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A
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Champagne Some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
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B
Expect the we stop for the bed.
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A
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. I'm John Pothoricz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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B
Hi John.
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A
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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C
Hi John.
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A
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi Eliana.
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D
Hi John.
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A
We are all here today because of the munificence and generosity of the people who give to commentary, Inc. The 501c3 nonprofit that publishes Commentary, that puts out our website and that produces this daily podcast. This is the season of giving and we ask you to give and give generously to keep the lights on, to keep us doing this podcast five days a week to continue publishing our 80 year old magazine. The most important magazine, as several people have said, is Jewish History, one of the most important magazines in American history. And I hope people who are listening to me understand its value and purpose today in 2025, as AI starts to take over all thinking and intellection. We are a handcrafted, artisanal product that can only be made by people, written by people, edited by people, laid out by people, and produced in the spirit of intellectual inquiry that has governed the west until until Skynet came to take over. So if you are a believer in that kind of thought, if you enjoy this podcast, if you believe that it is important for these voices to continue to be heard, please go to commentary.org donate and give generously a tax deductible contribution to our nonprofit organization.
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Here we are. Yeah, I got to correct something I said yesterday, though. I sort of corrected in the middle of the podcast I said that the national security strategy we talked about yesterday was largely the work of Elbridge Colby at the Pentagon. I was mistaken. In fact, the initial draft, or a lot of it, was written by former policy planning chief at the State Department, Michael Anton, who left in the June or something like that. And obviously it's been through many iterations. And Neil Ferguson and others say you can see the incoherence in the document in the fact that it came out six months after it was first drafted and a lot of people have their fingerprints on it. But I do want to point out, as Christine mentioned, that there is a paucity of talk about the nature of the national security threat coming from China. This is a long term issue for me at the Weekly standard In 1996, we published an issue called China the Issue. A full. All 48 pages of the magazine that week were dedicated to articles about why China posed an existential threat to the United States and to the future of humanity. This was a very brave thing, not for us to have published, but for our owner, Rupert Murdoch to have agreed to the publication of because he had a lot of business in China and he did not blink when people started to complain to him that we had done this. So we're talking about a three decade question of whether or not China could be brought into the international system, could be made part of the Western economy, could be changed by the West's involvement in its economy. And that answer has been pretty conclusively given in the negative. And yet, and yet, and yet we find ourselves with a growing Chinese military, the growing threat to Taiwan and the, and this, and the South China Sea, and with a growing threat to the good working order of the world's economy in China's moving to dominate things like rare earth metals, which will power the industrial economy of the 21st century in some of the same ways that oil powered the economy of the 20th century. And yet the document had not only has very little to say about this, but yesterday after its release, over the weekend or Friday, whenever it was released, a couple of major things happened with China that are completely and totally contradictory to the notion that we are facing a great power rivalry in China. Primarily Trump's announcement that he is supporting the export of Nvidia chips to China. The China can now buy. Not the highest level. Hold on. Sorry. If you hear that, that's if you, if you don't hear the fire engine outside my window, let me let it pass. Nvidia chips, which are the, which are the engine of AI and apparently Nvidia has a highest level chip it has developed.
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We are now going to allow the complete opening of the market with security guarantees. Trump says to the second level. Nvidia chip. And the United States gets 25% of every sale. The US government gets 25% of every sale. At the same time, Trump announces that he's gotten China to agree to buy some more of our agricultural products, which he had also gotten them to agree to in 2020, something they did not live up to after 2020, buying about 80% of what they said they were going to buy. And because of China's, because he started a tariff war with China and China is withholding its support for agriculture and all that our farmers are suffering. So now he's going to send money to farmers.
- [06:52]
Out of the money from the tariffs that have been collected as a tax on American consumers to give them to support their woes because he started a trade war in agriculture. So we're supposed to be facing down China. This security study says that China is a threat. And yet here we are about to provide China with the tools to advance its AI ambitions. What's going on, Christine?
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C
Uh oh, I knew I was going to get the ball tossed me. I'll grab it and run with it. Well, first of all, one thing to note about China's our battle with China over AI is that I think almost nearly all of the most used open source AI programs are already Chinese. So we've already fallen way behind. The Nvidia chip thing is, is not a good idea in large part. Well, for those of us who oppose the government getting involved in corporate boardroom decision making, which this administration loves and has done with numerous industries, I don't think the 25, the promised 25% profit is worth the risk to our security. But finally, on the issue of China as a long term threat, one of the first things that Pete Hegseth did when he took over the Department of Defense was to eliminate the Office of Net Assessment and reassign a lot of its people, which I brought up on the podcast at the time as a really foolhardy decision. These are people who just do long term strategy. They have spent many, many decades studying China and sort of thinking about how China poses a risk to us. And I will once again on the podcast this week we do cite, we're citing the New York Times positively. I'm going to do it. We did it yesterday on the immigration story. I'm going to do it again today and point to a discussion of the report called Overmatch, the Overmatch brief. This is what the Office of Net Assessment creates and its focus on China is very worrisome. I'll just read a little tiny bit of catalogs. China's ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites identifies the US Military supply chain choke points. And these have not been reported things Pete Hegseth was given a glance at this and he said in the Pentagon's war games against China, we lose every time. So this looks at long term threats, not just on the issue of Taiwan, but on the issue of our own safety and security, our ability to actually strike China and have it, have China not retaliate in a way that would damage us. And it's really, really concerning. So I think on numerous points, the, there's the economic point and we talked about how Trump is trying to line up, I guess a friendly discussion this spring on trade with China, but now he's having to bail out our farmers because of his own tariff policies. We talked about the surplus that China has, the trade surplus. Even with the tariffs, it doesn't seem to be bothering them. They are ahead in AI and caving on these small things I think has a cumulative effect in terms of our security risk. And then there's of course TikTok that's still out there. There are just numerous fronts on which I think Trump's approach, which is instrumental deal making, short term thinking is going to have a long term negative impact on this country's security vis a vis China.
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B
The best take that I agree with everything Christine said it. But the most succinct take I saw was on Twitter this morning that described this as the Trump administration's Iran deal.
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A big concession that won't be honored in the hopes of staving off.
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A threat.
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A
Well, okay, so I think the question that we raise here is, okay, there's a market, it's a world market. America has this great product, Nvidia, which is basically this chip which turned out was originally designed to help with gaming, turns out to have uncommonly powerful connections to the way AI works. And so it was a small company that has become basically the world's largest company in about four seconds. So it's an American product that is dominating the world market in an advancing technology. And ordinarily you would say great, America has produced this wondrous thing that it can export. And that is what we like to do. We like to innovate and then create something that we can sell to other people and make a lot of money nationally and be the leader in innovation and all of that. But if our main market is the country that, as I pointed out, as we pointed out in the Weekly Standard in the 90s, likes to take things that it doesn't own and steal them and copy their intellectual property and then make their own versions of it and it and respects no.
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No agreements that allow that, that. Say, you shouldn't do that.
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We are. We are risking our dominance, our predominance in this market.
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C
Can I. Can I give a slight. Sorry to interrupt. I just want to say, to your point, there's a wonderful book about this that my colleague Chris Miller wrote called Chip War. It's fantastic. It lays out the entire history of how China has done this, particularly with semiconductor and chip technology is. That is highly critical to security. So. Read, read. Chip War.
- [12:20]
A
There's also a 1980s parallel with Japan. In. In the 1980s Japan, and this was the first semiconductor controversy on the planet Earth. Right? As personal computing was becoming a major thing and as the size of the machine that we called a computer started to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink so you can get into your house. And America had dominance in the semiconductor market because it had dominance in the computer market. And then lo and behold, out of nowhere, Japan suddenly develops dominance in the semiconductor market.
- [12:59]
And it was pretty clear that this happened because of intellectual property theft. And not only had they gotten dominance, but that they were dumping chips on the American market, which is to say that they were making them and then selling them under cost in order to take out the American semiconductor market and control it themselves. And there was the first major American, the only American trade war with Japan, which broke out in the. In the late years of the Reagan administration. This is something that Trump cites, but we don't talk about that much, which is that the Reagan administration, a free trading administration, imposed 100% tariff on Japanese export goods in a wide range of fields, including televisions. Right. Which is basically most televisions were then being made by the Japanese, who put 100% tariff on them, passed the first Chips act in order to control the intellectual property of American semiconductor manufacturers. This went on for a couple of years. There was a lot of controversy about it. There was a idea that Japan was about to eat our lunch. But once we actually went in and took seriously the fact that some Japanese companies were doing things that they shouldn't have been doing and that we basically cracked down on their, A, dumping and B, theft of our intellectual property by the. By the early 90s, the Japanese advances in these fields had kind of slowed down. And it's one of the reasons that we have seen this three decades of Japanese stagnation, which was that they were sending, they were making things based on our plans. And at some point we said, okay, you know what? That's enough. Like, you can't do this. It was great. You became a major industrial power it's wonderful you have so much money. Congratulations. You can't do it on our back anymore. But Japan was our ally, was never our enemy. Japan was always our ally. And China is not our ally. It may not be our enemy as we define it, but it is our competitor. It is our main.
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C
Okay, I would define it as our enemy. Any country, any nation state that puts malware into the computer infrastructure at our military bases so that it can control the flow of electricity and water is an enemy. That is enemy behavior.
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A
I'm just saying we are literally allied with Japan. Right. We have allied treaties that define Japan as an actual one of the closest allies of the United States. And we have no such. We have no such paper between us and China, let's just put it that way. And China.
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We can conceive of. We should be looking at China as an enemy. And America is very, very divided on this. Trump wants to rebuild America's industrial base and spend all this money on the industrial base and revitalize the semiconductor and the chips industry and everything like that. And then simultaneously, he's going to sell our best chip to China in mass numbers, which could have been prevented.
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The schizophrenia here is, like, maddening. Well, and the Free Beacon side, free trade, we're not.
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C
Well, and the Free Beacon has been doing, I mean, for years has been writing about the soft power efforts that China has been doing in our own country. And there were. You guys just had a story the other day, another store of these, like, alarming stories.
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D
Are you talking about the University of Michigan story?
- [16:33]
C
Exactly, exactly.
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D
So, yeah, Christine, you're referring to the China has universities. And every university in China essentially is an arm of the government and they partner with American universities. And at the University of Michigan, 12 Chinese students that are part of this partnership, the name of the university escapes me now, were arrested and they are accused of serving as spies for China. And so that led us to ask the question, well, which other American universities have partnerships with this same Chinese university? And there are several, including Yale and other elite American universities. But this partnership at the University of Michigan turned into a major national security issue. And Christine, I mean, you mentioned yesterday when we were talking about the national security strategy, that it was that you were displeased with the language on China. And the language on China was markedly different from the language in other national security strategies. I will say I tend not to pay that much attention to these things because I just don't think like a national security strategy written on paper ends up mattering that much. You know, events Dear boy, events tend to drive the actual strategy on things. But it is if you look at.
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Talks about the relationship not vis a vis China, not about China as the major strategic rival to the United States, but it's primarily focused on trade, commerce and those things, which is a departure. And it struck me because it was in keeping with kind of one off comments that we've heard. Something that went basically unnoticed was Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. I think it was last week at the New York Times Dealbook summit where Besant almost he seemed accidentally to refer to China as an ally. And then he came back around and said he wanted to correct himself and he said China and Taiwan are allies. So that struck me. And then we got this national security strategy that was softer towards China. And it occurred to me, talking about Hegseth's remarks at the Reagan, whatever it was yesterday, that the Reagan forum yesterday, that.
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You know, a more traditional Republican party or an old version of the Republican Party might be using more Reaganite language to talk about China and to describe China, perhaps not evil empire, but something akin to that or some analog. And this administration is decidedly not talking about China like that. It is totally focused on the commercial and economic aspect of this. And the Nvidia chips are the latest iteration of that.
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A
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Abe, you know you mentioned yesterday that you were annoyed by the hegseth invocation of neocons and the neo you know and that stuff and how this national security strategy goes back and basically says we're not going to do all this utopian nation building and talk about freedom and all of that. But you know the weird part is this China policy leapfrogs over the George W. Bush administration into the thing that liberals I liberals seem to or or like that we hated and the little which is global neoliberalism. It is what we need. There's China. It's a huge export market. We need to get our taste. We got to get in there you know, they're, this is crazy. Like they make things cheaply. We can sell them chips. They're going to be a power. We need to have relationships with them. We, we understand, we understood then why people in the business community, among them, people like Scott Bessant, now in the government, but a billionaire before he was in government. And people who have these are like, let me in. I mean, my God, a billion and a half people. Let me in, let me sell, let me, let me do what I can do best. Like you're, you're, you're leaving money on the table otherwise. And then these notions about what it is to be a nation in a, in a world of nations, with a nation that does not follow the rules and is enriching itself at the expense of the United States and all of that, they're coming at neocons. Neocons are standing here both on terms of Israel, Ukraine and China defending the American national interest with the idea that there are things that need to be looked at more than the balance sheets of America's largest companies and their export policies. And we're accused of being like unpatriotic or you know, harming the country. They're the ones who are going for short term gain with long term consequences we can't even begin to fathom.
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B
But it's not even just that. We're the ones that are concerned with, with patriotism, defending the Western tradition and the rest of it. Who, who has the unrealistic expectations this time around?
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A
Right.
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B
The idea.
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The accusation against neocons is that we expected countries and cultures to adopt systems that were inimical to them and we thought that was all going to work out fine. Why does the Trump administration think that China is going to play by the rules when it comes to trade or Russia for that matter?
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Or why do you do the. Does MAGA.
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Putting its, putting its faith in the, in the new Syrian government, former former Al Qaeda fighter led government. I mean there, if you want to, I wouldn't call it.
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Utopianism on their part, but it's, it's runaway hopefulness. I mean they are banking a lot on a lot of long shots, but.
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C
It'S also a huge missed opportunity to actually do something that Trump and the MAGA universe has claimed it wants to do in every other arena, which is disrupt our weapons systems are the way our military procures and produces and banks all these weapons is very slow, bureaucratic, old and outdated. We, you know, China's got like 600 hypersonic weapons that can take out our gazillion dollar aircraft carriers and everything on it, and we are not responding quickly enough.
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A
This is.
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C
Would be an opportunity to doge the military. And if you had a leader at the Pentagon who actually understood how to truly shake up a bureaucracy and reform it, which hegseth is not. If you had someone like that there, I think you could see a transformation that someone like Donald Trump and his administration are probably the only ones capable of doing. But we're not. We're just seeing kind of. I think it's because Trump cares more about the trade deals. He cares about the deals. And for to. To truly reform the sclerotic bureaucracy that is our military and to make sure that we're ready for the next war or to deter future wars, which is what our country has largely tried to do. That requires really innovative thinking, new kinds of weapons, a shakeup of, you know, the kinds of contractors that we now use for weapons. Understanding from recent battles, particularly in Ukraine with drone use. And this has started. There are people in the military doing this in the Marines. They got rid of the slow, bad tanks and kind of had lighter tanks. And we see it's possible, but I feel like we're lacking the leadership at the very top. And then there's the issue of Congress and how it funds all this stuff. But this is a really huge missed opportunity, not just for our future security, but to kind of transform our military and bring it into the 21st century.
- [27:54]
A
But it's all part of the schizophrenia. Like, I don't understand. Trump comes in saying, we need to rebuild our industrial base and we need to rebuild our industrial base, particularly because it will help us with the defense and, you know, national security needs that the 21st century is placing upon us.
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And then he makes deals with China that upset that apple cart. So it's his apple cart. He's the one who said, I want to dedicate myself to rebuilding our industrial plant. I mean, he's not the only one. Biden said it also lying about the. Lying about the. His big act. What was it called again? This. Not the inflation reduction act, but, you know, his, like his. His whole effort to rebuild, you know, where the infrastructure chips Act. Sorry, the CHIPS act, which wasn't about chips. It was a. It was just green energy nonsense. But so this is a line every. Obviously it pulls really well. They know it pulls well. So you say, we're going to rebuild our, you know, we're going to the semi, we're going to bring it back to America and we're going to rebuild this and we have the means to do that with the coming of AI. If we're going to go full bore into AI, we obviously have, though. China is very, very heavily invested in AI. We have the engine of AI. We're about to give it to them. I don't understand the logic of it. And there is no logic of it. And you, Christine, you say Trump wants trade deals. He doesn't like trade. So it's not the trade deals he wants, it's deals.
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C
It's deals, right? No, he just wants to say, I made a deal.
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A
He made a deal. Yeah, but he doesn't like trade. So there is a way in which you could be him and do the Nvidia thing and say, you know what? The best man wins. We have a free market we'll sell to. We can beat everybody. We'll use the profits that Nvidia makes from China to see if Nvidia can like go 10 steps beyond China and, you know, let the best man win. And that's true of our agriculture. It's true of everything. But he doesn't believe that.
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C
Well, and he doesn't believe in a free market. His industrial policy is putting the government involved directly in the hand of decisions that the free market wants.
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A
The government now owns 10% of Intel.
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C
Right. Which it should not.
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A
I mean, where we're not even talking about stuff like that. Like he's calling Mamdani a communist and the government is taking 10% of intel.
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C
We've been talking about that on this.
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A
Production every time it happens. I know, I'm just saying who's seizing the means of production? Is Iran Mamdani seizing the means of production? No, Trump is seizing the production. He wants government positions in private companies. It's not control.
- [30:48]
C
And to Eliana's point about he has an opportunity here to be a little more Reagan esque. Just in rhetoric alone and explaining the situation and the balance of power between two great powers, he's alienated a lot of our allies who could actually help us triangulate with China. Fine. That's the new order we live in. But you know what he could do is he could say something to the American people, which is, if you live in an American city right now, China can very likely shut off the power plant, your electrical grid and your clean water in some of these cities. They have infiltrated local municipal electrical grids all over the country. We know this and we're trying to combat it. We have not always successfully combated this sort of malware. So imagine you're living in A mid level city in the Midwest and all the lights go out and nobody can figure out how to restore them. That's what China can do to us. What can we do in return if that happens? That's a very stark way. That is not at all dystopian. That is our current reality.
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A
He doesn't, to be fair, we don't know we can do to China. It's also like, well, you don't know.
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C
We can't shut down their major electrical.
- [31:53]
D
You know, one thing I forgot to mention when I listed this series of indications that the administration is softening on China, on China was Trump's decision decision, which was a reversal to admit 600,000 Chinese students. And I think that's important to acknowledge that it does seem like a shift is underway. And the administration had. And then, Christine, to your point about laying out the threat of China, you know, the administration helped to outlaw Confucius Institutes, which were nodes of Chinese influence in the US and the Beacon ran a piece about China's efforts to circumvent American law, which outlawed these things. And these, the Confucius Institutes which pop up on American campuses, have essentially rebranded as the Chinese student and scholar associations that are virtually identical to what the Confucius Institutes were. And there are now lawmakers on Capitol Hill raising the alarm about this. So I do think this is something that, you know, if somebody or a set of people in the administration were activated about, there's plenty of, there are plenty of data points for them to point to. And certainly there are lawmakers on Capitol Hill who would rally to the cause.
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A
So it's just very, very, very strange. Except if you look at it this way, Trump goes and says, I'm putting tariffs on. Farmers get hurt, right? American consumers get hurt. Because as you can, we'll say until we die, American government is collecting more money in tariffs than it has in decades. That money is collected at points of sale from consumers, from increased prices, from the taxes that are paid in. It's not just we're paying for it.
- [33:58]
So government's getting more money, effectively through a tax increase, which it does not call a tax increase. And then Trump gets to parcel it out to favored constituencies to pay them back. Mayors and governors have been doing this forever. It's a form of the individual tax cut. For example, you have a bank in New York City and you say, or you have a company in New York City and you say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm done. I'm going to send all my back Office jobs to Jersey City across the river or to Charlotte, North Carolina or something like that, because just it's too hard. So the schools aren't good in New York City and you know, it's grubby and the expenses are too high. And then the mayor, every mayor goes and you sit down with the mayor and the mayor says, I'm going to give you $2 billion in tax rebates so that, or whatever, $100 million in tax rebates so that these 800 jobs that you were going to send across the river or into another state are kept here. So this company essentially gets a payout from the city government. The mayor gets to say, I saved 800 jobs.
- [35:14]
And the taxpayer is paying, the ordinary taxpayer is paying some company a bribe and to stay in the city. That's urban state level politics. That's horse trading that goes on. It's how states keep companies from leaving states, all of that. The federal government isn't supposed to be in that game because who with whom is it competing, if you see what I'm saying? Like New York is competing with, like Georgia's competing with California over movie jobs. So Georgia provides preposterous tax credits to movie companies to Marvel, to Disney, to make movies in Georgia that are effectively taxpayers in Georgia writing 30, 40, 50 million dollar checks to Marvel to make Deadpool versus Wolverine in Georgia instead of somewhere else. Like, that's like, that's a great deal for the people of Georgia. Right, but who are we competing with on a national level?
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C
We're competing with, and also it's Congress that has the power, constitutionally, the power of the purse, not the executive branch. I mean, that's just a whole nother issue.
- [36:29]
A
That's a whole other right. I'm, you know, you know, you know, don't, don't, don't confuse me with constitutional niceties here. Trump is playing a classic corrupt urban pol game. It's a version of the spoil system, but it involves him giving money, taking money in the form of tariffs and then parceling it back. When people say, oh, the tariffs are hurting me and I'm your voter, and he's like, okay, here's a check. It's by the way, according to what I've been reading, it's not like the subsidies that he's going to provide back to the most, the farmers who are most harmed are going to make them whole. Like they're going to get a third back of what they've lost or something like that, which is better than nothing. But nonetheless, if the tariffs hadn't been imposed, the farmers wouldn't be losing two thirds of their income because of reciprocal tariffs.
- [37:27]
C
But this is probably where we should talk a little bit about how the administration seems to be waking up to the fact that this whole idea of strategic uncertainty with regard to the tariffs, the American people have, they're, they've had enough uncertainty. They want to actually see some relief or some plan that talks to them about the cost of living and inflation in particular. And Trump's supposed to give a speech at a weird time like, I mean, like a Tuesday night at 8pm in Pennsylvania. I mean, it's just clearly this seems kind of thrown together. And you had Susie Wiles go recently on a podcast and talk about how, oh, you're going to see him out there before the midterms talking about the economy, talking about affordability. So there's been a real shift in just the last week. I'm sure, based on the polling numbers they've looked at about Republicans in the economy, that it's time for him to start talking about these things. It will be very difficult for him or anyone on the right to explain this strategic uncertainty. It doesn't seem to be working. And lots of economists warned about this when the big tariff day was announced. A lot of, we've talked about it endlessly on this podcast and the comparison I've seen recently from a lot of economists is that we're kind of going the way of like Brexit, where you did this sort of withdrawal from the way things used to be, thinking you needed to do this to improve your economic long term future. And it just all kind of started falling, falling apart in slow motion. And we're still seeing that it's not just the cost to consumers. It's not just the fact that inflation hasn't gone down in all sectors. It's also that we, we can't plan. We don't know how companies are going to be investing or not investing because they're hedging their bets with tariffs.
- [39:01]
B
Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, I've been saying this for a few weeks now. There's, there's a shift that's taken place here where.
- [39:09]
When Trump first came to office and he announced the tariffs and we all started saying tariffs are historically bad. I don't know. We'll see, we'll see. Maybe he's up to, maybe this is a game. Maybe this is, we're on the other side of that now. The, the administration isn't fooling anyone anymore. Isn't there's no, there's no.
- [39:30]
There'S no suspension here.
- [39:34]
We've figured it out. The White House is in like an emergency affordability mode. There are all these plans to talk about it. I don't know what exactly they plan to do about it, aside from talking, because talking about it is going to be very tough because Trump's on record as saying affordability is a Democratic hoax.
- [40:00]
A
Right. Well, you know, Susie Wells is going to go out and talk about the economy.
- [40:07]
And it's great for him if he doesn't screw it up. He thinks he can't screw it up. He's wrong. Like, you know, we know what happens when Trump goes and gives speeches and he does the weave because off script things occur to him as he's talking. It's what people like enjoy about these speeches and what anyone who's interested in policy always finds them maddening because he then contradicts in sentence three what he said in sentence one. But this is more high risk than Susie Wiles and the people around her seem to understand. I'm not saying that he's cognitively disabled like Biden, but it's like you didn't want to send Biden out in 23:24 just to speak to anybody because God only knows what was going to happen. And Trump is not showing, he's showing incredible flexibility on policy to try to deal with the fallout and consequences of policies that he himself has created, like the farming tariffs crisis. So he's very flexible. But when he wants to go out and make a case that he's doing, you know, that the, that he's going to provide the country with practical solutions to the things that are upsetting them at this present moment. I would not, if I were part of his political operation, be at all comfortable with the idea that he was out there and what he was going to do was going to say was going to help.
- [41:33]
C
Well, what, I mean, look, he could, he, he said over and over again, I inherited a mess. He did. He inherited an economic mess. Thanks to the Biden administration, everybody accepts that. It's, it's a huge reason why voters gave him another chance at the White House in the last election. But what he can't do is say, I inherited a mess. And I have, you know, I have this big, beautiful tariff bill and I have these plans and these plans and think that we will put off the result, seeing the results forever. The early results are coming in, people are not happy. And his solutions are always these weird sort of rearranging deck chair on the Titanic moves like he wants to take over the independence of the Fed and make sure that whoever's installed there cuts rates. You know, so he tries to control the things that actually are out of his ambit of control, either out of norms or constitutionally in many cases, rather than just backpedaling a little bit so the payoffs start to look like graft or grift. It just voters look at that and say, wait, so farmers are getting a bailout, but my electrical bills are still really super high and so is the cost of groceries. And he does, he has to respond to that. And that's where I think you're right, John. It will be difficult for him to get into specifics because he likes to. He retreats into bluster when he gets on the defensive on those sorts of issues.
- [42:45]
D
It'll be interesting to hear what he says tonight. And I'm curious whether what he told POLITICO's Dasha Burns, who pressed him on this is a preview where, you know, she said, let's talk about the economy. And he first said, you know, the tariffs have brought in all this money and that was a real economic win. And she then did something interesting. There's a lot I, in this interview that I'm critical of, of her tactics and stuff. But, but she said, I want to quote a supporter of yours who gives you an A plus plus on your governance and that put him in a positive frame. And she said, but, you know, this supporter of yours in Pennsylvania, she says, you know, prices are still too high and what would you say to her? And he says, I inherited a mess.
- [43:37]
But we've done a lot on energy and that's really important. And he teases the idea that energy may become part of his message here. And he says prices are starting to come down and I wonder if he'll expand on that.
- [43:55]
Tonight. And she also asked him, would you be open to more carve outs in the tariffs you've made some on bananas and coffee. And he says, sure.
- [44:06]
A
Right. So that's the point, which is he gets to trade, right? Tariffs, create a pool pop a pool of money, and then he gets to give it back. If you ask him, you ask him nicely and you say, I'm a critical constituency in a congressional district that Republicans have to win in order to hold the House so that I don't get impeached in 2027. I mean, it is, it's, it's grab, it's a weird form of political graft to collect money from the public in the form of tariffs. And then give it back to other people in, in the public.
- [44:44]
C
It's just interest group politics. He's not changed anything about the Swamp in that regard. He's just actually, you know, exacerbated.
- [44:51]
A
Funny you mentioned this about the Fed because of course yesterday, you know, this extraordinarily important argument was conducted before the Supreme Court on what's called Humphrey's Executor. That is, that is excellent punk rock.
- [45:07]
C
Band name by the way.
- [45:08]
A
It is the best punk band. It's the best Supreme Court case name. Right. So it basically says that.
- [45:17]
In the agency, the agencies that are conceived of by Congress or have been created by Congress as being quasi independent, that officials who work for them can be fired.
- [45:33]
By the executive branch, but only for cause. And the question is, is the Supreme Court going to overturn this 90 year precedent on the grounds that Congress, somebody has to administer an agency that performs executive functions and that person is the President of the United States who was supposed to have oversight over it. And the Supreme Court carved out this exception for these quasi independent agencies. But if you follow the theory down the line, then nobody governs them. You just get picked for it and you can stay as long as you were. There's a, there's a term, a 10 year term or something like that. And then the question then goes to whether or not this will ultimately apply to the Federal Reserve Board, which ha. Which.
- [46:23]
Has to be, was created to be independent. That's why it exists, was to create, was to make sure that presidents and people could not just like inflate or deflate the currency the way other countries executives do, to help them politically. That there would be an independent currency monitor manager that would not have the political incentives that somebody who has to face voters every four years or every two years or every six years has.
- [46:57]
And this is, this is an incredibly important case. And the problem, it's like the poison child, the potential poison chalice that Trump represents, which is that if you have a certain view of the Constitution, Humphrey's executor was a terrible decision. And it is the fundament of what we call the administrative state that it exists. And the administrative state is very problematic. And this is one of the ways to get at it and rebalance executive power in the United States. And on the other hand, it's not great that Trump is the guy who will benefit from Humphrey's Executor being overturned because he will use the power in the worst possible way.
- [47:39]
D
I think you should note that the case is before the court because Trump dismissed an FTC commissioner that he himself appointed in his first term. And she, she challenged his authority to do that.
- [47:53]
A
Right.
- [47:53]
D
And so the Solicitor General yesterday argued the case. John Sauer, the Solicitor General argued the case before the Supreme Court saying that the President does have authority to remove anybody from the F ftc. And the reasoning they gave when they removed this woman from her chairwomanship at the FTC was that her vision didn't align with that of the administration. They didn't give any pretense of firing her for cause. And the court appears poised to side with the administration on this.
- [48:23]
A
Right.
- [48:24]
D
And the administration has made these sorts of firings at agencies all over the place.
- [48:30]
A
Now, I have no problem with that. As I say, like I think that that is the right way to look at it. These agencies are conceived of as semi independent, but that doesn't mean that.
- [48:47]
They are bereft of oversight. We don't have. Everything that the government does is supposed to be overseen by somebody.
- [48:56]
I mean, the last time we had such an official, it was the independent counsel who was appointed by courts and then could do whatever it wanted. And nobody was there to say to Lawrence Walsh or whoever because of the way the statute was written.
- [49:13]
Why are you indicting that person? That doesn't, that seems like a, that, you know, well, it's. Have a reality check here. You're doing something for political reasons and there was no check.
- [49:25]
D
You know, another thing I thought was really interesting, it's like kind of sort of related, but two things. One, John.
- [49:33]
Trump said in this interview with Politico, two related things. The first is that in terms of picking the next Fed chairman, a commitment to lower interest rates is a precondition. So, you know, it's in keeping with his view that he does not want an independent Fed. And second, he was asked, would you like to see 77 year old Clarence Thomas and 75 year old Sam Alito retire? And I was surprised that his answer was no. He said, well, I hope they stay because I think they're fantastic. Okay, Both of those men are fantastic. You.
- [50:06]
A
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- [52:16]
C
Can we, can we. This is a, this is a rough segue, but I feel we have to discuss this very important political news. The over the people. The agency oversight is a lot of it falls to Congress. And Congress, as we've mentioned many times, is kind of not up for the job that it should be doing in a lot of these arenas. Although I am, I am actually glad to see them demanding, for example, the, the unclassified video from the boat strikes. I mean, they're actually kind of rousing themselves from some sort of slumber that they've been in. So that's good. They'll have to do that in a lot of arenas. But we should talk about why. Maybe part of the challenge is also Congress because the people who want to go run for office say, oh, I don't know, Jasmine Crockett in Texas are not playing the, the understandable role of talking to their potential future constituents. Instead, they're playing to a larger audience. And so her debut video, which I found ridiculously self involved and entirely about Trump Insulting her. Nothing about the people of Texas, who she wants to represent now in the Senate, but got a lot of traction, got a lot of airtime, got her, I assume, helped her raise some money. But I just, I'd be curious what you're. If you. I mean, I don't think her candidacy where a woman who says that she doesn't need the GOP in a state that's very deep red. But it is, I think, indicative of the direction Congress is going, even as we see. We've talked about this before, more moderate on either side of the aisle. Leaving. They're just leaving. They're leaving town.
- [53:47]
A
Well, okay, so Crockett is one of the dumbest people in America. And the fact that she got in the race and a relatively rational. Even though I don't think he can win, candidate immediately dropped out because he's like, well, I'm not going to spend, you know, I'm not going to spend the next six months running against this. I. It's an uphill climb for me to win this Senate seat anyway against Ted Cruz, said Colin Allred. Like, I'm doing it because somebody should do it, and it'll make me. But, like, I don't need to be fighting with Jasmine Crockett for six months. I'm out. Like, you know, do you know what it's like to fight with. Have anybody watched Jasmine Crockett over the last three months?
- [54:24]
D
And Democrats aren't repudiating her and saying, she is not the new face of the Democratic Party. I reject this. Instead, Chris Coons is like, on the record saying nice things about her. I mean, it's farcical.
- [54:36]
A
I mean, she's bananas. She is a banana. She. She is actually. She is. If you don't like Marjorie Taylor Greene, you shouldn't like Jasmine.
- [54:45]
D
That actually is the parallel that occurred to me. And Republicans weren't like, oh, yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's the new face of the party. Like, they were afraid of this woman. They did not want her to be.
- [54:55]
A
They didn't put her over everywhere. She was removed.
- [54:59]
D
Exactly.
- [55:00]
A
She was not allowed to sit on any. After supporting. After saying that January 6 was good.
- [55:08]
She was not allowed to sit on a congressional committee. So that's how Republicans handled Marjorie Taylor Greene until. Until Kevin McCarthy really needed her. Because. Because Matt Gaetz came after. Because it was like the war of the crazy people. Like Matt Gaetz is.
- [55:23]
D
I was gonna say, because another crazy person caused problems.
- [55:26]
A
Yeah, Right. So thus, the incredibly narrow majority in Congress leads to horrible results as we've seen time and time again. But, but I mean. Yeah, go ahead.
- [55:40]
B
That's sort of the story of the, of our partisan age is that, you know, for all the reports of the Republicans have gone all in on this crazy person or on this crazy thing or on this one, there's always a vocal, noticeable effort to push back. There's always some antibodies that kick in on the right. There are people that repudiate the crazies. Doesn't always work. They always the fringe makes inroads where it shouldn't, but you never see anything parallel to that among the Democrats.
- [56:21]
C
There's, you know, I keep citing all my excellent colleagues books, but there's a wonder, if you really want to understand where Congress went off the, the rails sort of the history of it. My, my colleague Phil Wallach wrote a wonder book, wonderful book that came out last year called why Congress. And it gets into the history of sort of what is its, what is its role? What should its role be based on what the founders thought and how did we get to this point of the Jasmine Crockett, you know, Matt Gates sort of universe? And then it also offers some solutions which are technical in the sense of some of them are structurally about how to reform committee assignments, all kinds of stuff like that. It gets into the, I find very fascinating weeds of how Congress actually works day to day. But it is, it's just an excellent it helped me really deeply understand how we got the dysfunction, but also to have some optimism about being able to get out of it and sort of fix things if we can, if we can think about it structurally as well as just this matter of the kinds of people attracted to running for office these days.
- [57:18]
A
Well, look, everything about everything is about the introduction of social media and high, high broadband, high speed broadband to the Internet because Jasmine Crockett's appeal is not going to be to the people of Texas. For at least the first six months of her run, she is appealing like Zoram Hamdani did to people outside of the area in which she is running for office. She is trying to raise money nationwide as a, you know, as a bulwark against the evils of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. And so she begins with this broad message that has nothing to do with Texas. That started we can actually pinpoint when that started. And it was 2003 with Move on and Howard Dean. So suddenly, out of nowhere, a candidacy is ballasted by a candidate no one had ever heard of because he took a national stand on a national issue and because there was this newfangled way you could email 5 million people with at no price point and see whether you could get money out of them and then keep going back to them for money. Suddenly, Howard Dean becomes this sensation in the Democratic Party. He's ultimately, he doesn't win. Ultimately, John Kerry, the more conventional, you know, Massachusetts senatorial candidate, ends up lapping him and beating him.
- [58:52]
C
Remember, though, part of that was the viral, the viral scream moment, though, which also ricocheted all around also.
- [58:58]
A
And that's another way. Right. Suddenly you see someone acting at their worst and you see it in real time, something you wouldn't have seen otherwise. Anyway, my point is that we, we are still, it's too decades later, it's a generation later, and we still have the distortion field created by the fact that things that used to be local, which is to say a congressional election, a mayoral election, a senatorial election, which were about the districts and cities and states in which those things took place, are now all national. They can all be made national in five seconds. And there was a benefit. There's an, obviously, you can see the benefit. 80% of Mamdani's money before, before he got the nomination came from out of New York City. So which is why I say he was basically elected by care. Like, that's who was raising money for him. He was elected by Muslim radicals or he was given the, he was given the accelerant to get elected by, by Muslim radicals in the United States and their, and their fellow travelers.
- [60:08]
C
So which, by the way, Congress. Yeah, there was a, there was a committee that's trying to water down a little bit this terrorist designation, or at least not make it a requirement of the, of the law that they're trying to pass, saying that they investigate each branch. So that's something to watch for those of us who are concerned about CARE at the same time, that's the Council.
- [60:26]
A
On American Islamic relations, which Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the governors, respectively, of Florida and Texas, have effectively worked to designate in their own states as terrorist organizations, which has that, that legal designation means that they can't rent office space or they can't buy land to put offices on. There's all kinds of weird questions. And Trump has indicated that he may seek a national designation for CARE on the grounds that it is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist, international terrorist organization.
- [61:11]
C
But the House Foreign Affairs Committee is looking at a bill now to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organization. But they are, there's, there's motion going around now where they're removing some key provisions. So for people who care about this issue, that's something to continue to watch, right?
- [61:28]
A
Yes, it's a very complicated issue because it does, it implicates free speech, it implicates freedom of religion, it implicates all kinds of, it implicates all kinds of things. There is a history now, two decade history of finding individual groups inside the United States that claim to be religious in affiliation or efforts to simply lobby on behalf of issues that have been effectively outlawed. The most important being the Holy Land Federation in Richardson, Texas, which was found to be providing material support to Hamas and was out outlawed. And in fact a couple of people at the head of it were sent to prison and one of its leading sort of like defenders, Samuel Aryan, was deported professor at Florida International University, I think. Anyway, so there is a history of this, but it's a very complicated matter and it's probably not ultimately necessarily going to be resolved in the way that we, that we might in our deepest fantasies wish that it were resolved. But it is, it is something to watch.
- [62:33]
C
But Ted Cruz has a bill before the Senate that is, that is tough. The original bill in the House was tough and the attempt to water it down in the House is the thing to I think look at, to keep an eye on. But Cruz's bill is tough on the Muslim Brotherhood.
- [62:47]
A
Right.
- [62:50]
So I'm going to take what Christine has done during this podcast and we're going to convert it into today's recommendation. So you mentioned two books by your AI colleagues. Those are Chip War by Chris Miller.
- [63:03]
C
Which came out a few years ago. But the paperback has a new updated introduction that's worth reading. That kind of updates sort of a lot of his argument and Phil Wallach's why Congress. Excellent book. Just kind of the title tells you everything. It's like why do we need it? Why has it gone off the rails and how can we restore? It's an excellent book.
- [63:24]
A
Okay, well, we will be back tomorrow. So for Eliana, Christina and Abe, I'm John Podwortz. Keep the candle burning.
- [63:39]
C
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- [63:59]
D
Yeah.
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C
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