands for and it's something of a breakup that may result in a coalescing new form. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Liz let me invite you both to react to anything that they said and also read you your own words back to you Remember you asked for this It's I think you 

Liz Wolfe:  I think doing this panel just to correct the record 100% was not my idea. It was my idea while stoned. I was literally like smoking a joint on my patio and I was like, wait a second. I'm so annoyed by people on Twitter always asking me if I regret my Trump vote. What if we just got a whole bunch of Trump voters together and explored that question. So I messaged it to Zach and naturally Zach was like okay sure whatever. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Yeah, this is your chance to clear the air of weed smoke and also all the smoke on Twitter. This is, I mean, so what you said at the time was that the democracy subverting activities of January 6th disturbed me as did tariffs, but I'm more optimistic about the economic conditions that will arise as a result of a Trump administration. And I was pleased with his Supreme Court fix during his first term. Price controls, court packing, and massive amounts of government spending, which I expect to accompany a Harris presidency, will simply not work for me. So what do you, how, what's your reflection, how do you feel about things now? 

Liz Wolfe:  I mean, I don't really regret my vote because I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about who I voted for. I think libertarians have historically been completely correct in basically saying your vote doesn't matter to the degree that you think. You are probably best served sitting at home. It's just really not going to turn the outcome of an election. And the fact that people spend so much time sort of shaming people over this type of thing is really, it's just such a waste of breath and energy. That said… I always saw Trump, and I think I could have articulated this better at the time, I always saw Trump as a very high upside, very high downside candidate. And I think the thing that's been really frustrating for me is that so far we've seen pretty much all downside. In the early days, I was feeling really optimistic about what DOGE could do. And I recall reading the news about the CFPB being dismantled and like sending that link to a few of my friends and just feeling like, wow, I've been so vindicated. This is awesome. And DOGE seems like the only sort of hope of actually meaningfully reducing the size of government, at least in my lifetime that we've seen, like, this is incredible. And it's just absolutely wild how that really has not come to fruition. I think as it was initially conceived of by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, I think it could have been successful in that form when Vivek was sort of kicked off of the project and it became an Elon Musk initiative entirely. Um, it somehow just became, you know, profoundly unsuccessful. And I think a lot of their sloppiness and accounting has really kind of discredited some of the limited government cause, which makes me concerned from like a 4D chess political perspective, like does this sabotage government slashing efforts for like a decade to come, I hope not, but it's possible and then in a bunch of other areas too, it's just been. Absolutely horrible, you know, trying to make sense of what his tariff policy actually is and why. And what he wants those final amounts to be. I mean, the announcing of reciprocal tariffs has been such a problem. I'm concerned about that as well as the sort of constant 90 day pauses. And then immigration policy, you look at the degree to which he's just really aggressive with deportations. And look, there's some amount of like, deportation was never going to be, soft and cuddly and fuzzy, right? Like it was never gonna be sealing the border again and rolling back some of the Biden era chaos. Was never going to be something that looked good. But the way that the Trump administration has done it has been just shockingly, appallingly bad. And I really do think that there's like such an erosion of due process, which leaves me feeling like, how do we possibly get people to care about this again? The number of fellow Americans who I've seen justifying that type of behavior by the Trump administration is really, really frustrating to me, especially because using that alien enemies act to attempt to deport these people. Keeps getting swatted down by various judges. We saw the Fourth Circuit especially issue a really scathing rebuke. And I'm just a little bit like, you know, like even Trump appointed judges don't agree that the Alien Enemies Act can be used in this way. And I think that's a really big problem. I think the mechanism by which we do this really does matter. 

 Dave Smith:  On that topic, yeah, go ahead, please do. No, there was something, what Liz said up top there, I feel like I just wanted to like stress because there is something that I've, it's very interesting the way a lot of libertarians do react to voting at all. And it's almost as if in some weird way. They buy into the same principle that statists do. And like, I remember there was this one, one time, many years ago, I was on a Fox news show. I was on Kennedy, uh, and Julie Roginsky, who's like a Democratic strategist. She, at one point, like I forget what it was, but it was like, I criticized Hillary Clinton, and then she was like oh, so you must love Donald Trump, you know, the typical thing libertarians are used to getting, and I was like no, I actually don't like him either. And she was, like, wait, so who did you vote for? And I was, I didn't vote. And she goes, this is all on air, and she goes well, if you don't vote, then you can't complain. And I'm like, really? Because I'm about to. So like that's, it's like, that's like an, it is an empirical claim, and I'm about to demonstrate that that's not true. And every libertarian recognizes immediately like how ridiculous that is but then they almost apply the inverse when they find out like you're voting for one of the major party candidates like oh well now you're responsible for all of the bad and it's like all of this is so ridiculous it's like look from libertarian first principles you can deduce that like we're under duress. We are forced into we're forced into a false binary where that shouldn't exist. But one of these two people is gonna be president and it's completely reasonable for libertarians to say I find one of them to be slightly preferable to the other one. So I'm gonna throw a vote their way and see what ends up coming of all of that. So that was kind of just my I just I found it very interesting watching like how people how libertarians implicitly like conceptualize what voting is as if this means it's like a full endorsement of everything that this person has ever done or said or whatever they will do in the future rather than what it really is which is essentially a strategic guess you're kind of going like 

Liz Wolfe:  This is the thing that's like wrinkled me so much in the aftermath of my scandalous Trump vote, which has been the number of people who respond to me constantly on Twitter or YouTube or whatever and say, you voted for this whenever I'm criticizing a Trump policy. And it's like, yes, I voted for this candidate extremely reluctantly, but I didn't endorse every single thing that you would end up doing. And wouldn't you, in fact, rather have people who will vote for a candidate and still retain their independence and their ability to you know, critically assess each specific policy that this president puts forth and then is able to call balls and strikes and say, this policy is good, this policy's not aligned with my values. Like, it's confusing to me, and especially for a journalist to do that, like it's confusing to me what they want. Do they want me to vote for Trump and then become like a MAGA-tard Trump sycophant and just, you know be super, super excited about every single thing his administration does? Like, would they feel better served by me doing that? I wouldn't feel good. By me doing that. I feel much better about saying, look, I made an educated guess. So far, I don't really like how the guess is working out. It's not really aligned with my values and beliefs. As a libertarian, I consistently feel like there's no good option available to me. And you know what? The only thing I can do as a journalist for the next four years is try to be honest about what is good, what is bad, and what I know and what I don t know about what Trump's doing. 

J.D. Tuccille:  Yeah, I'm gonna get down on that. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I mean, I am just amazed. I've known people for decades who will come at me with, and it's clear that they kind of live at the intersection of tribalism and retardation, because it's a matter of being, they insist that you be all in. You're either entirely on Team Red or entirely on Team Blue, and they can't, and they're angry with me. They're furious because I write some columns that say, yeah, I think DOGE is a good idea. I'm going to scare the Department of Education. And then I write a piece saying, no, Trump's way over the top with executive actions and his trade policy is insane. So yeah, tribalism, the insistence that political identity is all, is a be all and end all. And actually, this is a good way to riff and say this. I've recently seen two studies, one from 2017 from Stanford, another from Political Psychology published recently. Both said that now political identity overshadows race and ethnicity as a matter of personal identification. And a source of interpersonal animus in this country. So yeah, people live in this kind of intersection of, and I'll say it again, of retardation and tribalism. And they insist that you go all in on this identity instead of saying, you know, the vote worked out or the vote didn't work out, and I think I'll just be critical of the policy, the action, the politician rather than the candidate. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Yeah. Let me, uh, triple down on that and say that it's, I think that the less, the more people can avoid letting a vote warp their brain, um, the better off we will all be. Um, I've increasingly come to view it as a harm reduction type of thing where it's like whoever wins, this is not going to be good for America, but is there a choice that is going to be less harmful for America? And if the answer to that is no, then. You can not vote, that was my decision, but this year, last time I made a different decision. We kind of bring this on ourselves at Reason by publishing our votes publicly and just for the record, so people get an understanding. We had 12 Chase Oliver voters, six non-voters, including myself, three Kamala Harris voters, and two write-ins and two Trump voters, to both who are on this show with us. Right now I want to keep going into some of the specific issues one that Liz raised was deportations and I'm really curious to get Dave's thoughts on this because I think Dave, you're the most kind of friendly to immigration restrictions of the libertarians on this podcast. However, there are some rule of law issues. The Supreme Court did order the government to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from this El Salvadoran prison. So far that seems not to be happening at all. What are your feelings about this? Do you have any sort of rule of law type concerns around this particular issue? 

 Dave Smith:  Um, yes. And I think, yeah. And you know, uh, um, I think it's already sold out, but I think they stream it, but of course Reason magazine, uh or Reason I always call you guys Reason magazine even though the magazine is the least of it these days, but it's just, that's what's in my brain for eternity. 

Liz Wolfe:  At least you don't call us ReaCNN. 

 Dave Smith:  That's, I've never, I'd never been known for that. I may have called you "Treason Magazine" once, but I was particularly mad at you. I think Brian Doherty had written an anti-Ron Paul piece and he got me pissed off or something like that. But, I love you guys. I've always been on record. You two are, this is my favorite show, that Reason does. But, you know, there's like, okay, so I'm doing a debate at the Soho Forum, which is a Reason, you know, event on immigration. I'm sorry about that. In a couple weeks so check that out there is put it out online so yes i am an immigration restrictionist and in fact i even think that i i'd personally believe and i think this is consistent with libertarian principles we've done shows on this before that i think people who uh… I don't think it's a natural right comma uninvited to it uh… Piece of property that you don't own even if it is absurdly claimed by the U.S. government. But regardless of any of that even if you're going to support mass deportations like let's say just like for the sake of argument come at it from the side where you want to see mass deportation and you've kind of won the day in many respects the public opinion of the American people has been pushed far to the right on immigration from the Joe Biden administration. Mass deportations have at least in several polls had super majorities of the American people supporting them. And so what does Donald Trump do at this moment? You know, you've got the American people on your side, you got the president, this is his signature issue. And so again, he does it in a way that would almost you'd think be designed to undermine public support for mass deportations. I mean, it's one thing to say, you came here illegally, you don't have a right to be here, we're gonna ask you to leave. It's another thing to send people to like a torture camp In El Salvador. In a couple instances people who are not from that country it's like this is madness and I would say I  think um me and JD may may see things a little bit differently on this but as the I believe the only jewish person on this uh on this show you know I gotta say and somebody who also doesn't like to see like a rise in hatred of Jewish people you know. Wading into the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is one of the most controversial ongoing events in the world, and is a very divisive and polarizing issue. To weigh into that and then deporting legal residents for the crime of having the wrong opinion is just about the worst thing you could do if you don't want to see a rise in Jew hatred. And I would also, obviously in terms of the policy, I support defunding all of the universities. College is essentially one giant government program that should be abolished just like basically every other government program. But again, to defund them based on the accusations of antisemitism is the worst thing in the world you could do if you want to see a decrease in hatred of Jewish people. Particularly after for at least fifteen years all of these universities have been hotbeds for the most vicious anti white bigotry imaginable I mean it's just like it's it's been totally institutionalized and taught into the entire curriculum that it's just okay to be viciously horrible toward straight white men and there's entire entire departments dedicated to it and so then to defund it i mean just plays right into the stereotype of like oh yes see the one group you're not allowed to accuse. It does nothing but give red meat to the Jew haters whose arguments are pretty stupid and like we don't need to give them any more red meat. So I think all of that has been terrible. I think that Donald Trump essentially had about as big of a like you know I don't like the term mandate. I know politicians always like to use it. I think it's kind of an anti libertarian idea that you ever have a mandate but Donald Trump coming back in and this time winning all the swing states and the popular vote and the corporate media being defeated. He had a real shot in the arm to get some amazing things done in the beginning of his presidency. I think he did a few good things, but at this point, a hundred days in, it is kind of like, I think he's blown that already now. And unfortunately, we're just back to kind of where we were. His approval ratings are, he had his highest approval ratings at the beginning and they're already right back down to where they were because just all of this stuff is so It's obviously clown show stuff. I mean, and the deportations and the tariff stuff, I think are right at the top of the list of that. 

Zach Weissmueller:  Stuff there. JD, I'm curious to hear your reaction to this notion that paradoxically Trump may have laid the ground for increasing antisemitism, but also just the general sense that, you know, it was articulated by Ezra Klein in this video essay he did where he said the emergency is here, like the threat to rule of law has escalated so bad that we're facing, like it's It's finally here. We're facing that constitutional crisis. Do you buy that it's like things are that bad? Like it is an emergency. 

J.D. Tuccille:  Well, I mean, two part question, two-part answer. He is definitely, in the way he's gone about, responding to some of the students, the other people here on student visas who expressed hateful ideas, but only expressed hateful ideas, and didn't engage in violence or criminal actions. The way he has gone about that has given them the excuse to act as martyrs. And so it creates a sense of martyrdom when he's visibly suppressing, punishing people for their speech. Rather than for their conduct. Others are being punished for conduct. So is that a problem? Yeah, it is. Because if you give people who are hateful, who are potentially dangerous in some ways, if you give them an excuse to wrap themselves in the flag of martyrdom, you can reinvigorate the movement and definitely give them a certain energy, you can have a lift under their wings. Beyond that, the rule of law, the due process, yeah, there seems to be, even when… Trump is on to something that is important and valid. He seems dedicated to doing it in the cruelest and most self-aggrandizing way he possibly can. And I think that is largely because the man has a walking personality disorder. He's heavy on narcissism. And everything, there has to be an expression of his will. It can't be, well, let's implement these policies and wanna go through the system that might be established by law and by the Constitution. No, it's got to be the CEO handing the orders down and getting it done right now, even if it's in violation of established rights, of protections for rights, and of legal process for getting things done, if you actually find somebody against whom action might legitimately be taken. And so at the end of the day, yes, he does create martyrs. He's a threat to due process. And yeah, he has no regard, so far as I can tell, for abiding by the Constitution, for abiding court orders, and for abiding by the dictates of a system that is a political system and not a corporate structure that he personally owns. 

Zach Weissmueller:  What about you, Liz? Do you have any thoughts on the rule of law question?

Liz Wolfe:  Oh, yes. I think, you know, when people talk about Trump's deportation policy, they so frequently bring up the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, which makes sense. You know, he was basically tarred as a member of MS-13 by multiple members of the Trump administration. He was deported to El Salvador originally. He came to the U.S. illegally in, I believe, 2012. It took him like seven years to actually sort of attempt to seek legal status. And he had, you know, one arrest on his record and the cops basically said he looks gang affiliated. But, you know, then he was able to successfully convince a judge that he had credible fear of persecution from gangs because of his family's successful pupusa business in his own country. And so he was to get a sort of withholding of removal that basically shielded him from being deported back to El Salvador. He married a US citizen He was not, you know, a legal permanent U.S. resident, but he had a child who was an American citizen and a wife. And he was sent to CECOT, to El Salvador's, you know terrible maximum security prison without really getting sufficient trial, without getting the ability to sort of contest the charges against him that he was MS-13 affiliated. And to be able to make the case for why he ought to be to stay, or at least not to be deported back to that place that he had withholding removal from. Most people know of that case, right? Everyone's heard of that. They don't necessarily know the case of Ricardo Prado Vazquez, the Venezuelan migrant who was I think doing like a door dash job or something near the Canada-U.S. Border, took a wrong turn, went over the bridge, attempted to reenter the United States, was detained, was then sent to ICE custody. And then his family hasn't heard from him since then. He was confirmed to be deported from the United States. And the US government appears to have lost track of him. They don't know what happened to him or where he went. There's also, by the way, no indication that he's gang affiliated and his child hasn't heard from him for I think over a month now. You know, you look at the flights of Venezuelans who were deported, not to Venezuela because the Venezuelan government won't accept them, but to El Salvador. And you have these flights of, you know, 238 Venezuelans or like the New York Times did a long investigative feature, basically saying. Are these people the worst of the worst, as the Trump administration claims? Well, if you actually cross-check their records and look through a whole bunch of crime databases in Colombia, in Peru, in El Salvador, in Venezuela, in places where these people might have lived or passed through, you don't actually turn up a lot of evidence that indicates that all 238 of these people are brutal rapists and murderers. There is some number, I think it was roughly two dozen, that do have wrap sheets like that. And then some other fraction have more minor offenses, like much more minor, like stealing something, like petty theft. And then a whole bunch of those people actually don't have a criminal record. Actually, there's no information that links them to Tren de Aragua or any other sort of violent gang. At least to me, the fact that the Trump administration feels so comfortable saying, these people are all rapists and murderers. They're all MS-13, they're all Tren De Aragwa, and they feel comfortable deporting these people. Cutting off contact with their family, cutting off with lawyers, and in some cases, sending them to a maximum security prison where it's totally unclear what their fate will be. I mean, I don't feel good about this. And many people basically say, what did you expect? Did you expect a court date? Did you accept a habeas trial for every single person deported? With the scale of the migrant crisis under Biden, that was always impossible. And I think my response is, well, we're America. And we have certain constitutional guarantees. And it is important to me that our executive follows the orders of different court rulings, including the Supreme Court's ruling, which has said that Trump needs to facilitate the return to the United States of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. We consistently see Trump appointed judges basically slapping down the logic, the justifications that he's using. And look, I'm not saying that it should be a situation where every single migrant who has a sob story or who married a US citizen or who is a father gets total and complete amnesty forever. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that we do have the procedural mechanisms to ensure that people get their day in court and they at least get to contest the allegations against them, or maybe bare minimum, we could just not have members of the Trump administration lying about how violent and how heinous and how gang-affiliated these people actually are. Some of them very much are, and the most violent people absolutely do need to leave our country and be locked up for a long time. But it's important to me to be careful about this. I think anybody who actually cares about justice, who cares about crime, who cares about public safety, owes it to themselves and to other people to be honest and to be very careful with how they sort of sift through evidence. And I just think it's frankly very offensive that the Trump administration hasn't done that. And I worry about what type of precedent that sets. When we ignore due process and when we ignore lower court rulings, what exactly do we become?

Zach Weissmueller:  Well, yeah, that's what I want to ask about, just to elaborate on one thing Liz was saying, and this will be open to anybody, maybe you'll have thoughts on it, JD, is I think that when it comes to thinking about the rights of immigrants, whether it's citizens or permanent residents or just people who are here on a visa, it seems like the kind of thing that is hard to get. Americans, a lot of Americans care about it. I think libertarians are particularly attuned to individual rights, whether it's the rights of an immigrant or, you know, stretching back to 9-11. You know, we were the people saying, like, maybe don't send these quote-unquote suspected terrorists to Guantanamo, or they are going to be hauled away with no rights. And that was not a popular position at the time. I wonder if… Like, do you think that there's any way that is there any way to get people to care about this and think about it in terms and like, should they care about it? Should they think about going beyond affecting this, you know, unpopular group of people known as illegal immigrants?

Liz Wolfe:  Well, my question to them is like, what exactly happens once Trump starts ignoring Supreme Court rulings? Like what actually happens, like truly, I don't think we want to know. I don' t think we wanna find out. And it's just wild to me that so few people have this sense of, you don't have to and you in fact shouldn't have allegiance to the Imperial executive, to any one branch of government, but you should have a respect for the way that checks and balances get to sort of curb the power. Of the executive when it's overreaching in the way that it has. And I am very concerned about what happens when you repeatedly undermine the judiciary. Like, where do we go from there if the Supreme Court can just be completely ignored by an executive that's very power hungry? Sorry, Jared.

J.D. Tuccille:  No, no problem at all. I was going to say, I mean, one of the things, one way to get people perhaps a little more open to the idea, because I know people are not necessarily sympathetic to the courts. When we say due process, they imagine a long, drawn out process and, you know, but fundamental due process. The basis of it is proving an allegation. And a lot of people jump to the ideas, okay, the government's rounding up illegal immigrants who don't have a right to be here. Well, how about asking the government to demonstrate they've got the right people? Because that's the fundamental element of due process, that you actually have the person you claim that you have, that this person actually is an illegal immigrant and not a citizen that you've misidentified or maybe somebody who an ICE agent happens to have his eye on the guy's wife. I mean, we don't know. That's the fundamentals of due processes, proving you have the right person. It's the very first step. And if we can at least get to that point, I think we could work from there. It doesn't necessarily have to be a year-long trial for each and every single person who's accused of being an illegal immigrant. It might just be, how about making the government prove that this person is the person you say it is? You got the right name, and it's actually an illegal emigrant and not a citizen you misidentified.

Liz Wolfe:  Well, this is the really frustrating thing about the degree to which so much of the sort of collective media imagination has been occupied by Kilmar Abrego-Garcia's case. It's like we're all interested in reading the tea leaves to try to ascertain whether or not he is an MS-13 member and like his finger tattoos. What exactly does the marijuana leaf mean? What does President Trump think about that? And it's like, well, in a sense, this was a huge waste of time because when Trump came into office, he had to use Dave's hated phrase, a mandate to crack down on open board, open borders, I put in quotes, but like Biden era rampant immigration, he had mass popular approval for that. And it's a waste of our time to be focused on whether or not the marijuana leaf signifies MS-13, whether or not the skull tattoo signifies that, because the thing that should really matter is, is this person in the country legally? Is there a withholding of removal or not that prevents them from deportation? Are they legally eligible for deportation?" And there's lots of people who absolutely fall under that criteria. So we really don't need to adjudicate whether or not they're Trendy or Agua or MS-13. And I think that our sort of, you know, popular health would actually be very well served by coming up with a system of doing that. And I think the Trump administration is being a lot more careful about making sure they're not tarring and feathering people who don't really deserve that. Like it should be. Enough just to say this person is in the country illegally, you know, we have a mandate to crack down on that type of thing, therefore we are deporting them and we're deporting in sort of like the most reasonable, low cost way possible where they're legitimately released into their home country and that's that. But they're not doing that, right? They're making a show of it and they're being, you know, as cruel as can be. And it strikes me as just like, it's like all this like a pageant, it's the show, it's this entertainment for them.

Zach Weissmueller:  Let me ask about one of the other huge Trump policies of these first hundred days, which Dave brought up earlier, the topic of tariffs. And not only tariffs, but these unilaterally imposed tariffs, which is what has really riled up people like Rand Paul, who's taken a stand against that. We had him on the show to talk about why. We'll link to that. Essentially he thinks it's a wild abuse of executive power, regardless of how you feel about the tariffs themselves. And I think that a lot of libertarians, including me, were very concerned about the Kamala Harris economic agenda. I mean, one of the things I raised as to why I could not vote for her was that one of first and only concrete policy proposals she made was to set price controls on grocery stores. And so, you know, I could never vote for somebody that is economically illiterate, like that's a road to ruin. I would feel horrible about supporting that in any way, in any form whatsoever. But I do think that the markets have been in turmoil because of the kind of unpredictability of this. They're now recovering because Trump has, you know, made this deal with the U.K. and maybe there's more deals to come. Um, but. To me, it's been kind of unilateral, like the president can actually change the entire global economy this way. That's been kind of disturbing. And I think you could make a case that the kind of economic nationalism we're seeing might even be worse than what we would have seen under the Harris administration. Let's start with Dave. What do you think about the tariffs really being the central. And defining features of these first 100 days or so of the Trump administration.

 Dave Smith:  I mean, just the economic illiteracy of it all is just infuriating. And it's like, you know, being as charitable as I can be here, because there is like, I think, a little bit of nuance to this, where, like, the current dynamic with many countries, is that there are countries that the U.S. subsidizes. Like both subsidize their military. We put them under our nuclear umbrella. We give them article five NATO guarantees of like, you know, helping defend them. And then those countries turn around and put tariffs on our products. And that is an outrage. I mean, that is truly appalling. Like that makes me white hot mad. Like someone should be shot over this. Okay, maybe not that, but it's like, it really is like an outrage Now, obviously, the correct answer, I think, from a libertarian perspective is that, well, then we shouldn't be subsidizing these countries and we should not be guaranteeing their protection, particularly like wealthy countries that are in less debt than we are. But okay, look, you could make an argument that, okay, in order to stop doing that, we would have to get this corrupt Congress, you know what I mean, to act and that's impossible to do. And so… Perhaps in theory, you could say that Trump could threaten tariffs against somebody. And if that resulted in them saying, okay, we'll lower our tariffs on you. If you don't come through with this, there could be a way in which you would threaten tariffs that resulted in lower tariffs for everyone. That would be a positive result. Not the problem is that that's not at all what donald trump's doing and that's not but that's also not the way he himself talks about it i mean he talks about tariffs and as if they are a good in and of themselves and that they make people rich and they may and and this is just totally backward you know i saw there was a a great uh… There's so but uh… If you guys are from a bob murphy is a senior fellow at the mises institute you are a really brilliant economist and he's really really great at the like. At things like this. But I remember, so he was reviewing, there was like a tariff versus free trade debate. And the guy who was arguing on behalf of tariffs, he brought up this Lincoln quote, which I'd never heard before. But the Lincoln quote, evidently is Abraham Ringgit said something like, he goes, you know, when we trade with the world, we get the goods, and they get the money. And when we train with ourselves, we keep the goods and the money. And like, it's one of those quotes that's got like a little bit of a ring to it. And you could see where that would maybe like convince someone to go, Oh yeah, you know, we get the goods out of the body and Bob Murphy's response to it, he just goes, uh, he goes, yeah, the first thing Abraham Lincoln did when the civil war broke out was put a blockade around the South. It's like, oh, I guess he was just trying to make sure they kept the goods and the money, right? Like he was trying to help the South. I'm sure that's why Israel has a blockade around Gaza right now. I'm sure why Churchill put a blockage around Nazi Germany, just because we wanted to help him so much. Bill Clinton just wanted to help Saddam Hussein in the 90s, right, because if you think about this, it's like talking about the minimum wage with leftists. What's the limiting principle here? If tariffs are good and they make us rich, well then why are we messing around with these 30-40% tariffs. Let's put 1,000% tariffs on that. Let's just cut off trade with the rest of the world. In fact, let's cut off the trade between the states. I mean, it's good, right? It's gonna, in fact, let's go off trade between you and your neighbor and everyone just has to produce everything on their own. That way, you keep all of the goods and all of the money and we'll all just be trillionaires, I guess. It's like, it's such economic illiteracy and it's infuriating. And then, and you know, the other thing to it, which I find truly remarkable, is such a huge part of the reason why Donald Trump is president again, right up there at the top, it might be the number one reason, is the price inflation during Joe Biden's presidency. And you know, truth be told, Donald Trump himself was very responsible for a lot of that price inflation, maybe not all of it, but it was on Donald Trump's watch that we locked down the country and printed $6 trillion, and that had a little something to do with prices going up in the following years. And, but for Donald Trump to be able to say, like, oh, you know, you have 30 dolls, maybe your kid will have two, as if, like the obvious follow up questions to that aren't like, okay, and what about the kid who's only got two dolls? Oh, they just get none, I guess. But the idea that first of all there's things that are a lot more important than dolls for your kids that the prices of which are going up. But the idea that anyone would, after the last few years, downplay the damage that rising prices does is just, it's disgusting. I mean, and this is a point of the picture where like, social conservatives really need to learn economics. Like social conservatives really need to learn their libertarian lesson because the truth is that it's not just like oh rising prices over here but that's just economic stuff over here like then we have these social issues over here they're all interrelated i mean rising prices destroys families it's the number one reason for divorce is financial stress this is this is what breaks up families this is What leads to little kids growing up without their dad around this is leads to men swallowing pistols this like it is It is a devastating force for working class and poor people when your prices go up. And there's something so elitist about it. Like, you know, like, look, I'm doing pretty well these days. If groceries go up by 30 percent, like I do, I'm annoyed, but it's not like the end of the world for me. But this is something like when you're a family, if you have the median household income in the United States is, I think, like high 70s, like 79 grand a year or something like that.

Speaker 5   Or something like that.

 Dave Smith:  Right around $80,000 a year. Like if you're making the median household income and you have three or four kids and groceries go up by 20% or 30%, it is devastating. It ruins people's lives. And yeah, so it's bad economics and I can't believe that after the last few years, MAGA supporters can talk about rising prices as if it's not a big deal when it is maybe immigration was number one, it depends on which poll you look at, but it was either number one or number two, the reason why Donald Trump is president again.

Zach Weissmueller:  And, you know, there was this hope, I think, that libertarians were going to exert some influence on MAGA. We had people like Vivek Ramaswamy in there, who was calling for this Libertarian Nationalist Alliance, and he was just kind of kicked to the curb. And now, history kind of repeats itself in this way, too. We were talking, when we talked with Vivek on this show, we talked a little bit about. How during the Pat Buchannon run, there was this alliance as well. And then basically Pat Buchannon ended up by the end, he was talking about trade wars, like every single time on the campaign trail. And there was a good retrospective written about this, about why it all fell apart that we can link to. But I'm curious to get Liz's thoughts on the tariffs, because you—you mentioned specifically in your reason to vote for Trump that the economic agenda, like me, you had major concerns. And I'm specifically interested to hear you talk a little bit about what Dave raised at the beginning there, this idea that maybe tariffs as a pure negotiating tool to eliminate. Trade barriers, to force other countries to drop their tariffs, maybe that is defensible.

Liz Wolfe:  Yeah, my sort of Trump theory of mind is that he's, I think, a little smarter than many people give him credit for. And so I am always interested in entertaining the possibility that this is in fact a grand negotiating tactic to attempt to impose really tough trade barriers that can induce other countries to come to the negotiating table and then decide to lower their trade barriers. If that is his goal, he's doing it in kind of an insane way, because for example, it was just announced this morning that the US and the UK have reached a trade deal. Okay, well, it's not like the U.K. was slapping massive tariffs on the United States. And so getting those tariffs removed, if that is in fact what will result, is not some huge win. I'm sorry, that's just pretty negligible. That's pretty minor. And so what he appears to be doing is not getting to an entirely zero tariff, complete free trade future. But something entirely different. And so I always want to like entertain, I don't want TDS to destroy my brain and I want there to always be this ability to say, hmm, is there this like 4D chess move that he is attempting to play and he's looking, you know, seven moves ahead and I'm not understanding that. Like, right, like I'm always interested in that. I'm gonna go full Scott Adams with it, but I think that it is good for people to think in those terms with Donald Trump. That said, it's so clear, you know, what Dave was saying is 100% correct. Trump appears to have this complete and total affinity for tariffs. He seems to be deeply worried about trade deficits just innately by nature of what they are without seeming to understand what they are. And when you look at the approach of his administration, it's very concerning to me, the number of Trump sink offenses, Trump boosters who seem to be. So down with excusing how much havoc this will wreak on the normal American family. And you look at, okay, well, people aren't having enough kids and his administration seems somewhat sympathetic to ideas about how to raise the birth rate. Well, it's not just that there's a bunch of only-tiled American kids out there with 30 dolls, which is intense materialism run amok. It's also big families that are the ones with 30 dollars. When you have eight kids, you have a lot of kid stuff, right? And so the thing that's so frustrating to me is like, he's willing to be so dismissive without understanding that people make lots of very rational choices, given the size of their families and the things that they value. And to act like it's just totally fine for him to basically force them into poverty or into worse living standards than what they've been accustomed to is something that just makes me, it makes me so angry. I was looking at Bari Weiss's tweet. She was excerpting Joe Nocera's work from the Free Press, I don't really know that writer, but she pulled a quote from it, which was, no one anymore on the left or the right denies that globalization has fractured the US, both economically and socially. It has hollowed out once prosperous regions, blah, blah blah, furniture making, car making areas. Okay, I deny that, right? I completely deny that and there's a ton of people who support free trade who can say yes. Globalization and outsourcing and, you know, the decline of manufacturing in the United States has certainly hurt some populations. And there is sort of cultural pain, cultural suffering that happens in those regions. But let's not act like the immense gains from globalization, the immense gain from outsourcing in free trade. Like we can't get into this mindset where we take these things for granted. Because if we do that, we will be in a situation where future generations are poor. Then what we've experienced in our lifetimes. And at least when I think about it, what type of life will my kid have? I don't want poverty for him. I want, you know, the abundance that we've grown accustomed to continue.

 Dave Smith:  Yeah, there's also this weird conflation that goes on that I feel like Bari Weiss is guilty of there, where it's like, what exactly are you talking about when you say globalization? Like, are you're talking about global governance? Are you talking about the World Economic Forum? Are you talking about the IMF and the World Bank? Are you talking about America being an empire? Are you telling about America fighting seven disastrous wars over the last 25 years? Or are you talking about the fact that we trade with the world? And to just put it all on, Like as if that last one is the culprit in all of this. Like look, the truth is that the deindustrialization of America and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs It's like old, like basic, like Frederick Bastiak stuff. Unless you want to argue that we should block out the sun so that the candle makers can do more business, like unless you're arguing that we should like, like it hurts us if people are making stuff for a more affordable price. The reality is that. And this has been kind of the story of the united states of america rate is that like the size and scope of government just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and you go through woodrow wilson instituting the income tax in the central bank uh… FDR instituting a new deal to linden johnston in instituting that the great society to whatever keep going forward to the George W Bush expansions to the Barack Obama expansions the Donald Trump expansions we've now gotten to a point where we're, I think it's $1.3 trillion in interest on the national debt. Like if we balanced our budget, we still run trillion plus deficits every single year. And we can't tax the people enough and we can borrow enough. So we print the money. Essentially the American worker has to carry the American empire on his back. And then as these new industries aren't coming in to replace the old industries, and now when you don't have a system where like a young guy could get out of high school and get a job where he can support a family we're supposed to sit here and blame the Chinese for producing stuff for us and not look at Washington DC and how much they've robbed from the American people and so like when you talk about globalization yeah I'm an anti-globalist in a lot of senses but not in the sense that we shouldn't trade with the rest of the world It's just the most ridiculous

Liz Wolfe:  Oh, go ahead, Jerry.

J.D. Tuccille:  I was just going to say, globalism has just become a bogeyman, for it represents whatever imagined wrongs are in people's heads about engaging with the world or about elites or about whatever it is that's bugging them and how they think the world has gone wrong. But the economic policy, the bad economic policy that has been the response of this has made that much worse, where it's the result not of, say, legislators arguing at coming to bad conclusions, but to the whims of one president. And this is what we're seeing now, I think, is the latest culmination. And unfortunately, it's not the end state, but the latest combination of turning the presidency into an elective monarchy, which we saw, I mean, four years ago, we were talking about Biden having set a new record for the issuance of executive orders, executive actions. Now Trump is invoking these tariffs, to impose these tariffs a 1977 emergency law. It was a bad idea then. People warned it would be misused by presidents. And it can be invoked simply by using the word emergency in an executive order. That's exactly what Trump did. So this is whim driven and it's so bad because it's one person's idea of what a tariff should look like when he wants to engage the entire world, bend the entire word to his will. And what we're seeing in this is kind of like the latest culmination of all the warnings about turning the presidency into a monarchy. And it's gotten as bad as it's been with Trump. And yet wondering how much worse it can get from here, but I'll bet it can actually get worse.

Liz Wolfe:  Yeah, and whether it's mourning the sort of decline of manufacturing in the Rust Belt or the decline of agriculture in the Midwest, the thing that's really frustrating to me about the Trump view of the world, and I guess some of the views proffered over by the free press, is that there's just this sense That the US economy is or ought to be static, not this dynamic ever-changing force. And it's like, as we gain the ability to industrialize further and to outsource more things, it is important and necessary and just a normal natural part of growth for industries to shift and for some industries to become defunct. And that's not, you know, like I go to Noleda, Manhattan today, and guess what? It's not all, you know, shirt-waist factors, right? Like, they're not- producing, it's not textile factories, they're not producing garments, right? The garment district no longer does that. That's not something that I lose a bunch of sleep over. And I understand part of the reason we're able to feel good about that is because so much time has passed, whereas with hollowed out, you know, areas with the decline of the Rust Belt, less time has passed. And we're seeing legitimately awful situations where there's lots of deaths of despair and people who are struggling to figure out how to transform their economy and help But it's really frustrating to me that people, I guess like Bari Weiss or folks at the Free Press seem to believe that it's the central planners that ought to sort of like deliver salvation to these people versus the fact that economies naturally go through these transitions. That doesn't mean that it is not very, very hard for the people who incur the cost, but the only thing to do is to continue to embrace a dynamic sense of what is to come. Central planners just can't save you from some of these hardships. I think it's important for libertarians and free marketers to not dismiss these hardships, right? If men are drinking themselves to death and killing themselves because they no longer have dignified work, that's something that as a fellow American, I'm very disturbed by. I'm very worried about that. I just really don't take that lightly. But at the same time, that can't be a reason to reject globalization and to force all Americans everywhere to cut their ability to buy things from other parts of the world. Like that's a crazy logical leap.

 Dave Smith:  It's a very, a really, really important point, particularly for libertarians to really understand that it's like, it's not, it, it it's like in the same sense as like when Bernie Sanders is pointing out the insanely high healthcare costs and then advocating for universal healthcare. It's like don't, don't downplay the fact that there is a real problem with what he's talking about, just the fact that he's advocating for the worst solution, you know, doesn't mean that there isn't. And I'll tell you, I mean, I know people who like, I know this one like younger couple or like on my wife's side of our family. And they probably, they both work incredibly hard. Um, they're probably make a hundred grand a year between the two of them. I think he makes around 70 and she makes around 30 grand a year or something like that. And, you know, I was talking to him recently and it's like, dude, he's like, how am I ever going to buy a house? The houses around here in the good neighborhoods are going for 900 grand. How does anyone who makes 100 grand a year buy a $900,000 house? I mean, it's just like, and the thing about it is, is that again, what people are missing is they're going, okay, look, there was a time, and this is true, like in my grandfather's day, you literally could go wait online and then get a job at a factory and you could support a family off of that. My grandfather owned his own house, he worked at a factory his whole life. He owned his house, his wife didn't work, they had two cars, they sent two kids to college. Now, you can't do that anymore, but the thing is that it's all about the money. I mean, it's like even sometimes you'll see, Zach, I think me and you might've talked about this once, but you'll like even those leftists will have the charts of like when the working class stopped being able to afford all this stuff. And it always starts in the early 70s. Yeah, it was always in 1971. And then they're always like, well, what happened? What happened? It's like, yeah, we went off the gold standard and like there's other government policies too, specifically that have kept the pricing of housing and the pricing of college and the price of healthcare, like, you know, ridiculously high. But the real essence of the problem is that we've destroyed the currency. And that, and so it's just, it's a shame that, which is very typical, I think, for statist solutions. That 's like, you just blame the wrong culprit and then the recommendation is more big government directed at that.

Zach Weissmueller:  I think that and the sort of devaluing the currency in this way, the effect often has been to force people to find other avenues to put their savings in so they don't lose all the value over time. And that has created a very distorted real estate market, for instance. We showed this chart that we can put up later. Of, we showed this when we were talking with Batya Ungar-Sargon and it's like there's these goods like housing and college and other extremely regulated goods that have gone up since that era and all the goods that are just produced in the marketplace, electronics, computers, entertainment, clothing, all this stuff has gone down over that time. So I think that tells you something too. And even…

 Dave Smith:  And even, even the best example of it is that even things like in the industries that are going up, so like there are the ones that aren't regulated and are left to the market. So you can get the equivalent of a college education for free online. We've made it literally free, but that doesn't work, and then the best examples of this are always up because in medicine it's laser eye surgery and cosmetic surgery. Are the ones that are not covered by insurance. There's no government regulation. And when it comes to things like LASIK surgery and boob jobs, they do them better and cheaper than ever before. You know, I'm not a big fan of the second, but the first one's great.

Zach Weissmueller:  Well, you've got to get LASIK to be able to see the boob job properly. That's, uh, it works. Yeah. Well, there you go.

Liz Wolfe:  It's not the way they're doing them these days, Zach. But it is. No, I do think that that's such a wild thing about America. It's like, you can't find housing stock that you actually want to live in, nor can you find housing supply that you can actually afford. But the thing that you can get for a lower price now than ever is the boobs of your dreams, right? It's a very frustrating thing, but I think it's more evidence for the sort of a thesis, which of course we believe the libertarians were always right, which is like- you get some of these absolutely awful middlemen, AKA insurers, out of the healthcare industry and you introduce pricing transparency, and suddenly you have much better results. And in the housing market, it's like you have all of these awful regulations that signify the ability to build new housing, and then we shouldn't be shocked when we end up having these cities that people want to live in but can't actually afford to make work. Like it's, it really, the compound interest of our choices for the last few decades have led us to a place that we don't want.

Zach Weissmueller:  To Dave's larger point, yes, it's important to really zoom in on what the actual problems are and not conflate it all as either globalism or the entire middle class is blown out. Even that is not exactly true. It's just that these certain really important goods, like housing and education and health care, have gone up. And that has made just being a middle class person harder even if wages per se have not gone down over time. So we need to fix those problems and not kind of you know throw back to Like FDR style unionism or something like that, but I want to bring a time frame. Yeah Sorry, go ahead. Jerry.

J.D. Tuccille:  As I was saying, the time frame Dave was talking about, 1971 going, finally going fully off the gold standard. It's about the same time the EPA was created too. And since the 50s, coming through this time, we've seen we've gone from 5% of jobs requiring a license to 25% to 30% requiring a license. So the 70s particularly saw a huge escalation in regulation of a lot of things. And the last time I looked, about 25% of the cost of building a house was regulatory. And it also extends the time period. Plus, if you can't cross the state line, because that means you gotta sit for another test in order to practice your trade again, it makes it harder. You're stuck in the same housing market. So a lot of what we're looking at in terms of why it's easier to get a boom job or less expensive now than it is to buy an affordable house has to do with the fact that we've regulated everything in the name of safety into being out of reach financially for the average American.

Liz Wolfe:  But if we didn't have an old vaccine, how would we have a vaccine mandate? This question is very important, thanks.

Dave Smith: And also just the fact which which kind of ties back to this, you know Donald Trump's comment about you know buying 30 dolls or whatever but and and it ties into what you were saying Zach to just that. Like look, the consumption-based economy is a total creation of the central government, and they explicitly say that this is what the goal is, is to drive consumption, to drive demand. That's always their concern with every giant spending bell. They always say that we have to increase demand, and then you get into this game where you but like which is always the nature of government is the worst part in some ways of government is that you think always incentivize the bad behavior and deep dick disincentivize the good behavior and so you you you know you incentivize consumption when you have a currency that's losing values and union you punish people who save who actually looks around at the united states of america and goes you know the real problem here is we have too much savings and not enough Consumption. And so again, this is, it's a government created problem through and through.

Zach Weissmueller: And I think it's important to note that this is not unique to Trump, but this is the continuing attitude and ideology of Trumpism is that all he's doing when he talks about the Federal Reserve, for instance, is like, we need to kick Jerome Powell out so that we can get someone who's going to slash rates at my behest. So, Trump wants to keep using these tricks to juice consumption. Yeah, until we get someone who kind of wakes people up to that, none of those problems are going to be fixed. I want to bring us to two final topics, one for JD and one for Dave, because they're areas that I think were important motivators for libertarians to get behind Trump, or at least have some enthusiasm for him. And one was his alliance with Elon Musk and the whole DOGE project, that's something that I was shared Liz's excitement about early on, even though I didn't vote for him, I was optimistic about it because it was the first time that I can remember that anyone in the federal government was actually talking about cutting spending and seemed at least like rhetorically serious about it. And like Elon Musk is the kind of person who can make crazy things happen. So if anyone's going to do it. It would have been him. He's now stepping down from Doge, which will wind down in July. The estimate is, you know, he came in saying he was aiming to cut two trillion. It's gonna be about 85% lower than that at best. And even those estimates are. Not much has been released. So we don't really know how much they've cut. Nonetheless, I am curious, JD, what are your reflections on the DOGE moment?

J.D. Tuccille: DOGE was the most promising part of Trump's later campaign and the incoming Trump administration. If it doesn't get better from here, if it does not fulfill expectations in a more wholesome way from here, it's also going to be one of the greater failures of this administration. The fact is, the government is metastasized. I mean, I talked about the effects of government regulation on, um… Science, technology, and housing costs we were discussing earlier, but also the bloating of the administrative state and creating these jobs creates built-in clientele for government, for a larger government. I mean, you have large bureaucracies that know they don't only get in the way of what we want to do with our daily lives, they interfere with our education, our ability to buy homes, our abilities to create businesses, but they also hire hundreds upon thousands and then millions. We were up to, let's count them, 3 million federal employees. 3 million people who are invested in seeing a large, expensive, and powerful federal government because it gives them something to do and it gives a paycheck at the end of the day. It creates clients of that large state. So DOGE is important, or at least it was promising, and its mission is important. And its disappointments so far are huge because of that. Because I don't know that we're going to get another chance before we kind of go off of that fiscal cliff that's approaching faster. Where the national deficit, the national debt gets so unmanageable that the world realizes it can no longer loan the U.S. Government money, the dollar starts losing value and the economy tanks as a result. So the doge is gonna be huge, it's as promising as it was, it's a huge disappointment so far, and especially so because its mission was necessary and it's so important.

Zach Weissmueller: I'm going to take this moment just to kind of selfishly promote a video essay that I did about DOGE just because it sort of draws on a book that Milton Friedman wrote amidst the Reagan administration because he was disappointed at the kind of shortcomings of the Reagan Revolution. And I think that if the right person looks at what fell short with DOGE and looks at what happened back then. You know that I have some hope that there is a blueprint that has not yet been tried. But I'll just leave that there and ask dave about a little bit about foreign policy because um That's one of your that's your one of you're top issues and it's something that I think everyone should put at the top of the list when they're considering a presidential uh candidate Um where we stand now is obviously trump and vance had their dramatic confrontation with zelensky Now it looks like there's a minerals deal in the works, where America gets to mine rare earths and I guess have some skin in the game for Ukraine going forward. They don't get a security guarantee. A ceasefire with Russia has not happened. Meanwhile, Israel has a pretty free hand in the Middle East, though Trump recently said he's gonna stop bombing the Houthis, who've agreed not to attack our ships. And that was to the apparent surprise of Israel. So what is your take or reaction to Trump's foreign policy so far?

Dave Smith: Well, you know, like a lot of things about Donald Trump, it's all over the place. And so there's not exactly one answer. I mean, I think that, you know, so just doing Ukraine first, I mean I do think his… His posture has been an improvement over the Joe Biden posture of like, we're going to arm them till the end. I mean, if you can remember back a couple years ago, there was just this ridiculous, as is always the case in D.C., these ridiculous, completely unattainable. End goals of the conflict. Nancy Pelosi said we have to fund them until Ukraine takes back Crimea and like nobody thinks that that is even plausibly going to happen. No one who knows anything thinks there's any chance that that's going to happen. And so, you know, it's kind of like setting the goal of life as soon as possible. Jeffersonian Republicanism sweeps the Middle East, then we can bring our troops out. It's just, it's a recipe for a forever war. I think the mineral deals thing is just terrible. I was hoping after that confrontation in the White House that maybe that would've snapped Donald Trump out of wanting to do this. I mean, the way he's selling it is, hey, it's kind of good for America. Except it's really not. There's really not that much rare earth minerals in Ukraine. It's not going to move the needle at all for America economically. And then he's kind of selling it like it kind of is a security guarantee for the Ukrainians, like maybe the Russians won't want to mess with you if you're in business with us. But again, the problem is this is the whole reason why the war started in the first place. And the one thing that Donald Trump got right was saying that we shouldn't be a part of it. If we are a part of it, we should be trying to negotiate an end to it. And that's it. I do think, you know, like Donald Trump does seem to want to negotiate an end to the war. And I think right now the obstacle to that is Vladimir Putin. And unfortunately, it's kind of like, we emptied all of our bullets and now we really have no leverage over him to not just take what he wants on his way out here. Um, so. I don't know, there's been some good and some bad on that. As far as the Middle East stuff, again, I mean, Donald Trump came in and right away through his envoy, Witkoff, he was able to negotiate a ceasefire. I don't think anyone else except Donald Trump was going to do that. Joe Biden expressed interest in wanting this exact result. It was the same proposal that had been on the table since May of 2024, and Joe Biden couldn't get it done and Donald Trump did. Now the ceasefire didn't make it out of phase one, but there were, I think, 20 hostages returned in that first phase of the ceasefire, and so those are 20 human beings' lives who were saved as a result of the thing, and that's nothing to downplay. Um, again… Like Liz said, I don't want to have TDS, you know? And so you don't wanna overreact to the things he says but doesn't do, but even just floating out plans of the U.S. Taking over the Gaza Strip and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out and never letting them return, this is just absolute madness. And look, I will say right now, I think things are substantially better than they were. Three or four weeks ago, where it really did look like we were about to go to war with Iran. And in fact, Netanyahu even drew up the plans and presented them that involved Israeli and American strikes on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program. And I do think that would draw us into a war. Donald Trump pulled the plug on that and is now in negotiations with Iran. He, as you mentioned there, said they've come to a deal with the Houthis where we'll stop bombing them if they stop attacking our ships, even though they only attacked our ships after we bombed. Regardless of that, I think that, um, I think Donald Trump is, you know, it's like he walks us up to the cliff and then walks away from the cliff. And then his fans go, oh, look at the 4D chest to get us away from that cliff. And it's like, yeah, but you could have just not walked there, man. Like there was no, we're right back where we started. The truth is Donald Trump never should have torn up the Iran deal that Obama was able to negotiate. And now he's back at the table with them, essentially trying to get a new inspections regime that we already had, but he tore it up because the Adelsons told them to, and it had Obama's name on it. I mean, not even technically, but in the public mind it did. So, you know, I will say the one thing which I've said on my show a few times, but war with Iran really is the one that I see as a likely possibility, where I will say I made a mistake in voting for Donald Trump and apologize for that for the rest of my life. 

Zach Weissmueller: Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Dave Smith: Yes, it would be truly horrible for humanity if I had to apologize.

Zach Weissmueller: Also, the worst thing about going to war with the right. Um, well, we look, we've covered a lot in this hour and 15 minutes. Um, I appreciate it. Uh, I want to wrap it all up with kind of just a big picture lightning round from each of you, what are the best and worst aspects of these first hundred or so days of the Trump administration, and we'll start with Liz and then JD and Dave.

Liz Wolfe: Best or worst first.

Zach Weissmueller: Whichever.

Liz Wolfe: Okay, I think the worst is that when the Supreme Court ruled on April 10th that the Trump administration legally needed to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia to stand for a hearing, the Trump administration has so far just ignored the Supreme court's order. That was a unanimous ruling. It was on pretty procedural grounds. It was pretty narrow, but it was clear. The fact that they ignored that really bothers me. Um. And the thing that makes it all the more frustrating is that four days later, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele was in the Oval Office sitting down with President Trump, and they were having a chummy good time, you know, boring out. And to me, that shows that the Trump administration very much could facilitate the return of Kilmar-Abrigo-Garcia if they wanted to, but they won't. And I'm really concerned about flouting the Supreme Court's rule like that, ruling like that. I think the best thing is, and this isn't exactly a first 100 days thing, I think the very best thing is the West Alabama Women's Center, which used to be the sole abortion provider in that portion of the state. And now it gives out gear for expecting moms, and it gives out ultrasounds at it, or conducts ultrasounds. It dispenses all kinds of medical advice to women who are expecting, who are very, very poor. And, you know, obviously that's a relic of Trump appointing more conservative justices during his first term, who then, in 2022, in the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, which had been the law of the land for so many years in this country, effectively returning abortion to be a state by state issue. But at least for me, I mean, I look at these things take a long time to sort of percolate and to have an actual impact on the culture. I'm not really interested in, you know, incarcerating a bunch of women for aborting children. But the thing that I am really, really interested in is creating a culture of life and ensuring that more and more poor women have the ability to actually give their children a dignified existence. The fact that this abortion clinic has completely transformed its mission to be one that is legitimately pro-life is to me a sign that some of the fruits that the seeds that Trump planted in his first term are years and years later actually really coming to bear something very good. And I'm curious about all the other ways the sort of pro-family ethos of the Trump administration might plant seeds now that bear fruit later

J.D. Tuccille: Interesting JD At the best of this administration, I think is Trump's disrespect for the political class his um his disdain for the established, uh, you know established bureaucrats and politicians and the way things are done His willingness to consider eliminating whole agencies and even departments, uh you know not treating them as if they're uh relics handed handed down from ancient times. They must be maintained at all costs. I like him basically treating the government as something that can change, and its denizens as people who are just not necessarily deserving of great respect or being treated as an elevated class. The worst aspect of Trump is how everything he does is so damn hard to win. Whatever is under his skin that day, whatever grievance he has been nursing for the last 20 years, whatever notion has been in the back of his mind. Becomes the most important thing that he has to achieve. And unfortunately, he inhabits a presidency that has the power to actually enact a lot of what he wants to see done. He's a living embodiment of all the warnings of the imperial presidency. Kind of, not necessarily the worst person, I mean, we could have a true psychopath in there, but kind of a warning of the worst person who could inhabit that office at a time when it has way, way too much power. So that's what I would say about that.

Zach Weissmueller: Great, thank you. Dave?

Dave Smith: Yeah. Well, I mean, just to, I, I agree with what, uh, with what JD said. And it's not, it's not just that Donald Trump has such contempt for the political establishment and the corporate media, but it's also that the American people sent him back to them cause we hate them so much. And that really is the best thing about Donald Trump. And look, man, like, um, you know, Zach, as you know well, like I'm the Rothbardian, the whole litmus test is do you hate the state? And there's a reason for that. I mean, the way I look at it like this, like over the, you know, you know there's, a lot made of like conspiracy theorists online and stuff. And sometimes there are some goofy conspiracies, but like real conspiracies that actually happened, just say over the last 25 years, the American people have been lied into, knowingly lied into multiple disastrous wars. The government made a virus that ended up killing millions of people, and then they used it as an excuse to lock down the institute totalitarian lockdowns while covering up the fact that they were funding the lab that made the thing, and they knew it and covered it up anyway. They also framed the current sitting president last time he was in for treason. Intentionally the CIA and FBI knew he was not a Russian spy and still intentionally framed him for being one. Oh, and also there's a giant pedophile ring that the highest levels of government covered up. Like all of that is real. And then Donald Trump. He brings in this team of people like tulsi gabbard and down bungee now and bobby kennedy and uh… Kash Patel and Donald Trump himself all these guys have essentially made names for themselves calling out these crimes committed by the government and now they're in and there is no movement happening to hold anybody accountable. You know, for all of the talk from the corporate media of the big threat of Donald Trump is that he could weaponize the justice system as they're weaponizing the justice system. He's not doing any of it. And all of those guys in there are not doing it too. So I think that in a weird way sums up what I think the best and worst things about the Trump administration are.

Zach Weissmueller: Thank you, Dave, and thank you all three of you are great models of how you can vote for somebody and not become a mindless partisan. So I really appreciate the kind of, you know, detached analytical take on all of this. It's been really interesting hearing all your perspectives and reflections on it. I'm not gonna ask Liz and Dave the final question of the show because they've been asked before. But I do wanna ask JD the final question that we ask all of our Just Asking Questions guests. What is the question JD that you think more people should be asking?

J.D. Tuccille: Is this government necessary? Do we need this? I mean, whether it's in its current form or at all, I mean I really think we ought to be rethinking fundamentals right down to the base. 

Zach Weissmueller: That's one of the all-time great just asking questions, final question. Thank you, JD. Thank you Liz, and thank you Dave Smith. 

Liz Wolfe: Thank all of you for helping my stone thought become reality. 

J.D. Tuccille: Thanks for doing this. 

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

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