This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human. Thank you. Thank you. The And good afternoon, everybody. It's Steve Schmidt with the warning. Happy to be joined again by David Packman of the David Packman Show. David, how are you?

You know, I'm hanging in there, Steve. The country has been better at other moments in time,

but I'm doing okay. You think? We have not reached the apogee of our greatness, you don't think.

I don't think this is the peak. I really don't.

Since the last time we have talked in a development that I'm not sure would have been surprising to either of us, America is at war.

There's a lot of different ways to enter into the conversation about it.

But as an old political campaign guy, let's start here, which is, I think it may be the most spectacular broken promise in American political history.

It bar none is in my lifetime that Donald Trump explicitly ran

that all of these foreign wars, particularly the Middle Eastern wars or dumb wars,

we have stupid leaders, and here we are.

What do you think about the magnitude of that broken promise?

My definition breaks other promises he made. I'll explain what I mean. When he promised that prices would go down

on day one and energy would be down and affordability would return like a Phoenix rising over the

horizon, all of this stuff. Many of us were skeptical and rightly so because those promises would be

even in perfect circumstances difficult to make good on.

Inflation is rarely negative in the United States unless things are really bad.

And so even if inflation stayed low, it's still a positive number.

Prices would still go up.

Fine.

But then we have two optional policy decisions that only make everything more expensive.

We have the tariffs, which Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair yesterday, said, are responsible for 50 to

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