I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren't* on-board. This isn't a Trump/Musk explainer.

Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators -- they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line.

So yeah, that's what makes some of the Stewart interview 'funny' to watch, Cass doesn't have a mission to trash Trump... so he just let's Stewart's jokes roll over him... and he's pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that's the point of the article). But his audience isn't Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists... he explicitly says the targets are 40-under.

Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line...

Musk seems to have flipped from Grey to Red (though who knows how long that will last).

Cass is an old-schooly kind of guy and seems to be the type of Team Red that no longer has a home under the new Stupid Party Paradigm.

A man out of time but 100% comfortable in the party of McCain and Romney.

Team Rust?

Eh maybe...?

I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.

The Good:
1) Tariffs on China.
2) What he's done with Israel.
3) Dismantling DEI and understanding it's like opposing someone's religion.

The Neutral (or with holding judgement):
1) I'm not going to put paper straw in there because it's a nothing burger.
2) I'm also not going to include cozying up to Russia as a bad thing because it looks like that's going to blow up.
3) I'm also going to withhold judgement on damage to rule of law because that's yet to come to a head... but lots of potential on this one.

The Bad:
1) Various tariffs for the sake of tariffs.
2) Mistreating our various allies (this would be a long list btw)
3) Hiring anti-vac people to head up Health.
4) General lawlessness and basically being at war with the judicial system.
5) Hiring people who are incompetent and firing the competent people below them who are needed to carry out policy.
6) General chaos and unwillingness to use governmental tools in appropriate ways. Rather than Musk's group we should have a copy of what Gore did as VP.
7) Getting rid of large amounts of gov competency without any effort to do a cost/value eval on it first (note I would have included bureaucracy reform as a good thing last time)
8) Apparently taking Russian info war stuff as legit information.
9) Going serious Tax-Cut and Spend.
10) General lack of stability. I think he's suffering from some age related dementia.

Some of this is chaos of administration transfer, having very new people in their jobs, and a negative relationship with the press.

However the overall summation is really bad. He's ripping up decades of international good will, and doing a lot of damage to the gov, and the economy. Whether that also includes rule of law is a work in progress.

At the moment I'd say he's probably going to end up the 2nd worst President we've ever seen and he's got an outside shot at #1.

The ideas are worth taking seriously but the conceit that Trump (or Vance, or Musk) understand or are motivated by them is.. a tough sell. I mean maybe if Rubio was president you could see there being challenges selling some of this in the face of institutional inertia and a fickle public raised on a Steven Spielberg version of World War 2 and the years immediately after but does anyone else in the administration have this kind of vision? I'm unconvinced.

That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for months or years, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all.

They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally.

You don't think that's meaningful?

Come for the Jon Stewart fun, stay for the autistic nerd talking about the new-center-right economic policies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgEQeLR-M0g

To me, Cass is interesting for his Pre-Post-Trump positioning...

I think he fumbled a couple answers ... I don't think he quite gets across his message that NATO doesn't have to be destroyed to become renewed/reordered effectively (it kinda gets tacked on at the end after he meanders a bit); and I think he's too circumspect 'implying' what he pretty much says, which is that the Trump Admin is poorly run and even if you enact some policies that *could* be good, if you do them haphazardly and without a clear outline of what other countries can do to amend behaviors to bring trade into alignment... then you aren't doing good policies at all. Or, per usual, the Trump Admin undermines everything it touches. It's pretty clear that his long-term Post-Trump objective is tied to younger parts of the party... but he doesn't define his future goals as either supporting Trump nor directly taking Trump to task for botching things up.

He addresses this second point directly in this essay (probably written after the interview, I assume) where he critiques the administration for not articulating the point, direction or correction behind tariffs. So, if you were looking for a steelman on the Point/Purpose of Tariffs if handled by a competent administration, this is your article.

https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/americas-three-demands

As a supervillain origin story, he tells how he was the guy tasked by Mitt Romney(!) to look at the China trade policies... and turns out, there was a bit of a gap between theory and reality. This is before (I think) Autor's China Shock came out. So out of the Romney Bain Capital labs ...