This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2017, when Trump came into the White House for the first time, he signed exactly one executive order on Day 1, targeting the Affordable Care Act.
In 2025, he signed 26 executive orders on Day 1, throwing pens into a roaring crowd. Some of these orders were really big. There were orders ending birthright citizenship and increasing energy production. He signed orders about the Department of Government Efficiency, and the federal work force.
Some of the orders were more messaging bills. Some of them may not be so big after the courts get done with them.
So what has really changed here? What is all this flurry of policymaking and activity amounting to?
One of the difficulties of covering Donald Trump is that it’s always hard to know where to look first — or where even to look at all.
Back in the day, I used to do a policy podcast at Vox with Matthew Yglesias, who is now the author of the excellent Substack newsletter Slow Boring, and Dara Lind, who’s now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. I thought it would be good to have a bit of a reunion with two of the people who most closely follow the policies that Trump is working on in order to get into the guts of what is actually changing — and what, as of yet, really isn’t.
Klein: Dara Lind, Matt Yglesias, welcome to the show.
Matthew Yglesias: Good to be here.
Lind: Good to be on.
Klein: It’s like old times.
Let’s dive into immigration first. Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders on border security and immigration. When you look at them together, Dara, what do you see?
Lind: What we see here is a body of orders that are pushing the federal government to take a much more aggressive approach on immigration enforcement, especially in the interior of the United States, especially integrating the military into border enforcement in a way we haven’t seen. But without really prescribing a whole lot in terms of specifics — because they understand that’s going to have to happen at the agency level. That requires the actual machinery of the federal government to figure out what that looks like on the ground.
A lot of Biden-era enforcement priorities got rescinded. As of Tuesday night, the U.S. has the legal authority to deport people without a court hearing if they’re arrested anywhere in the U.S. and cannot prove to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s satisfaction that they’ve been in the U.S. for at least two years. We’re going to have to see how that plays out on the ground.
There is a push toward building more capacity for detention — which is going to be very important if they’re going to scale up enforcement efforts. A push toward punishing other countries that refuse to accept deportation flights by putting visa sanctions on them — which is going to be extremely important if you’re going to succeed in deporting people.
So on the interior side, there is a very big shift toward both the kind of expanded legal authority and the expanded capacity, which you can’t do immediately but which they’re building toward.
Klein: When you read this, Matt, does it look to you like mass deportation, which was promised and feared? Or does it look to you like what they’re trying to do is create a climate of fear and — as Mitt Romney once put it — self-deportation?
Yglesias: What’s actually happening is closer to the latter. In terms of the question of what is the quantity of people who are deported, the historic peak for the United States came during Barack Obama’s term.
The main reason for that was that there was really strong cooperation between ICE and state and local law enforcement officials. And basically, they were picking people up out of jails all throughout the country, which is a very efficient process. If you’re thinking of deportation as a resource-intensive operation, people who are already in custody are the easiest people to deport. And then numbers started to come down because of policy changes in blue states, different enforcement priorities and things like that.
But what Trump and real immigration hawks would like to see happen is to create harsh day-to-day living conditions for people who are in the country without authorization. Very optimistically, they hope people will self-deport. Beyond that, they just think it’s a deterrent: People come to the U.S. without visas because they believe that life as an illegal immigrant in the U.S. will be better than their life back at home. So if you can make it worse in any number of different ways, including by just raising uncertainty that a person working off the books and minding their own business might get deported, that has an impact.
Yesterday, Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” was on TV saying that they had arrested 308 people already. And I think the average under Biden was about 310 ICE arrests per day.
So there is a certain amount of we’re-getting-tough theater that is occurring. But we don’t really know what’s going to happen. We haven’t ever seen really tough interior enforcement in the United States, both because of the logistics but also because the politics are tough the more concrete you get.
Right now, there is big immigration backlash. So the question of whether we should deport everyone polls pretty well. But say you go into a restaurant that you like, and ICE has deported the guys washing the dishes, and now the restaurant is closed. And one of them is married, and he’s got kids who are American citizens. And there’s a sad story in the newspaper. That’s where you get into more difficult things.
It’s why Trump always talks about criminals, criminals, criminals. It’s an easy sell — somebody who, in addition to immigrating illegally, has committed nonimmigration crimes. But the impetus behind these orders is to try to say: Nobody is safe. Everybody better watch their back.
Lind: The immigration hawk theory of self-deportation has never really been that the fear of deportation will lead people to self-deport. It’s that the inability to work will lead people to self-deport.
As far as that is concerned, there’s a provision in these executive orders that says that the agencies shall ensure that no unauthorized immigrant has a work permit. Now that’s actually not current regulation. Current regulation is: If you have a pending application for asylum, for a green card, etc., and it’s been pending for a certain amount of time, you can apply for a work permit and work in the U.S. legally.
If they’re going to change those regulations, that takes people who are currently working legally, puts them into the illegal labor pool and potentially removes what would be an impetus for them to stay. So that’s definitely something to watch for.
And there’s this noise about restricting all federal funding from any sanctuary jurisdiction, which was followed up with a memo sent by the Department of Justice to attorneys saying that they should investigate state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration.
So the question of whether places that would be resistant are going to be bullied into cooperating and places that are enthusiastic are going to have the full support of the federal government behind them — if you do both of those things, then you really ramp up the ability to do this more frictionless handover.
Klein: Do they have a legislative agenda here, Dara? You make the point that the self-deportation theory is that you can’t work here and it’s miserable to be here. But the longtime theory of how to make it hard to work here wasn’t deportations. It was things like E-Verify or holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented or unauthorized immigrants.
I have not heard them or Republicans talking that much about it. But I’ve been wondering if that’s coming. Or maybe they just don’t want to work with Congress, so they’re not going to try.
Lind: I was noticing this even under the first Trump term — the extent to which E-Verify had just fallen out of the top tier of the wish list.
Klein: You used to hear about it all the time under Obama, under Bush. This was the theory. What happened to it?
Lind: I think it’s because the traditional immigration hawks — the Center for Immigration Studies folks who put together the intellectual framework of attrition through enforcement, which is what got called “self-deportation — aren’t the people running the show. They’re a different flavor of immigration hawks who are much more concerned about cultural threat.
The Stephen Miller approach is: What are all of the other parts of the U.S. code that we haven’t been looking at that can be used? There’s a provision in here that cites a little-used provision of U.S. law that says aliens have to register and says: OK, so the federal government is going to publicize that people have to register, and then we have to do as much as possible to criminally enforce failure to register.
Now people who entered the U.S. without papers have not had an opportunity to register, in many cases. So there’s a certain bit of paradox for punishing people for failing to do something you never let them do. But it’s that sort of thing. It’s identifying unused tools.
The big question for Congress is really a budgetary one: How much money are they going to throw at enforcement? Because, as Matt pointed out, we’ve never done anything close to the scale of what they are threatening to want to do.
And the more that Tom Homan and company want to spend on getting headlines by sending a bunch of ICE agents into California, the less money there is, in theory, for stuff like building soft-sided detention facilities and other unsexy things that you’re going to need to do to get your capacity up.
Klein: But, Matt, they seem to have a much clearer pathway to working with Congress than they would have in the first term. You mentioned that one reason you had high levels of deportations under Obama was very strong cooperation between the federal government and the states.
Under Trump, after Obama, you had this huge blue state backlash to immigration enforcement, with sanctuary cities and so on.
We’re in New York City right now. I think Eric Adams would love nothing more than to cooperate with the Trump administration. But even among the kinds of Democrats in Congress who were resistance Democrats in 2017, 2018, you saw them move to working with Senator James Lankford on the Murphy-Sinema-Lankford border bill that Kamala Harris ran on. That was a big shift for Democrats. And now you’ve seen a bunch of Democrats sign on to the Laken Riley Act, which is a very sharp shift for Democrats.
So it seems to me that if the Trump administration wanted to kick off a policy process with Congress that is trying to toughen enforcement on the employer side, it’s a very different political alignment than it was in 2018.
Yglesias: Clearly the politics have shifted in blue America, particularly around removals of people who’ve been arrested. To the extent that Donald Trump wants to work with people and get back to an Obama-type policy agenda there, I think he could get it done through a mix of political fear and sincere change of heart on the part of Democratic officials.
The Laken Riley Act deals with a related set of considerations. The thing Republicans would put in an ad against you if you voted no on it is that this bill requires ICE to detain people who’ve been convicted of theft and some other list of crimes —
Lind: Arrested for.
Yglesias: Arrested — yes. So the objections to it relate to due process. I mean, people can be arrested for things they have not committed. But also it creates a lot of state causes of action — where you can sue the federal government for having not done X, Y or Z.
It was pretty clearly written when Joe Biden was president to get Democrats to vote no. By saying this is unworkable — it’s going to hamstring the executive, and then Republicans could run against it.
Democrats started saying: We’ll vote to advance this, but we’re going to fix that stuff in the amendment process. And then because Republicans really wanted to get to no on that bill so they wouldn’t do any of the amendments. And then Democrats refused to take the no vote that Republicans wanted them to take. So now this probably unworkable bill has passed.
E-Verify and employer sanctions are a different kettle of fish. Because when Republicans were putting together H.R.2, this big immigration package when Biden was president, initially mandatory E-Verify was in that package. Because the point of the package was to be maximally hawkish. Again, they wanted to get to no with Biden so they could complain.
But that’s a sticky point for Republicans. And it raises the question of: Where does Trump want to go with this, ultimately, in terms of workplace raids and other things that are bothersome to the business community? Versus just picking fights with progressive mayors and governors about local law enforcement cooperation.
Klein: Dara, the piece of this that people have heard the most about is the executive order on birthright citizenship. How did you read that?
Lind: Just laying out what it does: The birthright citizenship order declares that it is the position of the U.S. government that anyone born after Feb. 19 of this year whose mother is either someone who does not have legal status in the United States or who has some form of temporary visa or other temporary protection in the United States and whose father is not a U.S. citizen or green card holder is not a citizen of the United States by birth.
Most of the text of the executive order is a defense of a very novel legal theory that is: Not only is the 14th amendment of the Constitution not as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court for over a century, etc. — but also we can change that interpretation via executive action and simply declare it by fiat.
Klein: You could think of the birthright citizenship debate as having two components. One, which I think everybody was expecting them to go after, was children born to people who are not here legally.
Then there’s this other question that they added into it, which is people who are here legally — they’re here on a student visa or an H-1B visa. Some people have called this the Kamala Harris provision. I know many people who were born in the United States this way. And this has not been nearly as contested, but they added that in, too.
Matt, how did you understand that?
Yglesias: I think that part of it — and you saw this back during the “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” controversy, which is that the MAGA movement has tried to redefine people with things like temporary protected status or people with asylum applications in the process as illegal immigrants when, in a legal sense, it is not illegal to arrive without a visa and then benefit from a grant of Temporary Protected Status. Vice President Vance, who’s more cogent than President Trump, has explained that, in his view, this is a loophole. This is lawyer [expletive].
So part of the intention of this expansive order is just to sweep all those people in. The fact that it also applies to people with totally normal, uncontroversial visas — Trump was out there saying that he loves the H-1B visa program, that he employs lots of people with H-1B visas. He clearly doesn’t, and I think he’s actually referring to the H-2B visa.
But there’s never been a question that you are allowed to come to the United States on a J-1 visa. You are allowed to come on a student visa.
And then people get into relationships. Particularly people with employment-based visas are often here for many years before they get a green card. And there’s never been a political controversy about that that I am familiar with.
They really don’t like immigrants — at least some of the people behind this policy — in a more extreme way than the president’s official position. And I think they’re signifying that. And people should rightly read into that something a little bit menacing about the ultimate intention.
Klein: Are they just creating a piece of this that could be lopped off in the courts or even just in public debate? Where the extreme position is that you don’t want to have birthright citizenship for people here on student visas and H-1B visas, but the position then you’re left with — which is the one they really care about — is that you get rid of it for the children of unauthorized immigrants?
Lind: I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is because: Yes, we’ve never had a big political controversy around people on student visas having children — but there has been political controversy around people on temporary visas having kids in the United States.
When Trump was running for president the first time, in 2015, 2016, there were a couple of news cycles about birth tourism: the practice of getting a tourist visa, often spending that time at a designated resort for this purpose, having a child during the time you’re on the 90-day tourist visa. And then that child, who is not necessarily raised in the United States but is raised in whatever their parents’ home country is, has the benefit of U.S. citizenship at some later point, should they choose to act on it.
And that was a very big target of the Steve Bannon wing of the MAGA movement, which is very concerned about the lack of assimilability of, in particular, Asian highly educated immigrants who are taking jobs that could otherwise go to disadvantaged Americans.
So it’s not obvious to me that if you bisect that and say: Well, we really only care about children of unauthorized immigrants — that really does satisfy everyone. Because the question of birth tourism has been tied up in the question of birthright citizenship as the Trump world has understood it over the last decade.
Klein: To at least give the other side of this a hearing: Doesn’t the existence of birth tourism suggest there is something indefensibly broad in the way that citizenship has been interpreted? I am as pro-immigrant as you can possibly be, and I think that’s abusive of the rules.
Lind: So it is surprising to me that this has continued to exist because there’s so much discretion to the State Department in denying visas. In theory, you could have an enforcement-based approach to that that doesn’t change the law.
There’s an entire regime in place that is designed to prevent people from being issued visas who are going to abuse the terms of those visas. So I am surprised that there hasn’t been more of a crackdown on excluding countries from the visa waiver program if they have a history of birth tourism. More aggressive interviews at consulates: Gee, I notice this 90-day window seems pretty definite. Are you really staying for the whole 90 days? Can you talk more about what you’re doing during that time?
So I think what we’re identifying is a policy problem. I see where you are. I just think that it’s reasonable to talk about a solution on the scale of the problem.
Klein: I take that point. But obviously they don’t want a narrow solution to the most egregious of the policy problems. What they want is a big debate about what it means to be a citizen.
And Matt, I’ve been thinking about our long career in journalism. And you both probably remember covering immigration in what I’d call the 2005 to 2015 period. Back then, it was much more common to talk about illegal immigrants. And then you’d get a lot of emails from people in the immigration advocacy community — and also just people — who would say: Listen, that’s a really dehumanizing way to talk about this. It’s better to say “undocumented immigrant” or “unauthorized immigrant.” This made its way to yard signs — “No human being is illegal.” You can talk about illegal immigration but not illegal immigrants.
And behind this linguistic change, I think, really did come a change in the Democratic Party’s affect toward illegal immigration. Illegal immigration, unauthorized immigrants, moved from a really big policy problem to solve, then — during the Trump administration, particularly — to a disadvantaged class to protect.
And this feels to me like the argument that the Trump administration is at a very core level — across both some of the enforcement and some of the birthright moves — engaging, which is: How should we feel about these people who are here illegally? Are they people we should view with sympathy and try to protect? Or are they an invasion, a hoard or, at the very least, criminals who have abused our system and need to be treated the way we treat other criminals? Which is with punitive measures.
Yglesias: I think that Trump has basically won this argument. I shouldn’t actually say Trump, because in a lot of ways, Gov. Greg Abbott was more the key figure here. But they got Democrats to admit that they, in fact, think it is undesirable to have unlimited quantities of people arriving in their jurisdictions in an irregular manner.
To an extent, I think that was always reflected in some of Biden administration policy. But it only very much at the end became what they would say they were trying to do.
The interesting question for Trump — and I think people who win elections face this divide all the time — is: Do you want to make the most durable policy change that you can? Or do you want to have fights about things?
Because, clearly, if the president of the United States really wants to shine a spotlight on birth tourism and say that we need a bipartisan legislative solution to create some kind of denaturalization process for egregious abuses, I think it’s tough for swing-state Democrats, or anybody, to say: No, birth tourism is amazing. We want to encourage this.
The more things you stack onto the pile, the easier it is for everybody to say no. We’re going to basic 14th Amendment principles. People on completely normal work visas have all been lumped into this.
It’s really easy for Democrats to reject this order because it’s so broad. But that also means that Republicans can have a fight about the order. They can pick the strong cases. Democrats can pick the weak cases. Nothing will get done. I think they’ll just lose in court. The constitutional argument they’re going with here is risible, in my opinion. But —
Klein: This is the first time, I think, in our long association together that I’ve heard you suggest that the fact that a constitutional argument is risible will mean it will lose in court. [Yglesias laughs.]
I am pretty cynical about this. But you’ve always been more cynical than me.
Yglesias: This is just a topic that has been litigated a lot over the years.
Klein: Isn’t that what people said about the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare?
Yglesias: I know, but — Dara will correct me if I’m wrong. Very literally, this question of what it means to be subject to the laws thereof has been litigated. This is not a new version of an old question.
They want to arrest illegal immigrants. That’s a big point of emphasis here. Which is to say, they are subject to the jurisdiction of the American government. There’s no argument that illegal immigrants have diplomatic immunity or that they’re sovereign tribal nations.
Klein: Well, the argument is that they’re an invasion, right? That’s what they’re trying to play?
Yglesias: Yeah, well, the invasion thing is, I think, a separate, fascinating legal argument.
Klein: How would you describe the legal argument? If Stephen Miller goes to bed at night and is optimistic about the morning, what Supreme Court opinion does he hope gets issued?
Lind: I agree with Matt that they would have to be playing a whole lot of Calvinball in order to side with the administration on this.
But the other question here — when we’re talking about the kind of broad politics of how we talk about unauthorized immigrants — is that we have had a wave of new arrivals of people primarily entering through the asylum system over the last decade, and the growing population of people with temporary protections, such as T.P.S., such as these Biden parole programs, who are also more recent arrivals.
And you still have the unauthorized immigrants that you had 10 years ago — who have been here 10 years longer. And who, for the most part, still haven’t had any point of access into the immigration system.
So as we’ve talked for the last 10 years about immigration being a border asylum issue. And I think Matt was calling this out years ago — that that created political problems for Democrats because it took a population that had been here for a long time and made them feel like they were being shunted aside in favor of more recent arrivals. But it also means that they’re now in danger of getting lumped in as invaders.
And I think the legal aspects of the invasion argument are really hard because they’re primarily military, and I’m not an expert in that. But I do think that it is very important for the birthright point — that it’s building the rhetorical case that they aren’t subject to our jurisdiction, and they are trying to come for us.
Klein: I want to move to the economy. When Donald Trump was running for president, one of his strongest arguments was that everything had gotten very expensive under Joe Biden. He has said that the price of groceries was a very big part of why he won the election.
When you look at what Trump said in his inauguration speech, when you look at the executive orders, what agenda emerges for you on the cost of living?
Yglesias: They are clearly hoping that increased domestic energy production will have benefits for cost of living. That’s the part that you can connect the dots on. I think experts have some skepticism about that.
On the groceries, there’s really not a lot going on here. In the orders, there’s literally nothing. I could have suggested some things for them, if they wanted.
The Biden administration, for example, raised wage-floor standards for agricultural guest worker visas. It was the only restrictionist thing that they really did. You could put the wage-floor standard back down and make things cheaper.
Klein: Well, let’s hold on the energy piece, because Trump did do a lot on energy. And it’s not crazy to say that increased energy production would be good for American growth and bring down prices.
I think people forget this, but it took Trump months to leave the Paris Climate Accords in his first term. They moved much more slowly in their theory of what to do on climate and energy back then.
Yglesias: Elon Musk was very angry about it.
Klein: Elon Musk had some very different views back then.
The theory now is that you can increase domestic production. But domestic production of fossil fuels, which is what they’re targeting, is currently at record levels. It has never been higher in American history. How much headroom do they have here?
Yglesias: This is a tough one. If you talk to people in the oil and gas industry, the thing that they were really mad at the Biden administration about was pausing the construction of new liquefied natural gas terminals.
The Trump administration has done what the industry wanted there. I think he’s correct, frankly. And this will increase American natural gas production. The reason it will increase American natural gas production is that we’ll be able to export more gas — but, as the Biden people like to point out, will raise the price of domestic electricity, not lower it.
The thing that the oil and gas industry wants is more demand for their products. That’s what these liquefied natural gas export terminals are going to create. And the federal government, foaming the runway for the permitting of big data center projects, will also ensure that there’s a lot of demand for natural gas.
But is it going to make it cheaper for you at home? It actually might make it more expensive. It’s just ambiguous in terms of its basic upshot.
Similarly, he’s going to rescind some of these electric car regulations that Biden issued. But I think people will continue to buy more electric cars than they did in the past, one way or another. Again, Elon Musk continues to be out there making his Teslas.
Klein: Can we stop on that for just one second? Look, I don’t personally love Elon Musk’s sharp rightward swing and all the conspiracy theories —
Yglesias: But it’s going to get more people buying electric cars.
Klein: Yeah. If Elon Musk can depolarize electric vehicles and make them something not just that liberals in San Francisco want to do but actually status symbols for Texans, too, and maybe get Donald Trump on board with it as a symbol of American ingenuity and dominance of one of the obvious industries of the future.
It’s not like Trump is outlawing electric vehicles. But Elon Musk becoming the central consigliere to the Trump administration, and his central industrialist concern is the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. And Trump’s main policy on electric vehicles is to roll back the regulations that were accelerating their adoption. I guess you give Elon Musk points for being principled on things that are not just his business interest. But it’s a little bit disappointing as to what the trade ended up being.
Yglesias: It’s odd —
Lind: Can I step back a little bit? One of the things that really strikes me going into this Trump administration, as opposed to the first one, is: The first time around it was very clear that Donald Trump was a politician without a constituency. He had not been made by anybody. So there was nobody who was going to haul him into a room and say: We brought you here. If you don’t listen to us, we will end you.
And that made it much harder to predict what he would do. It made the White House intrigue stories of who he was listening to much more important because you couldn’t use that standard political calculus.
This time around, he’s coming in with what looks much more like a traditional political coalition, with various people feeling they have claims on him. Which includes both, in this case, the Musk and company industrialist policy, crony capitalist faction — which argues that it is very important for the government to affirmatively subsidize the things that they want. And the Russell Vought and company massive deregulatory faction, which argues that there’s absolutely nothing the federal government should be doing to support electric vehicles.
It’s weird for Trump, but it’s very normal for politics. And it’s going to be interesting to see how this very traditional interfactional divide plays out when the person making the decisions is still Donald Trump, a man who pretty famously doesn’t really hold on to anything consistently enough.
Klein: I think that’s right as a political science theory, but maybe wrong about the factions.
My understanding of Musk is that there are two plausible interpretations of Musk in his Tesla guise: There’s always the argument that all he cares about is saving the world from climate change and getting to Mars.
But then there’s this other theory that what he wants is for Tesla to be the biggest company in the world. Because that is where the bulk of his wealth and power is. And he’s getting the subsidies for electric vehicles pulled back at the time that Ford and General Motors and other players are accelerating into electric vehicles and maybe getting to a point where they could challenge Tesla for making good cars.
Tesla has a really big advantage. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They’re way ahead of everybody else. Their marketing is way better. People know them.
So my sense of Musk, at least in part, is that he’s really chilled out on the climate change question. He’s much less worried about that than he once was, although he still says he’s worried about it. And the support for electric vehicles is what made Tesla into the company it is today.
But Tesla is fine now. And if there’s no support for electric vehicles, then it is the legacy players trying to climb the electric vehicle ladder who are about to find that the ladder falls down under them before they attain the level of quality and production that Tesla did through years of federal and state support.
Yglesias: I think that’s right. We’ll see how Democratic states react to this. Because Tesla still receives credits from California. This is not as important to their business as it used to be, but it continues to be a big moneymaker for them. Because California has increasingly strict emissions rules. And then a number of other blue states piggyback on them.
Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to be trying to see whether he can reconfigure that as a subsidy for non-Tesla electric cars. And I think there’s legal and implementation questions around that.
Big picture, though: I think the thrust of Trump’s energy policies will increase America’s gross domestic product by causing us to care less about climate change and certain other kinds of things. Whether they will reduce prices to American consumers is much more questionable.
The Democrats were going nuts all throughout 2024. They were like: Why are people mad about inflation? Inflation is down to 2.4 percent year over year.
But we didn’t forget that there was 9 percent inflation 18 months ago and 5 percent inflation nine months ago. I don’t want to say we remember it was Joe Biden’s fault. But the people who think it was Joe Biden’s fault remember that they think it was Joe Biden’s fault.
Now a lot of conservative take slingers will be hypocritical when they pivot back around to being like: You can’t actually make the price level fall. But it’s true — you can’t actually make the price level fall.
It’s a shame for Joe Biden that we had 9 percent inflation when he was president. People were mad about that. And I don’t know that there’s going to be so much juice in like: Laugh out loud — prices didn’t get cheaper.
That being said, when I was a guest on your show previously, we talked about this a lot: Trump’s tariff agenda and his fiscal policy points toward a reacceleration of inflation. And that’s perilous, even if it doesn’t get up to 9 percent.
Klein: Although that’s something we saw, which is that he did not come in on Day 1 and impose a bunch of new tariffs.
Lind: I was wondering where the tariffs were.
Klein: We’re studying the creation of an External Revenue Agency, which definitely sounds to me like the kind of thing you do when you don’t want to put into play your big tariff proposal.
Yglesias: But then he did say there’s going to be tariffs on Mexico and Canada, starting in February.
Lind: One of the questions on tariffs has always been: Does Donald Trump really want to find a way to get to yes on tariffs? Or does Donald Trump love the ability to come into a negotiating room and say: If you don’t give us everything we want, we’ll tariff the hell out of you?
This is arguably the signature policy win of Trump’s first term on immigration — getting Mexico to agree to accept large numbers of people across the border who were waiting for asylum hearings in the United States, which he accomplished by threatening Mexico with really punitive tariffs for months. So I think that this is all consistent with using tariffs as a big stick.
And now that Marco Rubio is actually secretary of state, he gets to play good cop and go in and tell Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico: Here is how you can avoid the tariffs that the president really wants to put on you. But I have your back.
But I’m actually not sure. There also really does seem to be a belief among Donald Trump and at least a professed belief among some conservative intellectuals that tariffs are affirmatively good for America. So if he ends up saying: Oh, we’ve suspended all tariffs because we’re taking the win with Canada and Mexico and China, does that leave a constituency unsatisfied?
Yglesias: I think some foreign leaders have to ask themselves if they want to call the bluff here. Because you’re right, Dara. Trump, in his first term, pretty effectively wielded the threat of tariffs as a kind of negotiating strategy.
And then, during the last six months of the presidential campaign, Trump’s business community supporters were everywhere in the business press telling people: Don’t worry — don’t listen to what Janet Yellen, Kamala Harris and Ezra Klein are saying about this. The president is just using this as a negotiating tactic.
So Trump, during the lame duck, just tweeted or Truth Social-ed that there’s going to be 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And then Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, put out some announcement that was like: We’re going to get really tough on fentanyl. And then Trump took yes for an answer and was like: Oh, the tariffs are off.
But now he says they’re going to be back on. And I hesitate. These people have to listen to their own advisers. They have to think about what’s what.
But you don’t want to be a sucker in every negotiation. At a certain point, somebody has to be willing to say: Mr. Trump, it appears to me from your behavior that you in fact know that these tariffs are a bad idea and are doing a ploy. I can read to you the passage from “The Art of the Deal” where you talk about how you like to [expletive] a lot in negotiations and make dumb threats. And if you do this, it will be bad for my country. It’ll be bad for your country. The exchange rates will also adjust. It’s going to be political blowback on you, though. Not me. Because people know this is your stunt. Leave us alone.
It’s risky. But the fact that the tariffs weren’t implemented on Day 1 does call into question whether these business guys were correct.
Klein: That’s the question I’m really asking here: Were the business guys correct?
It’s been interesting that Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s trade representative in the first term and is widely considered the most effective single member of the Trump administration in the first term, is not anywhere there.
You heard him considered for Treasury secretary. You heard him considered for commerce secretary. But he’s in Florida somewhere at the moment. There’s this New Yorker piece on him.
It’s not that the people who are there are not pro-tariff. The head of the Council of Economic Advisers has written positively on tariffs. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary nominee, has talked about tariffs.
Yglesias: But Bessent has talked about tariffs as a negotiating tactic. And Stephen Miran, the economist, wrote an article for his hedge fund or something. And what the article “says” is that the liberals are wrong, and tariffs are really good.
But then the analysis is that tariffs actually won’t raise prices because exchange rates will adjust. And that means that you want to make the tariffs phase in slowly so that financial markets have time to adjust to the tariffs. And it all just seems like a way to say that you’re for tariffs while actually acknowledging that they’re bad.
One view is that Trump was tricked by these guys. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been looking at all the obsequious flattery that different chief executives have been throwing Trump’s way. And I’m like: Do I really think that Donald Trump is such a naive patsy as everybody is saying? Does everyone know the way to Trump’s heart is with completely disingenuous flattery? Or does he just enjoy this and think it’s funny that he can make the monkeys dance by putting it out there that if you say nice things about Trump, he’ll like you?
Klein: No, I would go further than this. One of the things going on right now is there’s been this announcement of Stargate, a consortium of companies working on artificial intelligence that want to put huge amounts of money into energy and A.I. data center infrastructure.
People were working on Stargate before Donald Trump became president. Then he became president, and now they’re like: Thank you, Donald Trump. We couldn’t do it without you. Which in some technical sense is probably true — it’s useful to have the help of the president. But it’s not a Trump initiative.
And then Elon Musk — who hates Sam Altman and is suing OpenAI for trying to turn itself into a for-profit — tweeted something mean at Sam Altman. I don’t remember exactly what. And then he and Altman got into a spat.
Yglesias: Musk said they don’t actually have the money — something like that. And then Altman came back and was like: I hope that in your new role you mostly make decisions that are good for America.
Klein: So that was interesting. And then the next day, Sam Altman comes out and says: I really realize that I completely misjudged Donald Trump in the first term. I was thinking like an N.P.C. — which is a right-wing internet meme for “nonplayer character” coming from video games, which is a crazy thing to say about yourself, but whatever — and that Trump is going to be so great for America, and I’ve really turned around on this whole thing, and I’m sorry for underestimating him before, but I am all in.
I’m paraphrasing him, but that’s functionally what he says. Maybe that’s how he feels. Maybe it’s half how he feels. But it certainly looks like he’s now trying to outmaneuver Musk. Trump is excited about Stargate, Musk is undermining Stargate, and now Altman comes in and says: God — Trump is so great.
Yglesias: And Musk retweeted a December 2021 Altman tweet, where Altman had been praising Reid Hoffman for how much he spent on defeating Trump. And saying: Liberals don’t know how much they should appreciate Reid Hoffman.
Klein: The point I want to make on all this is that there’s another interpretation, which is that Trump understands speech as a form of action and commitment. And whether you believe it or not, when you go out and you say: I am pro-Trump, and he’s a genius — you have either subtly or aggressively shifted who you are in public, if you’re Sam Altman or someone like that, in ways that then change how you have to act and who your allies are.
In the same way that making Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, say that the inauguration crowds were the biggest ever. You see this a lot in authoritarian countries: Enforcing that loyalty test makes people who have taken it more loyal because their other options have become worse.
Sam Altman is probably held in worse repute in the Democratic Party today. And to be fair, Democrats were already annoying him by sending him letters about why he was donating so much to the inauguration fund.
But if you move Sam Altman out of the Democratic Party because you get him to say very nice things about Trump, and that makes Democrats mad at him, and then he gets mad at the Democrats, then you actually have increased his loyalty, whatever the real content of the flattery was. Because to speak that way is to take an action. It’s to reorient your alliances. And then your incentives change, and they change in a pro-Trump way.
I’m not saying Trump is a mastermind. Lots of strongman leaders have come to this theory independently. It’s just a way human beings work. It’s the way corporations work: You make people go out, and whether or not they really agree with the new corporate policy, if they have to say they agree with it, then they have to act like they agree with it. That’s my read of what’s happening here.
Yglesias: So we need a Michael Bennett-Sam Altman beer summit where they can talk about their letter sending. [Klein laughs.]
That all makes sense. A year ago, I was really: Trump is a tariff fanatic. That’s why he keeps talking about this. That’s why he is having so many problems with these things.
But there are now significant doubts in my mind based on the team that he’s assembled. Because, to your point, he has gotten them to say that they’re for tariffs.
But they kept enough caveats in that analysis. They didn’t act. If you look at Bessent’s statements, Miran’s statements, the things that they’ve put on paper, they did not burn their bridges with conventional neoclassical economic analysis.
Which is different from this paper by Wilbur Ross, the former secretary of commerce, where they were like: Net imports are subtracted from the gross domestic product calculus. So therefore, if we balance trade, G.D.P. will go up.
And that’s totally wrong. That’s really bad economics. Everybody read that and said: These guys are numbskulls.
So that was a bridge-burning movement, where if you’re willing to make a statement like that, you are not going to be welcomed back into the polite society of people who understand international trade.
Whereas this Miran thing is like: Well, it might generate some revenue, and equilibrium price effects are not actually that large.
That’s not what most people think, but it’s reasonable.
All of this is unpredictable. My wife and I are thinking about buying a new car. And we were asking ourselves: Do we need to rush out and get it before the tariffs come in?
And we were like: The exchange rate might adjust. We don’t know what’s going to happen. There could be retaliation that actually makes things cheaper.
The world is complicated. And the level of tariff defense they’ve come up with is respectable enough that it makes me think: Maybe this is just for show.
And I’ll eat my words when imported fertilizer all has a 20 percent tax, and nobody can buy bananas.
Lind: The question of predictability is what I cannot get my head around, though. I didn’t think this was particularly controversial, but the fundamental insight of law and economics is that firms require predictability from the government in order to make internal decisions.
Not knowing whether there are going to be tariffs on your products or whether your C.E.O. is going to have to devote a tremendous amount of attentional capital to flattering the president — instead of a lot of other things your C.E.O. could be doing — you can imagine that being a problem.
At a certain level, the inability to know whether there are going to be these massive tariffs has to have some kind of knock-on economic effect.
Klein: It only has an unpredictability effect if the business community actually acts like it’s unpredictable.
But I think they’ve all persuaded themselves — perhaps correctly — that it’s not unpredictable. We’ve already had tariffs with China for some time, including under Biden. So I think there’s an expectation that you’re going to have tariffs on China, and that those might go up.
But the business world is not acting like we’re going to have 20 percent tariffs or 10 percent tariffs on everything. If it happens, then that’s going to be a hit. But the fact that they’re not preparing for the tariffs is actually a hedge against it happening, in a strange way.
The worse hit you can persuade Donald Trump that tariffs would be to the stock market, the less likely he is to do it. You could really imagine a day where there’s a big Wall Street Journal story that says: On Monday, the tariffs are happening. It’s on.
And then there will be a crash — some significant drop in the Dow. And then all of a sudden they’re not happening on Monday.
Another thing we’ve heard a lot about is D.O.G.E., the Department of Governmental Efficiency, co-run by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. They’re all over X, having big debates about H-1B visas and what spending to cut. There was a big Wall Street Journal Op-Ed they did, saying that they were going to advise D.O.G.E. at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform — regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.
Musk talked at times about cutting as much as $2 trillion from the federal government. And then he said: You know, maybe you don’t get quite there. Maybe you cut $1 trillion.
Now we see the executive order on D.O.G.E. Ramaswamy is out. And the executive order’s mandate is: “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
What happened there?
Yglesias: It’s a little bit hard to say.
The Obama administration created the United States Digital Service, back when exciting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were mostly Democrats, with this idea that you could improve the efficiency of government by having an elite tech strike team. I know people who have worked there.
D.O.G.E. is now going to be the new name of the U.S.D.S., which will be the United States D.O.G.E. Service so that they can reuse the logo. Which I guess is efficient.
And it is now zeroed in on changing information technology procurement. Which seems like a good idea. From everything that I’ve heard about federal I.T. procurement, it is an area that is ripe for reform and some increased efficiency.
When all these D.O.G.E. Op-Eds were flying around, I think if you looked at the more sober-minded people in conservative think-tank land, they were all saying: Guys, this isn’t going to work. That’s not how the government works. You can’t just come to the agency and say: Ah, there aren’t regulations anymore. Because it’s the government. We have laws. We have courts. We have the Administrative Procedure Act.
It is true that the government is not run as efficiently as a well-run start-up. Because unlike at a well-run start-up, you can’t just decide something isn’t working and shut it down. You have to change it through legislation.
It’s not like it never occurred to anybody that it might be more fun for the president of the United States to be able to make stuff up or tell people what they should do. But you have to implement the laws that exist.
Lind: I also have questions about who did that realizing. It’s clear that whoever on the transition team was responsible for drafting executive orders related to D.O.G.E. had that realization.
Has Elon Musk come to that conclusion, as well? That he can’t just waltz into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and say: Fifty percent of you are fired, and the other 50 percent have to show me 20 pages of code.
Klein: I have been wondering: What is Donald Trump’s relationship with Congress and legislation about to be?
Compared to every other presidency I have witnessed, this administration has come in with virtually no discussion about big bills they want to pass.
On everything we’ve spoken about — from energy to the economy to immigration to procurement in the federal work force, who you can fire and who you can’t — all of that could be much more ambitiously reshaped through legislation.
We know in the background that Mike Johnson, the House speaker, with his extremely narrow majority, is working on a tax bill. I think everybody expects a bill updating and expanding Trump’s tax cuts and extending them to at least be proposed at some point.
But they seem really intent on what they can do individually. I’m curious how you’re reading what seems like a very executive-focused presidency. But in being executive focused, it’s giving up on a certain amount of ambition that you can only have if you are going to really work on a legislative agenda.
Lind: Everyone is very comfortable with the equilibrium we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so: Instead of policy originating in Congress with legislation, policy originates in the executive branch. Then, via litigation, it gets punted to the judicial branch to issue a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. And half of Congress is responsible for turning the judge machine on and off. That is the equilibrium we have.
Congress has not been super-interested in legislating under presidents of either party. So it’s not that surprising to me that an administration that is very focused on areas where there is a lot of executive leeway — in terms of trade negotiations and immigration enforcement — has the general attitude that they’re going to see how far they can get with the executive branch. And they know that Congress isn’t going to stand up for its prerogative as the legislative branch to try to stop them from doing things that might have been seen as quasi-legislative action in the past.
Yglesias: I wanted to flag something that’s small but signifies what you’re talking about: The congressional tax writers told the transition: Do not issue an executive order rescinding Joe Biden’s electric vehicle regulations. We want to put that into the tax bill. Since there are tax credits for people who buy E.V.’s, if you rescind it in a bill, that scores as saving money. And you can use that to offset the cost of the tax cuts.
And then there were stories saying: It’s all squared away. They’re not going to do this executive order. It’s going to be part of the pay-fors. It was in the menu of spending reductions.
And then Trump just did it. It was not just that he’s taking action on his own rather than engaging with Congress. He did something that congressional Republicans specifically asked him not to do. And it wasn’t a disagreement — they were going to do it.
Klein: And it would make it easier for them to do other things he wants them to do.
Yglesias: I think the paradox of Trump as leader of the Republican Party is that he is just not as interested in changing American public policy as the typical high-level politician. It’s been very politically potent of him to just kind of cut off the anti-abortion movement at the legs once it became politically inconvenient for him. He’s a very dominating presence in Republican politics.
Joe Biden spent a lot of time worrying about blowback from the left over various things and showing that he was delivering. But with Trump, the presence, the persona, the lib owning, the announcements — are delivering for his core supporters. And I don’t think he stays up at night worrying: Well, if they wind up needing to settle for a temporary extension rather than a permanent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, I’m really going to be in for it.
But it’s actually a really big deal. There’s a reason earnest Congressional Republicans would strongly prefer to find enough offsets to make this permanent. Because if you make it permanent, that makes life a lot more difficult for the next Democratic president. If it’s temporary and a Democrat wins in 2028 or 2032, that’s way better for the cause of progressive politics.
It’s not like Trump won’t sign the permanent version or that he opposes this kind of thing. But he’s clearly not that invested in this question of permanent policy change.
And again, I was saying this about immigration stuff — he’s made so much headway politically with this that he could get stuff done in a bipartisan way, that overcomes the filibuster that is hard to reverse. But that doesn’t seem that important to him versus the position-taking, the sense of action.
But he genuinely appears to be a much more forceful presence who dominates the scene. He’s really into that. And I don’t know that he cares about the permanence that comes with legislation.
Klein: I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Lind: This is the most good-government normie take to have on this particular week, but I think that “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis is a good book to revisit — or to skim if you haven’t checked it out yet. Just for a reminder of the innumerable things that the federal government does that a broad-based attack on the civil service is going to end up degrading in some form or another.
“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver was the only novel I read twice last year. And I think that it is the rebuttal to all of the pseudosentimental “Hillbilly Elegy” debate, in terms of what really happened to the rural poor over the last 25 years.
And if I don’t say an immigration book, I’m probably going to be fired. “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” by Jonathan Blitzer — specifically the first half, which talks about the ’80s and has really great archival material — as a reminder that government is made of people, and people make decisions.
Yglesias: Timothy Shenk’s book “Left Adrift” is a great intervention into the “What’s up with Democrats?” kind of debate, looking historically at Bill Clinton and, to an extent, Barack Obama. But also Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, sort of center-left figures. Very good stuff.
Marc Dunkelman has a book that is not quite out yet. But I read it in galleys, and it is going to be released in a couple weeks —
Klein: I just read it, as well. It’s good.
Yglesias: It’s called “Why Nothing Works.” It covers similar themes to your book —
Klein: “Abundance” — coming out in March —
Yglesias: But in more detail, on a narrower set of topics. And you’ll really learn a lot about the history of big infrastructure projects.
I’ve been trying to reclaim my scrambled cognition in the new era. So I’m reading old long novels. “Middlemarch” is, by many people’s estimates, the greatest English language novel ever written. It’s really good. It’s by George Eliot. You’ll learn something. And you’ll learn how to read long sentences [Lind laughs], which is miraculous in this day and age.
Klein: Dara Lind, Matt Yglesias, thank you very much.
Yglesias: Thank you.
Lind: Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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