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- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
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.
- [00:21]
Abe Greenwald
The worst, hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, April 4, 2025. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:41]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:42]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today, Commentary contributing editor, host of the Breaking History podcast and contributor, columnist, staffer at the Free Press, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
- [00:53]
Eli Lake
Thank you, John.
- [00:55]
John Podhoretz
You are very welcome. Going to begin today with a treat. The treat is I've been telling you for several months now that you needed to Sign up@comMENTARY.org to become a daily subscriber to Abe Greenwald's newsletter. Produced in the afternoons and yesterday, Abe wrote, I think, his best, or one of his best, that sets the extraordinarily dramatic events of yesterday and the day before yesterday in stark relief in historical terms. So we're going to begin today with Abe reading yesterday's Abe Greenwald newsletter. So, Abe, take it away.
- [01:43]
Abe Greenwald
All right. It's titled Shock Treatment. By my count, the US has been rocked by 10 seismic shocks since the turn of the century. 1. The attacks of 911 2. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 3. The 2008 financial crisis 4. Donald Trump's first election. 5. The COVID 19 pandemic 6. The George Floyd woke revolution 7. The January 6th attack on the Capitol 8. Joe Biden's cognitive impairment in office. 9. The rise of pro terrorist mobs in the United States. 10. Donald Trump's second election. If Trump persists in his effort to undo global free trade, that will be the 11th. People will complain about it and argue against it, but we're already accepting it as a new fact of life. Americans have become so oriented to disorientation that nothing stirs genuine astonishment, let alone awe, in us. And we don't really expect to get back to a calmer, more predictable world, do we? Because beginning with 9, 11, each shock made the next one less, not more shocking. This partially explains why there was no organized resistance to Trump when he took office in January. And it also accounts for his swinging for every fence immediately, all at once. If you're someone who wants to reshape the world, this is the time to act. Reality has never been more malleable. We don't know what type of earthquakes will hit before the end of the day, but whatever they are, they're not likely to blow anyone's mind. We're kind of numb, in fact, like daredevils who don't feel alive without risking death. There are whole constituencies in America now trying to summon ever more outlandish and totalizing experiences, just, I think, to no shock again. They want fresh conspiracies on an endless loop. They want UFOs to land. They want their ayahuasca visions. They want children with autism to be telepathic. They want AI to become super AI. They want to age in reverse. They want to merge with the Internet once and for all. They desperately want to be awed. Because once you've gone through the looking glass and lived in Wonderland for a few years, Wonderland becomes just another place. The rest of us, no less fancifully want to return to a more coherent reality. Was there ever such a thing? It's fashionable to say there wasn't. Stoics will tell you that the country was always more vexed than you remember, and that you're just suffering from a nostalgic delusion. But they're wrong. Between the end of the Cold War and the attacks of 911 to take one stretch of time, things made more sense. The country was wildly imperfect in myriad ways, and there was no shortage of serious scandals and and wars did rage overseas. But even major events were of a scale that matched our ability to reckon with them. Horrors such as the Oklahoma City bombing were, in the end, discrete incidents. Look at the list at the top of this letter and consider the new tariff regime. These have unpredictable consequences for all of us, and we're unable to do much, if anything, about them. For some, the only thing to do is be vigilantly suspicious, and Americans are now suspicious of everything. Media, government, neighbors, you name it. There's a trust crisis in America because the ground has been shifting under our feet for a quarter century. Distrust is how one acclimates to a world of perpetual upheaval. With each blow, we grow more numb, more delusional, and less trusting. Here we go again.
- [05:21]
John Podhoretz
Remarkable piece of writing and beautifully read. And I think it sets in context this question of whether or not Trump is going to get what he wants out of the big beautiful tariff or whatever, whatever he is calling it, or whether he's already gotten it, that is to say, he has a reset the world order by fiat, and that now the great fear, I would say, of liberal commentators, even some conservative commentators, is that simply by opening this door or by making this pronouncement, which could be walk back, or the emergency powers that he has asserted give him the authority to do this Unilaterally, rather than Congress actually setting tariffs, will be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or something like that. We've walked through the door. We've crossed the Rubicon. The United States has, has announced its intention to upend the post war economic order that we worked so laboriously to try to help establish. So, Seth, how do you think that we are in a revolutionary period now that we've built up over this 24 years that Abe lays out from almost 24 years, from 9, 11 until the present, and that all of that was a kind of prelude to what Trump has broken through here?
- [07:04]
Seth Mandel
In a way, I think also, I mean, for sure, it's like, you know, medication or something that your body learns to metabolize faster. Right. There's no question that there's some sort of drug effect like that. And I think that ties into it because the drug is attention. Right. Our attention spans throughout this period have been shaped also in a different way. And it's unlikely that people's attention spans can ever go back to what they were. Right. So that facilitates more of these disruptions, I think, precisely because you become more inured to them. But the, the, the, the thing that concerns me about all that is that, you know, as Abe writes, there actually was a normal time not that long ago. You know, it's false, as Abe says, to say that there was no baseline normal period. And so we thought that that period was a sort of, you know, new normal. And instead, you know, the end of the Cold War, the sort of the peace dividend, as Bill Clinton said it, where we started to care about things that were less important than whether we're going to all die in a nuclear holocaust, ended up being an interlude and not the new normal it was. And it was, it was supposed to return us from this crazy 20th century, which was also not supposed to be the new normal. Right, whatever. So I think now we're in a battle with the whole idea of what's normal, because looking back, you know.
- [08:48]
John Podhoretz
Right, Eli. So your podcast, Breaking History attempts to retell incidents or moments of the last, say, three generations to remind people of the craziness that has overtaken America at certain periods. And a lot of what you talk about does not entirely conform with Abe's idea that there was once a recognizable reality in the 90s that somehow came to an end in 2001. You have a podcast about how Oliver Stone, a movie, as a conspiratorial movie director, effective, effectively changed and created and kept going for another three generations or two generations. The JFK conspiracy theories that had started to quiet down before he released his movie. You have the story of San Francisco in the 1970s and another podcast, your current podcast is about the effect of a single academic, Edward Said, on the entirety of the way in which America and the west study the Middle east and the east and how that has had a actual open effect on behavior on campuses that led to the Tentifada encampments that Abe. The pro terrorist protests on campuses Abe mentioned. So I would just say going back, and I wonder if that again, maybe this has a deeper root than 9 11. Because when I think of the 90s, and I do think, okay, well, you know, we had this unprecedented prosperity. We had a peace dividend. We were able to, you know, shrink, shrink the military. We got rid of a lot of nuclear weapons. We, you know, we were living through a kind of what seems to be an Arcadian moment, but at the same time we had the United States watching. And as a man whom we saw fleeing the cops in a Bronco on the LA freeway because we all knew, everybody in America knew that he had murdered his wife and killed a delivery guy from a restaurant, slashing, almost slashing his head off, was acquitted of murder by a black jury because he was, effectively because he was black. And we saw a president of the United States go in front of the American people and, and lie straight up about having been caught dead to rights, having had an extramarital assignation or a relationship in the Oval Office. And I would submit that those two events, you couldn't have Donald Trump without Bill Clinton saying, I did not have sex with that woman. So even though that was almost 20 years earlier than Donald Trump's election, but nonetheless does this, what do you think of this timeline?
- [11:37]
Eli Lake
I agree it's a really brilliant piece of writing and it's really thought provoking. So bravo, Abe. It's, you know, all the reason to subscribe to the newsletter as I do. I would say that it though I think I would point to 68 to 1980 as a similar moment of unraveling. So 68 is the year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are murdered. It's the year of the Paris, you know, sort of three months of revolt and anarchy in France. It's the year of the Prague Spring. And then you have the 1970s, which, you know, you have kids running away, you have the rise of cults, you have stagflation, you have Watergate, you have lots of attendant corruption and you have a domestic terror issue that's very similar to what we've experienced after 9 11, although not on the same scale. So like things that we don't even remember, like the 1975 kidnapping and hijacking of an airplane of the entire OPEC conference, it's just. That's like a small example. There were two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford in 18 days. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, the country seemed crazy in the 70s, and then the American people had the good sense to elect Ronald Reagan. And I felt like the country was seeming totally crazy in the last eight years or so, or maybe even 10 years, if you kind of look at the cultural trends. And instead of electing a Reagan figure, we elected like an anti Reagan figure who didn't believe in any of the things that were the underpinnings of our prosperity and security and thought that was all a ripoff. Now, it's important to analyze that on. It's important to steel man that argument, even though I don't agree with it and not just to dismiss it as economic illiteracy and kind of the full ravings of a mad king. I mean, because Trump is speaking for a real constituency of Americans who felt that the prosperity experienced by the coasts, that globalization, you could say made possible, had just devastated a way of life for lots of people who are living in the middle of the country. I don't think that tariffs will bring back the factories. I don't think anything can bring back the factories. And that world where, you know, auto workers in America were able to kind of have an opportunity to send their kids to college and experience like this kind of. I don't know how you, how you're going to. You can't go back in time. But it's also fair to say that the people who were making the promises of neoliberalism follow through and not enough attention was paid to the, you know, what things were like in Flint, Michigan, and these communities that were devastated in Ohio and other places like that because those jobs never came back. And the new lives, the new communities were terrible for a lot of people and I think correctly caused resentment. Now, the correct thing to do would be to sort of say, all right, how do we, you know, okay, how can we, how can we get. What's, what's the new thing that can bring prosperity to these, to this, to this region? How do we think about that? Instead, what we have is, you know, I mean, we have. We have a president who, in my view, is reaping the whirlwind. I also appreciate what you said, John, which is that it may be reversed. He is capricious. We have seen things in Congress. There was a statement I saw from Chuck Grassley that said that Congress had to approve in 60 days all the new tariffs. So that's a, that's a hopeful sign because in the same period that you've described Abe, of these shocks to the system, Congress has neutered itself, which is something the founding fathers did not anticipate, that there would be a branch of government that would not assert its rights.
- [16:04]
John Podhoretz
You know, it's not just, it's not just the tariffs, though. The tariffs are, I think, the thing that really could have been the Trump going way too far over his skis in terms of the assertion of executive power. And there's a lot of controversy about this. But, you know, in a, in a courtroom yesterday afternoon, a judge that I assume is a, I know is a big liberal and has a daughter who works for, you know, the immigration causes and all that, who was the person seeing, overseeing the case about the deportation of people on planes to El Salvador humiliated a Justice Department official under, under Trump with a, you know, apparently an unbelievably devastating series of questions about what happened when he issued an order saying that these planes that were deporting people without, without what he believed to be due process, that how was that order delivered to the administration and received? And who decided to ignore the order, number one. And number two, what were the, what are the genuine constitutional grounds for using the Alien enemies Act of 1798 to override more common understandings of, of, of, of due process? And from what I can tell, and I know I'm reading liberal accounts of this or something like that, he basically cut the guy's head off. I mean, he, he basically said, you have a, this administration has a real likelihood of losing this argument, this case, this constitutional argument and the procedural case and being held in contempt and all of that. Now, that is a fight that the administration may want to have on immigration because it is, it is, it is very much, the American people are very much with it on the idea that this has gone too far and has to stop. And most of these people are members of a terrible gang and they don't deserve anything but our scorn and our deportation and they can be in jail forever and we don't care. Nonetheless, if they can't make it stand up that they did it in a way that is legal, they're going to be hit hard and they're going to be slapped down. The Supreme Court is not going to find in their favor in My view. And then secondarily, as Nellie Bowles shows in her as usual, brilliant morning newsletter TGIF this morning, I didn't know this. There is a Gallup poll on trade and the American public's attitude toward trade. And around about 2011 or 2010, 2011, the idea that exports were good for the American economy and promoted economic growth or were bad or I mean, the free trade was good for economic growth or bad for economic growth, those numbers were pretty close to being 50, 50. And right now, in 2025, according to, according to this Gallup chart, 81% of the American people believe that free trade is good for economic growth and 14% of the American people believe it is bad for economic growth. So unlike the immigration.
- [19:30]
Seth Mandel
And can I add something about why that's so important? Because I was probably, you know, 10 years ago or so, but I remember I wrote a piece at Commentary, you know, probably a decade ago, a post about. It was during the election, it must have been during the Romney Obama election. But it was about the GOP and free trade. And it was the, the, I had shown several charts and trends and the thing that came out about it was that when there is a party leader running for president, they tend to be more protectionist. Ish. And they tend to bring the public along with them. And so if you followed the numbers, you saw the GOP try to get back to like a basically pro free trade. And I'm talking about GOP voters, not people in Congress. I'm telling you, this is these are polls. You know, what you saw was that people could be pulled along very easily by party leaders. This is significant because it's the opposite of that. The thing that used to happen was each party would run somebody for president as a challenger. And when that guy was a challenger, you know, when the other side had the White House, the challenger would be more protectionist because he would say, are you really profiting? You know, is your life better for you than it was four years ago, all this other stuff? And it would pull people along. And Trump did that for a while, I think, with NAFTA and some of the other trade stuff. But Obama, if you remember, Obama ran in 2008 complaining about NAFTA. And then his top economic adviser went to the Canadians privately, it turned out, and said, well, he doesn't really mean it. You know, he's not really going to do it or whatever. But even if you don't mean it, if you were running for president as an outsider, you ran as a bit of a protectionist and when Obama did that, Democrats became more protectionist. And then, you know, there was the rise of Trump and Republicans became more protectionist. And what's happening now is significant because it shows that there's actually a backlash within Republican circles on opinion on that, that Trump is having the opposite effect now, that people within his own coalition think he's gone too far. And that's unusual.
- [21:45]
John Podhoretz
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- [23:22]
Abe Greenwald
There'S some effect here of kind of similar to when people were polled about the importance of protecting democracy and you had people on the right who said yes, it's important. But they were saying it not for the reasons that liberals thought. So they were saying, yeah, yeah, you know, we have to protect democracy from liberal overreach and lawfare and two tier judicial system and all the rest of it. I'm wondering if there aren't protectionists or protectionist types who now because remember Trump called what day, what day? Wednesday. Liberation Day. If they're not saying free trade is, is important, what we've had isn't free trade. It's been a, it's been a rigged system where we, where we've been fettered. We're going to get back to free trade. You're On. You're. You're muted, John.
- [24:28]
John Podhoretz
You're right. Here's how Gallup phrases it, because you. You may be onto something here. What do you think foreign trade means for America? Do you see foreign trade more as an opportunity for economic growth through increased U.S. exports or a threat to the economy from foreign imports? And this number, this is before what happened this week. 81% say increased opportunity, 14% say threat. So I suppose that you could say that that means that in theory, if you can, this is not a growth through increased US Exports. So, yeah, you could say maybe Trump captures some of that, because what he's saying is we want to build our export market, right? That's what. That's supposedly. That's what this is all about, is we kill. We. We don't buy anything from them, and they have to buy everything from us. Therefore, the trade deficit disappears. We. We make Madagascar. You know, we make Thailand buy our mangosteens, even though we don't. We don't grow mangosteens by putting a giant tariff on their mangosteens. Right? So, but I mean, in theory, if you had a domestic mangosteen market and you put a huge tariff on it, maybe Americans would buy domestic mango. Not that there are a lot of Americans buying mangosteens, which are not what they sound like anyway. They're a kind of fruit. Well, they sound like kind of fruit, but it's a weird kind of fruit. It's not a mango from, you know, from. From. From the Caribbean. Anyway. So, yeah, maybe this is a vaguer fact, but that Americans feel positively about trade as opposed to negatively about trade means that Trump is. Is fighting a headwind. However you slice it, maybe they would be more inclined to support him, and therefore Republicans will be more inclined to say, yeah, he's fighting to make trade good, better, to make it better, to make it healthier. But I don't know. I really don't know. And I don't think Americans care about the details that much, or they know that the tariff schedules are bananas. And we're, you know, we're. We're punishing Lesotho, which has no domestic. Is not importing anything here, is importing T shirts here or something like that.
- [26:57]
Seth Mandel
Like, McDonald island has been tariffed, right.
- [27:00]
John Podhoretz
And all of its four goats right now. People aren't gonna. People aren't gonna, like, look in the details the way we are gonna look in the details. But there. There are these things, right, that people.
- [27:10]
Eli Lake
Are gonna notice when people are going to notice when we have much more inflation. People are going to notice when their purchasing power diminishes and people are going to say, you ran on in the inflation issue. Donald Trump, what are you doing?
- [27:25]
John Podhoretz
Look, I agree that every rule of sort of like logic and you know, sort of not that there are economic laws, but economic laws being common sense as laid out by Adam Smith and others who simply applied the benefits of reason to how people do business with each other, that, that all of that is going to happen. But let's not even presume that there'll be an inflationary spike. Let's just leave that to one side here. Here's what they know. It's going to be more difficult to buy things possibly it's going to get more complicated and their 401ks right now, this week. So, you know, as, as we, as we're, as we're taping this, the Dow hasn't opened on the markets, haven't opened on Friday here in the United States. Dow futures are again down by more than a thousand points. As I'm speaking. Dow went down 15, 1600. We're talking now about a 10%, we're talking about almost certainly 7 to 8% correction, maybe even a 10% correction by the beginning of next week. And you know, 140 million, I know it was at one point, 140 million, maybe 200 million people in one way or another are in the market in some fashion or other in terms of 401ks or how their businesses are invested and all of that, like, that's an instant hit. That's not even like what's going to happen down the road when they want to go buy something because that's not even going to start happening until next week.
- [28:55]
Abe Greenwald
And it's also very interesting moment because it clarifies this. There's this sort of fallacy among populist class warfare types where they think, oh, I don't care about the stock market. The stock market's this thing, it's this beast full of rich people. I'm talking about regular people. And as John's saying now, no, no, no, no, no. It's, you meet what you merge with it at some point here and if something bad happens to it, it's going to happen to you.
- [29:32]
John Podhoretz
That's a lot of people who actually have money in markets, meaning they don't have it in their mattress. So it means that it's dynamically affected by larger economic trends. Either they, you know, they're in a 401k or they have a little money in a mutual fund or again, like that they work for a business that depends on, on its stock market price being healthy for it to continue to employ them. There's a lot of different factors here and this, yeah, this kind of bizarre poo poohing of the importance of that. I also agree markets are transient and you can't make long term economic policy based on whether or not you can make sure that the market will be up or down. As everybody I know who does this for a living says, you can't time the market. Don't think about buying things that way, don't think about selling things that way. You know, the best thing you can do is a long term hold in a lot of cases, unless you're a really, really, really, really sophisticated investor playing, you know, like at a craps table, playing 10 different bets at once. And, and, and people are going to be hurt by this immediate, instantly, immediately this week, next week, you know, like you look at your portfolio, look at whatever you have, and it's down 10% where it was up where it was over here and now it's down here. And, and so that's, that's a, that's a, that's a real effect. But I don't want to again, like get back into the sort of the, the gyrations of the moment because I do think this question is, did this become possible? This is sort of Trump's greatest desideratum. But was, to what extent was this kind of radical move? Is it, as your, as your newsletter suggests, the culmination of a period of time in the United States in which people now believe that there is always a story under the story and a story behind the story, and that there's someone to blame who is getting off scot free, so that in this case it is rich people or it is our terrible policies that empower foreigners at the expense of Americans or something like that. That explains why we have trade deficits as opposed to the fact that we have trade deficits because of a theory promulgated 200 years ago by David Ricardo that there is such a thing as comparative advantage and that the thing to do is to buy a good from the place where it is cheapest and to maximize the goods that you produce that are of most value to other people. So that you don't waste your time growing things or making things in a cost and effective way. You get them from other people for whom it is cost effective and you sell them the things that you make in the most cost effective way. That's literally free market thinking 101 from 1805, from David Ricardo. And here we are 20 years later, and we are basically throwing it out the window. But even Paul Krugman, by the way, won a Nobel Prize for basically rewriting David Ricardo. And people seemed not to know that that was what he was doing. He won his Nobel Prize for praising and explaining comparative advantage in the globalized economy. Not that anyone should ever cite Paul Gregman about anything, but nonetheless, I just think it's an interesting fact, but even.
- [33:19]
Abe Greenwald
Free market thinking 101 is more counterintuitive than they're ripping us off. We're going to stop it. And, you know, Trump harnesses every intuitive argument, false or accurate. You know, the Republicans do generally right now. I mean, that's, you know, sort of something that's been going on. It's been the Democrats and the liberals who have, you know, been applying their academic theories and, you know, tinkering with the, with our social lives and with the culture and the whole Trump thing, the whole MAGA is just saying, no, no, no, stop. It's simple, it's checkers. And this, I think, is another manifestation of that kind of thinking.
- [34:10]
Eli Lake
Can I say there's another element here. Trump was correct in 2016 and in his presidency that we had not taken the real threat, the full spectrum of the threat from China seriously. And I, you know, who knows, There are many reasons why people vote for candidate, but you have to assume some of them might have been because people agreed with him that, you know, the presidents from both parties didn't do enough to look at the long tail and the long term effect of bringing an authoritarian communist system into the global market. And not just from a trade imbalance, but from a national security perspective. Well, what is one of the first implications of Liberation Day? China, Japan and South Korea are in talks on how to retaliate against America. Talk about undermining any strategic policy about containing China. That's your evidence right there. Donald Trump is somebody who has, I think, correctly talked about the horrors of a nuclear war. He has something he has, you know, talked about his uncle, you know, knew about nuclear weapons. It's something that he claims to care about. What is the effect of proving to the world that we are an entirely unreliable ally who will go back on our word and not even keep our promises on, like how we were going to do the tariffs, let alone Ukraine and Zelensky and all of these other things? Well, the effect is that Poland says it wants a nuclear weapon and probably the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and who knows who else. Japan maybe will want nuclear weapons. So we're going to have more nuclear states in the medium term as a result of this new Trumpian American for America first policy. These are huge deals and he owns these mistakes and that he's not even getting at the constitutionality of his assertion. Now. That was made possible by other presidents and Congress and lots of other things. But I just, I have to wonder like, I mean, obviously some people must have said, wait a second, what are you doing? It's notable that Scott Bessant apparently wasn't involved in the final sort of making the new Treasury Secretary. Yeah, the treasury secretary. So I mean, I'm just kind of dumbfounded. I'm not ready to join the bulwark. But.
- [36:55]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's, you know, in 2007, that was James Mann's. James Mann, the foreign policy writer was his. He wrote a book called the China Delusion. Maybe the China something. The China. Hang on, the China Fantasy. James Mann wrote a book called the China Fantasy. And his concept was that we believed that bringing China into the global economy would, and to, you know, all these international organizations would integrate them into the post Cold War democratic order, you know, the end of history. And James Mann's book was the, the concept that he talked about was reverse integration. That what might happen instead is that China will integrate the rest of us into a Chinese led order. Meaning that people will see that China didn't have to become a democracy in order to, you know, have, you know, in order to improve its economy. They'll see that China didn't have to become a democracy in order to be integrated. Right. If you want to join the European Union, you have to be a democracy in some fashion. If you want to join NATO, you have to have civilian control of the military. Right. All these Western organizations there are democratic baselines to join, but the economic ones there aren't. And so we, by pulling China in the economic ones we said politically they'll also liberalize because people will see, you know, it's like, you know, it's like looking at our soup, you know, Boris Yeltsin looking at our supermarkets or something like the Chinese people will see that prosperity lies in the Western way. And instead what happened was people saw that China had sort of figured out a life hack. There's a shortcut, you don't have to democratize. So what we're seeing is sort of the, the tail end of that, which is the reverse integration. And I don't know if, I don't know how you undo that at all. Well, what if that's a permanent state.
- [39:08]
John Podhoretz
What'S important about that set of observations is that the, the delusion that simply admitting an authoritarian to totalitarian country into the community of relatively free trading nations would have such an overwhelming effect on them. Country born or marinated in a totalitarian ideology was a delusion based on a fundamental misunderstanding which is that the economics is the driving force of everything. Whereas we had seen in the Far east in particular in Taiwan, in Japan, certainly many ways, and in South Korea though these were top down economies in many ways with giant conglomerates and government industrial policy and all of that. But that these countries were not ideologically authoritative, were not ideologically driven to the idea that a cadre at the top needed to control everybody's life from stem to stern. That was just how things had developed and that, and that they could move from authoritarianism to democracy or something resembling democracy or whatever, in part because it was beneficial to the public. China, this was an, this was a different, this was a, the delusion was that you can liberate China and that, you know, in the yada, yada, yada way, it would somehow surrender all of its, somehow its DNA would be morphed into a freedom loving DNA because freedom is in our souls and our breasts. And it, you know, could have happened except that, except that Xi Jinping decided in 2015 that the thing to do was to make China communist totalitarian country again after 30 years of loosening right like that. That was a political decision that was made by the leadership of China to consolidate its gains and then to decide to use its internal authority to crack down on its population, to make it, make sure that it understood that the national purpose was to get rich for a reason which was to become a dominate, if not the dominating force, not only in its region, but possibly to be the great adversary to the United States. Now Trump kind of understood that and kind of doesn't understand it. Like he is not interested in, in going after China's power to rebalance the world to make sure that China is not really. He doesn't like it because it makes too much money from us. Not because we need to stop them, because they're building a military and they're going to try to take over Taiwan and they're turning the South China Sea into their private lake. And therefore they will threaten Australia and they will threaten New Zealand and they might threaten South Korea and Japan in two generations, but because they sell us things and we buy them and then we have a trade deficit with them. And that's not Fair. And that's the worst argument. I mean, it's not the worst argument, maybe if you're, like making a bumper sticker, but it's the worst argument if you want to make something sticky over time, because then you do have the people going, well, I don't know. I don't want to pay $1200 for my flat screen TV. I don't want to.
- [42:47]
Eli Lake
That's the great Dave Chappelle joke. I want to bring those jobs back here. He's like, I don't want to make iPhones. I don't want to make sneakers. I want to wear sneakers. I don't want to. I don't want to make Nikes. I want to wear Nikes. Yeah, but so important. But he doesn't even. That's not even true, though, because America did benefit from the fact that China managed to sort of, you know, turn a population of peasants into something resembling a middle class. And that opened up a huge market for us and the rest of the world, and everybody got rich. It wasn't just China. And again, it's just amazing to me that he doesn't seem to understand anything more complicated than a trade deficit. It's. And look, he doesn't believe in alliances, right?
- [43:38]
John Podhoretz
Here's, here's how, here's what we can say about Trump now. Of a certainty. He does not believe in alliances. He thinks that the alliances are a sucker's game. He likes to call people friends, who I think, based on our understanding of how he lives, is not what we would call friends. His friends are not friends in the way that we imagine friends to be. He does not believe in alliances. He thinks that alliances are ways that people screw you. That's NATO, that's trade agreements. That's having a relationship with Canada. That's having a relationship with almost anybody who isn't an advert. That what you try to do is soften your contentions with people who are your enemies to kind of figure out if there's a way to do business with them. But he doesn't believe in alliances, and he has. Now, we can attack liberals a little bit. So my attack on liberals is that beginning in 2008, it was Barack Obama who laid the groundwork for where Donald Trump is now, who said America is not an exceptional nation. Barack Obama said, asked about American exceptionalism, said, well, you know, we think we're exceptional, and the Greeks think that the Greeks are exceptional. Every country thinks that it's exceptional. And that was not what American exceptionalism was as a doctrine which he, he fully well knew. The idea was that America functions on the basis of ideas. And some of those ideas have this universalist tinge that means that what we have, our freedoms, our abilities to move around, do all that are things that we can kind of export because we have seen them and we've made them work. And he thinks that we don't work and that these ideas stink, just like Obama did, but from a different vantage point. Obama thought that America wasn't exceptional because it was bad. It was bad to other countries, it was bad to other countries and it made the world worse. And we invaded countries for no reason and we were, you know, we were poisoning the atmosphere with our carbon and we were doing all these bad things and we needed to be restrained. And Trump is like the mirror image of that. It's like they're all bad. They suck, they stink.
- [45:55]
Seth Mandel
And the, and the idea, and the idea from, from Obama's perspective and the idea that we are exceptional was bad, that it had real world, that we, that, that it made us do things that, you know, it was bad for the world for America to have this, this self confidence and this posture.
- [46:15]
John Podhoretz
So let me bring this now full circle to Abe's newsletter and the larger point. So Obama thinks America's bad and Trump thinks America's bad in two different ways. Obama thinks America's bad because our system, our capitalists, all this unequal, unfair, you know, poisoning the world, making wars, all of this. We're a blunderbuss. We go around, maybe even we mean well, but we do badly, Right, Trump? We're screwed. The elites like Obama screwed people. Everybody's screwed. They don't want to sell our oil. They don't want us to dig our oil out of the ground. All they talk about is pollution. I don't care about pollution. I know I've been dealing with environmental regulations while I build things and it sucks. And NATO wants things from us, and who the hell are they? All we did was save the world. We saved them from the Nazis and now all they do is use our money to support themselves and they suck. And you know what? They treat me like garbage and they laugh at me and I don't like them and they can all drop dead. I bring this up to say that the 11 things that you mentioned and then all of the weird irrationalisms that you lay out, that's not just the bad things, but as you say, people want to age in reverse. They want more AI, they want to sort of live in this world of magic. And that goes to Eli's Breaking History podcast. Because what that means is again, that Trump and Obama in different ways and from one from an elite perspective and one from a kind of talk radio Art Bell late at night, Tucker Carlson paranoia perspective altogether believe that there is a story behind the story and that what Philip K. Dick, what we're seeing, the reality that we're seeing is not the reality that is actually controlling and containing things. Right. That capitalism in the 21st century. Piketty's book is a book about how billionaires are in control of the world's rules and economies and they must all be have their monies expropriated because no one is ever going to profit until they are taken down because they are building a system that is self perpetuating in there. But that's, but it's invisible because it's.
- [48:41]
Eli Lake
Quote to quote the great Chris Eidman in Barcelona. I keep reading all these books and novels and they're always talking about this subtext. I just want to know like what's above the subtext.
- [48:52]
John Podhoretz
Right. But I mean really think about it like you.
- [48:55]
Eli Lake
But they never talk about it.
- [48:56]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. So in order to get, yes. In order to get, as your, as your JFK podcast shows, in order to get to the point at which you say that the account of the Warren Commission and JFK's assassination is wrong. Which is, which is not totally implausible. People get things wrong. They were trying to get things together in 18 months and maybe they were sloppy or something like that. But the conspiracy, the 25 different possible conspiracies all require a level of manipulation, containment.
- [49:35]
Eli Lake
Control, the discrediting of the institutions which are supposed to render objective reality which had.
- [49:43]
John Podhoretz
Right. Yes.
- [49:44]
Eli Lake
The fact that it's a small thing, but like in 1963, in the aftermath, the first thing that Jackie Kennedy and the Democrats say is that a climate of hate, right wing hate in Dallas killed the President when in fact it was a communist who went to the Soviet Union who killed the President. It wasn't right wing hate. Maybe it was left wing hate or the Warren Commission having Allen Dulles and then, you know, not mentioning all kinds of the CIA, not providing them information, all kinds of things that, you know, could have been run down but didn't necessarily prove that they were culpable. But there's all kinds of things that the government did in trying to explain the story that would have, that eroded the trust that people would have had once more information came out. And including like for me the most amazing thing is that even Lyndon Baines Johnson who commissioned the Warren Commission, didn't believe that Oswald acted alone and said so to Walter Cronkite right before he died. So the idea, some of it is, I agree with you, that you have to sort of get yourself into a place where you believe that nothing is real and there's always something behind the scenes. But there's another factor in that, which is the institutions. The nothing works, which is a great theme of the commentary podcast, has frittered away much public trust. And boy, did the Biden administration fritter away lots of public trust in so many ways. But obviously most. The most obvious way is explaining that the president himself was sentient and had enough stamina and mental acuity to be the president.
- [51:16]
John Podhoretz
Which is One of Abe's 11, right? That's one of your 11 shots, right? That's the Biden is the bi. The fact we had a senile president and we were told for two years that he wasn't senile. And just this week, the books are now starting to come out with these stories. Eric Swalwell telling Amy Parnes and Jonathan Martin that he saw Biden in 2023, don't Biden for years they come face to face and Biden doesn't recognize him like that. So, you know. And going on tv, huh?
- [51:52]
Abe Greenwald
But Biden's, you know, incapacity was like the sleeper shock, you know, because it wasn't. We were outraged. And I remember Eli being on the podcast at the time, we were outraged, but. But no one, you know, it was like sort of ignored. But the resonance of that, the shock waves that that has produced since I think are incalculable.
- [52:19]
Seth Mandel
I mean, and I'm actually interested to hear your perspective on this, Abe, on that. On that point was, you know, by. You could argue that Biden, Biden's election was the public voting for a return to normalcy, whatever you want to call it. That was the pitch taken, right? Mistake. They thought they were voting for that. But was that a sign that the public does tire of all this chaos and that, you know, they. When Biden was elected, he turned out not to be that guy and it turned out that the normal guy, the return to normalcy guy, was his own form of chaos that was just as bad as anything else. And maybe people stopped believing in the fact that, in the idea that we could vote out chaos or whatever. But I mean, I'm curious to hear, like, is that is one of the legacies of Biden that they missed us missing the fact that the people actually do and did vote for sidelining chaos every so often when they get the chance.
- [53:27]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. And then he re traumatized us.
- [53:31]
Eli Lake
Yeah.
- [53:32]
John Podhoretz
Well, by the way, what's important here is, you know, Eli mentions that the late the 70s were insane. 79 and 80 were insane. The years that people don't even. I mean, you get. If you list. I almost wrote a book once called about 1979. If you list what happened in 1979, you would not you not believe how crazy things were. We had a massive environmental leak in upstate New York. We had a. Almost near meltdown of a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. We had a communist regime take over in Nicaragua. We had reports of a. We had Soviet Union taking over in Afghanistan. We had Iran take over in. We had the Ayatollah takeover in Iran. We had a second oil. We had an oil shock like week after week after week after week. And then the Republicans nominated this former movie actor. And everybody in among conventional opinions said, this guy is a lunatic who wants to bring about World War three because he's a, he's got a. He's got an eschatological doctrine that says that the world should end in a nuclear war. And this is crazy. And then it turned out that he was the most normal person ever to be president practically, and that he just applied common sense ideas to things and, and saved America from this incredible spiral. And Biden turned out to be exactly the outright. We're in Covid, we're in George Floyd, we're this. And it's like, just elect this, like, nice old guy. He was vice president for a while, you know, Scranton Joe. He seems totally normal. He gets elected, and then three people say to him, you could be FDR. And he spends $6 trillion and goes senile, causes 10% inflation. Schools are shut down. You know, people wearing lipstick and dresses with beards are running our nuclear waste program. And girls are, and boys are winning girls swim meets, and everybody goes, what? Okay, so you told me Donald Trump was crazy. This is crazier than Donald Trump in the end, when it comes down to it, even though Biden wasn't the candidate in 2024, it was sort of like, all right, well, you know, I kind of believed you that there was a way back. I don't see a way back. This wasn't a way back. Reagan was a way back. But this is.
- [55:52]
Eli Lake
But I think that the Trump White House is making this a similar kind of mistake. Because what the Biden people thought, well, it doesn't really matter. We're running against Trump, you know, and they by the way, the Democratic Party wanted Trump to be the nominee, as we talked about on other podcasts. And then I see the same thing. I mean, if you talk to MAGA people, what they'll tell you is, oh, the Democrats are finished. They've got such a generational hole to dig out of. Give it some time, you know, more of this nonsense, and we'll see. We'll see what happens in the midterms. You know, you'd be surprised how, you know, because this isn't working either. I'm.
- [56:33]
John Podhoretz
This is why I want to go back to that chart that I mentioned, the 81 to 14, free trade versus, you know, free trade, you know, a positive negative. So from 2023 onward, the 66% of the American people told the Democratic Party they wanted a different candidate for President of the United States. 66% of Democrats said they wanted a different candidate. And everyone went, it's like, hello, red. I mean, not even the word red flag doesn't even begin to describe it. Trump in the face of this poll, and I even take Abe's point that the poll is more ambiguous than, you know, 8114. Let's say it's 6238. There is evidence that Americans like free trade. And Trump is like, I don't care. It's like, okay, don't care. Aside from whatever the results are going to be, which I think we all agree are going to be parlous, but even if we don't know that they're going to be parlous, it's like, don't do that. Politics doesn't work like that. You don't, you don't, like, thumb your nose at American public opinion so readily. We're a. We're a democratic republic. You work for the people. You know, I mean, I'm sorry. Like, yes, as I said, on immigration, the people are with you. On economic growth, it is way not clear that the people are with him at all. So one last point, because I was thinking, I'm in a Dostoevsky mode. So we keep publishing articles by the brilliant Gary Saul Morrison about various things that Dostoevsky wrote a piece for us about the Demons, his novel about revolutionary, about the revolutionary fervor, which was great and got me. And then he just wrote a piece for us about the Ivan Karma, about Hamas and its treatment of children, and how that is reflected in the amazing chapter four of the Brothers Karamazov. And, you know, he famously said, without God, everything is permitted. Right? That is the famous sentence from, from the Brothers Karamazov. Without God, everything's permitted. And there is something in that passage of yours about the world that people are hoping for, the world that these sort of people are now seeming increasingly wanting to live in that has this weird paganistic. Without God, everything is permitted. Quality, which is. So they don't believe in God, they don't believe in tradition, they don't believe in the things that belief in God often bring you, which is a sense of continuity with people from the early, certainly if you're Jewish, the earliest times and all that. So they want to become gods themselves. They want to reverse engineer, but they want to. They want to live forever. They want to, you know, they, they whatever they want AI to take over everything. They are, they are enchanted, as somebody might say. Like, they're, they're. They're. They're fascinated by a more enchanted world because they're. All they're getting is this nonsense.
- [59:54]
Abe Greenwald
Yes.
- [59:55]
John Podhoretz
Anything to.
- [59:56]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I mean, well, as you. As you put it before, they want to live in a. In a magical world. You know, that's, that's the only.
- [60:03]
John Podhoretz
Doesn't.
- [60:04]
Abe Greenwald
Right, right.
- [60:05]
John Podhoretz
You know, I mean, that's the whole. You know. You know, I remember reading once about why Americans are so white Americans, why people. All fantasies in all countries, everywhere. Why the. Why there's always a figure, the idea that you're a human being who can fly, why this exists and why this is one of the like dominating primal fantasies that you could, you know, fly like Superman or fly or whatever. And it's because when you're a baby and you can't move, somebody comes and picks you up and transports you from one place to another. And since you don't understand cross cause and effect precisely that this is registered in the human brain, the universal human brain, as this. Hey, I need to go from here to there. And suddenly, just through force of will, I'm being moved through the sky from one place to another. Then you learn that that's not how it works. And you could walk by yourself, but this pre verbal, pre linguistic, pre cause and effect thing just sticks in your head forever. And that, that is, that is where magic. That is where the belief in magic might in part originate. Not that it's.
- [61:31]
Abe Greenwald
And then the thing is, you know, also like, you know, but with all these alternatives to religion, the, the benefit, which of course is not a benefit, but the immediate benefit, the illusory benefit, is that they don't obligate you to anything in terms of behavior, ethics, charity, you know, you can just take that's the real gift.
- [62:02]
John Podhoretz
You know, I will say the creepiest part about this, and not to get overly, you know, listen, I'm very grateful to Trump for the way he's behaved toward Israel, and I'm very grateful to him for the things that he's doing to combat anti Semitism. But there's one thing that he represents as a form of Jewish heresy without even knowing that he does so. And that is the thing that will, for that will, that will make it difficult for Congress to do what it needs to do to take the power of the tariffing away from him, which, as Eli brings up, is something that it really can do, and that is idol worship. That he has created a condition inside the Republican Party in which he is, he is the static figure and fealty to him and who he is and what he believes is what matters. And, and how this works. And Judaism is a religion that is built on the idea that idolatry is the greatest of all heresies. And that worshiping men as idols or idols as idols or something like that, as opposed to understanding that God is to be worshiped and God is everywhere and nowhere and is not, is not corporeal, is a very important jump. And when I hear Howard Lutnick or Laura Loomer talk about Trump, you know, I am listening to somebody who is, you know, literally experiencing idol worship. Both of them, by the way, born Jewish. So that's really great for us, yea Jews.
- [63:41]
Eli Lake
So can we take a second on the Laura Lou, I was just gonna.
- [63:44]
Seth Mandel
Say, if you watch us on YouTube, you just got to see Eli's head literally explode.
- [63:49]
Eli Lake
Like, you're taking advice from a like, third rate conspiracy theorist on who's staffing the National Security Council. Third rate.
- [64:04]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that's, you're rating her very high to call her third rate.
- [64:07]
Eli Lake
Seventh rate. I mean, it's just like she's a 911 truther and she's, she's like a lunatic. And I understand in the context of a campaign, he has a, you know, kind of broad coalition of people. And if it's, you know, or like, if you, sometimes you have people that, you know, you're like, all right, they get out votes and she's influencer or something like that. She's like a policy, she's in his ear on important policy matters. And I, that's.
- [64:37]
John Podhoretz
We should explain what this is because people may not. Yesterday, yesterday on Thursday, Laura Loomer, or. Excuse me. Yeah. Wednesday afternoon, Laura Loomer went into the White House, a kind of a I don't know what you call. Yeah, she was sort of like an Internet personality, Twitter, whatever. Ended up running for Congress, didn't get there. Trump likes.
- [64:58]
Eli Lake
Her turn was chaining herself to Google.
- [65:01]
John Podhoretz
Right? Yeah, right.
- [65:02]
Eli Lake
And wetting herself.
- [65:04]
John Podhoretz
Right. Anyway, she's nuts. And I say that as a psychiatrist, deeply not psychiatrist, but I don't need to be a psychiatrist to know that she's nuts. I was on, I was once. I once listened to her on Mark Halperin's wonderful two way podcast, and it was like, it was like visiting the psycho ward, you know, it was like visiting a psych ward, listening to her talk about herself. So I, you know, having, I'm happy to say this, she went in the Oval Office and said there were all these people in the administration who are disloyal to you. Named a bunch of people on the National Security Council, including a couple of friends of ours. And now that I mentioned that they're friends of ours, of course this is why they should be fired, according to a lot of people, because they're friends of ours. And, and, and people got fired as a result of this conversation. But it's worse than that because it's not about Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer doesn't know David Fyth from Adam. She doesn't know who David Fyith is. She doesn't know what he did. She, he already. He worked for Trump in the first term and seemed to be fine with him then. What she knows is somebody handed her a list to give to Trump to see if he might, they might get some scalps. So the question is, who is that? Now, I'm going to the person behind the. Who is that person? What? Tuckerite? What? Vancy? What? You know what. Who, what, what person gave Laura Loomer the list to see if she could get Trump to intervene and get rid of people that the Tuckerite wing of the party doesn't want from the National Security Council. That's what we need to know. Not her, in my, in my, in my estimation, anyway. All right, so we've insulted people, we've defamed people. I've called people idol worshipers. This is, this is, this is the month of Passover in which we do talk a lot about idol worship at the Seder. So I think I'm going to leave it there because, because things are spinning off, out of control. Please, if you didn't, if you haven't done already, you heard the brilliant newsletter from yesterday. Go to commentary.org go to the top menu, click on Newsletter subscribe to Abe Greenwalds daily newsletter Eli Lake Breaking History Current Podcast About Edward Said the great.
- [67:31]
Eli Lake
The great Orientalism and its discontents.
- [67:34]
John Podhoretz
Yes, Edward Said professor at Columbia and the person who is singularly responsible for the destruction of the study of Middle Eastern matters in the United States. One tidbit detail Edward Said goes to grade school grammar school with Omar Sharif and Omar Sharif in a moment to rival his incredible, glorious, glamorous turn in Lawrence of Arabia as the rebel chief beats up Edward Said in grade school.
- [68:09]
Eli Lake
In front of his classmates. Yes.
- [68:11]
John Podhoretz
So I could not love Omar Sharif. I thought I couldn't love Omar Sharif anymore. And yet Eli introduces There are two.
- [68:21]
Seth Mandel
Kinds of there are two kinds of people in the world. There's Omar Sharif and Edwards Said. B. Omar Sharif.
- [68:26]
John Podhoretz
B. Omar Sharif. Anyway, he was also with one of the world's great bridge players but I'm whatever that we it's not about Omar Sharif but perhaps it's time to do a celebration Omar Sharif under other circumstances Anyway, Eli, like everybody should subscribe to Breaking History presented by the Free Press fantastic world life changing mini documentaries about thank you America and we will be back on Monday. So for a with Seth I'm John Bob Hortz Keep the camel burning.