Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and billionaire Ray Dallio says the US is turning into an autocratic state.

We have such a great show for you today, Think like an economist.

Justin Wolfer stops by to talk about the latest in Trump's tarafors.

Then we'll talk to doctor Abdul l said about his run for the Senate in Michigan.

But first, here are the stories the media is missing.

Savali.

There was hundreds of workers over billionaires Labor Day rallies, and you know what, that is music to my ears because that's what I think the movement should be built on.

Again another case of massive protests not covered by the mainstream media.

We keep seeing this again and again, massive protests, town halls, filled with angry people, horrible polling for Donald Trump, and we don't see it in the mainstream media.

We don't see any of those stories reflect in the mainstream media.

Now there's a question whether or not there's some anxiety about reporting some of this stuff, like maybe it's hard to track down, but like people standing in the middle of their towns waving signs that should not be so hard to cover Labor Day's day about labor or in and what better place to focus on during that day than Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has been really catapulted into the national spotlight because of Trump's use of ice in the city and now the city again is in Trump's crosshairs because he wants to federalize it.

He denounced Trump's threat to deploy federal troops to the city as part of an immigration crepdown.

He said, no federal troops in the city of Chicago.

At the workers over Billionaire's demonstration in Chicago's Westloop, Johnson added, We're going to defend our democracy.

We're going to protect the humanity of every single person in the city of Chicago.

Go Over the weekend, I interviewed kat Abba Guzala, and she's running for a seat in Chicago, and she talked about just how aggressive ice has gotten in their city.

As someone who lives in a city New York City, haven't seen that but in New York, and so my hope is that he's not doing it in New York.

But I do have a sense that they're trying to do it in all of the Blue cities to make us all really scared and uncomfortable, and also to her people, and also to deport people who've been in this country for years and years and years.

Look, this is going to be the beginning of a lot of protests.

People are not happy.

And these demonstrations took place in New York, Houston, Washington, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Ohio, Greensboro.

When people are mad, they protest.

We saw this in Trump's first administration.

We're going to see this again.

So by Trump is really really losing a court this week.

A judge ruled this morning that Trump illegally deployed National guardens to Los Angeles.

Yeah, Posse comma Tatis Act.

Look is this was always the thing.

The law, like with so many things Trump is trying to do, the law says you can't do this stuff.

And here we have a US District Court Judge Charles Bryer in San Francisco, fifty two page filing.

So not lightly.

In short, defendants violated the Posse Commatatis Act.

And by the way, all of the Supreme Court experts we talked to said the very same thing.

Sending troops on the ground is a violation of an act which says we don't use troops on our people.

This is the difference between a free country and a military dictatorship.

Now again we get to a moment, as with many moments in this political moment, where Trump now it's illegal, they can't do it.

That doesn't mean they won't.

And that is where we are right now.

Again, in a world with a Supreme Court that wasn't completely in the tank, you would say, well, the Supreme Court is not going to allow this.

But because they made Donald Trump mango god king with the immunity ruling, we really don't know what's going to happen.

But we do know, and I think it's important for us to remember that there is the law and this administration pretty much breaks it on the regular And maybe that's okay for now, but at some point the bill will come to and the American people will decide are we a lawless country where we allow people to break the law or are we not?

And I think ultimately, and I don't know when this happens, if it's two years or five years, or fifteen years or twenty years, but at some point, it's a big country.

It's been a democracy for a long time, and at some point we're going to have to have a reconciliation here about what it means to follow the law.

I don't know when that happens.

So this is more legal challenges I'm sure the Trump administration, and we'll run it up to the Supreme Court.

And again, at some point the Supreme Court is going to stop rubber stamping things.

Or maybe they're not, and maybe you know, they just like the Republicans in Congress, become completely irrelevant.

Yeah, that sounds right.

So Trump also, many people missed this.

On Friday, right before the holiday weekend, court struck down his tariffs and boy they are as the kids say, big Matt.

So the tariffs are allowed to be in place for forty five more days.

But there's a great Peter Navarro quote, America.

It's the end of America.

So we have the highest tariffs of any developed nation.

We are alienating China, Russia, those would be the ones that you kind of want to alienate, but driving into their arms India and Canada and Mexico and Europe, and basically we are becoming parias in the world.

And this may not even be legal.

In fact, it probably isn't legal.

In fact, the Emergency Powers Act that Trump is using does not once use the word tariffs, which is kind of something to think about.

So look this again, like with all of these other court cases, will likely go to the Supreme Court.

I just want to specify one thing about this, and I think I've talked about it before, but the other side of this case, simplify, is the Koch brother I think we talked this about this on the last episode.

Actually the Koch brother and a lot of really evil Republican donors.

So this is a case where if the Supreme Court will have to decide whether or not they're going to go against Leonard Leo.

I think Leonard Leo is involved in this.

Are they going to go against their donors or their god king.

You know, it's a very difficult decision for them, and I personally look forward to them really struggling with this.

But you know, the rich Republican donors don't want tariffs and rich insane president does.

So you know, it's anybody's guess how this goes.

By the way, I just want to play the tape for a minute.

Say the Supreme Court is like, no, you have no legal powers for tariffs.

They have to come off Okay, say that happens, which I think is the best case scenario for all of us.

Even if they do that, even if they're like, okay, the Supreme Court, and then you have to assume that the Trump administration is going to be like, oh guy, the Supreme Court is right, let's not do the tariffs, which again we have never seen Trump world ever.

I mean, they might back down, but it's hard for me to imagine they back down on this.

But even if those two things happened, which would be kind of extraordinary, you would still have the question of lowering the rates of things.

And I'm not convinced, like this is the problem with trade wars.

Things get more and more expensive.

I'm not convinced that things get cheaper when the trade war is over.

I've not heard a single person say how that.

Could happen, And in fact, we've interviewed people who have said that it's very hard to get prices down after a trade war.

So I do see a real world in which Trump cooks us up into something real bad, changes his mind at the last minute because he sees the wreckage that it's caused, and then is unable to reverse.

It always makes me think of that meme that's like the I do something stupid, I convince my followers it's good.

I reverse my decision.

I convince my followers that everything is solved, and then it just repeats over.

Yeah and over and over.

Probably fine.

Yeah, that saysn't sound like decline to me.

No, In case you're wondering, decline is a choice.

And a woke construct anyway.

Okay, so, speaking of woke constructs, the Energy Department has a climate report and you'll be shocked to hear it has nothing but errors.

It is totally just done very lazily, probably in between jokes about really really stupid things that are the Republicans discuss.

Yeah, so you're going to be shocked to hear that this crew is bad at things pretty much everything.

So this is not our best and our brightest.

This is our dumbest and our worst.

And they are publishing things like they had a climate report and it is filled with errors, and you know, look, this is all you know, these people don't understand science, and they are making a gamble that climate change won't create that it's some kind of liberal fallacy, and that's not how it is, and there are lots and lots of scientists who know the truth.

I think it's worth realizing, like, this is a war on elites, this is a war on expertise, This is a war on science, This is a war on education and all of the kind of things that we hold dearest.

That's why they are against science and against progress and against all the things you know that we cherish and believe to be true.

This is going to all end in tears, all right.

Justin Wolfers is the host of The Thing Like an Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan.

Justin Wolfers, Welcome to Fast Politics.

And Fast Economics malade.

So I want you to talk us through tariffs.

I was told that trade wars are good and easy to win.

We now have the highest tariffs of any developed country right in the world.

And it's not even close.

And so, Molly, your question actually gets to the foundational mistake at the base of all of this.

When Trump was growing up, other countries had high tariffs.

So when Trump was growing up, he felt we were being screwed, and in some sense we were.

When other countries divert their trade away from US, that hurts them, but it also hurts American exporters.

Subsequently, happened was many decades, and during those decades, basically the entire industrialized world got rid of tariffs.

Now, when I say got rid of tariffs, I should say there's politics and everything.

And so there's an intellectual sense shared by shared never industrialized country that openness to trade is a good thing.

If you can help me and I can help you, well you can both be better off.

Simple as that.

So we had a general agreement on trade and tariffs, and then we had a World Trade Organization.

We had Europe become a trading block, we had North America become a trading block.

We had countries individually just decide that charging Americans more to support dying industries is not a good idea, and they did that in other countries too, And so what happened was we basically had universal agreement that tariffs should be low and close to zero.

And then there was an asterisk, which is what happens is when you get in the room with someone with another foreign leader and say, hey, I want to cut my tariffs that it'll be even better if you do yours too, They'll say I agree, but I got a couple of politically difficult industries in my home country.

So let's like eliminate tariffs everywhere we can, but there'll be a small number of industries like the Canadian dairy industry, the American farmers, the European mountains of butter where the politics are just too hard.

So let's agree we'll get tariffs down to as close to zero as we can everywhere.

But I'll give you a bunch of political carve outs so you can get re elected, and you'll give me a bunch so I can get re elected.

What that means is, on the eve of the Trump trade war, the average tariff right for every industrialized nation was between one and two percent.

And there are a few crazy countries that have poorer countries that are small and run by idiosyncratic leaders.

There's some euphemism there.

Autocrats tend to like tariffs, so there are a few countries that do have tariffs.

But even outside of the industrialized countries, tariffs had their day thereover.

The reason this is central is it the most we could ever have won out of the trade will if initially tariffs were two percent and the lowest they can go as zero percent.

The most we could ever win is very very little, and in fact, getting that very very little, he's going to be hotted in it's worth because these the industries where other countries have strong political interests, it doesn't really matter we fight a trade.

When we lose, American consumers are screwed or we win, are not much changes.

It was asymmetric from the very beginning.

So that I think is a really good point.

And let's talk about asymmetric from the really big from the very beginning.

I would love you to talk about because I feel like I haven't seen a ton of reporting.

I mean, I've seen some reporting on this, but it hasn't I feel like it hasn't captured those guys the way it needs to, probably, which is what is happening with India and tariffs, because it strikes me that what happened here is that Trump got mad at India.

The excuse we heard was that they were buying Russian oil.

I did know there was a sort of scam going where they were buying Russian oil, processing it and then selling it so that Russia could get around some of the terraffing, etc.

But whatever happened now the net net is we had pictures of Mody with g and also putin, which strikes me as probably not the ideal situation.

I mean, one thing is men don't hug in public enough.

And I thought they were showing tremendous leadership, tremendous and just a whole new masculinity.

And if we mention we want our autocrats soft and fuzzy.

We want all our men to be comfortable cuddling in public.

What I would like is, if we get a foreign policy right, I want our cuddler over there, I would love.

I think President Trump doesn't cuddle enough in public either.

He does a whole lot of extraordinarily camp things, right, but not Hugen dancing to Ymca.

I'm just talking about camp.

I'm talking about just a modern, comfortable masculinity.

So our tariffs suppose, here's my question.

Our tariff supposed to drive business to other countries in a way that cuts us out of the international world order?

Is that how it's supposed.

To go on?

Now, Well, if you were asking me, if America disengaged from the rest of the world, would other people go looking for friends elsewhere?

It seems blindingly obvious the answer is yes.

Does, doesn't it.

And so as a matter of foreign policy, maybe our tariffs on China hurt the Chinese people.

But the fact that we have punitive tariffs, without direction, without predictability, that not only are they punitive, I think people really really misunderstand or fail to see the president comedy and he's a very funny man, actually has very real consequences.

Yeah, my brother lives in Canada.

They hate us.

Just talking about my brother, I mean no, no, they hate us.

They hate us, and we have really really alienated Canada and Mexico, like real these shocking and also their economy is already suffering.

This gets me to this next question I have for you, which is, we have these tariffs, right, and we have this situation where the market seems to not have priced in tariffs because they think they're getting a rate cut and the rate cut is enough to boost the market, and so who cares about tariffs?

But it strikes me that all is still not fine in the American economy, and that the fact that stocks are going up while all these other indicators are not and are in fact going in the other direction.

And then we have this and I'd love you to explain to us what is happening with the bond market too, because that seems a bit scary and important.

Yeah.

So it's actually, I think, a very complicated story, but I think you're right to raise it because at one level, frankly, it is embarrassing for liberals.

We say the sky is falling, this is very bad economic policy, yet people want to buy more of American stocks.

So I just want to sort of slow down and work our way through it a little.

The first thing is, you know, I'm not going to go all the stock markets, not the economy on you.

I am, but actually what we should read from stocks is interesting and subtle.

So I'm not going to be one of these people that says ignore the market.

What I'm going to say is listen, but didn't do so in a sophisticated way.

So the one thing that's utterly absolutely true, we are on an unbeaten run that every time Trump leans into trump Ism, imposing more tariffs, firing the BLS Commission, and putting fed independence at risk.

Every time he leans into trump Ism, stocks fall.

It's literally unbeaten.

Since January twentieth, there's not a single day where it's gone the other way.

Every time Trump backs off from trump Ism, stocks rise when he suspends tariffs, when he tells the Chinese that we don't need to cut off all trade, and on and on it goes when the courts rule Trump's tariffs to be illegal every single time.

So what that tells you is the market's judgment is the value of American businesses are lower when the president's instincts are followed.

I think the market's worth following on this.

Why is that Because we're talking about something like tariff's.

If there are benefits for the American economy, they're all downstream of helping American business, and so if they don't even help American business, there's no way we get any of the benefits.

And that happens before we even get to the argument to the benefits to American business exceed the cost to American consumers, and so what we do it's a very very shortcut argument.

Normally in economics we have to think about all the benefits and all the costs, and here I can just say, hey, look, the market seems to think the guys who are meant to benefit actually have the opposite effect.

That's an unbeaten run.

Okay, But how do we then sort out.

So that's true.

Yet at the same time stocks have continued to rise.

What's going on here?

A little bit of it is, there's two Americas.

There's an AI boom, which is seven big companies that are worth an enormous share of the S and P five hundred, and if you look at the rest of the companies, you're seeing less optimism.

That are you still seeing some The other thing worth noting is that Trump passed an enormous corporate tax code.

Now that corporate tax cup means any money big American businesses get make, they get to keep more of it, a lot more of it.

That should have sent stocks to the moon.

It didn't.

Actually, the amount it should have boosted stocks is much larger than the amount of stocks have risen.

Basically, the federal government's just given them a whole bunch more money back.

Of course they're worth more.

We can try and think about in a fairly careful way how much more, And it turns out their value hasn't even risen that much.

So talk to us about the bond market.

What's happening there.

I'm going to do one more thing on the stock market, partly because I'm not sure what's going on in the bond market.

I'm not sure what's on your main money.

Here's because of the difference between the law term and the short I understand.

Yeah.

I want to say one more thing on the stock market.

Okay, stock market is big American companies.

So it's not small companies.

It's not cart ups, it's not you and I, it's not the government sector, it's not lots of things.

As we move to a trumpest form of statism or crony capitalism or interventionist, whatever it is you want to call it, the folks who can look for carveouts, Tim Apple can call the White House and say I want tariffs to be different.

Now, it turns out Apple was founded in the garage by two guys in Silicon Valley.

Right now, there are two guys in a garage in Silicon Valley trying to start the next multi trillion dollar business.

Those guys can't call the White House.

So what this is is an enormous preference for existing large companies over smaller startups.

Now the cost of crony capital So the thing is who gains from crony capitalism, the cronies, who loses everyone else, particularly entrepreneurs are the cronies.

They're the big ones who are in Trump's rolyodics.

He knows how to call and they'll pony up.

It's CBS, for instance, it's it is Apple, and on and on it goes.

So as we shift towards this form of capitalism, the value of big companies can rise even as the value of the rest of the economy falls.

The stock market only reflects the.

Former yields yond yields, right, So.

What's going on with bond yields?

So here's the problem.

When you attack the FED and you say, what I want to do is put a lunatic in, and I want the lunatic to always and everywhere move interest rates to be low.

And I want to do that because I'm a property developer, or because they want to move to what's called fiscal dominance.

That's the word for the day, fiscal dominance.

Fiscal dominance is when monetary policy is set not in trying to smooth the ups and down to the economy, but instead to keep interest rates low so that the government interest payments will be lower.

It works, we pay less, but if you keep interstrates too low for too long, you get high inflation.

So if you want, if I want.

To, we already have inflation ticking up.

We have moderate inflation.

It's higher than it should be.

But that's not the scare story yet, right, right, but.

Right, I know where this is going.

Go on.

You know how exciting it is to be Molly Jong Farce economic advisor.

I am economists to the stars, economics teacher to the stars, and sometimes my stupid star Paul when she's worked through a few financial crises and she ads written for that well known financial magazine Vanity Fair.

And Vogue and known for covering.

You, are the closest I've going to come to.

Vogue is talking to you and doing Can we do this together?

Come on, you can do it all.

Go on to.

Okay, talk about the bond market, girl, bond market market.

I'm only going to talk bond market while you keep voguing.

God damn it.

Okay, all right, it was too distracting for me.

Thanks for stopping mall Okay, So if we go the full trumpest future, which is basically what id On did in Turkey, we point lunatics who could be interest rates too low for too long inflation rises.

You'll notice I use the word if may not happen good news.

Problem is, if I were to borrow money, say take a ten year loan today, the lender knows there's some chance it will happen.

So therefore, already today, even without Trump having destroyed the FED, the lender is weighing the possibility that Trump destroys the FED.

If he does, inflation will be really high, in which case interest rates will be really high, in which case they're only going to be willing to lend me money for ten years if they added an extra premium, Which is the probability Trump destroys things, multiplied by what will happen to interest rates, And realize that when ERDA one did this in Turkey, interest rates went up above ninety percent at some point, or inflation went to eighty six percent.

So a small risk of a catastrophic outcome already right now will add a lot to the interest rate that I get charged.

So that's long term interest rates.

What Trump has managed to do, he's managed to make people convinced he's pro what's called it dove, someone who's in favor of low interest rates, which has led markets to believe interest rates might be a little lower over the next year or two.

But it's led them to worry that on average, across all the possible states of nature, they'll be higher in the future.

So he's lowered some instrates, has raised others.

Which ones matter for business, the long ones.

Your mortgage is a long run interest rate.

Your business loan is a long run interest rate.

If I'm breaking ground on the manufactory, it's a long run interestrate.

So Trump's desire it's a lower interest rates has in fact tustrates.

He's actually undone the very thing he was trying to do.

So I think that's a really a good point, and I wonder if you could just for a minute, it strikes me that there are other ways in which Donald Trump has done that, where he has said he wants something and caused the opposite to happen.

Okay, should I talk about tariffs?

Yeah, I mean tariffs are a great example, right.

I mean it just seems like so the tariffs he wants to bring back American manufacturing.

But the problems we see is like, for example, it's cheaper with certain materials to actually make things somewhere else and import them.

So yeah, tuk us through that.

So there's a huge problem inside the White House.

There's some beliefs that I don't agree with.

Fair Enough, we can disagree on beliefs.

There's ways of thinking about the economy that I disagree with.

I could be wrong, and there's sharing competence.

I'm against that under all conditions.

So if I were talking in a normal country at a normal time about tariffs, I would say, if you put tariffs that are designed to help the manufacturing sector, you will help the manufacturing sector.

And the question is to the benefits to manufacturers offset the cost to everyone else.

But the way we've gone about tariffs breaks every rule in the how to help Manufacturer's handbook, even though that's what they're trying to do.

I'm going to lead with the fact this is a Dallas FED survey where they surveyed Texan manufacturers and they said, what if tariff's done for your business?

Three point seven percent of manufacturers, this is the group that's meant to help, three point seven percent said it had helped.

Something like ninety percent said it that hurt, and a few other and a few others you know, had different effects.

You know, were unsure what the effect was.

So the way they've done it actually fails to do what they were hoping to do.

Well, here's I've got the numbers.

They had a seventy two percent of text and manufacturing firms set tariffs that had a negative impact, seventeen said no impact, seven percent didn't know, and three point seven percent set it that helped.

It would be if you'd said to me justin, I want you to be as incompetent as you can.

I want you to design a set of tariffs that will help a mere three point seven percent of manufacturers, it would have hurt my head.

I would have been, how can I implement tariffs that only help a tiny sliver because it's reducing the competition from abroad.

It does do that, it's hard to do.

And then I would have remembered page one of the tariff handbooks, don't put tariffs on inputs.

And so then I would have said, well, I know what I'll do.

If I really want to hurt American manufacturers, I will put tariffs on steel and aluminium and aluminum as well.

I will put tariffs on chips.

I'll start a trade war.

So the input you want to get from a broader harder to get.

I will make it so Canadians hate us and they don't want to buy any of the stuff that we produce.

Right, this is like they would be our most, our easiest trading partner, closest, easiest.

I will get the rest of the world of likeness.

I will make it so there are a fewer skilled workers for precision manufacturing by chasing away foreign students.

I will take the great engines of innovation and try to shop universities, being of course our universities.

So it's actually a striking accomplishment.

But I actually think it's something we should talk more about.

Not tariffs, not the bond rate, but the extraordinary levels of incompetence, tariffs that are on on Monday and off on Tuesday.

This incompetence is above and beyond any ideological divide.

It means they're not even achieving the right wing goals that they're after.

Thank God, we're out of Prat.

God, because it means not even the region, not even no one wins from stupidity.

So thank you.

Justin Walfer Hers doctor Abdul l Said is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in the state of Michigan and is the former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services for Wayne County, Michigan.

Welcome too fast politics, doctor abdulahs.

Yet, thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate you having here.

You're a doctor, but you are also running for the United States Senate in the great state of Michigan.

It's a primary.

It's a crowded Democratic primary with three candidates.

And I interviewed you this weekend on the Weekend Show when I was filling in, and what I was really struck by was that you have a very clear message about your lane in the Democratic Party.

So would you talk us through what that message is.

Yeah.

I don't know that there's a doctor lane in most Democratic primaries, but I think most Democratic primaries would be better if there was one.

I never grew up thinking I'd be great to run for office.

I actually grew up with a lot of my mentors telling me I should and thinking that's crazy.

Why would I do that.

I have an eleven letter first name that's got sounds that come out of parts of people's throats they.

Usually don't know they have.

And I really wanted to be.

A doctor in large part because of the contrast of my upbringing.

I was raised by my father who's an Egyptian immigrant, and my stepmom, Jackie, who's a daughter of the American Revolution, from like right here in Michigan, literally the middle of the state, and I would get sent off to Egypt often to spend most of my summer with the wisest, most intelligent person I've ever met, who was my grandmother, who never got to go to school.

She was the ninth to fourteen herself.

She gave birth to eight kids, got to raise six because two died before their first birthday.

She had this incredible moral sense, and she always always would impress upon me the fact that I had cousins who are smarter and cousins who are harder working than cousins who did all the right things.

And the thing that I got going for me more than any of the other ones was that I had to go back to America at the end of the summer.

And the crazy thing right was it would take me fifteen hours to get to or from Egypt, and I travel though I didn't have the language for it at the time, about ten years different from life expectancy, and I didn't have to go fifteen hours.

I could go fifteen minutes from where I grew up, just outside the city Detroit, into any neighborhood in the city and travel the same gap.

And the fact that I got all those opportunities that even my grandmother, who'd never been to America at the time, got to understand, and then there were kids whose families had been here far longer than mine who didn't get them is the reason I went into medicine.

And when I realized that the things that were making my patient sick had more to do with there.

They had to breathe the water, they had to drink, the jobs that they had or didn't have, the opportunity to eat healthy food that they had or didn't have the faster.

I realized that I was not long for the world of clinical practice, and I went into public health to do something about that, and rebuilt Detroit's health department to put glasses on kids, to take on corporate polluters, ran Wayne Counties Health Department, the largest, most diverse county in the state, to do things like eliminate medical debt and put a narcan in one hundred locations.

And so I see politics to me as more of a continuation of an answer to the question of why people get sick in the first place.

And once you run up against the political challenges that people face and start asking why do they make decisions like that, you start to question, well, you know, maybe I should, I should put myself in the position to make those same decisions.

And I told you, I grew up telling people I would never run for office.

In fact, I graduated Valtctoria in my class at Michigan and the main speaker who anybody actually went to listen to was Bill Clinton, who after our speeches asked me, you should run for office someday?

Why not?

And I told them about my name.

We Bill chuckled about it.

But I'm finally at a position now where I've I've kind of come to realize that if you're not willing to articulate at the level of our politics, which to me is a conversation about.

Who we are and who we want to be, that ideal of an America.

Centered around the well being of all of its kids, then I just don't know that we're going to be able to take on either Trump or build the kind of America where Trump can't exist in the future.

One of the things that we see a lot and by we I mean me in my second job, which is yelling at Democratic politicians about all the things they're doing wrong.

Which you do so well, Molly.

I really appreciate you doing it.

That's my hobby, by the way.

And all those spokespeople who think they're working me when I'm like, yes, let's have a long conversation about what I feel your boss is doing wrong.

All of those people really hate me.

But one of the things that strip by is that it's very hard to get good people to run for office.

This is a terrible way to live your life.

Like I to be honest with you, like, I've have a two year old and a seven year old, and I don't get to see them most evenings.

And you know, sometimes I think about, like, all right, if I win, I'm going to be in DC four days a week, and when I'm in Michigan, I'm going to be all over the state being the senator and making sure that I'm listening to the folks I serve.

And it doesn't leave much room for the things that, like, you know, make you a person.

And I think there's a lot of folks who do this because at some point they really like the idea of being like listened to because you have a position of power.

I think it would be better off if more of our politics was about the question of what do you want to do with your power?

Rather than do you want to be in power?

Yeah, I often tried to think of what politician I feel the most betrayed by.

Is it a Kirsten Cinema.

Is it a Joe Manchin, is it a you know?

Is it someone who knew the right thing but couldn't get it done.

But it strikes me that in the moment we're in where public health has been so politicized, the really the only solution is to have doctor senators.

And speaking of which, there is a Republican doctor senator who was the designing book for R FK.

Junior.

And I'd love you to talk us through a little little bit about that cowardice and also sort of what you think watching it and what you're feelings are.

Yeah, I got to meet Bill Classidy.

Actually I've testified before the Senate Budget Committee and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions or HELP Committee before, and he was the ranking member on the HELP Committee when I testified on medical debt, and it was fascinating to me.

We were having this conversation about the possibility of abolishing medical debt, which of course nobody comes by because they were making bad decisions.

You know, you don't get medical debt because you've got a Brazilian butt lift.

You get it because you got cancer.

He kept trying to make it about the three P forty B program, which is this obscure program that reimburses for pharmaceuticals and at times gets misused by large hospitals.

But you know, really is is a key lifeline for getting pharmaceuticals to people who need them.

I remember watching him squirm around this question of the RFK appointment because as much as I disagree with his ideals, he and I received very different training.

I'll be in different eras.

But when you go through medical training, there's a very rigorous process by which you are taught to ask and apply an analytical lens to every question you ask.

And it's not just an analytic lens from the position of your brain, like does this make sense, it's also like an analytic place from the position of your caring for the person in front of you.

And I could see he knew he was running in a bus saw And then I also just watched that like flicker of his political future in his eyes, and it was actually quite illuminating to me, because I'm like, what's it worth?

Like, you know, you've already lived the whole career as a doc.

You got elected to the US Senate by the pardnerance of your neighbors in the state of Louisiana, And what's so good about the job that you can't just do or say the thing that is so obviously wrong to you?

And I get that Donald Trump holds that entire party enthrall to him in the most brutal kind of way, But part of me says, like, if you're going to go out on something, maybe as the doctor who got elected to the US Senate, you're going to go out on the idea that we shouldn't appoint a guy who has no business in any legitimate conversation about the public's health overseeing all of the public health infrastructure of this country.

And at the same time, there was a question for me, like I was asking myself, I'm like, how do you when you put yourself in a position like this, how do you protect yourself from that?

Like what is the architecture of your morals or even your mind that keeps you from putting the obvious wrong ahead of the obvious right.

Just to save your political skin.

I just think that maybe part of it is and maybe comes down to this.

Bernie told me something when I ran for office the first time in twenty eighteen.

He's like, you know, in this business, you're either really good at lying or withholding the truth, or you're really good at telling the truth.

And he's like, you don't strike me as a good liar.

I was like, no, I couldn't do to save my life.

So part of me says that the thing that you can do best in this job is to be a really good teller of truth.

I think a little bit about my grandmother and about her leadership and my family, and about her recognition of like the odd moral circumstances in which I was growing up, or like I'm the one of my cousins who gets to have this incredible life and the others who are smarter, more capable than me, you know, drive cabs or work working class jobs in Egypt, and I hope that I can keep that.

But like, there is something corrupting about power.

We know it.

I mean, to your point, I'm trying to get to really like Plummet.

I don't know how we like get.

More folks to see the like moral core of the thing, or to be willing to be really good arbiters of truth, because I think if we were really good arbiters of truth, I think the Democratic Party would be a very very different place.

I think our politics would be in a different place.

It's that we have nobody who's willing to courageously or very few who are willing to courageously tell the truth who get to positions of power to be able to tell it in a real way.

First of all, I want you to talk about, like what the headwinds are you have this primary.

You have two opponents, both women, both they occupy sort of different lanes of the Democratic Party.

If you win this primary, you will go against the Republican.

It's a purple state, but there is definitely you have this sort of very very scary like Michigan militia.

And then it's a state with like a lot of different kinds of people, a lot of different kinds of voters, and a lot of different kinds interests.

First of all, I want to know how you win in Michigan and then I want to know sort of what you envision is a senator, what that.

Would look like.

Yeah, the first thing I'll say is this, I think we have an outdated political lens through which we try to analyze our politics, which tends to be this right left to divide.

And I think in accordance with that lens, you would say, well, Abdul is running further to the quote unquote left, and you would say that other candidates are running either further to the right or somewhere between the two of us.

And I think the proper lens for our politics today that helps explain why a state like Michigan would both support a Bernie Sanders in a primary and then vote for Donald Trump in a general election is more the separation between people who feel locked out of our politics or institutions of power and the people locking them out.

And I think if you understand Michigan that way, I think this race and my entry into it makes a lot more sense.

I'm somebody who, by virtue of just happenstance, got to be in a lot of the rooms that most people who look like me get locked out of, and in so many ways I've sort of looked at what's happening in those rooms and felt just this deep guttural disgust to the way that people are talked about and parsed and thought through.

And I have made my career about trying to unlock a lot of those rooms.

So when I travel my state, and.

I've been to what fifty some cities, I've probably done nearly one hundred public events.

Because when your name's Abdul, you take nothing for granted.

No matter where I go, people tell me the same stuff, like you close your eyes and you could be in a town hall in Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula, or a church in Redford, and people are literally using the same exact words, just that they don't know that they're using the same words.

And So I think that a political movement built around unlocking our system and being one hundred percent honest, clear and direct about the ways the methods of the locking out that happened, the ways that corporations can buy and sell politicians, the ways in which it's corrupted Republicans wholeheartedly, but also unfortunately too many Democrats, The ways that I've rejected that system.

I've never taken a dime of corporate money, both when I ran in twenty eighteen, and when I'm running now, and I see that I'm blocking as being a fundamental core value of what I'm trying to do, I think I'm going to win a lot of voters who otherwise.

Folks would code as quote unquote right wing.

Now, look, are there folks who are going to run it who are going to vote against me because my name is Abdul.

Yes, but let's be clear, they're not voting for any Democrat, right, So if like that's your assessment, I think you're not really paying attention.

But then the other part of it is this think about who Democrats lost in twenty twenty four.

They lost mainly Arabs and Muslims over the disastrous handling of Gaza, and they lost young men over the notion that young men don't feel like they have a place in the party.

I happen to be a younger I can't credibly call myself young anymore, but a younger Arab Muslim man, and I think that that allows for a conversation that Democrats too often have not had.

You couple that with the honesty and the integrity of my message and the fact that I've been saying and doing the same things now for a decade in Michigan politics.

And yes, my name might be Abdul, but like I'm the Abdul who wants to make sure you have healthcare, and the due who wants to make sure you can keep your job and form a union if they're trying to take it away from you.

And I'm the Abdul who's fought against the big corporations who are polluting your kids air, and the Abdul who put a pair of glasses on your kids face, and the Abdul who forgave your medical debt.

Like I think that there's an opportunity here to win both in the primary and the general.

And so you know, maybe as a child of immigrant, like as a hazard of that, like we do math, but like the math maths.

And my job is to have the conversations that other Democrats are not willing to have, because too often they're more interested in the conversations they're having behind closed doors with the corporation that's going to write them a pac check, conversations that I've never had and will never have.

We would love you to talk about the uncommitted movement and just sort of what you tried to do there, and there clearly was and I think a lot of us worried about this failure on the part of elected Democrats running for office to address the situation.

And I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yeah, people see the difference between principles and political position, and I think the difference is whether or not your principles apply in all places in all times, or if they just apply in some places and sometimes, which makes them just political positions.

And I've tried to be principled about the question of where our tax dollars go.

And I think a lot of us watched the just complete dumpster fire of the Biden administration's mishandling of Gaza, and I think it said a lot about his or his administration's capacity to do the job.

And I think the question was, how do we make sure that folks understand the risk of this ahead of the general election?

And so when the Uncommitted movement started to organize, I endorsed it because I think we saw that Joe Biden was not fit for the job in his handling of Gaza.

I think the whole world saw that after his first disastrous debate performance and ultimately who is no longer the nominee.

And for me, the minute that Kamala Harris was announced as the nominee for the party, I endorsed her.

I was the first Arab and or Muslim leader in Michigan to do so.

And the reason I did it and it was not because I agreed with the administration's handling of Gaza, but it was because whether you saw this from the eyes of a child in the city of Detroit whom I served, or the eyes of a child in Gaza, there is no world in which Kamala Harris would not have been better every single day than Donald Trump.

And that to me is again a matter of principle, right, And so you know, I endorsed her.

But here's the hard part.

One of the aspects of that was I would have thought that that would give me some space to have a conversation with the campaign and say, there really needs to be some distance on this issue, because there are a lot of voters for whom this is a non starter and we're seeing the Natan Yahoo administration disregard American public perspective or American political values, and you need to call that out.

And it didn't happen.

And at the same time, I'm on the phone with Arab and Muslim leaders being like, y'ah, this is insane.

Donald Trump tried to like stop people who look like you from coming to this country.

This is ridiculous, and he is going to come after our community again.

Okay, this is crazy, crazy, And unfortunately it was.

You know, you can imagine the frustration of months and months on the phone with these different groups of people and nobody seems to be listening, and you're like caught in the middle, trying to be the arbiter of like just basic logic and conventional wisdom and be like y'all, like can we all recognize what's about to happen here?

And in some respects I think, you know, there are frustrations obviously with the decisions that Arabin Muslim voters made.

I have a lot of those same frustrations.

And at the same time, we were talking about the vice president of the United States, right, Like we're talking about very very powerful people who who made political decisions, and these are political decisions that put them on the wrong side of the empathy anybody should have for dead, dying, maimed children or orphan children and I just it was just a dumpster fire waiting to happen, and it was really truly one of the most frustrating four months of my life.

And so I supported Uncommitted because my principles tell me that we owe a responsibility to our size and our power not to spend our tax dollars writing blank checks to foreign militaries who are dropping bombs on other people's children when we have starving children here at home.

And I endorsed Kamala Harris because I knew that Donald Trump would be worse when it came to those same principles.

Yeah.

No, as someone who was on the Jewish side of that conversation, the same exact thing.

I mean, fancy Jews saying, well, he's better on Israel and me saying a blank check to Israel to kill Palestinian children is good for no One' sound good for Jews, it's not good for Israel, It's not good for anyone.

And it's the same terrible tragedy and now it's just getting one hundred times worse.

So much of this conversation, especially when it comes to Michigan in Dearborn, boils down to a certain like tribalism about this thing.

My position on.

Blank checks to foreign militaries applies to Egypt, where my folks immigrated from.

It applies to Jordan, applies to Pakistan, applies to Saudi Arabia.

I just don't think that we pay our tax dollars so that somebody can send blank checks to another country's million terry.

I think we pay them to invest in our own kids.

Similarly, right, it has been really frustrating to watch anybody, right, whether with good intention or bad intention, equate the actions of a foreign government with the will or the beliefs of Jewish people or the Jewish faith.

And I find any attempt to do that as being essentially anti Semitic.

Similarly right, Like, it'd be a crazy thing off somebody who was like, well, the Egyptian government did this.

So clearly you believe, like no, like what f is that?

Right?

Like?

And so when we do it to anybody, it's wrong.

Similarly right, there are basic principles that all of us have to bring to this.

I condemned Hamas from day one, because anybody who puts children in harm's way is wrong.

No context needed, right, And so what I've always tried to ask is take the same principle and apply them everywhere, independent of your own background, independent of who the actor involved is, apply the same principles everywhere.

And I think if we did a lot more of that, and we had the courage to say what our principles were and apply them evenly, I think that this would be a far less challenging situation.

And in the end, what the issue is is you've got a special interest regime that allows maga billionaires to spend a lot of money to try and tell people what they can and can't say.

And like that's the same issue as we have with pharmaceutical money that comes in and tries to truck you if you talk about Medicare for All or health insurance CEOs or utilities who come in when you try to regulate them.

And we've got to sort of name the process and then also name our principles.

And the contrast between those things, I think is what can actually get us back to a party that maybe can win elections again.

You think the Democratic Party needs new leadership.

Well, I think the Democratic Party needs to remember what its base is about.

Like here's the problem.

There is a fundamental wedge between Democratic Party voters or voters generally, and Democratic Party donors.

We need leadership that is going to pay attention to the voters instead of the donors.

And you see a playout and it's like, we still haven't learned the lesson.

You look at this Gaza resolution at the DNC meeting, you're like, y'all, your base every poll that you have ever seen in the last month or two has shown you that your base disagrees with you on this.

And yet and yet you cannot as a party have the courage to proclaim that you agree with where the base has moved, which, by the way, is a statement of principle about what is happening with our money, and you still can't say it.

And part of me is is like, what are you worried about?

And the hard part to me is this, It's like, there is a certain political economy and incentive set that when you have the luxury suite on the Titanic, you're more interested in keeping the luxury suite on the Titanic than you are and making sure that the Titanic doesn't sink.

And unfortunately, that's kind of how our party feels right now.

Thank you for joining us.

It was my privilege.

I appreciate you having me a moment ou.

Jesse Canon.

So Maali, we previously discussed one of the most stupid performative moronics I've come across in a minute, which is that Oklahoma is going to test teachers from California and New York to make sure that they're America first, and the test is written by Brager, You who now seemed to be the outsource for all things performatively stupid.

Yeah, what did it shocked you to hear that these questions are some of the most ridiculously stupid misinformation I've ever seen.

Who is coming from New York and California to go teach at Oklahoma?

Like?

Who is doing that?

Who's like I need to go to a state where they pay teachers less, where they have less state taxes to pay for things.

I want to go work there because I mean Oklahoma.

You guys couldn't make yourselves any less appealing if you.

Tried, agreed the thing, being though, you'd also have to go.

I want to go here because I want to teach kids absolutely not true facts.

Nobody's doing this.

I mean this is like this crew is so delusional about being a teacher.

It's like their war on federal employees.

They think federal employees are making billions of dollars and they're doing it because they want to help people.

Like it's the idea that somehow wanting to help people is not in the calculate at all.

Yeah.

I almost wish they would go back to the War on Christmas because that one at least had no victims.

Yeah, well it did.

It had victims of me.

I was a victim of the War on Christmas.

I mean, I'm a victim of Christmas music every year and it makes me sad.

Happy Holidays, bitch.

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