CNN Fareed Zakaria GPS – May 24, 2026

0:00 I'm Fared Zakaria coming to you from New York. Today on the program, hi, President Trump. Hello, President Putin. The Russian leader visited Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, following swiftly in the American entourage's footsteps. We'll explore the ins and outs of the Beijing Moscow access and more with Richard Hos and Kishwar Babubani. Also, as the class of 2026 is unleashed on the job market in the age of AI, Derek Thompson will enlighten us on just how bad it is out there for these graduates. Then, Jody Caner of the New York Times

0:47 will explain how these young adults can find their passions and pursue them. Finally, what happens to a nation and its citizens amid the decay of democracy. The author Susie Hansen will tell us how a neighborhood in Istanbul has managed what she calls the dark punitive mess under Turkeykey's leader Erdogan. But first, here's my take. I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. That's what Jeff Bezos said about President Trump this week. >> I'm puzzled by this statement from an obviously intelligent and accomplished

1:33 businessman. I look at Trump's second term and I see the ham-handed efforts to enex Greenland in Canada, massive tariff hikes on most of the world, a cruel immigration crackdown that was both lawless and ineffective, and the sudden launching of a war without UN sanction, congressional consultation, or any clear strategy. If this is maturity, I would shudder to think what Trump's immature phase would look like. The opposite is actually closer to the truth. Trump's first term was disciplined, more disciplined, not because he was disciplined, but because he was constrained. He often deferred, however grudgingly, to the Republican establishment and national security

2:19 elites. His early legislative agenda was shaped by Speaker Paul Ryan and executed by Chief of Staff Rance Priebus. Top economic adviser Gary Conn repeatedly talked him out of the global tariff hikes he had long wanted. The generals whom he surrounded himself with urged caution on Iran, support for NATO and arms for Ukraine. The lesson Trump drew from that first term, however, was not that expertise mattered. It was that experts were not loyal enough. After the January 6th attack, you see, many of his senior officials distanced themselves from him. Some denounced him. So this time he has surrounded himself with people whose chief qualification is feelalty. The less distinguished the

3:06 resume the better. Such people owe everything to him. Process has given way to impulse procedure to instinct, government to gut. But the starkkest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not policy. It is enrichment. its scale, its brazeness, its open contempt for restraint. The day before Bezos made his remarks, the acting attorney general of the United States announced that the Justice Department would grant Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from all audits and investigations for any past tax related misconduct. And the announcement claimed it would last forever. The week before, Trump disclosed that his stock portfolio had

3:52 executed around 3,700 trades in the first quarter alone. A staggering number, many following a suspiciously convenient pattern. A stock bought shortly before a government action or statement that benefited it. On January 6th of this year, for example, the Trump portfolio bought half a million dollars of Nvidia stock. A week later, Nvidia received US clearance to sell its H200 chips to China. That was not all. The Commerce Department this week announced an investment in a quantum computing company in which a member of the Trump family holds interests. And don't forget the 500 million UAE investment in a Trump family crypto venture, the two billion dollar UAE investment using that company's

4:37 stable coin, the flurry of new Trump organization real estate deals, or the drone company in which the Trump family invested and that later miraculously received a Pentagon contract. One number says it all. Reuters calculates that from the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2025, the Trump Organization's income rose from $51 million to $864 million. This does suggest discipline, a relentless discipline devoted to monetizing the presidency, but somehow I doubt that is what Jeff Bezos had in mind. The Trump Organization has maintained that Trump himself, his family, and the organization don't have any role in

5:23 directing or influencing specific investments. The deeper question is why is this possible? And why has it produced so little resistance? Scholars of corruption have long assumed that in advanced democracies, graft becomes subtle and institutional. Campaign donations, lobbying networks, consulting contracts. Trump has taken the elaborate machinery of an advanced industrial state and used it to accelerate something far crudder. Old-fashioned personal grift. The public may be troubled, but his MAGA base doesn't seem to be. And that is the only constituency that could restrain him. In a hyperolarized country, corruption is no longer judged as an objective moral failing. It is filtered

6:10 through tribe. If our side does it, it's either fake news, clever politics, or totally justified revenge. This reveals a deeper weakness in the American system. The founding fathers built a magnificent constitutional framework, but it rested on an assumption that they did not spell out that public officials would retain some shared commitment to unwritten civic norms. Madison's design, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.

6:56 The legal guard rails are weaker than most Americans realize. The president is largely exempt from standard federal conflict of interest laws. Many of the actions I've described would expose even the seniormost cabinet secretary to grave legal peril. For a president, the Supreme Court has decided that the only remedy for official acts is impeachment and twothirds of the Senate voting for conviction, which in our partisan age requires a civic miracle. The mature response to these travesties is not revenge, but a restoration of the rule of law. After Trump, the urgent task for the American republic will be to turn norms into statutes, curtail the ethical

7:44 immunities of the presidency and find legal ways to ensure that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business. Go to faredzakaria.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week and let's get started. This week, after Xiinping welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to Beijing, the Chinese leader said his country's relationship with Russia had reached quote the highest level in history," unquote. Their meeting came only a few days after a highstakes visit from President Trump to China. I'm

8:30 joined by Richard Hos, former top state department official, president emeritus of the council on foreign relations and the writer of a great substack uh as well as Kishor Mabulani who is a veteran Singaporean diplomat and a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Um, Richard, we we now have a kind of interesting dynamic between these three great powers in the world where everyone's getting on a little bit better, I suppose, but the Russians and Chinese do seem to have formed a kind of access. >> I'd call it an alignment. It's not quite an alliance. The last I checked, China's aid for Russia is, shall we say, finite.

9:15 It's limited. It's also very much a relationship between unequals. That to me was the lead part of Mr. Putin's visit, which is how much he's become almost the supplicant pushing China to open up this this new pipeline almost more for Russia's economic benefit than for than for for China's. So I don't think it's all that significant. Also highlights the difference. China's a multifaceted major power. Russia's pretty limited, pretty onedimensional. And by the way, the last I checked, it's not winning its war of choice against against Ukraine and it's paying an enormous price for it. So Russia is going to emerge much weaker as a result of what it's doing. >> You you made this point, Richard, in in I think uh on on X that Russia and the

10:00 United States are both, you know, went to China and as in in in similar circumstances, they are both losing their wars of choice. One in Ukraine, one in Iran. >> Yeah. for all the differences between the wars. That's the bottom line. They're both going to emerge worse off as a result. The really interesting point for me, Fared, be interested what Keshawar thinks is what message China takes from that. And when Xiinping sees this, does he say, "hm, maybe these wars aren't so uh obvious. They don't turn out the way you think." So, I'm hoping this might be a moment of some sober sobriety, if you will, for Xihinping. Uh Kishure, how do you think Xiinping is looking at these two wars of choice uh where the United States and Russia are both floundering?

10:47 >> Well, I think um from China's point of view in many ways things couldn't be better now because the United States very clearly now is stuck in the Gulf. And so in that every war that the United States fights in the Middle East is a gift to China because it buys time for China to keep growing its economy and to become stronger. And at the end of the day, the Chinese are always playing the long game. They're trying to figure out where they'll be 10 years from now as a result of the current developments. But when you look at uh when they look at how difficult these wars have been despite Russia's massive uh asymmetrical

11:35 advantage and is much bigger than Ukraine, the US is much bigger than Iran. Do you think they look at that and draw cautionary lesson about Taiwan? >> Well, you know, the way the western media describes Taiwan is absolutely wrong. And I say this because everybody thinks that China is just preparing to try and invade Taiwan militarily as quickly as possible and then seeing whether or not the examples of Iran and and and Ukraine will apply to Taiwan. And here again, you know, I must emphasize that the Chinese take a very comprehensive long-term view and ask a very simple question on whose side is time on. Is time on Taiwan's side or is

12:20 time on China's side? And trust me, if the Taiwanese declare independence tomorrow, which is what will cause a war, how many countries are going to recognize Taiwan? When I was in Taiwan a few months ago, I told the Taiwanese people, you're lucky you have a Republic of China passport, which brings you to over 180, 190 countries. You change your passport to Republic of Taiwan, you'll be lucky if five or six countries recognize the Republic of Taiwan passport. So time is on China's side on Taiwan. Obviously, they're going to emphasize that the power they're accumulating is is on their favor. They're going to show signals of strength, but they're not in any way dreaming of a military invasion of Taiwan anytime soon. >> All right, stay with us. Um, we're going

13:06 to talk about all this and more when we come back. from Abubani who is a veteran Singaporean diplomat and writes in more conventional publications like foreign affairs but very well indeed. Um Richard we were talking about who has the advantage in terms of time China or Taiwan whose side is time on and Kir makes the point uh of course our China's they're the bigger economy they will get you know larger and larger over time that's clearly the Beijing strategy. Do you agree? I actually don't. China right now is what 1.3 billion people. By the end of the century, it's projected to be closer to 800 million. The ratio of working age people to people who are elderly is going to move much in the

13:51 direction of the latter of the elderly. Defense technology is increasingly through drones and anti-ship and anti-aircraft systems moving in favor of defenders. So, I actually think that could help Taiwan if if they uh adapt that. The key variable I think is the United States. I actually agree with to with Khir to a bit. China doesn't want to do an invasion. There's no Chinese soldier who's fought in a war to do a combined arms >> since the Korean War. If you come if you take Vietnam out of it, which was a very brief war >> and so they were basically all retired. So, you know, I don't think they they what they want to do almost in the principle of Shunsu, they want to subdue their enemy without having to fire a shot. Well, that's really that puts a lot of pressure on us. So the real question coming out of the summit in that interview that President Trump did with Brett Bearer on Fox is is the

14:37 United States prepared to trade off support for Taiwan for economic access to China's market. If he's willing to do that, then China might get its wish. I've always thought that the real thing deterring uh uh China uh is not the US military, but it is the fear of losing access to the American market, the European market, the Japanese. You know, they China wants to sell to the world. It's integrated into the world economy. That's why they I I tend to agree with you. they're not going to uh you know willy-nilly invade Taiwan. But that's the deterrent that that more more than the American military. >> Let me let me make two points in response. Okay. The first point is this.

15:22 What's the big lesson that Iran is teaching us in the Gulf? You don't need superior military weapons to seize control of a choke point. Okay? You don't need the best military in the world. Iran doesn't have the best military in the world. And guess what? It's held up 20% of the world's economy. Now, in the case of Taiwan, all the Chinese have to do is to say Taiwan is off limits. Okay? Isolate, blockade Taiwan. They don't have to fire a shot. Trust me, nobody's going to break a Chinese blockade on Taiwan. I mean, let's get serious about this area. when the if the Chinese declare that they are serious, people will take them seriously. That's my first point. And

16:10 the second point, your point about selling goods to the world, you know, selling goods to the world is a two-way relationship. This is one statistic everyone should understand. China's share of global manufacturing in the year 2000 was 6%. Now it's close to 30%, by 2030 be 45%. And you know what that means? Chinese products are becoming indispensable to the world. Absolutely indispensable. Now the Chinese have created this dependence on China for a very powerful deliberate reason to ensure that no American containment policy of China can succeed.

16:55 >> I have a short amount of time. You have a you have a thought. Well, China is also dependent on exports. China has not allowed domestic demand to grow naturally. They've repressed it. Why? So they've got this export-led e economy. So they need access as much as we need their goods. So I think that's also a constraint on China. >> Which is why I I tend to think I mean I think assure is right. It's a two-way street. But but for both and the real deterrent would be if the US and Europe and Japan and Australia would all come together and say if you invade Taiwan it won't be business as usual which by the way we could do except that we are quarreling with all our closest allies levying tariffs on them and making you know far from presenting a united front where we we have worse relations with Canada now than we have with China.

17:42 >> That was the strategic argument for joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We could present a united front. This is the great strategic advantage of American foreign policy. We wake up in the morning, we have dozens of partners and allies. What have we done? We've undermined our own fundamental strategic advantage. Kishar Mubani, Richard H. Always a pleasure to talk to you guys. Next on GPS, college students are graduating into one of the worst labor markets in years. Is AI the culprit? I will explore that next. Why we dream? Millions of students across the country are graduating from college, but unfortunately for them, they're entering a punishing job market, specifically for their demographic. For roughly the last year, the unemployment

18:28 rate for recent college grads has been hovering around 6%. The highest in more than a decade, leaving aside the pandemic. Many people blame AI for taking jobs that would have gone to young people. Joining me now is Derek Thompson. He is the host of the podcast plain English and writes an economous Substack. Derek Thompson, good to have you. >> Great to be back. Thank you, Freed. >> So, first of all, explain, is it true that for recent college graduates, this is a terrible job market? >> Yeah. The money statistic here is that the New York Federal Reserve has been measuring the unemployment rate for young college graduates between about 22 and 27 for the last 30 35 years. So this is a long data set and for the first

19:15 time on record, young college graduates now have a higher unemployment rate than the general population. This has never happened before. Historically, young people coming out of college are hired almost immediately. They are young. They are cheap. They've spent the last four years learning how to get that first job. Something seems to have broken down here now such that the unemployment rate for young college graduates is 20 to 25% higher than the overall unemployment rate. This is not something that we've seen in modern economic history. And that is really the central mystery here. What is it? If you look for the year that this break happened, that the unemployment rate for young folks tended to rise higher and higher, it was around 2022. Well, what else happened in 2022?

20:01 a lot of things. But just to kick things off, CHGBT is released in November of that year. And so a lot of people have been looking to blame artificial intelligence for this suddenly inflating unemployment rate. So when you look at it, you've parsed through a number of things to look at and let's get one technical one out of the way which I think is important which is the unemployment rate is calculated by asking not how many people are unemployed but how many people who are looking for jobs are unemployed and there's good evidence that recent college graduates look for jobs more in other words there are a lot of older people who stop looking for jobs they they they stop participating ating in the labor market. So there may be just some of this that is statistical, right?

20:48 >> That's exactly right. So look, it'd be one thing if it was just young college graduates that were seeing this that were seeing this elevated unemployment. That would suggest that maybe, you know, chat GPT and other large language models that are very good at doing the kind of thing you would expect from a 22-year-old graduate of Penn State University of Virginia, you know, reading writing synthesizing making powerpoints and spreadsheets. All right. Then you would say, "Okay, what's happened is AI is eating these jobs for 22-y old college grads." But here's what makes it a little bit more complicated. If instead of looking at the unemployment rate, which is a little bit complicated for all the reasons that you said, if instead you look at the employment rate, it looks like young folks who didn't go to college are facing the same declines in employment as young people who did go to college.

21:34 And that I think should make us not focus exclusively on artificial intelligence but rather say no something that is bigger is happening to the overall economy that is driving down the hiring rate for young people as a general category. >> And what do you think that is? >> So a lot of things happened in 2022. It would be very convenient for our purposes of you know just explaining the world if the only thing that happened in 2022 was open AI released chatbt. That's not the only thing that happened. Another really big thing that happened is that the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. What is the point of raising interest rates? The point is to cool off demand, to raise the cost of money. And what you've seen since 2022 is that the overall hiring rate in this country has gone down, down, down. So the way to maybe think of

22:21 the US economy right now and in particular the labor market is that all right, on the one hand, the unemployment rate is low, right? Older people who want a job overwhelmingly have a job, but the hiring rate is also low. Young people trying to break into the labor force are finding it hard to break into it. >> Finally, I want you to talk about uh the the the conclusion people draw from all of this is it's not worth getting a college degree. And I think that the data is overwhelming on this subject in one direction, right? >> There is a college wage premium. We can have a debate over whether the college wage premium declined in the last five years or grew in the last five years or is flat in the last five years. But a college wage premium by definition means that if you go to college all things

23:07 equal, you are expected to make a higher wage when you graduate. We have no clear evidence that that has changed. In fact, >> and that's fairly significant, right? That I mean, if you look at it over a lifetime, you're talking about a very large a very >> million dollars. >> Yeah. potentially a million dollars which is a lot of dollars. I think one way to think about technology is that every time technology is introduced to the economy the effect that it has is the same as the effect of the tractor on the working horse. Working horses had a great run for millennia. The tractor was invented and then the population of working horses in America plummeted by 99%. But that's not how most technologies work. Most technologies work more like spreadsheets. Now imagine

23:54 that you and I were commentators in the 1970s and digital spreadsheets are invented things like Excel. And imagine if you and I the only story of technological change that we knew was that of tractors. We would have predicted that the number of spreadsheet workers in America was about to decline by 99%. It didn't. It grew by a factor of about 1 million. Everybody works with spreadsheets now. Excel is on everybody's computer. And so sometimes what technology does is reduce the cost of a task, reduce the cost of a piece of work. And by increasing its efficiency, thereby increase demand for it. Once digital spreadsheet work was easy, everybody suddenly started coming up with work that could be done with Excel. And then you had this explosion of the white collar workforce that was doing work with Microsoft Office. So I would

24:40 encourage people to keep the possibility of both these things in mind. We hear a lot about the AI jobs apocalypse which treats artificial intelligence like tractors and human beings like horses. But I would also encourage people to remember that spreadsheets happened. They were invented and they didn't replace the white collar economy. They grew the white collar economy. It's possible that 20 years from now when you and I are having a conversation in the metaverse or something, we're going to look back and realize that everybody is using claude or open AI chat GPT on their computer. It has turned everybody into an AI worker. It has not led to a world where AI replaced work. >> Derek Thompson, pleasure to have you on. >> Thank you very much. >> Next on GPS, we'll tackle the other side

25:27 of the coin. What should young people do to navigate the difficult job market? We have an interesting answer in a moment. >> This of why the job market is so tough for today's graduates. But I want to focus now on the human side of the problem. These challenges are leaving young people feeling lost and hopeless as they try to begin their careers. A new book from the New York Times investigative reporter Jodie Caner seeks to offer hope and tangible advice for young people as they begin their careers. It is called How to Start Discovering Your Life's Work. Welcome Jody. >> Thank you so much for having me. So this was you were asked to give a speech at your alma mater Colombia the kind of

26:12 undergraduate class day address and you give it and you notice it's going viral. >> What is it about what you said do you think that made it go viral? >> Well the question I was trying to answer in the speech and in the book is what are young people actually supposed to do in this environment? Because we've all seen the negative statistics. We know that it's a grim time for hiring, but that doesn't necessarily help if you're 22 years old and looking to begin your life. So, I thought the compelling and very difficult but worthy question was, what does a positive, productive response look like to this environment? Because almost none of us can afford to give up on work. >> All right, so let's start right at the

27:00 let's let's not bury the lead. What is the best response to this uncertain job environment? >> I think the best response is a to acknowledge that we don't know what's going to happen. I mean, as we speak on a thousand podcasts, you know, there are people stating with great certainty exactly what the future of work will be. I will tell you, we do not know. What I would challenge any person, any young person listening to this today, any parent who's concerned about a young person is I would say don't just look for a job. You're certainly doing that. But I think the great careers are made of a craft and a need. A craft being some expertise or skill that you have

27:45 that other people don't. You want some way of distinguishing yourself in the marketplace. Your craft could be surgery. It could be baking. It could be making a great TV show like this. It could be inventing a new cancer therapy. The other thing that I think everybody should look for, if you have a craft, if craft is authority, you also want to harness yourself to a need. Need is propulsion. Need is what is going to push you forward. We've seen years of conventional wisdom about the supposed right thing to study. I think you'll remember this. When I was in high school, the advice was learn Japanese. And we were told that if you didn't speak Japanese, you were going to be a loser and you were going to be left behind in the world economy. Well, meanwhile, the Japanese stock market

28:31 languished >> became learn Chinese. >> Chinese, genetics, computer science, and these are all obviously great pursuits. But the idea that they are a golden ticket that is going that are going to protect you against disappointments or failures, that's not right. That is just conventional wisdom and herd thinking. So what does need mean then? >> So for need, what I want to ask young people now is, can you use your own eyes and ears to make an independent assessment of what you think society will need over the course of your working life because those needs whether they're business needs or altruistic ones, they propel us forward. The best locators of need that I have seen come from personal experience and often very

29:18 difficult personal experience. There are stories in the book of people who really faced tragedy or serious obstacles and built a career around addressing those problems. >> Tell the story for the story. Yeah. So the this is kind of she is really I think the person more than any who pushed me to write this book because I mean in in the middle of the chaos at Colombia that during the really bad time there they invite me to give the undergraduate commencement address. I have to figure out what to say. The students say to me how are we supposed to find our life's work in this crazy environment and I meet this extraordinary young woman. Exaria wants to be a research psychologist. She wants to get a PhD and she has a very specific reason which is

30:05 that she wants to come up with new forms of addiction treatment because her older brother Keith died of an overdose when she was 11. >> Where is she now? So, Exxaria, I am very happy to tell you, is doing groundbreaking research in addiction at a famous Boston area hospital where she she's just working with top flight people and she's she's really on her way. In the end, the need pulled her through. She was right about our need for better addiction treatment and it pulled her through those obstacles. Uh it's it's a very smart meditation on something I think every person is thinking about because either they're young and worrying about it or they know

30:51 people who are young and worrying about it. >> This this is a generational problem. It really is. >> Thank you, Jody. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Next on GPS, what does one neighborhood in Turkey tell us about that country's sustained democratic backsliding? A compelling new book explores just that. Up next.