Bye Bye Bibi?

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast – "Bye Bye Bibi?"

Date: May 18, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz (Editor, Commentary Magazine)
Panel: Abe Greenwald (Executive Editor), Seth Mandel (Senior Editor), Christine Rosen (Social Commentary Columnist), Eliana Johnson (Washington Free Beacon Editor), Dan Senor (Board of Trustees, Commentary; Host, Call Me Back podcast)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Commentary panel dives deep into the latest political crisis in Israel—specifically the looming collapse of Netanyahu’s government and the upcoming elections that have become a referendum on Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu himself. The broader implications for internal Israeli politics, coalition arithmetic involving Arab parties, and the ever-present issue of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) military conscription are dissected. The show also pivots into a robust discussion about the ongoing conflict with Iran, the prospects (and limitations) of regime change, America’s military objectives, and the political aftermath for Trump. The episode closes with commentary on US domestic politics, especially the drama around Republican primaries and redistricting.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Israeli Political Crisis – "Bye Bye Bibi?"

The Nature of the Election

• The next Israeli election, moved ahead due to the coalition collapse, is described as a pure referendum: “literally an election that is about Bibi or not Bibi. That's it.” (John, 04:11)
• The so-called "Bibi block" and opposition "anti-Bibi block" now dominate discourse, with newspaper headlines and public debate centered on these groupings.

Coalition Math & the Arab Parties

• The opposition lacks the ability to reach a 61-seat majority unless it brings in Arab parties (~10 Knesset seats) (John, 05:04).
• Precedent exists: In 2022, the Bennett-Gantz coalition included Ra’am, an Arab party, in the cabinet.
• But there's resistance across the spectrum to forming governments with explicitly anti-Zionist Arab parties, especially after October 7, 2023 (Dan, 07:30).
• The “whipsaw issue” for Bibi might be the possibility of the opposition rationalizing a coalition with Arab parties, even after public denials pre-election (Dan, 09:44).

Quote:
“You mean to tell me if suddenly...the opposition bloc has a shot of getting to 61. But in order to get to 61, they need to include one of, or all of the Arab parties... The vitriol against Netanyahu is so intense that I think they will figure out a way to rationalize including [them].”
— Dan Senor [09:44]

2. Key Political Issues: The Haredi Draft Controversy

• The coalition is currently unraveling over a dispute involving a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) faction’s opposition to conscription legislation.
• Dan explains that Haredi politics often favors short-term tactical gains over long-term strategy, enabling them to survive in left- and right-leaning governments (Dan, 18:40).
• The exemption’s unpopularity has dramatically increased post-October 7, when war made issues of national service more visceral for the Israeli public.

Memorable Moment:
“It's one thing to not be conscripted into a peacetime army and it's another thing to be exempted from being conscripted into a wartime army... it's like traitorous not to serve.”
— John Podhoretz [16:44]

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3. Israel, Iran, and the "Victory" Question

Resumption of War: What’s the Objective?

• There is feverish debate about renewed military action against Iran—will this be about controlling the Strait of Hormuz, degrading Iran's capabilities, or actual regime change? (Dan, 22:35)
• Dan breaks it down into possible objectives:
  • Wresting control or just reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
  • Continuing to degrade Iran’s offensive and missile capabilities.
  • Decapitation strikes (removal of top IRGC personnel).
  • Possibly targeting Iran's oil infrastructure as leverage.

Quote:
“I’m totally open for continued military action. I just don’t—no one has really spelled out: if it happens, what is it in service of?”
— Dan Senor [24:58]

Regime Change – Is It Realistic? (32:41–36:22)

• Israel’s Mossad reportedly advocated for a multi-pronged "shock and awe" approach, including arming the Kurds, to collapse the Iranian regime; only parts of their plan were executed, allegedly due to US or Turkish pressure.
• Mossad still believes the current economic collapse in Iran will lead to regime change—even with the conflict paused.
• But the panel’s consensus: Real "victory" may require regime change, as anything less is inherently unstable and leaves the Hormuz “card” in play (John, 41:55).

Quote:
“I still don’t understand how we achieve victory, in a sense that history will view this as a victory, with the Islamic Republic of Iran... still the governing authority in 2027.”
— John Podhoretz [43:53]

Dangers of Stasis & Political Tolls

• The panel debates the political impacts of Trump’s pause/ceasefire in the Iran conflict, with polling suggesting "no war, no resolution" is hurting him with independents (Eliana, 36:22; Christine, 41:39).
• “We're calling it a ceasefire. There isn't a ceasefire, but we are not doing anything to move towards a satisfactory conclusion...”
  — Eliana Johnson [39:52]

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4. US Politics: The Trump Factor, Primaries, and Redistricting

Revenge Primaries & Internal GOP Dynamics

• Bill Cassidy loses the Senate primary to a Trump-backed candidate, interpreted as Trump's final act of revenge for Cassidy’s impeachment vote (John/Seth, 62:34).
• Trump intensely focused on purging those who crossed him on impeachment, even if less interested in broader midterm strategy (Eliana, 64:03).

Redistricting as Political Bragging Rights

• Trump can take credit for redistricting wins (to some degree), though John points out that developments in California and other states are driven by court battles, not White House maneuvering.
• The panel notes however, that Trump and the GOP are better positioned than a few weeks ago, picking up steam due to favorable Supreme Court decisions in southern states (Eliana/Seth, 66:13–69:19).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (With Timestamps)

• “This literally is an election that is about Bibi or not Bibi. That's it...There is the Bibi block and the opposition block.”
  — John Podhoretz [04:11]

• “The sense now is...the leaders of the anti-Bibi block, they're all saying they won't form a government now with Arab parties. They're, it's the same thing again. Right now they're saying they won't do it.”
  — Dan Senor [09:00]

• “The draft issue is a key Israeli issue...because they hold this tiny but very important...king making or king destroying. The draft issue is a key Israeli issue.”
  — John Podhoretz [15:25]

• “[The Haredi parties] don't have a long term vision for how they want to play in government and what role they want in [the] future...they're always just...angling for, like, one temporary tactical maneuver.”
  — Dan Senor [18:40]

• “I’m totally open for continued military action. I just don’t—no one has really spelled out: if it happens, what is it in service of?...What's the objective, what are we trying to do?”
  — Dan Senor [24:58]

• “In the end this war fails, in historical terms, without regime change, because the truth is, we can never be sure that Iran will not pull the Hormuz card again.”
  — John Podhoretz [41:55]

• “You can cross Trump, but you can’t impeach him...Cassidy should have just understood that he made a certain decision when he cast that vote, and that’s what makes his vote...that much more frustrating.”
  — Seth Mandel [62:34]

• “If he wants to go through impeachment theater for two years and, like, not throw his back into this, like, so be it. But he should be focused...and the Iran war is tied to it, on bringing this war to a successful conclusion.”
  — Eliana Johnson [64:03]

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Key Timestamps for Segments

• [00:41–12:50]: Israeli coalition breakdown, the Bibi referendum, coalition math, and the role of Arab parties.
• [15:09–20:07]: Haredi draft problem, its historical context, and the post-October 7 political climate.
• [22:35–36:22]: Prospects and objectives for renewed war with Iran, including regime change scenarios, Mossad analysis, and strategic debate.
• [36:22–43:53]: Political impacts of the Iran conflict for Trump, polling, and US leadership questions.
• [62:34–69:57]: US Republican primary politics, Trump’s revenge primaries, redistricting wins, panel analysis on political ramifications.

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Tone & Style

• The conversation is frank, deeply analytical, and interwoven with dry wit and inside knowledge of politics—both Israeli and American.
• The language is direct, often sardonic ("pipsqueaks," "crazy Energizer bunny"), with in-the-weeds political references.
• The guests and hosts make frequent analogies to sports and popular culture, keeping conversation lively and accessible despite the complexity.

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For Further Listening

If you enjoyed this deep-dive analysis with Dan Senor, check out his “Call Me Back” podcast (as referenced throughout), and look out for the next June issue at commentary.org.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of

[A]

knowing which way it's going Hope for

[B]

the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Monday, May 18, 2026. I am John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. Happy to tell you that the contents of our June issue are available for your [e-mail], more on that in due course. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald.

[A]

Hi, Abe.

[C]

Hi, John.

[B]

Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[D]

Hi, John.

[B]

Our Social Commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[E]

Hi, John.

[B]

Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

[F]

Hi, John.

[B]

And joining us today, Commentary Board of trustees member, a host of the Call Me Back podcast, the inside Call Me Back podcast, three times a week, speaker at every Jewish event in America, author of the co author of Startup Nation and the Genius of Israel, Dan. Senor Dan, I just want to point out, I told you last week that I saw this meme that there are all different categories of American Jews and there is now a category of American Jew called the Call Me Back Jew. Just a person who listens to the Call Me Back podcast.

[A]

What, what categories? And is it like the Litvax, you know, there's the Litvax there, the, the Call Me Back Jews, it's like, it's like.

[B]

Well, I was listening. I was listening to Call Me Back inside. Call Me Back, one of your shows with Nadav Eal, who managed to tell me something I didn't know, and I think maybe you didn't know, which is that the party that seems to have really caused the, this possible disillusionment of the election is this tiny little party that itself, faction within a faction, fractured into two.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

And that the litvaks crashed the Israeli government. And this I know a lot about Israeli elections and Dan knows five times as much as I know about the Israel elections and the existence of this, this one.

[A]

I think they have like two seats. They're like.

[B]

Or one seat, I think he said, might even be, might even have been enough. Anyway, so dividing up Jews, despite the fact that there are only 14 million of us in the world, there are still, you know, like the joke about the two Jews on the desert island, the Jew on the desert island who builds, builds two synagogues, the one that he goes to and the one that he wouldn't set foot in. So anyway, well, we had the real

[D]

life version of that with the last two Jews in Afghanistan, right. Who didn't speak to each other.

[B]

That's right, exactly.

[A]

Well, that was the same conversation you're setting with Nadav in which he tried to buck me up by comparing the state of Israel's situation with that of the New York Jets.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I don't know if you caught that.

[B]

Yes, that was an interesting moment. Okay, so I guess since we're here, let's talk about this, because the Israeli weird machinations that aren't that interesting. The Israeli election was scheduled for October 27, and now the government has basically is falling. So now the Israeli elections might be September 1st instead of October 27th or so they have to be before September 15th because that's when the Jewish New Year begins. And the holidays, there's 10 years of the Days of Awe. And so you certainly can't have an election during that. Anyway, I don't think it matters that much. But just to give people sort of an overview sense that basically this literally is an election that is about Bibi or not Bibi. That's it. It's impossible to say that every issue just flows through him. And there is the Bibi block and the opposition block. And the Bibi block is literally now just called the Bibi block. Like that is what the newspapers call. It's what everybody calls it. So you are just either going to vote for Netanyahu or against Netanyahu. And the question is whether, however the machinations go here with all the many parties, whether Bibi Netanyahu can get to 61, 60 seats out of the 120 seats Knesset, he got to 64 in the election in 2022.

[A]

And then he grew it by bringing in Gidon Sar's party, so the Colic party.

[B]

So it was then up to 60, about 68. Yes, 68. Okay. So now the polling, most polling, shows him trailing, significantly trailing the opposition, but the opposition is nowhere near 61 unless the opposition is willing to bring in the Arab parties, which get about 10 seats in the Knesset. And the Arab parties have traditionally not been. The more Zionist parties will not sit with the Arab parties, which are explicitly anti Zionist. But in the government that formed before the last election, that was the first time this coalition of Bennett and Gantz agreed to bring in Ra', Am, one of the Arab parties. And so for the first time there was an Arab party in the government.

[A]

In the actual Cabinet.

[B]

In the actual cabinet, yeah.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So there is precedent, but it like. Yeah, so it's still very, very tricky to consider bringing in the Arab parties. I just defending Israel. And then I'll stop. It sounds racist. To say, oh, they won't sit with the Arab parties. The Arab parties, though they are citizens of Israel, they're voters in Israel, they collect all the social welfare benefits that Israelis collect and they have equal rights. They are anti Zionist parties. And so government that, you know, having, it's like, you know, voting in, it's like being in alliance with a communist government in, you know, if you're like a Libertarian party, it doesn't make logical sense. But anyway, Dan, so that's where we are and we have like three months, basically, I guess three months.

[A]

So say a few things. First of all, I do think the whole issue of whether or not the Arab party should be included in a government or not, I think you can, you know, not all of these Arab parties are the same. So there are some that are, I would say, more responsible as it relates to than others. There are some that are really, really hostile to the, to the modern state of Israel and the, you know, the Jewish sovereignty in the land, even while they serve in Israel's government, in Israel's Knesset. So they're not all. I just don't want to like, yeah, you know, paint with the same, I'm

[B]

tarring with the same brush.

[A]

Right, okay. That's the first thing. The second thing I would say is you're right. It's that it could come off as racist, you know, and that's how it's often portrayed. You can imagine why this issue has become More sensitive post October 7, 2023. The last government, as you said, that had the ROM party, this Muslim party, in the government, this was all before October 7, 2023. In a world in which Israel is fighting wars against Hamas and Gaza, if there's some kind of resurgence there or on any of the other fronts, having one of these parties that some of them proudly declare themselves as anti Zionist parties, having them in the room where decisions have to be made, it's one thing if they support the government in power, it's one thing if they serve in the Knesset, but it's another thing for them to be in the cabinet in some kind of decision making role while the government is having to make decisions on how to fight a war, a war of which could be very controversial in many parts of the Arab Muslim world and certainly controversial within the west bank and Gaza. So I just think the standard. It's a much more sensitive situation in the past and many Israeli political leaders from right to left have said they will not form a government with the Arab parties. Obviously that's what Naftali Bennett said in the government that he formed in the election he ran in that resulted in him forming a government. And so there's a lot of backlash on the right among, against Bennett because he said he wouldn't serve in a government with Arab parties. And he formed a government not only with an Arab party, but one that became a kingmaker in the party. By the way, the guy who runs that party, Mansour Abbas, is like an impressive guy. So I'm not, I'm not here to like criticize him, but Bennett did say he would not form a government with any of these parties and he did. And so the sense now is, it's interesting if you look at the leaders of the, of the anti Bibi block, they're all saying they won't form a government now with Arab parties. They're really like, they're, it's the same thing again. Right now they're saying they won't do it have to.

[B]

I know because this could be, this is, this could be the whipsaw issue that Bibi uses to stay in power.

[A]

But the question, John, but the. I agree with you, but the question is, will it Just like Bennett said he wouldn't. The question is if they, if they, if they. You mean to tell me if suddenly we get past the elections at the end of October and I want to come back to that. If they get back to the, get to the elections at the end of October, pass elections and, and the opposition bloc, what is now the opposition bloc has a shot of getting to 61. But in order to get to 61, they need to include one of, or all of the air parties. We can define what that means. I just, I'm. The vitriol against Netanyahu is so intense that I think they will figure out a way to rationalize including if that's what gets him to 61, if that's the only thing that can stop Bibi from forming a government, gets him in power, I think they'll figure out a way to do it regardless of what they're saying during the election. Now the real question to me is not what they say relative to what they do once they have to form a government, it's whether or not they can hold together the whole opposition bloc. So if you say like Avigdor Lieberman is key, this, this the leader of the Russian party, very secular but very right wing guy as it relates to dealing with the Palestinians and various.

[B]

That's Bibi personally like poison.

[A]

Right. But so, so will he form a government? In other words, he so he obviously wants the opposition to win, but will he join a government if. If it's led by whomever it's led by says, well, you know what, we have to temporarily cut a deal with the air parties to form the government. You know, someone like Lieberman may say, then I'm out. And then the whole plan to 61 by the opposition falls apart. So one other thing I would say is this whole, you know, we were joking at the beginning about the. This a faction within, you know, a faction within united Tory Judaism, which is the big Ashkenazi Haredi party in the government. This distinction, what we're really talking about now is whether or not it's all over. We won't get into details about this. Draft the conscription bill for the Haredim for the ultra orthodox. That is very controversial, which is this issue could sink the government. Netanyahu's play has always been get the election too late of end of October. All we're talking about right now, if the government dissolves because of these latest moves by this one faction within a faction, all it means is the elections will just be moved up by a few weeks. It's actually, by my lights, it's inconsequential. It's like, well, okay, so the election's good, but apparently according to people around Netanyahu, it is not inconsequential. Like they need those few weeks. Cuz a lot can happen in those few weeks. Like I assume we're gonna talk about what's going on with Iran, like whether or not things ramp up or not with Iran. There's still a lot of unsettled business that Netanyahu wants to be able to run on. And he was banking on having those few weeks. So all of a sudden he's like, wait a minute, these guys in the. This faction within a faction is gonna take away the few more weeks I had to govern before we went to elections. So it sounds like not a big deal, but from what I understand, it actually is a big deal.

[B]

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[D]

It's also the holiday season, right? And so people are, are like that does weird things to voter turnout, right?

[A]

Well, I mean Haredim think they'll do better before, before the. If this, if this is all accelerated before all the holidays go in.

[B]

The comedy here is that the Haredim are going to. The Haredim are the, are the ultra religious Jews who want there to be a. Who want to continue with a policy of exempting their followers from having to serve in the Israeli army. It's a complicated issue. It sounds horrible that they get this exemption, but it's a 80 year now a tradition complicated why they think sort of religiously this is important. Most people in Israel who are not them are repulsed by that, by this push on their part. But because they hold this tiny but very important. It's not that tiny actually. But they are king making or king destroying. The draft issue is a key Israeli issue.

[A]

Yeah, here's the comment. It was a theoretical issue. I just want to say it was a theoretical issue before October 7th. Now it is a very. For the average Israeli whose family.

[B]

Yeah, why am I fighting and why are my kids Fighting and dying. And these guys are like free riding

[A]

like, and they're sitting in seminaries studying Talmud.

[B]

Yeah. Because there was a mass call up of Israelis. Suddenly it really is like, hey, this is not fair. Like it's one thing to not be conscripted into a peacetime army and it's another thing to be exempted from being conscripted into a wartime army. And, and you are now actually it's like traitorous not to serve. And that's very potent. But one of the comedies here is that the parties that have decided to tank this Lithuanian rabbi decided to tank this coalition and bring it closer to election. He's not gonna get another. Bibi's the best he is ever going. It's not like he, he can't go into coalition with the opposition because the opposition has two issues. And one of the issues is the Haredi have to be conscripted. That is a universally accepted issue on the part of the anti Bibi bloc. So the idea that they'll bring, that they could, which was true in other governments and other labor in the left governments for the first 50 years of Israel's existence. This policy was created and enumerated by David Ben Gurion, the founder of the country. It wasn't like it's not some invention of this horrible new bloc, that this is simply a continuation of a policy that existed since 1949 anyway. They're never going to do better. Ultimately they're going to have to go into government with Bibi if they're going to get their even remotely succeed in getting their way. And having the Haredi remain exempt from the draft. There has to be Bibi or somebody to the right of Bibi as the Prime Minister. Because this is the first thing that's probably gonna happen in governance. Dan, is you're sort of bobbing your head like maybe.

[A]

Well, no, because I think that the Haredi, the ultra large parties, their, they don't have a long term vision for how they want to play in government and what role they want in future, long term future Israeli government. So they're always basically just playing for time and they're always just like angling for like one temporary tactical maneuver to get by them. A little bit of status quo succeeded by another. So who knows, you know, like I just talked, I just walked through the opposition's clearest path for forming a government after these elections. And then I painted a picture where the whole thing, their whole plan falls apart because Lieberman or this one says I'm out. You know what I Mean, so then. So, you know, the Haredi parties have served in governments of the right and the left. Are you kidding me? Like, look at the deals that Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin was doing with the Haredi parties when he. So they just may be calculating. You know, it's like, it's all temporary. It's all tactical. We'll get through this. We'll figure out this. You know, the. The next government or the, the next set of political parties that tries to form a government will fall short and they'll need us, and we'll be able to cut some deal. And the deal may not be as good as the one we have now. But I. I just think they're. They're. I agree with you in principle, but I. I think they're. They've managed to survive through government to the right and the left.

[B]

Right, okay. Amit Sehgal, your other. Your other.

[A]

Who sees, by the way, I don't know if you've noticed, he sees when you talk. I don't know if you guys sees when you talk about the Haredi parties, but.

[B]

So he says, elections are security or not security. And the thing about. Not that. The. When the party. When the election, the coalition came in. That wasn't the Bibi coalition for the first time since 2009, the one that Naftali.

[A]

The Bennett Lapid.

[B]

The Bennett Lapid government. Yeah, they managed. That was the one election pretty much that wasn't a security election. And now, of course, everything is security. Unless, of course, we have a triumph in Iran, like, the next eight weeks, and we should get to this now, you know, there's like a triumph in Iran and Hezbollah is somehow neutered. And Bibi then goes before the Israeli people and says, I did it. I have fulfilled. We've neutralized Hamas, we've neutralized Hezbollah, and Iran is no longer a threat to Israel. What, are you gonna pick one of these pipsqueaks over here? I have delivered on the promise of security. Or you could say it'll be so successful that they're like, all right, it's enough with Bibi already. He did what he had to do. It's amazing. What an accomplishment, what a great thing. But we're sick and tired of him. He's been dominating our politics for almost 30 years. It's enough. But he was prime minister 30 years ago. He's prime minister today. Get him the hell outta here. So we just don't know. But let's talk about Iran now. So the general mood seems to be that we are on the verge of a re. Engagement in some fashion militarily. It's a mood in Israel and there is this talk that tomorrow there will be a cabinet meeting at which Trump will order the resumption of the war. And he did tweet out this or truth out this thing last night, which is the map of Iran with 20 arrows pointing at Tehran, all red arrows pointing at, pointing at Tehran. So, Dan, thoughts on.

[A]

I mean, I've been asking this question if there is going to be. To folks in Washington and in Jerusalem, if there is going to be military action. To do what? Like to do what? I mean, I'm not, I'm certainly not opposed to it. I just. But, but to do what? So you could say you come up with probably three objectives. One is trying to deal with the Strait of Hormuz. So are we really sending in military assets and operations to really try to wrestle back control of the Strait? That's one another could be just continue to do, to take, you know, weaken Iran's offensive capabilities. You know, it's missiles, its conventional capabilities, its missile production capacity, its industrial, military industrial complex, whatever, just continued it. But, but the US And Israel, but primarily the US had been doing a lot of that. And there was a sense that the, the, the gains were, had kind of reached their limit relative to the cost of continuing to burn down our own munitions. And so maybe we should cool it for a bit because we're not getting that. We, we've hit most of what we could hit and the gains we're gonna get from continuing these operations are limited relative to the cost of our supply chains and our capabilities currently. And then the third option is further decapitation. Are there more? The head of the IRGC is still alive and operating. Do we wanna take out more of their personnel? That may be an option. I mean, I can go on and on. Maybe, you know, are we, Are we then maybe another option, which is not my list is, is finally is some have advocated for, is really hitting Iran's, you know, energy, its oil infrastructure. There's been a reluctance to do a lot of that because if there's a world in which there's a new regime or a new government in Iran, if this regime collapses, we don't want to, you know, degrade all their, their assets that they need to support themselves and support their economy. So I like, like I said, I'm totally open for continued military action. I just don't, no one has really spelled out if it happens, what is it in service of? Like what's the objective, what are we trying to do?

[E]

Well, and one other question, which maybe you can help me answer, is if we go back to doing what we did before, is it going to be more of the same, or are we talking about ground troops or a different kind of military action than what we've done before? Because, as you say, what we've done before has, has had a great deal of success, but it hasn't been what would be seen as total victory.

[A]

I, I would be very surprised if there was deployment of ground forces beyond something very limited and very targeted. Now, there is an argument that you could use ground forces, special, you know, special ops forces to deal with the strait. So that could be a reason to deploy ground forces. But anything beyond that, again, very targeted, very narrow mission, narrowly defined. Anything beyond that, I'm hard pressed to believe that we will do that. Not only, I mean, people say, oh, heading into the midterms, Trump won't want to do that. I don't, I mean, probably, but I don't think you have to point to the midterms. I just think Trump has always been allergic to the idea of a big ground operation. People have assumed that that then makes it interchangeable with major military operations, which we now know to be not true. He's fully comfortable with launching major military operations. I just don't think to him that means major ground force deployment.

[B]

I mean, I think that's what he thinks when he says the war is over or something like that, or when he said we won, sorts of things that had been said. A lot of this does involve an older concept that he has of war. That is our classic concept of war. Like when we went into both, you know, when we went into Kuwait and when we went into Iraq, Dan was involved with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. So we had hundreds of thousands of Americans on the ground. Like this is this, we're not kidding around. There were close of the eve of

[A]

the Iraq war in 2003, there was almost a quarter of a million US forces personnel in the region. It's astonishing to think.

[B]

And there were like 500,000 or something in the region in 1990.

[A]

In 1990, in 91, which doubled the

[B]

population of Saudi Arabia, practically. I mean, so this is an entirely different world. And so what he sees when he thinks war is D Day or hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border involved in skirmishes. He could order ground operations that are much more targeted, much more limited, much more Special Forces driven and all of that, that could involve several thousand people. But still, in his own mind think. Well, I mean, that's not. And he was right. I mean that's not Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran. Because we're talking about doing one thing or two things like we're not going to march into Tehran the way we marched into Paris. Like that's never going to happen. We couldn't even get men to Tehran, given it's.

[E]

But he's also about to deal with the constraints of Congress and appropriations in a way that he hasn't faced yet in this conflict. And Congress could hamper what he might even want to do regardless of whether that involves greater presence of ground troops. So he's going to be facing that in the weeks to come.

[G]

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[A]

When you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah, blah, blah. I looked up, let me tell you

[B]

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[A]

in sheetrock that are smarter than you.

[D]

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[A]

It is never gonna disrupt physical blue collar trade skill.

[D]

And the guy just looked at me

[B]

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[G]

That's Pod Crash with me, Matt ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[B]

Weird thing is like battling for control. The straight. We don't even want control. We just want the straight open.

[A]

It's like we just don't want them to control it.

[B]

Yeah, right. Okay, so opening the straight, degrading there essentially following the same battle plan, degrading them.

[A]

Right. Further decapitation, which is that we go

[B]

explicitly for regime change. I mean that's the thing that is missing. And I wanted to ask you and also see what other people have to respond. There's a. Amit Sehgal, your panelist in his invaluable newsletter It's Noon in Israel, notes that there is an argument abroad that there were two opinions in Israel about how the war should go and There was a political opinion and then there was a military opinion or something like that, or there was an intelligence opinion and another opinion. And one of the opinions was the whole purpose of this has to be regime change. And the way to do regime change is do what they did, decapitate, hit the site, hit the missiles, and then release the Kurds to go in on the ground and arm them, and arm them and let them go in on the ground and basically engage with the Iranian military and try to liberate Tehran from the Iranians and the irgc. And that that plan, which was very well designed or well thought through, was killed at the last minute, presumably because the Turks who hate the Kurds said, don't you dare do this. Or the Arabs who are problems with the Kurds said, don't you dare do this. And so Trump supported the Litvaks. Right, okay. So hearing about this, there's two things that occur to me. One is the Iraq war was always said to have been planned with an idea that we would encircle the forces. The Ba' Athist regime coming in from the, you know, coming in in all directions. And then in the last couple of weeks, the Turks denied us the right to place the 4th army in Turkish territory to come down into Iraq. That allowed the Ba' Athist army to kind of melt away. Like we couldn't trap them and kill them. There were only three fronts, not four. And that this is what resulted. This is why we had a civil war that lasted four or five years. The Kurd thing seems to me to be almost like a ready built excuse for why we didn't succeed in this war. Well, if we just let the Kurds loose, we would have won, but we wimped out at the beginning and we lost our chance. And because it sounds fanciful to me, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm being unfair, because the Israelis don't usually engage in fanciful planning.

[A]

What Amit, who has been, who has, as does Nadav. They both. I mean, not just the two of them. Many in the Israeli media scene have heard from the Mossad about this. What they say is the Kurdish play was just one part of a. Of a layered play in terms of what the Mossad thought would be necessary for a serious shot at regime change. There were other aspects too. There was a real shock and awe in those first 30 days. Meaning what if you shut down all the electricity in the country, with the exception of hospitals and other key essential services, but basically really kind of black out the entire country There were a bunch, and the Kurds was a piece of it. There were a bunch of things, a bunch of elements that the Mossad was advocating for. And what they say, what the Mossad says, according to these different reporters and analysts, is that the Pentagon signed off on aspects of the Mossad plan, but not all of it. So, like, they pushed a plan into the US national security apparatus and out came a revised version of it. And, you know, the Mossad was like, they, you know, we had been working on this for a long time and the US didn't do all of it. That's fine. Obviously they didn't want to discourage the US from proceeding, but they definitely say that what ultimately was agreed upon, and it could have been from pressure from Erdogan or whomever else, at least on the Kurdish aspect, was ultimately insufficient. If the goal was regime change, it wasn't. You could still seriously degrade Iran's threat to the region. And certainly Iran was not going to be on this side.

[D]

Do they think it would have succeeded had the Kurds been allowed, like these Mossad guys who were talking to journalists?

[A]

Yes, but they don't single out. They don't say, like, oh, if we done that. And I mean, they believe you needed a bunch of. It was like a flywheel. You needed a bunch of things happening of which the Kurdish peace was one part of it that the US Ultimately did not do. And the US Also did not proceed with other parts of the plan, too. Now, by the way, the Mossad right now, as we've talked about on my podcast, the Mossad right now is saying that regime change is still a real possibility, even if nothing else changes. Meaning in terms of what the US And Israel are doing this year by the end of 2026, in fact, I mean, I think I'm struck by how much precision they talk about it like that, with which they talk about it like that. The regime change is very much a possibility. Could happen, should happen, might happen, probably will happen. I mean, they talk about it. And when I've pushed back on people making this case, what they say is, when you think about it, they like, if everything just freezes right now, right, the war ends right now. There's no explanation for how Iranian life, day to day life, comes back to life. I mean, the economy is still in free fall. The country's basically leaderless. It's completely isolated. Like Israeli officials, U.S. officials said, how are they going to pay people? Like, how are they just going to pay basic government? It's one thing when the war is happening and everyone's told to stay in their homes. And there's no way to have real protests or organized protests because everyone's. But if the war is over and then people are coming out of their homes and they're kind of trying to resume their lives and they're like in way worse situation economically than they were in January of this year when the protest, first round of protests really started going. They just think it's like unsustainable, the economic situation, the country is a basket case and there's no path back. So that's their case.

[F]

Doesn't that presume that the US has the will to continue this blockade of Iranian ports? And I'm wondering about that, given the two new polls that came out, one over the weekend from CBS and one this morning that seemed to suggest to

[A]

me the one from the Times is the other one. The Times.

[F]

The other one is in. The Times seem to suggest to me that the status quo is utterly inadequate and that the ceasefire has driven the President's poll numbers down, which I doubt is what he wanted. The New York Times poll, which asks voters, which candidate, Democrat or Republican, would you vote for in Your district is 5133 DEM among independents. We should note, I think, that their independents lead toward Kamala by six points. So it's really, it adds up to a 12 point. He's 12 points underwater with independents and it's 6926 approved, disapprove, President's 43 points underwater within Independence, unapproved, disapproved and CBS News similar numbers. So I wonder, you know, if we just let, like, if there's the will to just leave things as they are. It would seem to me that the reason the president is going into meetings tomorrow with his national security team, had a meeting over the weekend at his golf course with his national security team, is that he's got these numbers in mind and that something has to give here.

[A]

I think one would think. But all I'm hearing is that he, he, and again, I haven't obviously heard this directly, that the President himself is not so fixated about the midterm. He's not so focused on the midterms and his advisors want him to be. Susie Wiles wants him to be focused on the midterms. Others are like other officials in the White House want to be focused on the midterms. He's not focused on the midterms. Basically, he's made this bet that the House is probably gone. So the, you know, conventional wisdom suggests that he's gonna lose the House. He's probably got a good shot, the Republicans have a good shot of keeping the Senate. And what he does on Iran between now and the midterms, and even if he does make a big change, walks away from the strait, doesn't, you know, it's not like things are gonna start moving so quickly. There's a real lag in terms of how quickly.

[B]

Can I just say Eliana brings something up that I wanna ask you about. Eliana says, and this is very interesting to me, says, what if the story is that the ceasefire actually was bad for Trump's poll numbers because the war's not over, but the war is not going on, so everything is frozen. So the idea that we're not making any progress, the strait isn't open again, and that we just stopped and we're just like, standing here in stasis. The one thing Trump has going for him is the idea that he's like a crazy Energizer bunny who is utterly relentless, and he stopped the war and without saying, we've won or lost. I mean, he says, we've won the war, but they're negotiating and negotiating and negotiating, negotiating. And now maybe he looks weak to some of these independence.

[F]

My case is as follows. We're saying there's a ceasefire, but there isn't a ceasefire. I mean, Iran over the weekend struck, you know, sent a drone to strike the UAE's only nuclear power plant. We're calling it a ceasefire. There isn't a ceasefire, but we are not doing anything to move towards a satisfactory conclusion that would, in fact, bring oil prices down and bring gas prices down. So in the meantime, they are going up and we are frozen, saying things like, oh, well, you know, their drone strike or their cigarette boat attack on our forces didn't rise to the level of breaking the ceasefire, and that's pathetic.

[C]

I don't think ending, walking away from the blockade would help Republicans or Trump's numbers here at all. I think sticking with the blockade is sort of the easiest, relatively speaking, piece of this puzzle. So to my mind, when Dan asks, sirs, for what would we resume combat if we keep the blockade going, which will eventually is designed to eventually have the effect of breaking them financially and freeing up the strait? I say continue to bomb the hell out of the IRGC and political leadership, because obviously, when Trump said many weeks back, we're talking to the right people now, we have not been talking to the right people. So while the pressure. While the blockade. What's that?

[F]

He said, we had regime change.

[C]

Right.

[F]

But, you know, not the right regime change, I guess.

[C]

So, to my thinking, while the blockade is. Is. Is applying the pressure that it's. It's applying, we keep going till we get down to the right people who can respond to that.

[B]

Well, let me just go on with this. Look, I've been saying for weeks that in the end, this war fails in historical terms without regime change, because the truth is, we can never be sure that Iran will not pull the Hormuz card again unless the regime changes and the new regime wants to be an international player. Similarly, the games that they might or might not play with oil regime change didn't have to be the goal of the Mission accomplished moment at the end of this war, that it would follow Dan's pattern, or what the Mossad said is the pattern, which is just that once we left Iran having satisfied our own military goals, the political superstructure collapses like a house of cards. They have no money. Their military has been humiliated. The IRGC has been humiliated. They look like paper tigers. And There are these 90 million people who are ready to see regime change in January, and they're obviously in a stronger position to achieve it with a government in tatters than they were in January when the government turned the guns on the protesters. So I don't think Trump comes out Wednesday and says, well, you know, we've been negotiating with them for, you know, six weeks to no effect, and now the regime has got to go. I mean, I don't think he's going to raise the stakes to that level. But I think, conceptually, I still don't understand how we achieve victory, in a sense that history will view this as a victory. With the Islamic Republic of Iran, as formed and constituted in 1979, still the governing authority in 2027. I just don't know how that works. Seth, you have any.

[D]

I mean, I think that, you know, I think one of the things happening here is that it's not. Is it the Islamic Republic? It is, but it's also the IRGC state right now, which is. Which is.

[A]

But I put those together.

[B]

I just think they're the same.

[D]

I know, but I'm saying. I think that's scrambling inside the administration, the question of who to talk to, when and where, and all that stuff, because theoretically, there's an ayatollah, but only three. Theoretically, we all know that. It's like, you know, something close to a Weekend at Bernie's situation here, where they're like, make a fatwa and they hold and they wave his arms and you've been fatwaed. But it's. What does, what does this look like? If you remove the sort of, you know, if we looked at this in a parliamentary system and said, what if there was no king in Britain, you know, or something like that, if you remove the, the, the, the technically nonpartisan but ultimate power, and you just leave humans who just got power in power, how does the state behave? And my assumption is that the state would behave more recklessly and more in a more disorganized fashion. And I think the administration is confronting what that means, which is that there isn't the, the king's hand who says, look, here are our red lines, here's what we're doing. And when I say stop, the IRGC stops. And when I say this, they do this. And then at least you have a, A, A working pipeline, right, to communicate these things. And I don't. I. The pipeline is there. There are people there are communicating. They are obviously negotiating their negotiations in Pakistan. We have an idea of who's in control. I mean, we know who's in control. We know, you know, we have answers. But I, I think that's fooling some people into thinking that there is a real classic Iranian Islamic Republic government in place, and there really isn't. That's, I think, a key challenge, John,

[A]

if you look at the two just coming off of what sets it. I mean, if you look at the two most consequential foreign policy decisions made by the regime in its history, it was one, signing, agreeing to the JCPOA in 2015, where they negotiate, negotiating, negotiating, and it's on and it's off and it's back on. And finally, Khamenei, who at the time was the supreme leader, the current Supreme Leader's father, says, we're doing this, and he pushes it through the system and makes a declaration and it's done. The other most consequential decision was to end the Iran Iraq war in 88, when Khomeini, then the supreme leader, the first supreme leader, which was a very difficult decision for the regime to make. It took a powerful supreme leader to say, we're doing this and kind of make it happen and drive the decision through the system. So to Seth's point, who on earth is that now? It's not, it's not the new Khamenei that, you know, and, you know, people talk about this Vahidi, Ahmed Vahidi, who's the head of the irgc, who's a major player, but at the same time, when I hear about possible military operations resuming. One of, one of the options I hear discussed. I'm not, this is purely speculative, but. So I don't know if it's is taking out Vahidi, it's to take out the current head of the irgc. So on the one hand, he's the guy who's really in charge. On the other hand, we're talking about taking him out. And so, and this reminds me, it really reminds me of 2024 and I guess early 2025 in the Gaza war when there was all this, all these negotiations, you know, the hostage deals. And it was always this, you know, there would be meetings between Hamas and other, you know, interlocutors in Doha or Cairo, and they would, they, Hamas would kind of semi agree to something and they would, you know, come to terms on something and then, but they would, they had to get, you know, they had to send it to Gaza to get, you know, Sinwar to sign off on it. And they would go, and there was no electronic communications, no telephonic communications. They would have to send a message to, you know, this messenger and it would go to that messenger and it'd be transmitted to this one. And then we'd get into some tunnel in Gaza and Sinwar would make his edits to it and then it would come back and it would sometimes take two weeks, two weeks to get a response when all the parties had agreed to something in Doha or Cairo. That's what this reminds me of, actually. At least back then you knew who was in charge. Xinwar was in charge. Here you have all the chaos and the lag and the disruption that I'm talking about. Plus we don't even actually know who's in charge.

[B]

And we have our own chaos because of course, we have our political superstructure, right? We have a Secretary of State who was also the national security advisor. We have a Secretary of Defense, we have a CIA director, we have intelligence people. But the people who are theoretically negotiating over this piece are these consultants, essentially outside consultants. We've got Witkoff and Kushner. Granted, Kushner is a classic kind of emissary, like from pre modern times, right? He's the son in law of the President. So he presumably has more the President's confidence in a greater way than say, Vernon Walters, who negotiated with the North Vietnamese. But they don't necessarily aren't in a position to say, okay, here's what America's willing to do. Because in the end, first of all, Trump's the one who will say what America's willing to do. But second, if you're sitting in your horse training, you're like, all right, 20 years, not 15 years, until you can enrich 20 years. And then they're sitting at a table and they don't have the full power of the federal government behind them or whatever. And then they go back to Trump, and Trump is like, I don't want 20 years. I don't want them to have nukes. Now, the latest one of these leaks we got today is that they must be sitting at the table and going, you know what? You'll give us half the dust. We'll end the war. Give us 400 kg, and you can keep the other 500 kg. And that's like. That's where you start getting into negotiations for negotiations sake, because either you're gonna get all of it. If you get some of it, then it doesn't mean anything, because they don't need £1,000 to be nuclear. They need one ounce to be nuclear. So either you take it all or you blow up the facility where it is to hope that it is never reached. But you like when things have gone so bananas that you're starting to say, no, you can destroy. You'll have half the power to destroy the world instead of all the power to destroy the world. You're like, come home. Stop negotiating. I don't even know what you're talking about. 12 and a half years, 13 years. It's like. Cause that's. If you're negotiating, that's. Meet me in the middle here.

[A]

That's basically. But what you're describing is a version of what happened with the JCPOA in 2015, where they would arrive at these expire in 15 years. No, the ballistic missiles will expire in, like, you know how they came up with these? You know.

[B]

Well, because Iran realized or at some point. How many. Whatever. Or they. Or they had the greatest negotiating strategy ever, because their idea was, we're never going to agree to this. You said Khamenei is the one who had to push it through. Like, we're never gonna agree to this. And Ben Rhodes and Obama so wanted. And Robert so wanted this deal that they Basically, all they did was negotiate against their own position for two and a half years, and then got to a place where it was such a giveaway that even Khamenei had to say, we'll sign it. It was so. It was like, you know, It'll take us 10 years to get there anyway. So meanwhile, they'll give us $150 billion. They'll open up all international financing. We won't be punished in any court. We can do whatever we want with terrorism and destroying Israel. Sure, okay, we're in. But we can't do that with Iran now because we have to. We started a war with them like so that to me ultimately Trump is, I now think I was very upset with like Neil Ferguson and some of the people who were opposed to this war at the beginning. Cuz I think there were wrong. Well, to be clear, to be clear,

[A]

John Neal included, who's a close friend, but he was supportive of the war at the beginning.

[B]

Okay, fair enough.

[A]

Yeah, he was, he was. But, but, but to your point, he did. I do agree also with you that he turned sharply.

[B]

He turned very sharply. Right. But I think the central point here is that, I mean, I hate to say it always seems to be the case with Americans and how we prosecute war is that we tap on the brakes when we should be stepping on the gas and we step on the gas when we might need to be tapping on the brakes. And now we basically put the car into neutral and we're gonna have to start it up again. But we're gonna have to start it up again because as like, this will be the most significant humiliation in American political history practically. If he somehow accepts some deal, some ridiculous deal, we'll say it's a failure. Everybody who hates him will say it's a failure. He'll be the only one to say that we won any. Now, Abe still thinks, and I agree, that like, you know, we've done an amazing job degrading Iran's capabilities. But the view, the what the look will be that Iran, you know, stuck it out, you know, was like, you could even say it was like Rocky. Like, Rocky lasted 15 rounds and he didn't win. But he, but it was a split decision.

[A]

He didn't need to win. He didn't, he didn't need to win. He just needed not to lose.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The most important decisions by Sylvester Stallone with that script, it was a very important.

[B]

So Abe, you have been the. I'm still grateful. No matter what happens, this has been a great thing that's been done. But again, like take my scenario where Trump, look, you know, somehow can't bring himself to restart the war in full.

[C]

Well, if he can't bring himself to restart the war, I think we have practical, immediate problems on our hands here, which is, we don't know what that means. We don't know what kind of Iran we're looking at in a month from today or today.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But I do remain grateful for what the US And Israel has done. I do think they have, on a practical level, forgetting a sort of cinematic or historical narrative. The fact is they have degraded the Iranian threat in a very significant way. That is not nothing as an immediate matter. Trump has to deal with the Strait issue. I mean, that that complicates his life and this effort exponentially. He knows that very well. I think he is focused on that. I don't really believe that this would not be a victory if the US were not to achieve regime change in Iran in 2026. I don't think that's our responsibility. I really, we don't. I think in historical terms, it will not be perceived as a victory if what we accomplish with all this doesn't facilitate regime change in the near future.

[B]

That's a very, you know what? You put it perfectly. That's sort of what I was saying. I don't think that he goes and declares regime change. I think that in the sense of what we wish to achieve with this war, that the necessary second step is regime change. Because as I say, the regime that exists will always have this idea that it will be able to. All it has to do is raise an eyebrow toward closing the Strait and it can cause a worldwide panic, which is crazy. But nonetheless, you know, if they had it forever and they never used it before, of course no one ever really attacked them before. So, you know, we haven't been in

[A]

this, but the theory is that we should have been. I mean, I don't necessarily subscribe to this argument, but, but you listen to many people inside and outside the US Government talk about this, but it's not like the Strait of Hormuz and what Iran, the, the havoc that, that Iran, the regime could cause in the strait was, was like a shock. Like we, this is something we should, you know, we should have known this wasn't like the Philly Special, you know, in Super Bowl 52, which, like, who saw that coming? You know what I mean? It was like so. And I think that that is going to be one of the legacies of this war. Whichever way it goes is that.

[E]

And that that gets to the point to this question of what, what are the goals which you raised? I think importantly at the beginning of this conversation, Daniel, they knew this scenario. The media wanted to pretend like the Department of Defense didn't know what it was doing and our planners didn't know what. Of course they knew. The problem is that when your People come to you with policy plans and strategic plans. They're dealing with Donald Trump and temperamentally, his disruptor personality, which can be very effective in some negotiations. In this case, I think, is starting to wear not only on his own strategist, but it already wore on many of our allies. That's the, that's the sort of great strength he had at the outset that I think is now might become a weakness for him. He's got to deal with Congress. He's got to tell the American people exactly what you said. If we go back again and use kinetic force, why are we doing it? What is the goal? I think there was a lot of wish casting at the beginning about assuming he's doing all these things and we want him to do all these things. Well, now we have concrete evidence of what we have and haven't accomplished, and he needs to present that case to the American people. So his temperamental need to kind of move on to the next thing. I'm thinking of Venezuela here. There was no regime change in Venezuela. We were just dealing with different people who he thinks are better guys than the previous guy. So we might end up with a situation like that in Iran, and that might be what will satisfy him and his administration. But then he's got to sell it to the American.

[B]

Okay, I got a central problem with your. I got a central problem with what you laid out there, which is we don't know what we've achieved. And the only way we're going to know we've achieved is to restart the war. By which I mean, if their ballistic missile capacity has been as damaged as Trump says and that, and that this intelligence assessment last week that said that they still have 70% of their missiles or whatever, if that's correct and Trump is wrong, then Israel should start getting rained, ballistic missiles rained down on it, that it's going to have to shoot down. One of the reasons that we thought we had an analogy showing us that they were getting incredibly depleted was that the number of missiles that they were willing to throw at Israel declined and declined and declined and declined. And it seemed to be a real world demonstration that they were running out of their stocks and that Israel was using each time they fired to locate another missile launcher to take it out. And so if the war starts again and Israel does not find itself under the same kind of threat that it was under, in a weird way, I don't want Israel to be, trust me, I don't want my relatives to have to go back into the shelters. But if Israel isn't as under threat. That will be an indication that the first phase of the war was as successful as Trump says it was. But we're never gonna, we're not gonna know, weirdly enough, we're not gonna know that until we start firing at them and they have to respond. All we have is them firing bits of things at the UAE or at, you know, or, you know, places that don't have missile defenses. I mean, Israel gave the UAE some patriots, but Saudi Arabia doesn't have missile defenses, apparently. So anyway, that's a weird aspect of this, is that Trump can only make those claims stick if Iran turns out to be hollow. When we actually go back to the real fight, it only has showed any success in pulling this non military threat. I mean, it's a military threat, but pulling this threat on Hormuz hasn't won a single thing against us. We were even able to extract our pilot when it shot down the plane. So I don't know. Very quickly, Bill Cassidy lost the Senate primary in Louisiana to Julia Letlow, the candidate chosen by Trump. Final revenge. Trump's final revenge for a vote against January, you know, vote to impeach on January 6th from the colorful, plain spoken, cute senator from Louisiana. My larger thought on this is that Bill Cassidy unfortunately marred his own agenda because he could have prevented RFK Jr. From becoming the HHS secretary as a doctor, and he chose not to do so to attempt to preserve his political career. And this is actually an interesting tell that, you know, he did it and Trump killed him anyway. So in future, maybe don't do things that you don't believe in.

[D]

Well, that's. So I, I actually think that that's, that's a big, that's most of it, but, but the key is understanding how much January 6th plays into that. There's a lot of, a lot of the narrative now is that Trump still has the power, you know, and you can't cross Trump. You can cross Trump, but you can't impeach him. I think that that's, I mean, that's been the case in other races as well. When people say I'm gonna run as a defender of Trump's honor because this person voted to impeach Trump, that makes a big difference. That person usually wins the nomination and whatever. And so I think Cassidy just should have known, he just should have known that when he, when he vote, cast that vote for impeachment, he was crossing a line in Trump's mind that you can't uncross. Even if they didn't get into fights over the next few years, that will always be in the back of Trump's mind. And if there's a challenger that comes up to Trump and says, I'm going to avenge Your Honor for January 6th, he'll back them. So I just feel like Cassidy should have known. In this case, I don't think it's true that you can't ever cross Trump, but I think Cassidy should have just understood that he made a certain decision when he cast that vote, and that's what makes his vote with Kennedy that much more frustrating, because I. He was trying to make amends for something that I think he should have known was lost.

[B]

Well, there are two. Sorry. Oh, Eliana. Sorry.

[F]

Yeah, I'm neutral. Trading Cassidy for Julia Ludlow. Fine. One Republican senator for another. But I do think it's worth noting that President Trump, Dan mentioned he doesn't appear to be too focused on the midterm elections. He is focused on some of these primary races, and he is throwing his back into ousting people who have gotten crosswise with him. There's Bill Cassidy in Louisiana. There are these six or so state senators in Indiana who got crosswise with him. That primary was a couple of weeks ago. He saw to it to force Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress. And there's tomorrow's primary with Thomas Massie, who's voted against him. President is getting involved in some of these races. And. And if he's not concerned about the midterm races, he should be. You know, his White House has poured an enormous amount of resources into these redistricting fights that have actually been successful. Okay. It's going to be much harder for Democrats now to retake the House because of James Blair's success in these redistricting battles. And the Virginia Democrats. Incompetent incompetence and their epic failure. And Democrats do actually have a chance to take the Senate. So, you know, if he wants to go through impeachment theater for two years and, like, not throw his back into this, like, so be it. But he should be focused, I think, and the Iran War is tied to it, on. On bringing this war to a successful conclusion. Sure. Like, the tailwinds, like, the effects of it may take a long time to see, but, like, people are going to see the humiliation or they're going to see victory. It does matter. He should be as focused on what happens in November as he has been in these primary fights. And I laud him for getting involved in many of these primary fights. Good. You know, great job on Massey Great job on mtg. I hope he is as enthusiastic and focused as you know about the midterm elections.

[D]

The ultimate excellent point, by the way, about the redistrictive.

[E]

The Trump backed candidates win the maga. The MAGA candidates win the primaries and they do much worse in a general election. And the Democrats benefit from the MAGA primary winner drawing more opposition just in the election.

[B]

This is the big temptation question then, which we can leave open. There are still two senators, Republican senators who voted to impeach. They are Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. One in Maine, one in Alaska. They both voted to impeach. You know, he would love to complete the. I destroyed everybody who came after me. He cannot go after Collins and Murkowski.

[A]

Well, Collins, the one who has a race. I mean, Murkowski's not a.

[B]

Well, Murkowski. That's a weird state. Right? And there is a Democratic, I mean, some. The Democrat, whoever it is, because you can't really poll Alaska, but did get a good poll. I mean. Cause it's all write in. It's all weird. And nobody votes. There's only 600,000 people in Alaska. So 200,000 vote. And she won a write in, which is crazy. Like she actually won a. Right, she won as a write in candidate, which.

[A]

But she's not. The one that's up now is Dan Sullivan.

[B]

Oh, Dan Sullivan.

[C]

I'm sorry.

[B]

Yeah, okay. Oh, my God, I'm so stupid. I apologize. Yeah.

[A]

So Murkowski is not playing. But you're right about Collins.

[B]

Okay, that was dumb of me. I apologize. So. But this is.

[D]

But actually, I mean, Eliana's point is one that we should really think about, which is really important, which is that does Trump now look like the victor in the redistricting? We had been talking about redistricting on this podcast as if it were a fight that Trump. I mean, I have certainly that. As if it were a fight that Trump picked unready to, you know, unprepared for what the fight entailed. The state courts and the challenges and all that stuff. Does that all look very different now? I think it does. And I think that he, you know, he can say like, I, you know, I gave you guys the space to win more seats. I did that. You were reluctant and I said go for it. And he might have bragging rights now.

[B]

I'm sorry, I got a problem with this. I know a lot of people have been saying this, but remember that by triggering the Texas. By doing the Texas mid decade redistricting, he triggered the California referendum to redistrict, and that that alone could be enough to end whatever hopes they had of prevailing in the redistricting. Like California will negate the gains. And Virginia only restores Virginia to the status quo. It's not like it.

[F]

But now all the Southern states are redistricting in the wake of Louisiana v. Clay.

[B]

Right, but that's not a Trump. Right, but that's not a Trump play. That's a whole different story. That's the fortuitous result of a case that has been going through the court system for years about the Voting Rights Act.

[D]

But I don't know how much people even make that distinction. I think, you know, I think Trump looks like a guy who started a fight on redistricting, and, you know, he's doing better now than everybody thought he was doing two weeks ago.

[B]

Okay. But I don't know that he's gonna get. I'm just saying, as a technical, practical matter, the Republican versus Democratic redistricting remains a draw because of California, no matter how you slice it. But if the Voting Rights act, the overturning of the majority minority district rule changes things now in these states, that's not Trump's doing. Unless you could say that appointing the three judges in the first term led to this result. So I guess you could sort of give him credit down the road for having made that happen. All right, well, Dan, Senor, you have, you know, you've given us the baby steps version of the Call Me Back podcast. So if you want the grown up version of the Call Me, just go listen to the Call Me Back podcast and you can subscribe to Inside Call Me Back, where you get to hear the conversations that Dan and Amit and Nadav have off the air. And then you get to listen to that.

[A]

And if you do the Inside, Inside Call Me Back, which is like the double premium, then you can have the relationship that John Pod Horiz has with the Call Me Back team, which is he listens to the Inside Call Me Back edition. And. And then he has my cell number and he calls me to yell at me about something that Dov said. So that's like the premium on the plane.

[B]

I tell you to yell at you about something that my sister Ruthie was mad about that Dob said. So it's inside. Inside Out They Call Me Back is Ruthie Bloom versus Dan Senor.

[D]

But Ruth, you could pull a cat out. The middleman, who is the director who tried to call Scarlett Johansson right from the. From the scene of the standing ovation. That's what you could do. You'll FaceTime, Dan.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

Right.

[B]

While listening to this podcast.

[A]

Yeah. Ruthie's cut you out, John. She now calls me directly or emails.

[B]

I'm glad to hear that because it's very, very important. I don't believe in these, you know, I didn't have to be like the Sherpa bringing the Hamas negotiating document into the guy into the tunnels. I don't know which one of you is Sinwar and which one of you is the guy in dohab. Yeah. In this analogy. But I'm, I'm the, I'm the messenger anyway, so. But thank you as always. Fantastic to hear you, listen to you. And as I say, there's no, there's some, some Jew in Kansas City, I'm sure, who will be hearing you speak tomorrow or Thursday or something. And then, then you're. What, what can I say?

[E]

He's gonna have roadies.

[B]

You're the Eurovision roadies.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So for.

[A]

Great to be with you guys.

[B]

Okay. For Christine, Eliana, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pot Horowitz. Keep the candle burning. Tired of overpaying with DirecTV? Dish offers a reliable low price every month without surprises. Get the TV you love and start watching live sports news and the latest movies, plus your favorite streaming apps all in one place. Switch to DISH today and lock in the lowest price in satellite TV starting at $89.99 a month with our two year price guarantee. Call 888-add-D dish or visit dish.com today.