Tuesday on the RealClearPolitics radio show — weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, and here on our website — Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan, and Carl Cannon discuss how the Trump administration handled the Jeffrey Epstein issue at today’s cabinet meeting, Andrew Yang showing interest in Elon Musk’s “America Party,” a new report evaluating the CIA’s investigation into alleged Trump-Russia ties in 2016, and a judge putting a two-week pause on cuts to Planned Parenthood in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” After that, RCP contributor Charles Lipson discusses why young people are so interested in socialism, and RealClearMarkets editor John Tamny talks about President Trump’s war of words with the Federal Reserve. *** First, Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Trump tried to turn the page on the Jeffrey Epstein debacle at this afternoon’s cabinet meeting. Is the administration’s effort to give a “last word” on Epstein raising more questions than it answered? “It was really bizarre,” Tom Bevan said. “Coming into office, Trump and his folks promised radical transparency on the Russia hoax, MLK, JFK, all that stuff. Epstein was part of that. They’ve botched that now, and made it worse.” “It was preposterous for the president to assert that this is too old a story to talk about,” Carl Cannon agreed. “The three of us spoke to Megyn Kelly today, and we think Pam Bondi is not long for this world as Trump’s AG.” “Now you have to think, okay, both sides are covering this up,” Cannon added. “Who can I vote for to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein murder/suicide? Oh, maybe Elon Musk’s America Party. There may be more conspiracy buffs out there than you think.” “I don’t think it is fair to call this a ‘conspiracy nut’ kind of story,” Andrew Walworth said. “It’s a very legitimate story. I would like to know more, and I find this explanation completely unsatisfactory.” *** Next, around minute 7, Elon Musk appears to be recruiting Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate who tried to launch the ‘Forward Party’ in 2021, for his new ‘America Party.’ Is Musk serious about launching a third party? “In a country where you can get 19 different colors of Ford Maverick, any number of phones, and 500 TV channels, you only get two political parties. It makes no sense and everybody knows it,” Carl Cannon said. “But the two major parties have put up these tremendous barriers to entry: ballot access, rigged campaign finance rules, and the media’s bought into it. So it’s hard. But, it’s not impossible.” “But this is Elon Musk,” Cannon said. “He fired rockets when everybody said only NASA could. Electric cars predate the internal combustion engine, but nobody could ever figure out how to make them make money. This guy did it with Tesla. So maybe it’s this kind of innovator who is really new to politics, and maybe that’s what it takes.” *** In the next segment, at minute 13, a new CIA report does not dispute that Putin sought to sway the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, but criticized investigations into alleged Russian “collusion” with the Trump campaign. “John Brennan, the CIA director under Obama, perjured himself before Congress,” Tom Bevan reported. “He said under oath that the Steele dossier was not used in any way, shape, or form to inform the intelligence community’s assessment. That turned out to be not true, according to this report.” “What’s the statute of limitations on that?” Cannon said. “He’s probably just a partisan Democratic Party hack who doesn’t even think he’s lying. But the mind boggles.” “It’s astonishing that a communist, a guy who voted for the communists, became our CIA director,” Bevan added. “The more we learn about this episode in hindsight, the more dastardly it seems,” Bevan said. “It’s one of the great political dirty tricks that have ever been performed in American politics.” *** After that, around minute 18:30, a Massachusetts judge has placed a two-week hold on part of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” barring Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. “I thought, after the Supreme Court, we weren’t going to have any more universal injunctions,” Andrew Walworth said. “This feels pretty universal, and pretty injunction-y.” “This is not an executive order issued by the president. This is a bill that passed both houses of Congress and was signed by the president,” Tom Bevan said. “I used to be shocked by this kind of stuff, but I’m not anymore. We’ve seen too many examples of judges and folks sort of getting outside of their lanes and doing all these things. The ends justify the means. It’s all just to thwart Trump.” “Let’s not-let’s not go off too far down that road,” Cannon added. “This is a tax bill signed into law. But if it prohibits things in Medicaid that are required in other legislation for Medicaid to do, it is up to the courts to sort it out.” *** In the next segment, starting at minute 22, Tom Bevan talks to RCP contributor Charles Lipson, a University of Chicago professor emeritus, about why university students are so into socialism and the influence of a radicalized professoriate. “There’s a lot of discussion about this among Chicago faculty who are part of a small listserv-and sadly it’s small-called the Free Speech Listserv,” Lipson said. “What would strike you is how many-there’s almost no support for firing such a person.” “Historians are all about how awful America is. English professors are all about anti-colonialism. People who major in English want to read Jane Austen. They don’t want to hear about colonial oppression,” he said. “Students have been forced out of these fields.” “If you declared yourself to be pro-Israel, for God’s sake, you would never get tenure at Harvard Divinity School,” he said. “These places have become awful. And American taxpayers are getting tired of funding them.” “I mean, who would you rather hire? A physics major from Mississippi State or a gender studies major from Harvard?” *** Finally, at minute 33:30, Andrew Walworth talks to RealClear Markets editor John Tamny about his recent piece on the fight between the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve over interest rates. Tamny wrote in Forbes: Say It Repeatedly, The Fed Isn’t Nor Can It Be ‘Independent’ “The notion that the Fed’s in control is laughable,” Tamny said. “Fed officials are appointed by politicians. To presume that they didn’t politic to be in that position in the first place… is laughable.” “This is a politically appointed entity. I don’t say that as a conspiracy theory. I just say that you don’t need the Fed to regulate banks. You don’t need the Fed to liquefy solvent banks. You certainly don’t need the Fed to set interest rates.” “I don’t say this as some wild-eyed Austrian School person who thinks the Fed is the source of all of our economic ills. The books I’ve written about the Fed make a case that it’s just not that important one way or the other,” he said. “Do we need it? Of course not. And how you know we don’t need it is that any bank that runs into near-term credit difficulties-as in, it’s solvent but it just needs cash in the near term-it would never go to the Fed… For a bank to go to the Fed for a loan is for a bank to admit that it’s bankrupt. And that’s why banks avoid it.” “In a perfect world, the Fed would disappear, because it serves no purpose. But that’s never going to happen. It’s never going to happen because it’s a full employment act for economists,” he added. “It’s also a way for Congress to outsource the dirty stuff about bailing out banks that markets no longer would prefer to go under in the first place.” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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