Did Biden’s Infirmities Ruin Liberalism?

Summary

Summary of "Did Biden’s Infirmities Ruin Liberalism?"

The Commentary Magazine Podcast's episode titled “Did Biden’s Infirmities Ruin Liberalism?” delves into the tumultuous political landscape of late 2024, dissecting the interplay between Republican maneuvers, President Joe Biden's perceived incapacities, and the broader implications for liberalism in America. Hosted by Commentary Magazine, the episode features insightful discussions among prominent commentators Abe Greenwald, Matthew Continetti, John Podhoretz, Seth Mandel, and Christine Rosen.

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1. Government Shutdown and Republican Fragmentation

The episode opens with a detailed analysis of the Republican Party's attempts to keep the government funded amidst internal discord. Abe Greenwald highlights Speaker Mike Johnson's strategy to pass a six-month continuing resolution to fund the government until March, aiming to synchronize with Republican control of all federal branches. However, Johnson faces significant opposition:

"Because Mike Johnson has in his conference members who will not vote for any continuing resolution on principle, he had to negotiate with the Democrats..." (02:50)

John Podhoretz adds a layer of satire to the discussion, comparing the chaotic House vote to the theme music of Curb Your Enthusiasm, emphasizing the disarray within the party.

2. President Biden’s Health and the 25th Amendment Debate

A substantial portion of the conversation centers on President Biden's mental acuity and the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment. Greenwald references a Wall Street Journal report detailing Biden's diminished capacities, advocating for Vice President Kamala Harris to assume greater control:

"We have a president who is non compos mentis and nobody is doing anything about it." (13:50)

Matthew Continetti questions the transparency of Biden’s engagements, noting the lack of in-person interactions and the reliance on Zoom meetings, which he argues obscure the President's ability to govern effectively.

3. Media Critique and the Fani Willis Case

The commentators express skepticism towards mainstream media's handling of legal actions against former President Donald Trump, particularly focusing on Attorney General Fani Willis. They criticize the media's portrayal and lack of accountability when Willis faced legal setbacks:

"What happens to all those profiles? What happens to all the Democrats who said, oh, look at Fani Willis is going to come for Donald Trump? Nothing." (47:14)

John Podhoretz underscores the lack of repercussions for media figures who once lauded Willis, highlighting a perceived bias and erosion of journalistic integrity.

4. Historical Comparisons: Nixon vs. Biden Administration

Drawing parallels to past administrations, the panel compares President Biden's situation to that of President Nixon during the Yom Kippur War. Greenwald argues that unlike Nixon, who took decisive action despite personal flaws, Biden's administration is hampered by aides managing his actions due to his perceived incapacities:

"The Presidents' aides were acting as his brain, but without proper oversight, it's unclear how effective this arrangement is." (27:41)

5. Impact on Liberalism and the Democratic Party

The discussion shifts to the broader ramifications for liberalism and the Democratic Party. Greenwald and Continetti debate whether Biden's struggles have crippled liberalism, questioning the party's ability to adapt and reform in light of internal and external challenges. They critique the party's handling of Biden's administration and its failure to present viable alternatives:

"When it all came down to it, they believe that they must be in power to do the things that they think are important. It doesn't matter how they get there, and it doesn't matter what they do once they're there." (64:53)

6. The Future of American Conservatism and Governance

Seth Mandel and the other commentators explore the ideological divide between American conservatism and liberalism, emphasizing the conservative belief in modest government intervention versus the liberal inclination for proactive government management. Greenwald points out:

"The ultimate divide between right and left in the United States is that the American right believes life is lived outside of government, while the left believes that people need to be directed for the common good." (65:29)

This ideological clash shapes the strategies and policies of both parties moving forward, with conservatives advocating for reduced governmental roles and liberals pushing for expanded intervention.

7. Closing Remarks and Recommendations

In the concluding segment, the hosts shift briefly to entertainment recommendations before wrapping up the episode. Abe Greenwald endorses the film September 5th for its meticulous depiction of the Munich massacre, praising its precision and depth. The hosts extend holiday greetings and express hope for a more stable and cooperative political environment in 2025.

"September 5th is my recommendation. That is our last recommendation of the year." (64:53)

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Notable Quotes:

• Abe Greenwald (27:41): "The Presidents' aides were acting as his brain, but without proper oversight, it's unclear how effective this arrangement is."

• John Podhoretz (02:50): "He comes out with this bill. It's not a big spending bill so much as it is filled with policy riders that then Republicans turn on..."

• Matthew Continetti (33:15): "Four more years of that. They're hiding him from people. Nobody can see him alive. And they're running him for reelection."

• Abe Greenwald (65:29): "The ultimate divide between right and left in the United States is that the American right believes life is lived outside of government, while the left believes that people need to be directed for the common good."

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Conclusion

The episode presents a critical examination of the Republican Party's internal struggles, President Biden's administration challenges, and the overarching impact on liberalism in the United States. Through incisive dialogue and pointed critiques, the commentators paint a picture of a politically fragmented nation grappling with leadership crises and ideological divides. The discussions underscore concerns about governance efficacy, media integrity, and the future trajectory of American political ideology.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

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[Abe Greenwald]

You told the police that you'd never met my son.

[Matthew Continetti]

But you had.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes.

[Christine Rosen]

Now streaming on Apple TV plus from Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuaron. Disclaimer.

[Abe Greenwald]

It was time to bring justice.

[Christine Rosen]

Critics are raving. It's a cunning psychological thriller.

[Abe Greenwald]

Something happened years ago. What exactly happened? He died.

[Christine Rosen]

Addictive and extraordinary. It's the best TV show of the year.

[Abe Greenwald]

I had to tell the world the truth.

[Christine Rosen]

Disclaimer. Now streaming on Apple TV plus.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the.

[Seth Mandel]

Worst Hope for the best.

[Abe Greenwald]

Welcome to the final newsbound daily Commentary magazine podcast of the year 2024. This is Friday, December 20th and we are doing our last on the news discussion before we take a holiday break. And we will be running shows for you that we have pre taped featuring viewer questions, listener questions and a host of other goodies. And last moment for me to ask you if you would to go to YouTube and like and subscribe our video version of the podcast. If you haven't had a chance to sample it, give it a go. If you can like and subscribe, that makes a real difference in terms of our exposure before the gigantic YouTube algorithm so that people aren't just hearing, you know, anti Semites, Israel haters and Democratic losers explaining how they actually won the election in 2024. So we will actually put you in a position where you can hear us and other people can hear us. And by us, I mean executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Washington commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[John Podhoretz]

Hi, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

And media commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Hi, John.

[Abe Greenwald]

So another day of hijinks on Capitol Hill leads to a new Republican bill to try to keep the government open this time. Reject that Trump supported advocated, which featured the extension of the debt ceiling, which I'm not going to explain because every time I explain, I start sounding like Biden trying to explain something but extending it for, you know, at least another year. And this time 20 or 30 Republicans voted against Trump's wishes. And now here Today on the December 20th, as we speak, something's going to have to be jury rigged or something to get a deal through that will keep the government open for the next at least couple of weeks. Or I think, as Matt Condetti would say, maybe there doesn't have to be a deal. So what if the government shuts down? Matt, explain why your view is not nihilistic.

[John Podhoretz]

Not nihilistic.

[Abe Greenwald]

Or explain why it's appropriate to the, to the present moment.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Embrace the nihilism first.

[John Podhoretz]

I would just say, again, my sympathies to the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. You know, this whole time he's just been trying to do the right thing. He wanted to get the government funded through March. He did not want to do a full omnibus bill that would have been a grab bag, would have cost a lot more money, and would be rightly criticized from the conservative populist perspective. And so he took their advice and argued for a six month continuing resolution which would fund the government into March, at which point the Republicans would control the entirety of the elected branches of the federal government and they could begin to set their own agenda with President Trump at the helm. However, because Mike Johnson has in his conference members who will not vote for any continuing resolution on principle, he had to negotiate with the Democrats who are a significant chunk of the House of Representatives. This is like a five seat margin, I think, maybe even narrower. That gives the Republicans control. And then of course, the Democrats remain in control of the Senate and the White House. So he comes out with this bill. It's not a big spending bill so much as it is filled with policy riders that then Republicans turn on, beginning with maga, then going to Elon Musk, and finally Trump turns on it. So that is pulled and Johnson tries to do the next best thing, which is he wants to float a bill that has Trump support. And Trump's added a demand to the new bill. In in addition to having the bill shrink in size and get rid of some of the policy riders, Trump asked that the debt ceiling, which is due to be breached next spring, be lifted until later in Trump's term. Or in Trump's tweet, it seemed to suggest that Trump wants to abolish it altogether. So Mike Johnson did that and he put it on the House floor and it went down in flames. And so I just had this image in my head as the vote was called against Johnson of the Curb youb Enthusiasm theme music playing in the background and you kind of Zoom out from Johnson standing there, say, well, I'm trying to do the right thing, just as Larry David is always trying to do the right thing by his mind. And yet here we go, we're back in chaos again. So what does this mean? It means that unless the Republicans find a way to satisfy not just Trump and Elon Musk, but now this contingent, some 38 House Republicans voted against the debt ceiling extension, the skinny CR or the skinnier CR that Mike Johnson tried to pass. If that doesn't happen, if he's not able to rally enough Republicans, then the government will be shut down. And I think that there's some thought among Republicans that, you know what shut it down. Most federal workers don't even go to the office. They're all going to be paid eventually. The way that government shutdowns are structured now, the Social Security checks still go out, the payment for the soldiers still goes out. The thing that would be most affected by a shutdown if the government shuts down at midnight tonight would be the tsa. And that could actually cause some blowback because we have the holiday travel rush. Yeah, well, the, you know, everyone loves a tsa, Right. But if they're not working, that means even longer lines. So that's the downside. The upside would be that this. John, you're muted, so I can't hear you. In. In. But can I just finish the upside before you.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes, go ahead.

[John Podhoretz]

Before you. The upside would be that the shutdown would occur on Biden's watch. Joe Biden is still the president. The Democrats are still in charge of the Senate. And so some Republicans say, well, if we have the shutdown now during the holiday season, then we can use the moment to blame the Democrats as much as our own recalcitrant members in the House. And that's what you saw Vice President elect JD Vance do last night. And what you see some other Republicans like Mike Johnson do, they're blaming the Democrats for the shut, for the imminent shutdown. Even though at the end of the day, what's been driving this curb your enthusiasm like scenario on Capitol Hill is Republicans desire to find some way to stand athwart the budget process yelling, stop.

[Abe Greenwald]

I just want to say that while I'm all in favor of parties figuring out ways to blame the other party for what's going on, this one doesn't pass the smell test, because the Democrats had essentially agreed to the original deal that Trump said that he supported, that Johnson was pushing. So it's a little hard to say that when Republicans kill one deal and then they kill a second deal that it's the Democrats fault. Having said that, I'm sorry just is and they can try it and zygos into them and let's see if the public buys it. The public may not care. Which I think is. Was the point that Matt, you were making yesterday that there have been a whole bunch of government shutdowns in the last 27, 28 years. The public doesn't care. People say things like Americans really blame the Republicans for these government shutdowns and they really did blame for the, for the original government shutdown in 95. That was a key moment in Bill Clinton regaining his footing as a political leader in the United States and leading to his reelection in 1996. But it's a little hard to say that government shutdowns, with the exception policy terms of the 2011 shutdown that led to the across the board 10% budget cut, have any practical effect on the way voters feel or think or anything, except that they don't like Washington. They think Washington is dysfunctional. Washington sucks. Both parties get blamed for it. And so I don't know how in what fantasy land people think the general public is ready to say, well, it's really the Democrats fault or, or it's the Republicans or it's like, you know, we get along just fine. Most of us don't work for the federal government. Most of us don't really like the federal government. They get paid. They don't get paid. If there are lines at the, at the tsa, I don't think people are going to blame Donald Trump for that. I'm not even sure they'll blame Joe Biden for that. The TSA seems to be in its own nether region. So in that sense, like this whole Kabuki gamut may come out to the government shutting down and nobody caring. And then you really have a kind of comic that's the ultimate sequel to Curb youb Enthusiasm, which is everybody terrified that they're gonna get blamed for something and nobody will actually pay the slightest attention. I wanna move on to the question of what the Democrat responsibility is because I wanna read a tweet from Benji Sarlin, a very guy at semafor Washington, bureau chief of Semaphore formerly at NBC, I think is an honest, fair, amusing person. Trump said in a truth, right, that if there's going to be a government shutdown, let's, let's do it now under the Biden administration. Not after January 20th under Trump. Right. So Benji Sarlin responds to this by saying it's easy to forget Biden is still president this week, but also, what is he supposed to be doing? Ds can't really negotiate until ours decide who's in charge. And if they have majorities behind them, Silver to prior House crises. They had a bipartisan deal before. And as I said, Sarlin is right that there was a bipartisan deal before. But what do you mean, what is he supposed to be doing? He's the goddamn President of the United States is what he's supposed to be doing. And I have to say that yesterday, after this blockbuster Wall Street Journal piece about Biden's diminished capacities showing up as early as 2020, and that his staff was already coming up with stratagems to deal with the fact that he could not be properly do fulfill the duties as president from the minute that he entered office. That Matt's former old colleague Charles Fain Lehman put out a tweet mentioned Charlie, our other friend, Charlie Cook of National Review saying, it's kind of amazing to think about the fact that with all this news about Biden's diminished capacity, the only person in America who is saying that Kamala Harris should be president right now under the provisions of the 25th Amendment is Charlie Cook of National Review. Now, I would say that we also would fit in this category. We have been talking about the possibility or the necessity of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from power, I think, since at least the middle of 2023. But this is a point that Charlie has been hammering and hammering and hammering. The entire political world has acknowledged that we have a president who is non compos mentis and nobody is doing anything about it. And he is president for the next. I don't. What is it now, 20, 30 days?

[John Podhoretz]

One month?

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, one month. And you know, I don't know if you know this, but, you know, the Russians just destroyed another Ukrainian city. There's a fight between Trump and Biden over whether or not the American missiles should be. The American atacms should be allowed to lunge deep into Russian territory.

[John Podhoretz]

So he is making plans, though. They just announced President Biden's last foreign trip. Right. About a week before the inauguration of Donald Trump will be to Italy to see the Pope and to also meet Giorgio Maloney and the Italian.

[Abe Greenwald]

He wants to meet the Pope because he needs to meet a foreign leader older than he is.

[John Podhoretz]

No, that's not why, John. I don't want to be cruel, but I don't think that's what he's going to be asking when he sees the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Pope, well, then he should go to Lourdes. If he needs to go anywhere.

[John Podhoretz]

There's a certain sacrament that I think he wants to be performed by his Holiness.

[Abe Greenwald]

Whoa.

[John Podhoretz]

That's all I'd say we should add.

[Unnamed Speaker]

That the, the Wall Street Journal piece, which everyone should read, has prompted an interesting response from a lot of our legacy media folks and mainstream media folks, some of whom are sort of gently hinting and even outright apologizing, like Crystal is saying, you know what? I just, I didn't do my job. It's terrible. And if you hear the sarcasm in my voice, it is on purpose. Because the cynical interpretation of why now all these stories are coming out and why I think we'll hear more Scyllas alike, mea culpas, isn't because they're acknowledging the error of their ways during the past four years. They want to get that off the stage so that they can start arguing that Donald Trump is too old to be president and that his faculties are deteriorating and that, oh, my God, what a constitutional crisis this poses. And I think that, I don't think that cynicism is misplaced because I don't trust a single one of these reporters who watched him. And if you read this report, the most astonishing tidbits include how they had to, as they say, bodily manage the president, basically get him physically from point A to point B. This, of course, also explains my obsession of the last four years, which is why he spent so much time in Delaware. There they could manage him in a very particular way, away from prying eyes, away from a press that would report much and we didn't have to hear who came and went. And so he, he did whatever he did and no one was the wiser. But the thing, the, the other little part of that story that caught my eye was a sort of defense of this that I think should be absolutely blown to smithereens. And that was this sort of, I think it was someone off the record, maybe they were even on the record saying, well, you know, we had a whole system to manage making these decisions, and we would, you know, compile these briefs. They would do all of the job of the executive, and then they would choose which important yay or nay, thumbs up or thumbs down decision. Like an emperor watching his gladiators. They would go into Joe Biden presented, and he would say yes or no, no explanation. No, anything like that.

[Seth Mandel]

And also, like an emperor, they wouldn't bring him bad news.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Exactly. Yes, yes.

[Seth Mandel]

Very important to note that they wouldn't upset the emperor.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, we heard that about Trump, remember? Yeah, the Trump term, it's like people would come and bring him positive stories and they would only want to bring him positive polls. Except the thing about Trump was that his omnivorousness about the coverage of himself meant that there was no way that he was gonna miss anything positive or negative.

[Matthew Continetti]

Even if it were true that he were sitting around watching Fox during those four years, he was seeing people on Fox push back against criticisms of him. He's always aware of what the discourse is talking about. But also, nobody for an extended period of time saw the President alive. Can we talk about that for a second? The rare one on ones that were granted, the article said they were moved to zoom. If the Secretary of Defense had to have a face to face face with the President, it was a screen to screen, which means, first of all, it obviously is not one on one. There's probably seven people in the room with Biden while he's on zoom with you people in his ear and whatever. And one person said that they were talking to Biden on a. I don't remember if it was a reporter, if it was a fundraiser thing, but that Biden looked up and said, I got to go to church. So nobody is, see, nobody has seen the president alive besides for like three people and one of whom is his wife. I'm not saying the President is alive. Obviously he is, but I'm saying nobody not being allowed. I think it's amazing that 2024, you actually can pull something like that off without the public knowing that. Well, eventually you can't.

[Abe Greenwald]

And we knew, the whole point is we knew because we were talk, talking about it really from January 2023 onward. And the thing that is not there.

[Matthew Continetti]

I'm saying I didn't realize, I didn't think you could have a situation where nobody could see the President in.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Okay, but that's. By the way, that's an extreme version of the entirety of the detail, which is that he had 19 cabinet meetings in the course of a four year presidency. Now, cabinet meetings are often photo ops. They're not like real decision making moments or anything. Trump had some pretty comic cabinet meetings where he would make people go around and praise him the table so that everybody should know that his cabinet was servile, stuff like that. But the point is that the entirety of it, no cabinet meetings, he's not meeting with his Defense secretary. While the United States is materially involved in, in the first war on the European continent in near, in four generations, he is Unable to reach him. He can only see him on zoom now. I mean, I would love to be a fly on the wall in a conversation between a non compos mentis person like Biden and an idiot like Lloyd Austin.

[John Podhoretz]

Reach Austin. So you have, maybe they were doing.

[Abe Greenwald]

Zoom from between Austin and Biden and no one even know.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, this is the right, it's kind of the blind leading the blind here where you have a president no one can see and then a defense secretary who goes missing wondering why American deters his family. Just one, one comment about the Wall Street Journal story. Christine's absolutely right. Why should we trust any of these people or give them any credit when having gone through the Biden years, having gone through the switcheroo, having gone through Pelosi saying Biden deserves to be on Mount Rushmore, Kamala Harris's joy explosion culminating in just this decisive victory by Trump. Now we get all this reporting, we learn pretty definitively that the COVID 19 virus did begin in the lab in Wuhan. And no one's questioning that. Now, the report came out two weeks ago. It was reported by the mainstream media. No one says, no one said boo about it. Then we get the New York Times saying, oh, by the way, there's been more immigration in the last four years than at any point in recorded history of the United States of America. And the foreign born population of the United States is now higher than it was at its peak during the Gilded Age. And we'll report that weeks after the election. And now we get this follow up from the Wall Street Journal, which to its credit was the only major newspaper earlier this year to call attention to what was happening very subtly right before it became impossible to ignore during Biden's trip to Europe and then of course, during the debate in June. But, so I give the Journal credit for that. But now we have this even more detailed report coming out after the election.

[Abe Greenwald]

Look, we had the special prosecutor in the Joe Biden purloined documents case issue a report to the attorney general in which he said he did it, but I can't pursue a prosecution of him because no jury will convict him because he's senile. Now, what happened to Robert her on the day that that report was released? I will tell you what happened. Kamala Harris came out and said, this report is a disgrace. How dare he? Joe Biden is, you know, Bobby Fischer combined with Gary Kasparov. He's got chess moves in five dimensions you've never heard of. Adam Schiff, then Senate candidate in California, came out and said that her was lying to help Trump because he had worked in Republican administrations. Joe and Mika went to see Biden and said he's. It's amazing. It's like having a conversation with Albert Einstein. People were lying through their teeth. That moment of the her report could have been the moment at which Democrats could have won the 2024 election. Well remember what all he's saying.

[John Podhoretz]

Biden came out, remember. Oh and showed that her was absolutely correct.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. He confused Mexico and Egypt. Yes but can I point is here that how many times are we Lucy in the football here?

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

He's been, his condition has been front of mind for people who are paying attention. Do I, do I think that Kamala Harris should ever be president United States, all things being equal. No, don't like her. I don't like her policies. I think she's a third rate intelligence and has a fourth rate temperament and I do not want her to be president. However, in under our constitution when the president United States is infirm and a process was put in place by a constitutional amendment in 1967 to deal with the problem of an infirm president. She is our vice president. She is the person who should have taken over the management of the government of this country in the wake of an obvious circumstance. And why did they keep the cabinet from Biden? Now let's talk tacless as we say.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Under the her job to start the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Process though it was not necessarily her job. Under the terms of the 25th Amendment the Cabinet, a majority of the cabinet can vote to write a letter to the speaker of the House and she.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Has to convene that meeting. Right. Isn't it the vice.

[Abe Greenwald]

I don't, I mean I don't have it right in front of me. The point is that the, they kept the cabinet away from Biden so that the cabinet would not get together at, you know, Cafe Milano in the back room and say holy shit, he can't be president anymore. There's a war going on in Ukraine, inflation is at 9% and he is like looking up at the ceiling and Jill is holding his hand and we can't talk to him.

[Seth Mandel]

Here's the thing.

[Abe Greenwald]

Deliberately kept him from the body of people who are the ones who could invoke the 25th Amendment against him. Here's.

[John Podhoretz]

I think she does need to be involved. Just. I'm looking.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay. All right. Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

The vice president and the majority.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well if the, if the cabinet went to her and said Ms. Vice President, you are aware that we have to invoke the 25th Amendment.

[John Podhoretz]

She would say, I need some time to think about it. And no one would hear from her for weeks.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

Finally she come out and say, okay, I'm ready to be president.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't. I don't think we've gotten to the heart of the real problem with this yet, which is while the. While White House aides are sort of praising themselves for this, quote, system where, you know, the emergency generator kicks in in the executive branch, it didn't work in. In terms of policy went south. Bad things happened. Seth touched on a bunch of this yesterday. In terms of foreign policy in. In a. In a post up at Commentary. For example, the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden was out there saying things about the. At the time standing Afghanistan government that was wrong, too hopeful and proved disastrous. And when people tried to get a hold of him to say, whoa, you're way out ahead of your skis. This is a bad situation. What's going on? They got calls from Tony Blinken yelling at him, and the Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster. This didn't work. It worked to the extent that they snowed people who wanted to be snowed in the media already sufficiently. Yeah, that worked. But they didn't run the country competently without a president.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, so there's two things here, which is I think that the policy went south and the policy would have gone south, that in that sense, the fish rots from the head. They were representing who Biden was in broad brush. All the policy blame for the failures of the Biden administration do, in the end, land on Biden's head. Even if he didn't know what was going on, they know him. The aides who were dealing with him and Jill and all that have known him for 30 years. They know what he likes. They know what he thinks. And they were probably, to some extent, fulfilling what they understood to be the policy as he would have wanted it.

[Seth Mandel]

But that's not a normal process, though, because normally there are fights within an administration over things like this, and those can affect the outcome of the decisions. You don't automatically.

[Abe Greenwald]

There can be fights, and they very.

[Matthew Continetti]

Specifically, were withholding information.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, okay, but that's my point, which is they're withholding information from him with the understanding that is, Tony Blinken's been a native his for years. He's been married to Jill for years. He's got this team of people, including his family, around him for years, and they're like, we've always been in his brain. We've always been his brain. So we're his brain now, what difference does it possibly make? And the American people, to their credit in some sense, were able to make this judgment based on the fact that the administration was lousy. It was lousy at what it did. It is that we don't know what, what bullets we dodged or didn't dodge. Let's put it that way. Things happen that we don't know about that he was not consulted on and we don't know what the ultimate consequences were. Was there a point in the two weeks before Putin invaded Ukraine that something or other might have happened that a more crisis managerial president on top and on the ball could have done to talk Putin out of it? It's stuff like that that we.

[Seth Mandel]

Or how about this? When Volodymyr Zelensky comes here and says, we need weapons, we need this, we need that, and we could turn the tide, we can win. Are the people around Biden saying he could be right? But this is the kind of undertaking that this president cannot deal with right now. We have to insulate him from taking on Russia via Ukraine.

[Abe Greenwald]

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[Christine Rosen]

Now streaming on Apple TV plus from Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuaron. Disclaimer.

[Abe Greenwald]

It was time to bring justice.

[Christine Rosen]

Critics are raving. It's a cunning psychological thriller.

[Abe Greenwald]

Something happened years ago. What exactly happened? He died.

[Christine Rosen]

Addictive and extraordinary. It's the best TV show of the year.

[John Podhoretz]

I had to tell the world the truth.

[Christine Rosen]

Disclaimer now streaming on Apple TV plus and the qu.

[Unnamed Speaker]

The problem I have is that I'm concerned that we will never know what we don't know. And I mean, if you look at one of the other things that they did, and this wasn't really covered much in the Wall Street Journal story, if this is one of the greatest scandals in American presidential history, the COVID up of Joe Biden's condition. But remember, all along the way they were cleaning up transcripts, they were putting pressure on archivists to alter things. We might not even ever get the full historical record, the full analysis, the full accountability that we should as Americans about what this administration did and how.

[John Podhoretz]

Much they in the entire time they're telling America that there's a threat to democracy.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

The opposition.

[Matthew Continetti]

And the entire time they're running the.

[John Podhoretz]

Leader of the opposition in jail.

[Matthew Continetti]

They're running him for reelection.

[Abe Greenwald]

Now let's, let's talk about right now.

[Matthew Continetti]

Four more years of that. They're hiding him from people. Nobody can see him alive. And they're running him for reelection.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

And I just to underscore what Abe is saying, it takes a president. And I immediately think back of the Yom Kippur war where it took Nixon, who at that, who, even though he was facing Watergate, even though he was definitely confronting the demons inside him, it took Nixon to get on the phone and say everything flies now and you need a president to do that. If you're just relying on the aids. Even Kissinger was not enough. And Kissinger, weirdly, was, like, fighting with Schlesinger over what to do. You need the President say, no, this all has to happen now.

[Abe Greenwald]

Nixon is a very good example, counterexample here, of when you don't need to invoke the 25th Amendment and your aides are working in concert with you. Even though we're talking about Nixon at low eb, The Nixon story is that Nixon would get drunk in the Oval Office, and we'd bring in Erlichman, Haldeman, and he would say things like, let's, you know. Or G. Gordon Liddy has a great idea. We can blow up the Brookings Institution or do something about all those Jews in the Ivy League, and they're terrible. And Haldeman and Ehrlichman knew that what he was doing was blowing off steam. They knew him. They knew Nixon to be a sophisticated, complex person who did not want these things done and that he was calling them in so he could vent and that they would not, like G. Gordon Liddy would have, had he been them, like, go out with a notebook and then say, the President says we should blow up the Brookings Institution. So somebody plant a bomb in front of the Brookings Institution. That's how a system dealing with the unbelievable pressures of a presidency, particularly one that was in decline, might or might not have to work. This is a different story because, as Seth says, they were running. Why were they running them for reelection? He had a perfect through line for his presidency. I'm a bridge to the future. I'm gonna run one term. I'm here to normalize. I'm here to get rid of Trump, put America back on track, and pass the torch to a new generation. He does that. He's Cincinnatus. He puts down his plow. Power is not what's important to him. The country is what's important to him. The narrative that you could see developed historically about Biden is so attractive and so impressive that you then ask yourself, okay, so why did he want to stay president? Let's assume that he thought he had to because Kamala couldn't possibly win. And guess what? She didn't. Maybe that's one thing, but the other is he didn't make that decision. They made that decision because they wanted to stay in power because Blinken wanted to be Secretary of State and Sullivan wanted to be national Security Adviser, and Jill Biden wanted to sit at the Resolute desk signing documents. That is why the 25th amendment exists is to prevent Edith Wilson from becoming President of the United States. And the failure of that process put into place so painstakingly and in complicated terms is worrisome because we don't know what we don't know. We don't know what decisions were made that Biden was or was not involved with. And we don't know what options were brought to him that he couldn't decipher or make sense of. And that's why the idea isn't, well, you know, he, maybe he can be president. It is. The presidency is a series of crises every single day across the United States and the planet. And if the President is not in a proper mental mind space to be president, somebody else has to become President because we don't know what's going to face him tomorrow. Do we know that the China balloon situation wasn't something that happened because nobody could wake him up? Do we know what the hell is going on with the drones? Do we have any trust that anything that we've been told about the drones over the last three weeks is true? No, because there's no check at the top. Ultimately, the Presidency has a check on the executive branch itself in that sense that, as Abe says, there are fights inside administrations over policy that the President is the final arbiter of.

[Matthew Continetti]

That was the reason one elected person in the executive, in that circle of people making these decisions, he's the only one that's been elected.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, but, but Nixon's the one who had to say, let everything fly. In the Reagan administration, there would be fights over budget versus tax cuts or this policy versus that policy, and they would roil and bubble and then they would rise to the presidential level. And Nick and Nixon, Reagan would make, he'd give a speech decision, he'd give.

[John Podhoretz]

A speech and then everyone know, okay, we're going to do that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, right.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And also the, the, the other problem with the Biden was the timing of the Biden administration's term, because we were coming out of this period of pandemic trust in our public institutions and in our federal government in particular was at an all time low, justifiably for agencies like the CDC in particular. And he came in saying, I'm going to, I'm going to rebuild. Not just that I'm going to be a bridge, but I'm going to, we are the adults in the room, we are going to all get together and we're going to talk to you honestly about what's going on. We're not going to tell you to drink bleach and all these other sort of, you know, ridiculous memes that surrounded Trump's treatment of the pandemic. And they very quickly made it, made it even worse in terms of the trust crisis people had because he made himself unavailable. The first story that showed that he needed cue cards with the picture of the person in the press corps asking the question and the actual question. The first time that story came out, I think a lot of Americans went, what is going on? Wait, that's not how an adult behaves when an adult's in the room reassuring the American public. And then his absolute withdrawal from any sort of press scrutiny, refusal to be interviewed, refusal to talk to the press. Cor. That should have. That was an early sign. And that really did, I think, help people understand that Trump coming back made a lot more sense in that context for a lot of regular voters.

[Abe Greenwald]

Let's go back to one final thing. Okay. One person in the Democratic Party arose at the end of 2023 to say, Biden cannot be president. And if nobody is going to say this, I'll say it. I'm an obscure congressman. My name is Dean Phillips. I'm going to run for president because somebody has to say Biden can't be president. And the people that Matt's talking about, the ones that we should never listen to again, what did they do to Dean Phillips? They made fun of him. They trashed him. They talked about how he was Dear Abby's grandson, and so he was being Dear Abby. I don't know. Whatever else they said, he did something patriotic. He offered the Democratic Party an off ramp from the disaster that it, the road that it went down in 2024, as inadvertently, in some sense, did Robert her. And the phalanx that protected him wasn't Sullivan and Blinken and Ashley Tofinetti or whatever her name is, Tofuti, and, and, and Jill Biden. It was msnbc, it was the White House. It was Phil Bump. It was everybody's court, though.

[Unnamed Speaker]

That's the point. They were the two kids who pointed and said, the emperor has no brain in this context.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Close. But, yeah, everybody immediately attacked them for that reason. They have, they had, they wanted to maintain proximity to power and the power that they wielded.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. And they're afraid of Trump and they think, oh, my God, if Biden's out, who's going to win? And Kamala's terrible and I don't know, whatever.

[Matthew Continetti]

But that's, that's, that's, that's part of, I think that's the other side to something Christine was talking about before, about the we should cast the cynical eye on the apologies for the lack of coverage. I actually think that one of the motivators of the lack of coverage is that they didn't see they, they are apologizing for Trump's victory. They're not sorry that they failed the Republic. They're sorry that they failed the Democratic Party. They're sorry that they didn't get rid of Biden two years into his term or make this switch happen two years into his term after the midterms. How the Democrats survived the midterms better than they thought they would and said, okay, now it's time for transition. And that is what doomed everybody because eventually, even switching out Kamala that late in the game. Now, I don't know if that means Kamala could have won. I mean, I'm not going to stretch this into, well, they could have saved the Democrats. I don't know. But all I'm saying, I think part of their mentality right now is that they feel that they failed to defeat the Republican.

[Abe Greenwald]

Of course. Of course the Democrats could have defeated the Republicans in 2024. I mean, first of all, history is contingent. So the idea that you can write a rule which you say Biden's the only person who could possibly be president because Kamala Harris is terrible. I mean, fair is fair. Kamala Harris lost the presidency. She lost by a point and a half. She lost by exactly the same margin that Trump lost and that Hillary lost in, you know, in the Electoral College. Given a year, could she have been a better candidate? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe policies would have been different the entire way 2024 would have gone in policy terms would have been different. Or they could have had an open primary or they could have had a real contest. Now, why do I say they could have won? Because in 1968, when the president steps down Johnson because he doesn't do well in New Hampshire, and suddenly there's a fight between Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey and Hubert Humphrey, after Kennedy's assassination, becomes the candidate of the party, the vice president, just like Harris, he loses by 3/4 of a point. In 1976, Gerald Ford has pardoned Nixon. He's 30 points down to Carter in the summer of 1976, according to the Harris poll, loses by a point, could have been president. Do we know how 2024 would have gone? This world of sort of press, media opinionizing, all of that, that that got to this place where they thought that they had to be a palace praetorium protecting Biden because otherwise we were going to get Trump is not only outrageous and unseemly for press, is theoretically nonpartisan in that way. It's also stupid and ahistorical and embarrassing, because when things change, things change. And when they changed it in The July of 2024, it's not like Trump won 500 electoral votes and 60% of the vote. He won the presidency better than he wanted before and certainly better than he lost it before, but it's not like he ate the country up and she vomited it out. That is not what happened. And we cannot go back in time and revisit this, except to say that everybody who decided that it was their job, either explicitly in the administration or implicitly in the world of liberal opinion that decided that he needed to be protected at all costs, needs to have a very long, dark night of the soul about whether what they do for a living is something they should continue to do for a living.

[Seth Mandel]

But can we also just touch on, like, the. The American public here for a second? I don't think most of them cared, and I think a lot of them knew, and I think they didn't care because they view they are so distanced from the workings of governance and they see it as impenetrably large and something that just rolls on no matter what.

[John Podhoretz]

Abe, I do think they care because we had polls beginning last year saying that Biden should not run for a second term.

[Abe Greenwald]

66% of Americans, they didn't want him.

[John Podhoretz]

They knew that there was something wrong with them.

[Seth Mandel]

They didn't want him out of office. Yeah, well, that's that. I mean, that's that. And that is the danger is that he's in office at the time.

[John Podhoretz]

It is. It is a danger. On the other hand, which set of aides would you rather have running the country, Biden's or Harris's? And I think that's a legitimate question. Ask and you know, one reason maybe he's been able to avoid the 25th Amendment option. But I would just say what I might take away from this is it's lies all the way down. And take Fani Willis, who was just kicked off the case of Trump in Georgia. I have read over the past couple years so many celebratory profiles of Fani Willis. I know everything about her. I know she's one. I know her background. I know her consumer tastes. I mean, during the hearing involving whether she should continue the court case, we learned even more about her, about, you know, her Drink of choice, how she keeps the cash under her mattress where she likes to go vacation. All of it just wrapped in a bow about how Fani Willis in Georgia is going to save democracy and all. And what happens yesterday the court decides you can't do this. You. You set up your boyfriend.

[Abe Greenwald]

Conflict of interest. Yeah, you're a walking conflict.

[John Podhoretz]

You set it up.

[Abe Greenwald]

So your boy paid yourself $600,000 through your boyfriend.

[John Podhoretz]

What so, oh, so what happens to all those profiles? What happens to all the people who wrote about it? What happens to all the Democrats who said, oh, look at Vani Willis is going to come for Donald Trump? Nothing. There's no accountability. But we had just have to. I just have to now.

[Abe Greenwald]

But there is accountability. The accountability is colossal. The accountability is the complete lack and loss of faith, right. Among a vast majority of the American people that they are being told things that they can be, that they can believe by the people who for 100 years they went to for information. And that is un. You cannot get that back.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, but then you. And then you get the complaints. But. Well, look at all the power Elon Musk has. Look at Elon Musk is. It's not concern over the democratic process, it's envy because, right. These media elites used to have that power and now they have so completely washed it away because of their own actions that it's going to someone like Elon Musk and they feel angry.

[Abe Greenwald]

Let me give you another example of that. Who do you want helping you sculpture or sculpt a peace plan for the Middle East? Do you want Thomas Friedman of the New York Times with his friend the king of Saudi Arabia coming up with cockamamie peace schemes? Or do you want the president's son in law who inherited a real estate empire in New Jersey and never did anything in government and kind of comes up with the Abraham Accords? I'm only bringing that up to say that the gatekeeping that was represented by conventional liberal opinion has collapsed so thoroughly. And this is not just wishful thinking on my part. I believe, I do think that when you say what are the costs of the. And we can go back to the Trump admin. To the Michael. The elevation of Michael Avenatti to the elevation of Adam Schiff, even though Adam Schiff is now a senator from the elevation of Andrew Cuomo as the great counter spokesman for sanity in the COVID epidemic. Trump has had a unique capacity to create conditions under which people accused him of things and then bought into shyster's con men and fools who were Doing exactly what he was being accused of doing and exposed over the course of time in a way that ballasted his position, Trump's position as leader of the Republican Party, and then eventually as a second president. The Fani Willis story is. I mean, we still have Alvin Bragg and Juan Meron to go here, but the Fani Willis story is really important because she says, I'm going to get Trump. Which right there should mean that a court should have stepped in and said, you, I'm sorry, you now, you can't. Anything that you do with a grand jury, particularly in the weird grand jury system of Georgia, is now suspect. It's idiot. It's politically driven, and you better not do it. So she did it. So they, they did these crazy indictments of like 20 people at once, right in the. In the thievery of the election scheme, saying. And then it turns out she hires her boyfriend. And then we have this hearing where she says she never asked a consultant to the government who was being paid by the DA's office for a receipt because she prefers to work in cash. And why? Because her daddy told her, wherever you are, wherever you lay your head down, you got to have 1500 dollars in cash under your pillow at that moment.

[John Podhoretz]

You never know.

[Abe Greenwald]

I thought to myself, donald Trump is going to become president again.

[John Podhoretz]

Because for me, it was a couple sentences later where she was talking about how she prefers Grey Goose. It was when she was talking about vodka brands, it's like, okay, where are we headed as a democracy?

[Abe Greenwald]

But it's important also to get back to what the implicit accusation is, that she has now been thrown off this case by this jury, by this appeals court. It is that she had a boyfriend. The boyfriend was her consultant. He was paid $600,000. If your boyfriend is paid $600,000, isn't the implicit accusation that you used your office not just to reward a friend, but how do we have any idea, particularly since there are no receipts, that you didn't get 400 of that $600,000. Classic urban politics, you know, that's. It's honest graft or not, or dishonest graft.

[Matthew Continetti]

$400,000 under the mattress, then they'll know.

[Abe Greenwald]

Wasn't even under the mattress, by the way, she didn't put it under a. Put it under the pillow. Yeah, because you needed to be able to. If you put on the mattress, you couldn't reach it in time. For when they come at you, as her daddy told her, you need that money right there. Because they could come at you because he was a Black Panther. That's why he said, you needed. She was the DA of Fulton County. She's behaving like she's a fugitive Black Panther running from the authorities because her daddy told me that was anyway, I mean, Trump, Trump's enemies. The mowing down of Trump's enemies over time is the secondary story of immense fascination because he drew the fire. He turned them into the worst possible versions of themselves and then watched as they destroyed themselves and he became president.

[Matthew Continetti]

But it was also a conscious thing. They said, if he's not going to abide by norms, we're not going to abide by norms. They said, you know, circumstances require, you know, special operations. They called into a, they called it an emergency government. Like they were like the president of Egypt or something. They were working under a, you know, a writ of emergency. And they said straight out that we'll get back to the norms when the threat of Trump is gone. Now, obviously that was ridiculous, but the main point is that they admitted it straight up. I, they, they've, this has been the conversation. They said, you know, don't come at us for norms right now. When the bigger threat, as long as Trump posed the bigger threat than the threat of the Attorney General of Maine throwing someone off the ballot, as long as Trump was considered a bigger threat to democracy than the slightly lower threshold threats to democracy that Democrats were doing to get him defeated and out of office, it was okay. And people just went along with this.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, let's, let's do one arrogance of.

[John Podhoretz]

That argument is so, it's amazing, mind boggling that let behave in this way.

[Abe Greenwald]

So, so they followed this Gulliver's right, John Johnathan Swift, the Lilliputians and Gulliver strategy, right, which was tie him down with as many strings as possible. He's lying on the ground. If you can tie him up with 150,000 strings, he won't be able to stand up. So that's 91 indictments. That's seven cases in four states and the federal government and all that, right? And guess what? He manages to break through the strings. Do a counterfactual. I think everybody believes that the strongest evidentiary case against Trump, which may have been the one that helped him the most politically because of the raid, was the documents case, right? Looked like they had him dead to rights. He had documents he had no right to. When they said, can you return them? He moved them around the house. All of that happened, right? He moved them around, gnarly, locked them behind a door. He seemed to Suborn people into acts that were potentially criminal. Now, imagine a world in which there was no Alvin Bragg, there was no Jack Smith, and there was no Fani Willis, and there was no Arthur Engerond, the judge, and there wasn't Letitia James. And the only case was the case before Eileen Cannon, who did not clearly like the case. And we don't know why. We don't understand that. There's a lot of theories she's grateful to Trump or she's a Trumper or whatever. If the entire focus of the legal proceedings against Trump had come down to that one case, the pressure on Cannon to make, to not to cavalierly dismiss it or to do whatever it was that she did, there would have been a better shot at getting Trump on that case if all those other cases had not taken place, and then we would have an entirely different American history over the last four years. Now, again, he is served by his enemies because it was in the course of that. That somebody said, my God, Biden did it too. Right? It was in the course of. Wait a minute. We better tell him. We just found at the Penn Biden center for figuring out ways to pay Joe Biden millions of dollars after he's president, using a nonprofit university institution to do that. Oh, we got these documents here. We better tell Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland. Oh, for God's sake. Now I got to appoint a special prosecutor in that case, too. So maybe it wouldn't have happened that way, but because Trump made his enemies crazy. Because maybe Merrick Garland could have known. Somebody could have known that Biden had purloined his documents and would have said, we better not pursue Trump in this case because we're.

[Matthew Continetti]

He dragged his feet because he knew. The criticism for a while was that right from Dems was that Merrick Garland was dragging his feet.

[Abe Greenwald]

What's he. But the idea that, the idea that the thing to do with Trump was to take. To spray bullet fire at him and hope that one bullet was going to take him out was clearly one of the greatest political disasters of our lifetime in terms of its net effect, because it didn't work and it got him the Republican nomination.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Literally tried to spray him with a bullet.

[Seth Mandel]

And not only didn't it work, but when you see someone staring at that many adversaries, that many gun barrels figuratively, and then beat them all back.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, he.

[Seth Mandel]

That person is elevated to a whole new level.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, absolutely.

[John Podhoretz]

Somebody.

[Matthew Continetti]

Somebody keeps reminding me on. On Twitter that at some point during the election when all this was going on, I. It was the first time Fanny Williams got into trouble. I said on the podcast that it might be time to admit that the universe wants Donald Trump to be president.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, there is.

[Matthew Continetti]

And John. John, you said, you know, for. For an Orthodox Jew, that's a. That's a very pagan sort of outlook. And we were joking about that for a while, but somebody reminds me of that conversation every so often on Twitter.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Matthew Continetti]

Because these things keep happening because he, like. Like Ace Ventura, pet detective. He keeps catching the bullet in his teeth.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Matthew Continetti]

With his head out the wind. Well, it's also to explain it is some kind of grander.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

There's also a sort of, like, I find it very funny, this sort of pop spirituality angle, too, which is everyone always talks about manifesting. You know, you manifest what you do, your future, and you believe if you think, if you act as if X is happening, it will happen. You have. You will shape the universe with your. With your, you know, abundance mindset or whatever the. The stuff is. Who's. Who's better at manifesting their reality than anyone in history is Trump. He's like.

[Abe Greenwald]

He. He is.

[Seth Mandel]

He's the ultimate spiritual guru here for them.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

But they don't see it, or they.

[Abe Greenwald]

Can'T take it, but to take. To do it in reverse. And then we can close on this. So you're saying, like, the universe wants Trump to be president. Trump manifested the presidency. How about the fact that 40 years of liberal thinking and behavior manifested Trump's presidency twice? That he is the result of behaviors on the part of the liberal establishment that put him in position to become president in 2016 and put him in position to become president again in 2024. That is what is present in the Wall Street Journal story. None of which is news to us, but is, as a compendium, a very useful way of looking at the last four years, which is that when it all came down to it, they believe that they must be in power to do the things that they think are important. And it doesn't matter how they get there, and it doesn't matter what they do once they're there, and it turns out that it matters a whole hell of a lot. Because if you're Hillary Clinton and you spend your entire life making personal deals with the devil to maintain, to achieve, and to rise to power, and then you are finally at the moment at which the public is going to decide whether or not this thing that had never happened before, which is that the wife of a former president is going to become president again. Right. Her. That behavior over 20 years, the public in the person of Trump said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. This is not the country that we want. We do not want this dynastic. We don't want Evita Peron taking over from Juan Peron and we'll take this lunatic over here over him. And then in 2024, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys, what are you doing? This is not the way the country works. You don't get to just say in the middle of July, oh, we got another. You don't like the one the president we had for you? Here's another one. And look how you're full of joy. Right? You feel joy. Feel joy. Until November we order you to feel joy.

[John Podhoretz]

It's what Neil Ferguson has popularized as late Soviet America. And I think it's recent. I think it started under the Obama presidency.

[Abe Greenwald]

It was the Greek. It was the Greek columns or something. Denver Stadium.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. It was like, okay, we have elections and one party is going to win and the other party is going to win sometimes. But then. Yeah, something during the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Then it's like the president can make the oceans recede. Yeah. But it's like, so you can make the oceans recede. We better do whatever.

[John Podhoretz]

The way, the way in which he behaved as president, especially after his reelection too, just kind of had this imperial quality to it. And so. Yeah. So now the right. Obama decided Hillary will be president and she's the former First Lady.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

It's just, it's so unseemly and so un small, our Republican.

[Matthew Continetti]

But with the oceans receding, is an Obama quote.

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, yeah, yeah. He said, he said yesterday.

[Matthew Continetti]

The ocean. Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

One was standing in the Greek columns in the stadium where the Broncos wasn't.

[Matthew Continetti]

Chris Matthews with a thrill going down his leg. Who said that?

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, no, it was John Elway's stadium.

[John Podhoretz]

Like I was there.

[Seth Mandel]

But in terms of the Trump fear that began in 2015, it really is, it's an example of almost mass scale self fulfilling prophecy. They began the moment that John Oliver joked, said, Trump's gonna run, do it, do it. It's like that, that, that hit the start button and then they all did everything they could to set up each piece to, to fulfill the prophecy that Trump would be in the White House. And they did it again.

[John Podhoretz]

So to just develop my thought a little bit further based on your excellence. Excellent point. It's the sense Obama brought to the left that the future belonged to them and this was inevitable and this was destiny. And then all of a sudden Trump comes along and spoils, spoils it all. But we're only, I only think it's this past election, the one that we had just last month, that has shaken the Democrats in the left to think, oh, maybe the future doesn't belong to us. And can I just say that is a remarkably healthy response. Yes, that is what, that's the appropriate response for both sides is to have, is to kind of say, okay, maybe the future doesn't belong to us. So now we have to think about how we can win public support, which they have not thought about since 2008.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And also maybe the federal government and the president person sitting in the White House isn't capable of, nor should we expect them to solve, you know, existential level problems. Our government just needs to do a certain number of things and the fight we should be having is at what level, at the federal level should do we want them to be doing some of these things. That's the old conservative argument and it needs to be revived in a new context where we don't see the Obamas and quite frankly the MAGA right sees Trump in this way too as some sort of savior of, of civilization versus like a guy who's, who's got a job to do that's limited deliberately by what the founder said that job should be.

[Abe Greenwald]

That's a very important point because it really does point out the ultimate divide between right and left in the United States, which is different from the divide between the right and left elsewhere, which is that the American right, or conservatism as America understands it, says that life is lived outside of government and that we need government is necessary for keeping the safety both domestically and abroad and to do collective projects that we cannot achieve individually because we don't have enough money or whatever. And we need to. Someone's got to gather the money together to do certain kinds of things. But that the whole purpose of this is to make sure that American life as it goes on is lived independent from the powers that run the elites and run the government and run the culture and that you can live a life without reference to them. Right? And the left does not believe that. They believe that people need to be directed in some ways for their own good, for the common good, for the good of the children, that people cannot be left to their own devices and that things have to be managed. And this is a very, very big difference. And the modesty and the difference here gets to modesty in the end. The conservative belief about government and leadership and all that is a modest idea. It is an idea that government needs to be relatively modest. And sometimes when conservatives lose sight of that. And I can say that I'm. We can all. We're all. Have all been guilty of this over time. When George W. Bush makes the second inaugural address and says, our purpose over the next hundred years is to liberate humankind from tyranny. And I thought, I think it's a wonderful speech in many ways, at least as a kind of statement of principle for the United States. It was a mistake, and it was a very big mistake precisely because he abandoned the intellectual modesty of the project of the right to a messianic idea about America's greatness and its fulfillment of a kind of divine mandate or something like that. And similarly, that's why when Obama came up and said, we're going to make the waters recede, the oceans recede, he wasn't totally novel. When the president, United States says, By the time 100 years have passed, no one is going to. Everyone is going to be free on the planet Earth, you sort of open the door to a world in which you can say things like, I'm the president, I'm going to, you know what? I'm doing five laws, and then the oceans will recede.

[Seth Mandel]

I know it's not a total criticism you're making of Bush here, but I just don't want to defend him further on this point. He's saying something that at least is in keeping with the founding of the ideals of our country.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

What the hell do we have to do with the oceans? I mean, you know, that's a. That's a step, you know.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, that is really pagan. Right? Yes. One is, we want to. We want to make sure that all humans are able to live as, you know, in God's image.

[John Podhoretz]

Remember where Obama was when he made the crack about the ocean?

[Abe Greenwald]

Oceans.

[Seth Mandel]

Berlin.

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Remember, Obama was not going to be the president of America. He was going to be, like the leader of the world.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. Remember he won the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his presidency.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

So, okay. So. So I'm just saying that intellectual pride. And so, yeah. And by the way, this is very important for maga. And so we've talked about this all week with this. What's going on on the Hill. Whatever the messianic ambitions of MAGA toward Trump, the American people denied them access to the achievement of those ambitions. In the results of 2024, it was not a landslide for Trump and it was not the House election did not represent a way of handing Trump and the Republicans Complete freedom of movement to alter the path of the course of the United States over the next four years. And if they cannot find a way to say they succeeded under these modest governing rules and authorities that they have been granted, they're going to look like they failed. And they better recalibrate their ambitions so that they can be viewed to have succeeded. Because that is where winning the next election is. What ultimately means that you are in the history books as a transformative person and a transformative movement. You have to score the victories and you have to define the victories as being scorable. And right now, when Chip Roy says, the Congressman of Texas says we can't add $5 trillion to the debt, what are you crazy? We're $37 trillion in debt. We can't add $5 trillion. That's an interesting thing, cuz he is obviously standing in Trump's way. But you know, it's important that somebody say that in the Republican Party on December 19, 2024, before they all go crazy and say, you know what? Trump shouldn't have a debt limit. There shouldn't be a debt limit. He should spend whatever he wants. Cuz otherwise liberals will destroy everything. So let Trump spend everything and destroy and see what happens. Get ahold of yourselves, splash cold water on your face and figure out how to govern. Because it's all, you know, it's been bad and you're supposed to try to make it better. And the way to make it better is to redefine the purposes of power more narrowly. I would say. Can I add a quick recommends at the end of the year? Very small movie, Quite brilliant, called September 5th, just out in theaters, it is one of the narrowest and most precise depictions of a major world event that I've ever seen. It is about the day of the Munich massacre where the Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists, taken hostage and then killed on an airfield in Munich during the Olympic Games in 1972. And the entire story is told from the control room of ABC Sports in Munich, where ABC Sports broadcasting the Games is suddenly finds itself in the middle of the biggest news story the world has ever seen. It turned out more people watched the unfolding events there than had watched the moon landing. And how these people who are not reporters, they're sports journalists and they're technicians, what they have to do to figure out how to tell the story as it's going and the mistakes they make, including figuring out at one point that the images that they are broadcasting of the Munich police trying to figure out how to Save the Hostages are being watched in real time by the terrorists on TV in the Olympic Village, stuff like that. It is a precise. It does not make large points. It's a very precise, very small scale, very modest movie, but very brilliant and I strongly recommend it. Also, it's only 90 minutes long. And when was the last time that anybody said, you know what, aside from a bad kids movie, you know, this movie, it's really Good. It's only 90 minutes long. So September 5th is my recommendation. That is our last recommendation of the year. And we will be back with more recommendations in 2025. So four, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, wonderful New Year, and all good things. And we all do. And let us hope for a better year in 2025 than in 2024. We deserve it. The world deserves it. America deserves it. Israel deserves it. The Jewish people deserve it. Our children deserve it. And maybe we'll get it. Who knows? So, for a mattress, Seth and Christine. I am John Pod Horitz. Keep the camel burn.