“Is Trump... all there?”

This is a paid message from GoFundMe. My name's Ashley Kane. I'm the daddy of a little girl in heaven and a father to two boys on there. I've got an incredible relationship with GoFundMe, both personally and via our daughter's foundation, the Xavier Foundation. GoFundMe has allowed me, the foundation, and thousands of people out there to give hope to what is in need. You'd actually be surprised how many people out there are willing to show love and support you in your time of need. My advice for anyone that needs to start up a GoFundMe will be do it. You don't need to feel shame. You don't need to feel guilt. You don't need to feel embarrassment. If you need GoFundMe, use GoFundMe. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. G-O-F-U-N-D-M-E.com. This message reflects one person's experience. As President Trump continues implementing his ambitious agenda, follow along with the MS Now newsletter, Project 47. You'll get weekly updates sent straight to your inbox with expert analysis on the administration's latest actions and how they're affecting the American people. The American people are basically telling the president that they are not OK with any of this. Sign up for the Project 47 newsletter at ms.now slash project 47. A whole civilization will die tonight. Words I never thought I would hear from an American president. And though Donald Trump thankfully didn't follow through this time, these words are a start reminder of how reckless, immoral, and completely outside the bounds of international law this president is. Regrettably, he is no friend of the United Kingdom. He's no leader of the free world. He is a dangerous and corrupt gangster. And that is how we must treat him. Hi again, everybody. It's now 5 o'clock in New York. That was Edward Davy, a member of the British Parliament, calling Donald Trump, quote, reckless, immoral, dangerous, and a corrupt gangster. And in fairness, check, check, check, and check. They are valid criticisms of Donald Trump for sure. But more urgent than his frame of mind this afternoon is his state of mind. As people all around the country and around the world are now publicly beginning to ask the question, is Trump OK? Is he all there? Hold your nose and consider just the last 10 days of his presidency, strictly through the prism of his own social media outputs. On Easter Sunday of all days, he urged the, quote, crazy bastards in Iran to open the bleeping straight, adding praise be to Allah. Two days later, in genocidal fashion, he asserted, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, end, quote, as you just heard, recounted in the halls of British Parliament, a sharp contrast to what he shared a few days later, and now deleted AI image of himself as Jesus. That was just the opener of an all-nighter, an all-nighter of social media activity that any other figure in any other industry would have seen followed by days of coverage about their mental state. 9 50 PM post, post at 10 10 PM, a post at 12 43 AM, a post at 2 35 AM. Less than two hours later, still awake, another post at 4 10 AM, and many, many in between. Donald Trump interspersed posts about major foreign policy matters and commentary about foreign policy with commentary about other stuff, like Trump Tower on the Moon. Today, after insisting that he thought that the Jesus image was an image of him not as Jesus, but as a doctor, he posted this, a photo of him getting a hug from Jesus. So we're back to Jesus, after Jesus, Dr. Jesus, if you're keeping track at home. Make no mistake, by virtue of his position as President of the United States, Donald Trump is right now the most powerful person on the planet. So evaluations of his state of mind and the tone, tenor and temperament of his public outputs are essential. Not just for those of us here, but for people who consider themselves his political patrons and supporters. They're mad too, and some of them have raged over Trump's blasphemy, the quote, demonic influences they're observing. Others appear to be more either in denial or understanding, but they too are concerned about the pattern nonetheless. Watch that. Overall, he's a good person. He's turned into a mean old man, whether it's dementia or whatever it is, and he just screams to everybody. As you get older, technology does pass you by. Maybe he did think it was Jesus. I'm not saying he didn't. I don't know the man. I didn't text him. But there's also a possibility he's just old. There's just a possibility he's just old. Now, I don't know what the bigger picture is here. Maybe it's just an old man with an ego. But Donald Trump, I think this one for me, kind of crosses the line. So we're now at the he's just old face of the Trump presidency in Iran. OK. Our friend Tom Nichols puts it like this in the Atlantic, quote, this is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader. Pope Leo, for his part, said he has, quote, no fear of the administration and will continue to preach the messages of the gospel. The rest of us, however, should be very worried about a commander-in-chief who is trying to govern the country between social media binges, who attacks religious leaders and narcissistic frenzy, and who imagines himself as a deity. If an elderly parent did such things, most people would be concerned. The president is doing such things. The president doing such things is far more alarming. The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president's deterioration and insist that the House and Senate start acting and functioning like branches of government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world. That was where we begin the hour. Former deputy national security advisor to President Obama, now a co-host of Pod Save the World, contributor Ben Rhodes joins us, also joining us, senior contributing editor Michelle Norris is here, Amali Zhang-Fast is still with us. Ben Rhodes, this is not just our problem, but we seem uniquely incapable of dealing with it. Your thoughts about the inability of Trump's own allies to speak the truth about how he acts, and frankly, I'll put myself in the category of American media to borrow a Trump behavior, stare at the sun, and cover this consistently. Yeah, I'll start with the second part here, because when you listen to that British member of parliament, I think what it highlights is that's obvious. What he is saying is obvious. And he's speaking in a moral language. He's not just speaking about a policy issue, he's talking about a feeling that we all have in our guts, that we know intuitively that he is behaving in an unhinged way, and it's moved, not just into social media feuds, it's moved into war and peace. It's moved into the use of violence. It's used into the threat, it's moved into the threat of the destruction of a civilization. And I think that that's the kind of language that people feel has been missing from the Democratic Party at times, where it feels like a normal policy difference when this is not normal, or a media that feels like it has to kind of sanewash what Trump is doing, so that they're presenting the information to viewers or readers in ways that are familiar. But what is happening is not familiar. And then with the Republicans, I think what you see them beginning to reckon with is, let's not forget, that whole media infrastructure on the right spent years doing this to Joe Biden. With some credence, right? And I think the Democratic Party kind of came around to the notion that, yeah, maybe we do need to step in here when Joe Biden was running for reelection, but the reality is we still have two and a half years plus on the clock with Trump. And so if the guardrails don't go up right now from Congress, I mean, putting aside removal, that's gonna be very, obviously, it's a fanciful conversation and a way to have before the midterm election, but the reality is he's acting with freedom of action because he's not facing any kind of pushback or guardrails from a Republican-controlled Congress. And those guardrails have to be put in place immediately because we are in an emergency moment here. And that's what I think all institutions in this country, the media, and you're increasingly seeing foreign leaders stepping up to do it too, there need to be guardrails around his behavior. Ben Rose, let me play a little bit more of Ed Davy, British member of parliament. Trump's latest cunning plan to blockade the Strait of Homoos, that will only escalate this crisis and jeopardize the precarious ceasefire. So it's right that the UK is not joining Trump. And I welcome the Prime Minister convening a summit to offer an alternative to Trump's. We must work with our reliable allies in Europe and the Commonwealth and our partners in the Gulf to bring this conflict to an end and keep open the Strait of Homoos. That is critical for tackling the cost of living crisis. There's getting worse and worse. The off ramp that he's offering there, if you listen closely, is an economic calamity. And I keep wondering if it is the economic calamity that will ultimately be the pretext, because you're right, and I will tell you this, even in newsrooms, talk of the 25th Amendment can be discouraged because people say, oh, it'll never happen, look who's in the cabinet, right? Or impeachment, it'll never happen, look at the Republicans. But it is one of those things that won't happen until it does because it must. And I wonder if you think that sort of frame around economic calamity might be, you know, the path through which we get there. I think so because Trump has approached this war in Iran, like a social media fight with somebody, when in fact, it's not just the realized that are at stake on the ground. This has been a calamity for the entire global economy. There are multiple countries around the world that have significant fuel shortages. The cost of living is going up everywhere, including here in the United States. And that's when political leaders start to pay attention. And Nicole, I think it does come down to fear. Trump, when he came in, he capitalized on fear. That's how universities and law firms and other American institutions capitulated to him. But the reality is out of political necessity and survival, the fear is breaking. Now, the Pope has his own moral authority to say that he's not afraid of Donald Trump, but neither increasingly are these other world leaders. You know, Mark Carney, just won significant elections in Canada, running ferociously against Donald Trump. Georgia Maloney, the right-wing populist leader of Italy, just got into a fight with Trump and stood up to him. That's someone who came to his inauguration, right? And I think what you're getting at is the fear factor is breaking. The sense that Donald Trump, we have to capitulate to him or we have to at least charm him or be nice to him because we're afraid of him. I can tell you, Nicole, that is gone internationally because it is more dangerous to placate Trump than it is to stand up to him. And that's the dynamic that if and when, and I think it will shift in the United States, including in the Republican Party, because the political survival of Republicans is at stake here too. When their constituents are paying five, six dollars a gallon for gas, when the fear breaks, right, that's it. Like it doesn't come back. And I think Trump is teetering on the edge of that kind of dynamic, and it's gonna take that fear breaking for people to stand up to him. And when they do, it could be in a herd. Absolutely, because if we know anything about the DNA, the Republican Party, it's at their cowards. And so when one goes, they will all go because then they'll be afraid of being on the wrong side of that political tide. Let me, because you mentioned Prime Minister Carney, let me show you some of what he had to say. At this decisive moment, Canadians are demonstrating just how strong we are. You know, it started quietly. People choosing a wine from the Okanagan over one from California. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone, anyone had any bourbon recently? No, thanks, I know. No. Sorry, sorry. A family planning a vacation to Prince Edward Island instead of booking flights to Florida. Small individual acts of solidarity, but repeated millions of time. And together, they make a statement. We are the masters of our destiny. I mean, Michelle, it's taking everything that Trumpism once represented. It's taking economic prowess. It's taking those winning vibes. And it's taking a brand that was once marketed as good and revealing it to be toxic. And that brand tragically is our country, is America. And you've got, you know, Canada was our closest trade, our closest ally. I mean, it was impossible to make Canada mad. And it is now an applause line to talk about choosing to basically boycott American vacation destinations, American bourbon, American wine. Well, I can tell you that the people in Kentucky felt a shutter when they said, when he said that they were no longer buying bourbon, you know, because that really hits them where it hurts. I want, for anyone watching this, you know, if we take the presidency out of this and just consider the behavior that we're looking at, the late night texts, the decision to go to war without any plan for how this war would be carried out. I mean, just take out the president for a minute and think of someone in your life who runs an institution that you care about. Your church, your kid's school, your company. If anyone engaged in this kind of behavior, they would be subject to, they would be called on the carpet immediately. They would be trumped out of office. And that's not what we see here. I mean, he lacks control, he lacks discipline, he lacks decorum, he lacks judgment. He's always talking about people who are low IQ. He makes decisions that show a lack of intelligence and he doesn't even listen to his own intelligence agencies. And because of all of this, we, the American people, lack the kind of standing that we have enjoyed for centuries now. And then he picks fight with the Pope. And, you know, 53 million Catholics in America, 1.42 billion Catholics, you know, around the world. He picks a fight with a religious leader. The Catholic population may be declining in America, but it's growing around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa. And because all politics is local, let's bring it back to America. When he picks a fight like that, the Catholic vote is very important. It helped Iraq, Obama, it helped elect John Kerry, it helped elect Donald Trump. And he can kiss that kind of support goodbye and the GOP will suffer because of this. But America overall is suffering and I think more and more people are starting to wake up to that. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's, you know, how about is it? It's so bad that you don't even have to be, Catholic to be, you know, aware of it. It's just broken through like almost nothing else. Here's Jimmy Kimmel on it last night. Even J.D. Vance wasn't able to go along with this doctor storyline. He came up with an entirely different explanation. Well, first of all, Brett, I think the president was posting a joke and of course he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren't understanding his humor in that case. He was posting a joke, you understand? And like all the best jokes, it had to be explained and then deleted. First, he was Jesus, then he was a Jesus, he was a doctor, now it was a joke. Why did I get kicked off the air again? I can't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. Trump is the thing that Trump hates the most. We learned from former president Obama's sort of mic drop moment at the White House Correspondents' Center. Trump has gone full circle. He's now the butt of the joke. Yeah, and look, the reason that we're in this moment where you see these multiple explanations, and you know Trump world is in trouble when they're offering multiple explanations. We're deleting things. Right, and not in lockstep because part of MAGA's huge success, getting him elected twice, which was a huge success, was because they were very organized and they had these messages that were the same everywhere. The thing that I think which Ben talked about earlier is the idea that this is too expensive now. It's too expensive for the world. It's too expensive for the American people. And the question is, when will it get too expensive for the Republican Party? And the problem, I think, what makes a lot of us scared is that Donald Trump has put people in his cabinet, the richest cabinet, but also the most sycophantic cabinet when you talk about the 25th Amendment. And you have the speaker of the House who basically serves because he is sycophantic, right? Mike Johnson was a background. And tell me where he won. Right, he got there because Trump was like, this guy will sign off on anything. And so that is what adds a sort of, even makes all of this a little scarier, is that there does not seem to be any grown up in the room. But what you see when you watch the UK and when you watch Mark Carney, is this has become too expensive for the rest of the world. And that means sooner or later, the Republican Party will also go along with that. But it's just amazing that they will follow Italy, Canada, and the UK. Yeah. I mean, talk about looking like the weakest of our once closest great allies. And also, Donald Trump spent the last year and a half alienating these people only to find that he needs them for his own blockade of a blockade of the Straits and Formutes, which was a completely self-inflicted injury. Like so much of Trump's policy, even in his first term, self-inflicted injuries and then getting sort of bailed out of them has kind of been the pattern. And so seeing this now is not so surprising, but it is, it's a question. And I think that is what's scary, is like when does the Republican Party go like, this is too expensive for us. I mean, in Saudi Arabia, for whom Trump trotted out a line that the Saudis barely were comfortable trotting out in the slaughter of Khashoggi has now gone against him on the blockade. All right, no one's going anywhere. There's much more to get to with our esteemed panel. And for us, the war in Iran has driven up prices as we're discussing and pushed the global economy closer to a recession. Now the Trump White House is making a bat-leap crazy ask of Americans grappling with high gas prices. They want us to imagine, just use our brain and travel and imagine a place and a time when they'll be lower. That really was said out loud into a microphone. And it is no wonder why patients among the American people for this war and the higher prices that accompany it and the president who started it is running out. We'll have that conversation later in the hour. Did the White House continues after a quick break? Don't go anywhere. This is a paid message from GoFundMe. My name's Ashley Kane. I'm the daddy of a little girl in heaven and a father to two boys on there. I've got an incredible relationship with GoFundMe, both personally and via our daughter's foundation, the Isabelia Foundation. GoFundMe has allowed me, the foundation and thousands of people out there to give hope to what is in need. You'd actually be surprised how many people out there are willing to show love and support you in your time of need. My advice for anyone that needs to stop a GoFundMe will be do it. You don't need to feel shame. You don't need to feel guilt. You don't need to feel embarrassment. If you need GoFundMe, use GoFundMe. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. G-O-F-U-N-D-M-E.com. This message reflects one person's experience. Listen to your favorite MS now shows anytime as a podcast. Enjoy new episodes of Morning Joe, Deadline White House and the Rachel Maddow Show. Every small D democratic muscle that we have is flexing. Plus the last word with Laurence O'Donnell, the beat with Ari Melbour, The Weeknight and more. On the go, wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening to all of your favorite shows, subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. Rebecca with Ben, Michelle and Molly. Ben, so where do we go from here, from this moment? I mean, I think we're in a different phase, right? Where people have figured this out. So just take internationally. A lot of foreign leaders thought that the way to deal with Trump, because they learned this in the first term, was you kind of charm him, you string him along. You know, you give him little bits of consent. You're to protect your interest over there. I think that internationally, things have fundamentally shifted to countries standing up to Trump in their own ways. And probably doing it collectively. I would assume that lots of world, in fact, I'm pretty sure that lots of world leaders, that's what they're talking to each other about. How do we, how do we stand up to this guy? How do we kind of bring an end to his capacity to kind of soak us? I think that in this country too, what you're starting to see is that, you know, you're starting to see what you're starting to see is some of those people that capitulated to Trump. Not all of them, because some of them, you know, maybe ideologically lined with them. But some of them are having buyers remorse. Some of them are a little worried about how it's going to look, you know, a couple of years from now, when people realize that, hey, they're the ones that wrote the checks for the ballroom, or they're the ones that capitulated Trump in all of his demands. And so I think where we are right now is this kind of interesting moment where Trump's capacity to control events is slipping out of his hands. The war has been that on steroids. He can't make it go away. He can't make it go away by posting something. He can't make it go away by spinning that we've won great victories. He can't make it go away by having a blockade that doesn't make any sense, because he's blockading the very straight that he says he wants open, right? And I think what's dangerous to Nicole is how will Trump respond when he feels his capacity to control events slip away? Does he double down? And suddenly we're talking about Greenland again, or he's going to invade Cuba, or he's going to start to deploy the military into the cities. And then we have a kind of crisis point where people don't just have to stand up. They have to kind of stop him. Or, you know, does he kind of begin to fade, and he's sitting there designing the ballroom and designing the arch and kind of following his preoccupations? I think we're at a kind of hinge point here, Nicole, between now and the midterm elections, because if normal political gravity applies, we are heading to an absolute wipeout for Republicans in those midterms. But the question is, does Donald Trump try to obstruct that? Or does he try to, you know, shift events like he has in the past by doing something even more erratic than what we seem to date? That's the kind of tenuous, you know, there's hope in that moment, and there's danger in that moment at the same time. Well, I think, Michelle, we're about to find out, and I've compared the moment to, you know, read those stories of people who think they're being held captive and they don't try opening the door, but when they do, they realize it's open and they walk out. I think what Minneapolis and the Epstein survivors gave back to the country as agency, and the No Kings movement has capitalized on it, but so do have the athletes that now seem to speak out without less fear of blowback. The Olympians and the NBA and WNBA players who seem to be speaking out more and more and more. The sort of lagging indicators are always going to be Republicans, because they don't know what they're there for, right? They were, they were, they followed McCain into, you know, the post-Cold War opposing Putin, and then they went to Moscow to dine with Putin. They, they were four wars, and then they were against wars to be for Trump three times and other four wars. I mean, they don't know who they are, but I, I, I wonder what you make of this moment in terms of Trump's sort of cratering and people realizing that they, they do have agency and they do have power. I think that, first of all, to answer Ben's question, well Donald Trump tried to control or have some sort of impact on the elections. I think he absolutely will. Every time I'm on your show, I say this over and over again, when they can't, when clean, they don't play fair. So they absolutely are going to try to do something to change the outcome of the midterm elections. But there is a different kind of currency at work here right now, and Donald Trump had operated on the idea that he could make people feel that he was saving them in some ways from a future that they were not comfortable with. And whether that was because of shifting demographics or because of sort of cultural issues, that he was the person who was sort of protecting them and, and holding on to this idea of America that felt good to them. Well that doesn't help you buy groceries. That doesn't help you pay for gasoline that the last time I drove by a gas station, which was this morning, the gas was more than $5. That does not help the farmer that is trying to figure out how to get the fertilizer and the urea they need to put plants in the ground right now because nature is not patient. Those crops need to go on the ground right now and they need to be fertilized. And so I think that, you know, while you've been talking about the different calculus for the Republicans in office, I think for some of the people who marched in lockstep politically with Donald Trump, who helped elect him, I foresee something, perhaps not sort of a revolution where people are suddenly going to rise up in anger as we enter the next quarter, as these prices start to hit, as we go through a very difficult summer economically. And yes, it is the pain point of the economy that will shift people's thinking on this. And it's sad that it took that, right? It's sad that it took that. That we have to wait until the economy crumbles before we will stand up to someone who has just taken an axe to so many of our political norms, so many of our cultural norms, taken an axe to our constitutional norms. But it's the economy that suddenly gets us to wake up. But I think that that is what will awaken people and inflame people. And I do agree with Ben, though, that a diminished Donald Trump is a dangerous Donald Trump. Yeah. Because he might have found ways to put himself at the center of a story, and he may become increasingly desperate in trying to find ways to do that. Yeah. I mean, he incites January 6th after he loses. The idea, though, of sort of inflamed and angry people rising up in anger is happening next to Democrats like Tolerico and Jolly and Mamdani. And I mean, the Democrats have now done what people have been talking for 25 years about Democrats. They now have a tent that includes Mayor Mamdani and James Tolerico and David Jolly. I mean, it now has sort of this broad swathe of ideologies. What does that sort of insulate the party promise they had into this, what could be a volatile and midterm season? Right. I mean, I think there are a lot of really what we're seeing. I mean, you were talking about these fundraising numbers. I mean, these fundraising numbers, the top fundraising numbers, the top 10 have eight Democrats and two Republicans, right? Because these numbers are huge, and people are giving with their wallets. They've decided that these are candidates that they support in different places, wildly different ideologies. But I do think what you were talking about this idea that people are not, that people know, you know, that once people turn on this, you know, I think so much about my grandfather Howard Vast, who was jailed because of the Black Lives because of McCarthy. You know, McCarthyism took over this country and, you know, a lot of our writers and artists and actors ended up in jail because of their refusal to name names. And when the American people turned on that after the Army McCarthy hearings, it was like, it was like, how was anyone ever for this? How did this happen? Yeah. And how did this happen? Like the fever broke. And I think to a certain extent, I think it's sad that it's $5 gas prices and not something ideological, but you're seeing it happen. That's amazing. Molly, thank you so much for being here across the two hours. Ben and Michelle, stick around a little bit longer. When we come back, the Trump White House is a brand new solution that they've trotted out for how to combat high prices in our country. We are to imagine that they aren't so high. The incredibly out of touch, Orwellian economic messaging that flies in the face of everything that is actually happening because of Donald Trump and his war with Iran. We'll bring you that story next. This is a paid message from GoFundMe. My name is Ashley Kane. I'm the daddy of a little girl in heaven and a father to two boys on there. I've got an incredible relationship with GoFundMe, both personally and via our daughter's foundation, the Isaelia Foundation. GoFundMe has allowed me, the foundation, and thousands of people out there to give hope to what is in need. You'd actually be surprised how many people out there are willing to show love and support you in your time of need. My advice for anyone that needs to stop at GoFundMe will be do it. You don't need to feel shame. You don't need to feel guilt. You don't need to feel embarrassment. If you need GoFundMe, use GoFundMe. Donald Trump and the Pentagon are continuing to send thousands of troops to the Middle East as the Trump administration continues to try to pressure Iran into a deal to end the war. There are already an estimated 50,000 personnel involved in operations in Iran, but Donald Trump's war remains deeply unpopular. According to a new Reuters-Ipsos poll, only 24% of Americans think the war in Iran has been worth the costs and benefits. And does Americans continue to feel the economic impact of the war on their family budgets? Take a listen to how Donald Trump's chief economic adviser Kevin Hassett tried to spin the matter and ease concerns as prices rise and nearly everything tied to the oil markets. We've seen airline fares go up. I mean, there are still pockets of platter numbers, and Americans feel those too. Of course. And those things that you're mentioning are energy related. And anyone who looks at a chart for energy prices will see that they've gone up quite a bit since the situation with Iran began. But the president is confident that it can be resolved. And when it's resolved, then those prices will go right back down to where they were before. Imagine if oil prices start going back down because the situation resolves itself somehow, then you could be looking at inflation close to zero. So this is what they have now. This is the official message of the Trump administration on the 47th day of the war with Iran. We are being asked, the American people are being asked to imagine, to imagine things costing less. People don't need to use their imagination though to experience what gas prices would be like if we hadn't gone to war with Iran. According to AAA, a year ago, a gallon of gas was $3.17. Two months ago, it was $2.91. So great, Trump put it in his state of the union. Four days later, he started the war with Iran, and today it is $4.11. Joining our coverage, former senior advisor to President Biden and former national economic advisor to presidents Obama and Clinton, Gene Sperling is here. Ben and Michelle are still here as well. I mean, we've all worked in White House's and you go before the cameras, especially at CNBC, with the best message you've got. And to me, what's revealing is that imagining prices coming down is the best that they've got. Yeah, as a former national economic advisor myself, I'd probably say let's leave the imagine to John Lennon and let's focus a little more on, you know, what we can do. And if I can invoke a title from a previous fiction, more famous fiction, I mean, this truly is a tale of two self-inflicted wounds. And we had talked about the first. But remember, and this is something you will never hear from the president, but not only was inflation at around 3%, but it was projected by every expert to go down close to 2% when he took office. He literally snatched higher inflation from the jaws of lower prices with a tariff policy that really did a lot of damage, that raised inflation, that really hurt small businesses. And you saw an economy where people were waking up dealing with higher food prices, higher coffee prices, higher electricity, worse medical costs. A lot of those do directly to Trump policies. And yet he had his one crown jewel, which was that gas prices had gone lower. And so now enter self-inflicted wound number two. Even if, and I'll leave to Ben and others, the merits of this war on choice, but even if you were going to engage in the conflict, it looks like nobody spent two minutes thinking about the straight of Hormuz or what they would do. And I think that this kind of reckless policymaking that they've made and also the disregard for our allies or the bullying of our allies in trade came back to haunt us. So now everything that we talk about, when you hear the administration talk about solving the straits of Hormuz, you got to remember that problem didn't exist prior to February 28th. This was a self-inflicted wound that I think came from the fact they didn't even really think about it much. They didn't have any planning. They hadn't worked on allies. So now that 298, which was the day before the war, is up at 412. But I think as you've said, it doesn't stop there. The longer this goes on, the more that gets injected into Amazon, FedEx, UPS doing a fuel surcharge price. Exxon and Dow saying they're going to pay more for plastics. Fertilizers, poor farmers with fertilizers, they got hit by tariffs. Now they're hit by the war. Fertilizer prices hurts farmers. It also means higher food costs. So again, I don't have to imagine any of that. That's the fact. The facts are that their self-inflicted policies are really responsible for having turned around what would have been a soft landing with lower inflation into the American public feeling like you have an administration that is consciously taking actions with very little regard for the price increases that those families are facing and those price increases overwhelm even the things they want to brag about like tax cuts on overtime or tips. Yeah. And I mean, I think we all know from being in government and from covering economic issues, it's how people feel about their personal economy or their kids' prospect for opportunity that is usually the most politically devastating. And this is how the public feels. Nicole. How do you think? The Michigan consumer confidence. I'll just say this for a second. Go ahead. It's just, it's one of those facts that just should strike at you. They found that consumer sentiment about the future now and about consumer confidence is the worst ever, like in 70 years. Wow. I mean, that includes 9-11. That includes the great financial crisis. That includes the pandemic. And Trump has presided over maybe seven or eight or nine of the worst, you know, 10, 12 months ever. So we don't have to speculate what the public is feeling. We can see it in the consumer sentiment and expressions where they also are now expecting inflation of 4.8% over the next year. It is stunning and you're right. It shows up in, you know, the public has weighed in and their verdict is grim. Gene Sferling, thank you so much for spending time with us today. We'll bring Ben and Michelle back in the conversation on the other side of a short break. Stay with us. We are back with Ben and Michelle. So these are the polls on how people feel about gas prices. How do you think gas prices in the U.S. will change in the next year? 63% of Americans think they will get worse. 18% think they'll get better. The impact the Iran War has had on your own American's personal financial situation, mostly negative 54%, mostly positive 1%. This is a political albatross now and it's really just started. Ben, I mean, how do you, I'm asking you to look into a lot of crystal ball gazing, but how do you see the politics of this playing out in the coming weeks? Now, this is not a hard crystal ball to read, Nicole. President Obama used to have something he'd say to us periodically when gas prices would tick up just a little bit, never like this. He called them an existential threat to the entire enterprise. And the reason he called it that is because gas prices are one thing that nearly all Americans feel, right? There's, you know, maybe there's, if Obamacare subsidies go away for some people, that's terrible for tens of millions of Americans. Gas prices kind of impacts the entire economy. And so there's no way around it. You can't spin it, you know, as Donald Trump will try to do. And here's the thing I hate to say, Nicole, it's not going to get much better because even if the war ends today, even if somehow they announced some deal and this is all over and even if the Strait of Hormuz is announced as open, there are disruptions in the supply chain that will last for years, both because of the amount of time it takes to just start moving traffic through the Strait. Also because of the damage done, the world's largest liquefied natural gas field was hit in Qatar. It's going to take them months, if not years to rebuild that. The estimates are that, again, if everything goes perfectly from here on, it would still take two years for all of that energy infrastructure in the Gulf to start cranking again, to be repaired, to be brought to tankers, to be brought back to market. So the gas prices might not stay at the high water mark that they're going to reach, but they're going to be stinging certainly through the midterm elections and probably, frankly, through the next couple of years. And there's just no way around that. Heading into a presidential. I mean, Michelle, there are a lot of people who believe, probably justifiably, that Trump doesn't care about that, which is unpopular. He may or may not. I actually don't know the answer to that question. And I think it matters less than what his sinking approval does to the rest of us, right? A president at 25% can't land Air Force One in too many places. I mean, you have to find a very gerrymandered corner of the country where you're welcome. A president at 27, 28%, which is where he's heading, with his personal conduct under scrutiny by hard MAGA podcasters and politicians, like the ones we showed at the beginning of the hour. The conversation about the 25th Amendment is less about whether or not the sycophantic cabinet would ever do it, and more about the fact that it means there's an active conversation in America and our politics about whether the president is fit for the office he holds. How do you see those threads weaving together over the coming months? First of all, it's an amazing place to be that we're having this conversation, sort of a conversation which is now coming to the surface. The conduct is one thing, the war is another thing, gas prices are another thing, but they all come together to create this toxic stew. And when Ben is talking about the recovery, part of the problem here is we're looking at the possibility of a global recession, and it's not localized. We're not talking about just America, we're talking about economies around the world. And when the damage is wider, that means the impact is deeper and that means the recovery is longer. And so when it reaches that far and reaches in tributaries that go all over the world, that means that we're looking at potentially a very long recovery. And even if things start to improve in the U.S., the other problem we have is the issue of conduct, and we have lost our standing, and people have lost faith in America. And so we don't have the allies that we used to have, and climbing out of this is going to be much more difficult. I just want to reach back to, you know, you played that tape from Mark Carney in talking about people in Canada who are no longer vacationing in the U.S. I mean, that's a 31% drop in tourism. Canada is the largest source of international tourism in the U.S. And so that translates to real dollars, and that's not something that will probably come back quickly. So we're looking at a long, cracky, rough road ahead. Right, because I think what you're describing perfectly is the economic bounce back that we need to get back to Stasis, and then the brand recovery, which could be an even longer project. I am smarter for having the two of you here for the whole hour. Thank you both so much for spending it with us. Quick break for us. We'll be right back. My guest on this week's episode of the Best People podcast is Cara Swisher. We talked about everything in the news. We also talked about her latest project. It is all about the longevity craze, but along the way, in covering that, she learned a lot about living a long and happy and healthy life. Take a listen to what she told me about that. If you're scared of death and fearful, you become partisan, political, hateful toward the other. If you accept death, you become community oriented, you become kinder, you understand your time is limited, and you stop grasping. And he's doing all these tests, these incredible studies about it. And death acceptance is a really healthy thing. How do you get there though? I mean, we have young kids, we have, you know, like how do you... I think about everything I do, I'm going to die in 50 years. Oh, okay. Then I'll do this. Like I start to think, am I really going to get in that fight with this person? But it's more than that, it's the idea, and you know, Buddhism is about that. Of course, a lot of world religions have that kind of sense about it. And what's really interesting is once you do that, it frees you to live. Because it's not about death, it's about how do you want to live. And once you start thinking like that and starting to do the practices that are, you know, there's a way to live where you eat Doritos and hate each other. Can you accept death and eat Doritos? Yes, you can also eat Doritos. We talked a lot about Doritos. But she gets into all of it. She's brilliant, she's unafraid to call out the people in power. It is a must listen conversation. So scan the QR code on your screen or download now wherever you get your podcasts. One more break, we'll be right back. That's this week on Why Is This Happening. Search for Why Is This Happening where you're listening right now and follow.