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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump's Tariffs Upended A Booming Economy; The Best Of Times And The Worst Of Times In The 1920s; The Ill-Advised 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariffs Hurt America. Interview With Bestselling Author Michael Lewis. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired April 20, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: This is GPS, the "Global Public Square". Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you from New York.

Today on the program, Trump takes on America's top colleges, freezing or pulling billions of dollars of funding from institutions like Harvard, Columbia and Cornell, unless they submit to his demands. I'll talk to the former President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger. Then, Elon Musk's DOGE has already removed some 280,000 federal employees from their jobs. The billionaire complains such workers tend to be liberal bureaucrats who work against the President's agenda. But, the author, Michael Lewis, found something very different when he reported on the government's workforce. He'll explain.

But first, here is my take. When Donald Trump was inaugurated, by most measures, the United States was the strongest major economy in the world. Growth was robust. Unemployment was at historic lows. Inflation had fallen to a manageable level, and productivity, the elixir of economics, had picked up. Trump took this booming economy and upended it with massive tariff hikes. Has anything like this ever been done before? Well, nothing quite as self-defeating, but the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were also imposed after a decade of heady growth. That story is worth recalling because there are startling set of parallels to today's situation.

We remember the 1920s as the roaring 20s, and in economic terms, it is apt. The annual growth rate for the decade was over four percent. Unemployment stayed low for most of it. Revolutionary innovations defined the period, allowing the mass production of cars, airplanes, telephones, radio and movies, television was birth then, as were band aids, which many saw as the greatest thing since sliced bread, which was also invented then. Henry Ford perfected the mass production techniques that would define modern manufacturing for decades. Just as the 1990s and 2000s were celebrated for creating a new economy, that was the feeling about the 1920s.

But, there was another story about the 20s, about the hollowing out of a core American industry, of jobs being shipped abroad, and the loss of the soul of the country. You see, agriculture had been at the heart of the American economy, comprising most of the workforce until the late 19th century. Even by 1900, 40 percent of the American workforce labored in the agricultural sector. The country was defined by its yeoman farmers. Every one of the first American presidents, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, had owned and run farms, but the rise of manufacturing had resulted in the erosion of that landscape. By the 1920s, more than half of the country had moved into cities, and only 25 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. The American way of life was in peril.

America's first great populist movement was birthed in the late 19th century in response to the decline of agriculture. It briefly captured the Democratic Party, with the fiery populist orator William Jennings Bryan becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party three times. By the 1920s, the movement had weakened and moved into parts of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It gained ground as farming got hit hard during that decade. You see, after the boom years of World War I, when America had fed a Europe at war, there was a sharp drop in demand once Europe's farms returned to production.

The Republican establishment was opposed to subsidies to benefit agriculture. Calvin Coolidge vetoed measures helping farmers when he was President in the 1920s. But, by 1930, in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and economic slowdown, congressional Republicans from farm states were adamant. Farmers needed support. They allied with legislators who wanted to protect American industry and produced what they might have described as one big, beautiful bill that raised tariffs substantially on a variety of products, industrial and agricultural.

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Over 1,000 economists wrote an open letter to President Herbert Hoover, urging him not to sign the bill because it would raise prices, lower standards of living, and hurt American exports. But, in those days, Congress was the leading branch of government on trade and mostly everything, and Hoover reluctantly signed the bill into law, hat tipped to Douglas Irwin for a super book on all of this.

The global reaction then was similar to now. Countries were outraged, many retaliated, and those with the closest economic ties to the U.S. responded the most forcefully. The tariffs upended relations with America's neighbor, Canada. The outbreak of protectionism infuriated Canadians who retaliated strongly with tariffs of their own. Canadian nationalism surged, and in the elections of that year, an eerie parallel to this year, the party that was seen as most authentically anti-American, won.

Scholars disagree on the effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Few now argue, as they once did, that these tariffs caused the Great Depression, but many believe they exacerbated it. What no one disputes is that they failed to preserve American farm jobs. Today, agriculture employs around one percent of the American workforce.

In the 20th century, we looked back fondly on farming as special. It was important to grow things. And so, we taxed the entire country to protect farmers. In the 21st century, we have similar views about manufacturing. It's important to make things. So, we are taxing the entire country, more than 80 percent of which works in services, to subsidize the eight percent of the workforce that works in manufacturing. It is fundamentally a politics of nostalgia, looking fearfully at the past, not confidently at the future.

Go to cnn.com/Fareed for a link to my Washington Post column this week, and let's get started.

The showdown between President Trump and some of America's top universities has reached new heights. This week, Trump threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status after Harvard refused to comply with sweeping demands from the government surrounding its admissions, hiring and many other policies. The Trump administration also threatened to block Harvard's ability to enrol international students unless it made data on these students available to the government, and it froze over $2 billion of Harvard's government funding. It is all part of a severe crackdown on universities, the earliest of which came against Columbia.

Joining me now to talk about the Trump administration's attacks on higher education is Lee Bollinger. He served as President of Columbia University for more than two decades, starting in 2002.

Lee, welcome. What do you think the aim of these sweeping demands are? Because it's premised on the idea that they want to rid Harvard of antisemitism, but the demands are so wide-reaching. It involves hiring of faculty, diversity viewpoints within departments, admissions policies. What do you think is going on?

LEE BOLLINGER, FORMER PRESIDENT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, & FIRST AMENDMENT SCHOLAR: So, I think that's right. I think the remedies that they're seeking, the intrusions that they're taking, are clearly designed to intimidate universities to, in some ways, really take control of the basic functions of universities. And it's not really about antisemitism. I mean, we all care about antisemitism. Every university does. We care as much as the government. But, these encroachments into academic freedom, they're really unprecedented. Haven't seen anything like this in my lifetime. I mean, I think the closest parallel is the McCarthy period of the 1950s but that was one Senator going after individuals. This is the executive branch of the government going after institutions, and it seems like a campaign of intimidation.

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ZAKARIA: And the government does have extraordinary powers, right? I mean, the things they're doing, again, I've never heard of them in American history, threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status, threatening to not allow them to enrol foreign students, even threatening to do something about the accreditation which would make it difficult for Harvard students to get Pell grants and loans and all that kind of thing. The -- this is a kind of weaponization of the government's power. Can a university fight it?

BOLLINGER: So, I think the universities have no choice but to fight it. Censorship is really what has been the core of First Amendment development over the last century. What has not really been tested is the massive power of the government, not just to directly censor and punish people and put them in jail for ideas they express, but the use of the funding, the contracting, the other -- the administrative state to really, really accomplish the same goals as direct censorship. And so, this poses a very serious problem for universities, for the society, also for the courts to figure out what are the limits of the government's use of these kinds of powers that really could be just as serious, if not more serious, than direct censorship.

ZAKARIA: You are a very distinguished First Amendment scholar. When you look at this situation, do you think Harvard, who was almost certainly going to sue the federal government, I assume, do you think it will prevail in court? Do you think the universities have a strong case?

BOLLINGER: I do think they have a very strong case. I mean, there are two fundamental problems here under a First Amendment analysis, one is, to what extent should the First Amendment sort of supervise or control government efforts through their funding, contracting and other powers to stop the government from limiting speech in that form? Again, First Amendment has many, many cases that say the government cannot directly censor speech. What about the efforts of the government to censor speech by employing its powers of dispensing funding? I have no doubt that, as applied to these actions of the government, that universities and Harvard would win.

The second issue is the extent to which universities should be entitled to a special status under the First Amendment, and there are some great opinions and some decisions that really do recognize the special role that universities play in advancing knowledge, the search for truth, and therefore are entitled to special protections.

Those two doctrines, those two areas of the First Amendment, are really what's at stake here. I'm fairly confident that at the end of the day, Harvard and other universities would prevail on these claims.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, when Lee Bollinger was President of Columbia, he had a tussle with Donald Trump. It ended with Trump calling Bollinger "terrible and a dummy". Is that why the Trump administration began its assault with Columbia University? That story when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: We are back with Lee Bollinger, the former President of Columbia University.

Let me ask you about your history with Donald Trump, Lee, and whether you think this had something to do with it. So, the story goes that Trump wanted to sell this block of land he owned in Manhattan to Columbia for $400 million. You were President at the time. He showed it to you. You decided against it because it was 40 blocks away from where Columbia was, and you wanted a more contiguous expansion. He castigated you, called you all sorts of names, and then the federal government is withholding $400 million, exactly that same number. Do you think that this is all some kind of payback?

BOLLINGER: So, I find it hard to believe. It -- this doesn't seem to me to be normal behavior, to think in those ways. I just have hard time believing that that is the basis of what is happening now to Columbia, after more than -- or nearly two decades.

ZAKARIA: Talk about the thing that seems to me to be in peril here, which is that the universities in the United States and the federal government have had this very synergistic relationship ever since the late 40s, where the government provides a lot of funding for research. The universities do it and they compete for those government grants, and that system has seemed to produce the greatest scientific and technological breakthroughs any country has had. What happens in a circumstance where the government pulls back this funding or makes it conditional, as you say, on various kind of administrative issues, admissions issues that it wants?

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BOLLINGER: So, from my perspective, and I bet, from years, Fareed, I mean, two of the greatest achievements in America in the last 100 years have been, one, the First Amendment, and two, universities. The First Amendment, the first cases of the Supreme Court were not until 1919 even though the First Amendment was part of the Bill of Rights from 1789. Since 1919, the Supreme Court has had hundreds of cases. There have been 1000s thousands cases from the courts, establishing an incredible jurisprudence of free speech in America, has become part of the identity of what America is all about.

The second major achievement of America has been our universities. So, there were small colleges that really were limited to certain fields of inquiry, and over the last 100 years, we have built them into powerhouses of search for knowledge and creativity.

And both the First Amendment and universities share these values of an openness, kind of creativity that people are willing to challenge conventional ways of thinking, search for truth, but primarily and fundamentally a respect for knowledge. So, when those are assaulted, as is happening now, it's incredibly reckless, and in my view, the consequences could be tragic. When a lab has to shut down; the experiments are ended; the people are laid off, that work is put in suspension and possibly even reversal.

I am hearing daily from faculty who are thinking about leaving the country, and I don't think that's at risk of a major flow of people out of the country, but it is happening. I think there is an intimidation that is certainly going on with respect to international students. I think it will follow with even speech, regular speech on campuses. So, these are very fragile achievements. I mean, they have taken a century to build up. They are stunningly successful, and now we're finding them at -- shockingly at risk. I mean, this is an encroachment, unlike anything we've seen, and the consequences, as I said, could be tragic. ZAKARIA: Would you describe this as a kind of path to authoritarian

government?

BOLLINGER: I think there is no other way to describe it. I mean, these are techniques that are designed strategies, that are designed to intimidate, if not crush opposition, and dissent, and we're seeing them in full force against our leading institutions and against individuals.

Under the First Amendment, we've gone through many periods where the government has acted in ways and the society has acted in ways that are repressive and that we are later, as we come out of those periods, embarrassed by. And we always say, and the courts have always said, we will learn from that and we will not go back to it. I think it's time now for the courts, especially, to make that point clear, because these are interventions, these are actions that are highly dangerous against the values that we have cherished as a society. So, I'm indeed very worried, and I do fear for the future of American democracy.

ZAKARIA: Lee Bollinger, thank you so much for joining us.

BOLLINGER: Thank you, Fareed. It was a pleasure.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPA, are federal workers do-nothing bureaucrats with the political axe to grind? That is what DOGE rhetoric might have. You believe? But, that is not what journalist Michael Lewis found when he met people actually working in federal agencies. He will tell us those stories, when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: Donald Trump has long been an advocate for slashing federal jobs, and now his administration is painting a picture of federal workers as lazy and unproductive.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We want to get rid of the ones that don't exist, and we want to get rid of the ones that do exist but don't work.

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ZAKARIA: But, when acclaimed writer and journalist Michael Lewis went behind the scenes to meet the individuals who actually work for the government, he found that the truth was far from the White House's narrative. His new book, "Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service", chronicles the stories of these workers.

Michael Lewis, pleasure to have you on again.

MICHAEL LEWIS, EDITOR, "WHO IS GOVERNMENT?", & BESTSELLING AUTHOR: It's great to be back, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: So, the central point of this book, it seems to me, is that public service is not just valuable, but hard, and that there are people who go into it who have -- sometimes have of unique qualities that make them do it well. And I want to get at it by just asking you to talk about a person, talk about the coal mines (ph).

LEWIS: Sure. Talk about the first character we meet when you open the book. Chris Marks spent 35 years in the Department of Labor trying to fix a single problem. And the problem is coal mine roofs collapsing on the -- on the heads of coal miners, which sounds like that -- how could that be a big deal?

Fifty thousand American coal miners were killed in the last century by this. It's the most dangerous occupation in the country and half the deaths are from this. And what interested me about him was not just that he'd fixed it and figured out -- kind of figured out the problem, but it was the sort of why of it.

It's like that all these people in the book are attracted to a problem. And it's sort of like the problem is natural. Home is in the government. They end up in the government for that reason.

They don't go to the government because they always wanted to be government workers, or because they want a 9:00 to 5:00 job, or they want safety and security. It's none of that. It's like, here's this problem. I want to fix it.

And he -- I mean, he was wild because this was a person who grew up to be an investment banker. You know what I mean? He was the son of a Princeton professor, could have gone to an Ivy League school, decides he's going to rebel against his father, who is the world's expert on how -- on what keeps gothic cathedrals' roofs from collapsing.

He is the one who has figured that out. Dad is famous for this. And the son goes off saying, I'm having nothing to do with what my dad did. Ends up working in a coal mine, sees this problem, gets out, develops the technical expertise to fix it, and fixes it.

And no one knows he has done it or why. And he expects no attention, no credit, not much pay. It's a purposeful life.

And the idea that we -- that we have in our head about these civil servants it's so not that. It's so -- it's -- we have this idea of kind of a lazy bureaucrat or a deep state or a partisan person. And it is so much more a committed, purposeful, mission-driven person.

ZAKARIA: You know, I've seen this with places like USAID, you know, over the course of my life. You travel somewhere and you meet somebody, and maybe they were a tourist or a Peace Corps volunteer, and they went to Ghana. And they noticed that the water was filthy and people were dying because of it. And they tried to ask themselves, well, isn't there some cheap, easy way to fix the water, you know, filter? And that leads them to then go to USAID for very little money, just trying to fix the water filtration system in Accra or something like that. LEWIS: And our government is the place where all the problems the private sector doesn't want to solve end up and -- the harder problems. And the people who notice the problem from outside end up there because that is the place to solve it.

You know, it's like -- and over and over the stories in the book are people like that. People who -- people who -- they aren't money people. They're definitely aren't attention people. Like I mean, they're moving into an environment where they get -- there's no culture of recognition. Like it's a culture of, if you get recognized, you're in trouble.

You know, it's -- it's really actually too much so sort of disincentivizes risk taking. But they -- they are -- they're about that as opposed to -- as opposed to themselves.

ZAKARIA: You talk about the person, this is one of your chapters, a woman who does infectious diseases.

LEWIS: Yes. This is an interesting thing that -- so rare diseases are a problem for the market. Pharmaceuticals are not interested because there are not enough -- they're not customers. They're rare diseases.

So, what happens with rare diseases is doctors around the world throw stuff at problems that are -- dying patients. And the stories largely don't get told. Like someone survives in Sydney, Australia, you might not hear about it. Or stuff that doesn't work. It would be good to know. You get anecdote. You don't get science.

And Heather Stone is a woman at the FDA who herself a victim of rare diseases. So, she got energized, motivated that way. Said, look, we just need -- we need a place that collects these anecdotes. She created an app called CURE ID. And the idea was that doctors would report the stories.

And it's a story -- it's a very moving story. She ends up saving the life of a six-year-old girl in Arkansas and -- by intervening personally. But it's actually a story of our weakened government. That she can't get this app off the ground because she's not really allowed to promote it. She doesn't really have the trust of the medical community.

It's like, this is what happens when you have a weakened government. And at the same time, she is saving, personally, a six-year-old girl in Arkansas. There's another little girl in northern California who dies because she never -- she never hears of the treatment. There's a new treatment.

And it's sort of the question I'm asking is like, what's -- what world do we want to live in? What government we want to have, one that saves the six-year-old girl, or one that lets the six-year-old girl die?

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ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Michael Lewis on what he makes of Elon Musk.

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ZAKARIA: Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, eliminated more than 280,000 federal jobs in February and March. Before the break, Michael Lewis told us about some of the people he met in the federal government.

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They're diligent, hardworking people striving to solve some of the most incredible and unusual problems that face the country. I wanted to know if Michael Lewis had any insight into why smart people like Elon Musk don't see that.

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ZAKARIA: You spend a lot of time with the private sector and even with the tech world. What is it that they don't -- you know, given their prism and their lived experience, what is it they're missing? What's the distortion that happens when you're in the private sector?

LEWIS: This is a really good question because look at Elon Musk. His fortune comes from Tesla. Tesla doesn't exist without loans and loan guarantees from the Department of Energy. He could see how the government played a role in the creation of his own wealth.

Any honest tech person probably can track whatever they've done to something the government did long ago and they don't want to -- but there is this -- there is a fantasy of the entrepreneur who doesn't need anybody else, the great man. And the minute you're wealthy, if you want to -- if you want to go to that -- to that place in your head, if you want to take all the credit, if you want to tell a story where it was all me, I didn't need any help, I don't need to feel gratitude towards anybody, you can because you can surround yourself by people who will say that's so. And --

ZAKARIA: And the organizations, it seems to me, are very different because everyone is motivated by money. They're getting -- you adjust those levers. You pay them more or less, bonus -- and you can understand -- as you say, bureaucracy, where actually the people didn't join to make money, or if they did, they made a very foolish decision.

LEWIS: That's right. And that they joined to -- because of a purpose and because of a problem they wanted to solve.

Now -- and it's also true. I mean, if you said to me like, he went into the government hostile to the workforce. They had an explicit mission to traumatize this federal workforce. And the story is telling -- is it's we're getting at waste, fraud and abuse.

My reaction to that was, well, one, if that's what you're doing, you're doing it in a very odd way, because actually the first thing they did was eliminate all the inspectors who actually looked --

ZAKARIA: Identify the waste.

LEWIS: Yes, waste, fraud and abuse. But second, it's like -- it's such an odd attitude towards the federal government. The government is so hemmed in -- a government worker is so watched there's not that -- I mean, corruption is very difficult. Waste is more complicated. There's some systematic waste in the way it's done. But it isn't about the people.

And so that when I look at it -- when I look at what Elon Musk is doing, it says -- I mean, unless -- he's not a stupid --

ZAKARIA: A lot of the waste, by the way, is private companies overcharging --

LEWIS: That's right.

ZAKARIA: -- the government for stuff.

LEWIS: Precisely.

ZAKARIA: So, the waste is actually --

LEWIS: It's actually in the private sector. That's right. And so, I look at them saying what they say, and I assume they're not stupid. And I assume -- so, I assume that they're saying they're doing one thing, but they're actually doing another.

That they -- they're telling us they're doing -- they're trying to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. But in fact, they've got some other motive and -- that they aren't telling us about.

ZAKARIA: Which is just to shrink the size of government, I think.

LEWIS: That might be right but -- this is the second thing. I think, you know, maybe if you ask the average American, they say this is a great bloated thing that just keeps spinning out of control. The civil service is the same size as it was 50 years ago.

So, in the population it is a third bigger. So, it has shrunk basically in relation to the society. It is not this like uncontrol -- uncontrollable -- out of control kind of growing monster. So just -- that ambition to shrink the size of the federal workforce is not a smart ambition. Like, make it work better but just shrinking it is not going to make it work better.

ZAKARIA: And you point out that some of this expertise is going to be very hard to duplicate or, you know, somebody else like the IRS story, which is one of the chapters. Amazing.

LEWIS: I mean, it's -- this is -- so, there's a unit in the -- in the Internal Revenue Service that goes after cyber fraud. And it has -- I mean, it has done all kinds of things, breathtaking things, broken up global child sex trafficking groups and all the rest. But in the bargain has managed to accrue to the government billions of dollars. It's a profit center. And it's a team of, I don't know, 60 or 70 people. And you would think if you're interested in the deficit, you're interested in cybercrime being minimized, you would -- you would invest in this. If this was private sector, it's your winner. Invest in it.

They've cut half the people. I mean, they've made it very hard for the guy who's the character in the book to do his job. Why? I mean, that doesn't -- that's not -- it's not rational.

And what interests me is that they can do it, that the population is starting to rebel a bit, but that we are so ignorant about what our government does that they can do almost anything they want, and people don't know what they've done. I mean, I think that's -- the bottom of the story is like, you need to know what's going on inside your government because it's actually important.

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And increasingly, not knowing is deadly.

ZAKARIA: I think what you're saying to the American people is you should actually be very proud of your federal government. There's like a lot of good stuff they do.

LEWIS: Not only is there a lot of good stuff they do. They're some of the most remarkable people I have ever met, it shocked me. I mean, this is why I got into it the first place. I started opening doors in the government and I was shocked by the quality of the people and -- not only were they not like the stereotype of the lazy bureaucrat or the deep state sinister person, they were the best among us. And their lives are sort of dedicated to serving other people.

And I felt like in many ways they had discovered like the key to leading meaningful lives. And that how we treat them, how we're treating them right now is a very damning indication of the state of our own souls.

ZAKARIA: On that note, Michael Lewis, thank you.

LEWIS: Thanks, Fareed.

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ZAKARIA: One of the most difficult problems facing a future post-war Middle East is, who will govern the 2 million people living in Gaza? I'll bring you an answer when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. Israel announced this week that it has turned 30 percent of Gaza's territory into what it calls a security perimeter, where troops will remain even after the war has ended. Israel may believe that this will solve some of its security concerns, but it still doesn't resolve the fundamental problem of who will govern the strip when the war is over.

Israel has previously said that it does not plan on governing the 2 million Palestinians living there, and no outside force, whether Arab, E.U., or American, would be viewed as legitimate by Palestinians. The only solution is some kind of governance that is acceptable to Israel, meaning not Hamas, and is still considered credible by the Palestinians. Is there any solution to this geopolitical puzzle? Actually, there is.

According to polls by a leading Palestinian polling institute, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, there is one man who has topped almost every opinion poll as the most popular Palestinian presidential candidate ever since he was put in an Israeli prison more than two decades ago, Marwan Barghouti.

Even now, Israel's separation wall with the West Bank is adorned with murals of the 65-year-old, who is cited by some as the Palestinian Mandela, by some as the world's most important prisoner, and by others, of course, as a terrorist. So, who is Marwan Barghouti?

Barghouti is a senior leader of Fatah, the secular nationalist faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Fatah was co-founded by Yasser Arafat, the late longtime Palestinian leader to whom Barghouti is seen as a potential successor.

In June of 2004, the Israeli justice system convicted Barghouti of murder and terrorism charges related to attacks during the Second Intifada. He claims innocence, but did not mount a defense because he refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court.

Today, Barghouti's popularity crosses a key political divide among Palestinians, as he is widely respected by both Palestinian Islamists as well as secularists. His release from prison remains an important priority for Hamas.

Throughout history, larger than life leaders have emerged from revolutionary struggles. These leaders have been seen as villains or, more recently, terrorists, but they were also often the only ones with the political stature to guide their movements to peace through politics. Think of Mandela in South Africa or Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland.

Khalil Shikaki, a researcher who polls Palestinians, told "The Guardian," "Barghouti is the single most popular Palestinian leader alive."

The reverence and lore that surrounds Barghouti at home gives him a pedigree that may allow him the space to negotiate a settlement with Israel. Barghouti was a strong supporter of the Oslo Accords, and, according to his son, he remains committed to a two-state solution. That might be why, even in Israel, he is seen by some as a friend and more importantly the best option for sustained peace.

For example, Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet, said to "The Economist," "It's in our interest he'll compete in the next Palestinian elections. The sooner, the better." Ayalon is right. Since the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, the lack of effective Palestinian leadership has been a key obstacle to any peace process. The current Palestinian Authority leadership is deeply unpopular. According to the latest poll, 84 percent of Palestinians from both the West Bank and Gaza want the 89-year-old president Mahmoud Abbas to resign.

Meanwhile, Hamas leadership has been decimated. Its once popular leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, have been killed in Israeli attacks. And last month, the largest anti-Hamas protests since the war began erupted in Gaza, signaling the rising unpopularity of the group in the strip.

[10:55:08]

Still, Barghouti's release is being blocked by Israel. It's understandable that the idea of a strong Palestinian leader might not be popular today in Israel, a country that is still reeling from the horrific October 7th attacks. But the best-case scenario for Israel, the Palestinians, the region, and the world is a political solution that charts a course towards lasting peace. Marwan Barghouti may well be the leader needed to help make that vision a reality.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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