This Trump Lackey Knows He Isn't Telling the Truth

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joanna Coles sits down with MSNBC’s own Stephanie Ruhle—seasoned financial journalist and host of The 11th Hour—for a sharply insightful breakdown of the economic theater inside Trumpworld. Ruhle dissects the tensions between truth and loyalty for financiers like Scott Bessent, who finds himself defending Trump-era trade policies he once publicly opposed, and contrasts him with Trump loyalists like Howard Lutnick, ever willing to sell the show. With a signature mix of Wall Street fluency and media savvy, Ruhle unpacks the deeper motivations behind Elon Musk’s quiet exit from Washington, the strategic silence of major investors, and how grift has gone from subtle to spectacular in the Trump era. Follow @SRuhle for her razor-sharp takes on money, power, and the political theater that binds them.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, sorry, I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast.
0:07.3	I was just inspired by Elon Musk there to try something with our plastic cutlery from the Daily Beast
0:13.2	Canteen.
0:14.3	You are watching the Daily Beast podcast and today our guest is none other than the fabulous,
0:20.4	highly energetic and brilliant Stephanie
0:23.3	Rule. She worked in banking. She worked for Bloomberg. Now she's the anchor at MSNBC's The 11th Hour.
0:30.7	And I love talking to her because she's full of insights. And she, like Michael Wolf, talks to people
0:36.7	all the time, both in the White House
0:38.6	and in Wall Street. So she's full of up-to-date information about what people really think
0:44.5	about the president. So let's get into it. Stephanie, you've got a great background. You worked
0:51.9	in finance. My first question for you, really, amid the chaos and
0:55.7	the madness, is does Donald Trump actually know anything about economics? He knows about business.
1:02.9	Yeah, he definitely knows about business, but he does not know about economics. And listen,
1:08.2	talk to any credible economist out there, even any credible investor.
1:13.6	One of the biggest frustrations about Donald Trump and the way he's handling trade and
1:18.7	the way the White House is, it's not based in truth.
1:23.6	So it's like when you watch Scott Besant on television and when people say, I thought Scott
1:28.3	Besant was really smarter, why is he so nervous on television? He's super smart and he really
1:33.8	understands economics. But one of the reasons he struggles on television is because he's not
1:38.5	telling the truth, right? You and I both know being on television is really hard and we're
1:43.4	actually reporting the truth.
1:46.1	We're speaking facts.
	...

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