Justin Wolfers: Is this the first step in a broader project? And it is. It is because we have never had a Fed governor fired before. It is because this rests on dubious legal authority. It is because it comes in the context of the president going after his enemies. And it is because the president has been making over an array of government institutions in his own image, and it’s a very dangerous image.
Colin Seeberger: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m your host, Colin Seeberger, and that was Justin Wolfers.
Justin is one of the leading economic thinkers in America. He’s a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. He’s also here to talk with us this week about the state of the economy.
We see that President Trump’s tariffs and his global trade war continue to wreak havoc on consumers and businesses alike. At the same time, we’re seeing him take more steps to take control over the American economy, from consolidating power over American monetary policy to wholesale nationalizing major economic engines in this country in the private sector.
By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Trump sought to fire Dr. Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, in an unprecedented attack on what’s supposed to be an apolitical protector of the American economy. All this comes while Trump continues to push the limits on the rule of law. We had a really good conversation, learned a lot about the economy, and I hope that you do, too.
And stick around after the interview for a moment of joy, because if you’re packing up the car for one last summer road trip, I hope you’ll enjoy some of our songs of the summer here at “The Tent.”
Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He previously worked at Gallup, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University.
Justin Wolfers, welcome to the pod.
Wolfers: Mate, you did a great job making me sound boring.
Seeberger: Well I’m sure that you will dispel any notion of boredom. And no doubt because we’re talking to you today following a really newsy event that happened last night.
President Trump announced that he is going to fire Dr. Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Dr. Cook was, of course, nominated by President Biden to serve a 14-year term. She says that she isn’t going to step down without a fight. She is going to continue to do her work in service of the economy. And yet, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a Fed governor can only be removed for cause, which Trump doesn’t seem to have, if you ask me.
I’d love to get your insights, catch our listeners up to speed on this story. What impact do you think that it will have for both consumers and investors, as well as how the Federal Reserve proceeds with its work?
Wolfers: Right. So one way of thinking about this is, this is the firing of one of 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee.
This is someone who’s typically voted with the chairman of the committee in a committee that’s consensus based. And so if you thought about it that way, you’d be like, “Well, 1/12 went away. And historically people have replaced departing Fed governors with relatively sane economists. Boy, there’s nothing here.” That’s one perspective.
A different question is, is this the first step in a broader project? And it is. It is because we have never had a Fed governor fired before. It is because this rests on dubious legal authority. It is because it comes in the context of the president going after his enemies. It is because this is part of the weaponization of government, and you’ve got the head of Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac] literally going through government records trying to find slivers of wrongdoing by any prominent Democrat but unable to find any slivers of wrongdoing by the non-prominent people or by prominent Republicans. And it is because the president has been making over an array of government institutions in his own image, and it’s a very dangerous image.
Seeberger: Well, Justin, I’m curious, on that point, why is it important that the Federal Reserve remain independent, doesn’t become basically just another political project of Donald Trump?
Can you walk us through the last time that a president tried to control the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates for political reasons? What ended up happening? And I think just providing some additional context about why Fed independence is important would be quite helpful.
Wolfers: I love that, Colin. You’re like, “I got an economics teacher. Could he just teach economics?” I got you, brother. OK, look, here’s the simplest version—this is the Thanksgiving table version: Do you want monetary policy set in the best interest of the American people or the political interest of the president? It’s as simple as that.
Now, there is a problem your audience will understand. That same logic, you could apply it to everything. Do you want roads done this way? Do you want health care organized by technocrats rather than by the White House? And on and on it goes. So there is a question of democratic legitimacy, on the other hand
Independents let the nerds do nerd things. Hopefully, they’ll do it in the interest of the American people rather than some political project versus let the people vote. But did they vote for this? I sure as heck never heard someone say that they were going to destroy the Fed before the election. I don’t think the American people voted for this.
Now, there’s something deeper here because this is macroeconomics. Let me go back and explain. A key part of macroeconomics is that expectations about the future really matter, and in fact, that’s really important for inflation. Here’s why: We often think that expectations of inflation can actually create the reality. So what happens if I were expecting inflation over the next year to be 4 percent, and I were running my own restaurant, and I had to print up next year’s menus. I’d think all my input costs are going to rise by 4 percent. All my competitors are going to raise their prices by 4 percent. By jingo, it feels like I should raise my prices by 4 percent to keep up. Notice there, I’m not saying your costs actually rose, I’m saying the expectation that they rise is going to be enough.
And so what you can get is a virtuous cycle. If everyone expects low inflation, then no one will bother raising their prices, and therefore you get the reality of low inflation. The problem is, if everyone expects high inflation, then they raise their prices to keep up. And that creates the reality of high inflation. That’s a vicious cycle. So expectations create reality. That’s totally different than much of the rest of how the world works.
So let’s now think about what would happen if the Fed were politicized, if it were run as an arm of the Trump political organization. There’s a huge temptation for a president to try to goose the economy before an election—do anything he or she can to make the unemployment rate as low as they can get on the eve of the election. Well if that happens, if they run the economy too hot, they would create inflation after the election. That’s bad enough in and of itself, right? So that’s a reason you might not want to let the president do that.
But this expectations channel takes you a step further. It says, “If I understand that the president might do that, then I expect high inflation in the future, and that creates the reality of high inflation today.” So if I want to move away from the vicious cycle to the virtuous cycle, I want to prevent anything that could cause people to expect high inflation in the future, which includes presidents goosing the economy just before an election. Is that responsive to how might this work in theory part?
Seeberger: It is. I mean, basically, slashing interest rates by, let’s say, hundreds of base points could end up meaning you’re making a lot of cheap money available, which sounds attractive on its face, but could end up overstimulating the economy and driving up inflation.
Wolfers: I was going a step further.
Wolfers: I was saying the institution in such a way that people might start to believe they’re going to do that.
Wolfers: That creates the vicious cycle.
Seeberger: Yeah. You don’t even have to get to the point of the cuts. Justin, I’m curious—we’ve seen a lot of overreach from this administration. You hinted at some of that. I’m curious whether you think that the economy itself is perhaps one of the few checks on this president and his overreach.
We have seen a little bit of a pullback or temporary cessation of some tariff announcements. We have seen some shoddy jobs numbers come out earlier this month that looked like the economy may be starting to cool. I’m curious whether you think that some of the economic data, some of the economic reality that folks are contending with in light of the president’s tariff announcements—does that end up potentially acting as a backstop to some of the overreach?
Wolfers: So think about what the constraints on the president are. One, the Supreme Court. He’s clearly shown enormous overreach in a range of domains where it’s not clear that he has legal power and in some where it’s clear that he doesn’t. In fact, including much of the tariff war. Many of the tariffs that he’s raised have been, already in the early stages of litigation, it’s gone against the president at every stage. He’s had to declare a national emergency based on bilateral trade deficits. If that sounds like gobbledygook to you, let me just say it in English: based on nonsense and horse shit. And even lawyers can understand that, but that process plays out slowly.
Next backstop: Congress. For instance, the trade war. The Constitution explicitly gives the power over tariffs to Congress. Congress has gone missing. Absolutely missing. And—
Seeberger: They forfeited. They forfeited.
Wolfers: It must be great. You get paid a couple hundred thousand dollars and all you have to do—I don’t even know, do they even sit anymore? Do they go to Washington? I haven’t seen a congressional representative do anything other than nod.
Seeberger: Well they’ve been enjoying a long vacation not promoting the president’s megabill this month. If only everybody could enjoy their quality.
Wolfers: And then the next constraint is the president himself. Do I want to do this? The president fancies himself a businessman, and if he upsets the economy enough, then he’ll get calls from Wall Street. He doesn’t want his legacy to be economic failure. Balance that against: He wants his legacy to be a big footprint on the United States. I don’t quite know how this balances. But through the first term, he messed with a lot of things, but he basically left the economy alone.
You might hope that’s the pattern for the second term. Maybe. But the second term looks kind of different than the first term. And yes, he went forward on tariffs and then TACOed—remember, “Trump always chickens out.” But then he’s still gone back with tariffs at the highest level since the Smoot-Hawley Depression-era tariffs. And he still fired the BLS [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] commissioner. And he still attacked Powell over and over. And he did just go and try to—it’s still of unknown legality—fire a Fed governor.
This seems like the action of someone quite unrestrained. So I do think a bad economy leads to a bunch of phone calls that will lead to some pressure for changes. But I don’t know, man, I know some 80-year-olds. I know some who are wonderful. I know some who don’t change their mind very often. And I know a lot who are extremely idiosyncratic and not necessarily plugged into the reality of lives around them.
Seeberger: That is very fair. Well, Justin, I’m curious, we’re talking to you a week after the Federal Reserve met last week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for their big annual summer meeting. And it was at that meeting, Chair Powell announced that the Fed is likely to start cutting interest rates again next month at its September meeting.
I’m curious, do you think that that was the right call? Do you think that the Fed is acting in response to some precarious economic signals in underlying data? And if so, what are the ones that most concern you?
Wolfers: We are at a really unusual and, I think, intellectually interesting point, which is challenging for many of us. Let me explain. Many of us on the left of politics have habitually been somewhat dovish. We tend to think that the pain of unemployment, the loss of dignity, the loss of self-worth, the loss of connection to important social institutions is extremely important. Maybe more important than an ounce of financial stability or inflation.
But now, we have a president who’s more dovish again. And I’ve seen many of my friends on the left look at the current moment, and they’ve become a little reflexively anti-Trump. If Trump wants low interest rates, that must be wrong. That’s a habit we don’t want to fall into.
So where are we right now? Interest rates are a little above the neutral rate, which is another way of saying Powell currently has his foot lightly on the brake. Given the state of the economy, what’s appropriate? I’d say you don’t want your foot on the brake, and you probably don’t want your foot on the accelerator either.
You don’t want it on the accelerator because inflation is 3 percent. We’ve got tariffs coming. So there’s not a really strong reason for the break or the accelerator. So maybe we should be cutting rates back towards what’s called the neutral rate, which would be cutting interest rates to about 3, 3.25 percent.
And risks seem balanced in the sense that, yeah, I’m worried about unemployment rising. It’s risen by nearly a percentage point over the past year and a half. It’s been drifting up. The job market’s been slowing, and there’s lots of reasons to feel very pessimistic about the state of the economy. So yeah, I think it is the right moment to be cutting interest rates. I can say that without saying the president is right that we should cut interest rates to 1 percent.
Wolfers: One percent is what would be appropriate if the economy has fallen into a hole. So I think Powell has done the right thing. I think anyone who characterizes this as Powell being bullied by the president is getting it exactly wrong.
Cutting interest rates by a quarter percent is not the same as cutting them by 3 percentage points. It’s 1/12 as large. I think the reaction of financial markets, that they bid stocks up by a percentage point in response to this, was absurd. But I do think it is a good moment for cutting rates somewhat. And this is the point that many of us are uncomfortable with, which is: A, I am on the president’s side, directionally. B, I’m still vehemently against what he wants to do. But it puts me on an unusual side.
I think the president is being recklessly dovish when he says he wants interest rates at 1 percent. I think that would be absurd. And I think that we want a more sensible monetary policy, and there are many people on the left of politics who’ve never had to make that argument in their lives because, on balance, for much of the past 30 years, maybe monetary policy was too tight.
Seeberger: For sure. Justin, all of these decisions that the Federal Reserve has to make really have to be rooted in sound data. And you talked about the firing of the BLS commissioner a few weeks ago following the quite concerning jobs report we got earlier this month.
I am curious, just how much faith do you have both in data that we are going to be getting out of the federal government, one, and two, also, the ability for the Federal Reserve to have a clear understanding for where they should be steering the economy based on what may be data that is questionably unsound?
Wolfers: Right. So let me try and put on my teacher hat and help folks who are not full-time economists navigate all of this. So far, the data that is produced by the government—that is, data that comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve—has all been totally reliable.
I don’t mean it’s perfect. I mean it’s the best guess we can make given the limited resources we have and the difficulty of understanding what’s going on with the economy. There was a time when I could have said, “And anything coming out of the White House is true.” I remember my partner used to work for President Obama, and before the State of the Union, literally every fact was checked. It would be someone who had checked the fact was true. That now has not been true throughout either Trump presidency.
So anytime the President speaks, the treasury secretary speaks, the commerce secretary speaks, or anyone inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the truth seems not to be a value they hold true—hold dearly—and one simply shouldn’t take them at their word. There’s often not just misrepresentations and mischaracterizations of data but literally outright lies.
Firing the BLS commissioner is truly banana epublic stuff. This is not what a confident government that is sure that it’s improving the economy does. If you are confident you’re improving the economy, you just want the statistician to be out there measuring it as much as you possibly could. It spells danger.
Now, what comes next is going to be very, very hard to discern, and that’s sort of by design. That’s what authoritarians do. I believe next month’s jobs report is probably going to be honest. I believe that almost with 100 percent probability. I know that because I have many, many friends inside the BLS. And they’d call me, and they say, “Hey Justin, the boss just came by and fiddled with some numbers in a spreadsheet. It’s all nonsense now.” And it would definitely get out.
That said, that’s never how they do it. They’re not actually going to be fiddling with the numbers. What will happen is they’ll say something that sounds kind of sensible but breaks everything. For instance, the potential BLS commissioner, the Trump nominee, has said, “The data need to be improved. We’re going to suspend publishing the nonfarm payrolls data for the next few months until we’re ready.”
What that means is just as the tariffs hit, and just as Wall Street economists say there’s a 40 percent chance of a recession, the single best indicator for whether we’re in a recession might just disappear. And maybe it’ll come back, but it’ll have a bunch of improvements. And maybe they’re real and maybe they’re fake, but they’ll somehow come back in a way that you can’t compare the later data with the earlier data, which means we’ll never know what happened in between.
Or maybe they’ll move from measuring the unemployment rate for all Americans to the unemployment rate of natural-born Americans. There’s political reasons, and to many people, that sounds sensible. But what that will do is create two series that can’t be compared. And also what that will do is use our existing surveys in ways in which they weren’t designed, adding noise to the whole process. And so bad things could happen, but folks like me would never be able to tell.
So I’m deeply concerned. I’d suggest to your audience what you need to do is today identify people whose analysis of the data you believe. I don’t mean an ideological bedfellow. I mean someone who’s going to tell you the truth, through thick and through thin. And it’s going to require some degree of sophistication because they’re going to mess with these numbers in ways that you can’t just—if they do, they’ll mess with them in ways that you can’t just look at the headlines and believe it. Because this will have come out of a compromised administration.
Seeberger: Justin, to that end, I think a lot of us have also been tracking not just the jobs data but inflation data following the president’s tariff announcements. I am curious to get your take on, your read of what impact they’re having on the economy. But I’m also curious to get your perspective on some of the few limited trade deals. We were promised a summer of deals, but last time I checked, there haven’t been that many. Just a few “concepts of a plan” or a trade deal.
So I’m curious to get your perspective on some of the announcements that have been made thus far. Are they actually delivering on the promises that the president made at the time that he announced these tariffs?
Wolfers: So you just asked me seven questions, Colin. So I’m just going to choose the last one because it’s the juiciest, and then you can come back to the ones that you want me to also answer. The problem with being blonde is I can’t keep all these in my head.
So the following is 85 percent true: There are no trade deals. Now, it’s 85 percent true. I’ll explain the 15 percent.
The easiest example is Britain, the one with Britain—sorry, the United Kingdom—because that’s the one the most public. So President Trump and [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer have fronted the press, and they said, “We’ve come to an agreement,” and the agreement included access to United Kingdom agricultural markets for Americans. It included the British buying Boeing parts. It included a special tariff carve-out for British cars coming in. And on and on it goes.
Then you read the agreement. The bottom of page one says, “Both parties acknowledge this is not a legally binding agreement.” Then you look at what’s actually said, and it says, “Both parties will work toward creating greater access to the British agricultural market for Americans.”
If you’ve ever had a fight with your girlfriend, you know that “both parties will work towards” is not actually a commitment. So there’s no there-there for most of it. The way I describe it is, Trump walked in and said, “I’m imposing a 15 percent tariff,” put that on a big piece of paper in 148-point font, and then put a little asterisk in 6-point font. And the little asterisk is, “There’s a couple of carve-outs for us and a couple of carve-outs for them.”
So, for instance, Trump imposed a smaller tariff on steel and aluminum coming out of Britain, which is politically important over there. Although a week later, Keir Starmer announced he’d gotten a 0 percent tariff, and then a week later, the Brits were told, in fact, it’s 25 percent. There is a carve-out that Brits can send 100,000 cars into the United States with a lower tariff rate. I can’t remember if it’s zero or just lower. Funny thing is, which cars do the Brits export? It’s Aston Martins and Bentleys and Jaguars.
Seeberger: The cars of the working class, right?
Wolfers: It’s the Mar-a-Lago parking lot. How do you take an anti-rich tariff bill and tilt it even more? Kind of astonishing. So there were a few little bits and pieces, but the sort of bits and pieces are enough that maybe two junior staffers could have figured this out over Zoom.
So the right way to think about this is Keir Starmer and Donald Trump both needed political wins at home. Starmer needed to show that he could tame Trump, and Trump needed to show that he could make a deal because he’d promised 90 in 90 days. So they both said, “We’re going to have a fancy press conference, and then when it comes to the deal, they’ll just be a little bit, but basically we haven’t agreed on anything.” They colluded to each improve their own political standing with their own respective publics. That’s the British deal. So there’s not nothing. There is something. It’s not much.
The latest deal with the EU is also really important. So now moving from the United Kingdom to the European Union. Because when Trump went over there and met with them, he imposed a tariff. That’s what he does. And then he came home, and he said, “The Europeans gave me $600 billion to invest in anything I want.” Holy shit.
Seeberger: That’s a lot of money.
Wolfers: Holy moly, correction. $600 billion is a huge amount of money. That’s $5,000 per American. Imagine if our president could go overseas and bring each of us a $5,000 check. I mean per American household, sorry. That would be fantastic. I would buy my kids probably a Nintendo Switch 2, and I’d still have a lot of money left over.
Seeberger: Well those tariff prices are driving up the price of Nintendo consoles, I saw.
Wolfers: It has made my son virulently anti-tariff. But five grand’s a lot.
Wolfers: And Trump came home, and he boasted about it. And occasionally someone on TV would push him. He’d be like, “Yeah, they gave it to me.” And because there was no text, no one could say anything. They’d be like, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting.” $600 billion.
So then the text came out. And the text says, “European corporations will expect to invest another $600 billion in the United States over the years to 2028.” Now I’ve got to tell you, expecting and promising—I took out a car loan when I bought my Honda Odyssey. Very cool car, my Honda Odyssey. Fits my kids. You can fit a lot of things in a Honda Odyssey. My car loan had that much documentation.
Wolfers: And that was a $30,000 loan. You’d reckon $600 billion comes with more than “expect.”
So basically, the Europeans let Trump lie, understanding that’s how he was going to leave them alone, and they delivered nothing. By the way, the same thing happened with the Japanese, and I think there it was $550 billion. So these are all lies. Literal lies. Now, there are some things that are not lies but a way of fooling the old man.
So you say, for instance, we’ll buy a lot of American energy. The thing about energy is it’s a commodity. So if instead of the oil tankers leaving the U.S. for some other country, they go off to Europe, it’s the same number of tankers leaving. The only thing that’s changing is the destination they go to. Because the price of oil is determined in global markets, and the global demand for oil and the global supply of oil are unchanged. The only thing that’s changing is which tankers go where. So that’s not a lie, it’s just pointless.
Wolfers: If we’re talking about commodities, if we’re talking about apple pie made in Detroit, then it would make a difference.
Seeberger: Now, Justin, another topic that I really want to dive into with you is we’ve seen a recent announcement that the administration has taken a 10 percent stake in the chipmaker Intel.
We saw Kevin Hassett, the president’s chief economist, earlier this week said that the administration is exploring more of these types of arrangements. This sounds like socialism to me, Justin, which I remember Republicans sounding the alarm about for quite some time.
But I’m curious to get your sense on whether—is this actually a good use of the federal government’s power? Is this an economic approach that Democrats, if and when they retake power, should be looking to Republicans as a model they should be building from? I’m just generally curious for your thoughts on this.
Wolfers: I do have friends who are deeply invested in the idea of nationalizing the means of production. Those friends are very happy right now. And so now Intel is a partly state-owned enterprise. And how you feel about the role of state-owned enterprises in our economy reflects a lot on the lessons you’ve learned from history and your personal ideology. I’m not going to tell anyone what their ideology should be. But what I can tell you is the underlying economics of this.
So the treasury secretary has said that the federal government plans to be a passive shareholder. They said they’re not going to bully people into using Intel chips. They’re not going to tell Intel what to do. We’re just going to hold their stock. So if we believe the administration, then what this does is literally takes a set of stock certificates that are sitting in someone’s safe, it moves those stock certificates to the Federal Treasury’s safe.
It doesn’t change who runs Intel. Doesn’t change Intel’s strategy. Doesn’t change Intel’s customers. It doesn’t change what they make, who makes it, where they make it, anything. So it does nothing, if you believe the administration. Now, there’s a step further, which is, there is a deep question—and I think it’s quite literally a question, and I can’t believe I’m even saying this out loud—whether the administration paid for that 10 percent or literally just nationalized it. It’s literally unknown.
If you watch Howard Lutnick, Lutnick says that the Intel CEO came to him and said, “I’ve got $10 billion coming to me from the federal government. I don’t want it, and please take 10 percent of my firm.” I know some CEOs. That would be highly unusual behavior.
So Lutnick’s lying. So did we buy 10 percent, or did we take it? That matters a lot because do I want to start a company if I think the government might just take it from me in the future? This is always the downside of socializing the means of production. It might lead people to hold back, and the means of production might be a little smaller as a result.
It’s a crazy moment, but it’s a part of a federal government that is the most interventionist government of my lifetime—that intervenes in everything from choosing which sweetener Coca-Cola should use, to telling Harvard which economists it should hire, to telling Goldman Sachs that it should fire its chief economist, to telling Intel to fire its CEO and then three weeks later taking a holding in the company run by that CEO.
Seeberger: It’s wild stuff. Justin, one last question for you—I know you’ve got to head out shortly—but Democrats have really done some big economic policies over the course of the past five years. They dramatically expanded the child tax credit. They invested a lot of money in upgrading American infrastructure. They fueled a clean energy boom that created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
And yet, Democrats were swept out of power. Republicans have a trifecta in Washington. I’m curious to get your take on, what actually do you think is the big economic idea, big economic solution to grow the middle class, bring more Americans along in this project?
Is it changes to the tax code? Is it health care or child care or some other issue? I’m curious for your take, both as an economist and somebody who’s got a good finger on the pulse for where the public is at.
Wolfers: Yeah. I’m going to give you the most boring answer in the world. We could have wonderful, deep, late-night conversations with glasses of red wine while wearing our leather elbow patches about what a more perfect society ought to be. I’ve got a much simpler thing: Can we just end incompetence? Just end incompetence now.
We can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but the one thing I know for sure is incompetently instituting them—so they’re on again, off again, creating uncertainty, no one knows what the business environment is—is a bad idea. Firing a Fed governor on a whim without thinking about it or figuring out whether it’s legal. You might want to destroy the institution, but do it competently. If you care about national statistics, think about how to fix them rather than destroying institutions.
So I just say, “Let’s just get in, get the nerds back, and be boring.” I can’t wait—and this is me as a person—I can’t wait for government to be boring again. I want it to be so dull, people go home and kiss their children at night rather than being worried that their aunt might get taken abroad and put in some foreign gulag. So that’s my big idea: End incompetence now.
Seeberger: Well, you heard it here, folks. Justin Wolfers, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.” It was great to get your insights.
Wolfers: Appreciate it. Thanks, Colin.
Seeberger: All right folks, that’s going to do it for us. Please go back and check out previous episodes. But it is almost the end of summer. Labor Day is upon us. I know folks are doing some last-minute road trips, so you need some song recommendations. Here to talk about our songs of the summer is Muggs Leone, our digital producer. Muggs, thanks for joining us.
Muggs Leone: Hello. Of course, always happy to bring some niche music taste into the conversation.
Seeberger: All right, what do you got? What do you got?
Leone: Well so as we all know, I’m a theater person, so I’ll start with my theater rec. There’s a new musical just transferred to Broadway from London called “Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York.” It’s a very cute two-person show. It’s not a love story—or is it?
And I just think it has a nice fun—it’s a very contemporary theater sound, but it doesn’t sound too musical theater-y. So I think if you’re looking for a little intro, it’s something to check out.
Leone: Then for the nonmusical-theater folks out there, I do listen to some pop music. There’s a new artist called Fulton Lee who I just kind of discovered, I don’t remember how. He has these videos he does on Instagram where he sets up a table in a park or in a downtown area, and it says “If you sing, come sit with me.” And he’ll promote local artists because they’ll come and sing with him, and then he’ll actually release them in his albums.
So he has a few out. He’s been releasing music for the past three or four years or so. So still a relatively new artist. Go check him out and comment that you found it here on “The Tent.”
Seeberger: I will do so. I’m actually headed out of town for the weekend, so I’ll have to give some of these a whirl.
I would say for myself, I’m sorry to bring it back—yes, again, folks—to Taylor Swift, but we are celebrating our newly engaged pop princess—soon to be queen, I guess—Taylor Swift, who just got engaged. We saw the news right before we’re recording this week’s episode. Very excited for her and Travis. So I feel like “Love Story” is just—it’s an oldie, but it’s a goodie and hard to do it wrong.
Leone: Nothing wrong with a classic. And I’m sure Kelly McCoy, our lovely, lovely producer, will have all kinds of thoughts to drop into our Slack channels.
Seeberger: No doubt. I would say my other recommendation for song of the summer—you all know I am watching “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” I’m obsessed. I can’t get enough of it. I’m so excited for this week’s episode because it’s going to hopefully be Jeremiah’s downfall.
Seeberger: Yep. I know. Sorry, folks, but your boy’s Team Conrad. So, my hope and my vision is that at the end of this season, it’s going to end with Taylor Swift’s “Treacherous” being the big finale track. And I am counting down the days until that episode. And I have been playing it nonstop the last few weeks. So for me, “Treacherous,” “Love Story”—again, they can do no wrong.
And very excited for Ms. Taylor Allison Swift and Travis Kelce, the king and queen of entertainment in 2025. I saw they just set a Guinness World Record—
Seeberger: —for the number of simultaneous streams for a recent appearance on the “New Heights” podcast.
Seeberger: We’ll get there at some point. Folks, do hang with us. Share the pod. Make sure everybody knows about “The Tent.” But yeah, very excited for them and know that they’ll probably have some good bops at the wedding. So we’ll see.
Seeberger: We’ll see who they have playing the tunes. I’m sure they’re going to have a good live band.
Leone: Well I would expect nothing less.
Seeberger: Nothing less, yes. Well with that, that’s going to do it for us this week. I hope everyone has a wonderful Labor Day, enjoys the last few days of summer.
Best of luck to the kids who are headed to school. My daughter is starting at a new school next week. A million kudos to her incredible teachers that have been taking such great care of her over the course of the last few years, have helped grow her confidence, made her even smarter than she already is. Love you so much, little girl. And we’ll talk to you next week.
“The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Colin Seeberger. Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer. Mishka Espey is our booking producer. Hai Phan, Olivia Mowry and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.