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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump's Massive Tariffs Rock Global Economy; Is Israel Reoccupying Gaza? A Political Earthquake In France; Why Americans Are "Stuck" In Place. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired April 06, 2025 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:39]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: 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.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's our declaration of economic independence.

ZAKARIA: Trump's tariff announcement shook the world. The president called it liberation day, while "The Economist" dubbed it "ruination day." I'll ask Germany's former minister for economic affairs what he thinks the fallout will be.

Also, Prime Minister Netanyahu says Israel is dividing up the Gaza Strip and seizing more parts of the territory. Is this the start of Trump's Gaza takeover?

TRUMP: The riviera of the Middle East.

ZAKARIA: Israel's former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is my guest.

Plus, I'll give you a preview of my new special, "THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT," airing tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

Liberation day is an apt name for Donald Trump's policy to impose massive new tariffs across the world. His view of the United States is of a victimized colony, taken advantage of by other countries that have robbed it of jobs, industries and money.

This week, when announcing his tariff plans, he said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Trumps acolytes like JD Vance and Howard Lutnick parrot this view, painting a picture of a hollowed out country with empty factories, unemployed workers and stagnant wages.

The reality is the opposite, and it is only because it is the opposite. In other words, because of America's unrivaled economic power that Trump can even attempt his tariff policy. It is U.S. economic heft that allows him to try to force the rest of the world to bend to his will. But Trump is using American power in such a capricious, destructive, dumb way that it will almost certainly result in a lose-lose for everyone.

The real economic story of the last three decades is that the United States has surged ahead of all its major competitors. In 2008, the U.S. economy was about the same size as the Eurozone. By 2023, it was nearly twice that size. U.S. average wages were about 20 percent greater than the average of the advanced industrial world in 1990. They are now around 40 percent higher.

The average Japanese person was 50 percent richer than an American in 1995 in terms of GDP per capita. Today, an American is about 150 percent richer than a Japanese person. In fact, the poorest American state, Mississippi, has a higher per capita GDP than Britain or France or Japan.

And yet, Donald Trump has been convinced that all these decades, as America has moved ahead, it is actually in steep decline. His worldview seems to have been set in the 1960s, when, in his memory, America was a great manufacturing power.

Another piece of that antique worldview is an overestimation of Moscow's power, which in his mind apparently remains a towering economic player on the world stage with whom he can do many important deals. Russia, bizarrely, has been excluded from any new tariffs.

The reality of America as the dominant nation in the fastest growing and most critical spheres of the global economy today. Technology and services seems to mean nothing to him. His tariffs have been calculated using a method closer to voodoo than economics. Among many mistakes, they are based solely on U.S. trade deficits with countries in goods.

That America runs huge surpluses in services, exporting software, software services, movies, music, law and banking to the world somehow doesn't count. More than 75 percent of the U.S. economy is apparently intangible fluff. Steel is the real deal.

[10:05:07]

But while America is the world's dominant power, it is not so strong that it can act this irrationally. The world economy has grown of a size and scope that it will find ways around American protectionism, which is now among the world's most egregious. Contrary to Trump's stubborn beliefs, the U.S. was in fact already

somewhat protectionist, with tariff and non-tariff trade barriers greater than in 68 other countries. Now, with these new tariffs, American protectionism is literally off the charts with higher rates than the Smoot-Hawley ones of 1930 that exacerbated the Great Depression.

In the short run, everyone will suffer. But in the medium to long run, countries will start trading around the United States. This movement has already begun. Since Trump won in 2016 the U.S. has abandoned virtually all efforts to expand trade. But other countries have picked up the slack. The European Union has signed eight new trade deals, and China has signed nine. As Ruchir Sharma notes, of the 10 fastest growing trade corridors, five have one terminus in China. Only two have a terminus in the United States.

Countries around the world need growth, and that means trade. China will clearly be the big winner in this new world economy, because it will position itself as the new center of trade. Add to this Trump's hostility toward America's closest allies, and you will likely see Europe, Canada, and even some of America's Asian allies find a way to work with China.

Donald Trump's nostalgic worldview is rooted even further back than the 1960s. He looks fondly on the late 19th century when, as he described this week, the U.S. had only tariffs and no income tax, and America was way stronger economically than it has ever been compared to the rest of the world.

This history is nonsense. In 1900, the U.S. was around 16 percent of the global economy by one measure. It is now about 26 percent of it. American standards of living and health are much higher today. But in acting out on his nostalgic fantasy, Donald Trump might well end up dragging America back to what it was then -- a poorer country dominated by oligarchs and corruption, content to swagger around in its backyard and bully its neighbors, but marginal to the great currents of global economics and politics.

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

In addition to a tariff on all imports, Donald Trump slapped higher tariffs on 60 trading partners on Wednesday, many of them allies. Imports from the European union will face 20 percent tariffs. Perhaps the country in the E.U. most vulnerable to that is Germany. It exported nearly $180 billion worth of goods to the U.S. last year, the most of any E.U. country, and it struggles with a stagnant economy.

How will Germany, the E.U. and the rest of the world respond?

Joining me now is Peter Altmaier. He is the former German minister of Economic Affairs.

Welcome, sir. Let me begin by asking you, you were the economics minister in Germany the last time around, Trump 1.0, when he did put tariffs on certain European goods. Do you regard this as a sort of replay of that?

PETER ALTMAIER, FORMER GERMAN MINISTER OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS: No. Certainly not. It looks like a replay, but it is totally different. In his first term there have been people like Wilbur Ross, the economic secretary, Bob Lighthizer, the trade representative, interesting in figuring out whether a deal could be reached by lowering tariffs and by preserving global free trade.

This time, my impression is we have a paradigm shift. It is a -- it's a severe disruption of the entire model of free trade with low tariffs or zero tariffs. And that will have consequences that have to be clarified in the coming weeks. But severe consequences, no doubt about it.

ZAKARIA: When you look at what Donald Trump has done with tariffs and you put it against the broader issues that have come up since he has come back into office, the disagreements on Ukraine, the discussions of NATO, do you feel that this is something bigger even than the tariff issue?

[10:10:07]

Do you worry that we are at a kind of turning point?

ALTMAIER: There is a turning point, and certainly there are conflicting objectives. Mr. Trump wants Europe to take a bigger burden in the defense of peace and freedom for Ukraine and in Eastern Europe. Many of our European member states of NATO, including Germany, are prepared to raise defense expenditure considerably. But this, of course, will become much more difficult in a situation where the economy is tanking and where the unemployment is rising and the standard of living of many people would be questioned.

ZAKARIA: Are we witnessing a kind of fundamental break with the united position of the United States and Europe, that open trade, free trade was good for everyone? Was it -- it was a positive sum game. It produced a, you know, it grew the pie and therefore everyone benefited.

ALTMAIER: Well, this is one of the very few rare cases where academic research by macroeconomists and political willingness and conviction were in parallel and the same. That free trade would benefit both countries, the importing and exporting countries equally. And it is proven.

I mean, the strength of the American economy, as you have pointed out in your opening remarks has grown over the last decade considerably. The U.S. are still by far the strongest economy worldwide. And all this, all this could be put at stake if so many countries disappointed and left alone by the benevolent hegemon that we have seen for so many decades would try to bypass, to bypass the difficulties and the problems by arranging for closer cooperation amongst them.

I still believe that the Western alliance and the Western values are so important that we should not allow Europe and the U.S. to separate definitely. So we have to fight for this trans-Atlantic partnership and friendship.

ZAKARIA: What -- how do you think Germans now regard America?

ALTMAIER: I'm still deeply convinced that the German people and the American people have extremely positive feelings. Whenever I had a chance to travel the states, not just Washington or New York, but the states then I realized how many people have been in Germany as soldiers as students. And it is exactly the case the other way around. And this is something that will not disappear. But there is a growing doubt whether the American president will be able to make sure that stability, rule of law and lasting peace, in a world that is shaken up by aggressions like Putin's war against Ukraine, like all the military and terrorist crisis in the Middle East, whether President Trump will have the willingness and the capacity to play this leadership role that we have seen under Ronald Reagan and many other American presidents.

ZAKARIA: Peter Altmaier, thank you so much. Thank you, sir.

ALTMAIER: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Israel has declared a new strategy in its war against Hamas. Divide up Gaza, seize more territory there. I will talk to former prime minister Ehud Barak about just that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:19:05]

ZAKARIA: On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Israeli military is switching gears in Gaza. The IDF's new strategy, he said, is to divide up the Gaza Strip and seize more territory there.

This announcement came two weeks after Israel broke the ceasefire with a massive attack on Gaza.

To help us understand where this war is headed, I wanted to welcome back to the show Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, and I believe still the most decorated military officer in Israeli history.

Is Israel essentially reoccupying Gaza?

EHUD BARAK, FORMER ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: I don't know. Nominally, say the reason for widening our control has to do with pushing or coercing Hamas into agreeing to the deal that they supposedly are blocking.

[10:20:02]

And the reality is that I doubt whether it can convince Hamas to come back to the negotiating table, but for sure, it's a death sentence to a majority of those hostages who are still alive.

So there is a great question. What it's about to achieve. We have been -- we have been conquering Gaza for the last 18 months. We were four times in Jabalya and three times in Beit Hanoun and two times in Deir al-Balah. There are different neighborhoods and cities there. And I don't see exactly what we're going to achieve in the next one if it doesn't have the basic element of any strategic campaign.

No war had ever been won without having a clear, realistic, objective, and end game. And it seems that we don't have one --

ZAKARIA: A kind of political of political objective, you know, at the end.

BARAK: Political objective. Yes. If you don't have -- you learned it the hard way in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, we should not repeat those mistakes. And we have to make a clear, realistic one, which is not the one that Netanyahu is stating now.

ZAKARIA: So what's the alternative?

BARAK: Yes. So basically there is only way to defeat Hamas, it is to replace -- and we have a compelling imperative to make sure Hamas will never reign over Gaza, will never threaten Israel from there. But the only way to achieve it is to replace Hamas by another entity, which is legitimate by international law, international community, the neighboring Arab countries, members of the peace agreement of the Abraham Accords, and the Palestinians themselves because they are still there.

So the only realistic way is to listen to the Saudis and Egyptians who raised an idea which is short of perfect, but could be modified with the help of the Americans if they become aware that that's the way, basically made of bringing in inter-Arab force, probably Egyptian, Jordanian, Emiratis, financed the whole construction, the whole thing by the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Create a technocrat government of Palestinians to control the area and build a bureaucracy. And later on, even security forces are out of the Palestinians with a blessing of the Palestinian Authority.

And the only rule should be kept in order to make sure that our compelling imperative is implemented is that not a single person who was part of the military branch of Hamas, or of the mob that followed them into Gaza, into the Israeli area in October 7th, not a single one who was involved in them will be a part of the government, the bureaucracy or the new kind of security forces. That's a practical give and take, short of practical proposal that should be dealt.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that Bibi Netanyahu and the people around him actually want the reoccupation of Gaza, followed by then massive population expulsion of Palestinians, which will then lead to the Trump plan of a vacant Gaza?

BARAK: You know, it sounds a little bizarre, but the signs on the table is that they are heading there somehow. Netanyahu already established a kind of a new entity under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense, the IDF refused to take part of it, that will be organizing the transfer of the willing.

Now, if it was about to come to North America, even Canada, people might, probably might find some 100,000, 200,000. But if it goes to Somaliland or other places like this, no one will want to move. And anyhow, it's totally impractical. I believe that it was a good idea that launched by Trump to shake the whole thing.

ZAKARIA: Shake things out.

BARAK: And impose both Israel and the Egyptians and Saudis to bring some more realistic ideas. And I think, I think and I believe that Witkoff and President Trump understand that that's not realistic.

ZAKARIA: I've been told by friends of mine in Israel that the IDF, the army, would actually probably refuse to participate in a forced ethnic expulsion of two million Palestinians.

BARAK: Yes, I hope that's the case. The IDF as an organization probably refused, and it will be very costly if they want, because the international community will come after Israelis, officers and leaders, political leaders, and will demand accountability.

[10:25:03]

But there is a huge debate, especially right now following 7th of October. There is still, after a year and a half, a strong pain and deep kind of rage and feeling of humiliation and calls for revenge, which are humane, natural, you cannot even criticize those kind of emotions coming after the barbarian attack of Hamas. But having said that, that's a not a good recipe for strategic mind.

ZAKARIA: Lasting peace, yes.

BARAK: For leadership and so on. Leadership should see the vision over the immediate emotions however humane and justifiable on an individual, even collective terms. Strategy should be led by a clear cut, sober, painfully sober realities and decision on how to move forward. Otherwise, you pay the price of not having this kind of thought in advance.

ZAKARIA: I have to say, at 83, you remain as strategic and wise as I remember you decades ago.

BARAK: Already starting my 84th year.

ZAKARIA: Ehud Barak, pleasure to have you on.

BARAK: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, France's far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, was banned from running in her country's next presidential elections. Will her party suffer from this ruling or will it gain new momentum? I'll talk to "The Economist's" Paris bureau chief.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:57]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: France's next presidential election may be two years away, but it made big news this week when the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen was barred from running in it after being convicted of embezzlement.

A poll released just before the ban was handed down showed her as the frontrunner, leading by 10 points.

To help us understand the enormity of this decision in France, Sophie Pedder joins me. She is The Economist's Paris Bureau Chief.

Sophie Pedder, thanks for joining us.

Tell me first, how is this being received in France? Is this a kind of political earthquake?

SOPHIE PEDDER, PARIS BUREAU CHIEF, THE ECONOMIST: It really is. I mean I think nobody had quite expected the decision by the judges to be this severe.

It wasn't, I don't think, that there was huge surprise that Marine Le Pen and her colleagues would be found guilty. What I think took everybody aback was, and including her I would say, was the fact that she was barred from running for any elected office for five years and that that bar was put in place immediately.

In other words, there was no chance of giving her, you know, suspending that sentence while she appealed. Even though she's appealing and the appeal will be heard by next summer, she still is barred from running for public office. That means running for the presidency in 2027.

ZAKARIA: Now, you know, in America it is being perceived through a partisan lens inevitably and Trump specifically referenced it. He said, it sounds like what they did to me or words to that effect.

Is there a feeling on the right in France that this was selective prosecution or the punishment was particularly severe? Or some, you know, is there a feeling that this was a case of weaponizing the law against her?

PEDDER: Well, that's certainly the narrative that the far right is playing with and they are making it quite clear, and Marine Le Pen herself has done so, that this was an attempt to undermine democracy, that this was an attempt to keep her from running for office and from becoming president of France.

Now, you know, the judges were applying the law, so they were entirely within their rights to prevent her from running, even while she appeals.

That is legal in France. The law was tightened in 2016 in order to give that option to judges and they have applied it. But it is certainly very easy for the far right and for everybody in Marine Le Pen's party to use that narrative that is common.

And so many countries in Europe, we're hearing that again. It's not just in America. We hear it in Hungary. We've heard it in the past in Poland that, you know, there is an attempt to use the legal system to keep out extreme politics.

ZAKARIA: And, you know, does it -- when you look back, I know there are cases of other French politicians. I think it was Juppe. But I think about Christine Lagarde. It seems like often they're fined. This does feel like, I mean, it feels to me like looking at it from here, you would want to take the step of disbarring the person who was, you know, the front runner in the polls.

You'd want to be very sure that you really had to go down this path. Is there a feeling of trepidation that this will turn her into a martyr, turn her into a victim among, you know, outside of her followers?

PEDDER: There are her core voters who are absolutely indignant about this and will, I think, be strengthened. She will shore up her base because there is this feeling of being, she'll play the martyr card and that will be -- that will go down well.

But there are also voters in France who've come to the party more recently. These are people who don't have any particular affinity for extremism, I don't think, but they see her as having made the party more respectable. They've come to her, seen her as an alternative to the traditional politicians.

[10:35:05]

And they may, I think, think again about her because, you know, as I said, 150 pages of the in the ruling, there's a lot of detail that's come out about what this organized system that she had put in place, according to the judges.

And I think that they may feel that both that and her reaction, very strong reaction on querying whether the judges were impartial may make some of those newer voters think again about the national rally.

ZAKARIA: And meanwhile, what is the likeliest political effect of all this? Does it increase support for her party, but or decrease it because they will lose her, you know, the charismatic leader?

PEDDER: I mean, at the moment, the party is insisting that she remains the candidate pending this appeal. But I think what's really happened is that it has made the race for the French presidency in 2027 much more open.

You know that Emmanuel Macron, the sitting president, he can't run again, he's term limited, he's already had to or will have had by then to five-year terms in office, he can't run again. There is no single successor in the center. That's where his political platform is to Macron.

But there will now, I think, be a sort of intensified rivalry, because there will, I suspect, be a feeling that this is now a race, this is a presidential race that could be winnable. She was dominant in the polls two years out, one never knows a lot can happen, especially in France. But she, I think the fact that it doesn't look that likely, or at least her route back to power or into power has been really limited by this ruling. It does look like the race is more open.

And that, I think, means that everything is now to play for all of the candidates from across the political spectrum who will be looking ahead to 2027 now.

ZAKARIA: Sophie Pedder, thank you for making sense of it all for us.

PEDDER: It's a great pleasure. Thanks, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on "GPS," Americans have long been incredibly mobile, ready to pick up and move across their state or across the country for a great opportunity. But that is no longer true, and it is a huge problem.

We'll explore when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:42:09]

ZAKARIA: Think of westward expansion, the California gold rush, moving in search of better opportunities. That's been at the core of America's DNA.

But Americans are moving at historically low rates today. Why? Well, that is the topic of the author Yoni Appelbaum's new book, Stuck: How The Privileged And The Property Broke The Engine Of American Opportunity.

Yoni, pleasure to have you on.

This is a really important book. I mean, there are these three books now, Mark Dunkelman's on Why Nothing Works, Ezra Klein and Derrick Thompson's book about Abundance and yours, which are all getting at this same problem. But you get it in a very interesting way, which is explain why mobility, physical mobility was so important to the American economy.

YONI APPELBAUM, DEPUTY EXECUTIVE EDITOR, THE ATLANTIC: This was one of America's great gifts to the world. In most times and places, you inherited most aspects of your identity at birth. You had a spot, a physical spot on the map and a spot in the social hierarchy. And it was very hard to rise above your station.

America set people free to choose their own communities. And by moving toward those communities, they are putting themselves in the way of economic growth. They were giving themselves the chance to define their own identities through the communities that they chose to join. And they built a nation that was really dynamic economically because people were moving toward the industries in the cities that were growing and thriving.

ZAKARIA: The comparison I've heard is that Americans used to move. I saw the sum of three times as much as Europeans on average, and now they move just about the same. APPELBAUM: Yes, it's been a remarkable drop. At the peak, probably one out of three Americans was moving every year. And we just got new numbers from the census. It's now down to one out of 13. We have fallen to European levels of geographic mobility.

ZAKARIA: In some ways, you could look at the, you know, whole issue of deindustrialization and things like that from this lens, because after all, we went through phases when agricultural workers went out of work and the textile mills went out of work. But those people would historically move to where the next area of opportunity was.

And I think now what's happened is people aren't moving, so they're stuck. And we're somehow expecting those whole industries to come back.

APPELBAUM: You know, that's exactly right. When I was reporting this book, I spent a week in Flint, Michigan.

In 1920, if you'd moved there, that was one of the best places in America you possibly could have gone. It was a growing, thriving industrial town. And people flooded in from all over the country, particularly from the South, in order to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

Everybody in Flint, at the very least their grandfather, moved there from somewhere else. But as those jobs left Flint over the last 50 years, only the people with sufficient resources, with higher education, with high incomes, were able to relocate out of Flint and chase the opportunities that the new economy was creating. Large numbers of industrial workers were left stranded in Flint, unable to afford the housing in the places in America where they could have built better lives for themselves and for their family.

[10:45:21]

And that's the change in a nutshell. Whereas it used to be possible for ordinary impoverished Americans to move to the places that had the most jobs in the fastest economic growth. Today, they're effectively priced out of those places and they -- they end up stuck in, in communities like Flint where you get intergenerational, endemic poverty.

ZAKARIA: And that is the, you know, that gets to your kind of the core cause for this. You give an example of, you know, a janitor. Tell us, you know, tell us that example.

APPELBAUM: You know, 50 years ago if you were working as a janitor in, in rural Alabama and you moved to San Francisco or New York your income would've gone up like 70 percent. And you would've paid a little bit more in housing costs. But you would've ended up way ahead. And that's if you stay employed as a janitor, you might well be able to jump occupational brackets too by, by being in a place that's offering many more jobs and -- and more opportunities.

Today if that janitor makes that same move, his income goes up by the same amount, but the housing costs more than cancel out the gains. He ends up with less in the bank at the end of every month.

But it's not like that for all Americans. If you're a lawyer practicing in Alabama and you move to New York, your income goes up and the gain is large enough to offset the increased housing costs. So, you end up ahead with a little more in the bank at the end of the day.

Mobility in America was once exercised most aggressively by those in greatest need of opportunity. Today, the people who can still take advantage of geographic mobility are the elite. It's become a privilege of the wealthy and the well-educated.

ZAKARIA: That is so fascinating. So now solve the problem for us. What do we do about it?

APPELBAUM: You know, we broke the engine of American opportunity because we layered on too many restrictions and too many veto points with the construction of new housing. People still want to move toward opportunity. People want to build housing for them in those places. but we've made it effectively impossible to build the housing where people actually want it.

And that's driven up the costs. It's squeeze the families in those places and it's left many people stranded elsewhere. We can fix that. We can fix that by simplifying the rules so that we have clear, consistent zoning rules and building codes that allow real estate developers to build with some confidence that their project will actually be approved.

We can fix it by legalizing a much broader array of housing types that can work for people of different incomes in different life stages. The -- the kind of apartment I lived in right out of college is not the kind of apartment I'll want to retire into. And we can fix it as well by building a lot of housing. We've got a 50-year deficit to make up here. we're not going to solve it overnight. But if we build at roughly twice our current rate of construction, we can dig our way out of this about a decade.

ZAKARIA: Yoni, it's such an important and interesting and well-written book. Thank you.

APPELBAUM: Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: Next on "GPS," I'll bring you a clip from my latest documentary, it's called "THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT," airing tonight at HBO (ph) Eastern and Pacific.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[10:53:06]

RONALD REAGAN, 40TH U.S. PRESIDENT: No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size, so government programs once launched, never disappeared. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: That was Ronald Reagan in 1964. When he was elected president 16 years later, reducing the size of the U.S. government was a primary goal of his as it has been for Republicans for decades.

However, it is a very elusive goal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: We're cutting down the size of government. We have to, we're bloated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: But Donald Trump's department of government deficiency has made a great show of slashing jobs, decimating institutes, and moving to close entire agencies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ELON MUSK, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: But will this actually reduce the size of the federal government? And how did we get from the party of Ronald Reagan to the Party of Rage Against Government?

This is a question I explore in my new special, "THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT," which premieres tonight on CNN.

Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): As he took the oath of office in 1981.

REAGAN: I Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Ronald Reagan began his big crusade against government.

REAGAN: So, help me God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now congratulations, sir.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): He believed in ever growing federal bureaucracy was stifling the American people.

REAGAN: Thank you.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Culminating in the malaise of the Carter year.

REAGAN: In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Reagan's solution, the most radical attempt to downsize government since the new deal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ronald Reagan is supporters. Hope the new FDR of the right.

ZAKARIA (voice-over): He would not waste any time before he even left the Capitol, Reagan signed an executive order to freeze all hiring in the federal government. Conservative's hopes were sky high.

[10:55:14]

But in the end, the Reagan revolution would fall far short. Big government got even bigger and many hardcore conservative once again felt betrayed.

JULIAN ZELIZER, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: The Reagan archives are filled with memos and letters from prominent activists complaining that Reagan is selling them out.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Don't miss "THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT." It airs tonight at HBO (ph), Eastern and Pacific here on CNN.

And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I'll see you tonight.

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