Christine Rosen (10:16)

One more, one more. I have to add one more. The disbanding of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon, the in house Pentagon think tank that, that talks about strategy, that researches strategy, long term readiness wars under Andy Marshall, credited with helping helping us win the Cold War. That's been disbanded and it's not exactly clear why, but that's, it's a little office most people don't know about, but that has done really far seeing work over the last many decades. So that's gone.

Jon Podhoretz (10:46)

Although that's a weird thing because the Office of Non Assessment was important because of Andy Marshall. Andy Marshall gone. So I don't know what it's done since Andy Marshall's.

Christine Rosen (10:57)

It's doing the same thing it was always doing.

Abe Greenwald (10:59)

I know, but paid, it paid Stefan Halper to talk to George Papadopoulos.

Jon Podhoretz (11:05)

That's, that's exactly right. So there is, there is.

Abe Greenwald (11:07)

I mean it did a lot else. I mean the main, the main worry with the Office of Net Asset Assessment being closed is a lot of its work in recent years has been about competition with China. And so the worry is that if that work is not done elsewhere, then we could be denying ourselves an important source of information. And it could also mean that some of the more non interventionist types that have been embedded in the Pentagon want to shut down that work because they're not interested in competition with China. They're interest in sending the, the cruiser to the Gulf of America, which also happened over the weekend. If you simply list what happens over a given time period. John, we're going to spend the whole podcast just listening to the news because it's, it's constant. It never, never stops.

Matthew Continetti (12:02)

I'm still thinking of things you missed.

Jon Podhoretz (12:04)

Yeah, go ahead, please.

Matthew Continetti (12:06)

The, the astronauts were picked up. Wasn't that since our last have not been picked up?

Abe Greenwald (12:11)

Well, they're there. They're going to come down tomorrow, Wednesday.

Jon Podhoretz (12:14)

They met them with the alien SpaceX. SpaceX hooked up. And in fact, Sean Duffy, our transportation secretary, of course, the reason the astronauts are marooned on the space station is that the first Boeing space vehicle was used to send them up and it broke. Boeing's Starliner broke. And Sean Duffy this weekend said Boeing stinks. And the federal government is going to basically intervene since Boeing is basically pretty much all we have left in the world of commercial flight. The federal government is going to kind of, you know, with all of the crashes and the, and the Dreamliner problems and787s and all of that. And now it can't, now it's we, we actually sent precious human cargo to space and the craft broke down and it was deemed too unsafe to even attempt to bring them back to earth. On the Boeing, this is a very big issue. This is part of the Abe Greenwald nothing works anymore and everything is broken theme that Boeing, which was one of the world's most impressive companies, has clearly fallen into decrepitude. I don't know how else you can look at it with large scale consequences for one of our major industries. So that is a good thing anyway. This is just three days. Three days in America, ladies and gentlemen. Three days in America. So what do we, oh, and of course, you know, we haven't talked about the mood. The general mood now is among, I would say, the resistance. There is no resistance because there's no mass movement. But the resistance now is represented by the liberal intellectual elite, has now turned decisively toward it is Germany. It's Germany in some, I don't know, some years it's 1931, some it's 1933, some it's getting close to 1938. I can't make sense out of what year in Germany it is, which is why it's such a terrible analogy. But the new McCarthyism is abroad because academics are frightened. They're can I say something about that, though?

Matthew Continetti (14:38)

I think Trump seems to want them to go, to go down that road. He does things that project illegitimacy even when they're legitimate. And I think it's part of his trolling. But there may be some strategic thinking to it here. It's kind of Steve Bannon esque. Really.

Abe Greenwald (15:09)

Well, you have to make the other.

Matthew Continetti (15:10)

Side go so crazy.

Abe Greenwald (15:11)

Have the liberal intelligentsia defending USAID Mahmoud Khalil, members of Trend Agua, Aragua, Aragua, and now targeting Chuck Schumer as some type of Republican simp. I mean, the administration's moves, whether they're strategic or not, has put the Democrats and the left in a ideological tailspin.

Jon Podhoretz (15:44)

Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, whom I quoted last week, has said explicitly that we are now living in an authoritarian.

Abe Greenwald (15:53)

Yeah, yeah, look at Twitter. I mean, much less I don't go on Blue sky, but I can only imagine what they're saying there.

Jon Podhoretz (16:01)

But the reaction on Blue Sky. Great piece on Blue sky in the April issue of Commentary by James B. Meigs, and I'll check it out once again, commentary.org, jamesB Meg's April issue. Subscribe to Commentary. You can read it. You're lucky then can read Christine Rosen and Matt Continetti and me in this issue.

Christine Rosen (16:21)

Anyway, there's there's a reaction going on now, particularly about the academic pseudo McCarthyist stuff that's similar to what's going on with the anniversary of the COVID pandemic talk, and that's that there'll be this small nod to excess. Like in the New York Times, we hear, well, maybe we shouldn't have shut down schools, but here's all the other things that happened, and I see this. There was a lengthy essay in the opinion section of New York Times this weekend, going deep into how scared everybody is on campuses and isn't this terrible? And people won't even speak to me, Megan O'Rourke writing this piece because they're so fearful. And there is, I think, three lines in this lengthy piece that say, well, yes, I mean, there was some excess on the part of people on the left for policing speech and whatnot. However, this is something else entirely, and that doesn't fly any longer because, again, the need for reckoning on some of these campuses is long overdue. And that's where I tend to have some sympathy with the trolling aspect of much of what's going on with the Trump administration, because these campuses, their own administrators, their own professors were happy to ignore the abuse of Jewish students, driving out opinions that differed from their own, you know, harassing professors who happen to be who didn't happen to share their progressive views for decades. So in that sense, I think I've become. I will sound very Trumpy here, but the way that they're approaching this is with a blunt instrument, because that's what's called for on campuses which have never really respected free speech, have certainly been McCarthy ist in their own tendencies on the progressive left. So I kind of this nod to, oh, yeah, we might have been a little excessive ourselves.

Jon Podhoretz (17:53)

No.

Abe Greenwald (17:53)

Can I just add, you know, people talking about authoritarianism, a rando district judge telling the President of the United States that he's got to turn a plane around filled with gang members just because he's decided this. It's kind of, I mean, it's certainly an exercise of power that strikes many people as disproportionate to the, to the role. Right.

Jon Podhoretz (18:22)

And, and it's not just him. There are three or four other judges.

Abe Greenwald (18:26)

This has been the case throughout, whether it's this guy in Rhode island with the spend a freeze. Right. There's a judge in New York. This was part of. Let's just talk about the Biden administration strategy for a minute. Biden and Schumer spent four years stalking the district courts with folks who are very left for precisely this reason that they can issue these national injunctions. And they, if Trump is trying to do these things with the blunt force instrument to see what sticks, so are the district judges. They're trying to stop it, and then we'll see. And I think it was interesting that the White House came out last night amidst this very, very important case about the flights to El Salvador containing the accused Venezuelan gang members. The White House said, look, we're not, we're not disregarding the judicial order. The planes were in the air. There's a difference, as John pointed out, between the written order and the verbal order he gave. And so they are saying that they're trying to comply with these district judges, who are in many ways just as flagrant and just as arbitrary as the Trump administration is being made out to be.

Jon Podhoretz (19:49)

Can I tell a story? Going to the old man with the anecdote that's supposed to reveal the truth. I had a moment once, literally 40 years ago. I was driving on the Washington Beltway, which people, as you may know, is a highway of. It's terrible, uncommon, uncommonly trafficking. Okay? So I was on the Beltway and the outer loop of Beltway, and suddenly everything stops like the Beltway, just free stop. It's not that we're in traffic stops. And I was 500ft. I was in the right hand lane and I was not going to exit there, but I was 500ft from an exit from the Georgia Avenue exit on the Beltway. And so I thought, okay, I'll pull over into the shoulder and exit out onto Georgia Avenue because clearly this isn't moving. I can take an alternate route. So I pull over onto the shoulder and I'm like, I say, I don't know, five car length, six, seven, eight car. I was very close. So I wasn't like illegally driving on the shoulder. I mean, I guess I was, but you know what I'm saying, Like I wasn't doing anything. And suddenly there was a cop standing in front of me, like standing. Puts his arms out, standing in front of me. So I stopped and I rolled down the window and I said, I'm just trying to exit. And he said, don't you understand? I've shut down the Beltway. Something had happened at a exit, you know, like there was a car, whatever. But I saw in his eye that this was the greatest moment deal before Zod.

Christine Rosen (21:37)

Yes.

Jon Podhoretz (21:37)

Of his entire life. And that I was interfering with my scofflawry, with his triumph in inconveniencing several thousand people in cars going back to the Baltimore Washington Highway. And I realized that I was in the presence of a certain kind of madness, like this assertion of power and authority. That is what these district judges are reminding me of a little bit. It's like I am stopping the firing of the provisional employees. Don't you say that. I can't, you know, like these when they rehire.

Abe Greenwald (22:27)

Yeah, right.

Jon Podhoretz (22:28)

You are not my order. Executive branch. As though the executive branch is not a co. Equal to the judiciary and as though Donald Trump works for Judge Boasberg. This is a very complicated relationship between the executive and judicial branches and the judicial branches is a check on executive power. But this is a non judicial. This is an issue that the courts have refused. The Supreme Court has refused to say anything systematic about whether or not these nationwide injunctions in one specific court that somehow then stand in for the entire country are in fact legitimate.

Matthew Continetti (23:19)

This is another example because, you know, the liberals and the resistance love these judges, you know, and they, they want this. They love this. It's another example of them turning on a dime like they did with free speech. You know, the same people who were telling us what pronouns we could say are now, they're the foremost champions of free speech in the country. The people who were talking about how illegitimate our justice system was, you know, for the past decade now seem to want a bureaucracy.

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Abe Greenwald (25:34)

Kelly from Arizona post a selfie with him of his new gas guzzler SUV showing his anti elon credentials. It's an amazing turnaround.

Jon Podhoretz (25:48)

Right.

Christine Rosen (25:49)

So in D.C. by the way, I've now seen four Teslas that have a little sticker on it that says I bought this before Elon went crazy.

Abe Greenwald (25:56)

Is that right?

Christine Rosen (25:57)

Yes, I've seen four.

Abe Greenwald (25:58)

Because you know what? That's the equivalent of putting a BLM sign in your window. Precise summer of 2020. Don't hurt me. Don't vandalize this Tesla. I'm on your side.

Jon Podhoretz (26:13)

So, yeah, I mean, who was the least. Who was the most attacked person in America in. I know, like 2024. In. In many ways, Judge Eileen Cannon. Right. That was. She was not ruling, making rulings that controlled entire efforts by the federal government. Right. She was ruling in the specific case of Trump in Florida, the Mar a Lago issue, and dealing with the question of how to deal with classified information and who could look at what and all of that. And whether or not this proceeding had or had not been legitimate and everything that she ruled was arguable. That is to say, she was not making it up out of whole cloth. She might have been wrong. She might have been right. She had law on her side. Maybe the other side had better law. Maybe she liked Trump too much. Doesn't even matter. She was. Because her findings ran contrary to what this phalanx of media resistance and the Democratic Party wanted. She was villainized beyond all measure. She had no business being on the court. She had only been elevated. She was so grateful to Trump. Look how people talked about Amy Coney Barrett and how we shouldn't confirm Amy Comey Barrett because she was just gonna be a Trump rubber stamp because she was so grateful he elevated her.

Abe Greenwald (27:52)

Or even before, when she was nominated for a circuit court with Difi telling her in the Judiciary Committee ruling. The dogma lives within you, Ms. Barrett.

Jon Podhoretz (28:03)

And what happened with Amy Coney Barrett?

Abe Greenwald (28:05)

She's a diva now.

Jon Podhoretz (28:07)

MAGA hates her.

Abe Greenwald (28:09)

Right. And Democrats love her.

Jon Podhoretz (28:10)

Yeah. So the whole point here is they're all a bunch of hypocrites. This is all nonsen. Trying to remain intellectually consistent at this moment in American life over the last, I would really say, 12 years. I really say it started with Obama's second term, when the transvaluation of all values really started to happen. When the party that supported the Constitution was issuing patently illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, and they were forcing people to twist themselves into pretzels saying that they were okay. And then, of course, it then worked in reverse under Trump, and then it worked under reverse again under Biden. And everybody is being required by their camps to say whatever they need to say at any given moment to support or oppose. To support the good guys and oppose the bad guys. And trying to have an architecture that says, you know, I didn't like this under Biden, and I don't like it under Trump. I said what I said under Biden. I'm gonna say what I say under Trump is now considered.

Abe Greenwald (29:20)

I will say, you know, Mahmoud Khalil is a bad guy. He is a bad guy. Trend Aragua is a bad organization.

Jon Podhoretz (29:29)

Yes. And did you guys read the Mahmoud Khalil profile in the New York Times yesterday? So there was a long profile of Mahmoud Khalil yesterday. And he is the sort of person who, if there's an ant crawling on the ground, he doesn't step on, puts it in his hands, and he puts it on the side of the road to be safe. I mean, that is not actually in the story.

Abe Greenwald (29:57)

Unless it's a Jewish ant.

Jon Podhoretz (30:00)

It might as well have been. He's gentle. And by the way, there are all these details. He's gentle. And, you know, things are, things are. You know, he, he was in this program is that he didn't wear a mask because he didn't think that he was doing anything that required him to wear a mask. I think the real story. Then, of course, there's a secondary narrative if you, if you read this story, which is he is a guy who figured out that being the front, the front man was a protection, not a cost, and that he was protecting himself by being a public figure or trying to be a public figure. And it worked.

Abe Greenwald (30:39)

You know, I didn't trifle with the liberal media yesterday. I read the real news in the New York Post, John, and America's best newspaper had another story about Khalil, about his activity in an Israeli politics course at sipa. And the students who spoke to the New York Post said he was harassing them constantly in the WeChat or the equivalent, you know, the chat group for the class. He was always targeting Israel and Jews. And the Israeli professor of the Israeli politics class would have to deal with Mahmoud Khalil's interruptions, according to this story, consistently through the class period and the semester. So the New York Times, clearly airbrushing for its political purposes.

Jon Podhoretz (31:30)

That's what I'm talking about. So here is Mahmoud Khalil, and we all say this, right? I mean, our friend Eli Lake says maybe this is bad. There's all sorts of people who think that what happened may have been a mistake or mishandled. Obviously, I don't think it was handled well by the ICE officials on Thursday night, who arrested him and all that. But we go Thursday. But what if the entire line here is Mahmoud Khalil is a disgrace, an embarrassment, a foul, anti Semite, and he is terrible nonetheless. America, he, like everybody in America, it is dangerous to make exceptions on due process matters. And we should not be doing that. And the Trump administration should not be trying to circumvent a process by which he has a fair hearing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like that. That is like, say, up front, he's bad. That's not what happened. What happened 24 hours in was the Senate, the staff of the Senate Judiciary Democratic minority saying, free Mahmoud Khalil. And 10 days later, this valentine to this guy in which there are still very peculiar missing details. For example, it says that he was born first. We were Told he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. I didn't really know that there were Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, particularly not in 1995 when he was born. Okay. He was. The term that. The Times then moves on from that to say that he was born in a Palestinian enclave in Damascus. So he was born in a neighborhood in Damascus. He was born on the Upper west side of Damascus in a refugee enclave. Give me a break. What the. You know, and then it's like. And then the Syrian civil war broke out, and he fled. He made his way to Beirut. Oh, he made his way to Beirut in a car. What did he have to do? Like, hide under, you know, hide in a. You know, in a. In a. In a train or like, you know, in a donkey cart. Getting from Beirut. Getting from Damascus to Beirut in 2014 was not. This is not like. This is not like getting to Shanghai from Dusseldorf because you have to get away from the Nazis.

Christine Rosen (34:07)

None of this matters in terms of his status. It is a privilege to be in this country as a visitor with a visa or even a green card. It is not a right. And he is being treated. Treated as if his rights were violated. And that's even separate from procedural violations which might have occurred.

Jon Podhoretz (34:22)

I'm only going through these details because there is a. There is a myth, a logical portrait being made of this guy. He gets to Beirut. He somehow gets to go to college. He ends up in this world of NGO UN employment. He's working for unrwa. He's got scholarships. He's working for the British in a capacity that allows him to have a security clearance and somewhere along the way gets an Algerian passport. Why isn't that the story? Oh, he meets his wife, NUR ABDALLAH, In 2016 in a program in Beirut. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that program was. You know, I don't know what's going. Anyway, everything in this story is a red flag for something else. And the Times tells it as though it's writing about the journey of a plucky young person caught in terrible circumstances who's just trying to make good on his ambitions and gets to America in order to study and be a blah. And then, of course, his conscience is lit on fire by October 7th. And if, you know, I were the editor at the New York Times on that story, and I had. It was 1977. I had a red. I had a red wax marker. I would be circling lines as my editor did at Time magazine when I got there in 1982, I would be circling words and saying, what does that mean? How did he get to Beirut? What is the name, the enclave? Who got him the scholarship? How did he get to work at? Unruffled. When did he go to Algeria to get a passport? How did he get an Algerian passport? What's his connection to Algeria? Does he have family in Algeria? Why didn't he go from Damascus to Algeria? Who was sponsoring him in the British government? Like, there are 72 different details. And the reason that they're not there is that they have decided to do this thing where they are turning him into a positive figure. Not just that he is an example of how Trump's acting recklessly because he didn't dot I's and cross T's in dealing with somebody that he wanted to deport, but as a positive figure on his own. And they're also not by the right track. Wrong track numbers are the best that they've been since 2004. You want to know why? Because Trump's on America's side. And everybody, whatever you may say, and I think there's a lot wrong with Trump, but generally speaking, people in the United States think that Trump is kind of like on America's side, and they no longer have any confidence that Trump's opposition is on America's side. In the broadest possible understanding of what it means to be on America's side. I don't think wanting tariffs really means that you're on America's side, but I can understand that people would think that being totally uncaring about China's economic depredations is the same as not being on America's side. So that's my monologue about Mahmoud Khalil.

Abe Greenwald (37:58)

Dave was going to say something.

Matthew Continetti (37:59)

Oh, no, I was just going to say that those details are also not in the story. Because, John, as you alluded to before, he's a much more mysterious figure than people realize. And there are a lot of questions. The story that would result from that red, red circling exercise that'll come out in 2030 when we know everything about him.

Jon Podhoretz (38:25)

Well, it may come out in two weeks in the Free Press or the Washington Free Beacon. I mean, the question is whether who has the resources to go after the details. I mean, the story was so mysterious that friends of mine and I were speculating on whether or not the story about him is that he was supply, you know, that he was an inside man and that Trump. Nope. Nobody told the Trump administration, and they went after him and didn't understand that they were Going after a double agent. I mean, I only say that I don't think it was a double agent, but I'm saying, like, if this were a novel, if this were a Daniel Silva Gabriel alone novel, he would be somebody that Gabriel alone had as a source, not the guy, you know, because he was the head of Coad. He would be a usable source on the inside or something that. But that's a novel. This is real life. And real life is. That's not the way it, that's not the way it works. All right, so generally speaking, are we, is this chaos or Trump's numbers are fine? The right track, wrong track numbers are seem to me to be incredibly significant. Am I overreading them? Am I overestimating it?

Abe Greenwald (39:45)

I think that the NBC poll that came out yesterday was a good poll for President Trump. As you said, he had his highest approval in the poll ever. And the right track number has gone up, even though still most Americans think we're on the wrong track. It was a very good number. I think overall, President Trump, his approval rating in the RCP average, I think is dead even or maybe slightly underwater now, but it's not terrible. I think the real danger is that on some of the issue sets, Trump is underwater. And so he remains extremely strong on immigration, that's his best issue. But he's underwater on the economy, on inflation, and on foreign policy. And so I think that would at least raise some flags in the White House political office. For instance, today, Trump is going to the Kennedy center to have a board meeting because he's now the chair of the Kennedy center, and then a tour. But while I understand why Trump is interested in this, I also would have maybe suggested I don't do an economic event or something, talk about lowering prices. So while I say that his situation is not as bad as some people in the media are making out to be, not by a long shot. There are still things to worry about. And just finally, one thing I'm interested in and planning on writing about is the poll. When you look at the NBC poll, it shows that the majority of the electorate narrowly, but still I think significantly is Republican. And this was the case, of course, in 2024. And the exit poll showed that the, the electorate leaned Republican for the first time in a hundred years. In other polls that I've been looking at, the last CNN poll, again narrowly but significantly Republican leaning electorate. And this gives Trump, I think, a lot of cushion because of the shift in America to the right and the fact that there are just more self identified Republicans than there have been in a long, long time. That will buoy Trump and I think give him the room to enact some of his more controversial policies, at least for a little while.

Jon Podhoretz (42:07)

He is very underwater with independence. The thing is that there may be no independence anymore. I know people say they're independence. I know that when you ask, it's like 30, 30, 30 or something like that, or it's, I don't know. But, but he's like, he's like 65% disappointment.

Abe Greenwald (42:26)

I think a lot of independents these days are former Republicans.

Jon Podhoretz (42:29)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (42:30)

They're Republicans who just, just can't be a part of the Trump coalition.

Jon Podhoretz (42:33)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (42:34)

And so they've moved into the independent.

Jon Podhoretz (42:36)

Space or they're radical where they're leftists who can't be a part of the Democratic space either. I mean, so you have this kind of weird independence who used to be considered like the leveling.

Abe Greenwald (42:48)

Right. Well, that, that was the case.

Jon Podhoretz (42:50)

Centrist influence in American politics maybe now be expressions of just simple generic dissatisfaction with the party that they actually should be.

Abe Greenwald (42:59)

Yeah, but I think the more important story is that they're just less significant. They're less important than they used to be in this new environment where the Republicans have an advantage. I mean, Trump lost independence in 2020 and lost the election, but that election was more significantly Democrat in the electorate in 2024. Donald Trump lost independence by a smaller margin than in 2020, but nonetheless he lost them, but won this pretty decisive victory because there are more Republicans.

Matthew Continetti (43:32)

And you know, the people who replaced those Republicans who left the party.

Abe Greenwald (43:41)

They.

Matthew Continetti (43:41)

Are not Reagan Republicans.

Abe Greenwald (43:43)

No, right.

Matthew Continetti (43:45)

They're Trump Vance Republicans.

Abe Greenwald (43:47)

They're Maha. Yeah, they're that.

Matthew Continetti (43:50)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (43:50)

Yeah.

Matthew Continetti (43:50)

Yeah. So I just wanted to, just to add to, to Matt's point about the cushion. So Trump has especially got some cushion there because this, he's not going to, he can't disappoint them.

Christine Rosen (44:02)

Well, and this was still, I mean, I think he risks making the same mistake that we criticized the Biden administration for in the first term. His victory was still kind of narrow compared to previous presidential elections and his Republican majority in the House is super narrow. So I, I over interpreting his victory is going to be a challenge for him, particularly if the economy doesn't bounce back quickly for people because then it'll, then it'll seem to the voters who, who shifted to Trump they'll go, well, you know, I want to change, but maybe this is a little too radical in the same way that a lot of voters looked at what Biden did in the first year and said, that's not what I voted for. I actually wanted something a little different.

Jon Podhoretz (44:42)

So.

Christine Rosen (44:43)

And again, there are a fair number of these fickle voters out there. They're not independent, you're right, but they are not, not total MAGA either. And that's actually, they're the ones who are really worried about the economy, aren't sure tariffs are a good idea, et cetera, et cetera.

Jon Podhoretz (44:58)

In the larger picture. I think the point here is that Trump has an opportunity to consolidate and grow. 36% of the country now says that it is comfortable calling itself maga. That's, I think, in the CNN poll, that's a pretty startling number. I mean, it gives, it means that the Trump base, not the Republican base, not the republic, but the Trump base, now constitutes more than a third of the country. But he has to show results. And this is the que. This is, as I say, I think, writ large. The Democratic Party has now, or liberals or the liberal establishment, whatever, has now lined up as follows. Republican Party is authoritarian. We support government workers. We support a Hamas terrorist on the campus of Columbia. We support judges ordering the president to stand down, unelected judges ordering the president to stand down. We support universities that hate the country if he can show general results of a general national improvement. That combined with the Democratic and liberal ceding of patriotism to him. And they're not even, they don't refer to it. I'm sure they think they're being wonderfully patriotic because they're, as Abe would say, they're sticking up for free speech or, you know, whatever, the right to assemble. I, I don't know. Whatever else they, whatever else they might may be telling themselves, Americans have open eyes. They saw what happened from 19, from 2020 to 2024. They saw people backing cop attackers rather than cops, backing criminals and illegal aliens rather than border police, you know, backing elements shutting down college campuses by screaming in favor of terrorism as opposed to forces of order. This is all a very strong platform to Trump for Trump to stand on if he can do the other things that actually will make his presidency successful or unsuccessful.

Abe Greenwald (47:23)

So maybe this is a good time to turn to international developments because we haven't spoken yet about my favorite Trump move of the weekend. There were a lot that I liked, but my favorite was his decision to order an attack on the Houthis in Yemen over the weekend. He released a long statement with plenty of all caps letters talking about how the Houthis have threatened international commerce, they've threatened national security, they've attacked American naval vessels. This is been the longest sustained engagement by the US Navy since World War II. The operations really fending off Houthi attacks more than actually going after the Houthis since October of 2023. And Trump says, your time is up and we're going to rain hell fire on you. And that seems to have been what happened over the weekend. Two things about this operation that I think are noteworthy. The first is the administration is saying that they went after the Houthi leadership, which was not the case during any of the Biden administration. And so if that is true, that would be a significant development, and I think one that should be cheered because by eliminating the leadership, you do erode the Houthi capacity. And the second thing that is important to note is that Trump also mentioned Iran in his statement and connected the Houthis to their main backer, which is Iran. And he said that if Iran should be watching this, and this could be a similar fate for Iran if they don't accede to his, you know, request for some type of negotiation. And further, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said that the operation against the Houthis could, could potentially expand to Iranian targets that are near the Gulf of Aden if the Iranians and the Houthis decide to escalate. So I think this is a long overdue move by the United States. The Houthis are a menace. They are really the last remaining element of Iran's ring of fire that exists today after Israel took out Hezbollah, has decimated Hamas, has, has made strategic gains after the fall of Assad. And we're even seeing now in a kind of a story that I thought was very interesting in foreign affairs last week, Iraq seems to be making moves that distance itself from the Iranian militias that, of course, play such a role in Iraq. So Iran is on its back, feet, on its back heels right now. And Trump is right to apply pressure at this moment.

Jon Podhoretz (50:29)

Steve Witkoff, the negotiator, I don't even know what, you know, Secretary of State.

Abe Greenwald (50:39)

We have like two secretaries of state.

Jon Podhoretz (50:41)

So Witkoff appears to be learning on the job because he took the strike on the Houthis and actually on Sunday shows connected it to Hamas and said Hamas should be paying very close attention to what we're doing with the Houthis. Meaning, you know, their, their time of safety from direct American involvement might be, might be coming to an end. Like, who knows, they should be paying very, very careful and close attention. I want to remind people that there are two forms of Hamas, right? There's Hamas in Gaza and then there's Hamas in hotel rooms. And Hamas and hotel rooms. I don't know that they're still in Doha. Some of them may be in Turkey, whatever. They're not safe in hotel rooms. They're not safe anywhere right now. There's this bizarre interregnum where the first phase of the three phase deal ended 10, 12, 14 days ago. And Israel appears to be in a state of confused paralysis about what to do next. Wants to get as many hostages out as it can before it restarts. The war is getting sidetracked or is itself awash, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, with its own internal controversies regarding reports about what happened on October 7th and who should get blamed for them. Things are in a very sort of chaotic state there. But if the administration is playing this good cop, bad cop on an hourly basis, Trump writing a letter to Iran saying, let's negotiate over the nukes and then saying, look, we're going to hit the Houthis, we're going to hit the, we could hit Hamas and we could hit you. So don't sleep comfortably in your beds. I don't know where this goes. I do know that we don't have any real sense of the uncertainty that Trump is bringing to our understanding of where the economy ought to be in terms of tariffs and others. He is very much, is very much present in his behavior abroad. I would say it's a much more successful strategy abroad in some ways than it is at home and look at the uncertainty. Although, you know, I don't like that we're not siding fully with Ukraine. But he did say, well, he's calling Putin tomorrow.

Christine Rosen (53:14)

Right? There's a, there's. Now they're going to talk.

Jon Podhoretz (53:16)

Witkoff met with Putin just before we started podcasting. Said it was a positive meeting, whatever that means. Like, and I'm not happy with this and I'm not going to say that this is a good thing or anything like that, but he is not. The notion that he is just, you know, serving as Putin's catspower or something like this is a very, he is pursuing a strategy in which our, our enemies or people abroad genuinely do not know what he is going to do day by day. And maybe that's not a good thing.

Christine Rosen (53:50)

The problem is I'm not sure Americans know either. That's where the.

Jon Podhoretz (53:54)

Well, they don't. They don't. But, but, but maybe in the case of taking one last effort to see whether or not people can be made to stand down if they want to save their lives. That means Hamas, that means the Houthis, that even means the Mullahs, if they can be made to stand down before, before hell is unleashed, give it one last shot. Of course, the thing is, if you don't, then unleash hell in the end. And Trump's whole issue is he doesn't want to be weak. He's going to start looking weak, and then he's not going to like that. Can we move on backwards? Because I want to talk about this pardons truth.

Abe Greenwald (54:39)

The auto pen.

Jon Podhoretz (54:40)

The auto pen.

Christine Rosen (54:42)

I have a secret obsession with the auto pen. So, yes, let's do that.

Jon Podhoretz (54:45)

Well, why don't you talk about your secret obsession with.

Christine Rosen (54:47)

Oh, no, just that I did a deep dive into the legal ramifications of, of. Of how the autopen was initially used. And it, and it is legal. There were challenges to whether or not it, it. It could, it could be seen as the very same as the President's signature in cases where the president used it. But then there's also this. There have been these scandals where, you know, different cabinet members have used their own auto pens to sign, for example, condolence letters for, for dead soldiers. And this, Rumsfeld did this, and this was, was very much a mini scandal, and he had to apologize for it. So our sense of the autopen being a weird, abstract expression of the, of the will of the president in particular, I think it's about to get a new chapter in its lease on life. It has not been controversial, but presidents also haven't used it very often because they sense that tension among the American people. That is it, is it really your signature if you didn't do it, if a machine did it for you.

Jon Podhoretz (55:42)

Anyway, presidents.

Christine Rosen (55:43)

That's the end of my obsession.

Jon Podhoretz (55:45)

Presidents use it constantly, but for. Well, they like that are honorific or.

Christine Rosen (55:50)

Meaningless, like Christmas card letters. Yes, but nothing in terms of an act of law or an act of pardon or something. They use it much less frequently or.

Jon Podhoretz (55:59)

Have obviously most times that the president signs something. Not national security documents, but things the president sign are often done in public as part of ceremonies. It's. It's like a, It's a, it's a famous image. Like you sign a. You sign a law into when. When you don't do it. Sometimes presidents have refused to sign laws into being because they're unpopular. They don't want the image distributed. I can't remember when, but this has happened in each presidency. That something is done late at night without a cameraman, without. Without a, without the Official photographer there, because it's like, you know, let's not document this moment because I' not happy about it.

Christine Rosen (56:46)

Well, or they're on vacation when some government thing happens that they probably should be in Washington for. This was Obama's problem. He was vacationing in Hawaii and he had to use the auto pen to sign something and.

Jon Podhoretz (56:56)

Yeah, but I would, I mean, on the one hand, reading this, it's pretty scary to think that Trump would imagine, as I said, he better be careful that he has the power to overrule a prior president's pardon. Like, that's a weird thing to do if he doesn't, if he wants the pardon power to remain, but he's not.

Christine Rosen (57:18)

Trying to overrule the pardon. He's questioning the authenticity of the pardon.

Jon Podhoretz (57:22)

Right. So now I would then caution people who are going crazy over this if they are to keep their powder dry, because we still don't know what condition Joe Biden was in in that last week.

Christine Rosen (57:39)

Oh, but Jake Tapper is going to tell us, John, don't, don't you remember.

Jon Podhoretz (57:44)

What about where Biden has been since the 20th of January? I mean, not that I care. I don't care where he is. Go and do whatever. Right. But if he didn't sign those pardons, and I don't know how you prove what we're talking about here.

Christine Rosen (58:09)

Well, someone would have to, someone on the inside would have to say that, no, he had no idea that we even drew up these pardons. And that's never gonna happen.

Abe Greenwald (58:18)

I mean, I think that this Trump truth was one of his kind of deep thoughts by Donald Trump. He kind of has these thoughts and he puts them out there and he's.

Christine Rosen (58:32)

He'S good enough, he's smart enough.

Abe Greenwald (58:34)

That's Stuart Small. But, yeah, he thought he's seen this story. He's been intrigued by it, I think, like most people. And then he gets on his social media and says, I declare the pardons null and void. I mean, I don't think he has the power to do that. It's hard for me to even see the legal process by which that power would be tested. And so I would just take it for what it was, which was a Trump truth.

Matthew Continetti (59:02)

But that's my point about how I think he wants. He likes being seen as illegitimate in some sense by the left, by the resistance. I mean, the truth was. Now we're calling it the truth. That Truth in Quotes was full of his nicknames. It was Sleepy Joe, it was Crooked Joe. It was the worst president in history. So the whole thing, this was another trolling. And watch me. They're gonna watch them call me an emperor now.

Jon Podhoretz (59:36)

I was at a party on Saturday night, and people were cornering me all night. People who would generally be supportive of kicking Mahmoud Khalil out of the country or generally very concerned on matters like that, very worried that Trump, Trump was discrediting himself. He was mishandling this. He was going to cuc. The cl. Going after Columbia with a, you know, with a, with a, with a hammer instead of a, you know, instead of a rapier. Like, this is bad because he's going to discredit himself, and it's going to be discredited, and he's going to discredit himself. And as I was listening to this, and I, I, I, it's not that I don't take this argument seriously, particularly in historical terms, but as I was hearing it out of the mouths of these people who were talking to me, I started saying to them, not just to be debating, but, like, discredited in whose eyes? Because if he's discredited in the eyes of the Harvard faculty, that's his superpower. That's actually not bad. This is sort of what Abe is referring to. If he's discredited in the eyes of the New York Times editorial page, that's not discrediting Trump. Forty years ago, even Ronald Reagan would have been worried about an onslaught against the use of his authority or his power by the New York Times editorial page because it had such outsized power to set a national agenda. People did care. They even cared about people or forces or reporters or writers or thinkers who were not, who were basically implacably hostile to them because they did not understand what the boundaries were. You know, Trump has now been, as Winston has been shot at without result for 10 years. And suddenly when you get to these points, including, like, is he over. You see now he really is Hitler because he's now saying, your pardons won't count, and I'm going to have you arrested again because of you, because you're so, you were so terrible. Hunter Biden or whatever, Joe Biden, Jim Biden, whoever he partnered with. Like, he's not at risk from the ill opinion of the people who are going crazy. And the larger consequences of that are very telling because it is like seeing the establishment become entirely impotent. Trump is going to stand or fall on whether or not he improves the economy, whether or not the American people think that he is doing a good job or a bad job for them. And can the mainstream media help shape that? To some degree. But I think enormous numbers of people either no longer listen to them or have already have a reality check against taking them entirely seriously when it comes to Trump, whom they understand they hate. Right. They hate and they want to destroy him. And they keep trying to destroy him, and they're not successful at it. So I don't know if he's trolling precisely. It's that he is making a point about the impotence of his rivals and his enemies. And the praise that he lavished on Chuck Schumer on Friday and Saturday is like a, is like, is like nine dimensional chess. Right. On the one hand, like, he wants to thank Chuck Schumer for agreeing and passing the CR that he wanted. That's appropriate. He should say that. Right. He's the President. He should say, thank you so much. We had a bipartisan moment here. That was really great. But on the other hand, he knows he is just driving the Democratic Party insane and causing a potential civil war simply by saying it. So I, you know, they're how they deal with the fact that they spent a decade trying to destroy him and failed. And their only play is to keep trying to destroy him somehow by saying that he's Hitler or to destroy Schumer. And then they'll destroy Schumer because that's.

Abe Greenwald (64:04)

That'S gonna be the upside.

Jon Podhoretz (64:05)

Right? Right. Well, that's Trump. Yeah. Right. But I mean, that's like the Republicans in 2023. Right? It's like we wanna destroy Biden, but we can't, so we'll destroy Kevin McCarthy.

Abe Greenwald (64:18)

I mean, I think that is, I've seen that argument, but I think that's unfair to the Tea Party, quite frankly. I mean, the argument of the Tea Party was we're gonna go after the folks who supported the bailout of the global financial crisis. You know, a major historic 23.

Jon Podhoretz (64:33)

I didn't say, I didn't say the Tea Party. I'm saying Matt Gaetz and people like that. It's like, well, we can't get Biden, so we'll kill Kevin McCarthy.

Abe Greenwald (64:42)

Oh, well, I've seen the analogy to the Tea Party and that this is a new Tea Party brewing on the Democratic side and so insurgent candidates will take out Schumer. And my point is simply, again, this historical analogy lacks all proportion because the Tea Party was this grassroots movement against big government, against the bailouts, and against the Republican politicians who had conformed to the bailouts and to the establishment response to the financial crisis. This is a continuing resolution that would have shut down the government had the Democrats blocked it. I mean, you're going to topple your leadership because they wanted to keep the government open and you're the Democratic Party, the party of government. It's completely illogical to me.

Christine Rosen (65:33)

Well, pity Schumer on his book tour, though he's evidently going to get a lot of supposedly they're organizing protests against him for stops on his book.

Abe Greenwald (65:40)

For his anti Semitism book.

Jon Podhoretz (65:42)

Yeah, his book about anti Semitism, which Leah.

Christine Rosen (65:45)

So many layers of irony.

Jon Podhoretz (65:47)

Incoming. Leah Leibovitz will be reviewing Chuck Schumer's book for commentary. So incoming is all I'm saying. He's got Jasmine Crockett and AOC coming after him. He's gonna have Lielle coming after him in the other direction. That's gonna be that's gonna be some big fun is all I can say. I want to do a recommends and then go very quickly, but this is a hate read recommends. Is that okay? I mean, there are no rules with the recommend dis.

Abe Greenwald (66:23)

Recommends. Okay, now you can have a hate reads recommends.

Jon Podhoretz (66:27)

Sure. So I read this book review, the New York Times Book Review, about two books about divorce. One of them was by a Canadian writer named Scotchy Kool, who is who is a of Indian descent. So her last name is K O U L and it's called Sucker Punch. And it's about her divorce. And it's one of the most fascinating books that I've ever read, though I hated every page of it. And it's about she's young, she's like 30. She her previous book was this collection of essays about how she was like an Internet oversharer. And then she found a man and she fell in love and he really understood her. And then it ends with them getting married. And this book is about how that whole book was a lie that she knew even as she was writing it that she was with the wrong code guy and that things were falling apart and that she had spent her life over sharing on the Internet. And now here she was. Who was she really as a person? Because she was making decisions based on how what she could write as personal essays to make her career and what she needed to say in them to advance her personal career. And that her husband didn't really love her and he was having an affair and he was mean to her, but she couldn't tell her mother because her mother was her mother was a traditionalist and didn't want her to marry a white guy in the first place. But if she was going to marry him, she would have to stay married to him anyway as a kind of compendium of everything wrong with because she's Canadian but also lives in New York with our society today. Sucker Punch by Scotchy Cool, which will only take you like two hours to read. It's an incredibly representative, very well written. She's a good writer. Like, she's funny and clever and the book is full course with energy. That's one of the reasons that I was able to continue reading it. But if you want to know why the kind of social culture of the United States's articulate class is crumbling into dust, this book is a very, very interesting example of it. Sucker Punch by Scotchy Kul K O U L I don't know if it's a recommends a disrecommends. As I say, if you are the sort of person who spent some time in the first two decades of the 20th century hate reading blogs. This is sort of like that and I was I think Christine was to some degree.

Christine Rosen (68:58)

Well you made me so that I could write about then I did read them on my own.

Jon Podhoretz (69:04)

I took all your time away from Japanese speculative fiction.

Christine Rosen (69:08)

I know to read mommy bloggers.

Jon Podhoretz (69:12)

So this is not even a mommy blogger because she didn't have kids. This is like a marriage blogger and a divorce blogger. Anyway, so that is my recommends dis recommends recommendation for investigating the sick soul of Western society. Scotchy Cools soccer players Punch till be back tomorrow For Matt, Christine and Abe, I'm John Pod Horace Keep the candle bur.