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- [00:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Hope for the best, Expect the worst. Some preacher pain, Some diapers, the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.
- [00:22]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best.
- [00:24]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, December 9, 2024. I am Jon Pott Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. I want to thank everybody who responded to my plea on Friday for end of year giving to commentary, a 501c3 non profit that, like all 501c3 nonprofits, depends on the eleemosynary generosity of our audience to help us keep the lights on and to keep doing what we are doing, particularly at the end of the year. Your response over the weekend was overwhelming. I hope those of you who intended to join but had other and more important things to do, like watch the jets actually win a game. You know, see that Juan Soto is now being paid roughly the gross national product of Namibia to play for the Mets, that kind of thing. You more interested in stuff like that, and I totally understand that. But if you do, could find it in your heart to go to commentary.org donate and give generously to our 2024 campaign to keep the lights on and to keep producing this podcast, producing our blog and producing our monthly magazine. I and my colleagues would be very grateful. My colleagues, of course, being executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:49]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:52]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John. And just the jets didn't win, by the way. They lost.
- [01:56]
Jon Podhoretz
Didn't.
- [01:57]
Seth Mandel
No, they lost an overtime.
- [01:59]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, the more fool me I saw something, I thought okay, it was.
- [02:05]
Seth Mandel
It was looking good.
- [02:06]
Jon Podhoretz
Not the more fool me, the more fool you, the more fool me watching the whole game.
- [02:11]
Seth Mandel
Me and Dan Sen are the poor, poor jets fans.
- [02:13]
Jon Podhoretz
Very sad. Okay, well, it's the first of many mistakes I'm sure I'll be making on this podcast and will be duly corrected by media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:25]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [02:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Obviously, the epical news of the weekend is the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the departure of Bashar al Assad to the sunny climes of Edward Snowden's apartment in Moscow. May they both enjoy the life of traitors to humanity while they sit and stare at each other, you know, until God comes to take them. We're not going to talk much about Syria today because tomorrow morning we will be having on Jonathan Schanzer of the foundation for Defense of Democracy as our contributing editor and someone who has forgotten more about Syria than most Syrians even know and will be able to give us a. A much broader perspective on everything that is going on. I think where we might want to go instead of discussing the geopolitical circumstances that arise here is I want to make one quick point. On October 7, 2023, Yaya similar led Hamas through the fence separating Gaza and Israel. And in the 14 months since, Hamas is all but destroyed, Hezbollah is all but destroyed, Iran's air defenses have been taken out. Iran's ability to demonstrate that it is an aggressive foreign power able to work its will in the larger Middle east has been completely devastated. And obviously therefore I think we can look at October 7, aside from being a monstrous moment that has had enormous ripple effects for Israelis and Jews and the position of Jews worldwide was maybe the most monumental blunder of the 21st century in terms of what its progenitors and its authors sought to achieve. In fact, it appears to have achieved and may yet achieve an even greater form, the worst possible outcome for them that anyone could ever even have imagined going to say and then we can move on from this that I am not optimistic about what will result in Syria. I think people need to be very unemotional about watching what is going on. Even though the liberation of people from a 50 year tyrannical totalitarian despotism of unbelievable savagery and monstrous violence and the use of weapons of war and torture, the likes of which the world has hardly ever seen, that is not to be overestimated. But no good has come from Syria lo these hundred years since the end of World War II and World War I when the British and the French divided up these areas. And a little good is probably to come of this since. So I don't want, I want to start off by being skeptical, by hoping.
- [05:59]
Abe Greenwald
For the best and expecting the worst.
- [06:01]
Jon Podhoretz
I'm not even hoping. I would like to hope for the best. I don't even know what the best would be. But I think expecting the worst. I'm actually, I would say this which is I'm hopeful that the worst will not happen because I do think that what Israel has done in remaining forthright and backboned and determined not to be thrown off course despite efforts largely by the Biden administration to throw it off course has had enormous ancillary positive consequences the likes of which Israel itself could not even have begun to imagine on the 8th of October. And so that I think is reason for optimism in the hope for the best, expect the worst world. But as I say, I think talking about what actually might happen on the ground logistically is something we should say for another day. What we should not say for another day, is to discuss the President of the United States. His name is not Donald Trump. His name is Joe Biden. You might have seen him last night at the Kennedy Center Honors where he refused to look Kamala Harris in the face, who was sitting next to him in the presidential box. I don't think that relationship is going to survive this, this interregnum period or a bunch. Or maybe he didn't recognize her, I don't know. But he did come out at 11 o'clock yesterday morning to discuss the Syrian collapse. Jake Sullivan, also the National Security Advisor, came out and talked a little about it and talked about how Israel deserves a lot of credit for changing the circumstances in the Middle east, which is a pretty chutzpah dick thing for him to say since he has spent 14 months trying to lasso Israel into submission and not to do things of a nature that would have led to this point. But fine, he and his incoming congressman wife can throw dinner parties and talk about how wonderful they are in 2025 while he finds a perch at Brookings or Carnegie or something and descends into the oblivion that he deserves. But Biden said, you know, the Syrian people overthrown it. I don't care about that. He mentioned an American who has been in Syrian custody for 12 years, Austin Tice, who was kidnapped. Nobody knows why. It seems very clear that Austin Tice was not an intelligence asset. He was on. They have. They've never tried to sought to trade for him, which means he's of no value to them. Who knows if he's alive, who knows if he's not alive. But we are enjoyed as Americans and have been for, you know, since his captivity, to call for his release, to do whatever we can. We're working night and day, let me tell you right now, night and day, for 12 years, people have been working to get Austin Tice out while they're eating their five guys and going to baseball games and paying no attention to Austin Tice whatsoever, which is actually what has gone on in the US Government. Anyway, the president did mention Austin Tice said, we have reason to believe that he's alive and we just sort of need proof of life to move on. And then he finished his statement and then he started walking toward the door to the room, whatever room he was in. And he opened the door and somebody said, what kind of mission are you going to stage to get him out? And Biden said, who? This was three. This was less than a minute since he had mentioned Austin Tice out of his own mouth. And he had forgotten who Austin Tice was.
- [09:57]
Christine Rosen
The context, though, there's another context here with regard to Tice. His family had earlier held a press conference, the National Press Club, where they repeated that they have reliable information that he is alive. So they believe him. They believe he is alive and expressed their deep frustration, a continuous frustration that they've had with the Biden administration in. In terms of whether they are being forthcoming about what the administration knows about Tice, what the administration plans to do about it. This has been going on, obviously, since 2012, when he was kidnapped. But it does sound like the family itself has become increasingly frustrated and more vocal and public about their disappointment in the Biden administration. So the fact that Biden said that and then immediately forgot is indicative of the actual policy the Biden administration has had about rescuing kidnapped Americans like Tice.
- [10:46]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, that's very generous because I think what it exposes, well, is that he's senile.
- [10:52]
Christine Rosen
Well, that too.
- [10:53]
Jon Podhoretz
And that he needs to be removed from office. The world is in a very dangerous position. There are another 30, what, 42 days. I don't even know how many days until. Until the inauguration. It is not safe for him to be in the presidency. Everybody knows it. I'm no fan of Kamala Harris. He should not be present at another second. The guy forgot who he was talking about after three seconds in the middle of a gigantic foreign policy upheaval about which he did not speak for 24 hours. And by the way, about which you cannot read on white house.gov which has not released the White House's own website, has not released Biden's statement from yesterday.
- [11:39]
Seth Mandel
Yet, as Christine says, that when they clean it up, well, they have to.
- [11:44]
Jon Podhoretz
Put it through ChatGPT and then they'll put it through the Humanizer and ChatGPT and Claude, and they'll.
- [11:51]
Abe Greenwald
And part of cleaning it up is the delay itself. I mean, the less accessible it is in its wake, the more likely the other outlets are to forget about it, not pursue it.
- [12:08]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, how can this go on? Lloyd Austin? The way the 25th Amendment works, if I understand it correctly, is that a majority of the Cabinet needs to write to the Congress and say the President is incapacitated from his duties. He should be temporarily taken out of the chain of command. You have to vote 2/3 to do that you in the House. And then should the three at the end of those three weeks, I believe then the House would have to vote 2 by 2/3, or the House and Senate would have to vote by 2/3 to continue the temporary leave of absence as instructed under the incredibly complex rules of the 25th Amendment in order to prevent coups. But this is not a close call. There are 14 or 15 members of the Cabinet. A majority of the cabinets needs to say today, write a letter to Mike Johnson and to Chuck Schumer and say it is our opinion that Joe Biden can no longer perform, cannot in his current condition, perform the duties of president and pull the trigger and do it.
- [13:20]
Christine Rosen
But John, you're assuming that they haven't had a system in place for years to run the country without Joe Biden's input. And I think they have a system in place. Remember how rarely he even had his cabinet meet. Perhaps for that reason they couldn't. They rarely all got in the same room together with Joe Biden there having to perform his duty as president. And I think what they're doing now, they're incredibly demoralized. The Democratic Party after this election, the leadership in the Biden administration are all looking for new jobs. There is no incentive at all for them to do the right thing now. On the contrary, the COVID up, I think they figure whatever coverup has been going on, and I do think it's been going on for some time will continue. They'll just coast right into inauguration. Those decisions will be made here and there as they have been by, you know, sub lieutenants and various agencies. Jill Biden will cover for him for public events and that will be that. We will not know. We may never know. In fact, if they are not forthcoming with documenting any of this or no one writes a good tell all memoir, I don't think we'll ever know. They have zero incentive to do that now. Even though I think you're absolutely correct that they should.
- [14:25]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, they have a perfect system now. I mean, if you look at the, what happened at Notre Dame, at the reopening of Notre Dame. So you have Trump there essentially representing the US as head of state. As president.
- [14:48]
Seth Mandel
Biden can't go as acting head of state.
- [14:51]
Abe Greenwald
As acting head of state, you have.
- [14:52]
Jon Podhoretz
Edith Wilson and then, but hold on. Right.
- [14:55]
Abe Greenwald
And then you have, you have Jill Biden who gets to fill in for Melania, who's not dying to be there. This is all.
- [15:02]
Seth Mandel
It's perfect that, by the way, that the Notre Dame thing was the perfect example of this because that was really because other world leaders needed to talk to somebody in power. Right. That wasn't, that wasn't even Trump trying to bigfoot Joe Biden. That was Macron and Zelensky and people like that saying you can, you Americans maybe will hold your breath and hold hands like Kramer in the car that's running out of gas on Seinfeld and just see how far and see if you can make it all the way back to the dealership on E. But, you know, Ukraine can't hold its breath until there's a new president. It's in a war with Russia and France. You know, Europe has all these things it needs to do. You know, the point was to say, like, all right, you guys do, you guys are obviously just going to hold your breath and wait, but the world can't. Meanwhile, in this, you know, breath holding period, the Assad dynasty fell practically overnight. Like, the world doesn't wait. We need to talk to somebody, put someone on the phone. And it's a reverse of the old, you know, probably apocryphal Henry Kissinger line about who do I call if I want to call Europe? You know, Macron is like, who do I call if I want to call America? And so right now it has to be Trump because it has to be someone.
- [16:35]
Jon Podhoretz
And let's remember, Macron's government is in crisis, right? Macron's prime minister has fallen. He's got to name a new one. Nobody wants to do the job. Keir Starmer in Great Britain has unbelievably low approval ratings and a foundering government of his own. Trump is sitting there. This were 2016, Trump would be like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to that cathedral, deal with those people. They need to pay up or whatever, right? It's an entirely different set of circumstances. He is now the single most stable and the most mandated leader in the Western world, having won a convincing election with a majority of the vote, with 312 electoral votes, and feeling very comfortable, looking very comfortable and happy to have what appear to be kind of sophisticated conversations about what is going on in the world as he starts to get ready to control the levers of power on January 20th. So he gave this interview to Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. And he said a lot of different surprising things, but one of them, he said, was, I'm not going after Jay Powell. I don't want Jay Powell to leave the Fed. It's kind of a big deal because there's been all this controversy about who was going to replace Jay Powell at the Fed now that Trump was coming in. Would it be Kevin Warsh or would it be this one? Would it be that one? And Trump has clearly come to the view that this is a fight he doesn't need to have at the beginning of his administration. You know, America needs to sort of solidify its economic policy. He has things he wants to do. And, you know, he doesn't have to throw everything into the wood chipper. He's got other. He's got other fish to fry. That was an interesting moment in that interview, I thought.
- [18:45]
Christine Rosen
Well, the other interesting moment in terms of his priorities was the discussion about immigration. I mean, he repeated his campaign promise to. Of mass deportation, which I think the mainstream media has yet to understand, that most Americans now support that as a policy, particularly when you start with criminals. And then. But he did say he'll move on to people who came to this country illegally, also a policy that a large number of Americans support. But then he said something really interesting. He said he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. And I found that somewhat fascinating. So I looked up, I thought, is that popular? I mean, I think birthright citizenship is fine. We've had it. You know, 14th amendment guaranteed it. We've. It's been the policy of the country for a very long time. But in fact, in recent decades and accelerating in the last few years, support for birthright citizenship among both Democrats and certainly even more so among Republicans has declined. So it would, I think, obviously it would probably take a constitutional amendment to remove birthright citizenship, but it is something that we chose to do in the 19th century and we could choose to undo in the 21st. But I found that kind of a fascinating thing. He said he would do it with executive action. I don't think that would be constitutional. But that interview is packed with all kinds of interesting policy approaches that he's taking. And again, you know, he's not the president yet, but the response both by the media and by other leaders is as if he's already president when they're responding to some of these policy choices well.
- [20:14]
Jon Podhoretz
So the birthright citizenship thing is interesting because he again said more sophisticated things about this than anyone would lead you to believe if you were the Dreamers.
- [20:23]
Christine Rosen
Yes.
- [20:24]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [20:25]
Jon Podhoretz
He said it would be unbelievably cruel to take people who were born in this country who have no connection to the country of their parents origin, who do not speak the language of that country and who have been here and lived here to just throw them out. We have to do something for them, he said. Now, remember in 2017, he wanted to sit down with Congress and make a deal on the Dreamers. He called them in. There was a big meeting of the House and Senate leadership and Trump for this purpose. And I'm not quite sure what happened. I think some of his own political advisors said, you are stepping on a, you're stepping on a landmine. I don't know why you're giving this to them. They're not even going to give anything to you if you give this to them. Don't do it. And he backed off. But clearly, emotionally, if you want to talk about Trump having political emotions in the way that we talk about other people, this is something that he thinks is would be right if it could be pulled off, that there should be some form of exemption for this very specific population of people who are here without any having made no choice to be here and having made a life here, because this is the country that they're from. And I think there was always a lot of sympathy for that, too. In polling, I haven't seen recent polling on the dreamers. Most polling on immigration has been moving in a rightward rejectionist direction. I wouldn't be surprised to note if that were the case with the Dreamers as well. But there is in the 14th Amendment. I'm having a little trouble reading this hold on about where the birthright citizenship principle comes from. So Section 1 of the 14th Amendment says, no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of light, liberty, property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Now, somewhere in that phrase, in, in that language that I myself am not Talmudic enough to understand, comes the concept of birthright citizenship, because it has to do with jurisdiction and whether or not states have any specific jurisdiction over people who live in the United States to deprive them of life, liberty or whatever.
- [23:19]
Christine Rosen
Well, it was tested constitutionally by There was a Chinese American citizen in the late 19th century who was born on US soil, but his parents were not naturalized because they were Chinese. And there was an exclusion act at the time. And he challenged, he argued the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court agreed with his argument that he was a citizen even though his parents were not citizens because he was born on US Soil, even though they could not even be naturalized at the time because of the laws on the books at the time. So there and then there were future. There were other Supreme Court cases which I'm sure our friend Adam White could, could delineate for us.
- [23:53]
Jon Podhoretz
So the language that I skipped, the language all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. The case that you're talking about is 1898 United States vs. Wong Kim arc.
- [24:12]
Christine Rosen
Right?
- [24:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Now, the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof is apparently the thing that makes this not like a slam dunk in favor of birthright citizenship. According to the Talmudists who read through the Constitution and can discern it in any meaning that they wish to take from it, precedent suggests that we have birthright citizenship. It's now been, as you say, 125 years since that Supreme Court case basically established the idea that the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship. So it is, you know, precedent says that it is. Trump can attempt to do an executive order ban, you know, ending birthright citizenship, and then obviously, we will then go through a gigantic morass of a legal process. I only wanted to bring this up to say that he is vaguer on this. There's more vagueness on this than people realize. In his view, what he is saying is we have laws in the United States. Laws in the United States say that people who are here illegally are here illegally, they are breaking the law. And there are remedies for people who break the law. Right. You can throw them in jail, that's one thing. But if they're not citizens of the United States, you need not be their custodial holders. You can send it back where they came from. That's how it works. And so it is the sheer numbers that make this untenable.
- [25:55]
Christine Rosen
Well, not the principle, but there's some contradiction in his own. On his own side of this argument, because up until now, his border czar has been saying, when asked this question about dreamers or, you know, children born to people who came here illegally has said, well, we'll just deport them all. We won't separate the families. We'll just. The whole family can go.
- [26:14]
Jon Podhoretz
And Trump said that, too. Trump has said that, too.
- [26:16]
Christine Rosen
So there is, you know, he's kind of playing good cop and bad cop with himself on this issue, although again, politically that's savvy because he's put some people in his administration, including supporters are, including Stephen Miller, who are obviously very far to the right of the rest of the country on some of this stuff and would never are the tough guys. So he's being slightly less of a tough guy in this interview, which is interesting.
- [26:39]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, well, that.
- [26:39]
Abe Greenwald
I think that was a big takeaway for me was his being less of a tough guy before I Get to that. Also on the question of illegal immigrants. So Kristen Walker was saying to him, well, so you're really going to remove all these people?
- [26:56]
Christine Rosen
Don't.
- [26:56]
Abe Greenwald
Isn't that hard? And he said, everything's hard. Yeah, he said, everything's hard, but we have to have rules, we have to have laws. It has to be done. Which I thought was a great, deflating, sobering response to that.
- [27:14]
Jon Podhoretz
It is the very weird nature of what has happened to the sort of liberal media mindset that Kristen Welker did not understand that she was handing Trump a grenade that he could throw right back in her face. We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Who said that? The icon. Right. John F. Kennedy Jr. We do things as Americans in our government, not because they're easy, but because they are hard. And another way in which you throw it right back in their faces is right now, Jacob Souvaroff of MSNBC and Errol Morris the documentarian have a documentary out called Separated, which I have no doubt will win the Academy Award for best documentary in 2025 about the monstrous fact of family separation. Now, you may remember in 2017, one of the disciplinary efforts that the Trump administration made to convince people who were trying to cross the border illegally was to say, do not cross the border illegally because we are going to have to, as a matter of human right, separate you from your children. You are going to go through a legal process by w in which you are arrested, and you will be treated as though you have broken the laws of the United States. We are not going to treat your children the same. We're not throwing your children in jail. So we're going to have to separate you from them. So don't come. Don't come here because you are going to force us to do something. You don't want to be separated from your children. We don't want to separate you from your children. Don't come. This statement, this act, which created the famous Jamel Bowie, the cruelty is the point. Or was it Adam Serwer? I can't remember who. The cruelty is the point. What they want to be is cruel. To make sure that migrants understand that America is cruel. And then we're mean, and then they'll stay away because they're mean. Well, this was never given a fully fleshed out kind of debate in the country about all of this. We're about to have that debate. And what Trump said was, we're going to send everybody back, including the little kids who were born here, because we don't want to separate families. So this is hard. But for the sake of the children, we have to send them back so they can be with their parents and not become wards of the state. And orphans inside the United States, who's going to win that argument? I'm serious. Like, I. Look, I've said this since we started this podcast almost 10 years ago, or maybe it was 10 years ago, whatever. Like, I'm. I am emotionally as dovish on immigration as you can possibly be. But, you know, you have to listen. You have to sort of follow the logic of things that are happening. All sorts of perverse incentives have been created over the last 10 years to cause people to bring their children in order to create facts on the ground that make it more difficult for the United States to return them to their country of origin. Or they come here and they seek to have children in order to create a chain migration possibility for themselves. And all of that. And that is all rational as we understand homo economicus behavior. That is all rational behavior on the part of people who are looking to come to America to live a better life because the places they come from are terrible and they will have more of a shot here. And I respect that. And it's very moving to me. And I really don't like that this is something that Americans are less and less emotionally connected to as a great feature of American life.
- [31:15]
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- [33:35]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's the point that Americans are not, are less and less connected to it, right? Trump is basically saying, look, I won the argument. That's a big part of this, that.
- [33:44]
Jon Podhoretz
He never, you never win an argument, right? You never.
- [33:46]
Seth Mandel
But he's, you know, when you win an election, once you, when you win an election and there's a big issue, usually you're able to say, you know, I've got a grace period here where I can claim that the American people knew exactly what I wanted to do and chose me to do it. And immigration is like the one issue, really, where Trump just is, it's just his brand from the very beginning. Now eight years ongoing, almost nine years. And so he has a way of saying like, you know, they picked me. I said this and they picked me. That's the one issue and that's what makes it much harder. But the other thing is that I think that the Biden administration allowing the chaos was a big part of this because I think Americans actually would like there to be some sort of order at the border and are not necessarily like in the deport all immigrants mindset. But they understand that the chaos is something you cannot have in a sovereign border. You cannot have the chaos. And so I think the first guy that institutes an order, like a sense, a policy that is clear that people know what to do and provides a sense of order. I think that guy is going to win the race. And I'm not sure it matters whether it's unfortunately, whether it's deport all the people or let Everybody in or whatever. I honestly think that the first sign of actual transparency and stability is going to be the winner.
- [35:20]
Christine Rosen
But Democrats, one other thing, one other thing about that, though. The Democratic Party itself has a real problem in responding to Trump's message right now. They have always used Trump is racist, Republicans are racist. That's why they don't like immigration. That no longer applies. If you look at the results of this most recent election where Hispanic Americans, African Americans, a lot more non white voters cast their lot with Trump and their voices on immigration mirror Trump's coalition. So in that sense, I think that's another reason they're scrambling. And they only very, very late in the game acknowledge Seth's point, which is spot on, that the chaos is what sowed the much harder line in terms of policy now.
- [36:03]
Jon Podhoretz
So I think Trump, these arguments are beginning, not ending. That's to say that we've had eight years of lies and deceit, falsehood propaganda, blaming Trump for putting kids in cages whom Obama put in cages, saying that the border wasn't open when it was open, saying there weren't these flows, 300,000 people a month who were sort of like getting lost by ICE or by the Border Patrol or whatever while they were getting lost, calling, you know, people being told, as in the famous scene 60 years ago in a movie called Billy Rose's Jumbo where Jimmy Durante is trying to sneak an elephant out of a circus and the elephant is behind him and somebody says, hey, where are you going with that elephant? And Jimmy Durante says, what elephant? And he looks to his left and he looks to his right, and then he just continues walking forward. What elephant? Well, the. What elephant? Argument collapsed in the last three years, but now the argument is, okay, there's an elephant. So are you going to cage the elephant? Are you going to send the elephant back to Africa? You know, are you going to send the elephant back to India? What are you going to do with the elephant's children? All of that. And here's where I think the border czar, whose name right now escapes me, Homans. Is that his name? Okay.
- [37:39]
Seth Mandel
And where actually, for five more weeks, it's Kamala Harris.
- [37:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, fair enough. And you know, Stephen Miller, who is, I'm not a big fan of, but as somebody who knows this issue the way, you know, I don't know, Gary Kasparov knows chess. There are 10,000 different moves that they're going to make in the first six months that are going to be unassailable and that are going to throw Democrats on The back foot and the entire world of liberal immigration progressivism policy. Like, what did Homan say was going to do? Start they were going to go through prisons, find the illegal aliens who were in prisons and deport them. Who's going to be against that? They're going to do low hanging fruit for a year while they prepare people in prison, people in drug gangs, people who are arresting for picking their feet in Poughkeepsie, getting into fights with psychotic local officials in cities across the country who say things like, we're not going to cooperate with the federal government on immigration, when in fact, according to the Supreme Court and everybody else, the federal government is the lead agency on immigration, arresting potentially elected officials in various places for obstruction of justice, for attempting to intercede or interpose themselves between the federal government and its enforcement procedures. A lot of stuff is going to start happening that isn't the deportation of 15 million, could be the deportation of 75,000. It doesn't matter. They're going to win the argument brick by brick until things really do start to get hard. And when things start to get hard, of course, compromises are therefore start becoming possible between the parties when the political parties look and say, is this what we want to run on in 2026, that we're protecting them in all these places where we want to win seats back so we can control the house and do whatever we can? I don't know, man. I mean, the politics here are very interesting. That's all I'm saying. And people have underestimated the sophistication of the potential because 2017 was such a mess because of the Muslim ban and the scenes at the airports and all of that. They are underestimating how organized and thought through the Trump administration's efforts here are going to be.
- [40:24]
Christine Rosen
Well, they've probably also forgotten that they have already played the card of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez weeping at a, in a parking lot and pictures that, as you said, John, proved to be false. Or from the, from the Obama administration of Kids in Cages. They, they've kind of played the emotional manipulation card. They did it in 2017. The problem for them now is that what's really stuck in the public's mind going by the recent election is crime and American citizens being murdered and repeat criminals being released back onto the streets of cities like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia because those blue state officials think they're doing something virtuous by not cooperating with ice. And there have been several very high profile cases and I know statistically illegal Immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes than native born citizens. I know all this perception war is the Democrats very successfully fought in 2017 and won, and they're not gonna win it this way again. I think people are a little more cynical about that effort now.
- [41:34]
Jon Podhoretz
Wanna talk about one other thing that Trump said that got everybody hysterical. That I think also is interesting to parse a little bit. So Kristen Welker said, you have all these enemies, say all these enemies, you know, you want to throw them in jail. Isn't that mean? That's so mean. Are you really going to harness the power of the presidency to punish your retribution, punish your enemies? So he said, if I, if I sort of, I, that's not my intent. That's not where I'm going. Like, I want to move forward. My purpose here is to have a successful presidency that turns America around and makes everything better. I don't want to think about the past.
- [42:20]
Abe Greenwald
By the way, he said something along the lines of success would be my revenge.
- [42:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Right, Exactly. Okay. Which, by the way, I mean, it's kind of thrilling.
- [42:32]
Abe Greenwald
Yes.
- [42:33]
Jon Podhoretz
And I say it's thrilling because it isn't something that he ever would have said before. I mean, he honestly, like, he would have said, you know, revenge is the dish best served cold. Or he would have, you know, quoted the Godfather. He would have done whatever and said, you know, reve, I am your revenge. Right. That's what he said. Right. I. He's now saying, success is your revenge. America being in better shape is your revenge. Like, let's encourage him to keep thinking that that's a good thing to say. Okay. But he said something, you know, I mean, I keep worrying that I'm starting to sound like, you know, I've taken some Trump Kool Aid or something. But here's what I wanted to say.
- [43:24]
Christine Rosen
It's cologne. Now he's selling cologne, not koolaid.
- [43:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, well, you don't drink cologne, Right. So Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, Republicans who served on the January 6th committee. And he said, you know, I'm not going to do it. They should be in jail. Okay. It's like, oh, that's terrible. How can you say you shouldn't throw your political opponents in jail? Everybody should get a blanket pardon. Michelle Goldberg says everybody should get a blanket pardon. I don't know who else is saying everybody should get a blanket pardon. I just want to parse this out just a little bit. Because Adam Kinzinger was a member of Congress, Liz Cheney was a member of Congress. They served on this Committee. They were appointed to serve on this committee. The purpose of this committee was to create, for all intents and purposes, an indictment to develop charges that could be used against Trump by Jack Smith in creating the January 6th case against Trump for attempting to overthrow the United States, the government of the United States of America. So maybe this is not equal. Maybe I'm not being fair. He's a private citizen, as he's speaking right now. They're not. They weren't. They wanted to use their political power as elected officials to throw Donald Trump in jail. If his response to them is they should be in jail. Somebody separate out the strands according to which what they did was okay, but what he did is what he is doing is not okay. Except for politests and good breeding and the America that we would all like to see where political combat is dealt with at a much higher level. I will stipulate all of that. The political process in the United States was harnessed from 2021 through 2024 in the Congress and in the Justice Department and elsewhere, including in this, in the, you know, in the New York City District Attorney's office and the New York State Attorney General's office and the Georgia, whoever the hell Fani Willis's office is, and in Florida to send Donald Trump to jail so he could not become president if he emotionally says, you know what I would like? I would like to see all those people who did this to me thrown in jail. Is that really so terrible? I'm just, honestly, I have. I have a family member who was abused by the special counsel independent prosecutor system. My brother in law, Elliot Abrams, who ended up being forced to plead guilty. I mentioned this last week on a bullshit charge because he didn't want to bankrupt his family in relation to the Iran Contra matter and was pardoned by George H.W. bush at the end of 1992. Do you know what my sister Rachel, until her dying day, would have liked to have seen? She would have liked to have seen Lawrence Walsh thrown in jail. She would have liked to have seen Daniel Inouye thrown in jail. She would have liked to have seen Arthur Lyman, who was the counsel who grilled Elliot in front of the Iran Contra Committee, thrown in jail. She would have danced, she would have sung, she would have celebrated. You know why? Because she was a human being and her family was abused and her husband was defamed and slandered for the crime of being a patriot who sought to save the help the United States and fight against communism and did nothing wrong. And that's what it's like when you get caught up in a dragnet like this that is politically inspired. And I see nothing wrong in Trump saying to Kristen Welker, I would like to see them in jail. They wanted to see him in jail first. Okay, my rant is over. I'm muting so you guys.
- [48:02]
Seth Mandel
Well, but also, difference is power, right? They would say the response to that would be, they can't throw him in jail on a whim. And, you know, maybe he can throw them in jail. That's what they would say. Like Adam Kinseker would say, I want to see him in jail, but I can't get, I can't put him there. The president maybe could put me there if he wants to.
- [48:22]
Abe Greenwald
But didn't he also Trump say something to the effect of, I'm not going to task anyone with doing this? I mean, that's, that's the other part here. Like.
- [48:32]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, that's the important part is he said, okay, Cash Patel says, whatever. Cash Patel says, I am not directing him, right. To start a task force to go after my enemies. That's what you seem to think I'm going to do, and I'm not going to do it.
- [48:46]
Christine Rosen
He even made an exception. And this, I think this might be the first time he's ever said this publicly. He even made an exception on pardoning January Sixers. He said, with some exceptions, he said, you know, they should, most of them should be pardoned. But with some exceptions, which, again, does at least acknowledge that there were people who clearly broke the law on that day in their support for him.
- [49:09]
Jon Podhoretz
Again, the January 6th thing, we can set to one side because we can look at the January 6 thing and say, he really shouldn't be doing that. I'm sorry, why is he even involving himself in this? That's weird. They clearly trespassed. Maybe he thinks that they had the book thrown at them. Maybe he can grant a bunch of them clemency. I mean, clemency, there are many stages of, you know, of interceding, right. George W. Bush granted Scooter Libby clemency, which was not sufficient to Dick Cheney, who never spoke to George W. Bush again or has only spoken to him hostilely since, or something like that. But you can grant clemency. You can say they've suffered enough. You can say all they did was they, it was bad. They broke into the Capitol and, you know, but they don't deserve to be in jail for three years. Whatever. A blanket pardon for 1200. Again, back to the term blanket pardon. A blanket pardon for 1200 people who went through a legal process with a jury of their peers. And all of that is not something to be spat at, and Trump shouldn't spit at it. But it's not the same. These are two different matters. The question of how he feels about his own experience over the last four years and how he feels about people who did this thing that, by the way, he will never have been found. It is not the case that a court of law is ever going to have found him guilty of encouraging. That's what happened with the dismissal of the Jack Smith case. A lot of us think that he probably should be held morally accountable for having encouraged that riot and that and that scene and that insurrection. And that's why I think he should have been impeached and removed. And had he been so, he would not be president elect again today. But that didn't happen. And this, the thing happened with the courts and he wasn't, you know, he was indicted. And the trial, they never came to trial. It's now been dismissed. That is, he is. No, he is not on the hook for that in any way, shape or form. So that's a whole separate matter, I guess. I. You don't have anything to say how. What happened?
- [51:40]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I mean, I. Whether or not he has been found in a legal sense to be responsible for the actions of the January Sixers, he knows that he. That they were doing what they did in defense of an argument that he was proffering. So obviously he wants them freed. I mean, that's, you know, there's no way he does. Whether he knows in his heart that he was lying or was not or whatever, I don't even know. I suspect he doesn't feel as if he was lying, but either way, well, of course he wants them freed.
- [52:25]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, to find myself in the position of saying, you know, Trump gets to vent like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney got to vent and do what they did is not anything that I ever expected to have on my Hanukkah 2024 bingo card. So there was just something striking about the idea that the presumption is that Trump is supposed to. I don't know what the presumption is, because no one, nobody who hate, no one who hates Trump has any presumptions that he should do anything.
- [53:05]
Christine Rosen
Well, but we do. Look, it has been so long since we've had a president who actually rises above the slings and arrows that his enemies throw at him and behaves like the better person. We just. I can't can we remember someone who did that? It's been a long time. So the thing is, we still have, I think, a very slightly idealistic but necessary hope that we will return to a time when our leaders actually wouldn't get down in the mud and wrestle with the pig on the other side. Trump is generally not that person. So it is surprising, as you say, John, to see him occasionally sort of giving glimmers of that. Him saying he wants to see them in jail is just him being Trump. I would like to see a president in the future who would just sort of shrug or roll his or her eyes and go, eh, you know, I've got more important things on my plate. More, more important things on my agenda.
- [53:57]
Jon Podhoretz
I mentioned my sister Rachel because I think that what Trump said, when he said it was relatable, a word I don't like. I don't like the word relatable, but.
- [54:05]
Christine Rosen
I didn't find it relatable, though. I found it just sort of like just Trump being Trump. I mean, understandable, yes, but I'm not sure Trump is capable of being relatable on that particular thing, given the public image that he's both cultivated and been subjected to by the media.
- [54:20]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, you have 91 indictments against, I feel like, cases against you. You have the entire. You have that. You have this January 6th report thrown against you. You have Jack Smith prosecuting two different cases in two different, you know, in two different jurisdictions against you. You have Alvin Bragg announcing that a crime that was a misdemeanor is a felony, but he's not going to tell you how the misdemeanor was risen to the point of the felony because he doesn't have to and you can't make him. And you have a judge in New York taking away, basically destroying his business with a wave of hand, and he says they should all go to jail. And I think that's a little relatable.
- [55:00]
Christine Rosen
He's more effective, but it's more effective, like when he jokes about his hair, like, he could have made it a little more. I just think there was a different way. I would have found it relatable if he'd sort of laughed and been like, yeah, but they didn't get me or something. Like, I mean, some sort of less. I don't know. I just. Well, I think this is like, not relatable.
- [55:18]
Seth Mandel
I think the relatability thing here is the Dukakis thing, right? When Michael Dukakis was asked at that debate and, you know, it's destroyed any chance of him Getting elected, when he.
- [55:29]
Jon Podhoretz
Was asked what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered, would.
- [55:31]
Seth Mandel
He support the death penalty in that case? Because he opposed the death penalty. Would you support the death penalty?
- [55:36]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, no, I wouldn't. No, I wouldn't, Bernie. And here's why.
- [55:40]
Seth Mandel
On the couch that night, people wanted to hear him. Like, we understood that the principle of opposition to the death penalty can hold, but is there a human behind that face? Right. Like, the human should jump out and say, you know, you're damn right I want to see him, you know, in the most painful way possible. Like, so, you know, and that was considered, you know, the problem. There was the, not necessarily the policy, but like, the. Is this, Is he flesh and blood, like, this person? Yeah, that's what you mean by, you know, what your sister Rachel, you know, felt and would have said. And, you know, the react, the natural reaction to these things is almost something that, like, can't be helped. And sometimes people worry and wonder when you seem to be able to control it, as in the Dukakis case, when they go, like, why is he answering in a statesman like manner this question?
- [56:34]
Christine Rosen
Trump has been acting aggrieved for years. I mean, like, this is not a new line. That's.
- [56:38]
Abe Greenwald
But also, you know, to Christine's point, I didn't find it relatable either. Anyone can have a family member who is the victim of violent crime. That's what makes that relatable. Not anyone is a president who denied his election loss and then had his enemies go after him and now wants to see them in jail. It is a.
- [57:01]
Jon Podhoretz
It's a very singular set of circumstances. I acknowledge that. And I acknowledge that had I had my druthers in 2021, he would not be here in 2024 because he would have been impeached and convicted of the crime of fomenting an insurrection at the Capitol. That was where I was. I still believe that largely to have been the case. But the American people had four years to create this, to be, have this question placed before them. Do you know what I mean? I mean, never before has a political question been more precisely adjudicated as, is Trump deserving of the presidency? As this. Because the American people decided that he was not in 2020 and then decided after the cases and the indictments and the January 6 thing and everything else that he was, and I don't know, living in a representative democracy as we do. I'm not saying that one's own moral compass should be swayed by, you know, by the tyranny of the majority. But that's also, that's not relatable. That's a very unique set of circumstances that he has survived and thrived under, that will have rewritten the rules of our understanding of how politics works and provide a very important message, both to Republicans and to Democrats and everybody who follows them about the long term danger of trying to harness short term controversy and weaponize it legally to your own ends. If the person on the other end refuses to bow to the will of the consensus and say, you're right, I'll just go away. That was what Trump did. That was different. Everybody else went away except him, and he decided not to go away and to make this success his retribution. Right. So I think we could say, all.
- [59:18]
Abe Greenwald
Told, that the interview, he continued to do himself some good.
- [59:24]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, the proof of the point, once again, none of this matters. Right. What matters is what's going to happen when he becomes president. And boy, is Biden setting him a low bar for the first three months. Right. Usually we say, oh, my God, ever lower. So, I mean, it's just unbelievable. Okay, so look, as I said, we are, we're actually going to tape our Tuesday podcast tonight with Jonathan Schanzer. It'll be out in the morning where we will delve very deeply into the matter of Syria and the, you know, earthquake that has happened right there. I do want to close with the dumbest sentence ever written by Thomas Friedman. Anyone wants to send in competition for the dumbest sentence.
- [60:12]
Seth Mandel
I know that's the attorney of 64.
- [60:17]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, fair enough. Look, you know, I just, you know, I. Recency bias because it just happened this morning. Right. Okay, so wait, let me just find the quote if I could. Sorry, I should have pulled this up. Okay, ready? President elect Donald Trump in his social media post. Syria is a mess, but is not. But it is not our friend. The night State should have nothing to do with it. Attention, Mr. Trump. Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. Syria is not the keystone of the entire Middle East. It has some shoreline on the Mediterranean. It has very little oil. It's sitting in the middle. You know, everybody is, you know, everybody has like been playing footsie with it for forever. You know, it's not Saudi Arabia, it's not Iran, it's not Iraq, it's not Egypt, it's not Israel, it's not even Lebanon, which is strategically more important than Syria. Right?
- [61:21]
Seth Mandel
I mean, look, you know, Tom, your, your, your famous book wasn't called From Damascus to Jerusalem, from Beirut to Jerusalem.
- [61:30]
Jon Podhoretz
The keystone of the Middle East. Retire already. Go. Retire. Go on cruise ships and give speeches to old Jews who still think you matter at Pesach time. That's all I'm going to say. We'll be back tomorrow. For Abe, Seth and Christina, I'm John Puthard's Keep the Camelbird.