Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

So, just like you, I'm trying to make sense of all of this.

My main question, is there any possible way these new tariffs make things better for average Americans.

It's hard to find an economist right now who answers yes, but this is a question we'll explore, uh, tonight with my guests, Steven Hayes, the editor of the Dispatch.

David Leonhardt is the director of the editorial board at the New York Times.

Kayla Toshi is the senior White House correspondent for CNN and our old friend Nancy Yousef is in national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

I don't mean you're old, by the way.

I just mean like I see you a lot.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Um, just wanna make sure everybody's clear on that at home.

Um, before we go to tariffs, which are kind of this feels like at least a world historical event, at least if you are looking at your 401k today.

It feels like a world historical event.

Um, I want to talk about a couple of national security issues.

Nancy, um, you're in the Pentagon, um, uh, Last Night, Thursday, the president fired the head of the National Security Agency and cyber command a dual-hatted position, uh, General Timothy Hogg, um, after Laura Lumer, who is this well-known far right conspiracy theorist and ostensibly close friend of Donald Trump's told Trump that he was disloyal, but just general, uh, because he was appointed by Mark Milley, who is obviously not a favorite of Donald Trump, and she also recommended and The recommendation was received that Trump should fire various other mid-level officials of the National Security Council.

Um, We both cover national security issues.

I don't remember anything like this ever happening before.

What is going on inside the defense establishment.

So we should start by talking about what the NSA does.

It's responsible for signals intelligence.

It provides um key intelligence in the presidential daily brief, and the reason you put a general in there is that it's apolitical because intelligence should be apolitical and the and the ideas that the president should get unvarnished intelligence to make the best national security decisions that a general who served for three decades was fired, uh, ostensibly because he was not seen as loyal enough to the president, politicizes that position.

It politicizes the military.

politicizes intelligence.

And this idea, uh Laura Lumer and her tweet about it said that this was because he was close to Mark Milley because Mark Milley had named him.

Well, Mark Milley named a lot of generals in that time.

So this the the the political tie that they're making him doesn't really hold you're successful in the Pentagon, every presidential administration, you're going to get a promotion of some sort and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might sign off on that, but there's no indication that their careers overlapped in any significant way or that there was any sort of alliance between them, and so all of that is sort of to your question as really raised fears within the Pentagon that they will be measured not to their um willingness to sign it to honor their oath to the Constitution, but to their personal loyalty to the president.

Has this ever happened before, to your knowledge?

It hasn't, but also I think perhaps even more consequentially, Trump said that Laura Lumer not only recommended people to fire, but also people to hire.

So who will be coming into these positions in these people's places.

A lot of the folks that they fired were people who were doing legitimate relative nonpartisan work.

I mean, apart from what happened at the Pentagon, I mean there were folks at the National Security Council who are helping to work on the deal that they were actively negotiating between TikTok and ByteDance and China, that being David Fei, who works on technology and national security and so there are real near term consequences to the people who are being removed from these positions, and that deal obviously getting scuppered in the last couple of days, needing to be extended yet again, but who she recommends to hire in their place is what I'm focused on.

And go ahead.

There seems to be an ideological component of this, which is the people who Laura Lumer is recommending for firing seem to be more isolated, seem to be more hawkish, and the people she wants in there are more isolationist.

And it actually comes back to your group chat, uh, in which we saw the JD Vance, um, wing of the Republican Party think of it as Mike Waltz's group, Fahrenhe fair enough.

You were just visiting.

Mike Waltz's group chat in which we saw JD Vance representing really the, the, the isolationist wing of the Republican.

Why would we do this?

What's in it for us?

Yes, and Mike Waltz and some others.

being more hawkish on things like Russia.

And so from a national security standpoint, I think it's concerning that you imagine the Trump administration will have even more people who are dovish toward Russia.

Steve, I'm sorry to do this to you, but who is Laura Lumer?

Yes, Laura Lumer is a well known far right conspiracy theorist who's thought of as so far right that Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks she's racist and crazy.

So it's alarming that she's recommending people to get fired and people to be hired, but it should be said she's not the only one doing this and to David's point, there is a sort of system more systematic effort happening inside the Trump administration to push out people who have sort of more Reaganite views.

My colleague Michael Warren reported on this 3 weeks ago.

Sergio Gore, JD Vance, acolytes, people who are in the sort of super mega part of the, the White House, part of the movement.

are making lists.

They have their, they have an email chain, a text chain where they are recommending people who might be disloyal they're purging even as they hire, I mean, Sergio Gore hires his job is to hire people in the administration, but they're already looking for blocked signs of disloyalty or both.

They're, they're blocking a number of people, some of whom Mike Waltz wanted to hire.

They blocked those potential hires, and they are already looking for people who are insufficiently insufficiently Nancy, the on this Mike Waltz question for one minute.

So he's the national security adviser.

um Laura Lumer, um, who Steve is memorably memorably described as to the right of Marjorie Taylor Greene, not That's not an everyday a lot of room, by the way, yeah, no, I mean, I think there is, but it's still way over there, obviously, uh, so, so she comes in and says, To the president, Mike Waltz says all these people who are bad and you should get rid of them, so the president just gets rid of them.

What does Mike, what does Mike Waltz done in the last 24 hours?

Does he defend his people and his institution?

Well, let's back up.

We don't even know how she got into the White House, who authorized her to go to the White House at whose request did she go there?

Then she's given interviews where she said that she provided a dozen names, um, and that she had done her sort of own research on their loyalty or lack thereof to the president and Mike Waltz was part of these conversations.

wasn't able to defend his people.

Now I can tell you at the Pentagon the sort of shock was not just that it was Laura Loomer as it was, they were worried about Elon Musk getting rid of people in their department and now there's this new name emerging.

They don't know the standards, they don't know the qualifications, and what it signals to your question that Mike Waltz doesn't have the kind of control over national security or his own staffing if somebody can come in sort of unannounced to the staff and make such dramatic changes to very key positions in national.

Security.

Yes, to Nancy's point, you know, people were surprised when Laura Loomer showed up in the Oval Office.

This was not something that was well known.

Susie Wiles, the president's chief of staff, who also served in a senior position on his campaign, intervened at one point because Laura Lumer was flying around the country on Donald Trump's plane and set up sort of a system whereby she would be excluded.

Um, the responsible people in the White House don't want Laura Luom around.

They don't want her talking to the president the way that he's talking.

So they set up these systems to sort of block her to keep her out and those systems failed and I think that's been alarming to people in the West Wing.

I think it's unclear whether it's been a massive gatekeeping failure, ala when she appeared on Ground Zero at 9/11 when she is a 9/11 conspiracy.

She's a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and she was at Ground Zero with then-candidate Trump and at that time there was such an uproar that there was a backlash to make you think that it would never happen again.

And so that leads me to think, well, Was her visiting the White House this time, was that actually a lapse or was this some sort of dog whistle to the far right where they're indicating that they're still keeping the far right's preferences and something that the president wanted?

I mean, if you go back to those those post-election days when Sydney Powell was, people were trying to keep Sydney Powell out remind us of Sydney Powell was was the um election conspiracy theorist lawyer who kept sort of appearing at the White House or in Donald Trump's ear, floating these conspiracy theories, telling him what he wanted to hear.

and people were alarmed at that time and she's been very active in a bunch of his stuff lately.

I mean, she also is one of the most aggressive people on social media saying really nasty personal stuff about any judge who issues some sort of ruling that Trump doesn't like, so I want to get to tariffs, but David, one more question.

Um I mean you've been around Washington for a while.

This is.

Alice in Wonderland stuff at a certain point.

Where are we going?

Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of presidents have relied on advisors who make their other advisors uncomfortable, right?

We can all kind of do the list.

But this is just still a completely different level, because, because it is getting in with the military as Nancy was pointing it out, and it really gives real reason to have concerns about national security in ways that we just haven't seen before, right?

And Nancy's point is a very important one that the NSA, they're supposed to be, they're supposed to be honest brokers.

might want the intelligence to mean this, but it actually means that based on actual experts, actual experts are telling you, so if you're picking an intelligence chief based on loyalty, you're going to get the intelligence you want.

But not intelligence that might correspond to reality.

That's right.

And that's when you get into serious trouble.

Let me, um, uh, 11 more note on, on defense.

I just wanted to ask Nancy about this because it's important.

The army is, uh, transferring the remains of 4 soldiers killed in Lithuania in a training accident, um, late last month.

The 4 soldiers, I, I'd like to mention them were, they were assigned to the first armored brigade combat team with the 3rd Infantry Division, Sergeant Troy Nuttson Collins, Sergeant Jose Duenez Junior.

Sergeant Edwin Franco and Private First Class Dante Teetano, um, they died in a horrible accident, um, and thousands of people lined up in in in Vilnius in Lithuania, thousands of Lithuanians up into including the president to pay their respects as they are being transferred.

I want to note, um, that the President Trump is not, as far as we can tell, meeting their bodies at Dover Air Force Base, and he is in Florida playing in a Saudi sponsored golf tournament.

You're in the building.

all the time.

How does this, how does that sort of thing uh affect people in the defense apparatus.

Well, let me begin by saying not every president goes to every dignified transfer, OK. Having, having said that, you know, if you've never been to a dignified transfer.

It is one that remains come back to this country.

For the first time it's a, a very moving ceremony, um, and for the civilians and those who attended, it is a very direct reminder of the consequences of their decisions and the families are actually right there.

The families are there, um, it's a, it's a heartbreaking um experience and so it's important for those who make those decisions to see that there's risk associated with it, not just in combat but in in in training as well as in this case.

NATO training exercise.

That's right, and, and we know how some people in the White House, as David alluded to feel about NATO training exercises generally.

That's right, you think there's a political quality to this decision?

Well, look, those conversations between the president and some of those families can be very, very painful.

They are seeing their loved one come back.

There have been really, really confrontational discourse between them.

Having said that, as you noted, what happened in Lithuania was really remarkable.

I've covered the beat for 20 years.

I've never seen something so moving thousands of people lined up, children carrying flags to American flags, yes, to show their gratitude for the service of these troops, and so, um, I, I think it's a very stark contrast this week and, and for service members, um, lost and the civilian leadership not being there will be noted by the building because this week the building.

was changed and following and mourning the loss of these four service members, it's it's a tragic situation