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A
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne, some die of thirst. The way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst of all.
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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026. I'm Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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E
Hi, John.
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A
And joining us today, Commentary contributing editor and columnist and podcaster at the Free Press, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
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B
Great to be here, John. Thank you.
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A
I almost said hialais, which what are you.
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B
CANDACE owens, I just want to say.
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A
That jai alai, there was this moment in the 1970s when somebody tried to make jai alai into a sport, like a competitive league sport. And in Connecticut, there were three or four jai alai arenas. And here's a word for you. For crosswords forever, a jai alai arena is called a fronton, because there was like a fronton and there was like a new Haven fronton.
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C
Wasn't it all fixed, though?
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B
Like, the soldier was involved.
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A
How dare you? How dare you insult the good people? And there I thought, hi, Alai was.
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D
That was the neighbor, the Cuban neighborhood in Miami.
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A
All right, so enough of this narishkeit. Eli Lake, you have a piece in the Free Press today about the pretender to the Iranian peacock.
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B
I would call him the Pretender. I would say, yes, I'm using the.
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A
Word pretender because I wanted to use the word pretender because it's one of the few times that you can use the word pretender. It's not really a word that is much in use. A claimant to the leadership of Iran through the royal, through his supposedly royal bread, Reza Pahlavi. And it's a wonderful piece. Everybody should read it because it goes through all of the twists and turns of what it means after a revolution for there to be an effort to restore a prior order that was supplanted. And before we go on, I want to say that I did a little research. I did, and I thought to myself, what, aside from this revolution, when has a leader with royal blood been restored to the leadership of his country? And the one person that I could think of was King Juan Carlos of Spain. And King Juan Carlos of Spain, when Franco died, basically sat atop an effort to transition the Franco regime into a into a constitutional democracy. And so I thought, well, look, that's within living memory. It was half a century ago, but it's still within living memory. But here's the difference between Pahlavi and Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos was in Spain. Juan Carlos was in the Spanish military. He, he did not go. I mean, he actually was educated outside Spain, but he, he went back home when he was in his, like, late teens, early 20s and became a military officer and worked in, within the Franco system so that he had legitimacy within the country. When Franco died, he wasn't coming in from outside, riding on a horse, you know, to take back what was rightfully his. He had served his country and was therefore considered a patriot and a member of the, you know, but he wasn't a politician. He was in the military. And, of course, the thing about Reza Pahlavi, who is the only person that anybody can name who might be an Iranian opposition figure, since, of course, most of the others have died, is that he literally has not been inside the borders of Iran for 47 years. So, Eli, talk to us about the question of this. If this regime is going to topple, it makes sense that this is one relatively sort of, like, clean way to find somebody to take the reins until you can transition to something better. But it's very skeptical.
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B
Let's start with a couple points. In Reza Pahavi's favorite one, it's true that not just this time, but in Women Life, Freedom, people were chanting, Javed Shah, long live the king. So now people can interpret that different ways. But there has been some polling that has been done from 2024 by a group that is pretty reliable that says that he has about 31% support, which is more than any other person, including Khamenei or anybody else is in this. Everybody else is in the single digits. So there is a level of support. And I think that that level of support is because, you know, I mean, the mullahs destroyed their country. And so people are saying, okay, well, what was before? Well, it's certainly better than this. So there's a part of it where there's a kind of. Especially since most of the people who are now part of the demonstrations were not alive for his father, Muhammad Reza Shah. So they have a kind of view of like, well, I want Iran to go back to, like, you know, lavish caviar and champagne parties and women topless on the beach and things like that. And that, I think, is a reflection of just how awful things are in Iran, not just in terms of political repression, but the level of corruption. It's not just the failure of the currency, it's the failure. I mean, the pensions that have been promised to workers were stolen. The banks are failing. It's everything. It's. It's in a total free fall. So, you know, it's a natural question for any Iranian to sort of say, all right, well, what. What did these guys replace? Secondly, when you're talking about Iran, I mean, there's an argument that royalty as we know it was invented by the Achaemenid Persians. And when the Islamic revolution happened, that was the end of the 2500 years of dynasties and monarchy in Iran, more or less. So, I mean, we don't actually know much about the Muslim conquest of Iran, but other than, I mean, like, you know, from the 1500s onward. And then you have the. The tradition of the, of the ancient Persian Empire that we. We all read about in Herodotus and Thucydides and so forth, the bad in the Bible and the Bible. And yes, Cyrus is a great hero of the Bible.
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E
So.
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B
In 1979, it was a kind of cataclysmic historic event. It was the first time Iran was going to be ruled by someone other than a king. And then, of course, Ayatollah Khomeini makes himself a supreme leader who has all of the powers of the shah, sort of a shah, except for the name. So there's an argument also that Iranians are used to living in, you know, at least having a king. I think that what, to Reza Pahlavi's credit, he's always said if, you know, if he was to become the king, although what I get into in this piece is that I don't think he's particularly interested in that it would be a constitutional monarchy. He wants a democratic transition for Iran. All very good. The problem is there are millions of Iranians that actually just want to restore the Pahlavi dynasty, and they are. They want an absolute monarch. And the point of the piece, in some ways it's a long feature, is Reza Pahlavi, you know, I sort of ended by saying, you know, the Moas didn't destroy the Pahlavi line. America did. Because Reza Pahlavi has fully assimilated in America. He likes his good life. He likes, you know, I've been to, you know, embassy parties in Washington. He's a pretty frequent presence there. You could find him if you. I mean, I don't. Back in the day, you used to go to this John. I know. I used to go the White House correspondence dinner. There would be little tents. Remember those tents where you would. Well, not a surprise. Many journalists who would attend in their tuxedos would get soused Even before the dinner. And you would go to the, you know, the ABC News tent, the Fox News tent, the Washington Times tent. And Pahlavi used to be like a guest of the Fox News. And you would find him there and you could kind of rub edels and he looked like a guy in a really nice suit. He would occasionally come on, you know, to talk about, you know, things going on in Iran and then he would work to, in a lot of good ways. I, you know, he's, he, like myself, is an admirer of Gene Sharp, who is the theorist of people power or non violent resistance. He, he was for many years somebody who would sound like, you know, like a John McCain staffer or somebody working for, you know, the National Endowment for Democracy. He was fluent in these ideas of the liberal, liberal democratic world order and the importance of civic civil society. And then in the last few years, he's now got a new set of advisors who are kind of like hardcore monarchists. And they have focused on kind of building him up as the king in waiting. It's almost, I mean, you could say that like there, there's a number of people online who love Reza Pahlavi, but they have adopted the tactics of like the hardcore MAGA Trump types where they will attack anyone for even slightly kind of questioning, like, well, you know, make sure there's elections. I wouldn't call him the leader of the revolution. He's very important. But what about these other people? And they'll just swarm them, including Masih Alinejad, who is the very brave women's activist who the Iranians tried to kill in her, her home in New York, who recently, you know, testified or saw her killer sentenced to, I think, 13 years in prison or attempted killer. So that, that's sort of the crux of it. And what I conclude, because Pahlavi is all over the place you can find. I went through a lot of his interviews over the years. Pahlavi himself, even a few years ago, said, you know, I've lived here for 40 years, all my friends are here, my family's here. Why I don't know what I would go back to. And that to me is really telling because if you are the king in waiting, if you're trying to reclaim the crown, you wouldn't give answers like that. Even a couple years ago, you would be talking about what he sounds like today. Where he talks about my bloodline is such that I have this bond with the Iranian people. I want the regime more than anything to topple. And there is a part of me that sort of says, well, you know, you go to the revolution with the revolutionary leader you have, and he's the closest thing that we maybe have to that. But unfortunately, he has not been able to kind of bring everybody in with him. And there are other groups. There are Iranian Kurds. There's like, there are unions in Iran. I mean, there are not just human rights activists that we know, but there's a real, you know, network of people and other institutions in the west that want to get.
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A
My point is. My point is when, when the, when regimes have toppled in our time, like the, in the, the Cold War. Right. The, the Central and Eastern European regimes, there was a known body of dissident leaders who had been imprisoned, who had been tortured, who had been, you know, sort of visible, not only in their own countries, but.
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C
Yeah.
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A
HAVEL Valenc, like, the, the Baltic states had governments in exile from the time that the Soviets took them over until 1990, 91. The we had, you know, sort of like prime ministers, f. Finance ministers, all that, who were like, assistant professors of economics at Wayne State University who then ended up going back, back to, you know, going back to Estonia to be the right to be the finance minister or something like that. There, there is a, there's a world in which this stuff exists. And I have, I mean, I have met Reza Pahlavi long, long time ago, and he's a very, you know, attractive. You know, he's a very attractive person. But, you know, the notion that a nation of 90 million people, you know, in one of the most strategically important spots on the planet Earth, with enormous oil reserves and a history of making incredible mischief, is just sort of, like, handed over to. I mean, I'm not saying that he's a dilettante, but I mean, it's, it's, he's like a guy who has been sitting there, being the person with his name since 1979, and that's what he is. He's the guy named Pahlavi, you know, so to go now, maybe to broaden this out, because everybody should read the piece because it's, it's so interesting and, and unusual, and this is obviously a sort of unprecedented situation. But I did want to point out that we're only talking about this, obviously, because we have this armada of ships outside Iran, and Trump having threatened to, you know, work over the regime because of the horrors that it has practiced upon its citizens over the last six to eight weeks. And now there's a negotiation supposedly going on, which seems to be a negotiation as much inside the administration, administration as it is between the administration and the Iranian regime, since there seem to be forces inside the administration who seem to be representing the interests or opinions of some people, some governments in and around the Gulf who are advocating for a, you know, a deconfliction of some sort and, you know, getting the Iranians to agree to something so we can say we got a deal. Jim Garrity did something very useful yesterday in his column, his Morning Jolt, which is that he just laid out the timeline of the United States's words, or Trump's words on Iran in the month of January. So this is where we are and what we've said, okay? So January 8th, Trump told Hugh Hewitt that they're doing very poorly the Iranian regime. And I let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots, they have lots of riots. If they do it, we're going to hit them very hard. January 13th, he posted on Truth Social. Iranian patriots, keep protesting. Take over your institutions. Stop. Help is on the way. President Donald J. Trump, January 15th. Trump surprises everyone by declaring, we have been notified and pretty strongly, but we'll find out what it all means. But we told that the killing in Iran is stopping. But throughout January, the Iranian regime continued to kill processors on a massive scale. As many as 30,000 people, according to two ministers of Iran's Ministry of Health, could have been killed on the streets of Iran on January 8th and 9th alone. On January 28th, Trump posted, A massive armada is heading toward Iran. Come to the table and negotiate a fair and equitable deal. No nuclear weapons, one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, is truly of the essence of, as I told Iran once before, make a deal. So, and here's how Garrity sums up. We have an erratic president who veers back and forth between promises of help and threats of force and then talks up how much he wants to work out a deal. Yes, in theory, there is value in cultivating a sense of strategic ambiguity, but at this point, it certainly seems like Trump declared help is on its way during intense protests and then failed to deliver any significant help in a timely manner. So, Eli, what do you think? There are two possibilities here, one of which is they're just like literally all over the map. Trump is here, he goes too far. He pulls himself back. They're having fights inside the administration. And the other is that this is all a big stall. He had to stall to get the armada in. He has to stall to get the Israelis to pre position proper interceptors or Maybe stuff is getting to Israel's quietly to make sure that the Jewish state isn't like overwhelmed by ballistic or he had to bring some kind of missile defense possibilities to American positions or hardened embassies and things like that against Iranian attack. And they're not ready yet. So he, so they're, they're, they're stalling for time.
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B
What do you think it's that the interceptors is I think driving all of this, which is, and this is really a scandal which is kind of related. But we've known now for 30 years we've been hearing that the future of warfare is missile defense. And yet our capability of producing our supply chains for producing the interceptors is inadequate to the need that we have in this moment. Between Ukraine and the 12 day war in June with Israel, the cupboard has been bare. So we still need to position fads and patriots, you know, in the Pacific to worry about China. I mean, I'm saying that there is a huge shortfall and the failure of defense secretaries and presidents and our giant, you know, and the firms that make these to prepare for moments like this when all of our, you know, national security and defense strategies have said we're going to need a lot of missile defense is mind boggling. It really, I would say it goes back. I mean that. So to me I think it is a reflect. That's what I've, I can repeat that.
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A
So there's nothing you can do about it now. Like there's nothing this month you can do to build, to make missile to incept.
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B
I understand. So they're doing the best they can. They're robbing Peter to pay Paul and they're trying to grab everything. But. Yeah, but I think that the talk of the negotiations is all kind of subterfuge on that, or at least that's what I've been told. But the other part of this is that knowing that we had this shortfall and you know, you don't have to predict, you know, the one kind of the last threat that the mad men have in Iran is to launch these barrages of ballistic missiles, that was the one thing they were rebuilding and crashing on after the 12 Day War. Again, all this is like publicly reported that if we had a president with more constancy, a president that wasn't that, that didn't just disbelieve, you know, his advisers and his experts and just did whatever he wanted. It starts with his tweet, I think on December 28th, 29th, where you know, he makes the first thread on this that didn't go through the national. I had a source when I was writing about this originally kind of asking would he actually do this, saying, well, that didn't go through the National Security Council process. That went through the Mar a Lago process. And so Trump, by kind of. This is one of the great strengths of Trump is that he has ignored broken and false consensus before that kind of hamstrung even Republican presidents before into not confronting Iran. But on the other hand, he could have used somebody who could say, Mr. President, you cannot say this because you will be raising the expectations of the demonstrators. And we don't have the missile defense capabilities at this moment to engage militarily. But he didn't, you know, he had his phone and like, he just. That's what he saw that he saw. He heard a report, he saw an image of it. He said something happened. And he said, okay, I'm going to fire this tweet out. And that's fine for the rest of us. But when you're the President of the United States, that has a huge amount of. That matters a great deal, obviously. And so that's my theory of it, is that he kind of, that, you know, he didn't kind of, he wasn't aware of this. And then when he's aware of it, he's kind of trying to figure out ways to delay. So I think that the negotiations are a bit of a delay. The one thing. And the other thing I just we always have to remember is that Trump knows the Iranians tried to kill him. And the Iranians recently acknowledged it. Like I think a senior general said, next time we won't miss. You don't think Trump's getting that? You don't think that Trump's advisors are putting that in front of him and they're saying, did you see what General Schmecaggy said? I'm sure he knows, and I'm sure that that's kind of. I think that's how he sees it. And, you know, Witkoff is useful because, I mean, you know, how many times is this gonna happen where he says, no, no, no, we're going to negotiate, and then, bombs away. So I. That's my sense of it. But I do think that there's a huge shortfall. And I know that the deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg, who doesn't make any headlines, is working on this. It's like one of his top priorities. But frankly, this should have been a top priority for Donald Rumsfeld, should have been a top priority for Leon Panetta.
- [21:37]
A
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E
I was just going to ask because this What I was thinking about when you were talking about Pahlavi as a potential, you know, transitional figure, if the regime does topple, there's. I went to undergrad with a. He's some sort of distant cousin of the Shah. Anyway, a lot of people in Iran who had any connection to the Shah fled. It wasn't just the Shah and the immediate royal family. A lot of expats here in the US who stayed, who built lives for themselves. My friend actually graduated from college here, but then went to London for graduate school and then went back to Tehran at great risk, actually, to his own life because the regime knew who he was and taught there and teaches in London. And he's a historian. He's looked at the Pahlavi era and is kind of reinterpreting some of the relationship with the West. So there, there's this interesting expat community. I'm curious about two things. One, how much of that expat community would also support someone like Pahlavi going back? And who in the Trump administration, Eli, do you find actually thinking through a post, you know, a new regime, whether it's, you know, a reinstallation of a shah like figure or some other thing? Because what we saw in Venezuela and what we've seen elsewhere, when Trump goes in big, then what happens afterwards is usually a mess that he's not focusing on. So is there anyone that you've talked to in the administration or you know of in the administration who, who is thinking about a post Ayatollah Iran and what that might look like?
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B
I don't think there's any serious planning on the, what comes next. And I think that Trump looks at it as an attractive model. If he can get some IRGC commanders who take the deal after a few of their comrades get blown up or something, I think that's his thinking.
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A
I want to point out that the allergy, one of the weird things about the leftist and sort of now liberal consensus on what happened in Iraq was, you know, we went in under false pretenses in order to make war so that we could take out Saddam, so that we could. It's not, it's never clear what the, what else we wanted to do so we lied our way into war and what purpose that served because we were allergic in, in the 18 months between 9, 11 and when we went to war, we were allergic to the prospect of that. What we should be doing inside the State Department, the Defense Department and everything was planning for a post Saddam future. Rumsfeld and others did not want to plan for a post Saddam future, because he did. They did not want to feel as though they were. America was becoming an imperial power with the need to be the reigning political force inside Iraq. And so the idea was, we're going to go in, we're going to take the regime out, and then they're going to have a loya jirga.
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B
And.
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A
And we're. Some of the exiles are going to come back and they. All the tribes were going to meet and they were going to, you know, have a, you know, they were going to have a battle, you know, with swords. And then whoever won was going to lead Iraq and we were going to have a light footprint and we were going to get out because we weren't imperialists and it wasn't our country and it wasn't for us to come up with a future for Iraq. And then we ended up having a regency because the guy who was supposed to be the guy who ran Iraq, Jay Garner, didn't have a plan, didn't have an idea. This lawyer jirga went sideways. Our hope that this exile person, Ahmed Chalabi, could run Iraq turned out that he was kind of a fraud and that nobody in the country knew who he was.
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B
Never given the keys to the car, John. But. Okay, yeah, okay, whatever.
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A
Okay. But I'm just saying that. So we don't plan for these things because rather than being the world's hyper power with plans to control all these governments and be the marionette master behind everything, we are ideologically and temperamentally as Americans, allergic to doing the precise thing that you're saying needs to happen. Well, Trump is exactly the same.
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B
Pahlavi has a plan.
- [28:33]
A
No, Pahlavi has a plan. I'm talking about America does.
- [28:37]
B
Right, right, America.
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D
There's also like, America has to have a plan. I mean, America, America should have a plan for post anything. Anything. Even if we're not the ones bringing it about.
- [28:49]
A
Right.
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D
I mean, that's like part of the concern here is if the Iranian regime falls, we do care a lot about what happens in its wake. But also we have to prepare.
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C
Right.
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D
There are security considerations if suddenly, you know, the IRGC isn't running around stuff like that.
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A
You're right, but we don't. That. My point is that despite all spy novels and despite all fantasies about how the government really works and how there are secret panels of secret leaders who have a map on the wall, you know, like with blinking lights, and they know where everything is and how everything is, we don't do it. And if we did it, the person who wrote out the future plan for Iraq or Iran or Azerbaijan or wherever, if the government fell, is a GS14, three years out of graduate school, who is on the desk at the CIA or is on the desk at the Defense Department and is. We have literally no reason to trust that that person has any idea.
- [29:54]
E
Okay, but there are, there are people in the world, if you have an administration that's open to things that can be done in different paths and scenarios. There are plenty of people who have thought through this, who have spent their lives studying Iranian civil society, who had, have themselves maybe been part of some organized resistance there at some point. So I think, I think the incuriosity of any administration we can, we can blame, but this one in particular seems to be, you know, there's a lot of bulldozer type mentality with their foreign policy. And as Eli says, that does sometimes bring good necessary change. But in this case, if they're not thinking about that, Seth is right. There's a huge strategic danger in not in wondering who's going to, you know, post revolution, a lot of mischief happens. I was just. One of my kids was interested in the Russian Revolution. So I was reading through, you know, Richard Pipes's short history of the Russian Revolution. You realize, wow, you really kind of want to get control of things quickly because it'll go south fast. And that's very important when we're talking about Iran.
- [30:51]
C
But see, all this makes me think that Trump isn't therefore going to attack because as we've discussed on a previous show, he will. He's not afraid of bold kinetic action abroad if you can essentially guarantee him 100% clean success, you know, like the Venezuela operation. And from everything we're discussing, from the, the missile defense issue to what happens after, who comes next, I'm not hearing anything that would say to Trump, okay, this sounds, this sounds solid. Let's do this.
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A
It's a very complicated mission. I mean, Venezuela was extract. Extract a guy, which sounds complicated, but is so pinpoint specific that if you, if that's your plan, you can see how you can design a plan that achieves that one aim centered on that one person.
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C
And they spend months do that. How do you pull them out of every piece into place? Yeah, yeah.
- [32:01]
A
In this case, we.
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D
To what extent is this not happening? Because, you know, we hear stories of people inside the government complaining that the CIA doesn't want to participate in this and therefore isn't drawing up plans or stuff like that. I mean, how. To what extent is. Is planning not happening? Because People who should be planning are not.
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A
I got, I got the agencies. I have a different perspective on this. So you're right that we have the pinpoint Maduro. So that's like, okay, how do we get Maduro out? Right? And then someone comes up with a plan that is comprehensible. Like, you sit down with Trump at a meeting and you say, we're going to do this. We're going to turn on the discombobulation machine. He'll have some guards that are cube. We have a source in his office. We know he's got some Cuban guards. We'll shoot them, we'll pull him out, we'll put him on the plane, we'll put him on the ship. They will close down all traffic and air flight over the Caribbean, and we'll. We'll. We'll get him to Guantanamo and then we'll get him to New York, right? Like, bing, bang, boom, it's over. I.
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B
But.
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A
So he trusted that. I suspect that he calls Bibi and says, okay, how are we going to do this? And Bibi's like, I don't know. Like, I'm not sure. We're. We don't have enough right now. We wouldn't go at Iran if we could because we don't have enough interceptors. We don't have enough interceptors to do this. So, you know, if it were us alone, we would, we would wait because we need to build up our forces to do this, even if the opportunity is presenting itself. Bibi, he trusts. He thinks he's a winner. He thinks he's like a militaristic guy who wants to do hawkish things. And maybe he doesn't trust Hegseth, or maybe he doesn't trust, you know, Ratcliffe at the CIA or whatever. I don't know. And, like, what he isn't hearing is they're like, well, you know, we don't really know what knocks the regime over. I mean, there's a story of Reuters yesterday that said that Iranians are worried that if there's any military action, they topple like a house of cards. So that's a story. If you're interested in seeing the regime topple. You were happy to read, right? That the Iranians think that it would only take some Iranians think it would only take some American military action to bring the regime to its knees and for it to collapse. But we don't even know what it means for the regime to collapse. What does that mean exactly? You know, where does it collapse into? Who, like, opens the door to the presidential, to the mullah's palace.
- [34:54]
B
Hold on, John. A couple things in Iranian civil society, people from the inside like Sharina Badi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in Nagress Mohammedi, and Akbar Gandh, a lot of. I don't want to bore you with all the I'm a nerd about that stuff, but there have been a number of Iranian kind of oppositionists and dissidents who 20 years ago, and they keep renewing this. They just. What they want is a referendum on the current constitution so that people can vote to eliminate the powers of the Guardian Council and the supreme Leader. That has been on the agenda. I have no reason to believe that isn't very popular. Raza Pahlavi agrees with that. Everybody pretty much wants that. So we have a nine months.
- [35:34]
A
That's nine months after regime time.
- [35:37]
B
And you're asking what happened the day after till the day after without an invading army that is keeping the peace. And that is a big unknown. But what I would say is this, is that the big argument against kind of decapitation strikes for years was are you sure you're going to be comfortable with what comes next? And given that Iran still has, you know, nuclear material and they have some enriched uranium and there's all kinds of nightmare scenarios, and that's. I'm not saying that that isn't a concern, but the question is, compared to what. And at this point, I would say anything would be better than these lunatics, not just from a human rights perspective, but from our national security perspective. If this regime is left, is allowed to survive, they will find a way to seek vengeance, not just on Israel, but on America. They say it all the time. And so you got to finish the job. And that I thought was a very interesting story in the last couple days was that even the Saudi defense minister who was here and the Saudis were initially very cautious and they're kind of very Janus faced at the moment on a lot of things. But he was apparently privately saying, you cannot do nothing at this point to Trump. You have to finish the job. Because at this point, after the 12 day war and everything else, I mean, like, you know, you can't to do this now would be worse than Obama backing away from his red line. It would be worse in some ways even than of George H.W. bush allowing Saddam to use the helicopters to put down the Shias in southern Iraq. It would be not just a bit like a betrayal of bad for our reputation. Okay, that that can change. But it would end up Emboldening Iran. It would change all of the good kind of things that are happening all over the region right now. You have a government in Lebanon that is publicly saying they're committed to disarming Hezbollah. I mean, nobody could have predicted that two years ago.
- [37:45]
A
Right.
- [37:46]
D
That changes as long as they're serious.
- [37:49]
B
If the Ayatollah.
- [37:50]
D
It's something to say.
- [37:51]
B
Even if.
- [37:52]
A
Even if the rhetoric is there, it's a massive sea change for a government in Beirut that essentially acceded to the idea that half the country was going to be run by this Iranian proxy organization, which they did. You know, it's like, okay, you're the. You know, it's like saying, okay, Antifa, you get to. You get to run Minneapolis. In Portland, we're. We're leaving you.
- [38:17]
B
Southern Lebanon. The Becca Valley is now Chaz.
- [38:20]
A
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [38:24]
D
You have to.
- [38:24]
A
Yeah.
- [38:25]
D
The idea. I mean, the IDF needs to, you know, crush that first. Like, nobody's called in the IDF on Antifa, despite what, you know, people on both far left and right. Far right might say. Hezbollah had to be, you know, kind of stomped to get there.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah.
- [38:41]
B
And then just sort of in the other. I mean, you know, everybody probably knows I'm on Team regime change here. But, you know, the other factor that's different is that when we did regime change in Iraq, with a huge military footprint and presence, the people who were mainly orchestrating the insurgency were the Iranians. So if you knock out the Iranian command and control, I mean, I don't.
- [39:06]
A
Know if it's coming in from the outside. This is the one thing I wanted to bring up, which is the weird thing that's going on inside the administration that involves what appears to be the partial empowerment of people that we should not be empowering, primarily Turkey's Erdogan, who we seem to have decided should be our interlocutor in peace talks. And it's another jarringly discontinuous factor of the Trump administration's approach in the world. That Erdogan, who is. Who is maybe not a total enemy of the United States, but is somebody who's aims, ideas, and desires are completely at odds with ours, that we want to somehow strengthen his position from being the famous weak man of Europe to being the strong man in the Middle East. That's bad policymaking. And it all goes to this weird. The Deal Team, you know, the sort of Kushner, Witkoff, Tom Barrack, you know, these guys who are all never been involved in foreign policy until, you know, five minutes ago, because they're Friends of Trump's. And I mean, how do we feel about that?
- [40:35]
B
Not good.
- [40:37]
D
I mean, Erdogan, Erdogan wants to. Erdogan's goals in Gaza would essentially be to have a version of a Hamas live on. Right. I mean, even if it weren't Hamas, the point is that any sort, any insurgency against Israel is what Turkey wants. Turkey wants dominance in the region. That's, that's, that's what it wishes for anyway. And in order to do that, you have to bleed Israel of, you know, you have to distract Israel, you have to bleed Israel resources. You have to have something biting at its, at its ankles at all times to weaken it. And so any sort of Turkish involvement in Gaza would mean the support for elements that would be against the US Plan for Gaza. So I hope that Trump is. Somebody makes that clear to Trump that it's not just about Israel versus Turkey. But the point is that right now, the Trump people theoretically want the same thing in Gaza as the Israelis do, which is quiet. And Turkey will work against that permanently. There's, there's no, there's no, you know, and, and you could replace, they could replace Iran as like a sort of, you know, as the, as the financial directors or the political directors of these insurgencies. But that's not what we're looking for. We're not looking for someone else to adopt Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all these groups. We're looking for those groups to wither and die.
- [42:13]
A
Right, but you're not talking about Gaza and I'm talking about Iran, like that Turkey wants to be, But Turkey wants to be the sort of Oslo, wants to be the, you know, of the US Iranian deal. Like that is the possible way for Trump to get out of going to war. And Turkey wants that. And there are people inside the administration that would like, like it fine if Turkey were that player. And it's eerily reminiscent to me because of what you say about Gaza and other things, of Obama gratefully accepting Russia's help to intercede, to get him out of his, out of the box that he placed himself in by saying the red line in Syria in 2013 was the use of chemical weapons. And, and then Syria used chemical weapons. And then he was like, Congress, you tell me what you, you say we should go to war, and then Russia's like, we'll take it off your hands, don't worry. And then he empowers Russia, and then Russia, like, becomes the major player in Syria. And then next, the next year it takes Crimea because it had, you Know, because it had the, you know, it had this. So we're empowering Turkey. That's crazy.
- [43:36]
B
Well, and the Turks also are behind the purge of our Kurdish allies in Syria who helped dismantle the ISIS caliphate. But more importantly, were the wardens of the jail where we had detained, you know, a little more than 10,000 very nasty fighters. I mean, there are refugee camps that are like these little laboratories for, you know, jihad 3.0. So we now are in a real national security bind because of Turkey basically, you know, prodding the president, Shara of Syria. So they're, They're a very bad actor. I'm not entirely convinced that these negotiations in Turkey are going to necessarily go anywhere, just because I still remember, you know, the 12 day war from seven months ago.
- [44:28]
A
Well, that's what I'm saying. We just don't know. But, but in any case, the headlines. It would be nice if the leader.
- [44:34]
B
Of the free world would not treat cataclysmic historical hinge moments like tune in next week for the episode of Revolution.
- [44:45]
C
I just want to say it's not just the tune in next week part, which is. Which is true. It's also that all he does is happy talk everything until the. The event happened. So we have no idea to what extent he's been briefed or understands these concerns about, say, Turkey. Because all he says is, he's a good friend of mine, Erdogan. We get along great. Strong, powerful guy, good guy. I like him a lot. We have a close personal relationship, you know, and it's just like, I don't want to hear all that either.
- [45:18]
A
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- [47:54]
C
The Republicans should just take national. The Republicans should nationalize elections in, in 15 states.
- [48:00]
E
Unnamed. He doesn't name the states. It's just 15 states. The Republicans should take over.
- [48:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is an interesting form of national a third of the states. Less than fewer than a third of the states.
- [48:14]
D
So and also saying Republicans should do.
- [48:18]
A
Like, like, like counting only a couple of counties in Florida when you're doing a recount in Florida.
- [48:24]
E
But we should put this in another context of this week's administration mischief making because they're also down in Fulton County, Georgia collecting ballots for from the 2020 election. You know, Tulsa Gabbard sent down there talking to FBI. The president got on the phone and talked to frontline FBI agents who were there on the scene, which is also highly unusual. If there's ever a case brought that's going to certainly be one of the defense exhibit A of you know, malicious prosecution. So some he's still relitigating the 2020 election and I think that's what this is about.
- [48:56]
B
Yeah.
- [48:56]
E
Yes. All of this is about, about his loss. And it's about the fact that he can't get over that he lost an election. And it's a huge waste of resources and time and it certainly erodes the integrity of institutions that are already, the public already has a lot of understandable mistrust about particularly the Department of justice and the FBI after the last 10 years. So I, it just makes no sense except within the concept of the things he cares about most, which isn't what would a post regime Iran look like that would benefit the people of Iran and have a flourishing civil society. But I didn't lose. And it's, it's that straightforward, I think.
- [49:34]
D
And it's also like, well, he says it, he mentions that, so go ahead.
- [49:38]
C
No, it's just also when he says these things, you know, you never know. Is this a considered idea of his. It's just something that, that came to him in that moment and it doesn't really make a difference. Excuse me. And the problem is now between that and his looking into Georgia and he's setting the stage for the next huge civic clash. Like there's going to, you know, he's, it's going to be around the midterms and he's going to have done and said so many things that so many people are going to be so outraged by that we're going to have another huge crisis on our hands.
- [50:17]
A
Okay. So we have two also.
- [50:18]
D
He's, he's, he said, just to be clear, he says this, he connected the two himself. He said, you know, we're Republicans should take over, say we want to take over these elections. You're, look at what you're, you're going to be surprised by what you see in, in Georgia down in Fulton County. Like we're down there, we got some interesting stuff. You're going to see it. So he's called, you know, he's doing the sweeps week thing again, which is like, wait till you see what we found in Georgia from 2020, which is now six years ago. I mean, you know, five plus technically for the election. But, but the other thing is that this connects to what we were talking about the other day, which is stirring the pot in states, you know, causing the crackup of these Republican parties in states that didn't used to be a problem for Republicans. Georgia's ground zero for that. Right. He, he like dis if you, if you were to tell Trump going into 2020 that his goal was to dismantle the Republican Advantage in Georgia, step by step, he would have done exactly what he did, and he's still doing it. And so people in Indiana who are, you know, frustrated over his push for the redistricting, people in Texas who are now Republicans, I mean, who are in Texas who are now dealing with the swing of that district to a Democrat that happened the other day and the, you know, and what that means for the future. Trump doesn't go away. He doesn't even just pick at scabs, you know, once he returns time and time to do it again. He has now been doing this in Georgia for six years. And Republicans have to figure out a way to have him not just not only start trouble in red states, but just pick at it until he gets what he wants, no matter how long it takes.
- [51:59]
E
Georgia did do that. Georgia did an audit of its election results. It looked through the rolls. It did find, I think out of millions and millions of voters, like 20 people who were non citizens and of the, who were on the rolls, who then of those, I think nine or ten actually cast a vote. So it's not. So I guess you can say there was fraud committed. There's fraud committed in every election, usually inadvertently or usually because of some sort of, you know, breakdown of how the procedure should go at the polls, polling stations. But this is, this is actually another effort by him to sow doubt. And the reason it matters is that in we're coming up to another election, he, the President of the United States should not be saying that the Republican Party should take over state election processes. First of all, it's unconstitutional. Second of all, a lot of what he's been doing already, remember there were the executive orders a couple months ago that tried to make certain requirements for voting. Courts struck those down immediately because it is not constitutional for him to try to do that. That is the state's role. And you can bring legal cases, you can do all kinds of stuff if you think there's been voter fraud. But it's not his role as president to relitigate. Previous election.
- [53:07]
A
David French published a piece on Friday and I read it and I thought, boy, David's jumped the shark. I love David personally. I think I have many disagreements with the way he has pursued his disagreements with Trump, the Republicans over the last couple of years. But I think he's a man of integrity and he wrote this column and I thought he's jumped a shark. And it was, this is not a drill. October, the end of October 2026. And then he lays out scenarios under which there is Mass unrest surrounding the midterms, all sort of ginned up by Trump and by Republicans who are going to say that this election and everything in the run up to it is going to be illegitimate the way the 2020 election they claim was illegitimate, and therefore things must be done in the run up to make sure that this doesn't happen. And you know, he even lays out the possibility of, you know, some kind of cancellation of the elections or some, you know, calling out of troops or something like that. And I thought, okay, you know what? You Trump derangement people, you're all out of your frickin. Like, stop already. Like what? Stop writing this fan fiction. You know, David, like, get a hold of yourself. And then Trump goes on Bongino show and says Republicans should take over over the election process. Then I'm like, well, you know what? I'm sorry, I guess I was a little unfair to David. Not that I think that Trump will be able to do that or that it will even be possible for that to happen. But could he be tempted to play that game? Could the lunatic, the millions of lunatics who believe every fool word that comes out of the stop the steel people's mouths and are and are given their heads and by, you know, by podcasters and radio people and Rasmussen Reports Twitter feed and Liz Harrington and I don't know who else, all madness. But could they be stimulated to like weird action in the week leading up to the midterms? The answer is yes. And that's obviously something that is very bad for our country and our republic and people could get hurt and all of that. But even so, let's say all of that. Like he doesn't understand how useful those words and everything else is to the effort of the Democrats to turn this midterm election into a wave. He is making it clear that every person who does not like him needs to drag themselves over broken glass to get to the polls to vote for anybody who is anti Trump. And in a midterm election, which is even though we now have these very high turnout midterm elections, is still a low turnout election relative to a presidential year. If the passion is on the we got to do something about this lunatic and his crazy people who are doing all of this and fomenting discord. And people, I think now, as the polls show, believe that the discord in Minneapolis and other places is his fault and not the fault of the organized resistance, which is what Republicans were hoping people would take away from this. He is own goal is self owning him again.
- [56:34]
C
And if you're an independent, to end.
- [56:36]
A
Up with an election result that will double his chances of being impeached and might even raise the prospect of him being convicted.
- [56:45]
B
Yeah.
- [56:46]
C
And if you're an independent who was giving him a chance, you're long gone.
- [56:51]
A
Well, that's it. That's the point. So there's Democrats and Republicans who are roughly equal in number, and then you have a larger number of people who are independents. And if they are bestirred, if the independent numbers that we're seeing in the polling, if those people who tend to be less involved in politics are bestirred to vote, they are not going to be bestered to vote for the Republican as a. Republicans are getting chased out.
- [57:15]
D
Of their own, practically chased out of their own town halls. In the last week, we saw two Republican office holders. Mike Lawler is one. He's obviously not in a, you know, a deep red district. He's in New York. He's going to fight for a seat. But, but at the same time, like two Republican lawmakers getting heckled by crowds. And I don't think you can say Soros bust those hecklers in. You know, I don't. You're. What you're seeing is people going, seriously, what are you doing? Right. Like there's a real, there's a real impatience, Republicans dealing with this at town halls for an issue that was a net Republican positive means. You know, that's the sign of, of, of a wave. But yeah, I mean, forget independence. You're now looking at Republicans in Republican districts who can't seem to convince their own constituents in the districts they hold again, which are Republican districts by virtue at least now, of their holding them, that what the administration is doing on immigration makes sense.
- [58:17]
E
It's making me nostalgic for the Tea Party movement, which used to, remember, read the Constitution, they'd get in groups and they should just go around reading article one, section four, just a section on elections, just go around reciting that at town hall meetings and reminding voters that not all Republicans believe elections should be taken over by the federal government.
- [58:36]
B
Why is it that the party that believes in the gender binary, that believes that there should be enforcement of our borders, is also the party that wants to maybe nationalize election in 15 states and, you know, has, you know, brings the kind of dregs who couldn't make it as police officers into these new jobs for border control and sends them into these high volatile situations. They don't know what they're doing. It's incredibly frustrating because I'm sure that this would be a very survivable midterm for the Republicans if all you did was just say, okay, here's the executive order on transgender sports. Here's what we did on the border. Here are the numbers here. The economy looks like it's picking up, you know, and now look at these lunatics. That would be fun. I mean, and how hard is that? It's like, just get out of your own way. It's hard.
- [59:37]
D
Answer to your question. And the answer to your question, Eli, is that Trump is the Monkey's paw president.
- [59:43]
B
Yes. He's a go.
- [59:45]
D
He's the monkey's paw president. You get what you wished for, but you also get some kind of deeply unnerving chaos as a side effect that comes along with it. So you'll get border patrol, but you'll get, you know, border, you know, security, but you'll also get this. And, and all sides across the, across the way. This is, you know, like realists wanted the non neo con president, so they got Trump, who doesn't like to intervene, and now they, now he's going around, you know, plucking leaders out of Venezuela and striking Iran and stuff. There's no, there's always the two sides to Trump. You get what you wish for, but it's always going to be the monkey's paw version. And that's what Republicans are dealing with now on immigration.
- [60:29]
A
Okay, well, we'll leave it there. We'll be back tomorrow. Eli Lake, everybody. Go to the Free Press and read Eli's piece on Reza Pahlavi, which has a really good title that I can't remember right now.
- [60:40]
B
Reza Pahlavi, Iran's Reluctant Prince.
- [60:43]
A
Iran's Reluctant Prince. Okay, so, and we will be back tomorrow. So for Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John Podwortz. Keep the candle burning.