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- [00:01]
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- [00:44]
Abe Greenwald
A.
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Jon Podhoretz
Thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
- [00:50]
Seth Mandel
Expect the waste of the bed.
- [00:55]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, May 18, 2025. I'm Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive Editor Abe Greenwolf. Hi, Abe.
- [01:07]
Seth Mandel
Hi John.
- [01:08]
Jon Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel.
- [01:09]
Christine Rosen
Hi, Seth.
- [01:11]
Matt
Hi, John.
- [01:11]
Jon Podhoretz
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:15]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:17]
Jon Podhoretz
So we do, as I mentioned yesterday when we had Dan Sinore on, We have our June 2025 issue up for your perusalometary.org if you are a subscriber, you can read all of it. If you are not a subscriber, you can read a couple of things. But you should be a subscriber. You know, you've heard me say it before. It's part of the compact between you and me and Christine and Seth and Matt and Abe that we're doing this. Help us along, help pay for it, help us go and read our stuff. Because the glory of Commentary, though I'm very grateful that a lot of you love to listen to us and now increasing numbers of you like to watch us on YouTube. As Matt mentioned, we are now over 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is in about five months, which is really, really great. But the magazine, the website, which is of course dominated daily by Seth Mandel's posts, is the heart and soul of what we do. And Christine, just for an example, you have a piece in the June Commentary up right now called Oligarchs Against Oligarchy. This is your social Commentary column. Let's talk about it a little bit. So there's a lot of yelling and screaming about oligarchs controlling America from Bernie Sanders and AOC and others. But you discern a level of hypocrisy in this assault.
- [02:53]
Abe Greenwald
Yes, I'm very glad you didn't ask me to explain those women whipping their hair around as the President was walking down that during his Middle Eastern trip, because I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Yes. So this, this in this column was prompted by a photo Spread that many people might have seen or seen snippets of on social media in the New Yorker showing fashion, fabulous New Yorkers in their living rooms, you know, important New Yorkers. Some of the, some of the portraits, the, the photos are really quite charming, but several of them feature really, really wealthy, influential left wing people like the, like Alex Soros, who is now running the Soros foundation, you know, Global foundation, and his fiance, former Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin. And it just struck me because they were very casually dressed, it was a very weird tableau. They're obviously in this extremely expensive piece of Manhattan real estate having their photo taken. And this guy funds a lot of left wing and Democratic Party causes. And I had been following the AOC and Bernie Sanders Anti Oligarchy tour, and there was a funny moment there where Bernie Sanders was found to have spent by the Washington Free Beacon, almost a quarter of a million dollars on private jet travel during his Anti Oligarchs tour. And there is of course, the standing fact that Bernie Sanders himself is a millionaire multimillionaire. And so I thought, hmm, what's going on in the Democratic Party? And there have been several academic studies recently showing what many of us have been talking about for a couple of years now, which is that wealthy people now vote Democratic. They don't vote Republican in the same level that they used to. So the Democratic Party is the party of wealth now. It's not not just the coastal elite, it is the party of wealthy people. And yet their message is very much, we represent the working men down with oligarchs. President Biden's farewell address in the White House mentioned the concerns of oligarchy. So how are they squaring this circle both culturally and politically? And I find they're not, they're in some form of denial right now. They really can't get their heads around the idea that a lot of Americans look at the Democratic Party now and go, that's a lot of rich people living in very rich coastal elite cities. And they don't really understand our problems. Meanwhile, their rhetoric remains the same, which is, oh, oligarchy is bad, dark money is bad. While they rake in people like Senator Chuck Schumer, for example, rake in, you know, $80 million in a year and a half long period from a left wing dark money group. So I tried to get at our understanding. Look, Americans have a complicated understanding and relationship with wealth. We, we resent wealthy people. We also admire them. We find them fascinating culturally, their entire reality television series devoted to just chronicling their habits. So I think that I end up concluding that the Democratic Party really either needs to embrace its new luxury brand or it needs to start acknowledging some of the contradictions in its, the way its leaders live and what its leaders preach. And this will become increasingly important in the next presidential election. Where you do have billionaires like Governor Pritzker of Illinois kind of thinking about running. This is someone of vast inherited wealth. How they deal with their own side's money and access to it and how they talk to the American voter about it is going to, I think, become increasingly important in a populist moment such as ours.
- [06:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Not just talk about the oligarchs and the politics, the oligarchs, or the weirdness of the photo spread in the New Yorker itself. Because one would expect nothing less from Alex Soros that he live in a startling penthouse with a 360 degree view of Manhattan. I mean, he's a billionaire. He's the son of a billionaire. He runs a, you know, he runs a foundation that gives out hundreds of millions of dollars of money. So that's fine. What it was most reminiscent of actually was a photo from 20 years ago of Gavin Newsom and his then wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, when she was, I I think, working in the San Francisco DA's office. And he was the mayor of San Francisco. And they were kind of splayed on the floor. She was kind of splayed on the floor of the living room and he was kind of sitting above her almost like it was a very sort of sexual shot. This wasn't sexual, but it was very lubricious in the sense that it was. Look how rich we are. And I don't that. So in that sense it was a. As they're bathing in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all good photographs do it. It told an entire story in a single image. Once you knew who they were, if you knew who they were, it enriched your sense of what kind of life all of this was and how they. And how they live and how the idea that this guy is sort of the leading philanthropist of the left or one of the leading philanthropists of the left and how insulated he would be from any.
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Abe Greenwald
Well, and a former party kid. Like, he's a former. His behavior was very much typical rich kid for many, many years. Like he'd rent these spreads in the Hamptons and there were always these New York Post stories about the wild parties with celebrities and models. But in this photo, he's. They're both dressed very casually. He's. It's Very. There's not a lot. There's no, like, obvious art or anything. There are a couple coffee table books, but they're both posed in a very. It looked to me like they were cosplaying middle class people in this very expensive piece of real estate there. It's all very much subdued. Subdued wealth, subdued power. Even though this is the same guy whose social media feed over the course of the last election was just full of trophy pictures of him with all the major leaders of the Democratic Party.
- [08:44]
Jon Podhoretz
So I want to just bring this up because, so those are the oligarchs. And then you have sort of the world of the Democratic politician who sees this as a winning issue, that, you know, we stand up against the oligarchs. So here in New York, it is primary season, not only in the mayoral race, but in the New Jersey governor's race. And there are four or five Democrats competing for the governor position. Mikey, Sheryl, Josh Gottheimer, Ross Baraka, a couple other people. Mikey Sherrill, former congresswoman or congresswoman, is in the lead in the polls. And in, I think, three of their ads, they say they, they all say they took on Trump and Musk. Not Trump. Trump stole. Trump and Musk stole $10 million from them, from us. And we're going to get it back like that. Trump and Musk. Trump and Musk. So that's insider businessman and outsider, you know, richest man in the world, and they're trying to screw you and we want you. We'll fight them.
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Christine Rosen
Right?
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Jon Podhoretz
So that's the Democratic Party's image of itself, and they think that this is selling. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren yesterday, or the day before yesterday, was walking down a corridor, asked a question by a reporter about big Pharma, and said, I take no money from big Pharma. Look at my website. And then somebody went back, and in 2019 and 2020, she was, she received almost a million dollars in campaign contributions from big Pharma. So she was the third largest recipient of money from the pharmaceutical industry. So I look at that, I look at what, I look at this of Trump, Musk and the oligarchs saying they're, you know, Democrats talking about this. And it's not just that they seem out of touch. They're just lying to people about who they are and where, where their money comes from. And there was a time before the Internet when I think you could get away with stuff like that because the funnel was very narrow and nobody really cared. And it's not like somebody would come out and say, this is nonsense. But now you can observe anybody going to opensecrets.org and seeing where your money comes from or whatever. Except for dark money. Right. So dark money, which is political money that is given, which the left raises.
- [11:24]
Abe Greenwald
More of and uses more of than the right. That's very important to note. So this is against it, even though they use it.
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Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, this is 501 C4 money, which means that it's money that is given. It's not, it's, it's, it's taxable income, all of that like any campaign conversion, but it is given to groups who do not have to report who their givers are. And so this is, you know. Yeah, and so the Democrats at some point spending 10 years saying we hate, you know, we want public financing. And all this after the, after the Supreme Court ruled that, that you could not limit to allow that the, the attack on, on, on campaign contributions, that this was a form of First Amendment speech and could not, could only be limited in minor ways. They were like, okay, well if we can't beat them, were going to join him. And they spent 10 or 15 years courting rich people in a way they had not before because they thought they couldn't. And lo and behold, not only could they compete with Republicans over money, they could best them, they could do better, Way better. And so. But you can do way better. But you can't say that it's not true. I mean, you could try, I suppose.
- [12:54]
Abe Greenwald
Well, this is the challenge for people. Look, it's the Sanders example. Sanders is a sort of earlier generation effort to do this right. He wasn't always a millionaire. He has a kind of way of speaking about this stuff that people bought into. The question is whether they're going to buy it with AOC and with a younger generation of Democrats who are coming up in the party and benefiting from these dark money groups and benefiting from this idea that, that they care about the working person when a lot of their policies actually benefit the people who give their party money. I mean, this was the whole, the whole luxury belief idea which Rob Henderson coined this phrase, luxury beliefs, you know, being against the cops, being against any sort of anything but an open border. These are all policies that wealthy people in blue coastal cities love because they're not affected by them. They can, their wealth buys them insulation from the results of a high crime neighborhood, for example. And so I think that the Democratic Party's challenging challenge will be convincing its own voters, and it didn't in the last election. Those vote many of those voters went for Trump for this reason, saying like, not just that they understand the problem, but they're not going to champion extreme culturally left leaning policies that the average person doesn't support. I mean, you can talk about trans stuff, you can talk about the border. There's a whole list of things that took Trump across the finish line this time. And I haven't heard consistency yet among people like Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris Pritzker, all these other Westmore, other people who are kind of dipping their toe in the water on the Democratic Democratic Party's bench about perhaps running in 2028.
- [14:25]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, when, when rich people were dominating figures or when, when you know, sort of the upper middle class and the, and the wealthy were Republicans almost exclusively, let's say, except for showbiz people or something who didn't make as much money in the time I'm talking about than they did now. Rich people had a real beef with the federal government and with the governments in the states that they tended to congregate in. Because before the Kemp, Roth Reagan tax cuts of 1981, the top federal tax rate was 70%. And so no one paid it because immense amounts of effort had to go into figuring out how to shelter your money from this relatively confiscatory tax policy where if you just follow the rules and did everything, you just, you know, every $.70 of it was taken by the federal government. And that's not even to talk about what, what state and local governments did. So in 1981, the tax rate was cut by 30% over three years, went down to about 40%, was then cut again to 28, has now then bounced back up to 30 and then up to 39. It's been in the 30s. And basically the wealthy have made their peace with the tax rate. I mean, they think it's inefficient. There should be cap gains cuts and all that. But the notion that what they need to do is prevent the confiscation of their own hard earned money is no longer in their heads. And what's more, a lot of the people we're talking about like Alex Soros have generational wealth. Not they're not the creators of these companies. And after the depression and all of that, who got rich and then had to contest with government taking way more of their money than they thought was fair?
- [16:27]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and this is, but then there's that other. Yes, and that has shifted. The interesting group now are the, perhaps not generationally wealthy, but, but hard earned wealthy, you know, tend to vote Democrat who do live in coastal cities. So they, they used to understand this mess of, remember the country club Republican. It was an easy villain in a lot of the stories that Democrats told about our system. Well, it's now, now the story is concierge Democrats, people who have the wealth and opportunity to buy themselves out of all the day to day hassles that the average American has to deal with. And that's where I think they've got to come up with a better message than the oligarchs are bad. Because the oligarchs are them and their wealthy party elite are able to buy their self, buy themselves out of all the day to day hassles that the average American voter and the average Republican voter now has to deal with.
- [17:17]
Jon Podhoretz
Anyway, so it's a great piece. It's a very important topic. It's an important topic in part because like I say, it has, it goes to just the fundamental honesty of politicians and political parties. And it is perfectly acceptable to be the party of the rich in this sense, which is okay, so people have concerns. They have the right to use their money to express their concerns. If they care about, you know, global warming so much, it's so important to them and that's what they want to put at the forefront of their agenda. They're free to do so, but they can't then pretend that they are really helpful to a working class guy in Pennsylvania who owes his job to fracking. Like you can't, you can't have it. You can try to have it both ways, but the cognitive dissonance is inescapable. That's, I think what the Alex Soros and Huma Abedin photograph shows that, you know, this is, this is just something that they are gonna have to reckon with because other people will reckon with it. I mean in this sense, like JD Vance becomes the non Republican nominee and 2028. And what is his life? His life story is that his mother was an addict, he lived with his crazy grandparents who done less, provide him with a measure of stability. And as Kevin Williamson wrote in our pages, like J.D. vance's book is not about being part of the underclass. His, his grandparents actually made a decent living. It was about social chaos. But he like lifted himself up by his bootstraps, worked at Home Depot, you know, got himself scholarships, went into the Marines, all of that. And he's gonna, he would be a very good voice to say, I lived in Middleton, Ohio. What do you know? What, what do all you people know? You know, and so Aoc could say, well, I was a bartender. And he was like, yeah, you were a bartender. Your dad was an architect. You moved to a. You moved to good school districts. Like, don't hand me your bartender credentials. That, that worked. That worked with idiots in Brooklyn. But it's not going to work on me, you know, so that's a, again, a real thing. And if the populist, I think the populist Americans who are held, who are governing things, they have much less resentment of wealth than I would have thought.
- [19:44]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, this is a really important point, because I think the Democratic Party elite thinks the average American must. Must hate the wealthy because the wealthy are sticking it to him. That's not how it works. They're fascinated by wealth. They admire, actually, people like Elon Musk, who made their. Made themselves billionaires. They do have a healthy suspicion of people with vast resources, obviously, but that. It's the fascination. Respect. And I do, I do go all the way back to one of our founders, John Adams, who wrote. Who I think had one of the most incisive understandings of American wealth. He, too, worried about oligarchy. And his point, though, was that wealth is like beauty. It's always going to be unequally distributed, and people are always going to admire and be fascinated by it. And that's not fair, but it is how things work. So I think that part, and that's where, for me, the example remains. Trump in his full, expensive, tailored suit, putting on a McDonald's apron over that suit and working the fryer. A Democrat would have worn the uniform or dressed down or been like, I'm one of you guys. He doesn't pretend. And it's the lack of pretense in populism.
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Matt
Or looked ridiculous.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah, oh, yeah, exactly.
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Matt
I mean, the thing about Trump is that he. It's such a. It's such a cartoonish picture that he pulls it off because of who he is. And that's, you know, anybody else would have done it. It would have been, you know, like putting on a helmet and sitting in a tank. You know, it was like that. That looks ridiculous. And we will forever remember you trying to look cool but looking ridiculous. But Trump has this. You know, there's a picture, one of the greatest pictures of his time in office is when he invited the championship football team to the college football team to a celebration at the White House. And he had, I guess it was a Big Macs or Burger King. I think it was big. The table, burgers in front, table of.
- [21:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Like, burgers in a ziggurat yeah.
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Matt
And like containers and. Yeah, it was, it was, it was like a feast of fast food burgers. It wasn't set up to look like, you know, three little sliders, a glass plate or something. It was very clearly a, you know, a sort of McDonald's type situation. Although I don't think it was McDonald's. Exactly. And then the picture. There was a picture.
- [21:57]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, I thought it was McDonald's.
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Jon Podhoretz
Oh, it was McDonald's. Totally McDonald's. Yeah.
- [22:00]
Matt
Yeah. So I mean, it was. And it was. It was. And then, you know, there's like this picture of. What is it? Abe Lincoln looking over his shoulder as Trump, like, smiles and gives a thumbs up in front of these burgers. And it's like there's so much about America in the picture of Abe Lincoln looking down on President Donald Trump giving a thumbs up in front of, you know, 180 McDonald's burgers or whatever. But it, because it's ridiculous, he pulls it off. And also because he doesn't pretend to be working class, he has the gold toilets. He loves that people know that he loves that people know that he's rich. He wants to fly in a nicer plane. And if booing can't make it for him, he's going to take one from the Qataris so that he can have a plush plane and travel and style and all this stuff. And so I think that Trump represents at the same time the, the wealth and the striving for it.
- [22:55]
Christine Rosen
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- [24:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Can use them to get right, get.
- [24:47]
Christine Rosen
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- [25:25]
Jon Podhoretz
You can get your word out like.
- [25:27]
Christine Rosen
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- [26:07]
Seth Mandel
This is a point that John made years ago and I thought was such a great point that Trump has spent ages becoming a popular personality in this alternate pop culture that the working class enjoys. You know, the NASCAR and wrestling and whatever else, you know, ultimate fighting, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Jon Podhoretz
He.
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Seth Mandel
And he shares their enjoyment of it. You know, that's.
- [26:36]
Jon Podhoretz
Who is this education secretary right now? Secretary of education was the CEO of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no, but I mean, I think also he's in on the joke, right? That's the thing. The thing about Trump that you have to remember is that he's a comic figure. There is a sense in which this is all a put on. And he tells you it's a put on. It's like love those camels. It's like he, half the time he is throwing off one liners like he's at the Friars Club. And so it's not like he's very proud and he doesn't like getting insulted. And you could say his entire political career is because Obama tried to make him the butt of a joke at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. That's what really impelled him to run. That's what a lot of people say. So like everybody else, it's like there, there, there are limits to. As long as he's the one making the joke, putting on the apron over his suit, you know, doing, you know, yeah, like bringing in burgers, like repaving, putting up gold leaf in the Oval Office, which he likes. And he wants to do what he wants to do and all that. Why can't I do it? But there is still this aspect that it's all performance and it's all a joke. The weird thing about the Democrats is how humorless they have become in their own self presentations and how easily they are mocked. So let's just take this week for an example. Next Tuesday is the publication date of the Jake Tapper Nick Thompson book Original Sin about Biden's infirmities in the COVID up of those infirmities. And all week Democratic politicians and Democrats in general have been asked questions because of the release of details from the book and this excerpt that was in the New Yorker that came out I think on Tuesday and all of that, when did they know? What did they know? When did they know? Right. And they're all, including Jake Sullivan, his own national security advisor, they're all saying, I just debate performance. It was just so shocking. I just, I can't believe that it's like this.
- [28:52]
Abe Greenwald
Can I just, can I just interrupt for a tiny mini rant? Because you described the book as about the COVID up of Joe Biden's health. And that's not actually the purpose of the book. The purpose of the book is to run cover for a media establishment that knew very early on that Joe Biden wasn't capable of this, knew it long before the debate, constantly lied about it, constantly covered up it, covered it up. And now you have these two guys going around interviewing people who they knew were all like them, understood the COVID up, pretending that the debate was the moment that they all had their eyes opened, including the media. And that gives them cover for two questions. One, the fact that they knew much earlier on and didn't want to report it and avoided strenuously reporting it and mocked people on the right who did report it and two, because they never want to ask the More important question, not could he run again, but at what point was he constitutionally unable to fulfill his duties as president as a sitting president? And why didn't Kamala Harris and others in his cabinet who knew that he wasn't able to do this do something about it? That's actually the true scandal. And this book, as you can tell, infuriates me. It is a, it is itself a form of covering up what in fact is the real story.
- [30:02]
Jon Podhoretz
So we haven't seen the book yet and I imagine, based on the excerpts. Right. And I imagine that this is dealt with in the book.
- [30:10]
Abe Greenwald
That I don't.
- [30:11]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, we'll see. But I would be surprised if there isn't. Nick Thompson doesn't need to do a mea culpa. Jake Tapper does need to do a mea culpa. Nick Thompson was covering the Biden story. And Jake Tapper has been surfaced throughout the two years that the Biden infirmity thing was a real thing, since we were talking about it in 2022, has been surfaced, pooh, poohing it or interviewing people in a poo pooing way or whatever. And he's gonna have to deal with it. But the reason the rant is great and you're probably right, and we'll, we'll see the book on Tuesday. But what, what I was, what I was, what, what struck me about this was how manifestly unprepared and uncomfortable these people, these leading Democratic figures, Chuck Schumer, others, Adam Schiff, all of that are to deal with the simple thing that they could say if they were like, sensible or honest or whatever, but also trying to say something that they had to say and say, look, we had a major concern in the idea that Donald Trump was going to be returned to power. And we were very, very worried about Donald Trump's being returned to power. We knew one thing about Joe Biden, which is that he was the one person in America who beat Donald Trump. Sixteen Republicans lost to him. Joe Biden beat him. And look where we are now. In my opinion, Donald Trump is leading the country toward. I'm in the voice of generic Democrat here, not speaking for myself. He's leading us down the road to 1930s, late 1930s Germany. He's going to suspend habeas corpus. He's going after his political rivals, and he's using the FCC to shut down free speech. He's, you know, he's deporting people, all of this. We were right, we were right to be worried. And if we, if we Aired. We aired because we wanted to save America from Donald Trump. Now, you may think that's not the greatest answer, but it's the only answer because it's. First of all, it's true. It is the true answer. Do Democrats love Joe Biden and worship him and think he was the greatest thing since slice bread? No, that was Barack Obama. For a while. They didn't love him. They didn't have, they didn't have this emotional relationship with Joe Biden. The last time he ran for president, when he ran for president in 2008, he got less than 1% of the Democratic primary vote. They were happy with him because he stopped Trump and he came in and then he did a lot of left wing stuff and they were sort of in control of him and in command of him. And they could say what I just said because it was the deepest truth about them, but they, but they're not saying it because they've lost the thread about how to be responsive to real news.
- [33:13]
Seth Mandel
In my view, the problem with that answer is then the unspoken part of it is. So that's why we lied to you.
- [33:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Right? But I mean, it's saying.
- [33:26]
Matt
But like, like, like Fauci with the.
- [33:29]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, right, yeah.
- [33:31]
Matt
Well, no lie.
- [33:32]
Jon Podhoretz
In a way, they've been, they've been cornered, right? They, they're in a corner and so there's no good answer. So then the question is, what is the least bad answer? And I think the least bad answer would be to say everything that I was worried about in the return of Donald Trump to office is coming true. He's selling the country. Qataris are owning us and we're doing this and we're doing that. Whatever. Everything I was worried about was coming true. And if Joe Biden were president today, in a wheelchair and even semi infirm, whatever the country would be, that doesn't.
- [34:10]
Abe Greenwald
Answer the question of whether or not he could in fact be the president. And I think again, it implicitly implies that Joe Biden was a means to an end for people in the party who just were worried about Trump.
- [34:20]
Jon Podhoretz
You're right.
- [34:21]
Abe Greenwald
He's actually.
- [34:23]
Jon Podhoretz
You're right that it's not a good answer. I am not saying that it's a good answer. I'm saying that it is a better answer.
- [34:29]
Abe Greenwald
Just say, you know what? We risked our, we gambled on this guy having the. Being able to do this again. It was a bad bet we placed. Some of them will dissemble and say we didn't really know how bad it was, he was being protected. It's interesting to me that they're starting to throw Dr. Jill under the bus too. You notice she's starting to emerge as the villainess in a lot of these narrat because that again, provides them cover. But I think, I think they should just acknowledge their error and acknowledge, I mean they're never going to acknowledge the COVID up. But actually the COVID up is the thing that I think voters sensed intuitively from very early on in his term as presidency. I mean, 20, 22 people were commenting, and not just in the right wing, just in general. There was a kind of, oh, is he going to be the bumbling Gerald?
- [35:09]
Matt
Majority of Democratic voters said he was too old to run again. Right. 7:1 poll had 70% or something like.
- [35:16]
Jon Podhoretz
It, 66% of Democrats, 75% of the country.
- [35:20]
Abe Greenwald
But he was, it was unnerving to watch him be president even before we were talking about reelection. That's the part that I want to see addressed in this book and I will give it the benefit of the doubt. I will read it when I that's the part where I'm like, unless they engage that question, everyone saw in real time, they are lying to their readers.
- [35:40]
Seth Mandel
By the way, the Democrats have settled on now their new best answer is we're looking forward that, that, that memo went out and that's, that's the, that's the, that's the default now to this. Well, we're looking forward, we're looking ahead.
- [35:59]
Matt
Well, I also think that they struggle with the Biden thing because why did Biden, why was Biden the guy who could beat Trump? Why did they need Joe Biden? Because he has a sense of humor about himself and because he, regardless of his station in life, he still appeals to the working class and blue collar voters. Right. And they, and they, I think that Democrats, rather than seeing that as, you know, something that helped them, I think they're embarrassed. I think that they resent what they had to do. I think that they, the act the, the, I think they don't like having to reach out and appeal to people who would like Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
- [36:49]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, you're absolutely right. Right. That was you literally, you hit the nail on the head. Not literally. It's the obviously opposite of literally that. You hit the nail on the head here. You metaphorically hit the nail on the head. Like who is it that Barack Obama was talking about in 2008 when he talked about the bitter, you know, the bitter clingers and the, you know, you have to understand, we really all have to understand These people who cling to their guns and their religion because they're scared. They're afraid of the future. So that was the condescending version of what you're. Which is the resentful version, which is what Tim Walls said at Harvard last week, I think when he said I. We all know why I was chosen, because I was. I'm white male coded. You. You.
- [37:33]
Abe Greenwald
Which a regular white male would never say.
- [37:35]
Jon Podhoretz
That's because I could talk about football. It's like, are you, are you kidding me? Like, are you. That's. If that's actually why he would. He was chosen. Of course they lost. It's the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my entire life. Because he was a high school football coach and he like looked like Homer Simpson. Like, am I, am I, am I.
- [38:04]
Abe Greenwald
Taking energy than Kamala at some of those rallies too? Like, I mean really in terms of like expressing himself and the jazz hands.
- [38:11]
Jon Podhoretz
And, you know, this guy.
- [38:13]
Matt
I didn't. They didn't like that. That they shelved them.
- [38:15]
Jon Podhoretz
Congressman two term governor of Minnesota said at that same thing that he did not sleep for weeks before the vice presidential debate because he was so terrified. Like, seriously, you. Most competitive people in politics who have a strong sense of themselves would be like, let me in there, let me add him. Let me at that. Let me at that little piss at J.D. vance with his, you know, cutesy little beard and everything. I'll, I'll rip him limb from lip. If you were like such a white male coated football player, you know, you would want to tackle JD Vance, not like cringe in your bed unable to sleep with anxiety. Like, this is where the party is in desperate cultural or emotional straits. Like they are talking themselves into an inability to speak to the people who decided that they would want to vote, that they wanted to vote for Trump or that they were. I don't even think that's why Biden won or was chosen or whatever. He ended up being the nominee of the Democratic Party because he was the only one who wasn't too left wing to, you know, to loot. Like, he was the only one who.
- [39:40]
Abe Greenwald
Democratic African American voters. He had the African American vote on his side in the Democratic Party, which was crucial for the primary process. And he wasn't the least left wing in the primary.
- [39:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, the Lee, Yeah, once the most left wing group in the party. Then as it aged and as they, you know, as they saw, as they saw white people going psycho in the 2010s, they said, you, you, you, you liberals are all you left wingers are all crazy. Like you're not. And none of you goes to church and I don't like you. So I'm just saying like that's not why he, he didn't win because he could have, because he could appeal to Trump voters. That's not why, that's not why Biden won in 2020, the nomination or the presidency. And the fact that I think Seth is right, that a, that's what they think and be they resent it because that's not the America they like. That's the America that they don't like and wish in the great replacement they wish to replace. They want to over.
- [40:45]
Matt
Democrats don't like Trump voters, but they also don't like Joe Biden voters if they're right.
- [40:54]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, so, but to the extent there.
- [40:55]
Matt
Is such a thing as a Joe Biden voter.
- [40:58]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah. I mean if the core Democrat, if the, if the people that you look at and you say if you were to draw a cartoon of a very large party, right. Democratic Party is a, you know, tens of millions of people are Democrats if not hundreds of millions of people are Democrats. But if you were to draw a cartoon of the, of, of a Democratic voter, the cartoon would look like a 37 year old guy living in Brooklyn or a 37 year old woman living in Brooklyn. Right. If you were to draw a cartoon of a Trump voter, you would draw a 55 to 60 year old white man with a gun, you know, who is watching wrestling, whose best friend is.
- [41:46]
Abe Greenwald
Hispanic, working class guy. Actually.
- [41:48]
Jon Podhoretz
Fair enough. Right. Okay. So who's more numerous, who are there more of and geographically, where are they better distributed across the country for national elections? This is the story of the Democratic Party. It dominates in 10 metropolitan areas and nowhere else in the entire United States. Ten metropolitan areas. There are 3,333, 300 counties in the United States. Trump won 2,600 of them. So the Democratic Party has to find a way to distribute itself better across the country. Right. And they can't figure it out. And they can't figure it out in part because they are living a lie. They're living a lie about who they are and how they appeal to people is what I think. And that's part of the Tapper story and part of the oligarch story and part of all of this. It's not that Americans need them to be authentic or whatever. I don't even think that's, that's, that's right. It's like they don't like the people who actually pick who's gonna be. We're gonna be our major leaders.
- [43:12]
Abe Greenwald
But I will add the one thing I don't think I included in the piece, but the one politician on the left trying to do this, and I'm not sure he's going to thread this needle, is Pritzker, who made a joke, a billionaire joke about a hundo millionaire at Trump's expense, you know, joking that, oh, he should talk to a real billionaire. You know, he thinks he's wealthy. So that, but that actually isn't going to play either. He's kind of embracing his, his generational wealth, but in a way that still sounds kind of condescending and obnoxious rather than if you want to attack Trump about not being as rich as you, I mean, that's a kind of like your yacht is bigger than his. I don't know, it's. That doesn't play either. So they're testing out different ways of having their wealthy candidates actually not pretend to be authentic working class people. But so far it's fallen flat.
- [43:56]
Matt
And they also have to play with Jay.
- [43:58]
Seth Mandel
This have to play a different game from Trump's. I mean, you can't, you can't, when you try to do exactly what the other, what you think you perceive your opponent is doing like that, it doesn't work, especially with him, because for Trump it's. So this is gonna be a weird word to use, organic, but it is his, his sense of boastfulness is organic.
- [44:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Also, if they wanna look forward, they should really look forward. Trump is not, despite all of the Narskite here, Trump is not gonna be the nominee of the Republican Party in 2028. He is the issue now. He is the 800%, you know, he is the gorilla, he's the horse in the hospital. He's, you know, he is everything in American politics now. But if you're looking ahead, you're running for the future. If you're going to try to look forward, that means stop having arguments about, figure out what America's like and see what you can say that will be meaningful to people in America. And the problem is that issue after issue after issue, Democrats are committed, ideologically committed, as they were in the 1970s to ideas about America or ideas about things that are inimical to things like economic growth, primarily economic growth, but also a sense of pride in the country. Right? I mean, that is, they are, they are part and parcel of a consensus that says that the story that we need to tell about ourselves is how wounded and pained and victimized we are by our own history, whereas everybody else in the world looks at us and says how do I get some of that like you guys, you make $72,000 a year in per capita income. How do I get there? And we're saying we were so mean to people 175 years ago.
- [46:05]
Abe Greenwald
They're trying, they're actually, they're, they're trying a shift in that direction. So the abundance stuff, Ezra Klein's book, they were, they were get the special star guests at a recent Democratic Party, you know, conference and they, and you did see the trickle down effect of that messaging in some of the Democrats leadership talking. The problem is I think again, to go to this question of what voters want to know from them, if you're going to start arguing that we should be deregulating the housing industry and they're basically doing a very free market, very Republican coded messaging now about the economy, they have to still answer the question, well, why did you give up these other policies? So what, what's changed? And it can't just be, well, Trump, because these are still things that the right is trying to do as well. So the abundance messaging I don't think has long is going to be long term effective because the other problem is that the leadership, leadership of not just the Democratic Party but a lot of the NGO complex around it are very highly educated white people, largely women. And they are going to stick with the message that you're describing right now, John, because it suits, it is their culture, it's their worldview, it's the air they breathe.
- [47:12]
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- [48:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Look, we have a really wonderful review of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson by Michael Warrenoff in the same issue as your oligarchy piece, the June issue. Go and subscribe. And he makes the same point that you do, which is like there's a very, this is very supply side ish saying, you know, we need to, you know, there, there, there's a housing affordability problem because of regulation. We need to fix that to have the future we want. We need to build more of what we need, they say. But what he says is they have no answer to how to get there. Well, they still want government to do.
- [48:51]
Abe Greenwald
Most of the work. They want government to do a lot of those building.
- [48:54]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, they say that, you know, rather, as Warren off writes, rather than shrink the size of government, Klein and Thompson proposed to make it more effective. And it's like, great. That always works. How Fanta. What, you know, you think this didn't occur to people before? There are better ways to regulate. There are more efficient ways.
- [49:19]
Abe Greenwald
But by the way, they're here to help. That's the new.
- [49:23]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, no, but I mean, it's true on the margins that there are, you know, worse and better ways to deploy regulation. But if the central problem is that you impose regulations on housing that increase the cost of housing stock to a point at which you can't build modest housing for people because of safety codes and because of zoning rules and because of this and because of that, the only thing you can do to fix it is to remove the blocks. And they're not willing to say remove the blocks. What they're willing to do is say, here's what we need and yada, yada, yada, then we'll have it. And isn't that great? And whatever hatred you have for Republican rhinos or Republican whatever, right. This week, as they have been debating and apparently failing to get anywhere on the big beautiful bill, they are grappling with this question of how much spending is too much at the federal level and where can it be cut? Because the, because something's gotta be cut. Because we are on an unsustainable path to national bankruptcy, basically. And what can we do? One of the things we can do is lower regulations to create more economic growth, because economic growth is the only way out of a spiral that we're in. If we're not willing to cut spending, we need to grow like crazy in order to forestall the inevitable moment when the government goes Broke because of entitlements. And Democrats are not willing to say that they are not supporters of economic growth. They are genuinely not supporters of economic growth. That's neoliberalism. Neoliberalism isn't just global trading. Neoliberalism is. You're right. There's a lot of. We really overdid things in some of these regulations, and we need to pare them back or slice them and all that. So the entire conversation about this, when it comes to actual working it out at the ground level, is taking place within the Republican Party. Now. It's an ugly conversation, it's not going well and all that, but at least there's a conversation. And abundance is not a conversation, it's a slogan. And then when you say, okay, put meat on the bones. Klein and Thompson can't put any meat on the bones because it requires them crossing orthodox lines that they're not willing to cross.
- [51:53]
Seth Mandel
By the way, it's a slogan that comes from wellness, doesn't it? This was like, you would hear this.
- [51:59]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, it's supposed to make you feel good.
- [52:01]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, yeah. An abundance mindset was where this, I think, started, and then it moved over into liberal politics.
- [52:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah. I mean, the hilarity of it, of course, is that it is a way of avoiding using the word wealth. Right. Abundance is sort of like a natural thing. Like, oh, my God, the soil in upstate New York is so great, produces an abundance of beautiful, you know, vegetables or something like that. It's sort of naturally occurring abundance. And we're talking about things that have to happen to get out of the way of people producing.
- [52:41]
Abe Greenwald
Who owns the land on which all that soil is being abundant.
- [52:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. Yeah.
- [52:45]
Matt
Well, it's also the exact opposite of the argument they used to make about peak oil. Right. I mean, the idea that. That. That our resources were limited. Abundance is. Is meant to evoke the idea that you're not going to. That you're going to bring about a situation in which you're not going to run out of stuff the next time that there's a bad flu season. You're not the. You're the. All the toilet paper is not going to be bought out at your local CVS or supermarket or whatever because we live in abundance. You're not going to have to be a prepper. You're not going to have to stay ahead of the curve and, you know, live in the mindset of what resources must I collect? You're not going to have to figure out alternatives for the things you use now, the things you use now you will continue using and you will have the peace of mind of living in a state where you don't have to constantly wonder how you will eventually replace the thing that you center your life.
- [53:49]
Jon Podhoretz
On right now in the end. One of the great divisions, Rich Lowry used to say this, said this, I remember on the National Review cruise right after Trump won in 2016, that I was on the old days of the National Review and the magazine cruises. And he said, I think we've all had this experience that the people that we meet who are voting for Trump and remember, Republican was much more divided then about Trump than it is now. You know, only 45% of the Republican primary electorate voted for Trump, but winner take all rules meant that he won, you know, won the nomination on the first ballot. So people weren't, you know, MAGA was not the dominating force in American politics as it seems to be now. And he said, well, we all had this experience that you meet people who work with their hands and they're all voting for Trump. From, from high end types like a, like a, like a builder to a plumber to a factory shop floor worker to whatever. People who work at their hands are voting for Trump. What, what is the, as opposed to thought workers, right, who are much more divided. What, what does that tell you? So Trump, even in the, even in the most sentimental readings of Trump's trade war and everything, Trump and the Republican Party is now on the side of the makers of people who make things. And the problem is we don't make enough things here. We need to make more things here and not buy so many things from other places. We need to make things in America and do things in America. And the reason that's a successful message and the Democrats are like on a suicide mission here is that they're like, okay, great, let's make things okay. How, what's the minimum wage going to like? How can we increase the minimum wage on that making and what are the OSHA regulations going to be to make sure that everybody is really safe in that factory and we better make sure that everybody has to buy a more expensive car to drive to the facility where they're going to make this stuff because of the problems of global warming and all of that? They're not like, okay, yeah, let's, let's try to. We agree we need to make more things. How do we do that? How do we get a slice of that pie? They don't want to make more things. They want to say that they want to make more things, but they don't want to do anything that makes it easier to make more things. They want to make it harder. That's, that's who they are. And it's not, I mean, they're not, you know, 10% of the pot. You know, they're still. Yeah, go ahead.
- [56:24]
Abe Greenwald
This has always struck me when people talk about the nanny state, you know, criticize the left for being a nanny state that they didn't. It's not the mommy daddy divide, right? Like, so the daddy is the risk taker in this, you know, ridiculous stereotype. But they are the nanny state. So the nanny is hyper risk averse because their job depends on it. And that's where you start to think about the Democratic Party. They are now the party of risk aversion. And one of the things that's been very appealing, I mean, we criticize, I think correctly, when they go a little too far. But Trump, and particularly the sort of musk doge like temperament, is very, very much about embracing certain risk. You know, it is the move fast and break things, which can end up breaking important things. But. So we need some breaks on it. But they are really embracing that. And I do think that speaks to, again to a hunger among the voter that when things don't work and we've tried the same thing over and over again, both parties, back and forth, back and forth, blow it all up or blow it all open and see if we can find new ways of doing things. And abundance is, is the still the cautious nanny, like underneath the monkey bars, you know, making sure they catch that kid.
- [57:27]
Jon Podhoretz
So we haven't said anything about Ukraine and Russia and the fact that the Ukrainians and the Russians showed up in Turkey and went to two different cities. They were supposed to have a negotiation. Apparently, one thought it was an anchor and the other thought it was an Istanbul. I don't even know who is who. Putin didn't show up. Trump is now saying, I'm going to have to go meet directly with Putin if this isn't going to work. I don't know when he's going to wash his hands of this. How long is he going to go on with this? This is a burr under your saddle. But I mean, like, Putin's not stopping the war, so I don't know why he's investing so much capital in this.
- [58:10]
Seth Mandel
Well, if in talks, Putin is stringing Trump along in one way or another, it doesn't take much. If you can just keep stringing him along, Trump will stay with this. He loves to be able to say, we've Actually made some progress. And pretty soon, there's gonna be an announcement, I hope, that I think you're gonna be pretty surprised about. But I can't say too much about it right now. And if he can say that for, you know, three more months, he will, because anything's better than saying, which will never say, I failed, you know, but, you know, he'll say, look, this was never my war to begin with. Leave me alone about this.
- [58:53]
Jon Podhoretz
Right? But, I mean, that's what he should say. I mean, in the end, like, that's the joke of this whole thing is it's almost like he can't believe. And I understand it. Like, he sort of looks at the situation. He's like, I can't believe Putin wants to go on with this. You know, there, There, There are reports that the Russians have lost up to a million fighters in three years.
- [59:16]
Abe Greenwald
Like, Russians have a very different understanding of war and its purpose than the West.
- [59:22]
Jon Podhoretz
But it's a million people and children, and they're killing children. And he doesn't like that they're killing children, all of that. And, like, Putin is perfectly, you know, maybe a child, maybe he gets the extra points for a child because it's smaller. Like, that's, that's who Putin is. And Trump, you know, so he's looking at going, what are you doing? Just get out of this. I've already said, look, if you just stop now, you'll get to keep what you got. It's very, you know, even, Even Zelensky is sort of acknowledging the inability that he's going to have to get back territory that you've taken. So it's a win. Take the win. And he's like, Putin's basically like, you have no idea what a win means to me. You know, I'm Genghis Khan. Like, what I need to see is, you know, the lamentation of the women. Like, that's. I need it all. I need it all, and I'm gonna have it all, and you're not gonna stop me or whatever. You know, it's. And so. But I mean, I do love the. I do love the fact that they went. They went to two different cities. That's. That is the perfect.
- [60:31]
Abe Greenwald
There's this very forlorn image of Zelensky sitting alone on a stage. Like, he's show up for the prom and his date has ditched him. It was very.
- [60:39]
Matt
Yeah, I like, I like the idea.
- [60:41]
Jon Podhoretz
Except his date was the. His date was the. Was the, you know, like, ugly girl that his mom insisted that he Take. Because he didn't want to be there either. I'm sorry.
- [60:51]
Abe Greenwald
In this scenario. Yeah.
- [60:53]
Jon Podhoretz
I like.
- [60:54]
Matt
I like the idea. I like the idea that if you're in. That it matters at all that you're in the same country. If you're not in the same city, like. Well, they're both in Turkey.
- [61:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [61:05]
Matt
It's like they're in different cities. He could be. He could be. You know, he could be in Dublin. It doesn't. There's no difference between him being in Ankara and him being in Dublin right now. If everybody else is somewhere else, you know, like this, it's like, well, we're both. We're both in New Jersey.
- [61:24]
Jon Podhoretz
Anyway. They could just do it all on Zoom. I mean, they don't need to be in the same room. You know, it's like. That's a. That's a. Talk about a boomer idea. They all need to negotiate peace deals and face to face. Like, I'm sorry, by the way, everybody should look at the Dispatch and read Christine's piece on why. It's. Why people do need to go back to the office. Even though I'm saying now that Zelensky.
- [61:47]
Abe Greenwald
Not every day, all day. But, yeah, face to face. The. How we get things done face to face matters. Yes.
- [61:52]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah. The existence of society needs to be reinforced at the workplace like that. We are human beings who need to see each other. Not that I have seen any of you in months, by the way. Just. But such is life anyway, so we'll leave it there. We didn't talk about the Supreme Court or anything. It's worth reading about this case because if you think this case was about birthright citizenship, the big case yesterday had nothing to do with birthright citizenship. Has everything to do with nationwide injunctions, which is a subject that we've published. Adam White has published a lot about in our. In our pages anyway, so that's. That's worth studying up on because the court is dividing in fascinating ways on this matter. Anyway, have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back on Monday for Christine, Abe and Seth and John Pod Hort's Keep the Camel Burn, Sam.