Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In 2017, when Trump came into the White House for the first time, on day one, he signed exactly one executive order. It was targeting the Affordable Care Act. In 2025, he signed 26 executive orders on day one, throwing pens into the roaring crowd. Some of these orders were really big, ending birthright citizenship. There were big orders on energy. He signed orders about Doge and governmental efficiency, about the federal workforce.
Some of them were more messaging bills. Some of them are big, but they may not be big after the courts get done with them. So what has really changed here? What has all this flurry of policymaking and activity amounted to? One of the difficulties of covering Donald Trump is it’s always hard to know where to look first, where even to look at all. Back in the day, I used to do a policy podcast at Vox with Matt Iglesias, who is now the author of the excellent Substack newsletter, Slow Boring, and Dara Lind, who’s now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
I thought it’d be good to have a bit of a reunion with two of the people who follow the policies that Trump is working on most closely to get into the guts of what is actually changing and what, as of yet, really isn’t. As always, my email is Ezra Klein’s show at NYTimes.com. Dara Lind, Matt Iglesias, welcome to the show.
Good to be here.
Good to be on.
It’s like old times.
Yeah.
So let’s dive into immigration first. Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders on border security and immigration. When you look at them together, Dara, what do you see? What we see here is a body of orders that are pushing the federal government to take a much, much, much, much, much more aggressive approach on immigration enforcement, especially in the interior of the United States. Especially integrating the military into border enforcement in a way we haven’t seen. But without really prescribing a whole lot in terms of specifics, they understand that that’s going to have to happen at the agency level.
That’s going to have to, you know, that requires the actual machinery of the federal government to work itself out to figure out what that looks like on the ground. And so a lot of Biden era enforcement priorities got rescinded. It is currently—and this is actually as of Tuesday night—the U.S. has the legal authority to deport people without a court hearing if they’re arrested anywhere in the U.S. and cannot prove to an ICE agent’s satisfaction that they’ve been in the U.S. for at least two years, which is something we’re going to have to see how that plays out on the ground.
And there is a push toward building more capacity for detention, which is going to be very important if they’re going to scale up enforcement efforts. A push toward punishing other countries that refuse to accept deportation flights by putting visa sanctions on them, which is going to be extremely important if you’re going to succeed in deporting people. So like on the interior side, there is a very big shift toward both the kind of expanded legal authority and the expanded capacity, which you can’t do immediately, but which they’re building toward.
When you read this, Matt, does it look to you like mass deportation, which was promised and feared? Or does it look to you like what they’re trying to do is create a climate of fear? And as Mitt Romney once put it, self-deportation. I mean, what’s actually happening is closer to the latter, right? I mean, in terms of the question of what is the quantity of people who are deported? The historic peak for the United States came during Barack Obama’s term. And the main reason for that, at least as I understand it, is that there was really strong cooperation between ICE and state and local law enforcement officials.
Basically, they were picking people up out of jails all throughout the country, which is a very efficient process. If you’re thinking of deportation as a resource-intensive kind of operation, people who are already in custody are the easiest people to deport. Then numbers started to come down because of policy changes in blue states, different enforcement priorities, things like that. But what Trump at least would like, what real immigration hawks would like to see happen is create harsh day-to-day living conditions for people who are in the country without authorization.
Very optimistically, they hope people will self-deport. Beyond that, they just think it’s a deterrent. Like, people come to the United States without visas because they believe that life as an illegal immigrant in the United States of America will be better than their life back at home. So if you can make it worse in any number of different ways, including by just raising uncertainty that a person, kind of working off the books and minding their own business, might get deported, you know, that has a kind of impact.
Like, yesterday, I think Tom Honan was on TV and he was like, we arrested 308 people already, which was like, I think the average under Biden was about 310 ICE arrests per day. So there’s a certain amount of like, we’re getting tough theater that is occurring and that will occur. But we don’t really know what’s going to happen, right? I mean, we haven’t ever seen really tough interior enforcement in the United States, both because of the logistics, but also because the politics are tough the more concrete you get.
Right now, there’s big immigration backlash. And so like, should we deport everyone? Polls like pretty well. You know, go into a restaurant that you like and ICE has deported the guys washing the dishes and now the restaurant’s closed and one of them is married and he’s got kids who are American citizens and there’s like a sad story in the newspaper. That’s where you get into more difficult things. And it’s why Trump always talks about criminals, right? Because he’s always talking about criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, which is like, I think, an easy sell, right? Somebody who, in addition to immigrating illegally, has committed non-immigration crimes.
But the impetus behind these orders is to try to say nobody is safe, right? Like, everybody better watch their back. So, as far as self-deportation, the immigration hawk theory of self-deportation has never really been about fear of deportation leading people to self-deport. It’s the inability to work that’s going to lead people to self-deport. And as far as that’s concerned, there’s a provision in these executive orders that says that the agencies shall ensure that no unauthorized immigrant has a work permit.
Now, that’s actually not current regulation. Current regulation is if you have a pending application for asylum, for a green card, et cetera, and it’s been pending for a certain amount of time, you can apply for a work permit and work in the U.S. legally. If they’re going to change those regulations, that takes people who are currently working legally, puts them into the illegal labor pool, and potentially removes what would be an impetus for them to stay. So, that’s definitely something to watch for.
And there’s this noise about restricting all federal funding from any sanctuary jurisdiction, which was followed up with a memo sent by the Department of Justice to attorneys saying that they should investigate state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration. So, the question of whether places that would be resistant are going to be bullied into cooperating and places that are enthusiastic are going to have the full support of the federal government behind them, if you do both of those things, then you really ramp up the ability to do this more frictionless handover.
Do they, Dara, have a legislative agenda here? One of the ways in which I mean that is you make the point that the self-deportation theory is that you can’t work here and it’s miserable to be here. But the longtime theory of how to make it hard to work here wasn’t deportations. It was things like E-Verify. It was things like holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented or unauthorized immigrants. I have not heard them or Republicans talking that much about it, but I’ve been wondering if that’s coming or they just don’t want to work with Congress, so they’re not going to try.
The extent to which E-Verify, and I was noticing this even under the first Trump term, it had just fallen out of the top tier of the list. I hear about it all the time, under Obama, under Bush. Like this was the theory. What happened to it? I mean, I think it’s because the kind of traditional immigration hawks, the Center for Immigration Studies folks who put together the intellectual framework of attrition through enforcement, which is what got called self-deportation, aren’t the people who are running the show.
They’re a different flavor of immigration hawks who are much more concerned about cultural threats. The Stephen Miller approach is what are all of the other parts of the U.S. code that we haven’t been looking at that can be used. You know, there’s a provision in here that cites a little-used provision of U.S. law that says aliens have to register and says, okay, so the federal government’s going to publicize that people have to register. And then we have to do as much as possible to criminally enforce failure to register.
Now, people who entered the U.S. without papers have not had an opportunity to register in many cases. There’s a certain bit of paradox for like punishing people for failing to do something you never let them do. But it’s that sort of thing. It’s identifying unused tools. You know, the big question for Congress is really a budgetary one, is how much money are they going to throw at enforcement? Because, you know, as Matt pointed out, like, we’ve never done anything close to the scale of what they are threatening to want to do.
And the more that Tom Homan and company want to spend on, you know, getting headlines by sending a bunch of ICE agents into California, the less money there is in theory for stuff like building soft-sided detention facilities and other unsexy things that you’re going to need to do to get your capacity. But Matt, you seem, or they seem to have a much clearer pathway to working with Congress than they would have in the first term.
You mentioned how one reason you had high levels of deportations in Obama was very strong cooperation between the federal government and the states. Under Trump, after Obama, you had this huge blue state backlash to immigration enforcement, and you had sanctuary cities and so on. I mean, we’re in New York City right now. I think Eric Adams would love nothing more than to cooperate with the Trump administration. But even among Democrats in Congress, even among the kinds of Democrats in Congress who are resistance Democrats in 2017, 2018, you saw the move to working with Lankford on the Murphy-Cinema-Lankford bill that then Kamala Harris ran on.
That was a big shift right for Democrats. And now you’ve seen a bunch of Democrats sign on to the Lakin-Riley bill, which is a very sharp shift right for Democrats. So it seems to me that if the Trump administration wanted to kick off a policy process with Congress that is trying to toughen enforcement on the employer side, it’s a very different political alignment than it was in 2018.
I think, yes, clearly, like, the politics have shifted in blue America, particularly around removals of people who’ve been arrested. And to the extent that Donald Trump wants to work with people and get back to an Obama-type policy agenda there, like, I think he could get it done through a mix of political fear and sincere change of heart on the part of Democratic officials.
The Lakin-Riley Act deals with a basically related set of considerations. I mean, the thing Republicans would put in an ad against you if you voted no on it is that this bill requires ICE to detain people, you know, who’ve been convicted of theft and some other list of crimes. Arrested for? Arrested, yes. So the objections to it relate to sort of due process. I mean, people can be arrested for things they have not committed, but also it creates a lot of state causes of action where you can sue the federal government for having not done X, Y, or Z.
It was pretty clearly written when Joe Biden was president, like, to get Democrats to vote no, right, by saying, like, this is unworkable. So it’s going to hamstring the executive, and then Republicans could run against it. Democrats started saying, well, we’ll vote to advance this, but like, we’re going to like fix that stuff in the amendment process. Then because Republicans really, like, they wanted to get to no on that bill, so they wouldn’t do any of the amendments. And then Democrats refused to take the no vote that Republicans wanted them to take.
So now this, like, probably unworkable bill has passed. E-Verify and employer sanctions are a different kettle of fish because when Republicans were putting together, I think they called it H.R.1. It was like this big immigration package. H.R.2? H.R.2, yes, when Biden was president. And initially, mandatory E-Verify was in that package because the point of the package was to be maximally hawkish. Again, they wanted to get to no with Biden so they could complain.
But, like, that’s a sticky point for Republicans, and it raises the question of where does Trump want to go with this ultimately in terms of workplace raids, other things that are bothersome to the business community versus just kind of picking fights with progressive mayors and governors about local law enforcement cooperation. Dara, the piece of this that people, I think, have heard the most about is the executive order on birthright citizenship. How did you read that?
Just laying out what it does. The birthright citizenship order declares that it is the position of the U.S. government that anyone born after February 19th of this year, whose mother is either someone who does not have legal status in the United States or who has some form of temporary visa or other temporary protection in the United States, and whose father is not a U.S. citizen or green card holder, is not a citizen of the United States by birth.
Most of the text of the executive order is a defense of a very novel legal theory that is not only is the 14th Amendment of the Constitution not as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court for over a century, etc., but that we can change that interpretation via executive action and simply declare it by fiat. You can think of the birthright citizenship debate as having two components. One, which I think everybody was expecting them to go after, was children born to people who are not here legally.
And then there is this other question that they added into it, which is people who are here legally, they’re here on a student visa. They’re here on an H-1B visa. Some people have called this a Kamala Harris provision. I know many people who were born in the United States this way. And this has not been nearly as contested, but they added that in, too.
Mm-hmm. Matt, how did you understand that? I think that part of it, and you saw this back during the they’re eating the dogs, eating the cats controversy, which is that the sort of MAGA movement has tried to redefine people with things like temporary protected status or people with asylum applications, you know, in the process as illegal immigrants. When, in a legal sense, it is not illegal to arrive without a visa and then benefit from a grant of TPS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I think Vice President Vance, who’s more cogent than President Trump, has, you know, explained that, like, in his view, this is like a loophole. This is like lawyer BS. And so I think part of the intention of this expansive order is just to sweep all those people in. The fact that it also applies to people with totally normal, uncontroversial visas, like Trump was out saying that he loves the H-1B visa program, that he employs lots of people with H-1B visas. He clearly doesn’t. And I think he’s referring to a different H-2B.
But, you know, there’s never been a question that, like, you are allowed to come to the United States on a J-1 visa. You’re allowed to come on a student visa. And then, yeah, like people get into relationships, particularly people with employment-based visas, are often here for many, many years before they get a green card. And there’s never been a political controversy about that that I’m familiar with.
And it’s quite, I mean, they really don’t like immigrants, at least some of the people behind this policy, in a more extreme way than the president’s official position. And I think they’re signifying that. And it, you know, people should rightly read into that something, I think, a little bit menacing about the ultimate intention. Are they just creating a piece of this that could be lopped off in the courts or even just in public debate?
Well, okay, the extreme position is that you don’t want to have birthright citizenship for people here on student visas and H-1B visas. But the position then you’re left with, which is the one they really care about, is you get rid of it for the children of unauthorized immigrants. So I don’t think so. And, you know, the reason I don’t think so is because, yes, we’ve never had a big political controversy around people on student visas having children.
But there has been political controversy around people on temporary visas having kids in the United States. You know, when Trump was running for president the first time in, like, 2015, 2016, there were a couple of news cycles about birth tourism and the practice of getting a tourist visa, often spending that time at, like, a designated resort for this purpose, having a child during the time you’re on the 90-day tourist visa.
Then that child, who is not necessarily raised in the United States but is raised in, you know, whatever their parents’ home country is, has the benefit of U.S. citizenship at some later point should they choose to act on it. And that was a very big target of the kind of ban and weighing of the MAGA movement, which is very concerned about the lack of assimilability of, in particular, Asian highly educated immigrants who are, you know, taking jobs that could otherwise go to disadvantaged Americans.
So I think that it’s not obvious to me that if you bisect that and say, well, we really only care about children of unauthorized immigrants, that that really does satisfy everyone because the question of birth tourism has been tied up in the question of birthright citizenship as, like, Trump world has understood it over the last decade.
Doesn’t the existence of birth tourism suggest there is something indefensibly broad in the way that citizenship has been interpreted? I am as pro-immigrant as you, I think, can possibly be. And I think that’s abusive of the rules. So it is surprising to me that this has continued to exist because there’s so much discretion to the State Department in denying visas.
Like, in theory, you could have an enforcement-based approach to that that doesn’t change the law. There is, like, an entire regime in place that is designed to prevent people from being issued visas that are going to abuse the terms of those visas, right? And so I am surprised that there hasn’t been more of a crackdown on, you know, excluding countries from the visa waiver program if they have a history of birth tourism.
More aggressive interviews at consulates about, like, gee, I noticed that this 90-day window, it seems, like, pretty definite. You’re really staying for the whole 90 days. Can you talk more about what you’re doing during that time? And, like, so that’s, you know, I think what we’re identifying is a policy problem. And, like, I see where you are. I just think that it’s reasonable to talk about, like, a solution on the scale of the problem.
I take that point, but obviously they don’t want a narrow solution to the most egregious of the policy problems. What they want is a big debate about what it means to be a citizen. And, Matt, I’ve been thinking about our long career in journalism. And you both probably remember covering immigration in the, I don’t know, I’d call this, like, the 2005 to 2015 period.
And back then, it was much more common to talk about illegal immigrants. And then you get a lot of email from people in the immigration advocacy community and also just people and say, listen, that’s a really dehumanizing way to talk about this. Can we say, you know, it’s better to say undocumented immigrant, unauthorized immigrant, sort of eventually made its way to yard signs, right? No human being is illegal. You can talk about illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrants.
And behind this linguistic change, I think, really did come a change in the Democratic Party’s affect toward illegal immigration. That illegal immigration, unauthorized immigrants, moved from a really big policy problem to solve, then during the Trump administration particularly, to a disadvantaged class to protect. And this feels to me like the argument that the Trump administration is at a very core level across both some of the enforcement and some of the birthright moves engaging, which is how should we feel about these people who are here illegally?
Are they people we should view with sympathy and try to protect? Or are they an invasion, a horde, or at the very least criminals who have abused our system and need to be treated the way we treat other criminals, which is with punitive measures? I think that Trump has basically won this argument, you know, that he has gotten— I shouldn’t actually say Trump, because in a lot of ways, Greg Abbott was more like the key figure here.
But, like, got Democrats to admit that, like, they, in fact, think it is undesirable to have sort of unlimited quantities of people arriving in their jurisdictions in an irregular manner. And, you know, to an extent, I think that was always reflected in some of Biden administration policy, but it only very much at the end became what they would say they were trying to do.
The interesting question for Trump, I mean, and I think people who win elections face this divide all the time, is, like, do you want to make the most durable policy change that you can, or do you want to kind of have fights about things? Because I think clearly, if the president of the United States really, really, really wants to shine a spotlight on birth tourism and say, like, we need a bipartisan legislative solution to create some kind of denaturalization process for egregious abuses of this, whatever it is, I think it’s, like, tough for, like, swing state Democrats, for anybody, for me, for you, for anybody to say, like, no, birth tourism is amazing.
Like, we want to encourage this, right? The more things you stack onto the pile, the easier it is for everybody to say no, right? That, like, we’re going to basic 14th Amendment principles; we’re talking about people on completely normal work visas who have all sort of been lumped into this. It’s really easy for Democrats to reject this order the way it’s been written because it’s so, so, so broad. But that also means that Republicans can have a fight about the order, right? They can pick the strong cases. Democrats can pick the weak cases. Nothing will get done. I think they’ll just lose in court. I mean, the constitutional argument they’re going with here is risible, in my opinion.
But this is the first time, I think, in our long association together, I’ve heard you suggest that the fact that a constitutional argument is risible will mean it will lose in court. It’s just— I am pretty cynical about this, but you’ve always been more cynical than me. This is just a topic that has been litigated, like, a lot over the years. And I’ve never— You just know what people said about the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare? I know, but, like, I mean, Dara will correct me if I’m wrong. But, I mean, I think, like, just, like, very literally, this question of what does it mean to be subject to the laws thereof has been litigated. This is not, like, a new version of an old question.
It’s, like, they want to arrest illegal immigrants, right? That’s, like, a big point of emphasis here, which is to say they are subject to the jurisdiction of the American government. There’s no argument that illegal immigrants have diplomatic immunity or something like that or that, you know, they’re sovereign tribal nations. Well, is it the argument that they’re an invasion, right, Dara? That’s what they’re trying to play?
Yeah, well, the invasion thing is, I think, a separate but fascinating legal argument. How would you describe the argument they’re trying to make? Like, if you were to say what they think in this court they have helped build, you know, and Stephen Miller goes to bed at night and is optimistic about the morning, what Supreme Court opinion he’s hoping gets issued? I mean, it is the arbiters on how much Calvin Ball we’re playing with constitutional law are the people in robes. And I agree with Matt that they would have to be playing a whole lot of Calvin Ball in order to side with the administration on this.
But, you know, I think the other question here when we’re talking about the kind of broad politics of how do we talk about unauthorized immigrants is that we have a wave of new arrivals of people primarily entering through the asylum system over the last decade. The growing population of people with temporary protections such as TPS, such as these Biden parole programs, who are also more recent arrivals. And you still have the unauthorized immigrants that you had 10 years ago who have been here 10 years longer and who, for the most part, still haven’t had any point of access into the immigration system.
And so as we’ve talked for the last 10 years about immigration as being a border asylum issue, you know, and I think Mao’s calling this out years ago, that that like created political problems for Democrats because it took a population that had been here for a long time and made them feel like they were being shunted aside in favor of more recent arrivals. But it also means that they’re now in danger of getting lumped in as like invaders. And I think that the invasion, like the legal aspects of the invasion argument are really hard because they’re primarily military and I’m not an expert in that.
But I do think that it is very important for the birthright point that it is, it’s building the rhetorical case that they aren’t subject to our jurisdiction. They are trying to come for us. Imagine running your business from a place where the cost per square foot is up to 60% less than other destinations. It’s just one reason that in Middlesex County, New Jersey, businesses that move here thrive here. Advantage is here, and you should be here too. Go to discovermiddlesex.com slash thrive to schedule a meeting with a business advisor in your industry. That’s discovermiddlesex.com slash thrive. Middlesex County, move here, thrive here.
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So, I want to move to the economy. When Donald Trump was running for president, one of his very strongest arguments was that everything got very expensive under Joe Biden. He has himself said that the price of groceries was a very big part of why he won the election. When you look at what Trump said in his inauguration speech, when you look at the executive orders, when you look at what they’ve at least said they are doing, what agenda emerges for you on the cost of living?
Well, they are clearly hoping that increased domestic energy production will have benefits for the cost of living. I mean, that’s the part that you can connect the dots on. I mean, I think experts have some skepticism about that. On the groceries, you know, there’s really not a lot going on here. In the orders, it’s like literally nothing. I could have suggested some things for them if they wanted to. So, like, the Biden administration, for example, like raised wage floor standards for agricultural guest worker visas. It was like the only restrictionist thing that they really did. You could put that back down, make things cheaper.
Well, let’s hold on the energy piece because he did do a lot on energy. And it’s not crazy to say that increased energy production would be good for American growth and bring down prices. I think people forget this, but it took him months to leave the Paris Climate Accords in his first term. I mean, they moved much more slowly in their theory of what to do on climate and energy back then. Elon Musk was very angry about it. Elon Musk was very angry about it. Yes, Elon Musk had some very different views back then.
The theory now is you can increase domestic production. Domestic production of fossil fuels, which is what they’re targeting, is currently at record levels. It has never been higher in American history. How much headroom do they have here? This is a tough one, right? I mean, I think if you talk to people in the oil and gas industry, the thing that they were really mad at the Biden administration about was pausing the construction of new liquefied natural gas terminals. The Trump administration has done what the industry wanted there. I think he’s correct to, frankly. And this will increase American natural gas production. But the reason it will increase American natural gas production is we will be able to export more gas, which, as the Biden people like to point out, will raise the price of domestic electricity, not lower it.
The thing that the oil and gas industry wants is more demand for their products. That’s what these LNG export terminals are going to create, and that’s what the federal government foaming the runway for permitting of big data center projects is going to ensure that there’s a lot of demand for natural gas. But is it going to make it cheaper for you at home? Like, probably it might make it more expensive. It’s just ambiguous in terms of its basic upshot. Similarly, he’s going to rescind some of these electric car-type regulations that Biden issued. But I think people will continue to buy more electric cars than they did in the past, one way or another. Again, Elon Musk continues to be out there making his Teslas.
So the long-term outlook for oil production— Oh, we can’t stop on that for just one second. For a very long time, I felt, well, look, I don’t personally love Elon Musk’s sharp right-wing swing and all the conspiracy theories. But it’s going to get more people buying electric cars. Yeah, if Elon Musk can depolarize electric vehicles and make it something not just that liberals in San Francisco want to do, but actually a status symbol for Texans too, and maybe get Donald Trump on board with it as a sort of symbol of, like, American ingenuity and dominance of one of the obvious industries of the future. And it’s not like Trump is outlawing electric vehicles, but Elon Musk becoming the central consigliere to the Trump administration and his central, in theory, industrialist concern is the rapid adoption of electric vehicles.
And Trump’s main policy on electric vehicles is to roll back the regulations that were accelerating their adoption. I mean, I guess you give Elon Musk points for being principled on things that are not just his business interests, but it’s a little bit disappointing as what the trade ended up being. Can I step back a little bit? Because, like, I think that one of the things that really strikes me going into this Trump administration as opposed to the first one is the first time around, it was very clear that Donald Trump was a politician without a constituency. He had not been made by anybody. And so there was nobody who was going to haul him into a room and say, we brought you here. If you don’t listen to us, we will end you.
And that made it much harder to predict what he would do. It made, like, the kind of White House intrigue stories of who he was listening to much more important because you couldn’t use that standard political calculus. This time around, he’s coming in with what looks much more like a traditional political coalition with various people feeling they have claims on him, which includes both, in this case, the, like, Musk and company industrialist policy, crony capitalist. It is very important for the government to affirmatively subsidize the things that we want and the, like, Russ, vote and company massive deregulatory.
There’s absolutely nothing the federal government should be doing to support electric vehicles. And, like, it’s weird for Trump, but it’s very normal for politics. And it’s going to be interesting to see how this, like, very traditional interfactional divide plays out when the person making the decisions is still Donald Trump, a man who pretty famously doesn’t really hold on to anything consistently enough to make it very predictable which way he’s going to fall. I think that’s right as, like, a political science theory, but actually maybe wrong about the factions.
My understanding of Musk right now is, like, you can imagine Musk in his Tesla guise, not his international right-wing provocateur and funder and attention-getter guise, as having plausibly two theories, right? There’s always the argument, all he cares about is saving the world from climate change and getting to Mars. There’s this other theory that what he wants is for Tesla to be the biggest company in the world because that is where the bulk of his wealth is and his power is. And getting the subsidies for electric vehicles pulled back at the time that Ford and General Motors and these other players are accelerating into electric vehicles and maybe getting to a point where they could challenge Tesla for making good cars.
Well, Tesla’s a really big advantage. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They’re way ahead of everybody else. Their marketing is way better. People know them. And so my sense of Musk, at least in part, is that he’s really, let’s call it chilled out on the climate change question, much less worried about that than he once was, although he still says he is worried about it. And he got his, like, the support for electric vehicles is what made Tesla into the company it is today, but Tesla is fine now. And if there’s no support for electric vehicles, then it is the other players, probably the legacy players, trying to climb the electric vehicle ladder who are about to find the ladder falls down under them before they attain the sort of level of quality and production that Tesla did, again, under years and years and years of federal and state support.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right. What will be interesting when we see how democratic states sort of react to this, because Tesla still receives credits from California. This is not as important to their business as it used to be, but it continues to be a big kind of moneymaker for them because California has increasingly strict emissions rules and then a number of other blue states kind of piggyback on them. Gavin Newsom seems to be trying to see, like, can he reconfigure that as like a subsidy for non-Tesla electric cars? And I think there’s legal questions and implementation questions around that.
Big picture, though, like, I think the thrust of Trump’s energy policies will increase America’s gross domestic product by causing us to care less about climate change and certain other kinds of things. Whether they will reduce prices to American consumers I think is much more questionable, right? Democrats were going nuts all throughout 2024. They were like, why are people mad about inflation? Inflation’s down to 2.4 year over year. And then just like, well, we didn’t, like, forget that there was 9% inflation 18 months ago and that it was 5% inflation nine months ago.
And I don’t want to say we remember it was Joe Biden’s fault, but the people who think it was Joe Biden’s fault remember that they think it was Joe Biden’s fault. Now, a lot of conservative take slingers will be hypocritical when they pivot back around to being like, you can’t actually make the price level fall. But, like, it’s true. You can’t actually make the price level fall. It’s a shame for Joe Biden that we had 9% inflation when he was president. But, like, people were mad about that. And I don’t know that there’s going to be so much juice in, like, lol, prices didn’t get cheaper.
That being said, I mean, when I was a guest on your show previously, we talked about this a lot. But, like, Trump’s tariff agenda, his fiscal policy, all of that points toward a re-acceleration of inflation. And that’s perilous, even if it doesn’t get up to 9%. Although that’s something we saw, Dara, which is that he did not come in on day one and impose a bunch of new tariffs. I was wondering where the tariffs were. We’re studying the creation of an external revenue agency, which definitely sounds to me like the kind of thing you do when you don’t want to put into play your big tariff proposal, right?
We’re creating a blue ribbon commission. But then he did say there’s going to be tariffs on Mexico and Canada starting in February. One of the questions on tariffs has always been, does Donald Trump really, really, really want to find a way to get to yes on tariffs? Or does Donald Trump love the ability to come into a negotiating room and say, if you don’t give us everything we want, we’ll tariff the hell out of you?
Like, this is arguably the signature policy win of Trump’s first term on immigration was getting Mexico to agree to accept large numbers of people across the border who were waiting for asylum hearings in the United States, which he accomplished by threatening Mexico with really punitive tariffs for months and months and months. So, like, I think that this is all consistent with we’re using tariffs as a big stick. And now that Marco Rubio is actually secretary of state, he gets to play good cop and go in and tell Claudia Scheinbaum, here is the way that you can avoid these tariffs that the president really wants to put on you. But I have your back.
But I’m actually not sure, like, there also really does seem to be a belief among Donald Trump himself and at least a professed belief among some conservative intellectuals that tariffs are affirmatively good for America. So if he ends up saying, oh, we’ve suspended all tariffs because we’re taking the win with Canada and Mexico and China, does that leave a constituency unsatisfied? I think some foreign leaders have to ask themselves if they want to call the bluff here, you know, because you’re right, Dara, right? I mean, Trump in his first term pretty effectively wielded the threat of tariffs as a kind of negotiating strategy.
Then during the last six months of the presidential campaign, Trump’s business community supporters were like everywhere in the business press and amongst themselves telling people, like, don’t worry, don’t listen to what Janet Yellen and Kamala Harris and, you know, Ezra Klein are saying about this. Like, the president is just using this as a negotiating tactic. So, you know, Trump, during the lame duck, he just tweeted or truth socialed that there’s going to be 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And then Trudeau put out some announcement that was like, we’re going to get really tough on fentanyl. And then Trump took yes for an answer.
It was like, oh, the tariffs are off. But now he says they’re going to be back on. And I hesitate. These people, they’ve got to listen to their own advisors. They’ve got to think about what’s what. But, you know, we all, you don’t want to be a sucker in every negotiation. Like, at a certain point, somebody has to be willing to say, Mr. Trump, it appears to me from your behavior that you, in fact, know that these tariffs are a bad idea and are doing a ploy.
And, like, I can read to you the passage from The Art of the Deal, where you talk about how you like to bullshit a lot in negotiations and make dumb threats. And, like, if you do this, it will be bad for my country. It’ll be bad for your country. The exchange rates will also adjust. It’s going to be political blowback on you, though, not me, because people know this is your stunt. And, like, you know, leave us alone. It’s risky. But the fact that they weren’t in the day one, right, I mean, it does call into question that, like, maybe these business guys were correct.
I mean, that’s the question I think I’m really asking here. Were the business guys correct? He doesn’t want to do this. He’s not going to do this. I thought it’s been interesting that Bob Lighthizer, who was Trump’s trade representative in the first term and is widely considered probably the most effective single member of the Trump administration in the first term, is not anywhere there, right? Like, you heard him talk about for Treasury Secretary, you heard him talk about for Commerce, but he’s in Florida somewhere at the moment, right? There’s just a New Yorker piece on him.
You know, it’s not that the people who are there are not pro-tariff. Many of them, the head of the Council of Economic Advisors has written positively on tariffs. Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, has talked about tariffs. But Besant has talked about tariffs as a negotiating tactic. And Stephen Mirren wrote an article. I think he just, like, did it for his hedge fund or something. And it’s like, what the article, quote-unquote, says is that, like, the liberals are wrong and tariffs are really good. But then the analysis is that tariffs actually won’t raise prices because exchange rates will adjust.
And that means that you want to make the tariffs phase in slowly so that financial markets have time to adjust to the tariffs. And it all just seems like a way to say that you’re for tariffs while actually acknowledging that they’re bad. One view, I guess, is that Trump was, like, tricked by these guys. I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’ve been looking at all the, like, obsequious flattery that different CEOs have been throwing Trump’s way. And I’m like, do I really think that Donald Trump is such a, like, naive patsy, as everybody is saying?
And it’s like, everyone knows the way to Trump’s heart is with, like, completely disingenuous flattery. Or does he just enjoy this, right, like, as a thing? He thinks it’s funny that he can make the monkeys dance by putting it out there that, like, if you say nice things about Trump, he’ll like you. No, I would go further than this. I think you’re missing an option on that. So one of the things going on right now is there has been this announcement of Stargate, a consortium of companies working on AI who want to put in huge amounts of money into energy and AI data center infrastructure.
And Stargate was going on and getting ready, and people were working on this before Donald Trump became president. Then he became president, and now they’re like, thank you, Donald Trump. We couldn’t do it without you, which in some technical sense is probably true. It’s useful to have the help of the president, but it’s not a Trump initiative. But then Elon Musk, who hates Sam Altman and is suing OpenAI for trying to turn itself into a for-profit, he tweeted something mean at Sam Altman. I don’t remember exactly what, and then he and Altman got into a spat. Musk said they don’t actually have the money.
Yeah, something like that. And then Altman came back and was like, you know, I hope that in your new role, you mostly make decisions that are good for America. So that was interesting. And then the next day, Sam Altman comes out and says, I really realize that I completely misjudged Donald Trump in the first term. I was thinking like an NPC, which is like a crazy thing to say about yourself. But whatever. And that Trump is going to be so great for America, and I’ve really turned around on this whole thing.
And I’m sorry for underestimating him before, but I am all in. I’m paraphrasing him. That’s functionally what he says. Maybe that’s how he feels. Maybe it’s half how he feels. But it certainly looks like he’s now trying to outmaneuver Musk, right? Trump is excited about Stargate, Musk is undermining Stargate, and now Altman comes in and says, God, Trump is so great. Well, Musk retweeted a December 2021 Altman tweet where Altman had been praising Reid Hoffman for how much he spent on defeating Trump and saying that liberals don’t know how much they should appreciate Reid Hoffman.
The point I want to make on all this, because it’s amazing to talk about, I guess, and depressing, is that I think there’s another option between Trump being a patsy who will believe any level of flattery, no matter how disingenuous, and Trump being a cynic who just enjoys the flattery. This option is that Trump understands speech as a form of action and commitment. Whether you believe it or not, when you go out and say, I am pro-Trump and he is a genius, you have either subtly or aggressively shifted who you are in public, if you’re Sam Altman or someone like that, in ways that then change how you have to act and who your allies are.
In the same way that making Sean Spicer say that the inauguration crowds were the biggest ever was a way of arguably enforcing that loyalty test, you see this a lot in authoritarian countries. Those who have taken it become more loyal because there are other options that become worse. Sam Altman is likely held in worse repute in the Democratic Party today. To be fair, Democrats were already annoying him by sending him letters about why he was donating so much to the inauguration fund. However, if you move Sam Altman out of the Democratic Party by getting him to say very nice things about Trump, that makes Democrats mad at him, and then he gets mad at the Democrats. You have effectively increased his loyalty, whatever the real content of the flattery was.
To speak that way is to take an action; it’s to reorient your alliances, and then your incentives change in a pro-Trump way. I’m not saying Trump is a mastermind. Many strongman leaders have come to this theory independently. It’s just how human beings work. I mean, it’s a way corporations work. You make people go out, and whether or not they genuinely agree with the new corporate policy, if they have to say they agree with it, then they sort of have to act more like they agree with it. But that’s what I read is happening here.
So we need a Michael Bennett, Sam Altman beer summit where they can talk about their letter sending. All of this makes sense. I think it’s like, a year ago or maybe even six months ago, I was really thinking that Trump is a tariff fanatic—that’s why he keeps talking about this and that’s why he’s having so many problems with these things. However, there are now significant doubts in my mind based on the team he’s assembled. To your point, he has gotten them to sort of say that they’re for tariffs, but they kept enough caveats in that analysis. If you look at Besson’s statements, Marin’s statements, and the things they’ve put on paper, they did not like burn their bridges with conventional neoclassical economic analysis.
This is different from when there was that Wilbur Ross paper where they claimed that net imports are subtracted from the GDP calculus. Thus, if we balance trade, GDP will go up—and that’s totally wrong. That is really bad economics, and a lot of people wrote that these guys are numbskulls. It was a kind of bridge-burning movement, right? If you’re willing to make a statement like that, you’re not going to be welcomed back into the polite society of people who understand international trade. Conversely, Marin’s approach, which suggested that it might generate some revenue and that equilibrium price effects are not actually that large, I think is not what most people believe, but it is reasonable.
All of this is unpredictable. My wife and I are thinking about buying a new car and asking ourselves if we need to rush out and get it before the tariffs come in. We’re left wondering. The exchange rate might adjust, and we don’t really know what’s going to happen. There could even be retaliation that actually makes things cheaper. The world is complicated. That level of tariff defense they came up with is respectable enough that it makes me think maybe this is just for show. I’ll leave my words when imported fertilizer all faces a 20 percent tax, and nobody can buy bananas.
However, the question of predictability is something I cannot wrap my head around. In economics as it’s understood, and I didn’t think this was particularly controversial, the fundamental insight of law and economics is that firms require predictability from the government in order to make internal decisions. Not knowing whether there will be tariffs on your products or whether you have to devote a tremendous amount of attention and capital to flattering the president instead of attending to a lot of other things your CEO could be doing is problematic. It seems to me that at a certain level, the inability to know whether there will be massive tariffs has some kind of knock-on economic effect.
But this only matters if you accept it. It will only have an unpredictability effect if the business community actually acts like it’s unpredictable. I think they’ve all persuaded themselves, perhaps correctly, that it’s not unpredictable—that specific tariffs might emerge. We’ve already been having tariff back-and-forth with China for some time, including under Biden, so there seems to be an expectation that you’re going to have tariffs on China. Those might increase, and that’s probably somewhat priced in. However, the business world is not acting as if we’re going to have 20 percent tariffs or even 10 percent tariffs on everything. If it happens, then, yes, that will be a hit.
Particularly because they’re not preparing for it, that’s actually a hedge against it happening in a strange way. The worst hit you can convince Donald Trump will be to the stock market, the less likely he is to take that step. You could really envision a day where there’s a big Wall Street Journal story announcing that tariffs are happening on Monday. There could be a significant crash, a notable drop in the Dow, and then suddenly, it’s revealed that they’re not happening anymore.
That’s a relationship I think is somewhat at play here. By acting as if it’s not happening, you likely make it a bit less probable that it happens. One of the other issues that is barking a little more quietly than it was maybe a month ago is DOGE—the Department of Governmental Efficiency. In between Donald Trump winning and taking office, we heard a lot about it.
Sure did. Co-run by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. They were all over X, having big debates about H-1B visas and what spending to cut. There was a significant Wall Street Journal op-ed they produced indicating their intent to advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major types of reform: regulatory rescission, administrative reductions, and cost savings. Musk mentioned times about cutting as much as $2 trillion from the federal government. However, he tempered that by saying, “maybe you don’t get quite there, but you can cut a trillion dollars.”
Now we see the executive order on DOGE. Ramaswamy is out, and the executive order’s mandate is to quote, “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” What happened there? It’s a bit hard to articulate. The United States Digital Service was actually created during the Obama administration, back when exciting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were mostly Democrats. This service operated under the idea that you could enhance governmental efficiency with an elite tech strike team. I know people who worked there.
DOGE is now going to be the new name for the USDS, so they can reuse the logo, which I suppose is efficient. The focus will now zero in on changing IT procurement, which does seem like a good idea based on everything I have heard about federal IT procurement. It is an area that is ripe for reform. When all these DOGE op-eds were circulating, I think if you looked at the more sober-minded individuals in conservative think tanks, they were all saying, “Guys, this isn’t going to work.” That’s not how the government operates.
You can’t just approach an agency and say, “Ah, there are no regulations anymore.” This is the government. We have laws and courts and the Administrative Procedure Act. It’s true that the government does not operate as efficiently as a well-run startup. Unlike in a well-run startup, you cannot just decide that something isn’t working and shut it down. You cannot just lay someone off because you think they’re unfit for the job—all of this is accurate. But you would have to change it through legislation.
It’s important to note that it’s not as though no one ever thought it might be more fun for the president of the United States to simply make things up or dictate what people should do. You have to implement existing laws. I also have questions about who exactly came to that realization. Clearly, whoever on the transition team was tasked with drafting executive orders related to DOGE had that epiphany. Has Elon Musk reached that understanding that he can’t just stroll into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and say, “50% of you are fired, while the other 50% must show me 20 pages of code?”
As we approach the conclusion, I have been trying to decipher what Donald Trump’s relationship with Congress and legislation is about to be. Compared to every other presidency I’ve witnessed, this one has emerged without discussions about big bills they want to pass. On everything we have discussed, from energy to the economy to immigration to IT procurement in the federal workforce—rights around who you can fire and who you cannot—all of that could be reshaped much more ambitiously through legislation.
In the background, we know that Mike Johnson, with his extremely narrow majority, is working on a tax bill. I believe everyone expects a bill aimed at updating and expanding Trump’s tax cuts, at least proposed at some point. However, they seem particularly intent on what they can do individually. I’m curious how you all interpret what seems like a very executive-focused presidency, which, by being so focused, is giving up on a form of ambition that you might only possess if you were going to truly work on a legislative agenda.
I think everyone is comfortable with the equilibrium we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so, where instead of policy originating in Congress via legislation, it originates in the executive branch. This then gets passed to the judicial branch via litigation for approval or rejection. Half of Congress is responsible for determining when to activate this judicial machine. This equilibrium results from Congress’s lack of enthusiasm to legislate under presidents of either party. Thus, it’s not surprising that an administration focusing on areas with considerable executive leeway, like trade negotiations and immigration enforcement, would adopt the attitude of seeing how far they can go with executive power, knowing that Congress isn’t likely to uphold its legislative prerogative.
I wanted to highlight one small but significant point related to what you were discussing. The congressional tax writers advised the transition to avoid issuing an executive order rescinding Joe Biden’s electric vehicle regulations because they wanted to incorporate that into a tax bill. Since there are tax credits for individuals buying EVs, rescinding it in a bill would score as saving money, allowing them to use that savings to offset the cost of tax cuts. There were stories that indicated everything was squared away and that they wouldn’t issue this executive order as it would disrupt their plans. However, Trump went ahead and did it anyway, not only disregarding Congress but acting in direct opposition to what congressional Republicans specifically asked him not to do.
This type of action complicates and undermines their ability to proceed with other initiatives he desires. The paradox of Trump as leader of the Republican Party has been that he does not seem as interested in changing American public policy compared to a typical politician. He has effectively cut off the anti-abortion movement at its knees once it became politically inconvenient. He’s a commanding presence in Republican politics.
Joe Biden has spent a lot of time expressing concern about potential backlash from the left over various actions and has been focused on meeting those expectations. In contrast, Trump seems to cater to his core supporters primarily through his presence, persona, and announcements. He does not appear to lose sleep worrying about a temporary extension rather than a permanent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).
However, this is significant. There’s a reason earnest congressional Republicans would much prefer to find sufficient offsets to make this legislation permanent. If you achieve permanence, it complicates the landscape significantly for any future Democratic president. A temporary measure allows more flexibility for progressive politics should a Democrat win in 2028 or 2032. It’s not as if Trump is antipathetic toward signing a permanent version or that he opposes those kinds of policies. Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem very invested in the notion of permanent policy change.
As I noted with immigration reforms, Trump has politically advanced in such a way that he could get bipartisan accomplishments that surpass the filibuster, making them more challenging to reverse. Yet that does not seem as consequential to him compared to the ability to posture, project action, and maintain his presence. He genuinely appears to dominate the scene and is very focused on that aspect.
I believe that serves as a suitable place to wrap up. As always, our final question is: what are three books you would recommend to the audience? Dara, why don’t we start with you?
This is the most good government normie take to have on this particular week, but I think that The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis is probably a good book to revisit if you have it and to skim if you haven’t checked it out yet. It serves as a reminder of the innumerable things the federal government manages, which a broad-based attack on the civil service will degrade in some form.
Demon Copperhead was the only novel I read twice last year. I think it serves as a rebuttal to all of the pseudo-sentimental debates like Hillbilly Elegy, regarding what really occurred with the rural poor over the last 25 years. If I don’t mention an immigration book, I’m going to be fired, so I recommend Everyone Who Was Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, specifically the first half, which discusses the 1980s and features impressive archival material that reminds readers that government is composed of people, and people are the catalysts for decision-making.
Matt?
Tim Shank’s book, Left Adrift, offers a great intervention into the discussion about what’s happening with Democrats, looking historically at Bill Clinton, to some degree at Barack Obama, and also at various center-left figures like Tony Blair and Ehud Barak. It provides very insightful content.
Mark Dunkelman has a book that I think is not quite out yet, but I’ve read it in galley format, and it will be published in a couple of weeks. I just finished reading it too. It is called Why Nothing Works. It addresses similar themes to your book but with greater detail. Abundance is set to release in March. It dives deeper into a narrower selection of topics, giving readers valuable insights into the history of substantial infrastructure projects.
I’ve also been trying to recover my scrambled cognition in this new era, so I’m reading older, longer novels. Middlemarch is considered by many to be the greatest English-language novel ever written, or at least that’s what I’ve read on the internet, which prompted me to give it a chance. It’s genuinely good! If conventional wisdom nailed this one, I can affirm it. It’s written by George Eliot, and you can acquire it for around 20 cents in an e-book format. The public domain is lovely. You’ll learn something and also cultivate the skill of reading long sentences—miraculous in this day and age.
Dara Lind, Matt, thank you very much.
Thank you.
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith and Kristen Lynn. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Siamalewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.