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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Jon Podhoretz
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]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, March 11, 2025. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:39]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:40]
Jon Podhoretz
Maybe I'll be able to speak English throughout this podcast. We'll see. Not clear yet. Signs point to no, but we'll see. The Magic 8 ball also tells me that with me is senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:54]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:55]
Jon Podhoretz
And of course, social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:59]
Christine Rosen
And I was going to throw you off and say bonjour, but no, I'll just say, hi, John.
- [01:02]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay. It's okay. We're off the chain today, as is the Trump administration, because the question that I want to pose to you is the famous question asked by Casey Stengel, the legendary manager, when he was appointed the manager of the fledgling expansion New York Mets in 1962, team that ended up with the worst record in, I believe, I think it still stands as the worst record in baseball history. 40 and 140 wins, 120 losses. And at some point during the season, the veteran Casey Stengel, a grumpy old man, said, can anybody here play this game? So let's just go through what's happened in the last 24 to 36 hours and then talk about the, the consequences of it. So we are awash the controversy over the arrest by ICE of, or the detention by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, the head of the Columbia encampments, a very bad guy. And that, I think is unquestionable from my perspective, a supporter of terrorist organizations, a blocker of pathways for ordinary students to get to class, organizer of the occupation of illegal occupation and trespass of Columbia buildings and the like, arrested by ice, ICE telling his lawyer that he was being thrown out of the country because he was on a student visa. He is apparently, although we're not 100% sure of this, we only have this through his lawyer, a green card holder, and therefore has a slightly, has a different status under immigration law than a, than someone who's on a student visa who can basically be thrown out of the country for, you know, picking their feet in Poughkeepsie. If that should have been the case and that they chose to start their test case of using immigration law to deport supporters of terrorism on college campuses, they clearly made a gigantic error. They didn't do their homework. They didn't dot their I's and cross their T's. They, they took somebody under the wrong aegis. There will be a hearing tomorrow in, in federal court to adjudicate some of these matters, but we have that. We have the stock market going through a five day correction relating to tariffs and the unbelievable level of uncertainty relating to our economic posture vis a vis other countries. We have, as Seth detailed in a fantastic post yesterday, the brain blowing behavior of Jared Kushner's college summer program roommate and owner of a home health aid business named Adam Bowler, who somehow ended up negotiating with some of the worst monsters in American history. And to say that he didn't know what he was doing in the negotiations with Hamas, it would be as though you handed me a wrench and said fix my Maserati like that. That is the level at which he was acting and various other aspects of the implementation of the Trump War on Washington convention. That not going well with some things that you got to enjoy. The dismantling of Black Lives Matter Plaza, which is a street in Washington, 16th street going up from I guess I to K or H K, I can't remember which. And you know this, the words Black Lives Matter having been having been sunk into the pavement, though you can't see them at street level by the way. You see them in a shot from above, literally dismantled yesterday in an act that should warm the cockles of all rational, insane people's hearts who don't hate America. So it's not like it's all unmixed. But can anybody here play this game? That is the question for today's podcast.
- [05:35]
Christine Rosen
Well, what's the game? Risk. Is the game Risk? Because yeah, I can play that game. But we two other two other data points to add to that sort of fascinating and terrifying list. Elon Musk said the quiet part out loud yesterday and talked about entitlements being the one thing that really would have to be cut if we're going to see any significant shrinkage in the size of government. So that was, that was interesting. That will probably be repurposed as a campaign ad for the Democrats in the midterms and some of the attacks on businesses. I think we should spend a little time on the image of the billionaires who were all the tech billionaires in particular all lined up at Trump's inauguration. And just what a hit their net worth collectively took just yesterday. And Trump actually saying we're going to feel pain because of my policies, but it's going to all work out in the long run. And what consumers and markets are reflecting, which is that trust but verify tends to be the consumer response and people are shaky about the economy. The jobs numbers are also not great. So a lot of economists, even on the right, have been, I think, increasing the volume of their alarms about the economy.
- [06:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Look, if you're taking a long term strategy on the economy, so using tariffs to rebalance the world economy is not an instant winner. Right. You're talking about a period of adjustment that should take years, in fact. And so the implementation of that strategy means you have to do what Trump did a little bit, but only a very little bit. Say, this is going to be hard at the start, when you're done, you're not going to believe how wonderful everything is. The problem is everything isn't going to be wonderful.
- [07:16]
Christine Rosen
Well, and it's starting. Exactly. His starting point is an economy that wasn't super healthy to begin with. So that's one of the questions is why do this when we're still coming out of this period of very high inflation and low growth?
- [07:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. So I'm just saying that, you know, when he decided to put his money where his mouth was on tariffs, the net result was always going to be an economic disruption that would be reflected in worry or panic in the marketplace and a concomitant correction in the stock market that would cost billionaires and other people, ordinary people simply have 401ks that were joined the run up of their 401ks over 40,000 to see those numbers plunge. And I don't imagine those numbers are going to reverse themselves this week or absent anything. And so you're doing this. It's a big, big, big move. It's like a huge move. The problem with it is it's stupid and it's a terrible economic idea that will not pay off. But he thinks it'll pay off. So fine. But if he then responds to the initial panic, that's also part of can't anybody play this game? If you're going to play a long game, you have to play the long game. You can't say, oh, I'm stopping playing the long game now, because you don't have a short game. Your entire economic strategy was the long game, which was tariffs, rebalancing the economy. So the short game is, what now? What now? How do you now how do you change things now? How do you fix the economy?
- [08:44]
Christine Rosen
We should add in there a looming government shutdown too. That was another thing on the list.
- [08:48]
Jon Podhoretz
Thank you. Yes.
- [08:49]
Abe Greenwald
Well, yeah, I'M very curious to see how stubborn Trump stays on terrorists because, you know, as we've said over the first few weeks and even before he actually took office, starting with his election, he's enjoyed this honeymoon period and that's coming to an end. It's not like everyone's hating him. But even on the Republican side, there is pushback. There are conservative economists pushing back. And I'm, I. He doesn't like bad press. He doesn't like when the market goes bad. Even though the other day he said, I don't give a damn about the stop stock market, I think he does and it'll be interesting to see if he sticks to his guns here. The short game, John, I think for him, if he stops this will be to claim some sort of win. He will claim that he put some sort of fear in a friendly country or friendly countries and got something and now it's over. And it was a gambit.
- [10:02]
Christine Rosen
The other thing I think is worth noting about the tariffs in particular, is that his message on tariffs, if he is playing a long game, has been this is going to help working class Americans. This is how we rebalance, we bring manufacturing back to this country. We do all these things that will long term help grow the middle class, grow the working class. The problem is working class people don't like tariffs any more than anyone else does, including economists. And there was a recent Ipsos poll that looked at, you know, sort of what the average American thinks about tariffs and then broke it out. People are concerned about tariffs. They don't actually perhaps want him to play the long game in this. If at the same time we have issues about tax cuts, we have issues about inflation remaining too high for most people. So in some sense he was elected to fix the economy. And I think if he's gonna do the bold gamb, he hasn't actually persuaded the people on whose behalf he claims to be making that gambit. And he's going to need to do that if they're going to be experiencing a lot of the pain and rather quickly in terms of the rising price of goods from the countries that are slapped with these tariffs.
- [11:02]
Seth Mandel
My answer on the can anybody play this game? Is that, yes, there are people here who can play this game, but there are also people here who have no business being passed the ball. And they are here, too. That's part of the problem. I mean, this Adam Bowler stuff was, are there, can anybody here play this game? Yes, Steve Witkoff can play the game. We don't always agree with him, but he could play the game well.
- [11:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, I could. I could, I could, I could give you an argument that he doesn't know how to play the game, but. Go ahead.
- [11:32]
Seth Mandel
Maybe. But, but I mean, my point is like, and we saw, you know, we saw the Oval Office or the reports at the Oval Office argument between Musk and Marco Rubio. I don't want Elon Musk telling Marco Rubio what to do as Secretary of State. I don't, I don't want it. I don't want to hear it. And I don't even want those exchanges taking place. And so part of this is just they have a habit of, well, you could throw anything against the wall and see what sticks. But. Because there are consequences, right? Because one of the things we're talking about is getting hostages home and ending a war. And another thing we're talking about is a looming recession, right? An economic downturn. These are like very big, important things with real consequences. You can't do the spaghetti on the wall trick. You have to say, look, when I was in my high school basketball team, we had a guy on the starting 5:1 game who was the best rebounder you ever saw. He just knew where to get. And we were instructed in the huddles with him in the huddles not to ever pass him the ball. We were just reminded, occasionally we had to be reminded, do not pass David the ball. He's not there to take a shot. He's not there to be part of the offense. You have to be able to say that, look, you're here, you know, but you're not. You're not going to meet with Hamas or you're not going to run point on, you know, USAID or, you know, some of these things. And that's. I just wish that he would make sure to have the guys can play the game in position and not restrained by people who.
- [13:12]
Jon Podhoretz
So he thinks that Elon Musk can play the game. He yet again, excuse me, yesterday tweeted out what a fantastic job Musk is doing.
- [13:24]
Christine Rosen
Right after Musk is calling an elected leader a traitor, we should add, for.
- [13:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Having not just elected leader. That's. We're talking about Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is a decorated, flew many combat missions in the first Gulf War. American astronaut. He's a senator, called him a traitor for saying that we should try to win the Ukraine war. Shameful. A shameful bit of behavior on Elon Musk's part. He paid $50 billion for Twitter, so he can do with Twitter what he likes. But, you know, like, I Don't have to listen to this loudmouth defame people. If he's going around trying to clean up, you know, the federal government at the, you know, with, with, with the President's blessing or, you know, following the President's orders, fine. If he wants to be a loudmouth on Twitter, fine. But he stinks. That was a garbage thing to do. It's a garbage thing to do to anybody and to call anybody a traitor. And if Kelly ever ran into him on a street and punched him in the face, he would deserve it. And Kelly could probably, Kelly could deck that guy in two seconds. And maybe it's time for somebody to take a punch at Elon Musk for his personal misbehavior, including Marco Rubio, who, according to these New York Times stories, Musk is standing there saying, you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what you're talking about. You're not firing anybody. What's the matter with you?
- [15:00]
Seth Mandel
And noxious things like you, you look good on tv, you're good on tv. But, you know, as if Marco Rubio isn't very much a hard working student of international affairs who takes his job very seriously.
- [15:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, so Musk doesn't stand on ceremony. That's fine. And he's allowed to do that. And someone should be allowed to take a swing at his, at his mug.
- [15:21]
Christine Rosen
So I would not condone violence, even against, even against Elon Musk, particularly because he is facing death threats right now because of the work he's doing for the Trump administration.
- [15:29]
Jon Podhoretz
Just saying, someone, swing, swing, swings, that this is like a John Ford movie. Take a swing at someone in a saloon.
- [15:35]
Christine Rosen
That's, look, he's advocating, he loves being this antagonistic figure. And that's actually why Trump loves him too, because he's kind of his alter ego. But he's, he's now coming up against a system, and that includes the courts, which also handed him a bit of a setback yesterday. And that they said, look, Doge, we understand what Doge is trying to do here, but we have a Freedom of Information Act. We have, if you work in the government, your records have to be transparent. And Musk, who's been riding this wave of we just want to open up the government to the sunlight and show you all the misspending that's going on. They're going to balk at having to reveal what they're actually looking at and what they're actually doing. But courts are now saying this is what the American people are allowed to Ask to see whether you're a reporter or just a citizen, you can file a FOIA request. Now, governments are very good at stymieing those requests. And under previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic have found all kinds of creative ways during COVID as we know they would. They would use pseudonyms in their emails, so it was more difficult to search for the record that were then being requested under foia. So there's all kinds of ways they can. They can slow down those requests. But that's actually that transparency I find fascinating, because that's what the Trump administration is arguing they're trying to pursue at the same time that they're. They're stymieing requests for that sort of sunlight on their activity.
- [16:56]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, not to get back into why someone should punch Elon Musk in the face. So maybe they shouldn't punch Elon Musk in the face. I'm saying Mark Kelly has every reason to punch Elon Musk. I don't. He hasn't done anything to me. But Mark Kelly would have the right. He called him a traitor, this guy who has served his country. And that's disgusting.
- [17:16]
Christine Rosen
But we don't have duels anymore either, even though that might actually be a duel.
- [17:23]
Jon Podhoretz
Duel involves killing somebody.
- [17:24]
Seth Mandel
That's why, more in the vein of Buzz Aldrin, when He was like 75 years old, who punched that moon denier.
- [17:32]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, right, exactly. Any. Whatever I've lowered, I've descended into the tar pits. So maybe if I want to lift myself up out of the tar pits, I think the central point here is that Trump loves Musk because Musk is a bull in a china shop, and he likes that. And the problem is now he's gone into the China shop, he's swept stuff off of the counter. Right. And sort of broken it in some fashion or other. But there's a lot of stuff that's still in the cases locked, you know, in the glass cases that are locked, that he. That are actually the more valuable Social Security and Medicare that are the more valuable items in the China shop, and that we'll see whether or not breaking the china has any positive ramifications. Because the other thing that you do when you go in the china shop and break all the china is that the. Is that either the owner of the china shop or maybe the cops come by and say, what are you doing? And in this case, the cops or some version of the cops are the courts. And they're like, okay, so is this procedure? Does this follow statute? Can you do it? This way, can you not? Maybe you should be able to. Maybe every goal that you have should be something that a president can affect. But you know, it's been 240 years of the United States and there are procedures called laws and that you have to write one and pass it and then sign it into law and then that opens up the opportunities to do the things you want to do. But if the law does not give you that latitude, we can halt you in your tracks here. And, well, this is the same thing. Then what, what does the future hold for business? You know, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. A bull market, a bear market, rates rising, rates falling, inflation's going up, inflation's going down. You need a crystal ball. But of course, there is no crystal ball. And that's why 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing your books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards, more time on what's next. If this were the kind of product commentary needed, we would take it in a heartbeat. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com Commentary the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Commentary netsuite.com Commentary hey everybody, look who doesn't love the good things in life? Even though I enjoy a little luxury, doesn't mean I can always afford it. Not with three private school and college tuitions. Then I discovered quince. Quince is my go to for luxury essentials at affordable prices. People know this, by the way, because they come up to me on the street if they recognize me from the podcast and say, is that a quince sweater? And I'm like, yeah, it is. And I'm also wearing a quince puffer jacket. I'm wearing a quince shirt, I'm wearing all kinds of quince materials. Ever since quince started advertising, I have become a fanatical quince customer. It offers a range of high quality items at prices within reach, like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from 50 bucks, washable silk tops and dresses, organic cotton sweaters and 14 karat gold jewelry. The best part, all Quince Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So give yourself the luxury you deserve with quints. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/complyment this is actually where, this is.
- [22:29]
Christine Rosen
Where I find a fascinating elision on the part of the Trump administration. They are treating our legal framework and our legal infrastructure like the bureaucratic infrastructure, and they dislike both. Trump, obviously, from a personal perspective, because he feels like the law was used as a weapon against him unfairly by the FBI and others. But Musk has this same contempt for the rule of law when you, when you listen and see some of his actions with Doge. And that's, that's a distinction that we really need to make as conservatives because I dislike bureaucracy probably as much or more than Elon Musk does, but I respect the rule of law, which means.
- [23:06]
Jon Podhoretz
You didn't get trillions of dollars, billions of dollars in subventions from the bureaucracy.
- [23:12]
Christine Rosen
That's my mortgage statement.
- [23:14]
Jon Podhoretz
Protest. Yes. I mean, you know, he's, he's, he's one to talk about how terrible the federal government is and the way it spends money, given that much of his fortune is built on government subsidy. So thank you very much, you took the money and now you want to shut the spigot off. That's NIMBY on a very high order. That's we're talking about, we're talking about Ford D. Chess, NIMBY right there.
- [23:36]
Christine Rosen
But this is where I think their techniques matter, the means and the ends matter. Because if you look at how Trump's Justice Department, for example, the most recent story yesterday is that they fired a DOJ lawyer because she opposed his effort, the, the department's effort to reinstate Mel Gibson's right to own a gun. He was convicted on a domestic violence charge, so he's not allowed to own a gun. And to, and that would obviously set a precedent that domestic violence people who've been convicted of domestic violence offenses should not have guns. And they could under this so she protested. She was supposedly fired for this. We don't know the full story.
- [24:12]
Jon Podhoretz
She says she was fired for this.
- [24:13]
Christine Rosen
She says she was fired for this. But the point is that the rule of law is something with which they treat with equal contempt as. As bureaucratic overreach. And those are two really different things. If you're a conservative, you have to maintain the rule of law. That is the entire point of being conservative.
- [24:28]
Jon Podhoretz
When you look at government, we all hate judges who don't do what we want. Let. Let. Let's be honest. Like, there are things we want. And then the judge comes in and says, you can't have that. And if it's like something that's very much on your. On your wish list or dream list, you're like that judge.
- [24:50]
Christine Rosen
That's why you could appeal, though. That's what appeal processes are for what you can appeal.
- [24:54]
Jon Podhoretz
I know, but then the appeals court are bad. The Supreme Court is illegitimate if it doesn't do what you want. Like this is a problem with having. I'm just saying. So we all understand the impulse. The impulse is, why can't I. I want to forgive student loans. I'm going to forgive student loans. No, you're not. That's not fair. I should be allowed to forgive student loans.
- [25:18]
Christine Rosen
The conservatives are supposed to hold. Sorry to interrupt, but we are the ones who are supposed to hold the line when people's response to that is to try to delegitimize the courts of law and the Supreme Court and the institutions that uphold the rule of law. That's where we say, you know what? Even if the outcome isn't something we like, we still respect that. This is the system. This is the process.
- [25:38]
Abe Greenwald
But the administration has not defied the courts yet.
- [25:41]
Christine Rosen
Not yet.
- [25:41]
Jon Podhoretz
Not yet, no. And it likely won't. I mean, that's the point, is that. Is that I don't think they have game here. That's. We're getting back to can anybody play this game, which is, do they have depth? Do they have depth of vision? Do they feel the vision? So, yeah, so you propose X, right? Like you propose student loan forgiveness or use an executive order. That doesn't work. The courts knock it down. So then you have plan two, you have plan three, you have plan four. The entire Biden administration kept throwing out new ways to try to achieve their aim of student loan forgiveness. Right. Or death transit, as Christine would say, debt transit.
- [26:20]
Christine Rosen
Thank you. I unmuted myself just to be a school on that.
- [26:23]
Jon Podhoretz
Fair enough. Okay. It's very important to do that. Do they have game if they lose X? You know, you can't fire someone's. You can't do X with provisional employees in the federal government. You can't do Y with grants to NIH or certainly with grants, the work for which has already been done. And therefore, the people who performed the work expected that they were going to have this flow of money to fulfill the project, that they signed a contract with the government would happen. Can't do that. Do they have backup? Do they have another way of going at it? And I would say the way that I'm seeing this now over again, it's only. It's not even eight weeks, right? Or it's not even seven weeks, or it's just about seven weeks. Is. They don't. They're just throwing. Yeah, it's the spaghetti thing. They're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. And this is. They are playing. We've had 20 years of a culture war that they. That in part they jumped in with, you know, jumped into the deep end to try to. Boy, I'm mixing metaphors, you know, to, like, fight the culture war in the deep end. I don't know what the hell that is.
- [27:39]
Christine Rosen
Sorry, Are we swimming in spaghetti in the deep end?
- [27:41]
Jon Podhoretz
Something like that. Right. Okay. But, you know, like, this is no joke.
- [27:46]
Seth Mandel
Who are the swimmers? If Leah.
- [27:48]
Jon Podhoretz
No, it's a terrible, terrible mixed metaphor. And I'm apologizing for the third time in 25 minutes for my misuse of the English language and my general discombobulation today. But the point here is, like, this is the fight that a lot of us have wanted to see conducted at the highest level. And if they screw it up, they are screwing. They are. The analogy I was using earlier, though I don't really, with a friend on text, is America goes to war with Iraq. Right? Goes to war with Iraq, makes quick work in 2003 in the first stages of the Iraq war. And what it wants then is to move on to other things. Give Iraq to Ahlman Shalabi, you know, start loya jirgas, have committees run the country, and it doesn't work. And over time, over the next four or five years, the American people lose faith that there was a victory to be had here, that we knew what we were doing. And the consequences of that are now two decades. It is two decades of consequences from failing to secure a victory in Iraq in a determined fashion with enough troops, enough efforts to crush the enemy, to do stuff like the surge in 2004 instead of in 2007 and that kind of thing. And the consequences, the knock on consequences are decades now. That's you wouldn't have what's going on in Ukraine if it were not for Iraq. That is Trump's foundational. This is America getting over involved and we have to pull back. Similarly, if this culture war stuff goes badly and he loses a lot of this stuff and a lot of the stuff on campus and various other things, this fight that we have wanted to engage in is going to be discredited or no one's going to want to go near it again because it's going to seem radioactive and you're going to have this failure. Right. Bush, another example. Bush, you mentioned Musk talking about the entitlements. Right. 2005, Bush goes to the third rail and decides to talk about Social Security reform. Basically has his head cut off. And it's Paul Ryan did the same in 2011 and lost the election in 2012. Nobody wants to go near it or touch it. And we're still seven or eight years away from the country going over the famous fiscal cliff and you can't touch it. So this is a very serious business. Like this is as serious as a heart attack. And you can't do it half assed. And they're doing it half assed. And I'm very worried that they are going to discredit this decades long effort to build the intellectual and policy superstructure for beating back left liberal dominance of the public square and the, and the high, and the high plains of the culture.
- [31:00]
Christine Rosen
So I'm going to suggest that that was like a million violent metaphors you just used there.
- [31:04]
Jon Podhoretz
So I'm saying, oh my God, I'm in. I'm such a mess.
- [31:08]
Christine Rosen
But listen, this, this is actually where populism ultimately tends to fail historically because despite its boldness in some arenas and really I would argue even as a conservative who's very happy to see a lot of the executive orders that Trump did in the culture war space that was low hanging fruit because he has 70% of the country on his side already. They are going in and not touching the one thing that a populist uprising is supposed to bring, which is radical revolution. And what is the one weirdly revolutionary thing he could do is reform entitlements. Because that's something neither party has managed to get near and effectively change for decades. And the fact that they are, you know, not going to go near it because of their, they're actually much more a traditional political movement in that sense because they want to win elections I get it. But if you actually really cared about the future of the country and the way that he talks about why he's doing radical things like tariffs, you have to talk about entitlements. It's just.
- [32:07]
Jon Podhoretz
But tariffs are snake oil. Look, here's what a tariff is.
- [32:10]
Christine Rosen
No, I agree, but it's still, it's a bold departure from economic policy of the past and we need a bold departure from our current entitlement policy.
- [32:17]
Jon Podhoretz
Biden used tariffs. Bush used tariffs for steel in 2002 to try to.
- [32:22]
Christine Rosen
Very targeted tariffs.
- [32:24]
Jon Podhoretz
Yes, I know, but still. Okay, so, but my point is, what are tariffs? Tariffs are this term's version of we're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. We have economic problems in this country. We're going to make other countries pay our taxes, they're going to pay our taxes for us. We're going to put tariffs out. That's how the federal government ran before there was an income tax. Right. Tariffs were the way the federal government collected money tariffs and toll fees and things like that. But the government was a hundredth the size that it is now. And that was a conceivable way to do things. But the thing you're trying to sell working class Americans that they're, as you say, the polling shows they're not buying is this is fantastic because you're not going to have to pay for anything. China's going to pay for it and Canada's going to pay. Those bums in Canada, boy, they suck. And Europe, what a bunch of bums they are, they'll pay for it too. And so far from saying, okay, we need to take our medicine and fix our Social Security system so we have a safety net that will last another 200 years and we're going to have short term pain for long term gain. He's saying we're going to have short term pain so that you'll never have to pay for anything ever again. And you know, the Chinese who make, you know, who have a per capita income, you know, a fifth of what we have, are somehow going to pay for everything in the United States. And it's not going to work. It doesn't work. Tariffs don't work. They make goods more expensive here and they cause war and all that. We have hundreds of years of experience of this and certainly the last hundred years of experience of it. So it's not serious. He's not trying to do something serious. So he's doing tariffs instead of Social Security. He's trying to do something unserious he's trying to get money for nothing, basically.
- [34:22]
Abe Greenwald
See on the, on the, in terms of the administration crossing its T's and dotting its eyes when it comes to things like, excuse me, deporting the student, the pro student, that's like there are all these bumbles. It's almost like the Muslim ban every day, you know, that was a one off in the first administration. Like he did this thing, he did it wrong. No one knew what was happening. Now that's every day something's happening. He's zigzagging on tariffs within the same day. The thing that's going to, that he doesn't have a lot of time on is the economic uncertainty and inflation. He is on a short leash when it comes to that, I think because the market cannot, what he calls short term better be really short term because we cannot endure an extended period of uncertainty like this.
- [35:31]
Christine Rosen
And he's meeting today at 5pm with the business Roundtable, a lot of business people sitting down and I will be very curious, curious to hear the tone of his economic remarks if he makes any tomorrow because they are, I assume, going to be rather firm with him and say precisely what you said, Abe, which he does need to hear. So we'll.
- [35:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, I don't think you're going to be firm with him at all. Nobody right now wants to be crosswise of him because he'll say I'm going to look into your, you know, I'm going to look. Oh, really? Oh, you don't like me? Well, I don't like you. You know, he, he does not stand for ceremony and he is misusing the powers of the executive branch already and he will, they're worried he'll, he'll go after them with a two boy for. So whether they're going to be like respectful or tough, I don't know. He's also speaking today at the business race. I don't know if he's listening or speaking because I don't think he listens to anybody anyway and certainly not at a forum like that.
- [36:27]
Seth Mandel
But he's gonna, he's gonna also, he's going to land on things that he has the power to do. And even in those situations he may just like hammer the nail relentlessly because he found something he's allowed to do. Right, like the, with the pro Hamas student. This is a difficult case because he's supposedly has a green card, right, which makes it, which means you have to have some sort of hearings before you can deport it. But if this kid were, if this guy had.
- [37:01]
Jon Podhoretz
He's 31 years old. It's time to stop calling him a kid. He's a 31 year old guy who, from, from what we can tell, didn't even get a degree. Like he's basically was brought into the Mideast. Mideast, the. What used to be called the Oriental Science Department at Columbia to be an act to do what he was doing off campus, you know, but so, but.
- [37:21]
Seth Mandel
So this guy, if he had the student visa that might have been assumed in this case. Yeah, you could. There would be no roadblocks here. The other things that, you know, trump, he posts on social media yesterday. Shalom Khalil. And you know, you're the first. Mahmoud.
- [37:42]
Christine Rosen
Right.
- [37:43]
Seth Mandel
Khalil is his last name. Excuse me, his. And says, you know, you're the first of many. He can go around plucking student visa holders who are making trouble out it and the courts can't stop it. So the other, the other, the other temptation is to, is to just like overdose on the things the courts let you do and just keep smashing that button over and over again and then get distracted with your presidency seeming to revolve around finding bad kids at college and throwing them out of the country.
- [38:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Look, I wouldn't have a. I would not have a moment's problem with that. My only problem here is whether or not. Not they chose a test case or they chose to start and they didn't.
- [38:32]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I wonder if he actually has a green card application that's under review right now because that takes like nine months. Even if it's quick, it's a nine month at least nine months usually for those marriage green card visas.
- [38:43]
Jon Podhoretz
All we know is that his lawyer told the ICE agent that he has a green card and his lawyer says he has a green card. There's going to be a hearing in Jesse Furman's courtroom tomorrow and we'll see if he has a green card, probably as a green card, but I don't know. Is there some green card database you can search? I don't think so. So we'll see if he has a green card. He supposedly has a wife who's eight months pregnant. Maybe we'll see her, we'll see his picture, whatever. Okay, now let's. We've been bashing them for, you know, 35 minutes. What is going on with Democrats and liberals? What is going on? Are they crazy? And I think they're not crazy. And that's. And I'm worried, but I'm gonna go with the crazy. The crazy Is free Mahmoud, you know, Free Mahmoud Khalil. The Twitter feed of the minority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose ranking member is Dick Durbin of Illinois, spent the day yesterday defending Mahmoud Khalil. Okay, look, if you want to say, as some people have said, I hate this guy. I hate what he stands for. He's a supporter of terrorism. But we have a prop, we have a process in this country, you know, if you're Walt, Wally Olson. So, you know, very. We have a way we do things. This is not the way we do things. I'm sorry, he, you know, he's disgusting. But, you know, these laws and methods of handling things are to protect everybody else, not him. So it would be like the version of a contemporary version of the Skokie March. Nazis marching in Skokie, which is, you say, I hate them. They're monsters, they're awful. We have to let them march because if they don't march, they can say that you can't march and we have this free. That also was also a highly volatile and controversial thing. It wasn't like a hard won thing that they should simply have an unlimited right to march in the streets of the community in America that had the largest number of living Holocaust survivors. Nonetheless, that was 1979. That was the Skokie March.
- [41:06]
Christine Rosen
Aren't the Democrats betting on, yes, they're saying, free this guy and defending him, but what they're really doing is betting on what Abe said earlier, that the administration didn't dot its eyes and cross its T's and made a mistake, in which case they can use this as an example, but that still puts them in a reactionary position. And so when you say, what are the Democrats doing? They are still in a cycle of merely reacting to Trump and not putting forward their own messaging and putting forward their own vision.
- [41:31]
Jon Podhoretz
They are still defending.
- [41:33]
Seth Mandel
They are saying, I actually think that this is that they are overcorrecting from the election, from the belief that they alienated both Jewish and Muslim voters with, you know, the sort of in between policy. And they've chosen. I mean, this is the, the Biden administrator, Joe Biden, personally walking around saying, I'm a Zionist. Right. For all his men, fault was already in that situation leagues ahead of literally everyone else in his party except Richie Torres and John Federer. I mean, it's, you know, and I'm Josh got him or whatever. There's a few. But the point is that the party is where the Senate Judiciary Committee is. And I think that they are making a calculated play to say, we've moved on from, you know, from our Zionist president or whatever, our party leader. We are not going to abandon you guys anymore. And I think that they see that that's where, that's where the party is trending. I actually don't even know if they care if Trump dotted his I's and crossed his T's. I have a feeling that like with, you know, I often think back to the, the, you know, to the, the Scott Walker stuff in Wisconsin, how the, the opposition to his union changes portrayed it as an extension of the Arab Spring. Yeah, I, I think that they, the Democrats have a tendency of, you know, completely blowing up things and they, and it doesn't really matter about the bureaucracy of it or whether they got the details right. I think that they are staking a claim that this is the direction they're going. And because it's Durbin, a floor leader doing it, he's telling everyone down the line, here's your, you know, as Noah would say, permission structure.
- [43:34]
Jon Podhoretz
Two things there. That is the worst you could be right. And that is the worst case scenario of all worst case scenarios of the last five years. There are two parties in the United States. Dick Durbin is a senator from I believe the fourth largest state in the United States. Long serving person, not thought of as a radical. He's not Bernie Sanders. I mean he's terrible. I'm not a fan of his, but thought of as being on the left side of the mainstream in his party. Right. If he has looked at that Gallup poll that shows that Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israel, for example, or whatever, if he's looking at that and they're making calculations of the sort that you're talking about that the Democratic Party, the Democratic base, young Democrats, all of that are now effectively anti Zionist or they are effectively supporters of efforts on campus to do what Mahmoud Khalil did and stuff like that and they're right. Boy, we are in a whole heap of trouble and it's worse than we, it's worse than we thought. I don't think that a major political party siding with somebody who has spent a year or a year and three months or four months causing chaos, disorder, disruption and trespass and scenes of near riots and these encampments and the disorder and decay that that's something that is appealing to the rank and file either in the Democrat or the Republican Party. Maybe it appeals to elites, maybe it appeals to kids, maybe it appeals to the 25 year old woksters fill the rooms in Politics. And maybe that's important for primaries and all of that. Right.
- [45:29]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's what I was gonna say. If it appeals to potential primary challengers, is something they're thinking about.
- [45:34]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, primary challengers or to people who. Yeah. Who make these choices, that's one thing. But because they handed them this issue. And the way to handle it would be to say Trump is railroading somebody who has rights and you don't want him doing that. Cause he'll railroad you. You when he gets a chance, as opposed to saying, somebody is. As we would. Somebody is standing up to these people who are, who are supporting forces that have murdered Americans, are holding an America still holding one American hostage, have dead American bodies in tunnels in Gaza, and have made a mockery out of our higher education system. And they're betting the other way. So I don't think that you could look at that and say, this is this week's version of Al Green yelling at Donald Trump.
- [46:33]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, see, I think it's all. I think it's all of a piece. I think the Democrats don't know what to do about Trump, what to do about the administration. And there's no broad resistance movement. So they're saying, okay, we're the resistance. We're going to be activists. That's where we're going with this. So they're heckling him, heckling Trump when he speaks before Congress. They're making videos where they're cursing at him. They're getting on the side of this guy, like they've decided to be the resistance. I think they are banking on the idea that Trump's going to blow it all, that, that he's going to do these things poorly. And when that happens, they're going to have their moment and they're going to go hard because he came in going so hard on his issues that they're going to meet that force with their own. I don't know. I hope Seth's wrong, but I suspect he's right in terms of. I think this also aligns with where they are in their guts.
- [47:43]
Christine Rosen
Did you guys possibly, I don't know if it was a day I wasn't on the show, but did you talk about, to Abe's point, the horrifying choose your fighter video of the female Democratic congresswomen jumping around pretending to shoot, you know, with their finger guns? Did we. Did you guys mention that? I mean, that's a perfect example, Abe, of a kind of performative resistance that elected officials are now taking on. Because they're, as you say, there's no organized resistance. Although one data point we should consider, and I'm not sure what it says about the Democrats yet, is Gavin Newsom suddenly becoming mildly conservative on issues about which there is a long record. His own tweets about using words like Latinx about, you know, having boys play in girls sports. So that shift has been fascinating to watch. And he has this weird podcast now which is like, beautifully lit. I mean, they all look like they're glowing from within. So kudos to his lighting guy. But they, but he's having people like Charlie Kirk and others on to, to sort of listen to the conservative side in a whole bunch of interesting political posturing that he's obviously laying the groundwork for some sort of run.
- [48:45]
Jon Podhoretz
It is interesting and it's going to be worth watching. His second podcast was with Michael Savage. Michael Savage, who's a friend of the.
- [48:52]
Christine Rosen
Newsom family, like no friend of family.
- [48:55]
Jon Podhoretz
And his son owns Rockstar energy drinks and is worth five and a half billion dollars. And so maybe being nice to Michael Savage will open fundraising spigots for Gavin Newsom if he runs for president through Mr. Wiener. The, another Wiener, by the way, after Citizen Weiner and Anthony Weiner. Michael Savage is not adopting that as.
- [49:19]
Christine Rosen
A commentary podcast catchphrase.
- [49:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Maybe it's Weiner anyway. No, but, but yeah, that, that is, that is, that is a sociologically interesting thing that he is up to. And, and I think why not, like, do doing things to differentiate yourself, you know, and, and create new pathways is how people do figure out new pathways to the presidency. I don't know what to make out of. I really don't know what to make of the idea of showing a glam picture of Mahmoud Khalil on the Senate Judiciary Dems Twitter feed looking handsome by standing by the Columbia Gate and saying, free him. Like he is a supporter of a terrorist organization that murdered 1200 people or led to the murder of 1200 people, the injury of 3500 others, and the taking of 241 hostages. And that has immiserated and dominated and totalitarianized this piece of land that they were ceded by Israel in 2005. And I don't know. I don't think that the Democratic Party is so far gone, given the fact that, you know, 75 million people vote Democrat. I don't think that they're supporters of supporters of Hamas. Maybe I'm wrong. I know that Rashida Tlaib is. I know, but that's, but that's the point.
- [50:58]
Seth Mandel
The members, their congressional Democratic colleagues attended these Encampments. There's a.
- [51:07]
Jon Podhoretz
Not many, but not many.
- [51:09]
Seth Mandel
But they are in a position where they're in a position where they are associated with people in office. Right. And they did it at the encampments. And now with the Senate Judiciary Dems putting this out, they are freely choosing each time the choice comes up to associate with the campus radicals. And the closest we got to, outside of, again, people like Richie Torres and John Fetterman who are, you know, they're not going to lead the party. But outside of them, the closest we got was the protesters have a point. And, you know, we don't, we don't condone. Even Biden was like, we don't condone this, but we have a strong tradition of free speech. There was no one, not one who just said, you know, go take a hike. Like, these guys are extremists on campus and they're causing trouble and they have no, there's no redeeming value to the argument that they think they're making or the position they're staking out. And I'm not going to go anywhere near it. Instead, you know, invite them in the bit, whatever the most moderate was like, let's talk. They have a point, stuff like that. And they've made this free speech argument and stuff like that, too. And that's kind of what they're. They're doing with Khalil. They've had choices and they've made.
- [52:29]
Jon Podhoretz
Made.
- [52:29]
Seth Mandel
As the great philosopher E40 said once said, everybody got choices.
- [52:35]
Jon Podhoretz
I don't know who that is.
- [52:37]
Seth Mandel
He's a rapper.
- [52:38]
Jon Podhoretz
They've made their figured.
- [52:39]
Seth Mandel
They've made their. They keep making choices. And at some point we have to say, like, if the leadership is going to make a choice in the other direction, then we can say, all right, there's really some sort of internal conflict roiling the Democratic Party about which direction to go. But we only see them make the choices in one direction. And I think it's okay to draw certain conclusions.
- [53:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Oh, look, when have we. We started drawing this conclusion about the Democratic Party really in hard with hard lines, right? In 2012, when they booed the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Democratic platform. And when in 2009, Barack Obama started saying things like, you know, we need to have some space between America and Israel and you need tough love and you stink and Bibi stinks and whatever. So, I mean, this is now, this is 15 years in this specific thing. You could say that the liberal problem with standing up for America's Jews and for Israel and for Zionism Is, you know, I don't know how long liberal problem is. 40, 50 years in the making. I mean, there's. I've told the story before, but one of the foundational moments in the creation of neoconservatism is a. Was a. New York. Was a moment during a scene in New York City, the New York City school strike of 1968, which involved the firing of Jewish schoolteachers in a majority black, black school district. People who had had tenure, who had been teaching there for 25 years on the grounds that they were Jewish. And when the union led by Al Shanker took the teachers out on strike because this was a violation of their contract and all of that, there was an expl. There was an anti Semitic explosion in New York City. People dancing around a coffin in Central park with a, with a, with a Magen David painted on the coffin, stuff like that. And this was the moment that my father and others said, okay, well, you know what? We got a real problem here in the United states. That was 1968. So that was like almost three generations ago that, that this divide broke. The, the. Something broke in the party, which had been, you know, completely philosemitic and very, very Zionist in its application. It was the Republican Party that was much, much, much more, much more hostile to Israel or to the idea of a Jewish state or whatever. So we got a long history here, but it is the last 10, 12, 14 years. I'm just saying, as a matter of electoral politics in the United States, siding with people who stage riots on campus, I don't think is a good look for them if they're trying to find a way to reoccupy the middle of the country. Maybe I'm being naive, but here's the.
- [55:50]
Abe Greenwald
But the, the X factor here is Trump in that he can, he can create an environment where that becomes more acceptable, as he kind of did in 2020. The idea that was it, you know, Trump was so bad that you can support the arsonists of Black Lives Matter now because things are so extreme that we have to be so extreme, and you can move what is considered beyond the pale into the center. He does that. He does that for the other side frequently.
- [56:30]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, so this is very bad, and I'm very sorry to have to be delivering this message about how bad it is, but it gets back to the point that if you're going to go into this war, right, you don't go in with pop guns and, you know, and BB guns and, you know, and, and, and slingshots like this is this is a very serious business here about setting the table for the rest of the 21st century. And they do not conduct themselves like serious people. I mean, on the one hand, Elon Musk is obviously a very serious person when it comes to the things that he does that are of deep seriousness to him. And on the other, he's wandering around, he's, you know, again, being like a bull in a china shop. He goes on his stupid social media platform and calls people traitors and, and acts obnoxious. And this is no way to run a railroad. Like this is. Can't anybody here play this game politics like anything else? That's why you want. One thing that was impressing us at the early going in November and December was, hey, it looks like Trump and the. His people have figured out how to do this. Like, he's coming in with four years of experience as president. He's gotten rid of the craziest people who were like. And most amateurish people who were around of him. He's got a solid political team. He's got an agenda, he's pushing it forward. He's. He's making these cabinet nominations, he's fighting for them. He's, like, going on all cylinders. This is pretty impressive. And he's, like, gone sort of seven weeks and something is running out of gas or whatever that early enthusiasm was. Here we're gonna go with more metaphors, right? It's an engine, and they're not changing the oil. So he needed to change the oil.
- [58:40]
Seth Mandel
And they haven't passed in a charging station.
- [58:43]
Christine Rosen
He ran, look, he ran on bringing back a period like the Roaring Twenties, right? Economic growth, lots of spending, everybody happy again. Wars are ending, but it's become like the roiling 20s, right? Lot of uncertainty. Wars are popping up everywhere. It's, it's. And the economy really is the key here for voters in terms of stability. Nothing seems stable right now. Nothing seems certain. And if you can just get certainty at a basic level and for the economy, for most people, that would be it. Just a sense that things are improving a little bit. It doesn't have to be a boom period. That's actually where I think his economic policy isn't that well thought out. Even though, as you say, John, he does have some smart people around him when it comes to economic policy. The question is whether, as we'll see today, when he talks to business leaders, does he also listen? Because he doesn't seem to be listening with a lot of the warning signs that really smart people on both sides of the aisle are raising and showing him.
- [59:40]
Jon Podhoretz
Of course, he doesn't listen, but the question is whether his animal instincts kick in and whether he says, I'm getting all of this. Is it signal or noise? Is the bad news noise that I need to ignore? That would be the playing the long game thing. Right. Stock market is noise. Like it goes up, it goes down. Yeah, it's reversed itself, you know, by several thousand points. But the stock market's at 42,000. Like, it can reverse itself. It's still only down a point, you know, like 1.1% for the year. Like, that's not so terrible. And it'll go up again. And that's the stock market, because I have a longer. I'm working on a longer time frame.
- [60:23]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, but consumer confidence, jobs, numbers. There's a lot of other signs.
- [60:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Or is it signal? Right. So signal would be, look out, you know, the. The light is flashing yellow and then on the train track, and then the light is going to flash red. And if you don't start braking or, you know, or going on the other track or something like that, you're going to go. It's going to be like, you know, Buster Keaton in the general, and your train's going to go off the. Off the bridge into the river. Like, that's. So we don't know what's signal and what's noise, and it's very hard to tell. And of course, the people that he likes the most love the chaos.
- [61:05]
Seth Mandel
Susie files if you're out there, if you're in trouble, blink twice if you're tied up in a broom closet or something. I mean, that was at the beginning of this. We were like, she's running a tight ship. And I don't know if it's possible to run Donald Trump's ship for anybody except Donald. Like, it just might not be possible. But I wonder there. Something shifted because there was gatekeeping and now it feels like there is.
- [61:35]
Christine Rosen
But she's playing the long game. Did you see the video? I think she is playing the long game. There was this interesting video clip of her and Trump and Musk walking to Marine One to go somewhere, and they're walking along and she's, you know, clearly Musk is. And Trump are going back and forth, and at some point, Musk turns and takes Susie Wiles heavy bag for her and schleps it the rest of the way to Marine One. And she's just plodding along. I think she understands them both as men and as human beings in a way that probably she doesn't show her hand. And my hope.
- [62:04]
Jon Podhoretz
She grew up around football, so my.
- [62:06]
Christine Rosen
Hope is that she's.
- [62:07]
Jon Podhoretz
She knows Alfred.
- [62:08]
Christine Rosen
She's letting certain things play out. She's letting certain plays go forth, and then she will. Will deal with the wreckage afterwards. She's savvy and strategic in a way that neither of those two guys is.
- [62:19]
Jon Podhoretz
There is no gatekeeping in a place where the person who is at the top of the food chain goes on social media without mediation or gives these. Has these daily press availabilities in which he blathers like, there's no nobody. Says you gatekeep the president. The gatekeeper is to keep people away from the President who pour bad ideas in his ear or distract him from where he wants to go. He's allowed to set the agenda on a moment by moment basis and to do it in public if he wishes. She has no power, nor should she have the power, nor should anybody want her to have the power to do that. If this is who he is, he should be himself. And then the public can judge whether or not what he is doing and the movement that he's leading and the things that he is doing are things that they should be supporting at the ballot box in the midterms. And if whatever succeeds him in the Republican Party should continue to dominate, you know, in national elections after his retirement.
- [63:31]
Christine Rosen
Can we point out just. Oh, sorry, go ahead, babe.
- [63:32]
Jon Podhoretz
I. Which.
- [63:33]
Abe Greenwald
The gatekeeping happened at the start of the administration. The gatekeeping was about keeping establishment Republicans out.
- [63:41]
Jon Podhoretz
Fair enough.
- [63:41]
Abe Greenwald
That's what we're looking at now.
- [63:43]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, well, that's what it really is. And then you have this one weird thing I want to point out, which is Mitch McConnell, the man who made everything happen for the Republican Party out of power. Right. Kept Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court, ensured the successful nominations of Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett. Right. And various other things. Mitch McConnell is now like, he's voting against everything the administration is doing. This is his last two years in office. He's no longer the Senate Majority Leader. He just voted against the labor Secretary nomination. And you know why? For conservative reasons, because she is apparently a supporter of the notion that a union can force people to be unionized and to pay dues to support political causes that they don't want to support. This turn in Mitch McConnell is among the more jaw dropping things. It's not a turn.
- [64:53]
Christine Rosen
It's consistency.
- [64:54]
Jon Podhoretz
No, it is, but it's a turn. He is a party man through and through. True. He was. He was the leader of the Republican Party. And he has now become a dissident in the Republican Party, like because the.
- [65:05]
Christine Rosen
Party is no longer conservative.
- [65:06]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [65:06]
Christine Rosen
He is. I mean, I, I would just add.
- [65:09]
Jon Podhoretz
That it's just interesting.
- [65:10]
Christine Rosen
I'm just, it's worth look from the perspective of voters. There's also a real whiplash that's still, that we're still recovering from and that's that as news came out just the other day that perhaps a lot of the pardons and orders and things that President Biden signed seem to have all have the exact perfect replicated signature of having been used by the auto that there's this, remember that we had for four years someone who we weren't even sure was really running the country. And now we have the opposite extreme of someone who's just in our faces constantly talking about how he's running the country. And I would like a happy medium there. Maybe, maybe in 10 years we'll get someone who just kind of is a normal president. But I find it fascinating that there is a risk for Trump of overexposure at a certain point for the average voter who put him in office again with some reservations, not because they love the Trump show like his base does, but because they really mistrusted the Biden administration and for good reason. So I will be really fascinated to see when that exhaustion kicks in for a lot of those voters who shifted to the our side of the aisle for this election.
- [66:17]
Jon Podhoretz
Sarah, enough. All right. I'm going to do a quick recommend recommends, but it's kind of like an ironic recommends. So people may know that the single most popular show on the now declining and soon to be gone broadcast television, meaning the networks, is a show called Tracker. And many of you may not even have heard of Tracker, though 30 years ago you would have known about Tracker because 40 million people would have been watching it. Tracker is essentially a knockoff of Reacher. It's about a guy who goes from town to town helping people. He's actually, he like finds missing persons for money. I mean, at the end of every episode when he finds somebody, he gets a check. So they make it clear that he's not just, you know, doing this out of the goodness of his heart, but a big strapping guy. And you know, he has a gun and grew up as a son of a survivalist and he goes from town to town. And so I, it's very watchable because this guy Justin Hartley plays him is very watchable. But I was watching this episode, I watched it on Paramount plus. So it's on cbs. And, you know, there's some. There's a serial killer. Serial killer takes a woman who was his shrink hostage. And. And Colton, the. The. The hero finds her and. And ends up shooting the guy. So I'm like, okay, well, this is like, he's not a law enforcement person. He's just like. So he shoots the guy. So I went to the Wikipedia page. I've seen six or seven episodes of the show, went to the Wikipedia, read through the plot summaries of the show, and this guy's like a serial killer. Like, this is. The funny thing about this show is at the end of every show, he shoots somebody. And then it's like he shoots somebody. The person is dead. And then he's at the local cafe having pancakes with his friend the lawyer. It's like he doesn't have to go testify. He doesn't, you know, the cops don't arrest him for shooting, you know, for coming into their town and shooting somebody like nothing ever. And he. It's like Murder, She Wrote where they realized that, you know, this small town, everybody was dying in this town. In the town in Maine.
- [68:21]
Christine Rosen
It was Angela Lansbury all along, right?
- [68:23]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, they had to move it to New York City because there had been 200 murders in Cabot Cove, Maine. So in this case, like, this guy is like going from town to town shooting people in the leg and the shoulder and the head and then just like driving off in his. In his van. So it is the perfect show for the Trump era is what I'm saying.
- [68:45]
Christine Rosen
That's.
- [68:45]
Jon Podhoretz
That's. And, and, and Mel Gibson should. Could play him if he gets his.
- [68:49]
Seth Mandel
Gun back, by the way, on the Mel Gibson thing. I feel very strongly about this, and people who follow me on Twitter are probably sick of me feeling strongly about this. I propose Mel Gibson gets his gun license back if he finally makes the Maccabees movie that he said that he Talked about making 10 or 12 years ago, whenever it was, that was the. That was the comeback. He was going to come back from his anti Semitic tirades, DUI arrests, and he was going to make the Maccabees movie. And we all know that. How great that would be. Like, brave.
- [69:27]
Jon Podhoretz
I don't think so anymore. Here's why. Here's why. So Mel Gibson may directly directed four movies, right? And three of them are remarkable directorial achievements. Braveheart, which is still an extraordinary movie, won him an Oscar. The Passion of the Christ, still the single most successful independent movie ever made. And Apocalypto which is about essentially, you know, is a sort of a chase movie in the jungle set in the 16th century New World. And they're great. And then he of course went nuts, right? Or was always nuts. But he came publicly nuts. He just directed another movie called Flight Plan with Mark Wahlberg and it's terrible. So in fact he stopped exercising his muscle, his directorial muscle. He's old. I'm sure he's compromised by the use of. Of substances meant to balm you in the forgetfulness, the forgetful water, the lethy waters of forgetfulness. And doesn't have it anymore. So I don't think that Maccabees movie would be any good now. And he's apparently making a resurrection. He's making the resurrection of the Christ now or is about to make the resurrection of the Christ with Jim Caviezel yet again. Though it's interesting because Jim Cavill was 20 years ago. So since, of course this is supposed to happen three days after the events of the Passion of the Christ, I don't know how it's going to be that he looks to do that creepy.
- [71:00]
Christine Rosen
De aging that they're now doing.
- [71:01]
Jon Podhoretz
Right? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so Mel Gibson not a good director anymore. So you got to give up on that. It would have been something. It is a great story. Somebody should still make it. But you know, it's a Zionist story. So I don't know where Hollywood, what is going to be with that right now. Maybe they'll have the directors of no other land make the Macabees movie. That would be. That would be really thrilling. Anyway, we'll be back tomorrow. For Seth, Abe and Christina, I'm John Pot Horatz. Keep the candle burning.