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- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, May 28, 2026. I'm John Pod Horace, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John. Oh, hold on.
- [00:39]
A
That was like the Brady Bunch episode with Peter's voice changes.
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B
It was Peter.
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A
Yeah, sure. Senior editor Seth Bendell. Hi, Seth. Out of puberty.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Okay, there you go. Okay. And social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:59]
D
Hi, John.
- [01:01]
A
Astonishing moment yesterday. In an interview promoting her new book, former first lady Jill Biden revealed, if true, that watching the debate that ended Joe Biden's political career on June 27th of 2024, watching him, she thought, oh, my God, he's having a stroke. Or he's had a stroke. Why is this a story? It's a story because the idea that he suddenly seemed infirm to her flies in the face of the fact that he had seemed for a long time infirm to many people. And secondly, that if she thought he was having a stroke, wouldn't she have like run on stage and said, oh my God, my husband is having a stroke. We have 45 minutes to get that shot in him so that it doesn't go into a full blown stroke and his life is more important than continuing with this debate. Or after the debate was over getting him to the hospital, instead of him going to an in and out burger or something like that, he went to some fast food joint or Philly steak place place or something and made a
- [02:21]
D
campaign appearance where on stage, Jill Biden was like, you did great. You did great. And applauded him while he walked around the stage looking confused.
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A
Yeah. So what do we make of this? Sort of. It doesn't matter, Right? The public made its judgment.
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D
It matters. Go ahead, Abe.
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B
When I was, I was watching it and I heard, I saw her say, I was shocked because. And she was asked why, and she said, because I had never seen him like this. And then I spoke aloud what I knew she was going to say right after that, which was before that or since. So in other words, according to her story, this was a non medical event that was a one off, isolated evening that resembled her understanding of a stroke without explanation. Right up until that moment, he was perfect. And right after that, he was perfect. This is such a terrible story, such an unconvincing story about why everything was actually just fine.
- [03:47]
A
I mean, it makes me want to revoke her medical degree, frankly, but there you go.
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B
That's right.
- [03:52]
D
Can I also add that there are two things she's doing. First of all, she's just lying. Straight out lying. Because we know from reporting at the time that she was the force who was going around berating campaign staffers saying, he's fine, he's fine, or you didn't prepare him well enough, or, you know, harassing them all about his. His poor performance. But she's also insulting the American people with this claim, and that's the part that really annoys me. And she was insulting the American people when she was lying through her teeth about his cognitive ability when he was still the president. We know that she was the driving force behind encouraging him to run for reelection, which ended in this debacle of a debate performance. But she's also trying to rewrite history here. And I know first lady memoirs are just, and particularly in her case, a cash grab and, you know, don't stand the test of time in general. And I don't know who ghost wrote hers, but this is insulting to the American people. We stood up there. We watched him, you know, in real time. Those of us on this podcast talked about it relentlessly. I think we should raise those same. We've. Some of us have raised those same issues with abilities of our current president, who's turned 8, who's turning 80. I mean, these are questions that the American people were asking the whole time. And for her to sit there and, you know, sort of shrug and have this faux naivete and concern about a husband who she was putting in front of the American people when he wasn't really capable of being there is ridiculous. And so. And the fact that this reporter didn't press her on any of that, and that now even I think Alex Thompson and others who acknowledged only after the fact what we all knew at the time, even they're saying that campaign staffers are telling them she's lying. So what's her motivation and why should we listen to her? And, you know, the Biden legacy is going to be a challenge for them. They're having money. They're having money troubles in terms of fundraising for the Biden library. He's, he's. The Democratic Party would like to sort of pretend he never happened. And even Kamala Harris is kind of turned on him. So I'm not sure where she thinks she's winning with this narrative, but as all our listeners know, never been a Jill Biden fan. She doesn't have a great reputation in Washington for how she treats her staffers and others. But I had the same reaction Abe did, actually. I felt like I was going to have a stroke listening to her try to insult the American people's intelligence.
- [06:05]
B
Can I just add one, I just want to add one point to Christine's point about how insulting it is. We've seen him like that before, if not exactly that bad. We've seen him mix up countries, leaders, countries stumble over all sorts of questions. I mean there were some people who seemed genuinely shocked by obviously who were shocked by his performance that night. Good portion of the country was not. So the idea that this was a total aberration that just happened once and never before, never since. It adds to Christine's point about the insult.
- [06:47]
C
Yeah, and I watched it thinking the same thing I was thinking during the Biden administration watching Jill, which is this is about her. This interview is about her and this whole thing is about her. She, she understands that she is looked upon as someone who, you know, regardless of her husband's health concerns, pushed on and wanted him running again and all this stuff. And you know, of course was part of covering up what was really happening. This isn't about defending Biden. Biden's out of office. And it doesn't this whole like as John, I think that was the point that John was getting at initially when he said does it even really matter this that what the reason it wouldn't matter is regarding Biden, regarding Joe Biden. Excuse me. But for Jill Biden, she knows she's still a live issue. And this is just, I feel like I'm watching a Jill Biden reputation resurrection tour of some kind and I don't understand why it even exists.
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D
Okay, can I add one more data point to why she might be doubling down on this line of self promotion? It's that the Department of Justice is set to release some of the transcripts and interviews that, that when he was still president Joe Biden did, where he was seen to, from what we know got confused was on the record not really clearly able to comprehend the questioning, undergoing. And so I think this is also a getting out in front of sort of pre potential damage control because if those are released, I think that's going to be again, quite damaging to his reputation because that occurred during his presidency.
- [08:31]
A
Well, remember those tapes? We know about those tapes because Robert Hur, who was the special counsel looking into his handling of classified documents that he had purloined and taken to Wilmington, Robert Hur, that was a double edged sword because on the one hand, the information came out that he had stumbled around and done all, you know, been incoherent. And it was for that reason that Robert Hurd did not pursue an indictment of Biden for mishandling classified information because he said, prosecutorial discretion requires me to wonder what would happen if I brought him before a jury. He will seem like he is a well meaning old man with very deep memory problems. And a person like that, I don't believe I can successfully prosecute. So those tapes saved him in a very peculiar way from even worse humiliation. That one of the reasons that he is now trying to suppress them or get them back is that now it would only be humiliation. Now there's no possible. Not that it was really that of help to him in that way, though it was certainly would have been very bad for him in 2024 to be indicted for mishandling classified information, that we would have had a race between two candidates who had mishandled classified information or would have been indicted for mishandling classified information. But now it's just a kind of. Would be the establishment of a historical record outside of the bounds of his own effort to get an autobiography written that would sort of seal forever for all historians the idea that while he was in office, he was unfit to be in the office, and that the people in that administration had violated their own oath to the Constitution to protect and defend the Constitution by not invoking the 25th Amendment against him. Now, I have a political idea that I have just been cooking up as you guys have been talking, which is that there is somebody whom this could possibly benefit. And some of this was in the bungled autopsy that the Democrats put out last week that caused everybody to have a temper tantrum, which is Kamala Harris is doing pretty well in the polling for 2028, which comes as a surprise to me. I would think Democrats would want to sort of discard her and put her on the ash heap of history with Biden. That does not appear to be the case, although it's too early really to tell. She gets a narrative out of this. Part of the narrative in the autopsy was that Kamala was unprepared to run for president because the Biden people had deliberately refused to prepare her for leadership, that they did not brief her properly, that they did not handle her, give her sort of issues to study and bring her close and make it clear that she could at any moment become president and she needed to be up to speed on everything. This allows her to make that case. Jill Biden saying he had a stroke, he was having a stroke on stage. That led to that weird three week period where he wasn't leaving and, you know, George Clooney had to write an op ed that would push him out of the race. This makes the case that there was a conspiracy inside the Biden White House to protect Joe Biden at all costs. And that involved pushing her down. And so that when she was actually finally in the position to run the 107 days that she ran, she was unprepared. And that was deliberate. That had been a deliberate choice. She could not have prepared herself because they didn't want her to be ready. Had she been ready, had she been an integral part of the administration, had other people in the administration had the experience of seeing that she was ready, maybe they would have invoked the 25th Amendment. Maybe they would have, as we said at the time, said, wait a minute, if you're not fit to run for office now, you're probably not fit to be president now In July of 2024, you still have your finger on the nuclear button. There's still stuff going on, there's still war in Gaza, there's still Russia and Ukraine. You can barely tie your shoe. We need to get you out and have the duly constitutionally following in your footsteps person to sit in this office. Now, I don't know how she makes that case without sounding like a victim, but it's not ridiculous at all to say that she was put in a position where she could not succeed in November of 2024, not just because of her own infelicities of performance or Trump's strengths, but because there had been a deliberate plot by the Biden team to make her seem less than. And remember that during the presidency, the talk about her inside the White House was unbelievably negative leaks, constant leaks about how unimpressive she was, how she had to be prepared, how she wasn't this, how she wasn't that, how she wasn't the other thing. And it's hard to see this and see Jill trying to rewrite the historical record and look at all this and not think that maybe the team that had decided that they were going to protect Biden so that they could remain in power, not so that he could remain in power, but so they could be the national Security Advisor and the head of the domestic, you know, the Economic Council and domestic affairs and this and that, that they could maintain their hands on the levers of power, because without him, they would be out. And, you know, she is there at the top of the polling and she now has a line of argumentation that would say I'm worth a second look.
- [15:05]
D
The problem is with this scenario, I like this idea. The problem is she actually is one of the worst retail politicians ever to run for president. She's so terrible at the job and she was not great as vice president in part because she was constantly indecisive. She's exactly what you don't want with the person whose finger is going to be on the button. She cannot make a decision. She, she's. Her reputation in Washington as a senator had similar problems and she never really ever faced a national electorate that she had to persuade. She's a, she's a blue state Democrat from California and that was a very easy ride for her. I will say that I think it would be in totally in keeping with the narrative thread about her own life story that she loves to spin as a candidate that this would fit right in because it's always someone else's fault when Kamala doesn't succeed. You know, the last, the election, it was because she was a woman of color and there's too much misogyny and racism, misogynoir. All these, you know, words that we heard cast about rather than the reality which many people, you know, if you put them under some truth serum or a couple of heavy cocktails in the Democratic party administration will tell you. It's just that she's not that good at this job and she should be better. Everything about her resume suggests she should be better than she is, but she's just not. So I for one would welcome with open arms a Kamala Part 2 because I think it would remind everyone once again why she was so decisively a loser in the last election.
- [16:36]
A
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- [18:55]
C
I just want to add to something John said about the the people staying in power wanted Biden to run again because they this was how they would stay in power. I just want to add that the Democratic Party is changing so fast such that these people won't be in power again even if the Democrats come back to power. That riding out the the Biden world was the last chance for them to to control, you know, the National Security Council and the State Department and stuff like that.
- [19:25]
A
Well, you can see though, as the party is changing so rapidly that they are following the pattern of the Democratic establishment in the 1960s, trying to catch up to the party as it gallops left. You have Jake Sullivan on with Aaron McClain on his podcast and Jake Sullivan saying things like that Gaza was a genocide, which he clearly knows it was not. He was the national security adviser and the population of Gaza over the two years from the beginning of the war to the end. And he certainly wasn't acting in power as though he believed that Gaza was a genocide. He was not stalwart in seeking Israel's victory over Hamas, let's just say that. But the moral necessity of acting against a genocidal state was nowhere in his deck of cards if he believed that Israel was genocidal. But he's only saying it as the as a lot of people are because he is trying to, as Bill Clinton would say, maintain his viability within the system if he can just say the right things and the reassuring things and sound like them. If they win in 2028 and they come into power, they're going to be uniquely ill suited. The sort of the DSA types or whatever, people who are DSA friendly to knowing how to run things. And the idea that, look, he's a steady hand, he knows how to do it and he's willing to toe the line and be somebody who is now on our side, you're going to see a lot of that. You are going to see a lot of that economically and you're going to see a lot of that in terms of foreign policy if they really get purchased. Kamala therefore becomes the establishment candidate. There are two potential establishment candidates in this race for Democrat in 2028, as far as I can tell, assuming that Josh Shapiro won't run, which I do, because I think it would be crazy for him to run as a Jew in an increasingly anti Semitic party, maybe he'll try it, I don't know. But the establishment candidates are going to be Kamala and Pete Buttigieg. And in other words, they're from the last administration and they are not from the burn it all down, you know, America's diseased camp. They're from whatever establishment camp you could say that hasn't gone the way of Mamdani and aoc. And there's that Lane is real. I mean that's, you know, the DSA hasn't taken over the Democratic Party yet. All we know is it's taken over some of the nominating processes in some of the states. And remember that every state gets, you know, there are states that aren't where the 10 metropolitan areas are that make up the bulk of Democratic voters that have gone very, very, very blue and are going DSA like, you know, but Nebraska has, will have Democratic voters that have to send people to the polls in Oklahoma and, you know, Wyoming and I don't know where else.
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D
And they get South Carolina, which if they are the first primary for the Democrats, that, that was the big. And that's still Clyburn, like that's still a huge political lever to pull.
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C
That's why they're fighting so hard for Maine because Maine is not a traditional DSA place and they see a huge opportunity. That's why they're fighting so hard for it.
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A
Yeah, so right. So that's an important point. I'm just saying the voters, Democratic voters who come out in primaries. Remember the joke about this is that, is that the conservative voters in the Democratic primaries appear to be black. Where the sort of the what do you white people crazy vote was very substantial against Bernie, both for Hillary and for Biden. You people are crazy. You're like, you wanna make boys girls and you, you know, I don't know what the hell you guys are talking about. And so Kamala's there for those voters. Buttigieg, I don't know if he's there for those voters cuz he's gay. But I'm just saying, like there's a weird world in which all we're focusing on is the party moving to the left. We're talking about Jill Biden's book here, which would seem to have no role in anything relating to 2028. But Kamala Harris's bid for the presidency is a real thing and she's gonna need all the help she can get. And if part of the help is man, she didn't get a chance. Like she was basically handed this thing with 100 days to go, having spent three and a half years being pushed down by this senile old white man and his vicious, monstrous aides who were hiding his infirmity. I mean, it's not really a positive argument, but it is some not an
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D
argument for leadership, that's for sure. Because if she didn't notice and didn't do something about it at the time, it doesn't suggest her ability to deal with a complicated internal administration problem would be high if she wants.
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A
Also true. Another. Since we're talking a little bit 2028. Another thing is that the polling is now increasingly showing we now have like the fourth poll in a row that shows that J.D. vance and Marco Rubio asked who you would prefer in 2028 of Republican voters are now tied. Whereas a year ago vance was at 56 or 60% and Rubio was at 18 or 19%. Yesterday's poll by a reputable pollster has them at 35 each. This rise of Rubio is very interesting. You wouldn't guess it, you wouldn't expect it. We talked about it before. I don't know half of it for all we know is the meme people are now very fond of Rubio because of the he has every job meme. I'm not joking.
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D
Is it his birthday today? I think I read somewhere.
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A
Is it? Oh well, happy birthday.
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D
I want to see him in a birthday hat in the meme.
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A
Yeah, but I mean like every day, Every day is Rubio's Birthday, that cultural moment, becoming an icon of some sort. Coming from this idea that Trump basically says the most competent person in my administration is Marco Rubio. I can give him, I can put anything under his aegis and I will at least know that it's not gonna go flying off into disasterland. Combined with what a great joke it is, him sitting in that chair, just being recostumed, you know, advancing.
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C
That's why the meme is so powerful for his popularity, because the basis of it is that I'm President Trump and when I need something done, I give it to Marco Rubio to do it. That, that is, that is the type of thing that can smooth over with a base that would normally be suspicious of somebody who was for, you know, comprehensive immigration reform and at the forefront of a couple actual policy fights that the base, you know, really didn't like.
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D
Well, he looks long suffering, not cruel. And that's actually, that, that's a distinction with the difference if you're going up against someone like JD Vance, whose meme, who's, who's, whose own use of social media has, has often leaned more towards cruel than, than long suffering.
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A
Right.
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C
And he's like, you know, usually you see presidents have like the meme is presidents as they're, as they're, you watch their hair grow grayer and they look, you know, the aging difference when they started for Trump. Trump looks the same, but it's the people who work for him like what they looked like when the term started versus what they look like when.
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A
I think that's true and I just think he, you know, Rubio is now fun and the word fun does not attach to J.D. vance. Nothing fun about J.D. vance.
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B
I think there's something else about Rubio aside from the fact that he,
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A
with
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B
very few exceptions, has conducted himself very impressively in key moments throughout this administration. But something else, and Vance can't do this. Rubio manages to sort of translate Trump speak. He gets the aggression of sort of Trumpism that people are into, but he translates it into sort of more respectable, articulate, established political language and that sort of, he sort of bridges like you know, fire breathing MAGA and pre Trump conservatives who have come on board. He continues to sort of make the case that Trump is okay for and is even a necessary part of, of the larger conservative project.
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D
You know, the moment that really struck me about Rubio versus fire breathing maga, even though he's in the administration and I was watching this press conference with my son, my 19 year old son, is when Rubio spoke Spanish at a press conference and was answering questions in Spanish and in English and just, you know, because he's bilingual. And then the strutting peacock, Pete Hegseth, comes on stage and is like, I speak American, thinking he'd like, gotten one on Marco Rubio. And Rubio was just like, okay, who was the adult on that stage at that moment? It was Marco Rubio and my 19 year old son who just said, he's like, why is he mocking a guy who's obviously smarter than him? I mean, he just. It struck him instantly that Rubio was behaving as you would want someone to behave in a moment. And also, it's cool that he's bilingual and Hagseth looked like a child. And that, to me, is a dynamic that, you know, Rubio could weaponize that and sort of, you know, get into these wars with other people in the administration. He doesn't do that. He behaves like an adult. And that, I think will become more and more important to all of, all of those of us who feel politically homeless in this country and who are looking for a change of tone, not just a change of leadership, when it comes to what the future of the Republican Party and conservatism looks like.
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C
So he has a moment that he can point to that brings all these points together, which was the Munich speech, where he gave this profound speech about being Americans, being the sons of Europe and will remain the sons of Europe, but articulated the grievances that the Trump administration and a lot of the American right has with the direction that Europe is taking, whether it's on free speech, whether it's on the Middle east and in general defense and security affairs. There are real gripes and frustrations. And Rubio was able to present that in a more productive manner than anybody I've ever seen, because it's so difficult to toe that line. And you did not leave that speech thinking that Marco Rubio hates Europe and doesn't want to work with Europe. You also did not leave that speec thinking Marco Rubio thinks Europe is the best and we should be like Europe. Somehow the high wire act he pulled off. And so he can point to that as a kind of, you know, we can say it's not just the meme we sort of watched. What would it look like if Marco Rubio put into form this Persona that he carries around? And he has done it that one time. And so that is presumably some kind of roadmap for, for. For, you know, what he would look like.
- [31:41]
E
From the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room, and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, health care and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [32:41]
F
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multibillion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show podcrash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [33:15]
A
When you get momentum, you step on the gas.
- [33:18]
C
That's how you get separation from everybody else.
- [33:21]
A
I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah, blah, blah. I looked up, let me tell you something. There's kids in my neighborhood putting in Sheetrock that are smarter than you.
- [33:27]
C
AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.
- [33:29]
B
It is never going to disrupt physical
- [33:31]
A
blue collar trade skill.
- [33:33]
C
And the guy just looked at me
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A
and he said, it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question.
- [33:37]
E
I said, it's impossible.
- [33:39]
F
Unless that's Podcast with me, Matt ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcast.
- [33:53]
A
Look, everybody has spent the last decade trying to figure out what the Trump secret sauce is. Is it the aggression and the sort of introduction of World Wrestling Federation rules into American politics? Was that change or seemingly authentic change? What is his secret sauce? Is that why candidates under him and even in the Democratic Party, you know, have gone profane and insulting and gone to sort of total ad hominem character assassination because that's what he does? Or is that something that only he really does well, because it's sui generis? Or is it that he represented real differences not in policy but in what you might call sort of General ideological tendency, which is like, Washington is garbage. The way politics works is garbage. I'm just gonna do it my own way and try to get things out of the way of business. And the Iranians have always sucked, and I'm gonna bomb them and all of that. And that's policy, sort of not as we would understand it. It's not laid out in papers and highfalutin speeches and things like that. So Rubio is the one who would be the carrier of the. Trump represents a new beginning in American politics in a policy direction, in this nationalist populist. We don't have alliances anymore in the way people understood alliances, because we're so much more powerful than our allies, and they do so little to help us or do anything to help manage the world that we're just going to walk. We're going to do what we have to do on our own, and we would like it if they would join us, but if they're not going to join us, the hell with them. And other such various ways of looking at the world like, no, the consensus that we need to do everything to protect our oil supply is not the way we're going to go. So he could be what kind of pence was trying to be in the first term, which is like the human face or the sort of the serious face of. Of Trumpism. And Vance. That's not Vance. Vance is, you know, I don't know what you. Vance is not. Also is not an insult comedian either, but Vance is more like. I don't even know how to describe it, but he's not that. And so this question of where the Republican Party goes after, that'll be a real fight between the two of them. And there is going to be a candidate to their right, both of their rights that we haven't quite figured out. It could be Tom Massey. It could be anybody who comes out of anywhere since Graham Platner came out of anywhere. But, I mean, it could be somebody who really does come up and say, you know, basically sort of runs almost unashamedly, unabashedly racist or unabashedly, you know, white. You know, the white country.
- [37:18]
D
I don't even think it's someone who has to run, you know, in a racist tone or anything like that. Given what Trump has not done in this second term with regard to speaking to people's economic concerns. It just has to be a more economically populous message, because that's actually. That's gonna decide the midterm election. It will likely continue to be the top issue on Voters minds in the next presidential election. And that's the one thing about Rubio I'm not sure. Like, how is he gonna talk about the economy? How's he gonna, is he gonna talk like the senator that he was? Cuz that's not gonna necessarily fly with a lot of the MAGA base, to be fair. But this is like Trump has completely fallen down on the job. I mean, he said the other day, like, I don't even care about the midterms, I don't care about the economy. And that's not great because he's supposed to be able to do lots of things at once. That's the job of the presidency. And so that dismissiveness, whether he means I'm not gonna talk about that today, still comes across as callous at the same time that he's, you know, showing pictures of ballrooms and, you know, all the, all the stuff he does care about for him, for his own interests and arches and all this whatnot. So I think that that's gonna have to be the message of Whoever's running in 2028 on the Republican ticket. It's like, how do we fix, is it gonna be a pro tariff candidate? Because there are all these questions about the economy that I'm not sure the Republican candidate's gonna have an easy time.
- [38:37]
A
To be fair to Rubio, his 2016 campaign was very much centered on economic issues. Nobody cared. He was stop with pushing everybody into four year liberal arts colleges. What we need to do is create a world in which it is more than acceptable, indeed commendable, to go do training, vocational training. We need to spend more on community colleges, vocational training, get people into actual work and help them, give them a path to a real job. And in the world of creeping AI, that message could be very resonant that the jobs that will not be taken by AI are jobs that people have to do with their hands. And that has been something that the political class in the United States had scorn for, has spent three, four generations pushing everybody into thoughtwork or pushing the idea that America is best when America basically has graduate degrees or, you know, gets a, you know, some kind of liberal arts degree or something like that. And we're better than you guys who just are, you know, plumbers and things like that. That's a real thing. It's not a joke like, and, you know, I don't know, I've got, look,
- [40:04]
D
I'm running an experiment in real time because I've got a kid in college and a kid pursuing a trade and so. And they're the same age, so it'll be really interesting. And that the contempt is real. The contempt is real mainly among knowledge class inside the Beltway.
- [40:16]
A
Texas.
- [40:16]
D
Yeah.
- [40:16]
A
I mean, you know, there is no conversation. It's sort of like the conversation people say that people have about Jews behind our backs or that, you know, African Americans believe happen among white people behind their backs. That the idea that somebody is, as you say, pursuing a trade if they're from an upper middle class family is viewed with horror, I would say pretty close to horror. Like, what do you mean you're not going to college? It's like saying you're not actually. It's sort of like saying you're not getting vaccinated. What do you mean you're not going to college? What do you mean you're not sending. What kind of parent are you if you don't send your kid to college? We went to college, Our parents went to college. You have to go to college. And then we all know. And I have two kids. I have a kid graduating next week from college, and I have a kid who's going into her second year in college. And we know that the juice is not worth the squeeze financially, economically. I mean, I am, you know, my older daughter managed to get herself a very good education at the college that she went to, but she had to do it. The school wasn't really of that much help in getting there. And we know that for most people, this is really not the experience that they're having, but that social sanction about being a person who does real things with your hands is very significant and does represent a real opportunity politically in a populist America to say, you guys are all like, walking into a dead end. Everything that you do, a machine is gonna do. Everything that I do, no machine can do. So I don't know. It's an interesting set of problems, but Rubio is actually reasonably well positioned for that. Although Vance is too obviously coming from his background and his life story and his mythologized life story in his own book. I mean, that's a.
- [42:22]
D
Although weirdly, when he talks about it, because it's so biographical, autobiographical, I often miss the kind of broader. I'm sure he has it, but he talks at the sort of 30,000 foot level of like, let's bring factories and manufacturing back to the US I think talking specifically about where will young people whose jobs have been disappeared by AI or whatever economic forces are at work? Where will they work? How will they work? What will they do? What Kind of different career and life paths can we put ahead of them? And how can we throw the weight of the American economy behind, encouraging the jobs that the future will need, not just the ones that we assume are gonna be every generation's. Within every generation's reach? He. I mean, his. His life story is incredible, but I don't. I've really never heard him talk specifically about the kinds of policies at the base level for youth today. The questions that every. Look, a lot of my friends who have recent college graduates, those kids have moved back home and they cannot get a job. Really smart, talented young people, and they cannot find real work.
- [43:26]
B
I think this gets at the heart of the contrast between Vance and Rubio. Dispositionally, what people sort of read from them. When John, you were saying Vance is. I don't know what Vance is as opposed to Rubio. I think the thing about Rubio here is that he has managed to successfully synthesize Trump's agenda and who he is and what he believes and how he conducts himself into a whole package. Whereas with Vance, you see, there's these sort of. There's Trumpism and there's Vance, and they sort of sit uneasily next to each other because Vance is at once sort of too adoring of Trump and known to be frustrated with certain aspects of the agenda. And it makes for a mix that really frustrates communication.
- [44:38]
D
Well, Rubio is also Gen X, so obviously I have complete skin in the game of wanting to see him be a president.
- [44:46]
A
Look, Rubio, here's the interesting, real contrast. And the next couple of months is going to give us a sense of how successful this message might or might not be. Rubio is an American Dream candidate, and Vance is. The American Dream has died candidate. Rubio is. My mother was a maid. My father was a cook. They came here. I built a life. Look at me. I'm the story that everyone can have. I am the embodiment of the American Dream. I want it for you. Vance is. I'm from a family that crumbled in the United States because of social conditions inside the United States. My grandmother was a nurse, My mother was an addict. You know, I lived a life of. Of chaos. I was only put on the straight and narrow by going into the military and then getting myself straight to college and then going to law school. But my path is not duplicable necessarily. The American dream has died. We need to somehow reignite it. But it's really not anybody's fault that they're failing because of all the social Conditions that have brought this about, you know, deindustrialization and the importation of drugs and social immorality and all of that. So Vance is the negative, Rubio is the positive. And we're about to go through this 250th anniversary and it doesn't feel like we're doing anything, taking it really seriously or the country doesn't seem to be like revving up to an exciting celebration of that. The way that it unexpectedly felt 50 years ago when I was 15 years old and we had the bicentennial. And that was a very big cultural moment, particularly right after Vietnam changed the heart of America a little bit or was like, we're not done yet, we're not dead yet, we're the greatest. Don't let anybody fool you. And it wasn't. Reagan was. There was still a Carter term to go before Reagan came in. But the stirrings of what Reagan was were very much present in the bicentennial. So if America has an unexpected surge of pride in its own history and what it can be and where we are, because after all, where are we? We have the world's largest economy by a factor of two and in terms of its productivity by a factor of five, we're the most powerful nation in the world. We have an extraordinarily high per capita income. All of the things we always focus on the terrible. And there is so much more that the famous veil of ignorance trick that John Rawls proposed, which is if you're a baby up in heaven and you get to pick where you're gonna be born on earth and you have full understanding of everywhere that exists on earth and you see America, where there's fentanyl and there's this and there's that, and there's, you know, immorality and, you know, homelessness and AI is coming and all of that, is there any other country in the world that you would prefer to be born into? And I think that answer is very clear. And so that's the question of whether or not a candidate can build from that base or whether people, cuz the Democrats certainly are, are going to run against America, which is what Trump did. And he did it at a very specific moment for a very specific reason in a very specific way. And remember, he eked out a victory and then he lost. You know, I mean, it's not like that message was universally accepted and swallowed and became the message of America.
- [48:46]
D
Well, and this is important because I think even with all of the indicators you've just listed, which are True. And certainly I think each of us on this podcast would choose to be born here. I mean, you win life's lottery if you are born an American, but each generation has to be reminded of that. And I think what we've had during the Trump era, even when he was out of office, is a pretty relentlessly negative portrait, both from the left and the right, about what this country is and where it stood. From the left, obviously, with all the WOKE stuff, we're racist, we're horrible, you know, we were founded in blood, blah, blah, blah. And I do mean blah, blah, blah, because what the 1619 Project and its ilk and along with sort of WOKE ideology really was corrosive to a sense of national identity for a lot of young people who were force fed it at crucial moments of their historical education. But on the right, there's not been as much of a positive message. So I think that's where, I mean, Vance is more likely to continue along the maga. Negative Make America great again because we're not great now. That's a negative message. And Rubio does have an opportunity to not just talk as like, I'm a person who came here and lived the American dream and so can you. But I think what this country's really hungering for right now is someone who can also say, and I have the skill set to fix the things that aren't working, List the things that aren't working, acknowledge why people feel like even though they love this country, why are our roads crumbling and this doesn't work and nothing works here. Someone who actually has those two skills to inspire, but also to fix. That's actually what I feel the country needs. And if that, I don't think, I don't think that can come from the left, but I do think it can come from the right. It has in the past. That's what Reagan did. That's what, like he did it. Focusing more on national defense, obviously, and the buildup of military. We need that now, too. So that's the fixing part of it. Because starting from COVID where we all.
- [50:34]
A
Part of it for Reagan was the tax cut.
- [50:37]
D
Yes. And the tax cut. So, like, I mean, the fixing. I want to hear someone give me a message that says, oh, we love this country and we want to make it be the best it can be. And here's how we're going to do that.
- [50:45]
A
Well, we got to.
- [50:45]
C
And you're right, that is not going to come from the left. Like the, the whoever wins the Democratic nomination is not going. This is, you Know, as I've said before, this is like the delayed Trump 2016 year for Democrats. The suppressed Bernie Sanders campaign during Hillary, the, the, the move to get behind Joe Biden, to stop Bernie in 2020, etc. This is the year it has to burst out of its chains. There's just no, there's going to be no stopping it. So there's not going to be the positive. That's another reason for the, you know, when John says that he doesn't expect Josh Shapiro to run, the other part of that, aside from his Jewishness, is that Josh Shapiro is, is a politician in a different mold. And that mold is also not going to be. So it's really going to be on the Republicans or nothing. And when you are running to hold the White House, that works as a, that fits. I'm saying it doesn't necessarily work, but it fits. It makes sense to run as. We're not dead and buried yet. Because if you run as we're dead and buried, it was you who buried us.
- [51:56]
A
Right.
- [51:56]
C
Look, so I do think you're not, you're not going to get that from the left and you can get that from the right. But I also think that they, they have to. There's a trap here, which is, Christine, you focus on the, on the fix things. And I think of the Saturday Night Live, the Kenan Thompson Saturday Night Live Weekend Update character who just goes, fix it. You know, fix it. That's the solution to do fix it. Yeah, but that's really, really important because there is a danger in going too positive. And I say this as a positive. You know, I'm an optimistic person. I'm not, I'm not a negative person. But I, there is, I recognize in the electorate on both sides, there is a danger in being lured into what will sound like just pure Reagan nostalgia. That, that is something that a lot of the right doesn't want to hear right now. But listen, you have to bounce.
- [52:51]
A
These races are, these races are between, you know, it's a binary choice eventually. And so a lot of what happens is who reacts to what the other people are saying. And you're right that the Democrats are going to burst out like Trump. And part of the problem is that the Democrats have not been in a position because they were in the House and a lot of, they didn't have, you know, they, no one was passing legislation and Covid came up in the middle and all of that. And Democrats did various socialisty things, but it was sort of like under the guise of emergency powers to Save the country from the pandemic. Zoran Mamdani is doing us a favor. Zoran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, is now starting to propose and announce and implement a series of policies that are the vanguard for the Democratic Party. And he did so yesterday or the day before yesterday in announcing a housing policy that involves, and I am not using a, I'm not being hyperbolic here, expropriation of property that landlords that are somehow determined to have to be bad and unsuitable and unfair and bad are going to have their property seized from them and run by the city. Meanwhile, the city has a housing authority called NYCHA which owns hundreds of thousands apartments that are in dreadful shape. And part of the policy is to fix up The NYCHA housing, $15 billion or something supposedly dedicated to NYCHA housing. According to most estimates, to actually bring NYCHA housing up to code will cost close to $90 billion. This is public housing that was built in the 1950s and 1960s, these giant housing projects. He's not interested in that. I mean, he's going to do it. And NYCHA should be better. He wants to establish the precept that housing is so important that it cannot be left to the private market. And not only that, but he and his administration will be the judges of whether people in the private market are allowed to own the private property that they have bought. And that is real socialism that has not been tried. And I mean, it's been tried with eminent domain, but that's not really socialism. Right. Eminent domain is a different thing.
- [55:45]
D
No. And a lot of those, Every, almost every one of those cases gets litigated and they often lose. State often loses.
- [55:51]
A
That. Yeah, right. And you're going to see in this and various other things the famous city run supermarket that you've probably all heard of. And this question of whether or not the supermarket is going to be running away, that is injurious to the interests of small business owners who live in the neighborhood of the supermarket because it will get favorable rates, favorable this. They'll try to underprice the bodegas, which are small family owned businesses. And there could be a real populist uprising against this socialist move by Mamdani, which will show a way forward for Republicans in 2028 if DSA style or DSA light candidates start running. Which is not only to say, oh, you want to live in New York, where if you're somebody who spends your life struggling to get the money together to buy your house so you can then live in the top floor and rent out the bottom floor. And you'll never know whether a city inspector is going to come by and say, I don't like the way that bathroom looks. We're gonna start initiating proceedings to take your house from you. You could have tens of thousands of people in the streets protesting this. Tens of thousands of small businessmen protesting in the streets against the.
- [57:21]
D
I mean, I like that idea. But the truth is, if you're a small business owner, you don't have the time to go out and protest. You either suck it up and pay the fine or you go out of business. I mean, I think we're. I think we're.
- [57:30]
A
You don't know that that's not true. That is. I'm sorry.
- [57:33]
D
But I think where, where a candidate. Where candidates. Where the Republican Party can really be effective here is not just pointing to Mamdani. Because I think a lot of voters, particularly Republican voters, like whatever you live in New York, you put up with New York, you know, that's your choice. But to point to any blue state local governance, because those in. In almost any city, no matter how large or how small, if you put a radical Democratic mayor in charge, things go south quickly. Not just with crime, with housing, with the price. I mean, we have so many examples over the last 10 years, and we have current examples for a lot of these blue state mayors. Blue state governance creates consistent problems. Democratic socialist policies don't work. And I think that's where connecting those dots, it's why, I mean, I have high hopes for the fraud task force that Vance wants to do. But I don't think it's going to come to much because you actually do need on board ags who are in blue states to prosecute the fraud where it's happening more likely, and they're not going to do that. But that like connecting the dots about. If you put someone with these ideas in charge, this is what happens. And point to New York, but point to Seattle and point to, you know, all the. All the places where stuff has gone south. I point to my own city of D.C. sometimes with the potential candidates for mayor, that is a problem. And I think for crime in particular, that's where a lot of people green off about. Right now you've got Tish in New York. She goes, I think you're going to have a lot more people worried about Mamdani as a political leader.
- [59:02]
A
Okay. I mean, I don't know.
- [59:03]
C
So the threat, the threat to Mamdani is that even if the protesters don't show up, the plan that he's proposing is the type of plan that. And Christine, I think you're talking about, this is. Initiates a cycle. The problem with blue state governance is that they initiate spirals. They feed on themselves. So Madani's gonna go after landlords and make it so that now you need to have all your. Now you would have to spend all your money not on repairs, but on legal bills or building a legal fund or something like that. And then the spiral that happens here is that nothing, the dilapidation only gets worse and the city comes after you.
- [59:48]
A
Right. This is a different spiral because all the stuff that you're talking about, Christine, has constituencies behind it. That is to say, screw up the schools. You got teachers unions there wanting to suck up the money that should be spent on other things. You have bad housing, you have bad regulation. That all helps the building trades. That all helps, you know, unions there too. You have shock troops. Mamdani is moving on parts of our economy and the way that we live that do not have organized support behind them except the activist class being trained by the NGO money. And those people cannot stand very readily against somebody who says, I make $75,000 a year running a bodega where I work 16 hours a day, and you are opening a store. The mayor of New York is opening a store that's gonna run me out of business. Who's on the other side of that argument? Except, you know, except a, you know, somebody who. An editor of Dissent or, you know, or Democracy, Michael Tamaski's magazine or something like that. There is no. Except for intellectuals. There is no. There are no shock troops for. Let's expropriate people's homes. And that is a populist issue. And in New York, the reason I disagree with you on the question of whether or not you can make, you know, you can sort of have a revolt like this is. There was one. It was a long time ago, but it was called the Hard Hat Revolt. It was against John Lindsay in his mayoralty. It gave rise to the kind of neoconization of New York which happened with Ed Koch and then with Rudy Giuliani over two decades. And it was this. You liberals are driving us into crime, bad schooling, and, you know, those of us who can't leave and a million people left New York from 1970 to 1980 are gonna have to stay here and fight it out. You're busing our kids to bad schools. You are. We're coming out with baseball bats and we're gonna stand on the street. So our Kids don't have to get on this bus and be bused from our neighborhood into a bad neighborhood. That was a real thing that really happened in the United States in living memory, in my lifetime. And it can happen again. But it's not the blue state governance, because the blue state governance model has this force behind it, basically the kind of public sector union force which is the heart and basis of how those mayors remain mayors and how those city council and how they can implement these policies or not. Or not defend against crime. So I'm saying it's horrible. I sorry to live here, but it'll be a gift in part because it's probably all gonna come to nothing and it's gonna all crash and burn before it's ever implemented. But it means there'll be something for the Republican to run against. As you're saying, blue state governance. I'm saying Mamdani himself or the worst aspects of it or something like that.
- [63:32]
D
Well, like the trucker protests in Canada where that, that was actually a more organically developed protest against the kind of government overreach that, that the people actually doing the jobs finally stopped doing them to say, no, this, no more.
- [63:46]
A
Exactly. We haven't talked about the fact that the ceasefire in the Middle east is not holding, although we're still referring to it as a ceasefire. We have ballistic missiles being fired at Kuwait. We have America dropping bombs on Iran. We have exchanges, dogfight exchanges over the above the Straits of Hormuz. So I don't know when we're gonna stop talking about the ceasefire. CENTCOM called the shooting of the missile equator severe violation of the ceasefire. So I just want to finish on this question. Have I mentioned my reverse Hamlet theory? Okay, I'm going to give you my reverse Hamlet theory about Trump and Hamlet. So Hamlet most best known work of literature in the world. Hamlet's a story about somebody who is given a task at the beginning of the play, right? Avenge your father's murder. And it is a play about how he resists and resists and he's full of self doubt and he wants to commit suicide and he can't bring himself to do it. And he gets distracted and, you know, he starts getting interested in a theater troupe that's come in and all of this and he is not doing it from Act 1 to Act 3. And then by Act 4, he really does start thinking, okay, I really have to make my plan on how to deal with my uncle. And then by Act 5, he's an avenging angel and makes sure that his uncle his father is avenged even though he dies in the process. Trump is reverse Hamlet. Trump started the war in Act 5. Trump bombed Iran in Act 5. And we're going backward in time. He has become more irresolute, more confused about what to do, more unsure of himself, more while understanding that the thing that he has to do, he hasn't changed his mind. Iran can never get a nuclear weapon. Iran can't have offensive capabilities and we need to win. But he's getting more self involved about how hard this is. And so usually this goes the other way. Like we build a drumbeat up to when we actually finally make the move. And we started with the move and here we are. And the question is, can he reverse field here somewhere in the middle of Act 2 and start moving forward again back to Act 5? That's my reverse Hamlet theory. What do you guys think?
- [66:37]
D
That's assuming this story has a plot to begin with. So that's where I guess I depart from. I'm not sure we ever had a plot, but. Right.
- [66:43]
C
I like the idea that it will make ceasefire a dirty word because all we heard for three years was ceasefire. Now we're just asking for a ceasefire. Now we're going to get. Trump is making it. So we get to a point where he says we got a ceasefire brewing and the anti war crowd says, no, not a ceasefire.
- [67:03]
B
My. I come up and I hit a dead end here because I cannot imagine either Trump being willing to go back and do what's necessary militarily to finish this job. I think it becomes harder with every passing day for him to do that. I also don't see him taking a nonsensical fake peace deal. So when I say I really. I have no idea how this ends, I am absolutely at a loss.
- [67:45]
D
I think they're going to force the. It's going to be the economic sanctions message for a little while longer. Like we're going to continue to the pretense of negotiations and ceasefires and meanwhile. Because I think Bessant is going to give a. Give a press conference today or is about at some point. And I think they're going to really double down on the economic warfare and hope that that might solve that problem. But I'm more in on your camp
- [68:07]
C
Abe, with yeah, they're sanctioning the authority that the IRGC created to toll non toll the Strait of Hormuz. And so that is, you know. Yeah, it goes into the economic sphere, but I think Trump is. He's basically trapped by reality. Right. Which is. Which is kind of weirdly reassuring because the reason he's waffling is because he doesn't love open ended war. But he can't, as you say, he can't bring himself to sign a stupid deal. And he knows that the only deal on offer right now is a stupid deal. Right? And so he's even fighting within his own administration. There's, there's leaks and trial balloons coming up behind him to try to get the public discussing something that may not even exist, but just to sort of move him, just to try to show him that people want peace, blah, blah, blah. But he can't bring himself to do it. This was a thing that we complained about, rightfully so much during the Biden administration was that they would talk about, when they talked about Israel and Gaza, they would talk about a war that was in the past. They would talk about, they talked about Rafa, for example, for so long. And we, we joke about Kamala saying, I've studied the maps, there's no way, nowhere for them to go, and whatever. But everybody kept up saying, you can't go into Rafah after Israel had evacuated Rafah of nearly a million civilians. And so you had this like these, not just Biden and Harris, but the world leaders even louder saying, no, we said, you can't go into Rafah. That was the whole deal. You can't go into Rafah, you'll kill everybody. And we're looking at a depopulated Rafah and going, what war? So this is, this is the thing that Trump, the trap that Trump has not fallen into yet. You know, knock on wood. Which is that he's not just getting tired and looking for a way out, that he's not talking about the war that was, there's new threats that come up during the war. And he is trying at least I think, to move along with it, to recognize that, all right, we didn't have this problem before, but now we have this problem, so we need a solution to it. Whereas in the past the instinct would be to find a solution to the war the way it was at the beginning and pretend that none of the developments that would change that have happened, happen.
- [70:34]
A
Fair enough. But my fear is that just as we have a reverse Hamlet, we're going to have a reverse Gulf of Tonkin or a reverse Fort Sumter, which is to say, because I'm not going to go with the Gulf of Tonkin. We did this on purpose. Which is to say that we're sitting there in a kind of stalemate and then something terrible happens. To Americans that the Iranians get off a missile that somehow hits an aircraft carrier or hits a base and actually does very severe damage, and hundreds of Americans are killed, at which point either we have to then reengage, say, okay, now you're done for which I think would be Trump's impulse, although he wouldn't necessarily have the American people behind him, because they'd say, well, this is your fault. You started this war. Here we are, you're just sitting there and you left them as sitting ducks. Or Lebanon 83, where we pull out after we're attacked, which was one of the most disastrous moments in American foreign policy history because it created Hezbollah. It was the moment at which the idea that America could be kept out of the Middle east and scared away was basically established and allowed the creation of new terrorist forces to kind of like grow and fester. And so that's why I hope we're not waiting around and just sitting there, because that is not a healthy proposition for an ongoing kinetic battle where, you know that the glory, the gold for Iran would be a direct hit on an American asset that killed a lot of Americans, which maybe they would be able to do if we stand in place long enough and they figure out a way to elude our, you know, our anti missile defenses or something.
- [72:40]
D
And they also can read the same polls we do, which is the most recent one from What, a week, 10 days ago. 64% of the country does not support this military action. That's, that's pretty significant. Much more support among Republicans than Democrats, obviously, but the average is about 64%. So those numbers, those matter in terms of long term stability of this effort, which is, by the way, remember, not officially a war.
- [73:06]
A
Yeah, I just want to make one final defense of Trump here. Something you mentioned at the beginning of the show, Christine, which is when he said yesterday at the cabinet meeting, I don't care about the midterms. That's good. The president of the United States should not be making decisions about the fundamental issues of national security based on the electoral needs of his party. He is supposed to be above party. He is supposed to be fighting for the entire country. This war he began, he needs to win it for the country. And while I actually think that if he won it, it would be the best thing for the midterm, that he should be very aggressive in trying to win it now because that would actually be better for him in the midterms than. Than this slow use of sanctions and choking off the Iranian money and all of that. Nonetheless, he's in his own inarticulate way, what he is saying is what I'm doing here is more important than any individual result that might occur in November of 2026. This is a matter for America and its future and its history. And that's what presidents should think in in my view. All right. We'll leave it there. So for Abe, Seth and Christine, I'm John Pothor. It's keep the candle. Bur.