Matt Iglesias

You're allowed to come on a student visa, right? And then, yeah, like people get into relationships, particularly people with employment-based visas, are often here for many, many years before they get a green card. And there's never been a political controversy about that that I'm familiar with.

And it's quite—I mean, 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, you know, people should— rightly read into that something, I think, a little bit menacing about the ultimate intention.

I think that Trump has basically won this argument. You know, that he has gotten—I shouldn't actually say Trump, because in a lot of ways, Greg Abbott was more like the key figure here— But like got Democrats to admit that like they in fact think it is undesirable to have sort of unlimited quantities of people arriving in their jurisdictions in an irregular manner.

And, you know, 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, I mean, and I think people who win elections face this divide all the time, is like, do you want to make the most durable policy change that you can?

Or do you want to kind of have fights about things? Because I think clearly if the president of the United States— really, really, really wants to shine a spotlight on birth tourism and say, like, we need a bipartisan legislative solution to create some kind of denaturalization process for egregious abuses of this, whatever it is. I think it's like tough.

for like swing state Democrats, for anybody, for me, for you, for anybody to say like, no, birth charism is amazing. Like we want to encourage this, right? The more things you stack onto the pile, the easier it is for everybody to say no, right? That like we're going to basic 14th Amendment principles.

We're talking about people on completely normal work visas have all sort of been lumped into this. It's really easy for Democrats to reject this order the way it's been written because it's so, so, so broad. But that also means that Republicans can have a fight about the order, right? They can pick the strong cases. Democrats can pick the weak cases. Nothing will get done.

I think they'll just lose in court. I mean, the constitutional argument they're going with here is risible, in my opinion.

This is just a topic that has been litigated, like, a lot over the years.

I know, but, like, I mean, Dara will correct me if I'm wrong. But, I mean, I think, like— Just like very literally, this question of what does it mean to be subject to the laws thereof has been litigated. This is not like a new version of an old question. It's like they want to arrest illegal immigrants, right?

That's like 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 something like that, or that, you know, they're sovereign tribal nations.

That's what they're trying to play? Well, the invasion thing is, I think, a separate but fascinating legal argument.

Well, they are clearly hoping that increased domestic energy production will have benefits for cost of living. I mean, that's the part that you can connect the dots on. I mean, I think experts have some skepticism about that. On the groceries, you know, there's really not a lot going on here. In the orders, it's like literally nothing.

I could have suggested some things for them if they wanted to. So like the Biden administration, for example, like raised wage floor standards for agricultural guest worker visas. It was like the only restrictionist thing that they really did. You could put that back down, make things cheaper.

Yes.

Elon Musk was very angry about it.

This is a tough one, right? I mean, I think 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, too, frankly. And this will increase American natural gas production.

But the reason it will increase American natural gas production is we will be able to export more gas, which, 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 LNG export terminals are going to create.

And that's what the federal government foaming the runway for permitting of big data center projects is. is going to ensure that there's a lot of demand for natural gas. But is it going to make it cheaper for you at home? Like, probably it 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 type 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. So the long-term outlook for oil production— But it's going to get more people buying electric cars.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. What will be interesting when we see how democratic states sort of 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 kind of moneymaker for them because California has increasingly strict emissions rules.

And then a number of other blue states kind of piggyback on them. Gavin Newsom seems to be trying to see, like, can he reconfigure that as like a subsidy for non-Tesla electric cars? And I think there's... Legal questions and implementation questions around that.

Big picture, though, like 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, I think, is much more questionable. Right. The Democrats were going nuts all throughout 2024.

They were like, why are people mad about inflation? Inflation's down to 2.4 year over year. And then just like, well, we didn't like forget. that there was 9% inflation 18 months ago and that it was 5% inflation nine months ago. And 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 like, it's true. You can't actually make the price level fall. It's a shame for Joe Biden that we had 9% inflation when he was president. But, like, people were mad about that.

And I don't know that there's going to be so much juice in, like, lol, prices didn't get cheaper. That being said, I mean, when I was a guest on your show previously, we talked about this a lot. But, like, Trump's tariff agenda, his fiscal policy, all of that points toward a re-acceleration of inflation. Yeah. And that's perilous, even if it doesn't get up to nine.

But then he did say there's going to be tariffs on Mexico and Canada starting in February.

I think some foreign leaders have to ask themselves if they want to call the bluff here, you know, because you're right, Dara, right? I mean, Trump in his first term pretty effectively wielded the threat of tariffs as a kind of negotiating strategy.

Then during the last six months of the presidential campaign, Trump's business community supporters were like everywhere in the business press and amongst themselves telling people, like, don't worry. Don't listen to what Janet Yellen and Kamala Harris and, you know, Ezra Klein are saying about this. Like the president is just using this as a negotiating tactic.

I mean, it's what's actually happening is closer to the latter. Right. I mean, in terms of the question of like, what is the quantity of people who are deported? The historic peak for the United States came during Barack Obama's term.

So, you know, Trump, during the lame duck, he just tweeted or truth socialed that there's going to be 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And then Trudeau put out some announcement that was like, we're going to get really tough on fentanyl. And then Trump took yes for an answer. It was like, oh, the tariffs are off. But now he says they're going to be back on. And... I hesitate.

These people, they've got to listen to their own advisors. They've got to think about what's what. But, you know, we all—you don't want to be a sucker in every negotiation. Like, 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.

And I can like read to you the passage from The Art of the Deal where you talk about how you like to bullshit a lot in negotiations and make dumb threats. And like, 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.

And like, you know, leave us alone. It's risky. But the fact that they weren't in the day one, right? I mean, it does call into question that like maybe these business guys were correct.

But Besant has talked about tariffs as a negotiating tactic. And Stephen Mirren wrote an article. I think he just like did it for his hedge fund or something. And it's like what the article, quote unquote, says is that like 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. Right.

And the main reason for that, at least as I understand it, is that there was really strong cooperation between ICE and state and local law enforcement officials there. And basically, they were picking people up out of jails all throughout the country, which is a very efficient process.

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, I guess, is that Trump was like tricked by these guys. I don't know.

I kind of feel like I've been looking at all the like obsequious flattery that different CEOs have been throwing Trump's way. And I'm like... Do I really think that Donald Trump is such a like naive patsy, as everybody is saying? And it's like everyone knows the way to Trump's heart is with like completely disingenuous flattery. Or does he just enjoy this, right?

Like as a thing, he thinks it's funny that he can make the monkeys dance by putting it out there. That like if you say nice things about Trump, he'll like you.

Musk said they don't actually have the money. And then Altman came back and was like, you know, I hope that in your new role, you mostly make decisions that are good for America.

If you're thinking of deportation as a resource-intensive kind of 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, then different enforcement priorities, things like that.

Well, 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 that liberals don't know how much they should appreciate Reid Hoffman.

But that's what I read is happening here. So we need a Michael Bennett, Sam Altman beer summit where they can talk about their letter sending. No, I mean, that all makes sense. I think it's like... A year ago, I was really, maybe even six months, I was really on like, no, like Trump is a tariff fanatic. Like that's why he keeps talking about this.

But what Trump at least would like, what real immigration hawks would like to see happen is 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.

That's why he's having so much problems with these things. But there are now doubts, significant doubts in my mind based on the team that he's assembled. Because he has, to your point, gotten them to sort of say that they're for tariffs. But they kept enough... caveats in that analysis, right? Like they didn't act.

If you look at Besson's statements, Marin's statements, the things that they put on paper, they did not like burn their bridges with conventional neoclassical economic analysis, which is different from there was this Wilbur Ross paper where they were like net imports are subtracted from the GDP calculus. So therefore, if we balance trade, GDP will go up. And that's totally wrong.

That's like really bad economics. And everybody wrote that, was like, these guys are numbskulls. And so that was this kind of bridge-burning movement, right, where if you're willing to make a statement like that, you are not going to be, like, welcomed back in the polite society of people who understand international trade.

Whereas, like, this Marin thing, where it's like, well, it might generate some revenue and equilibrium price effects are not actually that large, that's like... I think 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. We were asking ourselves, like, do we need to rush out and get it before the tariffs come in?

And we're like, I don't know. It's like exchange rate might adjust. Like, we don't know what's going to happen. There could be retaliation that actually makes things cheaper. The world is complicated. And, like, that level of tariff defense that they've come up with is respectable enough to that it just kind of makes me think, like, maybe this is just for show.

And, you know, I'll leave my words when imported fertilizer all has a 20% tax and nobody can buy bananas.

Like, people come to the United States without visas because they believe that life as an illegal immigrant in the United States of America will be better there. than their life back at home.

Yeah, it's happening.

So if you can make it worse in any number of different ways, including by just raising uncertainty that a person kind of working off the books and minding their own business might get deported, that has a kind of an impact. Like yesterday, I think Tom Honan was on TV and he was like, we arrested 308 people already, which was like, I think the average under Biden was about 310 ice arrests per day.

It's a little bit hard to say. I mean, so literally, right, it was the Obama administration created the United States Digital Service. Yes. 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've worked there.

Doge is now going to be the new name of the USDS, which will be the United States Doge Service, so that they can reuse the logo, which I guess is efficient. And it is now zeroed in on changing IT procurement, which seems like a good idea from everything that I've heard about federal IT procurement. It is an area that is ripe for reform and some increased efficiency.

I mean, when all these Doge 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, like, guys, like, this isn't going to work. That's not how the government works. Like, you can't just come to the agency and say, ah, there aren't regulations anymore because— I mean, I don't know what to say.

Like, 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 startup. Because unlike at a well-run startup, you can't just decide something isn't working and shut it down. You can't just lay somebody off because you think they're super. Like, all of that is accurate.

But it's like, it's genuinely true.

Right. And it's not like it never occurred to anybody that it might be more fun for the president of the United States to just be able to make stuff up or tell people what they should do. You have to implement the laws that exist.

So there's a certain amount of like we're getting tough theater that is occurring and that will occur. But we don't really know what's going to happen. Right. I mean, we haven't ever seen one. 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's big immigration backlash.

Well, so just one thing I wanted to flag that to me is like it's small, but it really signifies what you're talking about, which is that 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 because since there are tax credits for people who buy EVs—

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, like, there were stories of, like, it's all squared away. Like, 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. Right.

Like it was not just that he's taking action on his own rather than waiting for Congress or engaging with Congress. He did something that congressional Republicans like specifically asked him not to do because they were going to do it. Right. I mean, it wasn't a disagreement. And it would make it easier for them to do other things he wants them to do. Supposedly. And I think.

I think the paradox of Trump as leader of the Republican Party for a long time now is that he is just not as interested in changing American public policy as the typical high-level politician is. It's been very politically potent of him to just kind of like cut off the anti-abortion movement at the legs of

Once it became politically inconvenient for him, he's a very dominating presence in Republican politics. Joe Biden spent like a lot of time worrying about blowback from the left over various things and showing that he was delivering. But like with Trump, the presence, the persona, the lib owning, the announcements kind of are delivering for his core supporters.

And I don't think he stays up at night Well, if they wind up needing to settle for a temporary extension rather than a permanent TCJA, like, I'm really going to be in for it, you know? But, like, it's actually a really big deal. Like, there's a reason, like, 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 like 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 like, he's clearly not that invested in this question of permanent policy change. And again, I mean, I was saying this about immigration stuff. Like, I think he's... He's made so much headway politically with this that like 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. And like he's really into that. And I don't know that he cares about the permanence that comes with legislation.

And so, like, should we deport everyone? Polls like pretty well. You, you know, go into a restaurant that you like and ICE has like deported the guys washing the dishes and now the restaurant's closed and one of them is married and he's got kids who are American citizens and there's like a sad story in the newspaper.

Matt? Tim Shank's book, Left Adrift, is a great sort of intervention into the like what's up with Democrats kind of debate, looking historically at Bill Clinton and to an extent Barack Obama, but also a lot of Tony Blair, Ahud Barak, sort of center left figures. Very good stuff.

Mark Dunkelman has a book that is, I think, not quite out yet, but I read in galleys and that is going to be released in a couple of weeks.

It's called Why Nothing Works. It covers similar themes to your book, but more detail.

Yeah, but more detail on a narrower set of topics. And you'll really learn a lot about the history of kind of big infrastructure projects. I've also, 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 estimate, the greatest English language novel ever written. I read on the internet, so I read it. It's really good.

You know, it's something, the conventional wisdom, they just like, they really nailed that one. It's by George Eliot. You can get it for like 20 cents on an ebook version. Public domain is lovely. You'll learn something and you'll learn how to read long sentences, which is miraculous in this day and age.

That's where you get into more difficult things and it's why Trump always talks about criminals. Right. Because he's always talking about criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, which is like, I think, an easy sell. Right. Somebody who, in addition to immigrating illegally, has committed non-immigration crimes. But the impetus behind these orders is to try to say nobody is safe. Right.

Like everybody better watch their back.

I think, yes, clearly, like the politics have shifted in blue America, I think particularly around removals of people who've been arrested and that to the extent that Donald Trump wants to work with people and get back to an Obama-type policy agenda there. Like, I think he could get it done through a mix of political fear and sincere change of heart on the part of Democratic officials.

Like, and Riley Act deals with a basically related set of considerations. I mean, 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, you know, who've been convicted of theft and some other list of crimes. Arrested for. Arrested, yes. So the objections to it relate to sort of 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, like to get Democrats to vote no, right, by saying like this is unworkable, it's going to hamstring the executive and then Republicans could run against it. Democrats started saying, well, we'll vote to advance this, but like we're going to we're going to like fix that stuff in the amendment process.

Then because Republicans really like they wanted to get to know 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 like probably unworkable bill has passed. E-Verify and employer sanctions are a different kettle of fish because when Republicans were putting together, I think they called it H.R.1.

It was like this big immigration package. H.R.2? H.R.2, yes, when Biden was president. And 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 know with Biden so they could complain. But, like, that's a, you know, a sticky point for Republicans, and it raises the question, again,

of where does Trump want to go with this ultimately in terms of workplace raids, other things that are bothersome to the business community versus just kind of picking fights with progressive mayors and governors about local law enforcement cooperation.

I think that part of it, you saw this back during the they're eating the dogs, eating the cats controversy, which is that the sort of MAGA movement has tried to redefine people with things like temporary protected status or people with asylum applications, you know, 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 TPS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think Vice President Vance, who's more cogent than President Trump, has explained that in his view, this is like a loophole. This is like lawyer BS. And so I think 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, like Trump was out 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 referring to a different H-2B. But, you know, there's never been a question that, like, you are allowed to come to the United States on a J-1 visa.