Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, Tal Fortgang U.S.-China Tariff Agreement: Will It Stick? City Journal Podcast
https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/us-china-tariff-agreement-will-it-stick
Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, and Tal Fortgang discuss the deal between the U.S. and China to temporarily lower tariffs, Trump’s executive order on prescription drug prices, and Chicago-isms Pope Leo XIV should bring to the Vatican.
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today, Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel Di Martino, Argentinian policy expert, politics expert at the Manhattan Institute apparently, and Tal Fortgang, legal policy guy at the Manhattan Institute. Tal works for Ilya, so Tal, don’t mess this up. Otherwise, it’ll come back in your review.
Ilya Shapiro: But by works for me, that means he writes a bunch of stuff. I read a third of it and enjoy it. That’s our professional relationship.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good review. Tal, quote that. We have this on record. I want to take us into the big news of the day. Earlier this morning, I think, I was asleep, but China and United States announced a 90-day temporary reduction in the mutual tariffs. So they’re down on the US side from 145 percent to 30 percent. It’s a major de-escalation as we’re recording this, the markets are up like a thousand points, although God knows what will be happening by the time it comes out. So don’t get mad at me listeners if it’s changed. Daniel, where are we on this front? You’re the econ guy on the panel. Is this a good development? Is this a bad development? What do you think?
Daniel Di Martino: I think the Chinese negotiation team probably knows more about what the U.S. wants than we do. At this point, I don’t know what’s the goal of U.S. policy with the tariffs on China. If the goal was decoupling from China, then you should have wanted to keep the tariffs, not lift them. And if the goal was to get them to lower the tariffs, well, now we have a higher tariffs than we did before. So it seems like, at least by those two very different goals that are exclusionary from each other, we aren’t achieving anything.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, it’s sort of a messy situation. Ilya, know you’re not an econ guy, but I’m curious for your perception as an American consumer. Where do you think they’re going? Oh, OK. Well, in that case.
Ilya Shapiro: Hey, I took both Econ 101 and 102 in college, so I just want…
Daniel Di Martino: Ilya is from a socialist country and from Canada, so he has a lot of experience.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, coming from the Soviet Union to Canada now here, the damn socialism keeps following me around, so I don’t know where next to go. But what I want to know is when I can start looking at my 401k again.
Charles Fain Lehman: Today would be a good day for it, all things considered.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, I’ll log in. haven’t, you know, it’s been about a month and a half. like, I don’t, you know, I have a long time horizon. I’ll just wait for that dip to rebound up just like after COVID and I don’t know.
Charles Fain Lehman: So let me ask you a little bit about, do you have perception of the politics of this stuff? I mean, it seems like, you know, as Daniel’s alluded to, there’s been a great deal of back and forth. Do you think that this is likely to be a detente? You what’s your model of Trump and how people are going to respond to this?
Ilya Shapiro: Well, politically it’s about him appearing to get a better deal for America. I’ll defer to Daniel whether it is a better deal than what we had before with China or with anyone else. And to create jobs. So part of this is actually what’s on the ground. Part of it is vibes. And if he can keep pointing to these successes, then politically that’s good, but we’ll see. The devil in the details in terms of small businesses being affected, supply chains, whether stuff is indeed cheaper for people across the board, not just pencils and dolls and these sorts of sound bites, but do people feel that there’s less inflation? Do people feel like they’re getting quality items for a reasonable price while America’s manufacturing base, however that’s reconstituted in the 2020s and 2030s, you know, whether indeed that springs back.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you know, one of the big questions here, Daniel, I think is about sort of tariff uncertainty, that even the bigger damage than imposing attacks is the rapid fluctuations in what tariff policy is. I mean, do you have a sense of, you know, what argument here is that even though the tariffs have been ratcheted back, the possibility of their reinstatement in the next 90 days is going to make everyone very wary? What do you make of that?
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, and you know, I was actually just thinking about that while you were talking because there might be a lot of uncertainty over the next four years of the Trump administration, but perhaps the market doesn’t think the future post-Trump is uncertain. And the future post-Trump, meaning in the long run, right, is the most important future and expectation for any investment, right? Because most investments are looking beyond the four-year timeframe.
So perhaps they think, you know, regardless of what happens with all this craziness now, we better invest, do our things now, maybe buy the dip and, you know, maybe the tax cuts will be extended, which is what’s permanent. And, you know, Trump won’t be president after this term. Republicans will probably lose if they screw up with the tariffs. So then the tariffs will come down. It will be stable or at least not as uncertain. And perhaps then we can, we actually can make investment decisions. I’m just thinking about that now. And I hope that’s the case because that would be best for the U.S. economy. I do worry that the uncertainty that we have introduced now is only harming us.
Tal Fortgang: Daniel, maybe, sorry.
Ilya Shapiro: And on the legal front, this is an opportunity for you to jump in, Tal. I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but there have been lawsuits filed both on whether the administration is properly using the International Economic Emergency Act and whether that act in itself is an unconstitutional delegation of authority to the president over tariffs.
Daniel Di Martino: Mmm.
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, I haven’t been following that particular legal question that closely, but it does raise the sort of broader context in which this whole tariff discussion occurs, which is the ongoing Cold War with China. And so my question for Daniel was going to be like, really, the long-term consideration that we ought to be thinking about is this decoupling, this vaunted decoupling. What other tools are at our disposal? Is this just like, perhaps it’s a clumsy use of the tools that are at our disposal.
Ilya Shapiro: Wait, decoupling? Are we bringing in Gwyneth Paltrow? Wasn’t she all about the conscious uncoupling, decoupling, something like that?
Daniel Di Martino: I don’t know about this.
Charles Fain Lehman: Daniel yeah, well sorry, go ahead, Tal
Daniel Di Martino: He was asking about decoupling. No, he was asking about decoupling, whether the tariffs are a good tool. mean, the tariffs are a good tool in that that’s a way to do decoupling. What some people understand decoupling simply means should the U.S. just not trade with China, right? Try to make us less dependent on them because potentially, you know, there could be a war with China. Well, there won’t be a war with, say, Guatemala, right? And even if there was, it could be easily quashed, right? So…
I think, you if you ask my policy preference, my policy preference is indeed decoupling from China. But to do that and not harm the economy in a massive way, because that would be the cost of decoupling financially, we would need to have total free trade with the rest of the world. And I am totally comfortable with free trade with the rest of the world, meaning zero tariffs, not 10 percent, not 5 percent, but zero.
And that would be the only way really to compensate for the cost of cutting off trade with China. And it would harm China massively because, of course, would harm us partially in terms to China, but a lot of businesses move out of China to India, to Vietnam, to Thailand, to Mexico. And that’s a good thing, right? Because those countries are not going to go to war with the United States.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, mean, that gets back to the frenetic character of this. It’s like, if the thesis here, which was the thesis, so after they rolled back the initial wave of tariffs, the thesis became, well, China’s the real problem and we are going to deal with China specifically and we’re going to push towards this sort of balanced China. And now it kind of seems like they blinked on that too, or at least they blinked short term. Maybe we end up in…
Ilya Shapiro: Is it a blink or is it a getting what we wanted all along?
Charles Fain Lehman: What did we want all along?
Daniel Di Martino: But what is what we want?
Ilya Shapiro: I don’t know. That’s why I’m earnestly asking the question. So there is an argument…
Daniel Di Martino: Who knows? Maybe behind the scenes there’s a deal.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, also there’s the U.S.-U.K. deal, which apparently puts tariff levels back to what they were originally. Is that higher than it was before?
Daniel Di Martino: Not really, 10 percent. Yes, before we had almost no tariffs on the UK. So we have 30 percent tariffs against China now, 20 percent against the EU.
Ilya Shapiro: Huh. Huh. What about Rolls Royces and Bentleys? Because apparently for a while there was higher tariffs on like, you know, lower cost cars and lower tariffs on luxury cars. Is that still the case?
Tal Fortgang: Well, Ilya, your 401k may be recovering. It’s not recovering that well.
Daniel Di Martino: I don’t know. I think Ilya wants to buy a Rolls Royce and so he was like thinking about what’s the best timing.
Ilya Shapiro: My wife did authorize me to buy a sports car by my 50th birthday which is coming up in two years so I’ll be in the market soon.
Charles Fain Lehman: You’ve got to wait until the tariffs… Actually, that’s a good opportunity to take us out. Because really what I wanted to ask is, know, in, I don’t know, gosh, 91 days, are the tariff rates going to be higher or lower than 30 percent? This is very important because Ilya may be trying to buy one of those new Chinese electric cars at BYD, but a sporty one. So everyone needs a very practical projection for Ilya’s sake.
I mean, but this gets also to this sort of question of like tariff uncertainty. What the heck is happening? Tal, what is your, what’s your best guess? 91 days from now, the deal’s lapsed. Are they going back up? Are they settling down at the current level? Are they going lower?
Tal Fortgang: What the hell do I know, Charles?I mean, what the hell do any of us know about this administration?
Ilya Shapiro: Wait, I want to know if there’s a market for tariff futures, like that you can put puts and calls and all of those kinds of options that might be the, you know, making exotic financial instruments great again.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes. That’s that dirt.
Tal Fortgang: There is, Ilya, there is, but it’s already perfectly efficient. There’s already been enough information and put, you can’t beat it. Look, I’m sure there’ll be some intervening events where the, that will cause the Trump administration to lurch one way and then another. So, I mean, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we keep watching the markets rise. We try to keep conditions as stable as possible until the next thing comes in and throws a wrench into the whole thing.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay.
Ilya Shapiro: But isn’t it the case that, as Daniel was saying earlier, kind of not just the uncertainty, but the lack of apparent overall strategy that is counterproductive to whatever the ultimate strategy is, if there is one. Because it seems like we get conflicting information about what the goals of all of these policies are, and then it’s hard to evaluate whether they’re effective. Markets can’t efficiently price that in short or long term.
Charles Fain Lehman: I will, yeah, go ahead. And wait, Daniel, I want to know your projections, but go ahead.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, I was checking on the market as Ilya and Tal were talking about it. So, PolyMarket, which is illegal to bet from the U.S., but is very widely used worldwide, does have a market on whether Trump would lower tariffs, but it already settled because he just did based on his last deal. And there’s another one on Kalshi, which all of us can bet from the United States. And it says, will Trump end his tariffs against China? So the ones he imposed originally at the beginning of his term, will he end them? There is an over 60 percent chance he will do it before the end of the year, according to matters. But that still means about a third chance left that it continues, according to what people predict.
I think the chances of them going to pre-Trump levels are overestimated in this model. So based on that pricing, I would bet against the Kalshi odds. I think the tariffs will be probably higher after 90 days. I think they will say that the deal didn’t work out, the pause, we’re going to go back up, and then the negotiations will continue. That’s kind of how Trump is. But maybe I’m wrong. Who knows?
Charles Fain Lehman: See, I think…
Ilya Shapiro: I have an update for my portfolio. Just today I’m up 2.3 percent.
Daniel Di Martino: Good, I thought you were going to say the amount and I’m like don’t do that on the podcast.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, look at it over the long term.
Ilya Shapiro: No, no.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s enough to buy the German sports car now.
Tal Fortgang: Bentleys for all of us on Ilya.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I guess my suspicion is that they really are more scared of the bond markets than they want to admit. And so this is part of a broader strategy of slowly rolling back. So Scott Bessent is in control and we’re all with him in spirit. Go, Scott, go.
I want to turn this over even more Trump related news, even more econ related news, sorry lawyers. But there’s sort of an interesting angle here. The president, Donald Trump, in a late-night truth on Truth Social, promised to sign an executive order to cut prescription drug prices to be in line with those paid by other nations. This stuck out to me as a story because drug pricing mandates are something that appeared during the Biden administration.
On the other hand, they’re very interesting because they are extraordinarily popular with most voters. Putting caps on drug prices is one of those things where like, you know, the right is on the wrong side of the electorate. So, you know, I wonder how people think about the politics of this independent of the economic wisdom. First time was asked Daniel’s opinion, what do you make of the economic wisdom of this?
Daniel Di Martino: Well, this is curious because it does deal with a problem that is real, which is that other countries are indeed ripping off American drug companies and American consumers are subsidizing the rest of the world by paying higher drug prices that then go for cheap in the rest of the world. Now, that means there is no innovation abroad, but they don’t care because all the innovation comes from America.
The problem is that if America also rips off the drug companies, then there will be no innovation anywhere in the world because we are where that innovation comes from. And so that is the whole advantage of having patents and monopoly pricing is to encourage innovation. And so I’m not sure what the executive order will say. I don’t know sure how we will be implemented to tell you what the effect will be. I will say though, you mentioned that it’s popular, because price controls on drugs are popular, but price controls on anything is popular, Charles. If we were to poll the American people, should we make bread cheaper? Should the President of the United States unilaterally lower egg prices? The people will say yes, even though it’s a terrible policy.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Tal, I want to pull you in here.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, I hear we’re going to be importing drugs from Canada, though. And that’s the secret strategy for linking the economy and eventually taking it over.
Daniel Di Martino: But I thought imports were bad and they take our jobs, Ilya. So we’re going to destroy our hard-working manufacturing industry of pharmaceuticals?
Ilya Shapiro: But if Canada becomes part of the U.S., then that eliminates any trade deficit.
Charles Fain Lehman: And then we get their socialized insulin. It’ll be perfect.
Daniel Di Martino: No, it’s funny. It’s funny how this logic makes no sense because they say imports are bad, but then if we import cheap drugs, that’s good, even though it supposedly would destroy jobs of the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals in America. I mean, these people don’t know what they’re saying.
Charles Fain Lehman: Tell us how you really feel. Tal, I’m going to make you stand off on this topic. I mean, you know, this is part of the president’s strategy. Think about this like, you know, his commitment to not cutting Medicare and Social Security. He’s willing to sort of like turn left on economic issues in order to consolidate his base and sort of facilitate his broadly popular right-wing cultural issues.
Do you see this as part of that strategy? Do you think that’s a good thing? As a conservative, how do you think about these developments?
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, I definitely do see it as part of a broader strategy, largely catering, I think, to his geriatric base. It’s of a piece with him talking about it. We’re not going to touch your social security. We’re not going to touch your Medicare. We’re not going to touch your Medicaid. And many tens of billions of dollars of Medicaid go to elderly Americans. And these are some of the biggest Trump, you know, small dollar amount donors. This is a huge part of the the new Republican coalition.
As a conservative, it’s a very disconcerting thing to see price controls because you know about the inefficiencies that they create, and Daniel alluded to some of those. I do wonder how free the drug price market was before, right? To the extent that prices are supposed to be a signal and we want to leave that signal intact as a form of accumulated systemic knowledge. I don’t know to what extent the prices that we have without this intervention are that organic signal. So I’m not ready to raise five alarms and say this is like the worst kind of price control necessarily, but I’m still very, very skeptical.
Charles Fain Lehman: I have question.
Daniel Di Martino: That’s a good point, And I’ll say I want to give a shout out to the research of one of our colleagues, Chris Pope, because part of the reason, and he is the actual health economist expert on this, I’ll say, not me, that’s not my specific area of economics, but I’ll say one of the motivating factors for Trump’s order is that it’s not that they’re really ripping off the consumer in America, they’re ripping off the government that pays for most of the drug spending in America and that is through Medicare and Medicaid prescription drugs. And the reality is that a significant part of our budget deficit is explained by drug prices.
And our colleague Chris Pope says that there’s really a quick fix you can do to slow the growth of entitlements without cutting them. And that is that you should stop Medicare and Medicaid from covering new drugs from now on. Right now, Medicare and Medicaid cover the latest treatment, no matter what it is, at whatever price. And if you simply say, we’re going to cover all the drugs that exist until now, 2025, but not the new ones. We’re not going to cover the GLP-1 weight loss drug prescription like the Biden administration wanted, because you want to feel better, you should pay it on your own dime. And so that is a big thing that we could do to reduce demand for drugs that increase the price.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to ask one more angle on this, and I want to go to Ilya, which is that this is sort part of a broader trend in the administration of policymaking through the executive. And he’s been pretty aggressive about it in a way that has, until recently, typical of democratic presidents, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. I think even Congress was involved in attempting to facilitate Medicare price negotiations under the last administration. So I mean, do you see this as part of that broader trend and what do you make of the broader trend of most of the policymaking being done through the executive in this administration? What do you think is going on there? And that’s partly a legal question, just being a political question.
Ilya Shapiro: I don’t think it’s just democratic presidents or democrats plus Trump. I mean, it’s just a ratcheting up that as Congress is increasingly unable to pass much of anything, both due to narrow margins in the House and the filibuster in the Senate, that’s what we’ve had with what got characterized under Obama as pen and phone governance. Now we have pen and phone and tweet or truth or what have you. But I was reading that in the first hundred days of this administration, Congress passed seven bills, which is the lowest ever. So maybe we are spiraling further in that direction. And it’s not just a matter of this president, you know, wanting to act like a dictator and rule by executive order. That’s just the way things are and the courts are left to sort out with, you know, whether pushing the envelope is breaking through the envelope. I don’t think it’s a good thing as far as democratic accountability goes. I also don’t think it’s a durable thing, right? Because if you live by the executive order, you die by the executive order. And so we have these rapid swings, which is not good for long-term planning of the personal or business variety.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think that’s a common theme with the prior issue. I want to…
Daniel Di Martino: That should be the quote of this episode. If you live by the executive order, you die by the executive order.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good title. I want to, okay, I was going to ask you what…
Ilya Shapiro: The other thing I should have mentioned when Tal was starting to talk about Trump’s geriatric base. I mean, is it a geriatric base? And we have the vibe that the kids are now becoming more based or what have you. And the funny thing I read, so this isn’t my idea, but I thought it was clever that with the kind of industrial policy or kind of populist economics, what have you, what we have is a convergence on economics just with different pronouns, based on whether you’re on the left or the right.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, two economically far left parties with different pronouns.
Ilya Shapiro: Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to, you know, was going to ask people about medical innovation. I’m not sure we have strong opinion on that. So I want to ask and set actually about popularity. The president’s popularity has sort of been in a steady decline since Liberation Day, sort of before that, I think it took a note of decline around Liberation Day, because everyone just felt everyone got too tired of winning, I think. So I want to ask people, do we think that this…
Ilya Shapiro: I mean, he was doing really well, right? He had like, you know, positive things and then…
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, some of it was the honeymoon and we expected that to come down, but things, he’s the least popular president…
Ilya Shapiro: There is no honeymoon anymore. He was just doing things that were popular.
Charles Fain Lehman: The only president who is less popular at this point in his term is the first Trump presidency. So he’s doing better than himself last time, and other than that, not too great in the modern presidential era. So I’m going to ask, is this going to benefit, we talking about the popularity of this proposal, is this going to benefit Trump’s popularity at all? Is this a play to pull him out of the popularity tailspin? Daniel, what’s your take?
Daniel Di Martino: I think this will be popular and this will actually reduce drug prices in the short run. It will just come at an immense cost in the long run. But remember, politicians do not care about the long run. They care about the next two or four years. So this is going to be politically beneficial even if it’s going to be economically harmful.
Charles Fain Lehman: Tal, what’s your take? You agree or you disagree?
Tal Fortgang: I hardly have my finger on the pulse of the American people.
Charles Fain Lehman: Really?
Tal Fortgang: I’ve never tried to be a populist, but Daniel’s analysis seems to be correct to me. I mean, there’s a lot of just resentment for big pharma and all it stands for, and anything that could be seen as sticking it to them is going to be popular, not just among the people who stand to benefit, so to speak, but from younger people who feel like perhaps they’ve been sold a bill of goods about the nature of the economy, and Big Pharma always gets roped into those kinds of, you know, corkboard conspiracy theories about, you know, who’s rigging the game. So I expect a bit of a boost in popularity, again, to be displaced by the next story, whatever it is.
Ilya Shapiro: I really have nothing to add to that. I think that’s right. Lower prices on something like prescription drugs is a very popular thing. And of course, we’re not going to see the innovation that’s not produced five years from now because of it.
Tal Fortgang: Maybe you live by American medical innovation and you die by Canadian medical imports, because I’m pretty sure those are the drugs that they’re using most up there are not exactly life-saving.
Ilya Shapiro: I think that slogan is going to have to be workshopped. Doesn’t exactly drip off the tongue.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ooh, yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, I’m forced to agree with the consensus. I try really hard not to, but I mean, I think it will be a bump. I think it’ll be relatively small bump. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pick it up in the polling. that depends on what the policy actually looks like. That’s the big question. But not thrilled about the suppression of innovation.
Before we go, I want to turn to some lighter-hearted news. Good news out of the Vatican last week. Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected 268th Pope? 267th by the Pope of Conclave, relatively fast conclave. He’s the first American, well, so my Latin American friends have been scolding me for this. They’re like, he’s the first U.S. American Pope. He’s not the first American Pope. The whole of Americas.
Ilya Shapiro: And the first American, USA, USA.
Daniel Di Martino: But also he’s the first Peruvian Pope too, we should say, because he is a Peruvian citizen. He naturalized Peruvian. He lived there for like 40 years. I think more years in Peru than in the United States, actually.
Charles Fain Lehman: He’s also the first-
Well, but there was just a clip coming out that’s saying when they were both lowered down in hierarchy of the church, he did not get along well with Pope Francis. There was some…
Daniel Di Martino: That’s true.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, well, so it’s a very interesting election. think there’s a lot we don’t know about how the new pope is going to position himself. But I am very happy, as Ilya said, to have an American and a Vatican because everywhere is better if it’s run by an American. So I’m going to ask everybody, the pope is from Chicago. Before we go out, I’m going to ask everybody, is the one Chicago affectation, tradition, or character that you would like to the Pope bring to the Vatican? Ilya, will start with you.
Ilya Shapiro: To be clear, a White Sox fan, not a Cubs fan.
Lots of flavors on the food that’s served there. I like the Chicago hot dogs with all those toppings.
Charles Fain Lehman: Garden style, yeah, so you put everything on it. I once had a friend send me like a garden, make your own garden style hot dogs pack, worked very well, unfortunately. Tal, what’s the Chicagoism we would like to see brought to the Vatican?
Tal Fortgang: Man, I haven’t trafficked in Midwestern stereotypes in at least a couple of weeks, so I’m little rusty here. I was, I did want, just to go back to the White Sox thing for a second, given that the new pope is an American League devotee, I did want to ask his position on the designated hitter. I take it that this is a moot point now that the NL has adopted the DH as well, which hurts me deeply. I guess I’d want to know…
Ilya Shapiro: As long as he and Trump can get together and get rid of that ghost runner in extra innings, that’ll be enough.
Tal Fortgang: That’s true. I have no doubt that God himself wants us to do that. Both to banish ghosts generally and to stop abominations from taking over our institutions. But just as far as Chicago affectations go, I love a good Chicago accent, know, car, foyer, et cetera. I’d like to know how that translates to Latin. Well, that, you know what? Can’t say it any better than that.
Ilya Shapiro: Da Pope
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, Daniel, and I feel bad because I was like, I want to talk about the Pope, but it’s going to be three Jews and Daniel, the actual observant Catholic. So I was like, we’re going to be respectful of the Pope. like the Pope. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please.
Daniel Di Martino: Yes, but let me tell you about my Chicagoism. Let me tell you about my Chicagoism first.
He needs to bring deep dish pizza to the Vatican to be scolded by all the Italians. I think it would be epic to bring all like the terrible American pizza, I should say, relative to Italian.
Ilya Shapiro: Speaking of which, apparently Giordano’s is opening up a restaurant in D.C. So we’re going to have some deep dish.
Daniel Di Martino: Cool. I’ve had deep dish. Remember, I actually lived in the Midwest. I went to school in Indiana. I visited Chicago many times. I love the Midwest. I hope he brings in some of the Midwest politeness where when you bump into someone, you say, “oop.” That’s the Midwestern response. I’m not sure if in the big city of the Midwest, Chicago, they are like that.
Ilya Shapiro: In Canada, we say “sorry.”
Daniel Di Martino: But so that’s what I would say for that. And then I would say also just for the Catholic part, look, I think there’s many good signs of who the Pope is going to be. He just gave his speech explaining why he chose the name Leo XIV. And of course it was because of Leo XIII, who was the Pope who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which is the most important Catholic papal encyclical that explains the Catholic social doctrine of essentially what the role of government should be in society. And it’s really good. It’s greatly denounced as socialism. He also wrote Quod Apostolici Muneris, which is the papal encyclical that before any country had attempted socialism, denounced it as essentially a genocidal ideology that was going to happen, everything that actually did occur. And so, and then he mentioned that the new industrial revolution that he’s trying to respond to is that of technology and AI and all these things. And I think it’s very important for the church that guides us to speak about, for example, all the phenomenons that are happening with technology that are really new, you know, and we do need spiritual guidance about it. We were talking, I remember the other day in our Manhattan Institute meeting, how we’d like the AI bots, like some people are like falling in love with AI bots. Like these are deep spiritual issues that show lack of meaning, connection that the church needs to speak about.
Ilya Shapiro: There was a movie with what, Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson 15 years ago about this?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, Her, yes.
Daniel Di Martino: You know, the use of reproductive technology to pick the eye color of your children. how all these technologies are going to advance and really deform what the proper role of society, of government, of technology, of everything in our lives is something that the Pope needs to speak about.
Ilya Shapiro: Daniel, since you mentioned the Pope picking his name and the significance of Leo, can the Pope, like, what are the rules for, I’m sure our listeners are really going to be interested in what, because it comes, every time there’s a new Pope, I’m like, he just gets to pick his name? Is there like a certain cert-, is it a certified list?
Charles Fain Lehman: Regnal name.
Daniel Di Martino: He actually does get to pick his name. He could have, no, he could have picked any name really. Ideally it’s that of a biblical name, someone in the Bible or things like that. Francis was the first Francis, Pope Francis. And so, and I also say it’s really cool how the Pope is himself, somebody who lived in Latin America in addition to being an American, you know, born and raised, all of that. He has a really interesting background. The media is picking on his brothers and stuff like that and his statements on immigration. But I’m actually hopeful.
Ilya Shapiro: His Twitter feed.
Charles Fain Lehman: I will just say I would be happy to have either the Pope or the Pope’s brother on the City General Podcast. As for the Chicago thing I would like him to bring to the Vatican. Ideally, he would bring Mayor Brandon Johnson to the Vatican so the Chicagoans would not have to deal with him anymore. I think that would be a great service. Pope Leo, if you’re listening, please help out your home city. I assume, of course, because he’s an American, he’s a listener to the City Journal Podcast. Speaking of… That would be great.
Daniel Di Martino: I hope he comes. I hope he comes to America.
Charles Fain Lehman: Speaking of listeners to the City Journal Podcast listeners, that’s about all the time we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode or even if you haven’t, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, comment, ring the bell, whatever else you’re supposed to do on YouTube and all other platforms. Leave us comments and questions down below. We might eventually even answer some of them if you leave us them. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. I hope you’ll join us again soon.
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