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- [00:01]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
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B
Yay.
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A
Kathy Bates. Dolly Parton. Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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B
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst.
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A
No way of knowing which way it's.
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B
Going Hope for the best, Expect the.
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A
Worst, Hope for the best.
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B
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, January 20, 2026. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. Yes, we were off yesterday. I forgot to note that we were taking yesterday off. So if you were looking for us in your feed, I apologize profusely. And I blame myself. And I also blame executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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B
Just because I can, I just want to spread the blame around. Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:55]
D
Hi, John. I've already consulted a lawyer.
- [01:57]
B
Okay, thank you. See your editor, Seth Mandel, who also got the day off. And, you know, let's face it, it was a national holiday. So congratulations on that, Seth.
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E
Thank you. Hi, John.
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B
Hi. And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson, over whom I have no disciplinary authority whatsoever.
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F
Hi, dad.
- [02:22]
B
So I'm in kind of a very apocalyptic frame of mind. I watching the events of last week as they seem to roll over themselves day by day by day by day. And here I'm referring to the behavior of the Trump administration exclusively. Although I am not at all happy or comfortable with the lunacy that has been going on among Democrats and the left, from the revelations of Josh Shapiro's memoir to the behavior of Don Lemon and Black Lives Matter activists in a church in Minneapolis. Nonetheless, here's what I see, and then I want to ask you guys what you think it means. We have the developing international crisis over Greenland, which seems entirely unnecessary since we have, under current treaty, unlimited military basing rights and abilities to do what we need to do in Greenland. And Trump saying that he's no longer interested in Peace and doesn't care about peace, in a letter to the Prime Minister of Denmark because he failed to get the Nobel Peace Prize, which is not given by Denmark. The Peace prize is given by Norway, but I guess all Scandinavian countries look alike to him.
- [03:47]
C
By the way, it's not given by any country.
- [03:50]
B
Well, I know, but if it were given by a country, it wasn't Denmark. You know, Denmark gave us Hamlet. And I'm not sure, you know, what else, but then we get. We get Hamlet is. Was the prince of Denmark. And then we get Nobel setting up the prizes in Oslo, Norway. Anyway, to move on from this Narskite, we have Trump selling positions on the Gaza peace board for a billion dollars, inviting Lukashenko of Belarus, one of the world's three or four worst dictators, to be on the board of peace, as well as Putin and Gutter and all kinds of players who should not be on the board of peace, attempting to help steward Gaza into the next century or whatever. We have in the Greenland game, him saying this morning that if Macron doesn't go along with going on the. On Greenland and going on the board of peace, that he will tariff French wines as punishment. There's four or five other things that, oh, he's gonna make it illegal for any other sporting event to happen during the Army Navy game, and about three or four other things that lead me to believe that he has spun off his axis. I don't know what that means. I'm not saying that he's crazy or crazier than he used to be, or that he's old or that he's older than he used to be, just that all these things are happening at once. They have completely poisoned the well. On the successful military action, the successful military law enforcement action to extract Maduro from Venezuela, which only happened two weeks ago. I know that this is going to strike you as amazing, but it only happened two weeks ago that we had extracted a president out of his presidency, his dictatorial presidency, and of course, Iran. And of course, the kind of blinking on Iran and the praise for himself that he kept 800 people from being hanged. And he was very grateful for that. When we now know that it appears something like tens of thousands of Iranians were literally gunned down from rooftops in cities across the IRAN While those 800 people weren't publicly hanged. So I am feeling bad.
- [06:33]
E
Just. Can I add to that? Today is the first anniversary of Trump's being sworn in this term. So, you guys, we made it one year. Happy one year. There's only Three more years of chaos. If you thought that was a lot that John just went over, we're one quarter of the way through the second term.
- [06:59]
B
And I mean, you know, the first term was highlighted by an extraordinarily important world historical moment, which was the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program and the largely successful conclusion to what I viewed as the successful conclusion to the war in Gaza with America's help. And that remains the signature achievement of the administration and needs to be viewed as something of such importance and with so long lasting consequences that we should not then look back on the last year and say, oh, Doge, that was crazy. And what about Kash Patel? He's a nut. And RFK Jr. Is so terrible. And all of that, all of which may or may not be true, but the, but that administrations are remembered in history for doing three or four things, not for how they were conducted on a day by day basis. Nonetheless, this week seemed to me to mark some kind of a shift into a level of thuggish craziness that is, that goes beyond the first term and the kind of stuff that he did in the first term. And oh, and I didn't talk about the pardons. He, he, he commutes a sentence for the second time of the same fraudster who did fraud, got pardoned, went out, committed more fraud and got pardoned for a second time and we don't even know why. And the woman who gave two and a half million dollars and then her husband got, got pardoned anyway.
- [08:36]
C
All right, so, so I'm, I'm, I'll explain why. I'm not apocalyptic. I'm not at all happy. And I agree that the things you've outlined are fiascos. I think the Board of Peace and the threats to the military threats over Greenland and the tariff threats and the attack on NATO and Europe generally. But I am not apocalyptic because I've been trained by so many years of Trump. To me, every week there is a Lucy football moment and I'm just not going to kick until I see where things end up 24 hours from now, 48 hours from now. I mean, I agree that the stakes are higher with these fiascos. I think his behavior is more brazenly thuggish, as you say, John, with these steps. But somehow things come back from the brink over and over again. I mean, I was pretty apocalyptic after the Zelensky meeting in the White House, for example. Still a terrible, shameful chapter. Somehow things moved on. So that, that, that's where I'm at.
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B
Okay, well, I Mean, I wouldn't exactly say that you've bucked up my spirits there.
- [10:30]
C
No, no. I mean, there's no reason.
- [10:33]
B
I know, I know. Not to kick the football is a very low. Yeah, I'm waiting to. I'm waiting there.
- [10:40]
D
There is actually being somewhat apocalyptic is the appropriate response to this, because for all of the efforts, and we've made some of them ourselves on this show over the last year, trying to explain what we think Trump is doing because he offers no explanation of his own behavior beyond, I want this, I'm doing it that way. Impulsivity and as you say, a of greater thuggishness and, and just terrible, poor grammar, a lot of the statements. But that's just me being obnoxious. But here's the thing. Much of what he's doing now, even if he thinks it has some sort of purpose, is actually contradicting his claims for why he's doing it. So this is an administration that claims to value Western civilization and want to protect America's interests abroad. And all this. And what he's doing by attacking NATO and undermining that long term alliance isn't just sticking it to the European elites. He's, he's creating instability in what has been an 80 year, you know, difficult relationship at times, but a very stable source of power on the globe. Peace, calm, and there's no need for it. He could get everything he claims he wants without doing that, but he did it anyway. Another example with Greenland. He claims he wants to have a greater projection of American power in the Arctic to combat China and Russia. Well, he's having the opposite effect. The Canadian Prime Minister just met with the Chinese who all. Who's going there this week? The UK Prime Minister. Now, I'm not a fan of either of the politics of those leaders of those countries right now. They're basically socialist. But the alliance matters. The fact that he's driving people towards the very enemy he claims to want to be protecting America against contradicts his claims. So I think we should wonder and scratch our heads a bit about why he's throwing down the gauntlet on Greenland now. He's going to Davos tomorrow. One potential strategy is that he created all this chaos and then he's going to give a speech on Wednesday and maybe people will make deals with him and whatnot. But that tariff power itself is very highly at risk of being rescinded by the Supreme Court. So even all these things, all these tools he thinks he has in his toolbox might be taken away from him. I Think it's time for Congress to start speaking up a little bit more about these alliances. A lot of what he claims he wants to do in Greenland he cannot do without congressional approval and certainly without the purse. And Americans should be asking, okay, so say he takes over Greenland militarily and they resist and the Danish army shows up, are we going to start shooting Danish soldiers, soldiers who fought with us in Afghanistan and elsewhere? I don't know. We haven't. He's not even thinking that far ahead. So being slightly puzzled and apocalyptic at the same time strikes me as a very healthy attitude this morning.
- [13:24]
B
Okay, well, great. So you've just now brought me even lower than I was before. Abe tried to buck me up, but failed.
- [13:33]
C
Well, I'll add this.
- [13:35]
B
You don't have to make me feel better because, you know, my analysis is so correct, what I laid out is so self evidently not good that it's, there's no point in really trying.
- [13:47]
F
I think the counter argument on Greenland is as follows, though. I really do think you can argue it both ways. And Trump will be subject to the laws of reality at some point. But in the first term, when he was demanding that all the countries in NATO pay their fair share, there was all sorts of caterwauling that he was destroying the NATO alliance. And when he ran in 2016 and was making these kinds of statements, there was lots of hysteria and complaints that he was going to destroy the alliance and what is he doing and what is he saying? And it didn't destroy the alliance. And in fact, the countries ended up paying up. So it's possible that this, again, the NATO countries are getting their backs up, they're very upset, but will result in some kind of agreement that does strengthen security in the end. I think the counterargument to that is that this sort of chaos and overreach, maybe it doesn't result in any kind of catastrophe for a period of time. And look, like everybody said, the tariffs are going to be catastrophic. And you could argue they've had costs, but they haven't been catastrophic in terms of their market impact. But at some point he will be subject to the laws of reality.
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B
Okay, but I think you're operating on too short a timeline there when you say that, you know, everybody was worried about NATO, but by the end of the first term, they, they paid up. I mean, I don't actually know if they've paid up. They've all announced that they've paid up. We have no idea whether they've actually.
- [15:26]
F
They are, that that alliance is they are taking their security more seriously.
- [15:31]
G
They are certainly taking their security much more risk.
- [15:35]
B
Although a lot of their, taking their, their security more seriously had to do with not anything America did except badly, negatively, which is Biden, which is they, they saw Putin invade Ukraine and said we better get our weaponry in order because something new is happening on this continent. But what I mean to say is that Trump doesn't like NATO, never liked NATO, is a unilateralist, doesn't like these agreements, but he bullied them into doing things he wanted in the first term that did not moderate by getting what he wanted. It did not make him feel any more warmly or comfortably or more optimistic about this alliance, as this week demonstrates. So they.
- [16:22]
F
And vice versa.
- [16:24]
B
Well, okay. But no, I mean, he's aggressing against them. They're not aggressing against him. I mean, in other words, like if they're not feeling good about America this week, they have some reason not to feel good about America this week. He's got no particular reason that we by the way, can feel all kinds of things about these countries, how they're handling their Muslim immigration in particular, certainly relating to how Jews are being treated and all of that. But in terms of their international commitments and the things that we expect them to do as part of the NATO alliance, there's no sign that they are in arrears, that they aren't pushing things. He just, so when I say you're on too short a timeline, maybe he's still in the I'm going to destroy NATO one way or the other.
- [17:15]
D
Well, he's floating, he's floating an alternative, right, that the peace board idea he would like to spin out and franchise and you know, if you pay a billion dollars, you can stay on for as long as you want and he gets to pick who's making the decisions. That sounds to me, I mean, I think it looks like a kind of slightly insane model UN but he, he wants some sort of American led but American controlled institution. And that's where his blind spot and his lack of any historical grounding or sense of how our system actually works is detrimental to his goal. We are already the most powerful nation or, or have been for a long time and use that sway on in those international institutions when we want to and we can ignore them when we want to. Going to war with them is a very different strategy and not one that's been tried with the western alliance in 80 years.
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E
I've got, I've got an American led, American run alliance organization for him. If he really wants one. It's called NATO.
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D
Exactly.
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B
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- [20:03]
G
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- [20:34]
B
Isn't that an amazing thing?
- [20:35]
G
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B
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G
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B
I mean, this is the problem, which is what are we even talking about here? Like, you don't, you know, George Washington said we should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy in his, in his farewell address. And people brought that up who were opposed to the Maduro action by saying this is something that Trump was doing here and in violation of Washington's original animating conception of how American foreign policy should work. I don't think that's correct. But you certainly shouldn't be going out abroad in search of allies, alliances to destroy when there's no motive cause for it. I mean, you could make a case that NATO had There were these two or three moments in the course of the last 30 years where NATO was tested to its limits and survived because of the importance of the NATO alliance, particularly in the highly controversial commitment of troops to Iraq in 2003. But they did it. A lot of those countries did not want to do it. France in particular, which isn't really a part of NATO. I mean, France has got a weird semi, not in, not out quality, but, but, but they, but they joined because that was, that was what Article 5 obliged them to do. And they did it. And we're now in a position where we are playing games with our obligations or hinting that we will not fulfill our obligations under Article 5. And they've been put to the test and have succeeded. And I'm not, like I say, I don't like Starmer, I don't like Macron. You know, I don't, I don't like these, you know, I, I find them all repugnant in, in many ways. Certain European leaders, but the countries themselves and the per and the way that they function in the world have been on balance advantageous to US Interests in the world. They have not done what whenever there are things that we could say are not necessarily advantageous to our interests, they happen outside of NATO. For example, we could think that the Paris Global Accords on, on, on global warming or the environment, which I think, my guess is we all oppose. But you know, whatever doesn't matter. Like, but those, those had to be done outside of NATO. Those kinds of agreements had to be done out because NATO is a military and defensive alliance and it has Held the way no alliance has held in the history of the planet Earth and threatening it is psychotic. Unless there's a reason. Unless there's a good reason like they are going to prevent us from defending ourselves. And okay.
- [24:27]
D
And this is actually why I think we can't overthink. His letter to Norway is the reason he is behaving the way he wants. And it's because he was personally offended and doesn't seem to have a clue that the country of Norway isn't the one giving out peace prizes. It was the other way around.
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B
Denmark.
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D
No, no, the letter was to Norway.
- [24:48]
B
The letter was Sorry.
- [24:49]
D
Yeah, his letter, his childish toddler explosion on, in print. And that's my question. How is this advancing Americans interests? Because his MAGA is supposed to be about making America great again. You know, disrupting global chessboard is supposed to advance America's interests. Americans, we already know from public opinion polling do not want this Greenland stuff to get worse. Greenlanders don't want us there either. Greenlanders and Denmark would be happy to have some renegotiated expansive military presence by the US There. Do American taxpayers want to pay for that? We don't know. Will Congress actually allow those funds to flow? We don't know. There is no explanation from him beyond I'm personally wounded and I want something and I'm going to go get it. And I know I'll be accused of being like, I'm not anti Trump. I don't have Trump derangement syndrome. I'm happy to list the things I think he's accomplished that are good for this country as well. But his tone is going to have long term consequences for our alliances long after he's gone. Just like those tariffs, if the Supreme Court doesn't get rid of them, will have long term economic consequences for this country that will be felt by us long after he has gone. And I think that's where you look to the futures market in the last few days. Both the US Futures market and some of the European futures market and even some of the Asian futures market. Lot of instability. This is creating instability across the globe. But why? Why? How is it advancing Americans interests? I don't see my interests represented anywhere in that letter that he sent.
- [26:22]
F
Yeah, I think, I think the reality is, you know, Russia for a long time has wanted to divide Western Europe from the US this is doing that and in the meantime it is also driving Canada and others into the arms of China. So I agree with you, Christine. It's not achieving what the President has said he wants to accomplish, which is undermining Russian and Chinese interests in Greenland. And I do think we could pretty easily accomplish what we want, which is to, through diplomacy, achieve some agreement with the Danes to expand our military footprint, mine these rare earth minerals and have some profit sharing or, you know, whatever agreement with them. I do think we could achieve that without all of this drama.
- [27:15]
B
Now, to put the shoe on the other foot, as our friend Matt Con Netti would say. Now imagine that 2024 came out differently and Kamala Harris were president, and we have been given a little glimpse into what it would have been like for Kamala Harris to be president from the revelations that emerged at the, you know, the other day, from the early release of the leak, I think it's fair to say to the Atlantic of the New York Times of Josh Shapiro's memoir and his description of the vetting process that he went through as one of the two final finalists for the vice presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. And it's so chilling that it's almost like a, it's almost like a joke. It's like you go in, be like you going in for a job interview that, you know, you are one of the finalists for, and you are basically the HR department, not even the boss, but like the person who is in hr, starts asking you extraordinarily aggressive and hostile questions about things that in ordinary practice would be considered so beyond the bounds of acceptable questioning that you would be within your rights to stand up, walk out, and, you know, say, I'll, I'll never work with you people again. Obviously, the thing was this question of whether or not he, he was asked point blank to answer the question of whether or not he had been an agent of the government of Israel, because guess why, he's Jewish and went to Israel in his teens and volunteered on a kibbutz. And apparently on one document at one point may have written down that he volunteered for the idf, the Israeli army, by which he could have meant that the kibbutz delivered a box of grapefruits to an IDF base and thus and distributed them to soldiers and, and thus he volunteered for the idf. Now, by the way, in security terms, I have nothing against the idea that when you're vetting somebody who might have connections to a foreign power, you ask questions. I myself went through this process as a White house speechwriter in 1988 when I had to get security clearance and my sister was living in Jerusalem at the time. And not only did they ask me many questions about how often I'd been there and this and that. The other thing, they sent an FBI agent from the American mission, either the embassy or the consulate in Jerusalem or whatever it was, and they sent that person to her apartment to check that she lived there and to interview her about her connections. Because I was going to be getting what was called code word, and I got code word clearance, the highest level of security. I don't object to the idea that if you are doing a security, a process of vetting somebody, that you vet them for these reasons. Everything's on the table. You don't have a right to be vice president or not to be asked these questions. But it does appear from the context and from other things that he said that the very specific thing that they were concerned about in relation to Josh Shapiro was everything we thought it was back in August, which is that he was a Jew. And he was a Jew. And he was a Jew. And he was a Jew who supported Israel and keeps kosher and goes to synagogue and has a, and sends his kids to a day school. And was he somehow going to agree to apologize for this and apologize for objecting to demonstration to encampments on the Penn campus and other places, which I believe Harris asked him directly herself.
- [31:57]
F
Yes.
- [31:59]
B
So this is bad. And it gives you a sense.
- [32:02]
E
What's bad about it is that, you know, as we said at the time when this was going on, this was about more than Josh Shapiro. This was about Josh Shapiro being used as an avatar for a certain American Jew. This was like, in the future is, are other American Jews going to think twice about, you know, going to Israel for a summer or a month here or there or whatever because of what they're going to be asked because they, you know, what career they want to go into. Are they, are they going to try to hide it on resumes and stuff like that? There was this insinuation that, you know, I don't know exactly what these brilliant progressive minds thought 17 year old Josh Shapiro was doing for the IDF, but he certainly wasn't. You know, Israeli Brigadier General Josh Shapiro, age 17, he was volunteering. He was doing what a lot of kids do. And a lot of kids go there for, you know, a year abroad in Israel to seminary, to yeshiva, things like that. People go for, you know, summer camps, you know, usually your last year of like actual camper hood is, you know, often a summer in Israel. I mean, the problem here is that they're raising questions about legitimate activity that is that a lot of Americans engage in. And those American kids who go back to their high school after going to camp for the summer, don't need to be questioned at their high school about whether they came back Israeli agents and, you know, and all the rest. So there's a. There's a kind of paranoia you inject into normal Jewish American activity. And if you do it to Josh Shapiro, and it looks like, well, there was a reason to do it, you know, to Josh Shapiro, then there's a reason to do. Have that line of questioning with anybody and everything becomes suspect.
- [34:00]
B
I mean, that's a very important. Yeah, go ahead.
- [34:02]
F
Sorry. They're free to raise whatever question they want, and we're free to think what. What we want of it, and it speaks volumes about their mindset. I think it's worth recalling that the people who led the vetting for Harris were former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder of Covington and Burling White, she law firm in. In this country, and Biden's White House counsel, a woman by the name of Dana Remus, who represented Columbia University before the federal government in its exchanges with the federal government after she left office. These people work at an elite law firm, and these were the questions they thought appropriate to ask it. They were obviously representative of. Of where the candidate herself stood because she asked Shapiro, as you mentioned, John, if he would apologize for saying that he thought the Hamasnik protests on the University of Pennsylvania campus, which Shapiro was outspoken about, if he would apologize for his posture on that. You know, it's striking to me because it was bad politics, too. Not only is it morally stupid, but it was bad politics for her. And what's amazing is that she chose the guy, Tim Walls, who has now had to announce he will not run for a third term in Minnesota because his state has been overrun by welfare fraud and who traveled to China through 30 times and said things that, you know, might make one suspicious that he was an agent of the Chinese government. I'm not saying what are the differences.
- [35:55]
B
By the way, between China, China and.
- [35:58]
F
What is the difference? Israel is an important American ally. China is an American adversary. So, I mean, that's all we need to know about where Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party stood on important issues of the day.
- [36:13]
C
Can I say a couple of things, please? Apparently, Tim Waltz was asked about being a Chinese agent, and they picked up what it's worth. Yeah, I know. Well, he said no, but I mean, but, you know, so the way everything has sort of played out under normal circumstances, whatever that means, John, when you put the shoe on the other foot and you say, so that's. So where. Where this is where we would, we would be in some sort of extended version of this had Kamala Harris won. And that's true. And it would have had real, I think, horrible, devastating policy implications. And we would, the world would look very different today. As it happens, though, I think.
- [37:08]
B
The.
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C
Democrats losing and Trump winning somehow emboldened the woke Jew hating. Right. And what we do have now is Trump, who is an extraordinary friend of Israel and, you know, anti Hamas, to put it mildly, and all the rest of it, but who meets with Tucker Carlson at the White House. So I would like to be happier about the shoe that wasn't put on, but.
- [37:53]
B
Well, let me. Well, let me make you happier now. I'm going to make you happier.
- [37:58]
C
Thank you.
- [37:58]
B
Because the point here is not just that she asked these questions. The question is what it suggests about what how she would have governed had she become president. And one, and as I think we would be sitting here in January of 2026 with a fully intact Iranian nuclear program and a war in either right now, the war in between Israel and Gaza would still be grinding on because the United States would have been levying demands on Israel that Israel could not possibly meet. To conclude the war thus would have lengthened the war, given the Iranian axis, the idea that all it needed to do was wait things out until America shut, you know, like dropped the boom on Israel and said, we are cutting off our friendship with you unless you do what we want when we want it now. And everything would be a lot worse in terms of those policies, not to mention what life on campus would be like. There have been all these jokes in the last week about how, you know, that that meme of showing a completely empty college campus with, with no encampments and nothing in response to the horrifying massacres that Iran is committing against its own citizens. Right. Well, imagine a Kamala Harris administration with Israel continuing its war in Gaza and what those campuses would look like now absent the incredibly aggressive Trump administration's efforts and in this case, not following along the lines of the craziness of the last week, but in terms of applying Title 6 of the Civil Rights act of 1964 to Jews and the relations of colleges to the Jewish students whom they were not protecting as a class. Obviously the Harris administration would have done no such thing, would have used no such tool, would have not sought to protect Jews, would probably have pulled out of the Ihra definition of antisemitism conceit, which now Mamdani has obviously rejected as a sort of or as the, as the next element of how things are going to go in a resurgently leftist Democratic Party. And so in that sense, I think on those issues, there can be no doubt that the world would be a worse place. And the United States moral stain in refusing to see the difference between the attacked country, meaning Israel, and the attacker, meaning Hamas, and the decision essentially to express moral sympathy toward the attacker and not toward the attacked, what effect that would have. And I think also she would have been bad on Ukraine. In other words, Trump is like affirmatively openly bad on Ukraine in terms of his rhetoric, but hasn't really shifted US Policy in a major way, way to reflect that. Whereas Harris would have still been talking up how much she likes Zelensky and would have been cutting aid to Ukraine while it worked.
- [41:26]
C
It worked. I'm happier.
- [41:28]
B
Okay, good. I, I, you know, I can make.
- [41:32]
E
You even happier to make people happier. Pitchers and catchers report in 20 days.
- [41:37]
C
Well, that, that has no effect.
- [41:39]
B
Not if you're a Mets fan. You're not happier.
- [41:43]
E
Hope springs eternal.
- [41:44]
B
No, don't, don't go there, don't go there. Look, New York sports teams, this is a thing like There are now 10 great coaches out there for the jets and you know, they're going to keep Aaron Glenn and they're, you know, they're not even going to make a bid, you know, for any, for McDermott or anything. So I'm not going there because now you're, now you're, I don't know what that was supposed to be. Now you've thrown me off on an entirely other tangent. That is all, that is all depressing.
- [42:13]
E
They are the happiest words in the English language. Pitchers and catchers report.
- [42:17]
B
Okay, fair enough. Okay. So by the way, the other, the only, the only good thing in the last couple of weeks has been some of the greatest football that anybody has, has, has ever seen. I mean, I'm talking about like eight games at least, that were heart poundingly magnificent. So we had that going for us.
- [42:37]
F
But I missed the only good thing.
- [42:40]
B
Oh, is there another one?
- [42:41]
F
No, no. I was saying since I don't follow football, I missed the only good thing.
- [42:46]
B
Of the past, it looks like. I mean, I don't follow, I'm not, I'm not like a football fanatic, but yeah, this was, this is pretty. Well, do you have anything, what do you got for me that's made you feel good in the last, you know, aside from your children and, you know.
- [43:02]
F
That kind of got nothing.
- [43:03]
B
Nothing. You got nothing. Okay, well, so the tariffs, I want to Just talk briefly about the tariffs and the Supreme Court. I think the Supreme Court has been remiss in not issuing its decision on the tariffs more, more quickly. And I assume this means that there's stuff going on there that makes it, is making it. They're coming up with some split the baby, something that is going to be really bad. But I mean you can see the longer that this has gone on and it's now been almost like nine or 10 months and we're living in that uncertainty on the tariffs, all based on what they are going to say. And Trump is now Trump's rhetoric about the tariffs is getting again crazier and crazier. When he says he's gonna tariff French wine to force Macron into agreeing to be on the Board of Peace. Which by the way, also what's not clear to me is does Macron have to pay the billion dollars to get on the Board of peace? Is that like a membership fee or does he get to waive billion is.
- [44:15]
F
To be permanently on it. You can have a three year term and then a billion dollars is a permanent membership.
- [44:23]
B
So I'm here.
- [44:24]
D
It's like when your friends start a substack and they want you to be a founder of their substacks so you.
- [44:29]
E
Have to like fork over a lot also. You also get, you know, daily passes for your friends so they can use the gym at the Gaza Board.
- [44:38]
B
Yeah.
- [44:39]
E
Headquarters and you know, whatever else.
- [44:41]
B
That's what we need is a nice two and a half billion dollar Gaza board building. Like so the new Fed.
- [44:46]
D
The question about the Supreme Court's decision making, I'm sure you're correct, that they are trying that there's the negotiation that goes on with these sorts of complicated decisions is what is happening. But you know, they, they took their, they took some time when Biden was abusing presidential power to do the quote, unquote student loan forgiveness, which was really just spending money he wasn't allowed to constitutionally. And this is, you know, the question of whether the President's violated the Constitution by trying to tax. It's basically tariffs or attacks and whether that's legit. And he's saying what I think has been interesting is the unwillingness of anyone in this administration to specify what the alternative tariff power will look like if this one disappears. Because it's not clear that he's going to be able to do this sort of blustering tariff threat that he's used as an arm of foreign policy. If with, with any other tariff power that the President has So he. He will be quite weakened in terms of his ability to threaten these other countries with that. And I think that's why we haven't seen a lot of downstream effects economically yet. Everybody's kind of waiting, but I would rather they take their time and carve out a very clear constitutional principle here so that future administrations don't also abuse this power in the way that I think they did quite well with. With Biden's attempt to forgive student loans.
- [46:08]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
- [46:35]
B
Yay.
- [46:35]
A
Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry Dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [47:06]
B
Okay, well, we'll. I mean, you know, this is all wild, you know, speculation, but, because two weeks ago, there was this weird moment when they announced they were going to put out a decision on Friday, you know, totally out of phase with how they do decisions. And then everybody sort of assumed that it was tariffs. I had. We had this whole conversation whether or not we were going to have to do a special emergency podcast about the tariff decision, or should we wait on Friday until 11 when the tariff decision was coming out? And then it turned out it wasn't the tariff decision at all. It was something else. It's like, you know, it's like being like a head fake. Very annoying. But.
- [47:45]
D
But, but it is our most deliberative branch. And I think because we all exist in a world where just as we started this show, we listed things that happened in, what, the last week. They move slowly, purposefully. And that is a good thing. And I think we are often too impatient as they do that deliberative work. And we have to. It encourages us to practice patience while they deliberate.
- [48:08]
E
That is streaming shows who reveal who release one show a week on a specific day, like Apple TV releases a new episode of the show every Friday versus, you know, I don't know, Netflix or Hulu dumping, you know, at all at Once. But I do think there's an argument to be made that you speed it up maybe in this case not because everybody really wants to know the answer, but because, as you can see with Greenland, he uses the tariffs as like a first resort policy. And so you can make the argument that, you know, and I sort of agree that, that the court should take something that is immediate and treat it with immediacy, which is like, the longer this goes on, the more tariff cases there are going to be that could potentially unravel or be canceled or whatever. And we have to unwind if the Supreme Court, you know, rules against it and figure out how to implement the rulings. They just get more complicated as the weeks go on.
- [49:08]
D
This court has been challenged a lot in this administration with emergency questions. I mean, there's a lot of federal and local lawsuit disputes going on right now with, about, with presidential power to use the National Guard and to. I mean, with ice. I mean, all with the immigration policy. So it's not as if the court isn't. I mean, they have a lot on their docket, a lot of pleas for these sorts of emergency responses.
- [49:33]
B
Also, I mean, to be fair to the court, if this is a political question, the fight should be between the president and the legislative executive and the legislative branches. And because the Republicans in the Senate in particular are so, so pusillanimous. And, you know, the, the classic rule is, oh, you want to impose an emergency power like X, we're just not going to, we're going to basically freeze all of your appointments until you. Until you bring us into this conversation or you're not, you're not getting your bill read or something like that. Like there were throughout history, what the presidency had to fear was the either inaction or outright hostility of Congress and therefore had a moderating influence on it. Trump has broken the Republican Party to become his sort of, you know, catamite. And as a result, and we've seen an example of this this week, which is that he has endorsed a rival to John Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, excuse me, Bill Cassidy, who, you know, in a. In a reasonably shameful fashion, and because he knew better, you know, voted for RFK as Health and Human Services secretary in order to make nice with Trump because he had voted for Trump's conviction in the January 6th impeachment. And that effort to kind of like, smooth things over, obviously is far less important to Trump than making sure that everybody who went crosswise against him on January 6th is punished. So he endorsed Cassidy's. This congresswoman who was running against Cassidy and the Republican primaries. And that's how you see how he works his will to make sure that Congress, that the Republicans in Congress don't cross him. But you know what? So. So don't be a senator, you know, if you're going to be a wussy, contemptuous worm, don't be a senator. Like, leave it to somebody else who's willing to do something brave and lose office. Like, you know, by now it's like, so lose office. So you were a senator for a term. It's a pretty lousy job. You can go off and make a zillion dollars as a lawyer or a lobbyist or something like that. Like, you know, what do you. What are you clinging onto your power for? If clinging onto your power means becoming a, you know, toady? And Cassidy, I guess, is kind of getting what he deserves for voting for Kennedy, whom he knew perfectly well he should not have voted for.
- [52:23]
E
Cassie, I hope the lesson is that you can lose it. Like, you can lose your spot anyway.
- [52:29]
B
Yeah.
- [52:29]
E
You know, in other words, that you don't. Even if you become a toady, you may own. You may only get that single term. So I'm hoping one of the lessons is that you can't just bank on, you know, loyalty in this industry, in this city, you know, in a situation like that. And maybe you should just go out there and vote your conscience and you'll have exactly the same odds at retaining your seat as you would have had you toadied.
- [52:55]
F
Well, I think this is an interesting showdown in a different way in that Cassidy has said he's going to fight in this Republican primary against the challenger, Julia Letlow. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Trump in a conversation that he's backing Cassidy. And so what this looks like is that it will be a showdown now between President Trump and a primary challenger and a sitting Republican senator and the Senate majority leader. And I'm not positive that the president actually will prevail here. We'll see. But it will be quite an interesting test of the president's power, backing a primary challenger in the midterm elections. He has historically been incredibly successful in these challenges, and so it will be very interesting to watch.
- [53:47]
B
It will.
- [53:49]
C
This is making me think of something that it's related to this, but it also ties to our earlier discussion about what Trump is up to abroad. I think part of what is going on now is that because of Trump's successes, particularly the most recent one being the cap, the capture of Maduro, but also the taking out the Iranian nuclear facility. The, the, his, the forcefulness of the ice raids, even though that's turning into a problem, but it's, it's something that, you know, he's, he, he, he can, he puts that as sort of somewhere in the wind column because they're apprehending criminals and so on. I think these successes have fed his megalomania and he's sort of, in the wake of these, he's feeling more powerful. That has to do with the brazenness and the increased thuggishness.
- [55:05]
B
Yeah, I mean, you sort of expect that when somebody scores successes that it, and fulfills the sense that they have used their power both justifiably and successfully, that it has an oddly calming effect. You know, it's sort of like the dopamine rush calms you down. It doesn't like, make you, it doesn't cause greater rushes of fight or flight adrenaline. But that does not seem to be the way Trump's constitutionally made up, as it were. Okay, I want to conclude by making a recommendation, and this is a very heartfelt one, but it's a little complicated. I read an extraordinary book over the last three weeks, a novel called Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins, published in 2023. I read it because I had read that it was being made into a Hulu series. And it's a book about a boarding school and a mystery that takes place at a boarding school. I had read, and then I read some other somebody on substack saying that it was really interesting and I should read it. And it's a first novel by somebody who was a political, who was a Times Washington bureau Chief in the 2000 and tens. And it is one of the most haunting American books I've read in years. It is a very complex, seemingly simple story about a kid who goes to a boarding school in 10th grade.
- [56:53]
A
And.
- [56:55]
B
Is on the outs and is being mistreated by some of the in crowd and then falls in with the in crowd and then needs to try to maintain his position with the in crowd while he finds himself in love with the girlfriend of, like, the big man on campus. So that seems like a pretty simple Holden Caulfield esque type of story. But it's set in 2008, 2009 and 2010, at the real beginning of the social media age. And the book is told in many ways as a series of personal blogs, DMs, IMs, text messages, emails. And it is a story about the way that Foster Day, the character, who is obviously the eponymous character, Secures his position is that he ends up becoming the Adderall dealer on campus. Finds himself with a, with a, with a connection he can get Adderall. He starts feeding all of his fellow students Adderall, making a lot of money doing so, therefore having enough money to join them on their jaunts in New York, as they're all rich and he is not really rich. This seems to be set at the Lawrenceville School, though it's named something else, which is a boarding school in just outside of Princeton, N.J. a real, real boarding school. And it is about how the destructive, the destructive impact of the Internet on American life is the true subject of this book, which ends up with a revelation about how Foster's family fell apart as a result of the discovery of a laptop. This is before, before social media and the contents of a laptop which caused the collapse of his family. But we don't really learn about that until the end of the book anyway, as a kind of whole, whole bore picture of how life, social life, these kids lives and everything about their existences were changed at this moment in time, 2010, 2011, and went on the course that we then saw over the last 15 years of the increased depression, the social isolation, the Adderall and other drug addictions that affluent kids are experiencing. And this is all before COVID and all that. It's very thorough. It's a kind of a remarkable tour de force of a portrait of a society that has lost itself to the Internet. It's overwritten, it's too long. It reminds me in that way. If I were going to compare it to a great American writer, it would be Theodore Dreiser, who wrote several of the greatest American novels while simultaneously being a pretty bad prose stylist and full of weird longueurs. And this book is a little like that in the sense that, you know, if I had edited it would have been 100 pages shorter and would have been better for it. And on the other hand, it really is a masterpiece or something very close to a masterpiece. And I. It's a. It's very hard to shake. It's. It, it. It gets sadder and sadder as it goes. So I want to warn everybody that there's no, you know, it's not like. It's not like a heartwarming experience though. It's funny and clever and really smart. That's Foster Dade Examines the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins. And if you read it, please, please make sure to email me@podcastometary.org to let me know if you agree with me that this is a kind of overlooked American classic, because it's possible that in 50 years this is one of these books that people will turn to to try to get a sense of what happened in our time, that there are very few American novels that have attempted this kind of portrait of an entire class of people and the social changes that were wrought while they were living through them used to be a classic subject for fiction. Fiction turned very interior, very identity politics driven, very, and therefore often extremely uninteresting. And so this is a much different kind of performance. So that's Foster Date Examines the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins. We'll be back tomorrow for Abe, Christine, Eliana and Seth and John Pod Words Keep the candle, burn.