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Show Notes
During the 2024 presidential election, a contingent of libertarians cast strategic, often reluctant votes for Donald Trump, arguing he was the lesser of two evils. Among them: Reason's own Liz Wolfe and J.D. Tuccille, alongside comedian and Part of the Problem host Dave Smith. Each thinks a Kamala Harris administration would have been more troubling, citing concerns about censorship, economic illiteracy, and cultural authoritarianism. More than 100 days into Trump's second presidency it's time to start asking: do you regret your vote?
Reason's Zach Weissmueller, a non-voter, moderates a conversation on Trump's second term thus far. From the erosion of due process in immigration enforcement and the failure of the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency initiative, to aggressive tariffs and erratic foreign policy gambits, Smith, Wolfe, and Tuccille dissect the trade-offs they anticipated versus what's actually happened.
This episode was recorded on May 8, 2025.
Sources Referenced:
- Just Asking Questions with Dave Smith, David Stockman, and Jacob Grier: Who is the lesser evil?
- Just Asking Questions with Rand Paul: Why I oppose Trump's tariffs
- Just Asking Questions with Vivek Ramaswamy: Will MAGA become libertarian, nationalist, or both?
- Just Asking Questions with Batya Ungar-Sargon: The Case for MAGA Leftism
- "What I Learned From Paleoism," by Lew Rockwell
- "Milton Friedman's Warning to DOGE," by Zach Weissmueller
- Bari Weiss's discussed tweet
Chapters
- 00:00 Coming up…
- 00:42 Do you regret voting for Trump?
- 06:00 Counterfactuals and the Kamala Harris presidency
- 12:50 The problem with voting shaming and libertarian nuance
- 20:30 Immigration, deportations, and rule of law concerns
- 28:55 Is Trump undermining due process?
- 36:50 Tariffs, economic nationalism, and free trade debate
- 50:45 Globalization vs. protectionism: What's hurting the middle class?
- 59:40 The decline of affordability in America
- 01:11:00 Reflections on DOGE, bureaucracy, and missed opportunities
- 01:15:00 Trump's foreign policy: Ukraine, Iran, and Israel
- 01:20:00 Final reflections: best and worst of Trump's second term so far
Transcript:
This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.
Zach Weissmueller: Do you regret your Trump vote? Just asking questions. We're a little over 100 days into the second Trump administration. Though it kind of feels like more as the president came in hot with an arsenal of executive orders reshaping the immigration system, the federal bureaucracy and the global economy. You might recall that Trump made an explicit appeal to libertarians to vote for him showing up at the Libertarian Party Convention tomake his pitch. Many libertarians feeling queasy about a Kamala Harris presidency and underwhelmed by the state of the Libertarian Party decided to give Trump 2.0 a try. We've got three of them here today, including my co-host Liz Wolf and another of my Reason colleagues J.D. Tuccille. Dave Smith, host of Part of the Problem podcast, also joins us. I think it's fair to describe them all as reluctant Trump voters who had some serious reservations about various aspects of his agenda and maybe his character, but felt that the other options were worse. And so this seems like a good time to just reflect on how things are going so far from a libertarian perspective. Good to see all of you.
Liz Wolfe: I see you too much.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, yeah, you can just keep it to yourself. You each voted for Trump for slightly different reasons. So let's start there. First, Dave, we had you on before the election to talk about this a little bit, which we will link to that episode. And you told us at the time that "I might be casting the most unenthusiastic vote in the history of voting." But your reasoning was that it was purely a vote against Kamala Harris. Let's roll the tape to see exactly why you thought she deserved to lose at the time.
Dave Smith:(CLIP) I've never seen anything like the Kamala Harris campaign. There's not even anything else you could compare it to where on every level it doesn't exist. Like there's nothing. She didn't win a primary. She ran for president four years ago and didn't make it to Iowa. She's walked away from every single position that she was running on four years ago without explaining why. "That was five years ago. Ha ha ha ha". That's it. But oh, by the way, she's the sitting vice president. Is she running on the current administration? No. And why not? Because I'm not Joe Biden. Hey, like, it's just nothing there. And to watch her, you know, what really did it for me was this rehabilitate the Cheney's that I just was like, what are we what are we doing here? And to me, for you know for everything the Democrats have done over the last really eight years. Um, starting with framing the sitting president for, uh, treason for these claims that he was a Russian spy, which were totally all, they produce nothing. Then they were the, um, the party of lockdowns and, uh mandates, which, okay, the Republicans were bad on too, but no question. They kind of branded themselves that then they were all in on this disastrous war in Ukraine, which has done nothing except get hundreds of thousands of people killed. And then they're gonna essentially coup the president of the United States of America who they had spent four years pretending was not in severe mental decline and and now to run somebody who's just nothing who's going around campaigning with Liz Cheney is just enough for me that you deserve to lose forever.
Zach Weissmueller: Okay, so about 100 or so days in, and kind of imagine, I guess, the counterfactual Kamala Harris presidency. How are you feeling about things, Dave?
Dave Smith: I'm, uh, I enjoy talking to you guys much more from home than a hotel room. That's my reflection on that. Man, I hate being in hotels all the time. Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, running the counterfactual Kamala Harris, I think is a little bit difficult, um, because I don't know, you know what, it's hard to say exactly what her presidency would have been. Like my, uh my default assumption is that it would have I don't think it would have just been a continuation of the Biden administration. I think it wouldn't have been a ramp up. And I think we also talked about on that show that one of my major motivations for supporting Trump was that I thought it would really be a death blow to the corporate media and it would be kind of like the coronation. Like this had kind of already happened, but it made it official that the alternative internet world is the mainstream and that the corporate media is dead. And, and I, I got into arguments with this, but like with some people who I think are very smart, who I respect very much. Um, I remember arguing with Robby Soave.
Zach Weissmueller: Believe it or not, that's his real name, folks.
Dave Smith: Robby was basically saying, which he had a fair argument for, he was like, well, look, like the first time Donald Trump won, it actually drove the ratings up for the corporate media. And my thought was that it's not going to work this time. And I thought so much of that was driven by the Russiagate stuff. And post Russiogate being exposed, and post the entire COVID narrative falling apart, I just think they had no more bullets left in the chamber. Like there was nothing they could say. That's going to actually get people to want to tune in and listen. So for now, if I'm running the counterfactual, if Kamala Harris had won. In many ways, I think that would have signaled that no, actually, the corporate media still does matter more. And that even though Donald Trump, even though Joe Rogan and Theo Von and all these guys had Trump on, that didn't move the needle as much. And so almost completely aside from the politics of it, just like on a cultural level, I think this is a lot of why so much of the woke insanity has totally receded. It's just kind of like, oh, they lost this epic battle therefore we recognize the side that's won. Almost every Democrat, I shouldn't say almost, there's a sliver of them who still want to cling to it, but almost every Democrat now recognizes that's like, oh we can't push this radical cultural agenda anymore, it's gonna cost us elections. And so for that you know, and for the reasons I laid out there, I do, I, I still feel that way. Um, I think that, you know, the Donald Trump first hundred days have been, you know like a clown show in a lot of ways, there's been some really terrible policies, um, and there's been some good ones too. But at this point, I'm not feeling like, Oh, I regret my vote. I'd, I'd still at this point, you would say, Oh thank God we dodged the bullet of Kamala Harris.
Zach Weissmueller: Any reactions to that, JD or Liz, this idea that Trump was, it had to be done because there had to be a repudiation of the kind of gatekeepers that ushered us through COVID. And that is a major upside of Trump 2.0.
J.D. Tuccille: Yeah, I mean, there's an element of David's thinking of what I did. I think I described at the time my first ambiguous exploration and reason for voting for Trump, but then I openly wrote for National Post that I was voting for him, but I said I was engaged in damage control and.
Zach Weissmueller: I've got your reasoning right here, you said Trump, scumbag though he is, could be less bad than the empty vessel for the control freaks around her that is Kamala Harris.
J.D. Tuccille: Yeah and uh… That was my attitude then. Now is the Trump 2.0 presidency perhaps a little shittier than even I anticipated yes it is uh… I can't say I regret it i knew it was a gamble at the time. I thought the choices we face were actually awful uh… I liked Chase Oliver as a candidate for the Libertarian Party was uh… Shambolic is still shambolic and rebuilding so I uh… By cut through the dice and said you know what at least if we disrupt what what is a and by administration Kamala Harris administration that is heavily integrated with the permanent government the civil service with the political class with the elite, if we disrupt that a little bit maybe we can at least get a different variety a less organized variety of all hold us for a little while and and break up what has been a bad experience with the Biden/Harris uh you know presidency uh nothing either of them were in control i don't think i think the aids around works just as much the decision-making power. So, do I regret it? I don't really regret it. I'm also not happy about my vote. It just was what it was in an effort to exercise damage, to engage in damage control in a bad situation.
Zach Weissmueller: Can I ask you about one other aspect of your reasoning for voting for him? You said you were kind of standing in solidarity with your wife who felt that the left's anti-Semitism was just getting out of control. How do you feel on that front? Because there's definitely been a pivot towards combating anti-semitism, but from a libertarian perspective, it's kind of manifested in these. Crackdowns on speech on campus and even, you know, pulling visas and green cards from people for engaging in protest activities, what are your reflections on that particular point?
J.D. Tuccille: Yeah, I mean, I was and am concerned about the antisemitic turn of the Democratic Party. I'm not pleased with how the Trump administration enacts even its good ideas, but the way I look at it is that we were given a choice between a nativist, economically illiterate authoritarian political party, the Republicans, and an antisemitic, economically, you know, illiterate totalitarian political party which is the Democrats. And I'm deeply concerned about antisemitism. They're really, my wife is an observant Jew. I mean, you know, that's a matter of concern for me. And there are two places in the world now that are probably safe for Jews to live. And that's the United States and Israel. You know, Jews are kind of running out of places where they can live and openly, you know, observe their faith and be visibly Jewish. Uh… Even Canada uh… Is going through a major turmoil and an open and accidentally some business tax on jewish schools and synagogues so uh… That is a major concern now is the Trump administration going about this the right way. Well I'm not gonna lose too much sleep about pulling money away from Harvard University, Columbia University depriving any of the uh… Universities of government money uh… Do I think that people ought to be busted just for writing an op-ed? No, I absolutely don't think that's the case, even if it's horrendous out there. Expressing hateful ideas. But a lot of this stuff crosses that line, like what we saw at Columbia University yesterday in the library, when two security guards were driven away in ambulances after there was a quasi-riot in the library on a pro-Hamas protest. So yeah, this is definitely part of my reasoning, is that I'm troubled by the anti-Semitic turn of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Which is I think still dominant now, even though the Democratic Party is going through what Republicans won through say five or eight years ago, which is kind of a re-examination of what it stands for and it's something of a breakup that may result in a coalescing new form.
Zach Weissmueller: Liz let me invite you both to react to anything that they said and also read you your own words back to you Remember you asked for this It's I think you
Liz Wolfe: I think doing this panel just to correct the record 100% was not my idea. It was my idea while stoned. I was literally like smoking a joint on my patio and I was like, wait a second. I'm so annoyed by people on Twitter always asking me if I regret my Trump vote. What if we just got a whole bunch of Trump voters together and explored that question. So I messaged it to Zach and naturally Zach was like okay sure whatever.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, this is your chance to clear the air of weed smoke and also all the smoke on Twitter. This is, I mean, so what you said at the time was that the democracy subverting activities of January 6th disturbed me as did tariffs, but I'm more optimistic about the economic conditions that will arise as a result of a Trump administration. And I was pleased with his Supreme Court fix during his first term. Price controls, court packing, and massive amounts of government spending, which I expect to accompany a Harris presidency, will simply not work for me. So what do you, how, what's your reflection, how do you feel about things now?
Liz Wolfe: I mean, I don't really regret my vote because I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about who I voted for. I think libertarians have historically been completely correct in basically saying your vote doesn't matter to the degree that you think. You are probably best served sitting at home. It's just really not going to turn the outcome of an election. And the fact that people spend so much time sort of shaming people over this type of thing is really, it's just such a waste of breath and energy. That said… I always saw Trump, and I think I could have articulated this better at the time, I always saw Trump as a very high upside, very high downside candidate. And I think the thing that's been really frustrating for me is that so far we've seen pretty much all downside. In the early days, I was feeling really optimistic about what DOGE could do. And I recall reading the news about the CFPB being dismantled and like sending that link to a few of my friends and just feeling like, wow, I've been so vindicated. This is awesome. And DOGE seems like the only sort of hope of actually meaningfully reducing the size of government, at least in my lifetime that we've seen, like, this is incredible. And it's just absolutely wild how that really has not come to fruition. I think as it was initially conceived of by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, I think it could have been successful in that form when Vivek was sort of kicked off of the project and it became an Elon Musk initiative entirely. Um, it somehow just became, you know, profoundly unsuccessful. And I think a lot of their sloppiness and accounting has really kind of discredited some of the limited government cause, which makes me concerned from like a 4D chess political perspective, like does this sabotage government slashing efforts for like a decade to come, I hope not, but it's possible and then in a bunch of other areas too, it's just been. Absolutely horrible, you know, trying to make sense of what his tariff policy actually is and why. And what he wants those final amounts to be. I mean, the announcing of reciprocal tariffs has been such a problem. I'm concerned about that as well as the sort of constant 90 day pauses. And then immigration policy, you look at the degree to which he's just really aggressive with deportations. And look, there's some amount of like, deportation was never going to be, soft and cuddly and fuzzy, right? Like it was never gonna be sealing the border again and rolling back some of the Biden era chaos. Was never going to be something that looked good. But the way that the Trump administration has done it has been just shockingly, appallingly bad. And I really do think that there's like such an erosion of due process, which leaves me feeling like, how do we possibly get people to care about this again? The number of fellow Americans who I've seen justifying that type of behavior by the Trump administration is really, really frustrating to me, especially because using that alien enemies act to attempt to deport these people. Keeps getting swatted down by various judges. We saw the Fourth Circuit especially issue a really scathing rebuke. And I'm just a little bit like, you know, like even Trump appointed judges don't agree that the Alien Enemies Act can be used in this way. And I think that's a really big problem. I think the mechanism by which we do this really does matter.
Dave Smith: On that topic, yeah, go ahead, please do. No, there was something, what Liz said up top there, I feel like I just wanted to like stress because there is something that I've, it's very interesting the way a lot of libertarians do react to voting at all. And it's almost as if in some weird way. They buy into the same principle that statists do. And like, I remember there was this one, one time, many years ago, I was on a Fox news show. I was on Kennedy, uh, and Julie Roginsky, who's like a Democratic strategist. She, at one point, like I forget what it was, but it was like, I criticized Hillary Clinton, and then she was like oh, so you must love Donald Trump, you know, the typical thing libertarians are used to getting, and I was like no, I actually don't like him either. And she was, like, wait, so who did you vote for? And I was, I didn't vote. And she goes, this is all on air, and she goes well, if you don't vote, then you can't complain. And I'm like, really? Because I'm about to. So like that's, it's like, that's like an, it is an empirical claim, and I'm about to demonstrate that that's not true. And every libertarian recognizes immediately like how ridiculous that is but then they almost apply the inverse when they find out like you're voting for one of the major party candidates like oh well now you're responsible for all of the bad and it's like all of this is so ridiculous it's like look from libertarian first principles you can deduce that like we're under duress. We are forced into we're forced into a false binary where that shouldn't exist. But one of these two people is gonna be president and it's completely reasonable for libertarians to say I find one of them to be slightly preferable to the other one. So I'm gonna throw a vote their way and see what ends up coming of all of that. So that was kind of just my I just I found it very interesting watching like how people how libertarians implicitly like conceptualize what voting is as if this means it's like a full endorsement of everything that this person has ever done or said or whatever they will do in the future rather than what it really is which is essentially a strategic guess you're kind of going like
Liz Wolfe: This is the thing that's like wrinkled me so much in the aftermath of my scandalous Trump vote, which has been the number of people who respond to me constantly on Twitter or YouTube or whatever and say, you voted for this whenever I'm criticizing a Trump policy. And it's like, yes, I voted for this candidate extremely reluctantly, but I didn't endorse every single thing that you would end up doing. And wouldn't you, in fact, rather have people who will vote for a candidate and still retain their independence and their ability to you know, critically assess each specific policy that this president puts forth and then is able to call balls and strikes and say, this policy is good, this policy's not aligned with my values. Like, it's confusing to me, and especially for a journalist to do that, like it's confusing to me what they want. Do they want me to vote for Trump and then become like a MAGA-tard Trump sycophant and just, you know be super, super excited about every single thing his administration does? Like, would they feel better served by me doing that? I wouldn't feel good. By me doing that. I feel much better about saying, look, I made an educated guess. So far, I don't really like how the guess is working out. It's not really aligned with my values and beliefs. As a libertarian, I consistently feel like there's no good option available to me. And you know what? The only thing I can do as a journalist for the next four years is try to be honest about what is good, what is bad, and what I know and what I don t know about what Trump's doing.
J.D. Tuccille: Yeah, I'm gonna get down on that. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I mean, I am just amazed. I've known people for decades who will come at me with, and it's clear that they kind of live at the intersection of tribalism and retardation, because it's a matter of being, they insist that you be all in. You're either entirely on Team Red or entirely on Team Blue, and they can't, and they're angry with me. They're furious because I write some columns that say, yeah, I think DOGE is a good idea. I'm going to scare the Department of Education. And then I write a piece saying, no, Trump's way over the top with executive actions and his trade policy is insane. So yeah, tribalism, the insistence that political identity is all, is a be all and end all. And actually, this is a good way to riff and say this. I've recently seen two studies, one from 2017 from Stanford, another from Political Psychology published recently. Both said that now political identity overshadows race and ethnicity as a matter of personal identification. And a source of interpersonal animus in this country. So yeah, people live in this kind of intersection of, and I'll say it again, of retardation and tribalism. And they insist that you go all in on this identity instead of saying, you know, the vote worked out or the vote didn't work out, and I think I'll just be critical of the policy, the action, the politician rather than the candidate.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Let me, uh, triple down on that and say that it's, I think that the less, the more people can avoid letting a vote warp their brain, um, the better off we will all be. Um, I've increasingly come to view it as a harm reduction type of thing where it's like whoever wins, this is not going to be good for America, but is there a choice that is going to be less harmful for America? And if the answer to that is no, then. You can not vote, that was my decision, but this year, last time I made a different decision. We kind of bring this on ourselves at Reason by publishing our votes publicly and just for the record, so people get an understanding. We had 12 Chase Oliver voters, six non-voters, including myself, three Kamala Harris voters, and two write-ins and two Trump voters, to both who are on this show with us. Right now I want to keep going into some of the specific issues one that Liz raised was deportations and I'm really curious to get Dave's thoughts on this because I think Dave, you're the most kind of friendly to immigration restrictions of the libertarians on this podcast. However, there are some rule of law issues. The Supreme Court did order the government to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from this El Salvadoran prison. So far that seems not to be happening at all. What are your feelings about this? Do you have any sort of rule of law type concerns around this particular issue?
Dave Smith: Um, yes. And I think, yeah. And you know, uh, um, I think it's already sold out, but I think they stream it, but of course Reason magazine, uh or Reason I always call you guys Reason magazine even though the magazine is the least of it these days, but it's just, that's what's in my brain for eternity.
Liz Wolfe: At least you don't call us ReaCNN.
Dave Smith: That's, I've never, I'd never been known for that. I may have called you "Treason Magazine" once, but I was particularly mad at you. I think Brian Doherty had written an anti-Ron Paul piece and he got me pissed off or something like that. But, I love you guys. I've always been on record. You two are, this is my favorite show, that Reason does. But, you know, there's like, okay, so I'm doing a debate at the Soho Forum, which is a Reason, you know, event on immigration. I'm sorry about that. In a couple weeks so check that out there is put it out online so yes i am an immigration restrictionist and in fact i even think that i i'd personally believe and i think this is consistent with libertarian principles we've done shows on this before that i think people who uh… I don't think it's a natural right comma uninvited to it uh… Piece of property that you don't own even if it is absurdly claimed by the U.S. government. But regardless of any of that even if you're going to support mass deportations like let's say just like for the sake of argument come at it from the side where you want to see mass deportation and you've kind of won the day in many respects the public opinion of the American people has been pushed far to the right on immigration from the Joe Biden administration. Mass deportations have at least in several polls had super majorities of the American people supporting them. And so what does Donald Trump do at this moment? You know, you've got the American people on your side, you got the president, this is his signature issue. And so again, he does it in a way that would almost you'd think be designed to undermine public support for mass deportations. I mean, it's one thing to say, you came here illegally, you don't have a right to be here, we're gonna ask you to leave. It's another thing to send people to like a torture camp In El Salvador. In a couple instances people who are not from that country it's like this is madness and I would say I think um me and JD may may see things a little bit differently on this but as the I believe the only jewish person on this uh on this show you know I gotta say and somebody who also doesn't like to see like a rise in hatred of Jewish people you know. Wading into the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is one of the most controversial ongoing events in the world, and is a very divisive and polarizing issue. To weigh into that and then deporting legal residents for the crime of having the wrong opinion is just about the worst thing you could do if you don't want to see a rise in Jew hatred. And I would also, obviously in terms of the policy, I support defunding all of the universities. College is essentially one giant government program that should be abolished just like basically every other government program. But again, to defund them based on the accusations of antisemitism is the worst thing in the world you could do if you want to see a decrease in hatred of Jewish people. Particularly after for at least fifteen years all of these universities have been hotbeds for the most vicious anti white bigotry imaginable I mean it's just like it's it's been totally institutionalized and taught into the entire curriculum that it's just okay to be viciously horrible toward straight white men and there's entire entire departments dedicated to it and so then to defund it i mean just plays right into the stereotype of like oh yes see the one group you're not allowed to accuse. It does nothing but give red meat to the Jew haters whose arguments are pretty stupid and like we don't need to give them any more red meat. So I think all of that has been terrible. I think that Donald Trump essentially had about as big of a like you know I don't like the term mandate. I know politicians always like to use it. I think it's kind of an anti libertarian idea that you ever have a mandate but Donald Trump coming back in and this time winning all the swing states and the popular vote and the corporate media being defeated. He had a real shot in the arm to get some amazing things done in the beginning of his presidency. I think he did a few good things, but at this point, a hundred days in, it is kind of like, I think he's blown that already now. And unfortunately, we're just back to kind of where we were. His approval ratings are, he had his highest approval ratings at the beginning and they're already right back down to where they were because just all of this stuff is so It's obviously clown show stuff. I mean, and the deportations and the tariff stuff, I think are right at the top of the list of that.
Zach Weissmueller: Stuff there. JD, I'm curious to hear your reaction to this notion that paradoxically Trump may have laid the ground for increasing antisemitism, but also just the general sense that, you know, it was articulated by Ezra Klein in this video essay he did where he said the emergency is here, like the threat to rule of law has escalated so bad that we're facing, like it's It's finally here. We're facing that constitutional crisis. Do you buy that it's like things are that bad? Like it is an emergency.
J.D. Tuccille: Well, I mean, two part question, two-part answer. He is definitely, in the way he's gone about, responding to some of the students, the other people here on student visas who expressed hateful ideas, but only expressed hateful ideas, and didn't engage in violence or criminal actions. The way he has gone about that has given them the excuse to act as martyrs. And so it creates a sense of martyrdom when he's visibly suppressing, punishing people for their speech. Rather than for their conduct. Others are being punished for conduct. So is that a problem? Yeah, it is. Because if you give people who are hateful, who are potentially dangerous in some ways, if you give them an excuse to wrap themselves in the flag of martyrdom, you can reinvigorate the movement and definitely give them a certain energy, you can have a lift under their wings. Beyond that, the rule of law, the due process, yeah, there seems to be, even when… Trump is on to something that is important and valid. He seems dedicated to doing it in the cruelest and most self-aggrandizing way he possibly can. And I think that is largely because the man has a walking personality disorder. He's heavy on narcissism. And everything, there has to be an expression of his will. It can't be, well, let's implement these policies and wanna go through the system that might be established by law and by the Constitution. No, it's got to be the CEO handing the orders down and getting it done right now, even if it's in violation of established rights, of protections for rights, and of legal process for getting things done, if you actually find somebody against whom action might legitimately be taken. And so at the end of the day, yes, he does create martyrs. He's a threat to due process. And yeah, he has no regard, so far as I can tell, for abiding by the Constitution, for abiding court orders, and for abiding by the dictates of a system that is a political system and not a corporate structure that he personally owns.
Zach Weissmueller: What about you, Liz? Do you have any thoughts on the rule of law question?
Liz Wolfe: Oh, yes. I think, you know, when people talk about Trump's deportation policy, they so frequently bring up the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, which makes sense. You know, he was basically tarred as a member of MS-13 by multiple members of the Trump administration. He was deported to El Salvador originally. He came to the U.S. illegally in, I believe, 2012. It took him like seven years to actually sort of attempt to seek legal status. And he had, you know, one arrest on his record and the cops basically said he looks gang affiliated. But, you know, then he was able to successfully convince a judge that he had credible fear of persecution from gangs because of his family's successful pupusa business in his own country. And so he was to get a sort of withholding of removal that basically shielded him from being deported back to El Salvador. He married a US citizen He was not, you know, a legal permanent U.S. resident, but he had a child who was an American citizen and a wife. And he was sent to CECOT, to El Salvador's, you know terrible maximum security prison without really getting sufficient trial, without getting the ability to sort of contest the charges against him that he was MS-13 affiliated. And to be able to make the case for why he ought to be to stay, or at least not to be deported back to that place that he had withholding removal from. Most people know of that case, right? Everyone's heard of that. They don't necessarily know the case of Ricardo Prado Vazquez, the Venezuelan migrant who was I think doing like a door dash job or something near the Canada-U.S. Border, took a wrong turn, went over the bridge, attempted to reenter the United States, was detained, was then sent to ICE custody. And then his family hasn't heard from him since then. He was confirmed to be deported from the United States. And the US government appears to have lost track of him. They don't know what happened to him or where he went. There's also, by the way, no indication that he's gang affiliated and his child hasn't heard from him for I think over a month now. You know, you look at the flights of Venezuelans who were deported, not to Venezuela because the Venezuelan government won't accept them, but to El Salvador. And you have these flights of, you know, 238 Venezuelans or like the New York Times did a long investigative feature, basically saying. Are these people the worst of the worst, as the Trump administration claims? Well, if you actually cross-check their records and look through a whole bunch of crime databases in Colombia, in Peru, in El Salvador, in Venezuela, in places where these people might have lived or passed through, you don't actually turn up a lot of evidence that indicates that all 238 of these people are brutal rapists and murderers. There is some number, I think it was roughly two dozen, that do have wrap sheets like that. And then some other fraction have more minor offenses, like much more minor, like stealing something, like petty theft. And then a whole bunch of those people actually don't have a criminal record. Actually, there's no information that links them to Tren de Aragua or any other sort of violent gang. At least to me, the fact that the Trump administration feels so comfortable saying, these people are all rapists and murderers. They're all MS-13, they're all Tren De Aragwa, and they feel comfortable deporting these people. Cutting off contact with their family, cutting off with lawyers, and in some cases, sending them to a maximum security prison where it's totally unclear what their fate will be. I mean, I don't feel good about this. And many people basically say, what did you expect? Did you expect a court date? Did you accept a habeas trial for every single person deported? With the scale of the migrant crisis under Biden, that was always impossible. And I think my response is, well, we're America. And we have certain constitutional guarantees. And it is important to me that our executive follows the orders of different court rulings, including the Supreme Court's ruling, which has said that Trump needs to facilitate the return to the United States of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. We consistently see Trump appointed judges basically slapping down the logic, the justifications that he's using. And look, I'm not saying that it should be a situation where every single migrant who has a sob story or who married a US citizen or who is a father gets total and complete amnesty forever. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that we do have the procedural mechanisms to ensure that people get their day in court and they at least get to contest the allegations against them, or maybe bare minimum, we could just not have members of the Trump administration lying about how violent and how heinous and how gang-affiliated these people actually are. Some of them very much are, and the most violent people absolutely do need to leave our country and be locked up for a long time. But it's important to me to be careful about this. I think anybody who actually cares about justice, who cares about crime, who cares about public safety, owes it to themselves and to other people to be honest and to be very careful with how they sort of sift through evidence. And I just think it's frankly very offensive that the Trump administration hasn't done that. And I worry about what type of precedent that sets. When we ignore due process and when we ignore lower court rulings, what exactly do we become?
Zach Weissmueller: Well, yeah, that's what I want to ask about, just to elaborate on one thing Liz was saying, and this will be open to anybody, maybe you'll have thoughts on it, JD, is I think that when it comes to thinking about the rights of immigrants, whether it's citizens or permanent residents or just people who are here on a visa, it seems like the kind of thing that is hard to get. Americans, a lot of Americans care about it. I think libertarians are particularly attuned to individual rights, whether it's the rights of an immigrant or, you know, stretching back to 9-11. You know, we were the people saying, like, maybe don't send these quote-unquote suspected terrorists to Guantanamo, or they are going to be hauled away with no rights. And that was not a popular position at the time. I wonder if… Like, do you think that there's any way that is there any way to get people to care about this and think about it in terms and like, should they care about it? Should they think about going beyond affecting this, you know, unpopular group of people known as illegal immigrants?
Liz Wolfe: Well, my question to them is like, what exactly happens once Trump starts ignoring Supreme Court rulings? Like what actually happens, like truly, I don't think we want to know. I don' t think we wanna find out. And it's just wild to me that so few people have this sense of, you don't have to and you in fact shouldn't have allegiance to the Imperial executive, to any one branch of government, but you should have a respect for the way that checks and balances get to sort of curb the power. Of the executive when it's overreaching in the way that it has. And I am very concerned about what happens when you repeatedly undermine the judiciary. Like, where do we go from there if the Supreme Court can just be completely ignored by an executive that's very power hungry? Sorry, Jared.
J.D. Tuccille: No, no problem at all. I was going to say, I mean, one of the things, one way to get people perhaps a little more open to the idea, because I know people are not necessarily sympathetic to the courts. When we say due process, they imagine a long, drawn out process and, you know, but fundamental due process. The basis of it is proving an allegation. And a lot of people jump to the ideas, okay, the government's rounding up illegal immigrants who don't have a right to be here. Well, how about asking the government to demonstrate they've got the right people? Because that's the fundamental element of due process, that you actually have the person you claim that you have, that this person actually is an illegal immigrant and not a citizen that you've misidentified or maybe somebody who an ICE agent happens to have his eye on the guy's wife. I mean, we don't know. That's the fundamentals of due processes, proving you have the right person. It's the very first step. And if we can at least get to that point, I think we could work from there. It doesn't necessarily have to be a year-long trial for each and every single person who's accused of being an illegal immigrant. It might just be, how about making the government prove that this person is the person you say it is? You got the right name, and it's actually an illegal emigrant and not a citizen you misidentified.
Liz Wolfe: Well, this is the really frustrating thing about the degree to which so much of the sort of collective media imagination has been occupied by Kilmar Abrego-Garcia's case. It's like we're all interested in reading the tea leaves to try to ascertain whether or not he is an MS-13 member and like his finger tattoos. What exactly does the marijuana leaf mean? What does President Trump think about that? And it's like, well, in a sense, this was a huge waste of time because when Trump came into office, he had to use Dave's hated phrase, a mandate to crack down on open board, open borders, I put in quotes, but like Biden era rampant immigration, he had mass popular approval for that. And it's a waste of our time to be focused on whether or not the marijuana leaf signifies MS-13, whether or not the skull tattoo signifies that, because the thing that should really matter is, is this person in the country legally? Is there a withholding of removal or not that prevents them from deportation? Are they legally eligible for deportation?" And there's lots of people who absolutely fall under that criteria. So we really don't need to adjudicate whether or not they're Trendy or Agua or MS-13. And I think that our sort of, you know, popular health would actually be very well served by coming up with a system of doing that. And I think the Trump administration is being a lot more careful about making sure they're not tarring and feathering people who don't really deserve that. Like it should be. Enough just to say this person is in the country illegally, you know, we have a mandate to crack down on that type of thing, therefore we are deporting them and we're deporting in sort of like the most reasonable, low cost way possible where they're legitimately released into their home country and that's that. But they're not doing that, right? They're making a show of it and they're being, you know, as cruel as can be. And it strikes me as just like, it's like all this like a pageant, it's the show, it's this entertainment for them.
Zach Weissmueller: Let me ask about one of the other huge Trump policies of these first hundred days, which Dave brought up earlier, the topic of tariffs. And not only tariffs, but these unilaterally imposed tariffs, which is what has really riled up people like Rand Paul, who's taken a stand against that. We had him on the show to talk about why. We'll link to that. Essentially he thinks it's a wild abuse of executive power, regardless of how you feel about the tariffs themselves. And I think that a lot of libertarians, including me, were very concerned about the Kamala Harris economic agenda. I mean, one of the things I raised as to why I could not vote for her was that one of first and only concrete policy proposals she made was to set price controls on grocery stores. And so, you know, I could never vote for somebody that is economically illiterate, like that's a road to ruin. I would feel horrible about supporting that in any way, in any form whatsoever. But I do think that the markets have been in turmoil because of the kind of unpredictability of this. They're now recovering because Trump has, you know, made this deal with the U.K. and maybe there's more deals to come. Um, but. To me, it's been kind of unilateral, like the president can actually change the entire global economy this way. That's been kind of disturbing. And I think you could make a case that the kind of economic nationalism we're seeing might even be worse than what we would have seen under the Harris administration. Let's start with Dave. What do you think about the tariffs really being the central. And defining features of these first 100 days or so of the Trump administration.
Dave Smith: I mean, just the economic illiteracy of it all is just infuriating. And it's like, you know, being as charitable as I can be here, because there is like, I think, a little bit of nuance to this, where, like, the current dynamic with many countries, is that there are countries that the U.S. subsidizes. Like both subsidize their military. We put them under our nuclear umbrella. We give the