The Power Brokers and Palace Intrigue of Trump's Rollercoaster Week, with Stephanie Ruhle

The Dow Jones looks like an EKG chart. The world economy feels like the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the sycophantic administration's policy is more volatile than the Denver Nuggets' front office. But to Stephanie Ruhle — the former banker turned host of MSNBC's The 11th Hour, receiving frantic calls from investors and C-suite execs — the real problem underneath America's tariff turbulence is more fundamental: trust that was gained in droplets is now lost in buckets. Who's suffering the consequences of the art of the deal while Trump and his cronies profiteer from golf tournaments? Probably you. Plus: the dark heart of a Twitter warrior, Stephen A. Smith's tariff strategy...and a basement taco joint with A-Rod and J-Lo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Pablo Torre?

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• 1:28Pablo Torre?

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• 2:13Pablo Torre?

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• 2:58Pablo Torre?

  I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Donald Trump was not a super-successful businessman. What he's super-successful at is politics.

• 3:09Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  You're listening to DraftKings Network.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Is this Alex Rodriguez?

• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  As a centaur, yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  He's a complicated guy.

• 3:33Pablo Torre?

  He is.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  One time, Alex and I, it was a charity day on a trading floor, when like, all their, you know, a piece of their commissions all goes to a charity, so they invite all these people to come. So like, that morning, Alex, I guess, didn't want to show up alone, and he sees me on the list, and he's like, "Oh, hey, you going?" I'm like, "Yeah, yeah." He's like, "Well, let's go in together." So, me, like, the dope that I am, like, sits in my car on a corner for like, 35 minutes. I wait for Alex. He gets there, I see him for a second, then of course, as soon as we walk in, the whole place surrounds him. It's Alex Rodriguez, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They have me, you know, in the corner, holding a watermelon. And I go, I do my thing, and then it's basically over, and I'm like, "Okay, Alex, so, I'm leaving." And Gary Cohn, who used to be the economic advisor to Trump, was also there, and we're both like, "Hey, let's go get lunch."

• 4:18Speaker 02

  So I text Alex, I'm like, "Yo, I'm not going to wait for you, we're going to go get lunch next door." Never thinking he's gonna come meet us. So me and Gary go to this Mexican restaurant, like this dump right next door. It's in a basement and of course, it's just the two of us and he's been living in Washington. So we proceed to order every single thing on the menu, just like human pigs. And Alex texts me, he's like, "Oh, I'mma meet you guys." And I'm assuming he's alone. And so I'm like, "Uh, yeah, we're at this place next door." And all of a sudden, I'm shoveling guacamole in my face. Like, there's burritos, there's tacos, there's everything. And who walks in? Alex with J-Lo, okay? So it's, it's the day after the Met Gala. She is so glowing, she is so beautiful, she's just radiating through the restaurant. The restaurant is like, what in the, like, Jennifer, okay?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  So she sits down, she is so-

• 5:05Pablo Torre?

  She, okay, she sits down.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Okay, she sits down, but she is so repulsed and disgusted by us and this restaurant. Like, she didn't exactly put a napkin down before she sat down, but she might as well have. So the waiters all come over and they're like, "Oh my God, what can we get you? What can we get you?" And I'm just like, "Oh my God." And literally, she's like, "I'll have hot water with lemon." And she just sat there and drank hot water with lemon. As I probably have like taco sauce like pouring down my face. Like, it was just the absolute worst, yeah. She was beautiful and smart and interesting, but it was- My, my notion that like, "Oh my gosh, if I meet some unbelievable superstar, they're gonna wanna make best friends with me," it didn't come true.

• 5:50Pablo Torre?

  I feel like that story is the best possible introductory Mad Lib to who you are.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a sad one for me, but totally true, but totally true.

• 6:22Pablo Torre?

  So the whole reason I am sitting here talking to my friend Stephanie Ruhl, the host of The 11th Hour on MSNBC, is not because we have a coaster in our studio with a photoshopped image of our old friend Alex Rodriguez as a centaur.

• 6:36Pablo Torre?

  Although we do.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, listen, when that's your poster, you thought I was gonna start with Trump? You are incorrect.

• 6:42Pablo Torre?

  The whole reason I called Steph is because in her former life, and this was long before she became the senior business analyst for NBC News, she decided that she wanted to work on Wall Street.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  When I was a student, I was studying in Italy. I wanted to stay living abroad. I had no money left and I thought, oh, I'm gonna go work for a bank. They have banks all over the world. I ended up working for Merrill Lynch.

• 7:02Pablo Torre?

  I'm sorry, your logic was there are lots of banks.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:06Pablo Torre?

  I should work for one of those.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Sure, right? They have banks, they have banks all over the world. Oh, and the other thing I needed, money. I didn't have any and I needed to make a lot of it. I grew up in New Jersey. I wanted to live on the other side of the bridge. And being a New Jersey commuter and taking that ferry boat every day, especially when you take the ferry back at 6:30 at night when you take it back and you see all the girls from New Jersey getting on the ferry to meet the guys downstairs from Merrill Lynch in the World Financial Center at happy hour. I can distinctly remember feeling like, maybe I'd like to meet a guy at a happy hour, but I definitely don't wanna need to meet a guy at happy hour. I'm gonna keep working at this bank.

• 7:46Pablo Torre?

  And she did. She worked there until she eventually joined Credit Suisse, where she then became the highest-producing credit derivatives salesperson in the entire United States. And then Steph became a managing director at Deutsche Bank, where she worked in global markets, senior relationship management. For years. All of which now basically means that Steph is the sort of extremely plugged-in finance person who will get tacos with aforementioned Trump adviser Gary Cohen, who used to be the president of Goldman Sachs. And it also means that Steph has a particularly special insight into the hidden dynamics behind one of the most insane weeks in the history of the American economy.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Good afternoon from New York. We're coming on the air with breaking news about an exceptionally brutal day on Wall Street.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  The economic fallout from President Trump's tariffs has heightened concerns of a recession and a global trade war. The Dow Jones industrials fell more than 2,200 points, erasing more than a year of stock market gains.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  Seven trillion dollars worth of market cap just traded in 30 minutes. There is rampant chaos.

• 8:52Speaker 07

  President Trump just truthed out, saying, quote, "I have authorized a 90-day pause." The president here announcing a 90-day pause on tariffs, though it's not clear specifically which countries this pause is going to apply to. The Dow right now, shooting up over 2,000 points. Look at that.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  The president posted on Truth Social, "Everything is going to work out well."

• 9:14Pablo Torre?

  And if you're listening to that thinking to yourself that you still don't totally understand all of the terminology involved in this, it is incredibly complicated, of course. What I want to assure you is that what I'm trying to find out today has as much to do with inner circles and inside information and questions of influence as it does the actual economic policy. Which brings us back now to the Mad Lib that is Stephanie Ruhle' life. Your network of people that you talk to

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Is a weird one.

• 9:49Pablo Torre?

  Is my favorite one, which is, I think, the highest compliment I can pay a person as somebody who is deeply curious, always, about like, what's in other people's cellphones? Like, who are they talking to?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Nothing naughty, naughtiness. Yeah, on this one.

• 10:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah. But just the idea of who does a person listen to is kind of the story of this administration right now. It's the story of tariffs and the economy. And it's kind of the story of your life, because you originated in a world Of business, you're from Wall Street.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Well, I am, and I can tell you how I got from there to here. But I actually think, in terms of both careers. So I spent 14 years working in investment banking, covering hedge funds, selling them structured credit derivatives. It doesn't get nerdier than that. But that business, to me, is not that dissimilar to the business that I'm in. It's all about relationships. If you can build a relationship, if you can build trust, either on the other side of that phone, because it's your client, or the other side of that camera, which is your viewer or your listener, that's going to breed success, right? So even in banking, was the salesperson, Stephanie Ruhle, was she the person responsible for hedge funds hitting their mark?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  No, but I was a person who could help them get from point A to point B, and they could trust me. But even early on, I didn't have a finance background. And as embarrassing as this is, sort of my early days, I figured out what do these guys need that I can provide? And when you're a 21-year-old from a girl on a trading floor that did not have a lot of experience in derivatives, I'm like, these guys want to go out every night. They need to go to hot restaurants, they need to go to hot bars, they need to go to hot nightclubs. So I would study Time Out Magazine. I would meet every maître d', I would meet every doorman.

• 11:41Pablo Torre?

  That's just smart.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Okay, no, no, no. I was such a loser that sometimes I would pretend to have an English accent on the phone to make reservations. Like, I was as desperate as they come.

• 11:51Pablo Torre?

  Wait, how?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm not doing that now. But I'm saying, I would do... No, of course not. I would do anything, at wherever it is, Moomba, Jetline, I mean, 100 years ago, Joe's Pub. You can't have a table of 42-year-old guys. You have to have a girl at the table, too. So then there I was, 22, 23 years old, three nights a week, out with hedge fund managers and the dudes that I worked with, because I'm like, well, you're gonna have to have a girl at the table. And it's how I sort of built my business in banking. Pathetic, but it worked.

• 12:18Pablo Torre?

  Well, but that's just something that I hope people understand. And I want to get, of course, to this week and the day that we're taping this and everything that's happening in the world and what it's doing to your job and our country. But just the very basic premise, that behind all of the math is actually a bunch of dudes who are scrambling around, fumbling in what feels like, if not total blackout darkness, then certainly a dimly lit, just sort of like... I don't know if they really know what they're looking at. Kind of a vibe. And it's all about who you trust in your innermost sanctum.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. And so that's, to me, that's what's been extraordinary this week. So in the last five days, I can tell you, I have never had so many private conversations with C-suite executives, Wall Street investors who have huge amounts of money and businesses at stake all around this tariff issue, who are desperate to know who's near the president.

• 13:23Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Okay? And this is so crazy because we're not talking about people just betting on the ponies. We're talking about people that move markets, people who are running major businesses. And the fact that they're trying to figure this out. Let's just talk about the palace intrigue happening. Because all of this has been about, well, who's near the president? Right? Is it Peter Navarro? Who, by Wall Street standards, they consider to be a complete out-of-the-box kook? Who, if you don't know...

• 13:51Pablo Torre?

  I need you to tell this story.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  If you don't know, the way Peter Navarro ended up in the first Trump administration is because Jared Kushner was desperate to find someone whose trade views aligned with President Trump. Because Steve Mnuchin, the first Treasury Secretary, didn't. Gary Cohn certainly didn't. Jared's didn't. And so it's so funny because right now, everyone's going, man, I miss Jared and Gary Cohn. They were blocking the president. And so Jared said, I have to find somebody whose views align with my father-in-law's. And it was Navarro. He brings Navarro in. Gary Cohn wouldn't even let Navarro be part of the National Economic Council. He sent him over to Commerce to work with Wilbur Ross.

• 14:30Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, Gary's not inviting him to the Mexican place with you.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. So that's who Navarro was, is. And remember, a year ago, he went to jail.

• 14:39Speaker 08

  We are following breaking news. Peter Navarro has been sentenced to four months in prison on two charges of contempt of Congress. These charges stem from his refusal to comply with a subpoena related to his actions after the 2020 presidential election.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So he is a true Trump loyalist, right? He's a big Trump loyalist, and he shares his trade views. And in Peter Navarro's mind, we should have all manufacturing in the United States. China and all other countries are basically the enemy. Tariffs should be sky high, and we're going to bring in a huge, billions and billions of dollars because of those tariffs.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. Then I was reprimanded by the fake news. They said, "What about love, religion, and God?" I said, "I agree. Let's put God number one. Let's put religion number two. Love, I don't know. We gotta put that number three, I guess, right? And then it's tariff. Because tariffs are gonna make us rich as hell. It's gonna bring our countries' businesses back that left us."

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So put him in one corner. Wall Street wants nothing to do with him. And the fact that so many investors, just this week, only woke up to who Peter Navarro was, I just saw it last night, right? Businesspeople, investors, whose job it is to study businesses, to study how they work, who runs them, suddenly realize, "Who's this guy Peter Navarro?" Suddenly, they realize, in 2019, it was reported that in one or multiple of Peter Navarro's books, he referenced an expert, a finance expert, whose name was Ron Vara. Okay? Ron Vara. Do you know who Ron Vara is? No one. He's an invented persona that later the publisher had to put an asterisk, like, "This is not a real person."

• 16:32Speaker 02

  And so suddenly, this week, people are like, "We have to get this kook away from the president." You've got Elon Musk arguing with Peter Navarro. And my argument is, "We told you this." Musk calling Navarro, quote, "dumber than a sack of bricks," end quote, and a, quote, "moron." And by the way, you're surprised that Donald Trump picked him? Remember, Donald Trump is John Barron, the guy who created a persona to call People Magazine and others and say, you know, "Let me tell you who the sexiest, most successful man alive is."

• 17:08Speaker 02

  So why are you surprised that Donald Trump chose him?

• 17:12Pablo Torre?

  Well, the fact also that Ron Varro is, of course, the letters of Peter Navarro basically scrambled up.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I know.

• 17:18Pablo Torre?

  It's so on the, like, this as a subplot in HBO series gets laughed out of the room because it's too on the nose. That's the guy who's had the ear of the most powerful, if nothing else, manipulator of the stock market we have ever seen.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  It's why Donald Trump calls him "my Peter." But now, all blame should not fall on Peter Navarro. Let's keep breaking it up. Now you have the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, okay? Howard Lutnick, this week, is quietly not getting blame. He's trying to, he's going, "Look over here, Peter Navarro." But let's be clear. Howard Lutnick, and it's just been reported this week, right? There's some trouble in paradise. People in the White House don't like him. Don't think that was an accident, that the White House is leaking that out. Because in the last week, I believe the president can't be happy with many of Howard Lutnick's media appearances.

• 18:09Speaker 09

  Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up, and she'll get it next month.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  You're right, Howard. She's not. Her son-in-law's worth $2 billion. And what's important about that isn't, if we have a hugely successful cabinet, great. I'm not saying this as an anti-wealth or an anti-capitalism thing at all. But you have to have people in the highest levels and lowest levels of government who understand the American people. So Howard Lutnick's mother-in-law might not be worried about her Social Security check, but millions and millions of other Americans aren't. Just like it's easy for Scott Bessant to say, you know, "Don't look at your 401K right now." Sure, Scott, you don't have to. It's easy for Scott to say, you know, "All these manufacturing jobs are coming into the country. The fired federal workers could go get those jobs."

• 19:07Speaker 02

  And that's what begs the question to both of those men, where you want to say, "Do you know what manufacturing looks like? We have manufacturing in the United States. We're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. What we don't manufacture are things that don't make sense for us." And when they talk about bringing all this manufacturing back, like apparel, like sportswear, like electronics, you mean to tell me a fired federal worker, a climate scientist, an IRS worker, is going to leave the IRS to go work in a factory screwing in screws in an iPhone that's now going to cost three grand? That now we're going to get rid of worker protection so you can leave the IRS to sew socks 15 hours a day?

• 19:49Pablo Torre?

  Oh, by the way, until the robots come and take all of those jobs off the assembly line, from humans anyway.

• 20:05Pablo Torre?

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• 21:34Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

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• 22:27Pablo Torre?

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• 23:05Speaker 10

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• 23:37Speaker 02

  And the thing that blows my mind this week is all of these people, who in theory can reach out to the president, who are basically pleading with him, lobbying to him on Twitter. Right, right? Bill Ackman, who I know really well, right?

• 23:53Pablo Torre?

  Steph, I just need to tell you that I don't think I've been madder at my phone than when I read a 10,000-word Bill Ackman tweet.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Well, don't throw that phone. That iPhone might cost three grand in a couple of years, so don't you throw that phone.

• 24:07Pablo Torre?

  I have read so many of them. And just for people who don't know him, he was regarded as one of these, and you tell me if he still is, but as a gen- and all these guys have the computing horsepower, the intellectual-

• 24:22Speaker 02

  He's a super talented investor.

• 24:23Pablo Torre?

  Incredibly smart and savvy.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Very, very well-known short seller, right? He goes all in betting against a company.

• 24:32Pablo Torre?

  But to see him tweet and grovel and try to spin, it's gross. And the fact that you know him makes me so curious about your read of how he is this avatar for a type of person who threw his money and his reputation behind Donald Trump and has been since navigating this EKG chart of a stock market.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Listen, on the positive, one could say Bill was willing to swallow his pride and publicly say, "Mr. Trump, please don't do this. You're causing a nuclear economic winter."

• 25:13Pablo Torre?

  That's the phrase.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  So if you want to give him credit, right? So if you want to give him credit, you could say, you know, lots of other people out there who went all in Trump would never, ever speak against him.

• 25:22Pablo Torre?

  They would never say, "The global economy is being taken down because of bad math."

• 25:26Speaker 02

  He has definitely fallen in love with fame. Now, short sellers are well-known in their community. But about a year and a half ago, when all the speech issues started in Ivy League universities, Bill Ackman went hard after Claudine Gay and Harvard, your alma mater.

• 25:44Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  And I can tell you, I actually called him on the phone on a Friday night. I've definitely not told this story. I called him on the phone on a Friday night. It's when he really started to get in this Twitter war. And I don't remember all the details. And it was his wife and plagiarism and Business Insider. And I remember calling him and just saying, Bill. And I didn't even know the details of who was right or who was wrong. But I said, let me tell you, somebody who's been in the barrel, don't do this to yourself. Like, you're this unbelievable investor and you have this great reputation. You get in a Twitter war, like, you won't win. These are the dregs of society. These are the worst of the worst people. Like, don't do it. He, like, took a breath. He responded. And then his wife was on the phone with him. And, and all of a sudden, he's like, oh, we're good. We're good.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And at this moment, I realized, I'm like, oh, my God. He likes this. Like, I thought, I'm like, yo, yo, yo, Bill. Me to you, like, I'm in the media. I'm gonna tell you, nothing good happens on the Twitter. Nada, zero, zippo, zilch. And he's like, oh, oh, oh, I'm good.

• 26:45Pablo Torre?

  Oh, no, Steph, Steph, he has a poster's heart. He has the, the endorphins that get released when you cross that 5,000-word Twitter X barrier.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  This shows how naive I am, that I'm like, yo, yo, yo, let me help you out. And I, me not realizing, he's about to cross over and is now, like, he, he, he, he, he's in the Musk space of like,

• 27:10Pablo Torre?

  No question.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Let me have all these bros love and worship me. And he thought he was gonna build a huge retail platform with all those day, you know, day trading bro investors. That did not work out for him. Listen, he's still an extraordinary investor. I'm not arguing that. But watching Bill, who is, who does have this great reputation on the street, weigh in on anything and everything. I mean, it was a couple of months ago. It was just an hour after the horrible plane and chopper crash in, in DC. Bill's, I can't remember what it, this is either an inside job or blah, blah. I'm like, yo, dude. I, I don't remember what it was that he claimed it was, but it was so far from the truth.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And it was like, I'm not saying shut up and dribble or stay in your lane. But, but you have an enormous reputation. You have an enormous following. Before you just let it rip.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  No, make sure you've got your T's crossed and your I's dotted. So on one hand, you could say, "I'm gonna give Bill credit this week. I'm gonna give Bill credit that he said, 'Mr. President, please stop this. This is really bad for all of us, like on behalf of all Americans.'" But I think the most interesting thing about Bill's tweet, or almost anybody else, almost every person who's criticized the president for the tariffs and the math and all of it, almost all of them that come from the business world or the politics world, start their criticism with, "Dear Mr. President, I know we need to get our trade, uh, we need to get our trade relationships in order. Your hair looks great today. We know you just wanna do great for America, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 28:49Speaker 02

  You're so strong, you're so smart, uh, your golf game is the best. However, this is about to cause a recession. And the reason I bring up the first part is 'cause it's not something to joke about. It's something to worry about.

• 29:02Pablo Torre?

  The fact that you gotta hide the medicine in peanut butter like you're feeding a dog?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  We're going to get rid of these trade deficits. Trade deficits are a problem. No, they're not. We've had trade deficits in the United States for 50 years, 48 years. Over the course of those decades, our economy has grown 255%. Do we have a trade deficit with Madagascar? You're right, because they produce vanilla, we need vanilla, and they don't need all of our stuff, 'cause it's Madagascar. But to watch scores of other people actually play into this false narrative because it suits the president's incorrect belief about trade policy, that's a huge problem. And that is when we start to lose our brand of American exceptionalism.

• 29:50Pablo Torre?

  But it's exactly the through line, which is, we're watching people, we're watching people show their ass all of the time. And you're like, there used to be something, not merely to the exceptionalism of America as the brand, but to the mystique of it. And all we're seeing over and over again is a bunch of people debase themselves intentionally or unintentionally. And the only real question left, which may be the most irrelevant question, is whether it's actually intentional or not. Because we're dealing with the consequences of what happens when the world not merely laughs at us, but actually doesn't have confidence in us as a thing they want to be in business with.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's the whole ballgame. And first of all, if there was an ass we were gonna see in this podcast, we'll go back to the beginning, we'd like it to be J-Lo, and that's not being offered. We are now with the likes of Peter Navarro, Howard Lutnick, Bill Ackman, and Donald Trump.

• 30:47Pablo Torre?

  Ron Vera's ass is remarkably less appealing to me.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  So no thank you to all of them. But what you're talking about, this loss of trust, that's the biggest issue. Because right now, now that the president has said, we're gonna have a 90-day pause except for China, we're seeing the markets shoot back up. And the markets are shooting back up because underneath the tariff problem, we have a strong economy. And that's why everybody's been hanging on every word, and they're saying, if he's gonna have a pause, let me step back in and buy. But the real problem here is the loss of trust, right? Trust is gained in droplets and it's lost in buckets. And when you've got the rest of the world looking at us as the United States, the superpower, a trusted partner, right?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  The last trade deal that was negotiated was USMCA. That was between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Donald Trump did it. I think Jared Kushner is the one who focused on it. And all that really was, was NAFTA 2.0. They tweaked it. If you're those two countries, our closest allies, and four years later, Trump's in office, and the first thing he wants to do, before deregulation, before tax cuts, before everything else, is launch a trade war with you, how are you gonna trust him again? Right? When you think about all these countries around the world, if you're Vietnam, if you're a US corporation, who the government told you for years and years, stop producing your apparel in China, move it to Vietnam.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  So now you moved it to Vietnam, and now you're sitting here facing a 39% plus, plus, plus tariff? You're saying, "I don't trust you." So when you have the likes of a Howard Lutnick saying, "All the jobs are coming back in the manufacturing here," why are you going to believe that? Because if you own any sort of big corporation here, it's going to take you three to five years to build a factory. Three to five years from now, Donald Trump's not going to be in office. You have a Scott Besson in the Treasury Secretary who says, "Well, the tariffs are just a negotiating tactic." And then you've got Navarro and Howard Lutnick, who are potentially saying tariffs are here to stay. So which is it? So if you're any of these countries around the world, how do I trust the word, the reputation of this country?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Because you have a president who, as a businessperson, did not have a good reputation. No. Didn't stand, right, right? Didn't stand up to his negotiations, didn't pay his contractors. Was not trusted. Was not trusted. Would enter into deals and then would say to his counterparty, "Listen, I know I didn't make that much money off of it, but can we BS the New York Post so I get the good headline?" And his counterpart would be like, "Yeah, I don't give a hoot about the headline. You take it. I just want the money." Donald Trump was not a super-successful businessman. What he's super-successful at is politics. Yes. Right? He's a brilliant, skilled politician. And now, he's a really successful businessman in what two arenas? Crypto and Truth Social,

• 33:44Speaker 02

  a company he's taken public that's actual earnings are light-years away from the multiple in which the stock trades. So both his social media company and his crypto exchange and meme coin can be used as a vehicle for people to basically pay him because they potentially want a political favor. So don't say, "He's a business guy. Let the businessman do his thing." What he is, is a really skilled politician taking dicey business acumen to the world order.

• 34:21Pablo Torre?

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• 35:02Pablo Torre?

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• 35:44Pablo Torre?

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• 36:27Pablo Torre?

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• 37:10Pablo Torre?

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• 37:42Pablo Torre?

  But even those two specific businesses, which is exactly where I wanted to go next, share something in common. It's an enterprise where you turn your bull [bleep], your words into money.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:55Pablo Torre?

  That is crypto, that is social media, and it's no coincidence that when I'm watching the stock market, effectively feel like it's being manipulated.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:05Pablo Torre?

  Because, yes, on Wednesday, there was a 90-day pause, a truth post, a truth, we're pausing this for 90 days. It just feels like crypto. It feels like the US economy is being meme-stocked. It makes you wonder, who was benefiting from this on the way down, and who's benefiting now on the way up?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Okay, well, on Sunday night, Bill Ackman said, "I know why Lutnick is pushing this, and it's crashing the stock market," because his own firm is long bonds, they're long treasuries, they're betting against the economy, okay? And he said, "We should never have someone in a cabinet position that's this conflicted." He posted that Sunday night. Monday morning, Bill says, "Sorry." So, oh my goodness, "Sorry I said that." Now, who called Bill? Why did that happen? Unclear. But what no one has now answered, so were they long bonds? Were they betting against market?

• 39:03Pablo Torre?

  Exactly.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  That somehow has been erased. And so, I, for years, have railed against congressional stock trading because it is actual insider trading.

• 39:13Pablo Torre?

  It's definitional corruption.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Correct. On both sides of the aisle, right? Like Nancy Pelosi's no stranger to it and scores of Republicans are no stranger.

• 39:22Pablo Torre?

  Absolutely.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  They all trade stocks and not all. Many, many.

• 39:26Pablo Torre?

  They will find a way to not get in trouble at best.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:30Pablo Torre?

  While knowing the incentives.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  They're legally allowed to do it. They're legally allowed to do it. And it seems that the incentive to change the rules is tiny, tiny, tiny. So, all of this is happening right under our eyes, right? You've got Eric Trump, who says, "I have nothing to do with government. You know, I'm in private business," saying like, "Things are gonna, you know, buy the dips. Things are gonna look great in crypto." And then Trump says, "Maybe we're gonna do a crypto reserve." So, all of these things that are absolutely bananas are happening. And I guess they're thinly loophole legal. And I will say, "Hey, Democrats, one of the reasons people voted for Joe Biden is that Democrats promised, not only will we never have a Donald Trump in office again, we're gonna change the rules.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  So, the self-dealing, none of that can ever happen again." Because lots of the rules that Congress has to adhere to or even cabinet members have to adhere to, the president doesn't because they always thought the president would be above it, right? And instead, he's like, "No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna throw everything at Mar-a-Lago. If we don't do it at Mar-a-Lago, it'll be at Doral. And I own a hotel in DC." He did the first term. "And everybody who wants anything from me should book all your events and parties there." And Democrats said, "We are gonna close these loopholes so this can never happen again." They didn't close the loopholes. And now, they're not just open, they are ripped open and it is a frenzy.

• 40:51Pablo Torre?

  Yes. The whole idea of who profited off of this, who got rich, right? It's not merely a fascinating exercise in which I wanna examine all of those dudes' phones, right? Which is like, "I wanna know, okay? You say you're not an oligarch, but my understanding is that this is more or less what Vladimir Putin did in Russia. He took..." Percentages of all of the deals secretly held the money and maybe or maybe not became the richest man in the world at one point.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  He was once potentially a KGB agent, moved up and up and up and up to become one of the richest people in the world. It's one of the reasons Donald Trump admires him. And what you see happening with Doge, which is basically breaking down our government, our agencies, down to its studs, what's the next move? Privatize. And that's what happened in Russia, which served oligarchs in them becoming the richest people in the world and crushed the Russian people and the Russian economy for decades.

• 41:50Pablo Torre?

  And so to now connect all of the dots here, when it comes to what's worrisome about the US economy, which again, has never been, as you know, as I know, as anybody knows, has never been a lily-white, pure haven of integrity, to be clear.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Of course not. No one, none are.

• 42:08Pablo Torre?

  None. None of these people as a category are. But when it comes to what's such a problem about that feeling like crypto, unregulated, social media-driven, and totally impossible to inspect, what are you supposed to do? Like, as a normal person who's deciding, what do I put my money into? And even more pressingly, I guess, what does that do to the economy that seems often disconnected from people who are beneath the line?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Businesses are grinding to a halt when they don't know what to plan for. When they don't know what...

• 42:45Pablo Torre?

  Uncertainty.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  When they don't know what is ahead, they're not gonna do anything. There's not a corporate board in this country that would sign off on a multi-billion-dollar investment on anything when you have a president who on Monday is all in tariffs and on Tuesday says, "I'm off." Listen, I'm not gonna say I'm not grateful for this 90 days, not just for big business, but for small business, right? Every politician out there loves to say, "This country was built on the back of small businesses." Small businesses and big businesses are reliant on the global supply chain, right? Building out the global supply chain unleashed prosperity around the world. We don't build cars here that go from here to Mexico, here to Mexico, China to Mexico. We don't do that to be silly.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  We don't do that because we don't want American workers to work. We actually do it because it's the most efficient. They improved supply chain mechanics and now you have a president who's saying, let's tear that up. So if you run a small business, a big business, a medium business, you're simply saying, I don't know what's to come, so I'm just going to hold on and try to get through this. And for the everyday American who's looking at their investments, honestly, this is a moment of just hold tight because he could change on a dime. And the person you feel the worst for is the person we always do. It's the person who was planning on retiring this year.

• 44:04Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  It's the person who's depending on that social security check because we didn't even get to Doge and the IRS and what they're doing in all those places, right? Because when everyone says, listen, there may be a short-term recession. Well, if there is a short-term recession, what are we doing about SNAP benefits? What are we doing about food stamps? Because when the country takes a downturn, triggers are enacted to make sure the safety net gets bigger and broader and picks the people up on the bottom. So we're doing something from a tariff policy perspective, a monetary policy perspective that could hurt the people on the bottom. And then in the left hand, you've got Doge just cutting, cutting, cutting these agencies and the workforce. I mean, imagine the idea, you know what? Social Security, we don't have to have a phone number for people to call.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  We don't have to have an office for people to call. Senior citizens, and I'm not being ageist, I'm being the daughter of two senior citizens, some of them don't use the internet.

• 44:59Pablo Torre?

  Of course not.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Okay? Some of them don't know how to type into something to see their statement. They need to call that person on the phone. And so to make cuts that really attack our most vulnerable, that's where the disconnect is, right? It's easy for Scott Bessent to say, short-term pain for long-term gain. You and I just established, it's hard for us to exactly see the long-term gain in manufacturing because nobody's building a giant plant here. But in the short term, are they really thinking about the people who it could hurt in the short term?

• 45:27Pablo Torre?

  All of this is now spinning, of course, towards this idea that we have just witnessed, Steph. Is the art of the deal. This is all worked out exactly as the chess master has planned.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Well, for him it has. Like, let's just be clear. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States once. He was then convicted of 34 felonies, and he was elected twice. And now, he is spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago. What did he do this weekend? He was at the Live Golf Tournament. What is this? The fifth giant Live Golf Tournament, held at one of Donald Trump's properties? An enormous amount of money he's made, right? Down at Mar-a-Lago on the weekends, you can pay $1 million to go to a candlelit dinner with Trump, or you can pay $5 million for a one-on-one meeting with him. When the Trump administration was, the first one, was coming to an end, people said, Jared and Ivanka, they can't come back to New York. These people, you know, what he's done, what he's done with COVID, they're disgraced. No, they're not.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Jared Kushner left the White House, and though he had never managed money before, worked in his family business, he was able to get $2 billion, I think it might be $4 billion now, from MBS, from the Saudis, to manage. He manages that amount of money.

• 46:42Pablo Torre?

  Oh, it's just a coincidence.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Just a coincidence. There was not a journalist that had a murder or...

• 46:48Pablo Torre?

  There was no bone saw, what do you mean?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  There was no bone saw. So, he left the White House. No, he didn't come back to New York. He moved to Miami, he's in LA. He's made an extraordinary amount of money. He's hugely successful. So, we do have to be careful. When everybody laughs at the art of the deal, and saying, "Oh, my goodness, it's clownish." No. He won. He won the presidency a second time. He obviously did not go to jail. He's doing everything he wants in this administration. He's surrounded by loyalists, and who knows what's gonna happen from here? But he's also become wealthier than he ever imagined, and so has his whole entire family. The people who are suffering the consequences of the art of the deal is the United States of America.

• 47:47Pablo Torre?

  I was talking to somebody in my phone, who's this longtime mergers and acquisitions guy, M&A guy, one of these investment bankers who's been doing it for four decades. And the way he characterized it as looking for a way to just like, explain this, he texted me, "It's a bit of an economic Cuban Missile Crisis, with China being the USSR of the day. And I don't know what to do with that, except to infer from what the Cuban Missile Crisis felt like, that doing what you do, Steph, monitoring tariffs every day of your life now, with everything feeling like it's on the brink, like, we are taping this,

• 48:30Pablo Torre?

  and in the hour before we started, everything changed. And we're just all, we're just perpetually trying to keep up with the social media platform that so many of the men that you have been talking to, that we've been covering, are obsessed with."

• 48:47Speaker 02

  When you think about all of this, it's easier for Wall Street guys to play this game and play the game with the tariffs, because many, many hedge funds have 10 employees, have five employees. Maybe they have 50 employees if they're really big. They don't even have holding periods of how long they have to hold a stock. They can be in and out and in and out. They can buy a derivative on it. They could be hedging themselves. If you run a giant business, if you run an actual company, if you run an apparel company, if you run a restaurant business, how do you do that? How do you make long-term hiring, firing, growth, purchasing decisions when we're dealing with this,

• 49:30Speaker 02

  "It's so crazy, it just might work."

• 49:33Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  And the whole idea is, "But I just have to have the inside track and know what the president's really doing." And, and think about how unsettling that is. And, and I would say this about banking, because... I remember six, nine months ago, talking to a CEO of a company here. He, an American company, but he was Canadian. And he was like, listen, I hear everything you're saying about Trump, blah, blah, blah. But he's a business guy and Kamala doesn't know anything about business. She didn't do a great job telling her business story. I'm not arguing that. But this notion that like Donald Trump's a business guy. He's going to be really good for business. Couple that with the exhaustion the business community all seem to feel about wokeness.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  They felt like DEI and the DEI officers in their companies were strangling their ability to hire more Princeton lacrosse players because that's who they really needed. Or I'm, I'm, I just say that because that's my husband. But, but you know, this, this, oh my, you know,

• 50:31Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, when can men be men again?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  All these DEI hires we have to make are standing in the way of, of progress and profitability. And it was right after, it was in January, the FT had this article with an anonymous banker. I love how tough he is, so anonymous. I think he was at UBS or something who said, finally liberation, a new dawn. Okay. Not strangled by DEI. You know, no worry that we're going to get canceled if we use the P word or the R word at work. It's a new dawn. It's liberation. And I wish I knew that guy because I'd love to call him on the phone and say, how's liberation feeling for you? Right? I get that there was an exhaustion that they felt like they were talking about DEI all day, every day. I, I actually get that. I'm holding space for it.

• 51:17Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  But the idea that that was crippling to your business. But this ride that we're on this week, this ride of insanity was a good idea? That one, I need someone smarter than me to explain.

• 51:32Pablo Torre?

  Stephanie Ruhl, um, I am very grateful that you came to our studio and that you're in my phone.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  I'm glad to be in your phone. My question to you.

• 51:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  If Stephen A. were the president, how would he handle tariffs?

• 51:46Pablo Torre?

  Oh God.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  I know.

• 51:47Pablo Torre?

  Oh God. You know what? I think, I, I, I know that, uh, it would be less chaotic than what we have now.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  And that's saying something.

• 51:59Pablo Torre?

  It's saying so much that it makes my head hurt.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:14Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Rachel Miller Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems. Our sound design by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. And we will talk to you next time.

• 52:54Speaker 10

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