Chaos, Chaos Everywhere

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Chaos, Chaos Everywhere"

Release Date: April 21, 2025

In the April 21, 2025 episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast titled "Chaos, Chaos Everywhere," hosts John Podhoretz and Abe Greenwald delve into two significant and tumultuous events: the death of Pope Francis and the pervasive chaos within the Trump administration. Joined by Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti and social commentary columnist Christine Rosen, the panel offers a deep analysis of these happenings, exploring their broader implications on religion, politics, and governance in the United States.

---

I. The Passing of Pope Francis and Its Implications

Christine Rosen opens the discussion by addressing the recent death of Pope Francis, a figure of global prominence and controversy. She contextualizes his papacy within the broader narrative of declining religious adherence in the West, emphasizing the Catholic Church's struggle to maintain its influence amid secularization.

"The elevation of Pope Francis was an effort by the Catholic Church to engage in the question of how to turn around or pull the institution out of a secular slide." [01:46]

John Podhoretz reflects on the paradoxes of Francis's papacy, noting how his progressive image contrasted with a resurgence of traditionalism among younger American Catholics.

"He is a progressive leaning figure and the younger church in America went right." [04:27]

Christine Rosen adds that Pope Francis was the first Jesuit and the first non-European pope in centuries, highlighting his unique approach to issues like technology and AI, which often led to media misinterpretations.

"He appointed a brilliant scholar about AI within the Vatican to study it." [06:39]

The panel discusses whether Francis's efforts to align the Church with liberal values succeeded or inadvertently accelerated secular decline by alienating less committed members while galvanizing more devout followers.

---

II. Internal Turmoil Within the Trump Administration

Transitioning from religion to politics, Abe Greenwald introduces the chaos enveloping the Trump administration, marked by leaks, resignations, and inter-departmental conflicts.

"The controversy that erupted yesterday over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not mapping properly according to the left and the right." [13:36]

John Podhoretz elaborates on multiple scandals, including leaked war plans and internal disputes within the Department of Defense, State Department, IRS, and Justice Department. He highlights the rapid turnover and lack of cohesive leadership as symptomatic of deeper systemic issues.

"This is an incredibly chaotic and confused government that's happening all at once." [20:52]

Christine Rosen points out that the administration's mishandling of leaks and internal conflicts reflects a broader inability to maintain institutional integrity and effective governance.

"The org chart is very confused in this administration." [34:48]

Matthew Continetti warns of the potential long-term consequences, suggesting that continued internal strife could lead to policy implementation failures and erode public trust.

"There's a potential time bomb here... if there's some sort of security failure." [45:58]

---

III. Policy Implications and Economic Consequences

The discussion shifts to the administration's policy decisions and their ramifications. John Podhoretz critiques the "Liberation Day tariffs," arguing that their mismanagement could precipitate economic instability.

"Liberation Day will be considered a turning point." [55:17]

Abe Greenwald concurs, noting that these policies, combined with the internal chaos, could lead to rising unemployment, inflation, and declining median wages, thereby weakening the administration's standing.

"Fear that they are going to have the negative effect of enshrining liberal orthodoxy, not uprooting it." [58:24]

Christine Rosen adds that judicial interventions, such as the Supreme Court halting certain immigration policies, further complicate the administration’s ability to execute its agenda effectively.

"This is a moment where the process really matters." [44:04]

---

IV. The Future of American Governance and Political Landscape

Looking ahead, the panel members express concerns about the trajectory of American governance. John Podhoretz emphasizes that while Trump's approval ratings have dipped, the Republican base remains strong, suggesting potential electoral resilience despite current chaos.

"Trump's approval rating has gone down... but he's still not a total disaster." [62:12]

Abe Greenwald and Christine Rosen discuss the long-term implications of the administration's actions on institutions like universities and federal agencies, fearing that poorly executed reforms could entrench liberal biases rather than fostering genuine ideological balance.

"If you go about it this way, you're just giving talking points to a more radical, younger Democratic Party." [60:38]

Matthew Continetti underscores the risk of a "circular firing squad," where ongoing internal conflicts could exacerbate governance failures, particularly in moments of crisis.

"This is an incredibly chaotic and confused government that's happening all at once." [37:17]

---

V. Recommendations and Concluding Thoughts

In the closing segments, the hosts briefly recommend engaging with other intellectual content, including Dan Senor's podcast on Israeli strategies and John Podhoretz's literary recommendation, reflecting their commitment to informed discourse amidst chaos.

John Podhoretz recommends Call Me a Cabin by Donald D. Westlake, praising its suspenseful narrative devoid of violence, demonstrating the podcast's dedication to fostering thoughtful and engaging conversations beyond current events.

"It's a wonderful novel... even if you're not really a Westlake fan." [70:43]

Christine Rosen underscores the importance of genre writers who challenge themselves creatively, drawing a parallel to the podcast's own approach to tackling complex subjects.

"These genre writers do this all the time... a form of storyteller." [72:20]

---

Conclusion

The episode "Chaos, Chaos Everywhere" paints a vivid picture of a world grappling with religious transitions and political turmoil. Through insightful analysis and candid discussion, the panel navigates the intricate interplay between institutional integrity and political maneuvers, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of the forces shaping contemporary American society. By addressing both the immediate crises and their long-term implications, The Commentary Magazine Podcast provides a nuanced perspective that is both informative and thought-provoking for audiences seeking depth beyond the headlines.

---

Notable Quotes:

• "He is a progressive leaning figure and the younger church in America went right." – John Podhoretz [04:27]
• "Liberation Day will be considered a turning point." – Christine Rosen [55:17]
• "This is an incredibly chaotic and confused government that's happening all at once." – Abe Greenwald [20:52]
• "If you go about it this way, you're just giving talking points to a more radical, younger Democratic Party." – Christine Rosen [60:38]

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

Don't miss your chance to spring into deals at Lowe's right now get a free 60 volt Toro battery when you purchase a select 60 volt Toro electric mower. Plus buy three 19.3 ounce vegetable and herb Bonnie plants for just $10. It's time to give your yard a grow up Lowe's. We help you save valid to 423. Selection varies by location while supplies last. Discount taken at time of purchase. Actual plant size and selection varies by location. Excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

[Abe Greenwald]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only.

[Christine Rosen]

Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.

[John Podhoretz]

Hope for the best it's take the words some preach and pain, some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it's going.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, April 21, 2025. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John Washington, Commentary columnist Matthew Gone Nettie hi Matt.

[John Podhoretz]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Pope Francis died this morning at the age of 88, obviously a remarkable and remarkably important world figure, a figure of some controversy. And today is not the day to adjudicate the controversies that he was involved with. Nor is it properly our place to here at Commentary to involve ourselves in the internal, practical politics of the Catholic Church. But I will say this, that there's been a general conversation going on at the highest levels of intellection in the United States and in the west over the last couple of years about the question of the decline in religious belief, religious attendance at church or the practice of religion, and the social and moral and spiritual consequences of this decline, which is obviously, you know, a century long, but has been accelerating as the data supplied by Ryan Burge I believe his name is probably pronounced Burge, has been detailing and clearly the elevation of Pope Francis to the papacy was an effort by the Catholic Church to engage in this question of how to turn around or how to pull the institution of the Catholic Church out of what seemed to be a kind of secular slide as a result of, as a result of the scandals and things like that. And, and he, and he did so by engaging what you might call sort of the liberal conscience. And, and it's an interesting question, going long term, whether that was successful in halting the Catholic Church's slide with its flock or whether it was yet another example, as we've seen in Judaism, of how the embrace of what I would consider some of the values of secular liberalism have actually only accelerated the decline in religious practice among less committed people and turned more committed people toward more, much more serious practice that is kind of countercultural within the terms of the mainstream of the faith.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, that's what I see among the American Catholics I know best, especially younger Catholics, younger male Catholics, also female Catholics. They've gone in a more traditionalist direction during Francis's papacy. And this is a paradox for someone who was known as a progressive figure. I think it's safe to say the obituary on NPR this morning was very adulatory toward Pope Francis, whereas if you compare it to the way that they treated Pope Benedict. Right. It was a clear contrast. The paradox of Francis, there are a few. One is that he is a progressive leaning figure and the younger church in America went right, as I think was clear. Of course, the last major official he met with the day before he died was J.D. vance, a convert to Catholicism who has challenged Pope Francis interpretation of certain aspects of Catholic theology. The other paradox was while he was coded liberal and progressive, his actual theology doesn't seem to have departed all that much from long standing Catholic social teaching. So he, his first encyclical was about the environment and how it's important to take care of our planet. Well, okay, that seems like within the bounds, but the way that the liberal press in the west interpreted it was, oh, here we go. He's warning about climate change. And in his statements, which are different from his official doctrine, his statements were much more progressive. Say, that often led to confusion. For example, especially some of his comments about gay Catholics, gay and lesbian Catholics, and also trans individuals. He would say something and then that would kind of cause a ruckus because it was interpreted as being very progressive, whereas the actual doctrine of the church never really changed.

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, sorry.

[Christine Rosen]

I was just going to add that, I mean, he's the first Jesuit pope, first one to first person born outside of Europe to be pope in a very, very long time. But he, and he's also stacked the college of Cardinals with people who tend to agree with him as most popes do. So about half the college of Cardinals been appointed by this pope. So that battle over whether, as Matt points out, whether there'll be a shift back to more conservative papacy or continue along the path he found. But he was really, I think that's an important distinction to draw between both his public statements and how the media often misinterpreted them or ran with them a little, taking them to a logical conclusion he might have made himself. He was a really fascinating pope with regard to technology, is really interested in AI, its impact on humanity. He appoint, appointed a kind of brilliant scholar about AI within the Vatican to study it. And so he, he's, he's a very quirky guy. And I think it's very easy in our polarized world to be like, oh, he was a liberal this or that. He was very complicated. And I think the real battle will be for, for Catholics, which direction the church will lead its flock in the next iteration of the papacy, but also out. This is a, this is now largely a church that exists outside Europe. I mean, there are widespread Catholics in Africa and in the Americas. And so that is what I would like to watch, not only because I saw Conclave when it came out, but because it is a fascinating ritual, a very old ritual to choose a new pope. And so I think we'll all be curious to see who they end up selecting.

[Matthew Continetti]

You know, not to, I don't want to immediately turn this into about something else, but the media and liberals very much wanted to claim him. That was the way it always seemed to me when he would, a statement would be issued and they would use it to say, you know, well, this is a new kind of pope. The Pope is taking a new. Even the Catholic Church is looking at this conservative thing and saying it's cruel and so on. There was a lot of that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, I think there are two matters. So the most hot button social issues of our time, the church did not, or the three or four did not change on. Right. So he no liberalization on the question of human life, at least in technical terms, and no real liberalization on the question of the practice or the conduct in terms of sexuality. So that's really where if you were going to say, well, you know, if there's a really a liberal pope, he's going to liberalize on these matters. Certainly the American Catholic. The fights in the American Catholic Church have been around these hot button issues, even secondary ones, like can you give communion to a politician who supports, who supports abortion? But there Was there is an interesting dollop of radical, I would, I think, in larger sense, radical subjectivity or something like that. That, that, that is like a kernel of the potential self destruction of the Catholic Church. Which is when he was asked something about gay practice and he said, who am I to judge? Who is the Pope to judge, like of all the people on the planet earth, right. The Pope, who is supposedly, who is the one figure on earth who claims a direct connection. He is the, he is God, you know, he is God's representative on earth. I mean, the more the Mormon president.

[John Podhoretz]

This gets to one of the paradoxes, which is he did not see his office as that stately, regal office that most of us view the, the papacy as, and which has historically has been, I mean, to the point where, you know, the Pope ruled much of Italy for much of the past thousand years. Right. Parts of Italy at least. He viewed his job as a parish priest. And so it's interesting. His, his funeral will not be a stately funeral. He gave, he left instructions for it to be as modest as possible. Now it's the Vatican. So modesty, you know, might still be pretty opulent. But he, I think that's how he kind of got into these rhetorical cul de sacs is because if you're a parish priest and someone comes to you and you're asking for compass response, you're going to, I'm going to be compassionate, I guess, who am I to judge? But of course, he's also the Pope, as you say. And so when he says something like that, everyone goes, hold it. Does this mean we're changing the Catholic view? Here's another part that's been heavily contested of Catholic doctrine, which is the male celibate priesthood. He didn't budge on that either. So he's this, he's, he is more complicated than I think that a lot of people believe, especially kind of the way that the media covers this, because the Catholic categories don't map out onto the American left right spectrum in an orderly fashion. And so for people who know only the American left right spectrum, they can get, they can be easily kind of confused or led away from what the intent of the Pope was. All that said, I mean, he was.

[Abe Greenwald]

A progressive pope and obviously he's the most progressive pope right in history. Far more progressive and very controversial than John XXIII and all of that even. Yeah, and controversial. And the controversies will, I think, as Christine indicates, will likely continue given the sharp ideological divide apparently in the College of Cardinals, which is the body who will choose who will choose the next pope and will send the white smoke up the chimney at the Vatican when it is time to announce that, that, that a new pope has been found. Now to move back to things that don't properly map onto the right left divide in the United States and to transition from the, from the highly spiritual to the resolutely practical. The controversy that erupted yesterday over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not mapping properly according to the left and the right.

[John Podhoretz]

American politics no longer maps that easily on the left right spectrum, does it?

[Abe Greenwald]

Absolutely. So what you have happening is a leak that Hegseth had yet another private signal chat apparently involved, which involved his family members, not quite sure who else, in which he revealed battle plans for what is described as an upcoming attack on Yemen. I couldn't quite tell because the date of the, of the signal chat was March 15th. So I don't know whether the upcoming Yemen attack that was discussed in this leak is one that has already taken place against the Houthis or if it's still upcoming. So that, that the, the stories didn't quite get that clear to me. But that. So this is the second insecure chat on highly classified matters whose public exposure could obviously put American pilots and American military at risk if the plans are foreknown. And this of course, follows the absolutely astoundingly egregious leak last week of the almost entirety of Israel's war plans relating to Iran in a story revealing that people in the administration had convinced Donald Trump not to join in on a military strike on Iran. But that as our, as Seth Mandel said in a very great post about this on our website, that wasn't really the purpose of the. It was to say Trump said no. It was actually just to sort of lay out Israel's war plans as a form of checking Israel's behavior. We don't know where that leak came from. We don't know. But what we do know is that the Hegseth signal leak, that leak, three or four people at the Hegseth Pentagon were, have been fired over the past couple of weeks for their involvement in leaking. And now there's a leak against Hegseth and an op ed in Politico. This is record time, I gotta say. Everything has been sped up. But a guy who got fired on Wednesday has an op ed in Politico on Sunday. John Elliott, spokesman at the Pentagon, calling for Hegseth to be fired and saying that the Pentagon is a clown show and everything is terrible.

[Christine Rosen]

He was fired. He resigned. He was not one of the ones fired. He resigned.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm sorry. I apologize. He resigned. Although possibly. Although it's weird because there are indications in the. As I was wrong, but there are indications in the counter response to Elliot that. That the. The Hegseth line is going to be that he was somehow involved in stuff relating to the leak investigation that has.

[Christine Rosen]

Felled Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll, and Darren Selnick.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, okay.

[Christine Rosen]

Who also are complaining about some of the things that they. So now they're claiming that the Hegseth. Department of Defense is making up, lying about why they left and the circumstances under which they left a lot of fighting.

[John Podhoretz]

The chief of staff also resigned.

[Christine Rosen]

Yes.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

So five people here that were.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, so tracking. This is all intra Trump world. None of this.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Involves anybody but maga. Right. And you have MAGA on MAGA war. So they're saying. And maybe Elliot's right, and maybe this is true, and maybe this is. His piece is, you know, rather than being a, you know, sort of hit job, is a cred. Like, I like pizza. I wanted to be part of what Pete Hegseth was doing. He's destroying the Pentagon. Trump needs to fire him. And it has only been, you know. How long has Hegseth been Defense secretary? Two months. Has it even been two months? It took him a month to get confirmed. So maybe he's been there for eight weeks. Seven weeks. Eight weeks. He was.

[John Podhoretz]

He's been there longer than that. Let me just.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, the administration's only. It's three months yesterday. The administration has been in office. Right. So I mean, he's at least only been there 91 days.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, he was. They voted him on January 24th. So.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, so he'd been there 80. 80. Pretty much 88 to 87 days. Okay, fine. So I can't remember a meltdown like this before anywhere. I mean, there was like the firing of Michael Flynn, but that was over a specific story and a specific thing. The idea that, you know, people come in, they're hired, they're out the door, they're quitting, they're being fired.

[John Podhoretz]

What about Scaramucci?

[Abe Greenwald]

No, but again, these are longer than Scaramucci. No, I'm not saying that Hegseth is. Paneletta is. No, I'm talking about a department. The senior officials in a department at war with each other. And again, this is MAGA on MAGA war. So what is going on here? Because it's. It. It does all seem to center on this question of the leak investigation.

[John Podhoretz]

But look, let's just. Let's just broaden the canvas for a moment.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

Because it's not just dod. You also have State Department where there's this fight over this proposed reorganization. That memo that leaked Rubio's distancing himself. The MAGA head of usaid who had been brought on there to totally shut down the department, he left the State Department. There's a war of leaks going on about why this individual left. Then you take it over to the irs, the Treasury. Right, yeah, but. Right, irs, part of Treasury. But we've had, I think four IRS acting commissioners since this administration began, while the, the nominee to head the irs, Billy Long, is still waiting confirmation. That I think you're right, relates to Treasury Department trying to exercise control over the irs. Then we also had the story that came out this week that the Harvard letter with the demands that provoked Harvard's heroic resistance. Heroic, amazing. Harvard. We have to be, we have to support Harvard. Don't you peons know that Harvard is the most important place on the planet? Anyway, that letter apparently was a mistake.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

So that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Sorry, we didn't mean to send that.

[John Podhoretz]

Letter in the first place. Yeah. So I think we can safely say that this, this is an incredibly chaotic and confused government that's happening all at once.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hey, it's John here. I want to talk to you about a new advertiser, one I'm very excited about because of my experience with their product, Brooklyn Bedding. So Brooklyn Betting, this is true of a lot of podcast advertisers, want you to sample their wares. And so they sent me a mattress. So the mattress that I needed in my house was one for my 14 year old son who had been complaining that his mattress was uncomfortable and that he was having trouble sleeping. We got him the Sedona Elite from Brooklyn Bedding slept on it the first night, got up the next morning, said this is the best thing I've ever slept on. And then a couple of nights later he went off for a sleepover and I slept in his bed to sample the wares. And let me tell you, this is one quality comfortable mattress. And shouldn't be surprised by that because Brooklyn Bedding has been around for over 25 years, known for its top of the line comfortable and quality without the luxury price tag. It's got different firmness options, heights, dimensions, including non traditional sizes. They're designed and custom made by the best master craftsmen in the industry with free shipping in the US from their factory in Arizona. Free of fiberglass, by the way, which can be harmful to your health, unlike other mattress brands. They ensure their entire facility is free of fiber fiberglass. Sleep on your Brooklyn bedding mattress for up to 120 nights. And if you don't love it as much as my son and I do, they'll help you return it or pick out a different one. So go to BrooklynBedding.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. You have to use my promo code on the very last page of checkout to get this discount. That's BrooklynBetting.com and use my promo code COMMENTARY for 30% off site wide. BrooklynBetting.com promo code COMMENTARY. Hey everybody, vacation season is upon us. Spring has hit New York. Got some warm weather, got some rain. But it's just making me think about the summer and the fun that I can have, fun my wife and I can have. We got a trip planned for Wisconsin in July. Other stuff we're going to do with our family later in August. And this year I'm going to treat myself to the looks upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices. And the premium luggage options and stylish tote bags they offer are perfect ways to carry all of my Quince goods. My sweaters, my polo shirts that I just got from Quince and those like everything else you get there, priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How? By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So for your next trip, treat yourself to the looks upgrades you deserve from quince. Go to quince.com commentary for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q U I n c e.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com commentary so we need to pull back now. Go back to Hexa.

[John Podhoretz]

That's what I'm saying.

[Abe Greenwald]

It's not. I actually want to move on to the IRS and that story because if people weren't following the details of that story, very important details to that story, which is that Gary Shapley, who is one of the two IRS agents who was seems to have been cashiered and criticized and sidelined for properly flagging Hunter Biden's tax dodgery and you know, emerged as whistleblowers at the, you know, in a, in a, was it a house hearing. I mean, it was these two very impressive IRS agents who said they had done their jobs and had been punished for doing their jobs, had been told not to do their jobs and all of that. And we're like, we're not political. We're not. This is just what we're supposed to do. And this guy got favorable treatment. Very. You know, it was a remarkable moment, I thought. And so he was made one of these acting IRS commissioners, although apparently was made. So. And I don't really understand how this happened again. We don't. Things are. You can't just be made acting IRS commissioner. Like, somebody has to write a letter. It has to be state, you know, notarized. Like, who. Who gave him the keys to the office? You know, who gave him the password? Computer. Yeah. Like, yeah, he got the good parking.

[John Podhoretz]

Spot before he was moved again.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. So according to what we've been reading, it was Elon Musk who made him acting IRS commissioner. And then when the Treasury Secretary, Scott Best, Scott Bezos, like, what. Who is Elon Musk? Elon Musk can appoint anybody to be the acting IRS commissioner. I'm the treasury secretary. What the hell is happening? And I think this may have been one of the moments in the last two weeks when Trump, who had already been hinting at this, was like. And I know that Musk is on a. Only has 120 days to serve before he has to start doing financial reporting and stuff like that. But clearly, you know, Musk is like. Musk has now come to me to seem like Leslie Nielsen at the end when he be. When he plays the umpire in the Naked Gun, Frank Drevin goes, and he's the umpire at the Dodgers game, and he starts calling balls and strikes because every time he calls a strike, the crowd cheers. So he starts calling strikes before the pitcher has thrown the ball into the mitt.

[Christine Rosen]

Does that dance and does.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, does the moonwalk. It's like that. Like, Musk is just like, you're acting IRS commissioner. Okay, what? State Department is good. Half of the employees. State Department are going to be fired.

[Christine Rosen]

This is. This is an important point, though, because I think it does speak to what's going on both across all these departments, and that's that the org chart is very confused in this administration. But if you notice, whenever a mistake is made, all anyone does and Hegseth is already doing this is work. The only ref, the only umpire that matters, which is Trump. So he made another big oopsie daisy, and rather than defend his own behavior, even try to as they sort of initially did with the first signal leak. He's saying, oh, this is just the mainstream media. The late, you know, he went straight into Trump media attack mode, assuming that his boss will look at that and go, yeah, well, I'm not going to give them another scalp. They're always, they're always after me. I'm going to double down. And yeah, I'm with Pete. So that strategy has worked so far. But I agree with Matt. There are enough of these cases piling up and enough thoughtful maga friendly conservatives and populists going. Get your act together. That it's not clear that he, he's not going to have to remove one.

[Abe Greenwald]

Of these guys, but two things in relation to that. So Hegseth said, you know, we're going after woke and dei and that's why this is happening to me. And Elliott wrote a book called why Woke and DEI Are Breaking the Defense Department. So I don't really think that he can attack somebody who has published a book on this very topic for being part of the mainstream media attempting to derail his agenda. This is Elliot's agenda. So clearly something else is going on there. There are other weird things going on.

[John Podhoretz]

So can I just make one point about Elon and Dosha, because the three, the three Pentagon officials who were escorted outside of the building and out of the building and have been fired, deny any role in the leaks. It is interesting that the initial leak investigation seems to have been opened in order to find out who leaked the details of Musk's planned briefing on China in the Pentagon into the Wall Street Journal. And I had long suspected that the reason that leak took place was to alert Trump to this planned briefing in order to get Trump to cancel it, which he did, which is exactly what happened.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

So again, you see how Musk and Doge are playing this part of this kind of radical element within the chemistry of the Trump administration that's setting off all these different combust, combustible reactions. And no one has figured out, I think, how that ends or how that's organized. Though I think you can see at State and at treasury, the secretary's beginning to put more pressure on Doge and saying, we are in control here. You can still do your thing, but we are in control. And Bessant, of course, did the same thing. One other episode I left out of my litany was the way we got our 90 day pause on the Liberation Day tariffs, which was besant. And interestingly enough, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who's a big Proponent of the tariffs, waiting until the moment that Peter Navarro was in the. Was in another part of the White House, away from the Oval Office, meeting with Kevin Hassett, to the two of them approach Trump immediately, convince him that we would have a financial crisis if the Liberation Day terrorists were going to go into effect as scheduled, and literally supervised Trump as he tapped out the truth. Announcing the pause. And then Besant, very cleverly said, says, great, it's posted, gets Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, and immediately goes outside to the bank of microphones before that gives you a picture of what's happening here on a daily basis.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

And I think the hope of any steady administration we might have is in these Cabinet secretaries exercising more authority.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, so this goes to the State Department leak. So the State Department leaks, I believe, if you think about who benefits. So that leak is actually was a leak for the purpose of alerting not just Trump or whatever, but, I mean, alerting the Senate, I think, primarily to the fact that there was this astoundingly radical and frankly demented plan to reduce the staff of the state department by 50%. I got nothing against this whole notion of ending, you know, tenure in the Foreign Service, whatever it is, however, that works. Like, I think we're all in agreement here that the rules that have governed how people serve as civil servants and not at the pleasure of the President and all that are very much worthy of review and overturning and all of that, and that the President is right to be concerned that his agenda will not be fulfilled by permanent employees of the government who are looking to hold him off or stave him off and all of that. But you can't reduce the State Department. This is like the Thanos snap. You can't just remove 50% of the personnel from the State Department. That's not how you do something like that. Somebody might actually be the only person who has an open line of communication to a nuclear scientist in China who can help, you know, how many warheads they have, or something like that. Like, you have to know who everybody is in order to know whether or not they deserve to be fired. Not, not this kind of Malthusian population reduction plan. That seems to be the Doge formula. Secondarily, we had had this hope that the conduct of the Trump presidential campaign, disciplined, sober, like, they didn't fall for it. They, he didn't go off half cocked. They stuck to their plan, they kept to it, and Trump was Trump and did what Trump did. But, but the, you know, the trains were running on time, things were Orderly. Everybody knew what the chain of command was and that Susie Wiles was gonna go be White House chief of staff and she was gonna bring that same focus and concentration to the Trump second Trump administration. And guess what? It is like a court. It literally is like a king's court. And whoever is the last courtier to talk in the king's ear gets Trump's attention. And he's so adhd that he is with them for five minutes until somebody else tells him otherwise. And so there is no order. There is no so, yeah, Hegseth is right to go at Trump. And then there was the I'm sorry to I gotta go to the Harvard thing before I forget it. So the Harvard letter is sent out by the chief of staff of the task force, right? No.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, it wasn't. Oh, right. Yeah. No, it was D8. It was like HHS.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, HHS.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Who is on the task force.

[Christine Rosen]

And that guy was a. But that guy. And the guy who is taking the fall for it was a first term HHS Trump official too. Like he served in the first.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, they're all.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, there is no maybe on.

[Abe Greenwald]

The anti Semitism task force. I don't even know. But he sends the letter to Harvard. Right. And then apparently after Harvard says, hey, wait a minute, I thought we were negotiating. Now you're saying we have to bring in an outside panel to review whether or not our classes have viewpoint diversity. I. That really wasn't part of the deal that we were in the middle of maybe negotiating with you. And then the story comes out two days later that they weren't supposed to get that memo, that it was a draft, that it was like maybe the, the most you were going to want to ask for. And then they would sit down at the task force meeting and edit the draft and send out a more reasonable letter. Right. Okay, so we get this story that the memo was sent to Harvard in error. And then a spokesman or a lawyer or somebody who had been a Stafford, the Independent Women's Forum May mailman attacks Harvard for releasing the letter or believing that the letter was legitimate. They didn't call us to find out if the letter was legitimate or not. They just went off half cocked. Says a person who is a spokesman for the Trump administration which sent the letter to Harvard.

[Matthew Continetti]

We're skipping one. We're skipping one.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Matthew Continetti]

The Justice Department official who said that the Garcia detention was a mistake.

[John Podhoretz]

The government admits that they mistakenly sent Garcia to El Salvador. They could have sent him anywhere else. We wouldn't be in this ridiculous scandal.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. But. But then they got rid of him.

[Matthew Continetti]

Oh, was it her? I think it was a Mr. Revenue or something.

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, I don't know. There are two different. Lawyer.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, he was the lawyer.

[Abe Greenwald]

He was the lawyer. But there was something. There was another. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so he's gone.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay. So basically what we have here.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Is a clown show. So we now have Justice, HHS, DoD, treasury and DoD. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

And State.

[Abe Greenwald]

These are the four and five. These are the five central departments of the executive branch. Right. Three of them, I believe, mentioned in. Two of them, at least mentioned in. In the Constitution. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

I just want to say the small. The Small Business Administration is doing fine.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like at the student loan.

[John Podhoretz]

Portfolio, which is over a trillion dollars, so maybe that would be for the best.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, hud. So then, by the way, you also have weird things where this is. This is my other favorite. I'm sorry. There is this acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin. Yeah. And Ed Martin needs to be put in a straight jacket and taken to Devil's island on a rendition plane. He is a psychopath, a very high order. And he keeps issuing bulls, papal bulls from his office, demanding that people do this and demanding this and demanding that, over which he has no jurisdiction, authority or anything. And somebody, I think, on at the Hill, like some journalist was on. Was on MSNBC calling into question something that. That Ed Martin had said. And another Maga, like, pre. Maga. Maga. Maga before Maga. Person in the Republican far right firmament, Michael Caputo, who is known to people in New York for having been the amanuensis of a very crazy politician named Carl Palladino who ran for governor.

[John Podhoretz]

But Caputo's OG Maga.

[Abe Greenwald]

He was there since 25 from. Yeah, but he's 23. But he's like. He's like the kind of person who was doing stuff like this in the 2000s.

[Christine Rosen]

Hailey omaga. Okay.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. Like Maga before that type of. Yeah. Anyway, he issues a statement like, he doesn't even work for Ed Martin. He's like his advisor, like, outside advisor. I didn't know that, you know, acting U.S. attorneys had outside advisors. But he, like, issued a statement saying, you better watch your words, completely obscure journalist, or we're gonna come after you. So it's not only in the, you know, in the bowels of the White House or the centerpiece of the administration, but there are these, like, outer flanks, outer banks, where it's sort of like we're in power now. And we're all Trump. I, Michael Caputo, am Trump. I, Ed Martin, am Trump. I, May Mailman, am Trump. Like, I'm allowed to say I, you know, how dare you, Harvard, you know. Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

To add a specific thing that angered a lot of people I know, in, like, bioethics and medicine that Ed Martin did, which is he was sending. He was just churning out letters to scientific journals saying, you need to respond to the Southern, show that you have viewpoint diversity.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

This is like a. Like a pulmonary health journal. They're like, what are you talking? Like, where is the jurisdiction here?

[Abe Greenwald]

So that was what I was thinking. I couldn't remember the specific detail.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, crazy. This is similar in a lot of ways to the first Trump administration. I mean, the first Trump administration was very chaotic. There was a lot of coming and going. There was a lot of confusion. It all came down to what President Trump decided on a. Any given moment. What I think may be different so far, and we're not even 100 days in, we still have a little bit over a week to go, is that one could say in the first Trump administration, certainly prior to the COVID shutdown, that, you know, oh, yeah, it's crazy. All this stuff is happening in Washington. It's a mess. But most people outside of the Beltway were not affected by it, and they were benefiting from the Trump economy. And most people hate Washington, D.C. anyway, so they looked at the headlines and say, Trump is doing what we want him to do, which is go there and fight everybody and stick up for the forgotten men and women of this country. The difference right now, it seems to me, is the Liberation Day policy has set off this chain of events in financial markets that is leading to global economic chaos, which was not the case for much of Trump's first term. And you see the American consumer and the American voter begin to have, you can say, depreciating views of the state of the economy. And that, I think, could be a big problem for Trump and the Republicans. On the other hand, I should also say that Trump has accomplished quite a feat in less than 100 days, and that is he's effectively shut down migration to the United States through the southern border. And so this is why I think the Trump administration likes having the fight about Mr. Garcia, is because it draws attention to what is his real remaining strength in the polls, and that's immigration policy. If you go outside immigration policy and you start looking at economic policy, foreign policy, the state of governance in the United States, voters have turned sour pretty quickly. And just bringing the chaos to the international dimension. I mentioned foreign policy. Just think about what's been going on here. We have the president of peace through strength, no new wars in his first administration, pledging to end the war in Ukraine within a day when if he were elected president, his chief diplomatic envoy, essentially the shadow secretary of the state is failed to get a cease fire in Ukraine. He has failed to get a cease fire in Gaza. And he's now embarked on a diplomatic process with Iran that I hope fails because if it succeeds, it will give Iran another version of the Obama nuclear deal, which means that the not only does the Iranian regime have a new lease on life, but that its nuclear infrastructure will be maintained past Trump's presidency. So if you're a Trump supporter, you really have to hang on to the border and the accomplishment there because there's a lot of other dimensions are not.

[Abe Greenwald]

Going too well at the moment.

[Christine Rosen]

There's a slow release poison there for him even on the border question with some of these cases. I mean, over the weekend we had the Supreme Court said halt. You cannot just be busing people off to these countries without process. And even people we all know, lots of people on the right who support this policy, particularly the border policies, who are saying you need to follow the process. This is a, this is a moment where the process really matters. For now, the Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot by having margaritas with dodgy guys who were wrongly, wrongfully detained and deported. They might continue to go down that path. But Richie Torres, his comments over the weekend struck me as prescient. They're going to pivot to focus more on the economy, as Matt says, that's going to really resonate with voters right now and the instability of our financial future. And, you know, they're being urged internally to stop focusing on the character and, and sad story of Maryland man, as Seth likes to call him, and instead talk about the process. Because the court, a very conservative Supreme Court, at some point is going to have that showdown with him. That's their job. They are very deft in trying to avoid it up to now. But if he continues on this path, they'll have to.

[Matthew Continetti]

I just want to say one more thing about this. The Trump sort of department by department chaos and backstabbing and blame shifting and leaking is that there's a potential time bomb here. If there's a real crisis, you know, if there is some sort of security failure, some sort of real policy slip up with real consequences, not just for one case, not just for one school not just for one attack, but something big. And then there's going to, then there's suddenly the circular firing squad. And we will see behind the scenes the breakdown of everything.

[Abe Greenwald]

This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply. The Abrego Garcia case is very suggestive because maybe it highlights or turns into a kind of echo of or example of Trump stopping, you know, revolutionizing the way we are handling the border. And, and they think, okay, well, this kind of focuses a spotlight on things. It's drawn Democratic fire. The Democrats are handling it in a very problematic way. With Chris Van Hollen having a margarita with Abrego Garcia in, in El Salvador, which is like so unbelievably stupid. I can't even understand why he didn't know what the optics of something like that would be and saying things like, I told him to stay strong, you know, that kind of thing because clearly he's not a good guy. I'm not saying that he is Ms. 13 or he's the head of MSR trend or whatever, not a good guy. Beat his wife, she had a restraining order on him. Like, don't, like, do your homework and don't, you know, don't try.

[John Podhoretz]

He's also an illegal immigrant and an illegal immigrant could be deported to any country in the world except the one the Trump administration deported him to.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Which is why that's the administrative error, I believe when the person, the Justice Department who has been relieved said that there was an administrative error in putting him on that plane, it may have been that what was being referred to was the fact that this was the one country he couldn't be sent to.

[John Podhoretz]

Send him anywhere else.

[Abe Greenwald]

2019 ruling by the Trump Justice Department's immigration court, which, you know, I, again, like, I thought I knew a lot about that. I keep learning how little I really understand about how byzantine our federal government is that the immigration court that rules on this is not a court as we understand it. It is not part of the judicial branch of the US Government. It is a division within the Justice Department. I don't even understand how it's called a court under those terms. I Mean. I mean, have to be Judge Walker. You're bound by law.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, is it. I mean, you know, is it Judge Judy? I don't. You know, it's like, can Judge Judy also rule on the.

[John Podhoretz]

This has been a teaching moment. I don't think many Americans understood just how much money the federal government shovels to our elite universities.

[Abe Greenwald]

I didn't know that either I said.

[John Podhoretz]

That last week or how big the government is because of all the DOGE teams going everywhere. And you learn about departments and agencies within departments that you had never heard of before. Yeah, that DOGE is slated for destruction.

[Abe Greenwald]

In 1989, I was very briefly on the staff of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, otherwise known as the Drug Czar. The first drug czar, Bill Bennett. And I was a special assistant to him for a couple of months until I realized that the last thing I ever wanted to do was work for the federal government. And I stopped and I never have again. And we were setting up this department. And the drug Czar's office had been created to bring order to the drug war by one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Put it into the 1988 crime bill. Republicans didn't want this office, you know, but they agreed to it as part of a negotiation. And so Bill Bennett became the drug czar. And it turned out that in this is 1989, so the government is actually like half again as large or something, even though the Defense Department is half the size that it was, which was the largest department, because we had, you know, million persons standing army. We don't have any more. Two million people even. I can't remember what the numbers were, but turned out that there were 56 separate federal agencies that were involved in the drug war. Not five, not eight, 56 agencies. And my colleagues and I went on kind of like a college tour of the federal government. Like, we go in to the Commerce Department and in a conference room, and there would be seven people, each of them from some branch of the Commerce Department that had some amount of money dedicated to fighting illegal drugs. And these are the Office of Community Control Authority, the Office of Extra, the Office of Urban Categorical Spending Initiatives, you know, and one after the other after the other after the other. And like, after about six weeks, I think we all looked at each other and said, this is ridiculous. Like, just Bill should just go make speeches because, like, there's nothing. There's not. There's nothing to harness here. There's no way to do this. There's no way to organize this in Fact, it's like this. So it can't be organized just so that everybody can get their taste. You know, you get a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there. Justice gets money here. ATF gets money there. This one gets this. This is when. This is when different cabinet departments had, before the reorganization by the Homeland security Act of 2002, like, cabinet departments had their own police offices. Departments like. Or armies, like comrade. Like, somebody had atf. Alcohol, Tobacco and Farmers was in the Department of Commerce. So they had planes and guns, and they could. They could shoot people. Agents who had shooting privileges. Treasury had one. Like, five or six different departments had their own, like, paramilitary police forces to fight the drug war. I'm only bringing this up to say that obviously, there is very good work to be done in the clarification of what the federal government is, where it is, and where it should be stopped. This is. This work is not being done properly is my deep feeling. Well, this.

[John Podhoretz]

I also think this is part of the problem when you prioritize loyalty to Trump above every other consideration. And not just loyalty to Trump as in you want someone who supported Trump in 2024 to work for him, but loyalty to the point where the vetting for some of these positions goes far, far, far back. And it's not only about Trump, but it's about policies in the past.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

It's about, if you're in your 40s and you want a job, they're asking you, did you support the Iraq war in 2003. Right. As most of the country did at the time. So the. This type of vetting, which we would say, okay, it's the president's prerogative, they want people who are. Who agree with him and work with him, but it also has excluded people with experience in these agencies. And so you do kind of need some practical knowledge in order to get in. Many of the people who are now staffing, say the national security or foreign policy branches of the executive branch are people who are longtime outsiders and critics of those branches. And they are coming in. They didn't. Many of them don't even really have experience in the first Trump administration because they were criticizing Trump's foreign policy in his first administration. Now they're coming in, and all of a sudden they're charged with these huge responsibilities. And I think it's contributing to the confusion and to the. Yeah, I think it's fair to say, chaos of governance, especially in the past few weeks, I think Liberation Day will be considered a turning point. And there are many other turning points to come, but at least a turning point in the first hundred days. Whereas there is a sense prior to that that, okay, we know what Trump is doing. This is typical Trump. But then since it's kind of gone into this amazing surrealist tableau that I think the best response is to find comic. But that, of course, is causing great psychic distress for the half of the country that opposes Trump.

[Abe Greenwald]

I want to talk about my main concern here, actually, in terms of the next 25 years, which is things have been undertaken by this administration, beginning on the 20th of January, that frankly, have been on a kind of wish list of conservative policy proposals, sometimes seemingly fanciful proposals, for the last 30, 40 years, particularly as regards questions of Title 6, the Civil Rights act, the abuse of this, what you might call the university government, you know, industrial complex, and the choking of free flow of opinions across ideologies, free inquiry, even at schools that are run by states and things like that. All of this very much a front of mind for people like us for decades. And finally an administration has taken up these cudgels. And my great fear, and these and other matters, and my great fear is that in the way that they are handling it, they are discrediting the implementation of these ideas and are going to enshrine. They are going to have the negative effect of enshrining liberal orthodoxy, not uprooting it, and of making it harder rather than easier to change these institutions so that they can be a positive for the people who are obliged, by the way, our whole social compact is set up to participate in them rather than, you know, give them more power rather than less. When the dust clears and when all of this is over with and I am, I am extremely disheartened by, for example, the Harvard stuff, because half of the Harvard stuff is fantastic and half of it is really bad and really bad even from my life. I don't care about, you know, whether or not there's an outside board that Harvard agrees to, to ensure that there's viewpoint diversity, whether or not that supposedly is an interference with Harvard's. If Harvard agreed to it as part of a deal, then it wouldn't be unconstitutional or a violation of academic freedom. You know, it's not. There's no, there's no rule. There's no principle that says that academic freedom can involve having an outside board say, I'm sorry, but your department is, is. Is badly out of balance ideologically. That, that's, that could be academic freedom depends on how people who own or run these institutions handle it.

[John Podhoretz]

You Also don't need a board to determine that, by the way.

[Abe Greenwald]

You don't. But maybe you have a board because you, you're acknowledging your inability to do it without.

[John Podhoretz]

I see what you're saying.

[Abe Greenwald]

If the school companies hire McKinsey to come in to tell them how to fix problems they don't know how to fix because they're two up their own patooties in order to do this. So you bring in an outside advisor to say, you know, you know, this whole division over here, you can fold it into that division, you can save seven. You can save seven positions and use the money elsewhere. You don't know that there's.

[Christine Rosen]

But there's a, there's a problem with, I think with this analysis in the sense that the first idea you said, which is correct, that a lot of us have, for decades, a lot of conservatives for decades have been arguing for just these kinds of reforms. You know, getting smaller governments, balancing the budget, fixing academia, you know, making sure our institutions are reflective of the American public's views. MAGA has contempt for that process. We are part of the problem, in their view. And that there were glimmers of that in the first term. But it was very clear when he was running for a second term that the idea was, well, you guys had your chance, you blew it. You just either caved to the left or weren't tough enough. And so now we have to come in with our sledgehammer. And that is the message he ran on. It shouldn't surprise any of us. And they. Which is why they have contempt for the kind of processes we're talking about here. And they will not go to the experts who understand how academia works and say, well, how do we fix this? And they won't. They'll go after Harvard because maybe Stephen Miller has a chip on his shoulder rather than look at who gets the most funding from the federal government, Johns Hopkins, and what is that funding used for? I'm telling you, a lot of this is medical research. And to Abe's earlier point, you start swinging the ax and you start cutting off programs that people have real benefits from. Normal voters can see the benefits of the medical research and the scientific breakthroughs. Then that's a really easy message to run on if you're a Democrat. It just is. And so they are. I'm happy, as you say and totally agree with you that there's so much waste in the federal government and certainly in academia. But if you go about it this way, you're just giving talking point after talking point to A more radical, younger, maybe AOC led Democratic Party in the future to say, look at what they did, look at the mess they made.

[Abe Greenwald]

And you know, there's a place for both. Like, this is the problem with the MAGA on MAGA fighting or maga's weird, you know, like wanting to sort of stand and a phalanx on the right and then spray bullets around to everybody else on the right while they're in formation, which is. You knew. Maybe you do need the sledgehammer. You need people who wield the sledgehammer, but if they wield the sledgehammer without having somebody provide a certain directional goal for the sledgehammer, they can swing the sledgehammer, swing it around and smash into their own head.

[Christine Rosen]

No, but the problem. No, they have a. They have someone who's telling them what to do. But that, that's a person. That's Trump to Matt's earlier point about loyalty. But if you're conservative, you have loyalty to the ideas, not to the person, not to the one individual who represents.

[John Podhoretz]

You also should have somebody to send a letter at the appropriate time. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of that simple.

[Matthew Continetti]

But it says, it's as if they think sending the letter at the appropriate time or any step of the proper process is part of the ideology that needs tearing down.

[John Podhoretz]

No, I think that's. I think that's ex post facto. I think that. I think they get into these situations and then maga, the MAGA ethos of never back down, never, never complain, never explain. Right. That ethos kicks in and so then you just kind of turn around and you blame Harvard or that new turn around and you blame the lawyer.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think it's both.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think it's. I agree with Abe that it's both because I think you can see where this guy at HHS is like, I'm sending this letter before, before those wimps get to it.

[Matthew Continetti]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And weaken it and boil it down and take all the good stuff out, because the good stuff is going to get taken out. And the other stuff about, you know, anti Semitism and all that. Yeah, who needs that? We're going after. We want them to be run by a commission, by, you know, by a viewpoint diversity panel, you know, who's going to be on that Kid Rock.

[John Podhoretz]

Now you're engaged in a flight of fancy hearing that. You do. I know, I enjoyed it, too. Yeah, it was nice. But can I just say for a second here, you know, look, Trump, Trump's approval rating has gone down. He's now at around 45, 47%, I think in the RCP average. His disapproval rating has gone up, I think, which is slightly more troubling. It's now 51, 52%, I think. But 4751, it's still, you know, it's not a total disaster. In fact, it's at the place where he could, where Republicans could win the House again next year. I think we're undervaluing what happened in 2024 with the Democrats and with the composition and potential strength that the Trump coalition. There's a lot of slack as they, as you would say. And so it's not a straight line from they're messing this stuff up to AOC is going to be the president in 2029. I mean, it's not a straight line at all because the things that the Democrats, what are the Democrats putting forward here? They're putting forward Garcia, they're putting forward Mahmoud Khalil, they putting forward Bernie Sanders and aoc, Right. They're putting Chris Van Holland, no friend of Israel or the Jewish people, I might add. He's, he's now their face. Who's the new flavor of the day? J.B. pritzker of Illinois. Right. One of the worst governors in this country and a billionaire to boot.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

So I just, I just think it's, it's, it's still much too early to make any definitive pronouncements that here because at the end of the day, what you could wake up to, you could wake up next year and you could find, oh, gosh, yeah, that really didn't work out. But things have balanced out, things are muddling along and the Democrats are still so far to the left that the Trump coalition is like, well, we don't want, we don't trust these people anymore to run the country after what they did for four years.

[Abe Greenwald]

I completely agree with everything that you said. So these, this discussion is prospective. The idea is that the mess that we're seeing will have follow on consequences that are both failure will lead to failures in policy implementation, which is bad because the policies may be good. And so therefore that is incredibly unfortunate from the perspective of what should be done to help the country and to move forward and to, and to do the right things after so many of the wrong things had been done during the Biden administration. So there's the policy implementation question and then there's the political question, which is just at the end of the day, the Democrats are far too left wing, but they don't have any power. They have very Little power in Washington. So everything that happens from now until November of 2026 is inside the Republican tent and will therefore be pretty easy if the public is not happy with the direction of the country in the middle of next year. I don't know why Democrats say, hey, don't look at us.

[John Podhoretz]

My only counter to this is 2018. By the way, the Democrats at the moment are performing less well than they were in 2017.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, right.

[John Podhoretz]

So but in 2018, did the Democrats win the House of Representatives by, by winning quite a few seats on Trump's a chaos agent or Trump's going after the universities or Trump is so mean to illegal immigrants? No, they won it because the Republicans tried to get rid of the preexisting condition protection by attempting to repeal Obamacare legislatively. That Nancy Pelosi's press conference day after the election. She comes up to the lectern and.

[Abe Greenwald]

She says they won 40 seats.

[John Podhoretz]

Pre existing. Pre existing, pre existing. That's what they ran on. Because that type of issue goes to the Trump coalition, which is a working class coalition.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

So what I think the danger is is they, the Republicans either screw up the tax bill somehow. Right. Or they leave themselves vulnerable on this Medicaid issue. And that allows the Democrats next year to say, look, Trump was benefiting the rich while cutting Medicaid and messing with your Social Security. That's where they're going to go. They're not going to go to. Trump was mean to Harvard and threatening biomedical research.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, but you mentioned, you mentioned Liberation Day and there was no policy during the first, those first two years.

[John Podhoretz]

I agree with that. I agree with that. The tariffs have to. What they have to show there is that this time next year we have to have higher unemployment, higher inflation and lower median wages.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

They can show those three things then. You're absolutely right. We're headed toward a good day for the Democrats.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

But I still think it's far too early to say that you can make the connection between the tariffs and those three things.

[Abe Greenwald]

Just warning signs.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, and a lot of self inflicted wounds. I think that's actually where. Yeah, there's just a lot of bungling that could be avoided with a little more competence in the administration of his policies.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to America in the year 2025.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, well, it's true.

[Christine Rosen]

Works as Abram.

[Abe Greenwald]

True. But there is much, there's far less patience. I mean, that's true on the right and on the left and in general, like everything is moving too quickly and there's far less patience. And when People say things like, you have to give Trump time. That's fine. People on the right are going to give Trump time, and they will. And if the choice is between him and aoc, the right will choose. The people who elected Trump in 2024 will choose Trump over AOC. About that, I have no, I have, I have no doubt. It's not like swing voters are going to swing to aoc. That's not, that's not where my head is at. But I do think the idea that they will have infinite patience for him if they are not fully MAGA is a delusion. Because nobody has patience for anything anymore. Nobody thinks everybody wants everything done immediately. And so, you know, the right track, wrong track numbers are better than they've been in 40 years. But if things look pretty much the way they look today, in three months, they will not be where they were. I don't think so. Again, we don't know. This is all projecting into the future. Before Matt makes a recommendation, I just want to commend to everybody's attention we didn't get a chance to talk about this today. Dan Senor's new Call Me Back podcast with the two Israeli journalists, one of the center left and one of the center right, Amit Sehgal and Nadav Eyal, talking about Israel's next steps. Bibi Netanyahu made a statement right after the conclusion of Passover on Saturday night that seemed to indicate that Israel was about to make major moves in Gaza and possibly toward Iran. And since we didn't have a chance to talk about this, this is an extraordinarily literate, interesting and engaged debate over where, where this might go that I think would be incredibly useful for people to listen to. That Stan's Call Me Back podcast that was released this morning. Anyway, Matt, you have a recommendation? Sure.

[John Podhoretz]

Thanks, John. Had a little vacation. I was able to do some reading. I'd like to recommend one of the books I read over my trip. It's a kind of a lost novel by the great Donald D. Westlake that was then recovered by the editors at Hard Case Crime after Westlake's death and published as part of the Hard Case crime series in 2022. I finally got around to reading it this past weekend. It's called Call Me a Cabin. Donald Westlake, great crime writer, mystery writer, kind of set himself a challenge in the 1970s to write a suspense novel where there was no violence. And the premise of Call Me a Cab, as a New York cabbie picks up a fair, a woman is trying to decide whether to marry her longtime boyfriend who lives in Los Angeles. And since she's cannot come to a decision, she hires the cab to take her across the country from New York City to Los Angeles so that she can deliberate and make up her mind by the time they arrive in la. It is just a wonderful novel featuring some of Westlake's best writing, and there is no violence, but there is a lot of suspense, and it keeps you engaged for 220 pages as this duo makes their way in a cab across the country. And I just recommend it to anyone, even if you're not really a Westlake fan, which I couldn't understand if that would be the case. But if you're new to him, maybe picking up Call Me a Cab would be a pretty fun place to start.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is my favorite thing about genre writing, like, great genre writers. And Westlake was a. What we would call a genre writer, even though he wrote comic novels and he wrote mystery novels and suspense on thrillers and violent thrillers under. Under other names and stuff like that. But like, my favorite version of West. My. My Westlake is Ed McBain. And the thing about these writers is that they. People always talk about postmodern writers with formal challenges, like the writer George Perek, who wrote an entire novel without using the letter E, that kind of thing. But these genre writers do this all the time, or have done this all the time, which is that they set themselves a formal challenge. They write two books a year, and they decide it's just too boring to write the same kind of novel about the cops of the 87th Precinct, like the subject of Ed McBain's novel. So I'm gonna write one that takes place over two hours. I'm gonna write one that's about a heat wave, or I'm gonna write one that's about a cold snap, or I'm going to write one that takes place in one tenement where a crime occurs, and then everybody in the tenement is somehow involved in the crime. Like, the idea is I've got to keep myself entertained as somebody who writes for a living and makes money writing for a living, because I'm going to go crazy if I just take the same. You know, if I just go through the same formula. And they do really, really interesting work that is simultaneously unpretentious and actually kind of radical as a form of storyteller.

[John Podhoretz]

We have many people in the entertainment community who listen to this podcast, and I would just recommend Call Me a Cab to them because it has not been adapted into a film and I think it would make really a fantastic kind of romantic comedy around.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Well, call me. Cab Donald Westlake. Call me back. Dan. Senor. We'll be back tomorrow. For Matt, Christine and Aba, I'm John Pothoritz. Keep the candle bur.