The Five 05-29-2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the key announcements made by Elon Musk?
Well, also, he was compliant with the statute, right? So we knew he had to leave at that time, which is why when the mainstream media crows, oh, he's being chased out of D.C., that's not at all what's happening. He came in for a certain amount of time, fulfilled his duties, and then left. He did cut spending.
I mean, he found $4.7 trillion by the Treasury that because didn't have to do a line item. Literally overnight, that spigot was turned off because all of a sudden there had to be accountability. I think about, you know, the reality that it's so simple to slash all of this spending and all of this waste, fraud and abuse.
But the complexity was in the execution, was in the selling, because at every step of the way, all of these Democrats and all of these liberals, they just inherited a system. And that was why they accepted it. Like it. It matters about the title, not the actual productivity, right? You take the Social Security Administration. That's where I worked as a federal attorney in part.
In one year, there were overpayments of $23 billion. But the Dems at the time were like, well, that's just 1% of the whole budget, so who cares? And it's that kind of thinking that is so destructive instead of saying we do care because it's death by a thousand cuts, because economic catastrophe is the next logical step if you keep throwing away other people's money.
So at the end of the day, when people who complain about the DMV think that that's not this on the larger scale, we have pundits right now saying, oh, he's he fired everyone that inspects our food and that does. No, he didn't. That's, again, them inheriting the system, so automatically ascribing value when the reality was all of that bloat, all of it needed to be bloat, needed to be exploded.
And the only person that could do it was him through the algorithms. That's what Speaker Johnson said today. He said the bureaucracy was hiding it. That's why you can't do it the legal, boring way. You didn't say boring.
I did say legal, though, which we should aspire to.
Dana, I do find it... I think the thing that bugs me the most about it is he was doing something that was widely popular among the American public and still is. And yet the Democrats and the media attacked him for it. It's like you talk about public service. He's not a politician. He didn't have to do this. Right.
I absolutely think that the long-term legacy of Elon Musk in this period of his life, and maybe forever, will be complicated. Because... One thing that is wonderful is to go back to actually being willing to have this conversation about overspending. Right. We're having the conversation.
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Chapter 2: How does the panel view the economic implications of Musk's decisions?
And he's basically said what a lot of us know that Donald Trump, he's obsessed with.
with harvard and there's an online rumor and i i also read the milani was upset about that baron applied and he didn't get in and i i'm not saying that it's about that but the administration seems to be focused on them and they are the toughest opponent you could ever ask for the lawyers that are defending them are super conservative lawyers that understand that this is an assault on the first amendment and there will be huge economic impact foreign students bring in forty four billion dollars annually to the american economy
But if I may say, the majority of that $43 billion per year on tuition of those internationalists, $1.1 million.
It's not just tuition. It's what they contribute. They spend here. They vacation here. They eat out. They live here. And they have money. We want rich people to be here or people with rich parents.
But according to The Washington Post, the majority of that is on tuition and housing, which goes to Dana's point about just feeding the administrative bloat. Essentially, these international students are subsidizing the American kids.
And that's why it's so ironic, because for an institution that was determined by the Supreme Court to discriminate against Asian Americans, they have no problem bringing in the majority of their foreign students from China.
Right.
Because they pay the full price now. And we know to your point, last year alone, five University of Michigan Chinese students were prosecuted for counter surveillance espionage. And do I care as a UW graduate? No. Go dog. But at the end of the day, that's a massive. There's I feel like there's there's two sort of buckets here. There's the anti-Semitism. And that is so real.
I mean, we had a Harvard professor that called this. The Trump's threat to defund an extinction level event. And having just been in Poland this weekend at Auschwitz and the like. No, no, no. The extinction level event begins with rhetoric that is rampant on Harvard campus. And it continues to the refusal by the administration to tamp it down and say this is not enough.
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Chapter 3: What are the criticisms against Musk and Trump?
The president's rationale for imposing these powerful tariffs was legally sound and grounded in common sense. Three judges of the U.S. Court of International Trade disagreed and brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.
There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.
All right. So this is the process that we have. And there's a judicial branch, Emily, that's weighing in here. And the Trump administration is going to appeal. So we're a little bit in limbo. Where do you see it?
Yeah. And these are administrative law judges. Right. So it's sort of on a different channel that I think a lot of people don't realize is really a big effect on our country, including the Social Security Administration and a lot of different agencies. But then it gets. it gets sort of put into the track of obviously the circuit court and eventually SCOTUS.
Look, the senior judge had this quote, which was, it may be a very dandy plan, but it has to meet the statute. So at the end of the day, these judges argued that this particular statute did not levy the authority to the president to deal with tariffs, right? Only embargoes and sanctions.
And then they said, and even if it did, this doesn't rise to the level of a national emergency because we've been sitting and drowning in these tariffs for 49 years. Now, the counter argument to that, the White House was like, No, it is an emergency, actually, just because we've been sitting in it doesn't make it less acute. And also, indeed, I do have the authority.
So now that was stayed, it will go, I'm sure, to the Supreme Court. And also, though, note this, that I think they're going to start just leveraging all of these tariffs under other statutes. So they're going to say, fine, I can't use this particular one. I'm going to start leveraging the same analogs in others.
Do you think Congress would pass any other laws, Jesse, to see if they could, like the Republicans? Yeah. Yeah.
Congress isn't going to do anything about this. He has the statutory authority. But you're right, Emily. They just have to invoke a different act. You could invoke the Trade Act of 1974 of 1930. You could expand it to different sectors because steel, aluminum and auto tariffs are still on. You could say it's a national security threat.
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Chapter 4: What solutions do Democrats propose for economic issues?
Yeah.
So the court said they had to bring him back and he never came back. So who cares, right?
Just for the record, he's doing this because he knows that I'm right about it. You brought it up.
I'm just responding to your erroneous assertions.
In just the last month, 96% of federal district court rulings went against the Trump administration because they are not following those.
You can find those judges anywhere. But we're still moving the bad guys out of here.
They're Reagan appointees. They're Trump appointees. They're Bush appointees. It's all appealable.
They could win in the end, but they might lose in the end. So all I was saying is they've got to have a backup plan. Yeah, what's the backup plan, Jess? We'll find out.
We don't need one.
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