John Podhoretz (3:36)

Photographer.

Matthew Continetti (3:39)

Evan Vucci on July 13, 2024. Evan Vucci is the AP photographer who was in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Donald Trump was shot and captured the images of Trump raising his fist surrounded by Secret Service agents with the American flag in the background. This was not mentioned at all during the White House Correspondents association dinner. A complete absurdity that they would give this. I like Doug Mills a lot. He's a great photographer. He's taken great images of Donald Trump over the years. He's taken images of Biden looking, I don't know, out of it, senile, prepared to abandon his attempt to claim a second term, dooming his party in many ways. And yet they chose this image. It's bizarre. And one last point. The honoree, one of the honorees was Alex Thompson of Axios. And I have to say, good on Alex Thompson, because he went up there, accepted the award, and he said that the White House Correspondents association had failed in its responsibility to cover President Biden accurately. And there was no other reporter during the Biden era who actually tried to hold the Biden administration to account. Basic journalistic canons and standards. And you know what he got for it up until this weekend? Scorn. Scorn from his colleagues. And when he was saying this to the White House Correspondents association, there was apparently silence in the room. So once again, the DC Political class but clowned itself.

John Podhoretz (5:15)

I want to read from Alex Thompson's remarks at the dinner. I guess he won an award, which is why he was speaking, by the way, every year at the Correspondence center, they give away, I think, four awards. One is called the Aldo Beckman Award, one is called the Theo von Schman Schmengledek Award, one is called the for Wonderful the glories of being the best hack of the year. The one whose conventional wisdom and completely useless reporting that represents whatever the liberal consensus is in that year. And they give three of them and they celebrate themselves. And then the president, usually in the prior times, comes up and says, you know, every look, the pull and push of politicians and the press, this is our dynamic in American life. And sometimes we are friends and sometimes we are at daggers drawn, but our Constitution and God bless a free press and blah, blah, blah. And then he tells some jokes and he sits down and then some idiot comedian gets up and insults the president, unless he's Obama, in which case he of course, licks the underside of the shoe of the President. And so this is how it goes. So Alex Thompson's remarks were extraordinary in that they represented a moment at which someone within the White House Correspondents association said, we stink. Now, he was able to say this because he doesn't stink, because he, as you say, did try to cover the mental acuity question. And here's what he said. President Biden's decline in its cover up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception. But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better. Again, I've been a two dozen White House correspondent. I have never heard anybody do anything but, but say Edward R. Murrow and Woodward and Bernstein and.

Christine Rosen (7:31)

Yeah, but I have to, I have to push back a little bit on this. And even on Thompson, who I also like and admire for having tried to write this story earlier, we missed some of this. They didn't miss any of this. Everyone knew and they covered it up. And I cannot insist on that enough because a couple of other journalists also did. They're starting this very soft pedal mea culpa. That isn't a true mea culpa. The true mea culpa would lead to people saying, yeah, yeah, we knew and we covered it up because we thought it was better for the country if we didn't know. Just like it happened under FDR and other presidents with. With issues. The other interesting thing about that AP photograph that Matt correctly mentions as the most iconic image of 2024. Recall that lots of out there, there was this whole effort on behalf of the media to suppress using. You never see it.

Matthew Continetti (8:17)

You never see it. In fact, it's so the. There's a painting based on it that hangs in the White House where Donald Trump gave his interview to Time magazine that came out last week and on X journalists and never Trumpers were mocking Trump for giving this interview before the portrait of himself after being shot. So it's not just that no one sees this image which when you do, the power of it is undeniable. It's actively suppressed.

Christine Rosen (8:46)

Right, right. Both hearing and since.

John Podhoretz (8:49)

Yes, look, that's a very fair point and again we will. Alex. Tom Thompson. We will have a moment to judge Alex Thompson when his book that he has co written with Jake Tapper comes out in a couple of weeks about this subject and how much of in what happens in the book will deal with the media's complicity in the COVID up and whether it is this passive voiced or oh my God, what was that? Oh, oh, the blaming handlers who went past me, I really wasn't able to make it out. Did you see the license plate? I couldn't see the license plate.

Christine Rosen (9:26)

The blame has always, so far what, what we've seen is this very careful effort to blame Biden's people rather than themselves.

Matthew Continetti (9:34)

So I have one other point about the White House Correspondents dinner weekend. And this is an equal opportunity offense for offense and that is, you know, it's remarkable to me that the MAGA insurgency which has been roiling American politics for a decade now, beginning to find itself very comfortable in the Corridors of Washington D.C. in particular the social aspects of it. So as I was going through my newsletters every day, you know, kind of crawling out of the deluge of papers that fall on me every morning, I kept noticing all these MAGA celebrities who were at all of the tony White House correspondent hot ticket parties that have been part of this weekend for decades since. And not only are the MAGA celebrities going to the parties and hobnobbing with the D.C. establishment that they've spent a decade critiquing, well, they're starting a club of their own. And one of the big news event items of the past weekend was Donald Trump Jr. Omid Malik and two Witkoff sons forming a new club with David Sacks as well called the Executive Branch, which was going to be a, it's located in a townhome or nice home in Georgetown. Apparently they're spiffing it all up. Membership starts at $500,000 and I learned this morning that some prospective members are offering to pay two times that in order to get off the waiting list. So our, the, the tracking of MAGA from a movement into the new establishment is ongoing and was never in greater relief than this past weekend.

John Podhoretz (11:24)

Georgia. Terrible choice by the way, for a location for this club. It's very hard to park there. They're going to obviously have to have valet parking if they're going to do this right, because it's a nightmarish, you know, 19th century neighborhood in terms of that, that, that sort of thing. This is based on several institutions in New York and in Los Angeles, one here in New York called the Core Club. The idea is that the price point is there not only to ensure a wondrous and lavish Surrounding for you to have your club, but also to make sure that, you know, Riffraff.

Christine Rosen (12:04)

No riffraff.

John Podhoretz (12:04)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (12:06)

Like us. Can't go.

John Podhoretz (12:08)

For me having to party with Donald Trump Jr. And to. Given who Steve Witkoff is and his unbelievably horrid performance, I'm not sure I would want the Nepo Baby Club membership myself. Not that I don't have Nepo Baby credentials on my own, but. But I wasn't really thinking of you as a pure member. But that doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me. Unless what you want to do is, you know, sit around and talk about how you can monetize your, your relatives being running the executive branch and maybe going hunting for yak in Mongolia. That, that would seem to be the two major subjects of fun discussion at the, at the Cry More Libs club here. But I also wanted to. If we're bashing the press, so we get back to bashing the press.

Matthew Continetti (13:05)

Yeah, sure.

John Podhoretz (13:05)

I have to tell you guys about something you did not see. But I saw this morning, just because my wife had on the Today show to see the weather and I saw a segment on the Today show this morning that made my jaw drop. I mean, I'm 64 years old. Like, I think I've seen everything, including from Richard Engel, the NBC News correspondent in the Middle east who has done great work and horrible work over the course of the 20 years that he has been covering the wars and America's, you know, deeper involvement in Middle Eastern matters. From reporting from Tehran, Richard Engel reporting on optimism regarding the Trump administration's efforts to secure a new nuclear deal with Iran. There is renewed optimism, so much optimism you wouldn't believe. And they quoted Trump standing on this tarmac saying he thinks there's going to be a deal and he really thinks there's going to be a deal. Steve Woodcoff, very. Oh, he's there. Optimism, deep optimism. That's not really the story. There were two elements of the story. Number one is there was this gigantic explosion at a port in Iran this weekend. Hundreds and hundreds of people dead. The footage, go look at it is like astounding. And in an effort to pursue this deal, the Iranians almost shamefacedly said that what was clearly, I mean, I know clearly it's not clearly, it is more likely than not that there was some Israeli involvement in this attack on Iran's export capacities. And they said, no, no, it was human error. It's human error. Duh. You know, human error. By the way, as we are now recording. About 15 minutes ago, the Iranian Foreign Ministry released a statement saying they believe the Israelis are involved. So they spent 48 hours. They must have had a fight inside over whether they were going to blame the Israelis or not, because of course this will have some effect on the negotiations in some fashion or other. But Richard Engel, straight facedly looking in the camera, says, no, no, it was human error. As though getting something from the Iranian government is to be trusted. And then he did. And you know what, it's kind of a new day in Iran, he said. Then he showed footage, B roll of a park and a woman in an Iranian park uncovered, playing the violin. And she was playing the violin. And you see just before her arrest is there's new optimism in the streets of Iran about a nuclear deal, which, you know what the Iranian people, the thing they want most in the world is a nuclear deal with the United States. I gotta finish the anecdote. Okay, so first you've got the Iranian woman playing the violin over Engels saying that there's just new hope about it, a nuclear deal that, you know, is just roiling the population of Iran in its hope. And then we cut to an art exhibit and guess what? Right now in Tehran at the Modern Art Museum, which I didn't know Tehran had, and know what he did. And maybe it really hasn't existed until Thursday. There is a modern art show where they are showing works of modern art that have not been shown in Iran in many, many years, including some Picassos that have been in hiding. And then Engel cuts to a woman speaking in English, not clear whether she's a curator or there's no, like Chiron saying who she is or what. And she's like, it is so wonderful for us to see such beauty and to be. It represents a new moment of our time that we are getting to see this incredible beauty here in our beautiful city. And I was like Walter Durante of the New York Times, the creator, the person who created the image of Stalin as the benevolent leader taking the Soviet Union into, you know, new peaceful times in the 20s and 30s. Walter Durante was sitting in hell watching the Today show this morning. And he turned to if Stone and said, well, that's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, if you're gonna be publishing propaganda on behalf of a totalitarian regime, you need to be a little more subtle than Richard Eng. This is on NBC this morning. Shame on him. Shame on the Today show. I'm not getting lectures from 60 minutes on how terrible Trump is and how awful Shari Redstone is for making them clear what they say about Trump and Gaza. That's what I got. That's what I've gotten for five or six days, is CBS sentimentality and nauseating propaganda about how wonderful 60 Minutes is. So that's 60 Minutes. And Richard Engel is not responsible. He is his own evil. And this was an evil piece of propaganda in support of the Iranian government. And he should be ashamed of himself and NBC should be ashamed of themselves. And I could not believe my eyes.

Matthew Continetti (18:17)

Just a couple of things. The first thing is, I think America is suffering a deficit from people playing violins in parks, because whenever I hear a report from another country, there's always that setting of someone playing a violin or viola in a park. This happens often in radio reports from Ukraine that I hear on my morning Hate. Listen NPR first. There's someone, when I go to a park, that's usually I hear a raving homeless person. I don't hear violin. I prefer the violins. So maybe we can create a special visa now that the border is secure for the violin players in the parks. The second thing is this explosion is big. When a similar explosion happened in Beirut several years ago during the pandemic, it created political fissures in Lebanon that are resonating to this day, especially after Israel decapitated Hezbollah there. But the public sentiment toward Hezbollah after this explosion at the Beirut port took a nosedive because it was considered to be a result of stockpiling chemical munitions at the port. And there seemed to be, at least in the first analysis I read, similar indications of this happening in Iran with this huge port explosion. So I think, for me, the lesson of the port explosion is the vulnerability, the continued vulnerability of the Iranian regime. The Iranian people are not going to like this. And that's what makes this piece on today, which I haven't seen, so ridiculous because Engels talking to Iranian people. Right. They're not the problem. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or whoever the regime put in front of him. But the Iranian people are not the problem. The problem is the government. The government is engaged in this diplomatic process not in good faith. They're engaged in the diplomatic process in order to sustain the regime. They know that if they get this deal, Donald Trump will back off, maybe they'll even get some sanctions relief. And so they will be able to refill their coffers and the regime will live another day. When you consider everything else that's happened, whether it's this port explosion, whether it's Israel's annihilation of the Iranian air defense system and some of their ballistic missile factories last year. You should be looking at this as a place to exert continued pressure on the regime eventually to bring it down and let those violin players and the people, the docents at the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran have a better life.

Ryan Reynolds (20:59)

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John Podhoretz (22:01)

All well spoken and indeed maybe it's better for the Iranian regime to blame the Israelis precisely because if you're right, and this is following the model of the port explosion in Beirut, which Israel was not involved were implicated. It was like a classic 19th century horrible industrial error where they put ammonia too close to like a flame. You know, it's like the stories in the 19th century of how people discovered how to start preventing industrial accidents which is you know what? You don't put the hay on the ferry right next to the furnace. If you put the hay on the ferry right next to the furnace and a spark goes, the entire ferry will blow up and 1500 people will die in the Hudson River. Better find a different place where you have to put the hay into a container like that. In Beirut it was literally that they had placed flammable materials and flame in proximity to each other and an entire neighborhood of the city exploded. And that was yes, as you say has had a has had knock on political consequences that are potentially epic making in in that in the Levant. And here we have if if the Iranian regime can get tagged with running its port so incompetently that it led to this event, that there, there are, I think, at least a thousand casualties between the dead and wounded so far. Right.

Matthew Continetti (23:28)

I mean, that's my point. The new hope that Engels talking about is not the hope of the Iranian people, and it's not the hope of anyone who's concerned for a more secure or free world.

John Podhoretz (23:36)

Right.

Matthew Continetti (23:37)

It's the hope of the government of Iran, which is the world's largest sponsor of terrorism and behind so much malign behavior and supporting the Houthis who were bombing constantly, and supporting Hezbollah and supporting Hamas. That's the new hope. And that's a bad hope.

John Podhoretz (23:52)

So we are coming on, I believe, tomorrow it's either the hundred days of, of the. And so Trump has been on a publicity campaign, PR push, interview with Time, interview with the Atlantic, being interviewed by ABC later today. I think there's an NBC interview coming, stuff like that. And here's what's of interest to me, which is, of course, they're all asking him about the chaos and the polonomy. He's like, I'm having fun. He said to the Atlantic something really striking, which is like, basically my first term, I was like, fighting everybody off, and now I'm running the country and I'm running the world. Well, he's not really running the country, particularly, certainly not running the world exactly, except that he's got everybody scared. But it is an interesting perspective that he's like, you know, you know, what you, what you thought last time, everything was chaotic. Actually, it was kind of chaotic because, like, I was just, you know, this pack of animals was running after me and I had to keep running. And now I'm the pack of animals and I'm chasing, chasing everybody else. And then we, of course, have all this polling that has come out, 100 day polling that is terrible for him. And even if, as a couple of people say, you do the Trump poll game, that seems to have been mastered by Trafalgar, one of the polling firms where you just add numbers to Trump's numbers because you figure that he's under polling. So if you figure two or three points, it's not fair. Like, they always say that Trump is doing worse than he is in the polling. Even if you add 2 or 3 points, one of the poll averages has him at 39. So if you add 3 points, he's at 42. That would still make it the lowest number for a president in his first hundred days of any president in modern history.

Matthew Continetti (25:50)

You mean one of the Polls has him at 39.

John Podhoretz (25:53)

Well, so one of the polling averages. No.

Matthew Continetti (25:55)

Well, the RCP average.

John Podhoretz (25:57)

Right.

Matthew Continetti (25:58)

Which Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution, no conservative he has said has been consistently the most accurate. Average has Donald Trump today at 45% approval, 52% approval. That's including the spate of polls from over the weekend. So, okay, his numbers have declined. There's no question about if you took.

John Podhoretz (26:17)

Just the polls of the last, these polls in the last three or four days.

Matthew Continetti (26:22)

Right.

John Podhoretz (26:23)

And not aggregating them over a month or something like that. His best number I think is 42 or 41. 3 or 4, doesn't matter. Forget the polling.

Matthew Continetti (26:34)

45 to 52, RCP not good.

John Podhoretz (26:37)

Under 5 is bad and it's bad for, for a first hundred days, like people.

Matthew Continetti (26:41)

Yeah, but look, I mean, you say the Trump poll game, there, there is something to the fact that pollsters have consistently underrated Donald Trump in three presidential elections.

John Podhoretz (26:53)

I am, I am giving him those points. I give, I'm giving them. Okay, so.

Matthew Continetti (26:58)

And I just want to say why. I mean, it's a combination of things. One is non response bias, which is that as we know, Trump voters don't talk to pollsters, they don't trust pollsters. They especially don't trust pollsters from mainstream media organizations, all of which came out with the polls that we saw this weekend. And the second thing is, how did Donald Trump win in 2024? He won because of low propensity voters. That is when USA Today polled the universe of people who do not vote last year, they found that Donald Trump was winning over, I think then Biden was the candidate. 60, 40.

John Podhoretz (27:34)

Yeah.

Matthew Continetti (27:34)

And so Trump wins the election by 49, 47 over Kamala Harris because his campaign was able to mobilize enough of low propensity voters, people who do not normally vote, to come out for him. Now, how any pollster can capture that universe of low propensity voters, people who are usually disaffected and disillusioned from the political process. How are they going to capture them in a poll, I think is a hard task. So my general take is his numbers are down. There's no question they're not as down as people as people say.

Christine Rosen (28:06)

But the low propensity voter who came out for him in 2024 also was a bit in an elitist tone, criticized by the media because they were, they would recall the first Trump term economy as good. And so that's actually where he is. Still at risk are the people who don't follow the day in day out political jockeying and power struggles that we do. But they're a little concerned about their 401k. They're concerned about the fact that production is slowing down. There are companies that aren't hiring things that aren't happening because of the uncertainty. So on that I think he's still quite vulnerable. The immigration stuff is interesting. You know, they've put up these posters around the White House, 100 wanted illegal immigrants who are accused of crime. And here he's still very lucky in his enemies because the media has continued to try to rewrite the stories of some of the people who the administration has picked up. We have this case of this judge in Milwaukee over the weekend who was arrested for obstructing federal charges, for obstructing ice's ability to come and get someone. And, but every time you go to a media story about, it's fascinating to me, you actually have to dig. You have to dig around. You have to go to, as I did, to the affidavits for some of these cases and actually read the legal filing of charges to understand the narrative of what happened. So he continues, I think, on immigration to have the public at his back, but on the economy, he's, he's, it's very risky. And I don't think him saying things like, hold on, we'll have tax cuts. If you earn less than $200,000, the tariffs will mean you'll never have to pay income tax. This is all a lot of, I hate to say it, word salad that I'm not sure anyone beyond his really core base is going to believe for in another six months.

John Podhoretz (29:42)

Okay. I want to also move. We've been spending. It wasn't like the last week being pretty nasty to Trump. And I want to talk about something that is very important that the Trump administration did last week that is potentially, you know, epical and is worth spending some time talking about in one of these executive orders, which is the, which is the opposing or ending in whatever fashion he can end it, the policy of measuring by disparate impact. That sounds, it's very hard, it sounds obscure or hard to follow. But disparate impact is the applying outcomes to policies and then saying that the policies, if they did not produce particularly here racially balanced or gender balanced or whatever balanced. You want outcomes that, that means that the policy is enacted was unconstitutional or was unjust or unfair and had to be. And had to be changed. So this was racist.

Matthew Continetti (30:53)

Racist or sexist is evidence of discrimination.

John Podhoretz (30:56)

Right. So literally the Civil Rights act of 1964 in the course of its passage, and the arguments over its passage dealt specifically with the question of whether or not what was going to be measured in terms of fairness as a result of passing this legislation was would we have equality of opportunity or would we have equality of outcome? And all of the legislative history, all of the promises made by those who wanted the Civil Rights act passed, all of the, all of the rhetoric around it was we want America to be fair. Everybody needs to get to the starting gate in an equal position. And then we see what happens. Equality of opportunity, the policy of disparate impact, which has been rolled out both in the public and in the private sectors over the past 40 years, but really mostly over the past 20 years, is a deliberate, conscious, self aware and blatantly unconstitutional effort to reverse the equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes policy. Because the idea is come out if the country is 12% black and every industry isn't 12% black, the disparate outcome kicks in and penalties can be assessed on businesses. They can be sued, they can have to go into consent decrees with, you know, under by judges in order to get the result that we should want, which is that everything is either reflective of the population of the United States together or unreflective. As long as it's unreflective on behalf of those who are supposedly have been discriminated against historically. Like it would be fine if a profession went from being 5% black to 50% black. You would not therefore be able to make a disparate impact case that it was something was being unfair to white people.

Matthew Continetti (33:03)

Yeah.

John Podhoretz (33:03)

I mean, because you had.

Matthew Continetti (33:04)

Consider the National Basketball Association.

John Podhoretz (33:07)

Yeah, right. But it's a remedy for past discrimination. So if people weren't discriminated against as a class or a race or a group in the past, you can't make the argument that they're being mistreated according to the theory of disparate impact. And so of all the things that Trump has done, the sort of elimination of DEI in the federal government, some of the other stuff, it's conceivable that this is the most important. And it's important for us to acknowledge that while all the mishegos is going on, there are still very serious things that are coming up that are intellectually sound, that are procedurally proper, and that our efforts to make constitutional the governance of the United States, that is unconstitutional. While you hear that he is a fascist who wants to suspend the Constitution and do everything wrong.

Matthew Continetti (33:59)

So I think this is very important. The first thing to say is this is an executive order that is saying that the executive branch of government, of which Donald Trump is the head, does not countenance disparate impact legal theory. Now, that doesn't make it illegal, right, because a disparate impact was actually constitutionalized, so to speak, by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions in the 70s and 80s. However, what this order will do is trigger legal challenges that, like all the other legal challenges happening in the United States right now, will eventually arise to the Supreme Court. So this might actually have the effect of the Supreme Court revisiting the theory of disparate impact and overturning it, which would be a huge victory for equality in the United States of America. The second thing I'd like to say is, you know how while we live in the Trump era, we're always trying to kind of post hoc ascribe intellectual influences or say, oh, these are the books that best represent what's happening through Trump at any given moment. And the first term, of course, the books that we associated with Donald Trump was Hillbilly Elegy by a certain J.D. vance, but also a book called the Virtue of Nationalism by the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazoni. Those two books were said to be the kind of texts you needed to read if you wanted to understand what was happening Trump. Trump's appeal to working class Americans in the case of Hillbilly Elegy, and then also kind of the theory of nationalism that informed Trump's comments consistently that he is a nationalist with Hazoni. I have to say, 100 days into Trump too, the book to read is the Age of Entitlement by our friend and colleague Christopher Caldwell, came out in 2020. The reception was pretty hostile by the intellectual elite. It was picked up by Tucker Carlson in particular, and Tucker Carlson's support, I think, helped make the Age of Entitlement a bestseller. But now, if you were to read Chris's book, which is exactly about how the Civil Rights act of 1964 evolved into something very different than what its legislators intended, you would have a clear eyed view of what Trump is doing. Abolishing dei, affirmative action and now a disparate impact from the executive branch and attempting to reset the American government at the level of equal opportunity as people thought we were going to get when the Civil Rights act was enacted in 64.

John Podhoretz (36:41)

To back off a little from the wholehearted endorsement of the age of Entitlement as provided here by Matt, Chris worked with us at the Weekly Standard, old friend of ours, he believes that the Civil Rights act of 1964 was a disastrous error. I believe otherwise, like, because he thinks, like it was a natural outcome, outgrowth of the Civil Rights act of 1964, that, that, that all of this stuff happened. And the interesting thing to me, I believe, is that we are. We find ourselves at a time at which what is going to destroy DEI and disparate impact and stuff like that is the Civil Rights act of 1964 properly applied. Because what the Supreme Court did in the 70s under the, you know, the Burger Court and others was go antinomian to some extent and decide that they would allow this but not allow that, and take a little bit of this and take a little bit of that, because the purpose was to have a more just society. And they could cobble together 5, 4 cases in favor of certain types of things. But that the civil. But as I say, both the legislative history of the Civil Rights act of 64 and its plain language, were it not for the Civil Rights act of 64, the things that are important in terms of the war on the universities, the stuff about anti Semitism and all this, I mean, we can argue about whether other things have gone too far or have muddied the waters. That's all because of the Civil Rights act of 64. It's Title 6 of the Civil Rights act of 1964 that has been violated by these universities that are not, in fact, protecting students equally according to its provisions. Without that on the books, it's not clear to me that you would have this lane into. Into going at the corruption of the schools.

Christine Rosen (38:56)

So this, this was, this is important because if you remember during the four years of the Biden administration, that was the effort to start talking only about equity, to stop talking about equality of opportunity and that, and to frame that in all of the administrative agencies in terms of the application of regulation and the capture of the institutions, particularly academia in the 70s, 80s, 90s, they were practicing a form of equity all along, but they were calling it, you know, disparate impact came into play. We should also not avoid the fact that HR departments and corporations were playing this game for years as well, voluntarily. So it is. It is a very dramatic. It would be a very dramatic thing, as Matt says, to have a case revisit all of these claims again, because it affects a lot more than just academia and more than just the federal government.

Matthew Continetti (39:43)

I just want to add, too, it's exactly for this reason that the administration, I think, should be slightly more, let's say, accommodating or friendly to the Supreme Court, because A whole lot is riding on this administration. It's not just immigration policy or a certain interpretation of the Alien Enemies act from the 18th century. And whether the members or accused members of Trend Aragua can be shipped off without a hearing. There are multiple different legal challenges at work here. And the most important, it seems to me, are the ones affecting equality of opportunity as understood by the Authors of the 1964 Civil Rights act and by the founders, the framers of this country, which turns 250 years old next year. So if you get into a crisis with the courts, as some of Donald Trump's advisors are urging him to do, that could actually have knock on effects which ruin our chances of making substantive gains for equality as understood by the founders of the United States.

John Podhoretz (40:55)

Axios has produced a document today. You can go to one of their newsletters and find it, a very helpful document which is a timeline of the actions taken by the administration and the count and the responses to it by, you know, over, over the 100 days, which I commend to everybody's attention. I'm trying to find it here just to give you a taste of it. Pretty striking.

Matthew Continetti (41:28)

You mean it's this, this calendar thing.

John Podhoretz (41:30)

This calendar. So it basically goes from the 20th of January till 9 and till, till, till today and now I.

Matthew Continetti (41:38)

And you can do it? Well, you can do, it's right here. I can send you the link here. But what in particular did you want.

John Podhoretz (41:43)

To talk about, point out is that here is what it looks like it is. Trump does X suit immediately filed.

Matthew Continetti (41:53)

Right.

John Podhoretz (41:54)

Trump does Y suit. There is no action that the Trump administration has taken either doge actions, personnel actions, policy, whatever that have not immediately been moved into the judicial system, the judicial system. And so the fight of the hundred days is going to go on. These 100 days are going to define the next four years in this sense, which is everything they do is going to go into a courtroom. And the, and while people on the MAGA right, who are nihilistic revolutionaries and want to see massive, want to see constitutional confrontations that I don't believe. And Trump pretty much says in all of these interviews he does not want to see either all the rhetoric about the Jacksonian, oh, let's see if the Supreme Court can enforce what it wants, he's not there with that. That is something more that is going on in other corners, either of the administration or of the maga, right. He, he is willing to like throw the, throw the hand, you know, put his, put his chips into the middle of the table and See, if he wins the pot when the court. And if the court doesn't, fine, whatever. And if it does, fantastic. But that's what's actually happening in the American dynamic that I think we lose sight of. Is he scaring the bejesus out of liberals on campus and in the healthcare and all over the place? Yes. Is that helpful to him? Yes and no. Hard to say. In other words, it's helpful because it unites the right. It makes it clear to the sort of liberal, leftist, NGO government academic nexus that they are, they are. They now have a pretty relentless opposition that is no longer accepting their ability to set the standards and sort of set the calendar and set the general approach on these matters. So they haven't had this blowback except in a couple of places, Wisconsin in 2011, Florida maybe in 2021, 22. But of course, across the United States and in the federal government, there's been very little of this, including in the first Trump administration. So is that. That's very serious. That's culturally very serious. They're scared, they're nervous, they don't know what's happening. They haven't had to fight these battles. But again, in the end, what's happened is policies are being advanced, including the policy on disparate impacts, and it's going. There's going to be an adjudication process. It would be better if the adjudication process, as we have been saying forever now, took place as a result of Congress.

Christine Rosen (44:51)

Interview. I was going to interrupt to say the one missing piece is this, is this legislative body that could actually encode a lot of this stuff did in the past. I mean, this was a large piece of legislation. It could encode a lot of the good parts of the executive orders. It could encode stuff about tariff power. I mean, they have the power to do all of this as legislation and that is what the founders wanted them to do. And they are not doing that. They just, they're barely getting budgets passed. So that's actually an area where the weakness of Congress right now could provide both ballast to some of Trump's better instincts and a bit of a break on some of his worst instincts.

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John Podhoretz (46:58)

The problem there historically is that if you want to take the Civil Rights act as an example, it's important to remember that when Lyndon Baines Johnson won his gigantic 1964 election, that election night ended with the Democrats having 69 Senate seats, 69 Senate seats and I believe 100 seat majority in the House, following which were 22 months of legislative accomplishment. If you believe passing bills counts as legislative accomplishments the likes of which the country had never really seen before and will never really see again, gigantic earth changing pieces of not only the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act, the creation Medicare, four or five fair housing, four or five different things that happened that were of such size that we have been digesting them like the elephant in the snake in the Little Prince. We've been digesting them for 60 years and the effect that they've had. And here we have a two or three seat majority in the House and a three seat majority in the Senate or two seat majority in the Senate and there's just no way for Congress to do what we even we would want Congress to do.

Matthew Continetti (48:29)

Well, the filibuster makes it very difficult.

John Podhoretz (48:31)

The filibuster raises the senate majority from 50 to 60, the necessary majority right from 50 to 60.

Matthew Continetti (48:37)

It's very hard to encode this type of social legislation. Yeah, or much of anything when you need a 60 vote threshold. And because Americans are, you know, closely Divided, it's, it's almost impossible. So that, that's one reason Congress is weak. There are a whole lot of other reasons. But, yeah, it would be ideal if a lot of this was passed into law. I would also make it more sustainable because you always have to think about, well, what would President Aoc do? And of course, the first thing she would do is reverse almost everything Trump has done through executive order, because that's exactly what Biden did when he came to office in 2021 and then imposed executive orders of his own. Congress bypasses that whole problem by actually following the procedures set out in the Constitution.

John Podhoretz (49:32)

And this raises an interesting philosophical question about, about the Trump efforts and the way MAGA thinks about them, which is there isn't a national consensus for revolutionary change in the United States. But on the other hand, there wasn't a national consensus for revolutionary change in the United States under Biden either. And he used emergency powers, emergency authority, and various forms of chicanery to enact changes that the American people neither wanted nor needed, nor thought were fair, nor.

Christine Rosen (50:11)

Could afford in many cases, or could afford.

John Podhoretz (50:13)

And the Democratic Party suffered gravely as a result of its overreach. And so this is where you start thinking, well, sometimes lessons are procedural. And if you don't have this, this was a very important election. Something new happened that never hasn't happened in modern era. Guy getting reelected after losing, certainly after all these trials and everything like that, and very important election, very interesting election. But did the American people vote for radical change?

Matthew Continetti (50:46)

Well, maybe. According to the Fox News voter analysis, something like 70% of the electorate wanted either substantial or radical change in the way business was done in the United States. And it is a funny thing when you look at these polls. Again, I concede the premise that Trump's political standing has slid over the course of 100 days, especially since March when we started approaching Liberation Day and subsequent to the Liberation Day, reciprocal tariffs. But many Americans vote support for what Trump Trump wants to do. It's that they have doubts in these polls about how he's going about it. And so if you ask me, which no one has, but I'm going to ask myself, why have, why have we seen this deterioration in Trump's position? I would give two reasons. One is the tariffs. The tariffs have introduced economic uncertainty into the equation at a time when Americans still not quite feeling the economy, even though some of the macro numbers are pretty good. Again, the same kind of dynamic we had during Biden a lot. The tariffs are just another kind of disruptor, one that especially when our relationship with China will have severe consequences in the next six months economically. So that's one reason. And the other reason is there's just so much happening. The volume of change, I think, has made voters kind of stand back and just their jaws kind of agape. And what's necessary is someone, someone explaining it. And no one, no one's really done a very good job at explaining what's happening. We have the ceremonies where Trump signs these orders every day. The staff secretary, Will Scharf, kind of explains what the order does, Trump comments on it, then he signs it. You know, we have Caroline Levitt, who's I think, a very effective press secretary. But in terms of kind of focusing on one or two things and taking the American people through, here's the problem, here's what we're going to do about it. This is what you might expect. And not just doing that in the Liberation Day speech on the South Lawn with the big chart and pointing out how Cambodia is ripping us off, those Cambodians, but doing it every day. That's, that's, I think, the missing element here. Trump is accessible every day, but we don't really get kind of a sustained argument that's repeated on a daily basis.

Christine Rosen (53:16)

But that's because the philosophy behind the tariffs doesn't work. I mean, this idea of bringing manufacturing back to America and the way that he, when he does get to the argument phase of it, he's wrong on that, too, and it's not persuasive. That's why I think he talks at the sort of 30,000 foot level. And it's always bringing back this, bringing back that, making America great again. And his base loves that because they see a sort of, they have a kind of nostalgic understanding of what that would look like. But if you talk to anyone who runs a factory or does any form of manufacturing and they start explaining to you how that doesn't work and where are, where our strength as a nation is in terms of business, it isn't in manufacturing. In most cases, we have other skills and most people aren't going to. You know, the poll that really struck me was the one where they asked American Republican MAGA types, you know, should we bring manufacturing back to the US And I was like, yes. And then they followed up with, would you want to work or your family member want to work in a factory? Absolutely not. So there is a disconnect there in the rhetoric. And I do worry to the, to Matt, to your correct point, about whether or not he's Explaining things well, you know, what gas was to Biden in that early summer of his first of his administration, what eggs ended up being, that's going to be toys at Christmas. If he doesn't get his head wrapped around what's going on with China, toy prices are going to spike. Lots of the kinds of things that Americans expect to buy inexpensively will be expensive. And he, I don't think his explanation of just keep holding on, trust me, trust me is going to work in a few months. I mean it's working now for him. But I'm not sure sustainable.

John Podhoretz (54:46)

I just don't think that that rational country that is just trying to get along with itself day to day life likes to look at Washington and see what appears to be chaos. Like, I just don't think that redounds to the benefit of a president that doesn't necessarily look like radical change.

Christine Rosen (55:04)

It just looks like mucking around with the free market and letting the economy, you know.

John Podhoretz (55:09)

Right. I just think it's very hard, sorry, if you hear the noise outside my window. I just think it's very, very hard to, to separate out what is, you know, relentless efforts to improve American life for the better by changing the basis under which the liberal elites have undermined our economy, our regulatory state and our, you know, our ability to do things fairly and have, as I say, equality of opportunity instead of equality result. And then just a general sense that everything has gone haywire. Now that isn't necessarily we're down solely to him because we keep talking about him because he's the colossus who, you know, he is the bestriding the narrow world like a colossus. Of course, the Democratic party is at 29, 28, 27% in the polls. There is no leader of the Democratic Party. The people who are sitting on the.

Christine Rosen (56:04)

Capitol steps this weekend. John, how dare you? How dare you.

John Podhoretz (56:08)

Yeah. J.D. pritzker, the obese billionaire governor of Illinois, reporting that what he wants is mass mobilization and mass action in the streets of the country so that Republicans do not know a moment of peace. This is how he essentially begins what is clearly going to be a presidential campaign in 2028. You think that message, not that the American people in general are going to hear it, but if it's sort of what emanates out of the Democratic Party, even though what he's doing is speaking to Democratic activists and trying to get a leg up as he introduces himself to them as a national figure, you think that's American? People want to hear that. Here's what we Need a lot of mass action in the streets. A moment of priest and yeah, implicit.

Christine Rosen (56:52)

But they think Trump. This is the big debate among Democrats right now. Right. Do they need a figure that can rival Trump, can be Trump like and kind of rally the base plus those swing voters, or do they need someone different and who. Or do they need the kind of go back to the Bernie 2.0 and AOC oligarchy nonsense?

Matthew Continetti (57:11)

You know, I thought John Ellis of the News Items newsletter had a good item over the weekend where he pointed out the discrepancy you described, John, which is, you know, Trump has lost ground. He's not as popular as he was when he was inaugurated. On the other hand, the Democrats haven't gained any ground. They're still extremely unpopular. They have no leadership. Bernie and AOC are not the way forward for the Democrats. Nor. Nor are Pritzker or Cory Booker, who really seems serious about running and is all over the place and was on Capitol Hill over the weekend, like Christine said. So what does that leave us with? And John Ellis pointed out in this item, there might be an opening for independent candidates. People who say, I'm neither MAGA nor the Democratic Party, I'm something new and I'm going to try to be commonsensical and normie.

John Podhoretz (58:02)

That's like Trump. Right. Essentially, Trump was that candidate. We keep saying there's no independence, There are no independents, and the independents can't win. And they're right. So what Trump modeled and what Trump created was the model of an independent candidacy that moved inside of one of the two political parties. And that's. No one's coming in as a third party candidate. Creating a third party and winning in 2028. The structure of our, the structure of how we run elections makes that almost insuperably impossible. But could somebody be a Trump of the Democrats? Sure. I mean, unless the Democratic Party's nominating structure. There was a way in which to do this in the Republican Party's nominating structure because of the nature of how primary delegates were allocated. That is a different story in the Democratic Party. But the independent candidacies will be. It's not a governor, it's not a senator, it's not a congressman, it's an ex. Somebody. Right. So that's why people say there's.

Christine Rosen (59:06)

I was joking with you.

John Podhoretz (59:07)

But even a Smith. Right. There's the.

Christine Rosen (59:09)

Well, no, they're saying, like Mark Cuban. That's the one I've heard all my Democratic friends.

John Podhoretz (59:13)

Right. So Stephen A. Smith would be the celebrity. Yeah. Or whatever. Yeah. Or movie star, you know, George Clooney when he's finished up with his Broadway run. I don't care. I don't know who it is. And I, and I. And by definition, I shouldn't know who it is. Right. Because that person has to come out of nowhere and knock everybody, like, sideways. And at this point in the 2016 nominating process, Donald Trump was still kind of a joke in the middle of 2013. If I had said to you Donald Trump was gonna be the nominee in 2016, even though we had been talking about Trump as a potential presidential candidate for almost 25 years at that point, he started talking about running for the presidency in 1988, not that anybody knew who he was or.

Matthew Continetti (60:00)

He ran for president in 2000.

John Podhoretz (60:01)

He ran for president briefly in 2000. Exactly. So it's. So it's not like you. Maybe there's somebody on the scene who would, who would fit that model. But, but that is. Right. So the Democratic Party is, as in, in some ways in worse order than the Republican Party and is acting as though it isn't. But I want to go. Christine mentioned this, and we should talk about this and then close. We have to talk about the judge in Milwaukee because this is a very important story about what is going on inside the mind of the Democratic Party. This judge, Judge Dugan, who is an elected judge. Right. Elected Milwaukee County. In Milwaukee County. So I think we can all agree that even though elections are important, all that. There's something about elected judges that makes us all, in the American context, makes us all a little uncomfortable. Right. Because they're basically part of a political machine. And it's weird. And they usually come out of activity, either conservative or liberal activism. And so they have. They're beholden to other forces and they're part of movements when they get in. And. Okay. But in any case, all you need do is read the affidavit of the FBI agent who arrested her. And unless that agent is spinning a complete fabricated fantasy of what happened on the morning of the arrest of Judge Dugan, Judge Dugan is guilty as sin. Like open and shut case guilty as sin. This is a timeline in this affidavit. It's a 13 page affidavit that lays out what happened in that courtroom that morning while they attempted to. While ICE attempted to detain this.

Christine Rosen (61:50)

Well, he was standing trial for abuse, physically abusing women who were in the courtroom at the time to face him.

John Podhoretz (61:57)

Yes. So they, ICE and the. They, they. There were all these rules that were stipulated that some parts of the courthouse were deemed to be public areas. Some parts were deemed to be private areas. It would be okay for them to detain this guy in the public area, which was one of the hallways, but not in a courtroom and not in one of the private areas like a chambers or something like that. And that she, as she was negotiating with and they were negotiating with the chief justice or whoever the guy who runs the courthouse is, he wasn't there. So he was doing it over the phone and she was getting angrier and angrier. And then she took occasion to move this guy through a door through which they had been. They had agreed not to enter and to bar their entry and into a private area that is a path of passageway for the judges to travel. Not in the. Not in the open, not in the open hallways and stuff like that. And then to lead him down into her chambers and then down through a door onto the street, at which point they had to chase him down and arrest him because she was attempting to release him.

Christine Rosen (63:15)

He would have gotten away. If he hadn't taken a wrong turn.

John Podhoretz (63:18)

Hadn'T been for those meddling kids, he would have gotten away. But I mean, she literally let him flee through a back door from the courthouse rather than be apprehended by ICE as the judge in the case that she was supposed to hear because he had apparently been, you know, or was accused of being violent toward these witnesses. It. So she's dead. Like, she did it. She's got. And Tammy Baldwin, Senator of Wisconsin and Amy Klobuchar, Senator of Minnesota, are.

Christine Rosen (63:53)

Jimmy Rustin and Henry Quail are sending her a bunch of Democrats.

John Podhoretz (63:59)

This is like a time bomb. I'm sorry, but again, this case is going to go through. We're not done with this case has just started. She's going to be prosecuted, right? She's going to. She's in a federal court system. Like the FBI is not going to let this go, NOR Will the U.S. attorney in Wisconsin, I imagine. And the idea that leading figures in the Democratic Party defended a judge for trying to let an illegal alien fleet a legally executed. They did it the way they're supposed to do it. Not like the, you know, Abrego Garcia case. Like they had a warrant. They had him. They were getting take him and put him in, deport him based on a judge's order. And it is, it is so interesting.

Matthew Continetti (64:49)

It is connected to Abrego Garcia because again and again in the past couple weeks, who is the Democratic Party representing? Are they representing American citizens who presumably voted them into office? They seem to be representing illegal immigrants. I mean, I was always struck. I wasn't on the show. But when the Maryland Mann case broke and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he was going down there to set cot. To visit, to visit Abrego Garcia, my constituent. My constituent. Well, illegal immigrants are not supposed to vote. In fact, they're not supposed to be in the United States. That's why they're illegal immigrants. But if you view them as your constituents, it means that they're who you're representing. And I think that mentality exists throughout the progressive left that the people in this country are their constituents, whether they're here legally or not. And that will motivate people like Judge Dugan in this indictment to go cut corners and violate the law and then have the same response by senators like Amy Klobuchar. It's kind of an upside down view of who you're supposed to be representing. And I think it's also a sign of just how important illegal immigration is to the Democratic coalition that sense that unless illegal immigrants are amnestied sometime before the next census, the Democratic Party is going to have severe problems getting to 270 electoral votes because of the internal migration of the US citizenry toward red America. That really leaves blue state senators with, with illegal immigrant populations as the only basis for potential support and electoral growth. And just finally, over the weekend, I was slightly amused by Andrew McCabe. No Trump lover, he former FBI official, now a CNN commentator who commenting on the case in Wisconsin, said, yeah, if the indictment's true, she probably broke the law. But, you know, couldn't they have just been a little bit nicer to her?

John Podhoretz (67:16)

Right.

Matthew Continetti (67:16)

Did they have to arrest her this way? Couldn't they have just had a phone call or something like that? Again, that mentality is, let's just, let's just sweep this under the rug.

Christine Rosen (67:25)

Apparently a former president's home or apparently bad.

John Podhoretz (67:30)

What was bad was the cash. Patel, the director of the FBI, tweeted out a photo of the judge being led out of this. Another back door.

Christine Rosen (67:42)

It's a perp walk.

John Podhoretz (67:43)

It wasn't. But it wasn't a perp walk. It was the opposite of a perp walk. There was a car waiting for her, a door open. She was walked into the car. Somebody was there to take a picture. And Patel tweeted the picture out and this was like, oh, how could he, how could, how, how, how could you know how he could. Because this is going to destroy the Democratic Party. They don't understand. It's like they haven't grasped yet. And again, I only say this because like I said about the 99 day calendar in Axios and everything, what has happened over these three months is the subject of the next four years. And this case, which will presumably take a couple of months, if not a year to work itself through the system isn't going away. And the story will be told over and over and over again about how a judge sought to effectuate the fleeing of a legitimately busted illegal alien from ice. And like that is gonna be incredibly unhelpful to Democrats. And they better like splash some cold water on their face. Because unlike some of these other cases, the key thing here is that this reveals a secondary and important point about the war on the elites, which is that people like Judge Dugan and others believed that they were somehow immune from judgment. She could do this because she was a judge and could get away with it, or she didn't even think she was. She's righteous by her by.

Christine Rosen (69:38)

It's clearly ideological. She has worked with immigrant populations before.

John Podhoretz (69:42)

Being a judge, it didn't occur to her that she could get busted. Just like it didn't occur to anybody at Harvard or Yale or anywhere else that they were going to be held to account if they patronize their squeaky wheel, gutter supported terrorists on campus, as opposed to the Jewish students who are nice and they keep their heads down and they're nice and liberal and their parents only want them to get through so they can go to law school, that there were going to be consequences if they went this way because no one had ever force them to face consequences. And that's maybe the most important thing about disparate impact and other things like that. And what Trump has done in these last 100 days that are worthy of celebration, even if you are worried about other aspects of it, which I am very much, which is they thought that they had control of the American conversation on these matters and they don't. And they are. And the American people spent four years having their rights abridged being told what to do about when they could go to the beach or take their kids to the playground or what, or, or, or what they could do when it came to vaccination or what adults now here, all that stuff. And they were like, no, I'm sorry, you guys have gone way too far. You, you want to talk authoritarians. You guys are the authoritarians. I don't like this. And they're, now they're reminding people of who they were in 2024. They think all they need to do is say Trump's the bad guy and they're in the clear and they're behaving like the same bad guys they were before.

Matthew Continetti (71:30)

It's called entitlement, which is why the title of that Caldwell book, which the Age of Entitlement struck people as a little odd in 2020. But now I think makes perfect sense to me because it's the same entitlement mentality. Whether you're talking about the judge or whether you're talking about Harvard University or you're talking about Mahmoud Khalil. Of course I'm entitled to come to this country and spend my time harassing Jewish students and proclaiming my enmity for everything the American state and nation and its ally Israel stands for. That. It's. It's entitlement moment. It's everywhere.

John Podhoretz (72:06)

I also want to remind people we're going to mention Mahmoud Khalil to say this every single time this comes up. Mahmoud Khalil is in jail in Louisiana because he chooses to be in jail in Louisiana. If he said, I'm getting on a plane to Beirut tomorrow or in six hours, they would open the cell door, they would put him in a cab, they would take him to Hartsfield Jackson Airport, and he would get on a plane to Beirut, American, and he would.

Matthew Continetti (72:36)

Step off the plane able to go wherever he wanted, unlike some of the accused Trend members who go straight to set cot right in a jail cell.

John Podhoretz (72:47)

Right. I'm just saying he's in jail by his own choice because they're not going to let him out. Even though he's married to an American. Secretary of State is permitted under the law to find that his presence in the United States is inimical to the interests of the United States. There seems to be very little in the way of any kind of check on the Secretary of State's ability and authority to do that. The only issue is that he's married to an American and that she had a baby. And isn't it mean they didn't let him go to the delivery room? Well, you know what? You know who didn't get to go to the delivery room? There are about 30 people who had babies in Israel over the course of the last 18 months whose families were murdered, whose fathers were murdered on October 7th, and they didn't get to go to the delivery room. And he celebrated their demise. So as far as I'm concerned, he can rot Louisiana, or he can go to Beirut or go to Algeria, where his passport is from, or go to unra, where he worked or do whatever he wants and his wife can get on a plane with the baby and go live with him or stay here. That's up to her. But asking me to cry tears for this monster on my shores, not going to work. And he doesn't have a leg to stand on. So anytime someone says, oh, it's so mean. He's in jail in Louisiana. It's not mean. He's there by choice. He is staying there by his own choice because he could just get out right now. He just can't be in the United States.

Matthew Continetti (74:34)

Okay.

John Podhoretz (74:35)

All right. So anyone have anything to recommend?

Christine Rosen (74:40)

I mean, I'm enjoying the new season of hacks, but I always like hacks, so it's great.

John Podhoretz (74:46)

So that's a pro hacks.

Christine Rosen (74:48)

Pro hacks. But I've already recommended hacks, so I'm still working my way through all the Matsumoto Japanese crime fiction, so already recommended.

Matthew Continetti (74:55)

Hacks and Japanese crime fiction. Can't go wrong.

John Podhoretz (74:58)

Yeah. If they only did anime hacks.

Christine Rosen (75:01)

What?

John Podhoretz (75:01)

If they only did an anime version of hacks? You would be in heaven. I know.

Matthew Continetti (75:07)

What would Jean Smart look at like, as anime character? I know it's a little big.

Christine Rosen (75:14)

She's very strategic. It's great. There we go.

John Podhoretz (75:16)

Okay. So. All right. Well, we will be back tomorrow for Christina. Madam John Pothorotz. Keep the candle burning.