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- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, Expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:18]
Noah Rothman
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
John Podhoretz
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
Noah Rothman
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast Today. Today is Wednesday, April 2, 2025. I'm John Pothorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
Noah Rothman
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:40]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
Noah Rothman
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [00:45]
John Podhoretz
Hi, John.
- [00:46]
Noah Rothman
I am here today to report that we have limited new product merch for you. And I don't have it in hand for the YouTube view viewers, but I will get it before the end of the podcast and show it to you at the end of the podcast. It is a T shirt, a beautiful black T shirt with the words it's worse than that in large, unmistakable letters. Abe Greenwald's signature phrase with the Commentary Podcast logo right there in the middle of the O. It's worse than that T shirt available to you for a limited time. Because we didn't print, we didn't make too many of them. We have a small office here. We're not storing a lot of merch.
- [01:31]
John Podhoretz
Where's my.
- [01:34]
Noah Rothman
Let'S, let's put up the, put up, put up the dough. Get a freebie continent. You know, I have the, I have the hat.
- [01:44]
Seth Mandel
The hat arrived this week, you see, extremely comfortable.
- [01:49]
Noah Rothman
That's the hat. But we don't have any more hats. We may order more if we get orders. We are, we are being very judicious with our merch ordering because you don't want to be in a position where you suddenly have like a thousand pieces of merchandise and they're sitting there and you can't sell them. So we will be, we, you can go to commentary.org merch or go to our website and just click on the merch tab. It's there and you can look at it, you can order it. Maybe I'll send Matt a shirt if he, if he's nice on the show today. Sometimes he gets a little uppity and you know, I, you know, you know.
- [02:26]
John Podhoretz
I'm not going to challenge you today.
- [02:28]
Noah Rothman
You know. Yes. As, as Nurse Diesel says in the, in the Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety, those who are nasty do not get fruit cup. So I'm just going to warn you, Matt, I'm watching you. If you've already made something from me, so I going to need something from you. And that, that includes a little analysis. Today. We have all kinds of things we can Start with. But I guess the, the, the hottest news were the three special elections last night, two in Florida for House seats, and then the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. One thing to say, and then I'm going to turn over to you, which is, you know, Elon Musk has now learned what Meg Whitman and Michael Bloomberg and many other people in politics have learned, which is that you can take a gigantic pot of money and overturn it on a state and spend more than anyone ever thought was even conceivably possible to spend on a race that you want to win. And you will lose that race if the public decides it wants to go in another direction. And the weird confidence that people have that money turns elections. We have every reason now, after 15 years in the wake of Citizens United, to know that people really have to deliver themselves of this delusion. And yet it's so easy to think that money will translate into votes, that it's very seductive to convince people with unlimited resources to just take a match and set their money on fire. Because my guess is that had Elon Musk not spent $30 million in this race, the result would have been exactly the same. Do you agree, Matt?
- [04:26]
John Podhoretz
I don't know.
- [04:26]
Noah Rothman
You have to agree or you're not going to. I forgot about my T shirt.
- [04:29]
John Podhoretz
There goes my T shirt. Look, it's not just that we learned that money is necessary but insufficient to win elections. A lesson that, as you say, John, is abundantly clear in the record of history is that Elon Musk is necessary but insufficient to win elections. Because as we all know and see every day, he really got into politics last year. And when he endorsed Donald Trump after the assassination attempt before first assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk went all in campaigning for Trump, holding rallies for his own rallies in advancing the Trump candidacy, handing out the million dollar checks. And he carried that same pattern to the Wisconsin judicial election last night. On Sunday night, he held a major rally in Green Bay. He had one of his doge personnel there who gave a presentation about some of the fraud they found in Social Security. And Musk came on stage at that rally wearing a cheesehead. One of the more memorable images so far this year. And it wasn't enough. The liberal candidate won handily by double digits. So what does this tell us? Well, the first thing it tells us is that when Donald Trump is on the ballot, is not on the ballot. Rather, Republicans do not do as well because the connection that Donald Trump has with low propensity voters, working class voters, the voters who are not interested in politics, but really interested in Donald Trump and what he stands for. They don't turn out if Donald Trump is not on the ballot. And that's especially the case in a off year special election like we saw in Wisconsin yesterday. And the other thing I think we learned is that, you know, everyone's focused on Musk's money. That wasn't the only money involved here. George Soros political network donated quite a bit of money to the judge who won. J.B. pritzker, the billionaire governor of Illinois, donated to the liberal candidate who won, Crawford, I think her name is. This was a contest of billionaires. And I was amused by my favorite podcast this morning, my favorite hate this morning, when the host on NPR said somehow this race turned into a referendum on Elon Musk. And I said to myself, oh, I wonder why that happened. It's because the media turned it into a referendum on Elon Musk. But even there, I'm not so sure we can draw any a concrete lesson about Musk's role. Was this a defeat of Musk? Because at the end of the day, it's important to remember this was a status quo election. The liberals had the seat, they held onto the seat they'll maintain control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
- [07:28]
Noah Rothman
Important to note that Plato's caves rules apply here. Maybe Elon Musk wasn't the reason that they held onto the seat despite his money. The question is, will the political class, the consultant class, the people who plan elections, will they take away from this that Musk is a net negative and will they start distancing? Will Republicans who are running for office start distancing themselves from Musk because they believe these results demonstrate that he is a net negative and that he will be a problem for them going forward? I don't have an answer to that question. I think Patrick Raffini and you know, and Kirsten, his team and all that will somehow manage to dig deeper into the results or do focus groups to find out if that's the case. But I think it's a 5050 proposition that the takeaway from this, and not just among Democrats who are looking for anything that they can use as a weapon against Republicans is in these specials and to sort of derail the sense that the Republicans are have total charge of everything. They'll want to believe this. And then if you can put some meat on the bones of that idea, Musk really could become an even more legendary figure as the, as the way you get at Trump, like giving you a second stage attack, a second element of attack that will affect voters.
- [08:59]
John Podhoretz
So just to, to make a few more points, I mean, you're right. I think that's where the conventional wisdom in Washington is headed, certainly among liberals and I think among some people in the Republican sphere as well. But I think that would be an overreaction. Wisconsin was the closest state in 2024. Trump won it very narrowly. Again, as I said, this was a status quo election. And what do we know? We know one, we know two things. We know that the Republican Party does not do well in low turnout special elections. Now, turnout was higher in this election than normal. In fact, the way higher. Some county clerks were not anticipating the turnout, but at the same time, it wasn't a midterm, it wasn't a presidential. And, and also the voter ID proposition on the ballot passed handily. So what do we take from that? Is it people don't like Musk, or people kind of liked the status quo in Wisconsin, but they also love voter id, which they'll now have in Wisconsin, which many liberals and Democrats don't like. And at the same time, in the two special elections in Florida, Republicans won. Now the media is spinning these congressional special elections as somehow not quite wins because the margins were lower than in 2024. But if, imagine the reaction had Mike Waltz's former seat, Florida 6, actually turn to the Democrats, right? That's when you start panicking and it didn't happen.
- [10:52]
Noah Rothman
Can we talk about that a little bit? Because I think that's funny. So that these two seats were won by the Republicans by 14 or 15 points and the claim is that, well, they were, they were won in 2020, whatever it was, by 30 points and Trump won them by the, in, in the mid-30s. But these are new candidates nobody knows coming into a race. They win landslides in April and this is, and this is determined to have been a defeat or a warning shot or oh my God. And as you say, it's like these were proxy votes for Trump essentially, or tests of Republican strength. And what was, I'm going to remind you, as little as six years ago, a totally purple state that is now a rock ribbed Republican state. And the results were what you would expect from a rock ribbed Republican state, which is a very little known guy in Mike Waltz's seat winning by 15 points. Now, one of the things that happened here was that the Republicans panicked, they got bad polling. And Ron DeSantis doesn't like Randy Fine, the guy who was running in Waltz's seat, has some personal beef, said he was a bad candidate, made it clear, made it known that he had no confidence in Randy Fine. I'm an admirer of DeSantis governorship and governing abilities. I am far less of an admirer of his as a political actor and player. I think he created this idea of crisis apparent seemingly out of whole cloth in a way that might have even have talked Fines numbers down in the polling in the state. That caused Republicans to panic and I think caused Donald Trump to pull at least Stefanik's nomination from the UN Ambassadorship out of a fear that Randy Fine was going to lose and that the margin in the Republican House was going to go down to one or two. And so he could not risk Elise leaving her seat and becoming the UN ambassador. So it actually had a real world effect, this idea that Fine was in trouble.
- [13:17]
Seth Mandel
If that is what happened. He may have done Republicans weirdly in Congress at least a favor because they've shown creative ways. As a Jets fan, I can recognize it's creative ways to lose seats. Sometimes you don't know how somebody can lose a position and then you watch the jets and you go, oh wow, that was, that was, that was new. And so they've, they've shown ways, I mean they having these fights over the speakership. Each time they had a fight over the speakership, the guy who lost left Congress before his term was technically up. Right. I mean they've, they've had kind of unprecedented ways of exiting Congress with a minimal majority. And so I think that it may have done them a favor because they can't just count on a one seat majority anyway. They can't really afford. I think that the lesson is that they might not have really been able to afford Elise Stefanik leaving Congress in the first place and also that they don't know what would happen with her seat because, you know, Florida is Florida and New York is a bit more open and they lost the last special election for a Republican held seat in New York. And I think that they are right to be more spooked at the prospect of losing Stefanik seat than they were.
- [14:41]
Noah Rothman
Randy Font, let me make another point that Abe, I think could take up here, which is it's possible in the larger sense of the battle over the next couple of years that the Stefanic choice though was very heartening to those of us who support Israel and love the idea of using, you know, the platform at the UN as the leading American way to defend Israel on the world stage. But at least Stefanik's reputation was made as the warrior against the universities and that fight is fully joined. That fight is not over. That fight is right is like 12% accomplished. And in terms of her future and in terms of the future goals of the conservative movement in rebalancing America's culture, she may be more val, way more valuable staying in the House and being the lead prosecutor of the universe, of the fight against the universities in Congress than she would have been at the UN where you could get David Friedman, the former US Ambassador to Israel, as the ambassador who will do pretty much the same thing. Abe, what do you think?
- [16:00]
Abe Greenwald
I think she would be more valuable. I agree with you. And very possibly be much more valuable to her because you don't necessarily want to be at the UN this time around with Trump. Because while Stefanik is fantastic on Israel and who knows what she's going to have to would have had to say and how she would have had to vote on matters such as Ukraine and other allies, who needs to be tagged with that? Things weren't quite like that when Nikki Haley was UN Ambassador. She could run with her approach to the UN And Trump was completely in line with it.
- [16:49]
Noah Rothman
She's very young, she's very talented, she's very smart. She has a way of grabbing the spotlight and isolating and highlighting important issues and basically punching way above her weight, though not really above her weight. But there she was sitting alone Congressman, against three university presidents of the most prestigious, prestigious among the most prestigious schools in the world and she flattened them like a pancake. And in terms of her own future in the post Trump Republican Party, she's one of the few people, I would say in Washington who has developed a somewhat independent standing even though she's very Trumpy apart from Trump as the Tribune on this issue, which kind of is a consolidating issue for the relatively fractious right that Matt, you delineate in a really brilliant piece in your new column in the Free Press this morning. Like what, what is the Republican Party right now? The fight against the universities and the cultural institutions in the United States is one of the few things that you can say we're fighting about tariffs, we're fighting about Ukraine, we're fighting, fighting about this, we're fighting about that. I don't know that anybody who could be count themselves as part of the Republican or conservative movement is not all in on the taking the universities down agenda.
- [18:21]
John Podhoretz
Oh, absolutely. Well, that's because, you know, what unifies the conservative movement these days is anti wokeness and the universities are the petri dishes of wokeness. I also think the conservative movement is pretty much unified on immigration and crime. But then the disagreements start piling up pretty rapidly. But I would just say this is about the House. It's about control of the House. And I thought it was very interesting listening to Elon Musk during his rally. I watched part of it. And his goal there in trying to flip this judicial seat was in order was to prevent a Democratic gerrymander from going through. In Wisconsin, the governor, Tony Evers, very progressive governor, has designed a map that Musk says could lead to the elimination of two Republican House seats in Wisconsin. Remember when Eric Holder was always talking about the Republican gerrymanders? Well, you don't hear that so much these days because gerrymanders essentially are tools Democrats use to maintain their representation in the House at the level it is. Without gerrymanders in California and New York, their majority would be much lower.
- [19:45]
Noah Rothman
Hey, everybody. Vacation season is upon us. Spring has hit New York. Got some warm weather, got some rain, but it's just making me think about the summer and the fun that I can have, fun my wife and I can have. We got a trip planned for Wisconsin in July. Other stuff we're going to do with our family later in August. And this year, I'm going to treat myself to the looks upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices. And the premium luggage options and stylish tote bags they offer are perfect ways to carry all of my Quince goods. My sweaters, my polo shirts that I just got from Quince and those like everything else you get there, priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How? By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost to 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 for your next trip, treat yourself to the looks upgrades you deserve from quince. Go to quints.com commentary for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's quince.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary when they lost their gerrymander in 2022, that was what saved the Republicans, right?
- [21:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, in New York.
- [21:25]
Noah Rothman
Exactly.
- [21:26]
John Podhoretz
We had a huge fight. And there the New York Democrats wanted to almost entirely eliminate the Republicans in the state. Racial gerrymanders in the south, preserve a certain number of seats. Those are coming up. And actually in the Supreme Court, though I don't think the Supreme Court will do away with them entirely, even if, in my view, they should. So gerrymanders now are one of the few things that work to Democrats advantage. And what Musk was saying is if the liberal candidate Crawford won, then the map would go through and the House majority would be endangered more in 2026. It's already a narrow majority. And so when you think about the effort that Musk put in in order to flip the seat, when you think about pulling Stefanik's nomination to keep her in the House to get that majority up, it's about, it's 220, 213, I think now, which means you can afford to lose more votes, but not many more when legislation comes into play. 3. Right. This is the big concern because there's an understanding in the Trump administration. This is what you get when you have our novel situation of a president who served one term, then was out of office for four years, and now is back. They know that if the Democrats control the House, Trump will be impeached, the agenda will come to a halt, and the last two years of Trump's second term will be very similar to the last two years of his first term and very messy. So they want to prevent that. And the question is, I think they've, in terms of, you know, any unexpected contingencies here, such as an accident or death. They have this majority now. Right. But.
- [23:11]
Noah Rothman
And Johnson is holding them, and they hold it very important.
- [23:14]
John Podhoretz
Something very interesting this week.
- [23:16]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, go ahead. Just yesterday, weird. A weird thing happened.
- [23:20]
John Podhoretz
Well, it's weird, but it's, it shows you how, you know, the Republican House is always this kind of crazy laboratory monster that, you know, is always kind of like the, you know, the, the xenomorphs and aliens where you can just kind of like, you know, strike out of your stomach. Pop out. Yeah. You don't know where they're going to come from. You know, just so just the House is out of session. There are no more votes in the House for the rest of the week. Why? Well, because the House leadership is going to put forward a rule, did put forward a rule in order for the House to vote this week on important legislation. One piece of the legislation was a plan to stop or limit these national injunctions where the one liberal district judge can completely halt a nationwide policy on a whim. Right. So that was one piece of legislation. There's companion legislation that Chuck Grassley has introduced in the Senate. And the other thing that the House wanted to vote on this week was ensuring that people who vote are citizens of the United States. Right. Again, one of those issues that not only unifies the right, but also is very popular at the country at large. Well, that's not going to happen. And the reason is the rule was voted down by nine Republicans. And I'm still trying to figure out what caused these nine to kind of band together to bring down the rule. There are always kind of, you know, personal reasons. One of the more interesting reasons is that a MAGA congressman, Anna Paulina Luna from Florida is engaged in this intense fight with the House leadership over her proposal to allow recent mothers to vote by proxy. Proxy voting has been a constant conflict in the House since the pandemic. Nancy Pelosi allowed it.
- [25:23]
Noah Rothman
We should explain that it is tradition for a 200, you cannot vote in the House or the Senate without being present on the floor to vote. This is a very, very important thing because it would be very easy for shenanigans to occur if the vote is not cast by the person there. If you start making this voluntary, you could have an aide going on the floor claiming to have the proxy vote of their boss and there are voting the other way, being bribed, stuff like that. So the idea is the only person who can vote in a vote is that person in Congress assembled. The Congress in Congress assembled as it is, right? As it says in the Constitution. So.
- [26:11]
John Podhoretz
But there's been this effort since the pandemic to loosen the rules. And the Democrats in Pelosi were very open to it. Congressman Luna, she wants to do it from a Republican side and the House leadership said no. And she said, fine, I'm going to tank your rule. And once again, House Republicans are in this stage where they're kind of like scrambling to figure out, well, what are.
- [26:35]
Noah Rothman
We going to do?
- [26:36]
John Podhoretz
So there you have evidence that even, even on a day where you think things are okay, it's a status quo election. We had. The two vacancies are filled. Now they have a little bit more margin. Oops, they did it again.
- [26:53]
Noah Rothman
And Annapolina Luna, of course, is in an emotionally fraught position over the last couple of weeks because she was the subject of a really vile sort of story that appears in one of the post 2024 Books about Trump saying to her when she was flying on Air Force One and was pregnant, saying, you can go lie on my bed at the back of Air Force One, but don't tell Melania because she doesn't like other women in our bed. Like a joke, right? She was joking, he was joking. And the story is told as though he is being salacious. And gross. And she was, she gave a statement. She said I had preeclampsia. Like, I was very sick. This was a very bad and hard pregnancy. He was showing me incredible kindness. And for you to go at me as a pregnant woman and somehow intimate that he and I were having a thing on Air Force One, you know, you people are all garbage. So I think this is, she wouldn't somehow be doing this if that hadn't happened last week or the week before that. You would think she would take very on edge.
- [28:13]
John Podhoretz
She would take out her anger on liberals.
- [28:15]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, right.
- [28:17]
John Podhoretz
Her colleagues who want to, who want to stop these national injunctions and make sure illegal immigrants.
- [28:22]
Noah Rothman
Absolutely, absolutely. But I'm just saying that there was a predicate to her behavior.
- [28:30]
John Podhoretz
Drive by smear.
- [28:31]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:33]
John Podhoretz
And Trump, I mean, yeah.
- [28:37]
Noah Rothman
And he was like, a lot of people wouldn't say, you can go lie on my bed. That's my bed. Like, you have cooties. I don't want you lying on my bed. Supposedly he's a OCD neat freak and would never shake anybody's hand. So, you know, whatever. Just saying. It's like an anecdote about how nice Trump was being that was spun to be how mean, how gross Trump was and, and how this MAGA chick is kind of like in his, you know, is like, is one of his bond girls or something. It really was foul harem. Yeah, yeah.
- [29:10]
Seth Mandel
I mean, the chick part is part of it too. There's, you know, I, I, one of the, one of the sports, one of the right wing leaning, like sports culture websites refers to her exclusively as the bikini congresswoman. You know, there's like, she has to deal with that too, which is part of all this, which is like the idea that she's like some sort of trophy congresswoman. And I think that all that builds up to being, you know, to being enough already for her in her head, like more than even just the story is just like she, she has been kind of treated like, you know, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader by people on the right who think that they're celebrating her, you know, and are trying to say, like, look, Republicans are cool, Republicans are hot Republicans, you know, there's a segment of the right that came out with that beer calendar, you know, conservatives that the, the, the sort of like Amer in America, stars and stripes bathing suits or whatever. Like there is a sort of problem here that has dogged her even before this, which is to be taken seriously by her own, by the people who, who should be and are supporting her should be able to rely on them for support. Their support is a sort of double edged sword.
- [30:27]
John Podhoretz
Here's my segue to what the second topic we wanted to talk about, which is here's the House. We're, we're speaking about how it's a very narrow majority, the administration, and Elon Musk, who's part of the administration, is very concerned about holding the house in 2026. There are still problems with the internal governance of the majority, as we saw this week with the voting down of the rule. But meanwhile, there's the Senate. And it's still unclear how close the Senate is to passing its budget resolution. So we can move ahead with this tax, this tax and spending reconciliation bill, the one big beautiful bill that will also include funding for the wall, will also include deregulation, include ways in which to increase our energy production in the United States. We're waiting on the Senate. And as the Congress is in this kind of limbo on the very important and enduring legislation, today is liberation day.
- [31:26]
Noah Rothman
Yes.
- [31:26]
John Podhoretz
And at 4pm that's my segue. And at 4pm today, President Trump is going to come out and announce his reciprocal tariff policy, the new tariff policy, the new economic policy of the United States. And we don't know. We don't know. That's the most fascinating thing. No one has any idea what he's.
- [31:47]
Noah Rothman
Gonna say as we speak. It is seven hours and ordinarily a huge package of material would be being presented to the sort of the intelligentsia. There would be briefings at the White House laying it all out. Columns are always into place and nobody knows what the number is or anything like that.
- [32:10]
John Podhoretz
Note, they're doing it at 4:00pm yeah. Right.
- [32:13]
Noah Rothman
So speaking of the unelected injunction official that needs to have the rule that why is the Senate being held up on the one big beautiful bill? This is one of my favorite things about the way Washington works. Sometimes they're waiting on a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian about one reason.
- [32:35]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [32:36]
Noah Rothman
About the. Whether the bill fits the rules that allow it to be passed under reconciliation, which is the principle that says that because a bill involves the budget and deals with how the budget is adjusted, it can be passed by a simple 51 seat vote rather than requiring a 60 seat vote that brings a bill to cloture. And the Senate parliamentarian has taken her own sweet time with this thing. It's been like a week without a.
- [33:10]
John Podhoretz
Ruling, yet the parliamentarians taking their time. And of course, the Senate didn't engage in any business yesterday or the day. The evening before, because Spartacus was there giving what is now the longest speech in Senate history, overturning the previous record set by the late Strom Thurmond.
- [33:32]
Noah Rothman
You are, of course referring to Senator Cory Booker, right?
- [33:36]
John Podhoretz
That is his.
- [33:37]
Noah Rothman
Cory Booker, once known as a great friend of the Jewish people, particularly when he was mayor of Jersey City. Very tight with. Not my favorite rabbi, maybe my least favorite rabbi. That's not an anti Zionist Newark, by the way. Huh? Newark. I'm sorry, Newark. But, you know, somebody who went to synagogues and delivered what are called var. Torahs.
- [34:04]
Seth Mandel
Those are.
- [34:05]
Noah Rothman
Those are sort of analyses of the weekly Torah reading. And was. And he seemed almost to be flirting with converting to Judaism or something like that. Anyway, I bring this up only to say that Cory Booker basically spent Yom Kippur on the floor of the. Of the Senate 25 hours, which happens to actually be the length of the Yom Kippur fast reported, because he is a vegan who does intermittent fasting. That he had made this possible for himself by ceasing to eat for three days and drink for three days beforehand so that he did not have to go to the bathroom. And then he stood on the floor assailing Trump's tax policies and elon musk for 25 hours. And I gather Democrats are very excited, and I don't really understand why. Because he stood in the Senate and talked for 25 hours. That's why you're excited. I mean, the last time this happened, Ted Cruz stood and talked for 14 hours and read Green Eggs and Ham and did whatever he could to keep talking because he was actually pushing a specific agenda item. I think it was the shutdown of the government. I can't remember what the hell he was talking about the whole time. Maybe it was. Whatever. It doesn't even matter. That's the point.
- [35:33]
John Podhoretz
Rand Paul did one too, about droning.
- [35:36]
Noah Rothman
So this is literally performative nonsense. He wasn't holding up a bill, which is what filibustering was originally for, was you stand there and you keep talking on the floor descent, because once you stop, they can call the vote, close the debate with that tech thing I talked about called cloture, where you get 60 votes and then the bill passes. So the idea was to give time. You'd have a filibuster because you can't. You can't stop a senator from talking. So you'd have a filibuster to give your team time to try to bully other people in the Senate into changing their vote and not passing the bill that they wanted to pass or closing debate and bringing the bill to a vote. It was a tactic used like Strom Thurmond used it to end civil rights legislation. That's what it was most famous for as a. As a technique. But Cory Booker had no aim.
- [36:43]
Abe Greenwald
But do you think he wanted some sort of. Some moment of greatness to come out of this? Do you think he was thinking that it was going to be more of an effective rallying cry than it was, as opposed to.
- [36:57]
Noah Rothman
I don't know. That it was stunt and it's not for us. Right.
- [37:01]
John Podhoretz
Think about the budget speech. Think about Trump's speech last month. The Democrats do not know what to do. All they're doing is screaming into the wind. That's why I said it's like Macbeth, the tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. He's there for 25 hours. He's complaining about Medicaid cuts that haven't happened. He's talking about Elon Musk firing federal employees. Most of America not really concerned about that issue. He's protesting. It happens that he followed up the end of his speech with a fundraising appeal, but it won't get anywhere. And you compare that to what Senator Chris Murphy is talking about, saying that fascism has descended on the United States. You have this whole trend of Democrats thinking that the way to stand up to Trump is to use. To use vulgar language. Let's be potty mouths. That's gonna show how we're really fighting Donald Trump. Right. And then you have Tim Waltz, who apparently was let out of the asylum, wandering around the United States, actually saying over the weekend, I can be a train wreck sometimes, as if we didn't know that already.
- [38:15]
Noah Rothman
You know, the Booker thing was not for us. Obviously, it's not directed at us. He doesn't care what we think of it. Maybe he would like us to attack him because it'll elevate his standing. This is his opening gambit for the nomination in 2028. He had to do something. And remember, what did Kamala Harris do to make herself famous in the Senate? Not that he hasn't been in the Senate for a long time, because he has. Right. She, like, yelled at somebody during a hearing. Right. Who? I can't remember who it was. Was. That was Barr. It was Barr. It was Bill Barr. She yelled at Bill Barr for an hour. And somehow, five years later is, like, the stupidest person ever to run for president.
- [38:57]
John Podhoretz
This is also, like, the one thing the Kamala Harris team could find in her clip reel. I know.
- [39:03]
Noah Rothman
Here she is standing there like she knows how to fight. And like I say, like, then you're standing in September 2024, and you're like, how did, as we said yesterday on the April fool show, how did this happen? How did she ever get into the position of even running for president? And it really did all start with that hearing with Barr. So Democrats love. Not that Republicans don't. So I'm not saying. But this performative. We're fighting and you're not going to get away with this. We're going to you. I'm going to take you. And that's what Cory Booker did early here in 2025 to somehow raise his profile. And I know from the local news in New York that I watched some of last night, you know, again, it's only New York and it, but of course you raise money in New York and all of that. But it was sort of like he really stood up and he was there and he's our Tribune. And I see Ron Filipowski, who runs Midas Touch, this very popular left wing was saying at least somebody is fighting while Chuck Schumer is, you know, some people will leave their jobs and Chuck Schumer refuses to stand down when he needs to stand down and make room for new blood and blah, blah, blah. And there's Cory Booker. And, you know, I don't the hell they're talking about, but they know their own team better than I know their team.
- [40:19]
Seth Mandel
And maybe Franklin said, Franklin said that he conducted a, you know, a focus group and, and with Democrats. And they loved it and they loved the messaging. And, you know, everybody seemed to agree that this is what they should be sounding like. So I think the messaging is one thing, but it's the messenger is the problem. Right? I mean, he's going to be. It's funny saying this now because Joe Biden did end up being president, but Booger is basically in a Biden situation where he's perpetually running for president because he has nothing else to do. And the voters repeatedly are saying no thanks. And, you know, he's, he's not going, I don't think he's going to get any more traction out of this. At the best, he can sort of feed Democrats talking points that maybe connect with voters. But I think that they're looking for new blood. And Cory Booker has already been rejected as that new blood. So I, I don't even really understand what the point of it was because it's not going to advance him. And I don't think it's going to rally people who had a chance to vote for him in the past and just couldn't wait to not vote for Cory Booker.
- [41:30]
Noah Rothman
Okay. But, you know, it's an opening salvo. So the question is, can he build on it? Can he, can he go make a national.
- [41:36]
John Podhoretz
The field is wide open, Right.
- [41:38]
Noah Rothman
And it is so wide open, 28 is. There's never been a. Yeah.
- [41:42]
John Podhoretz
But I would just say that what happens today at 4pm will be far more consequential than any messaging coming from the Democrats. Recently, the Democratic pollster, Bill Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, said something that really struck me. And he asked and said, well, what can Democrats do? He said they can't do anything. He said it's always Trump versus Trump. That's actually how politics plays out these days for the past decade. It's not Trump versus Democrats, it's Trump versus Trump. And so we have this situation here that Trump's going to pull the trigger on a policy that no one knows what it's actually going to be. And we also don't know the consequences. Economists are modeling pretty bad consequences. The economists may not take into account the dynamic situation of markets and the fact that if we do get the tax cuts through and if we do get the energy through and the deregulation through and the spending cuts through, then maybe the rise in tariffs will be mitigated, but we just don't know. But at the end of the day, it's what Trump is going to do that's going to determine the future success of the Democrats. Not filibusters or vulgarity or Tim Waltz's Tim Walls Roadshow.
- [43:06]
Noah Rothman
Here's why 4:00 is so spectacularly important, easily the most important moment of the presidency so far. Nobody believes in these tariffs. People believe in Trump, so they'll believe in Esterra. And then there's this crew of crackpot economic thinkers who seem to be able to dispose of 200 years of solid evidence, or at least 120 years of solid evidence of the ineffectuality, inefficiency, and indeed, you might even say, you know, backfiring of the policy that he is about to enact, who are willing to say, no, no, this time it's different. The classic this time it's different because we want this and Trump wants it. And he wants it with a kind of religious for it's the. This is a thing that he wants and has almost religious fervor about, because as we've talked about many times, he is a believer in zero sum economics. It comes from his own business, which is a zero sum business. Right. Real estate, where you build a building where somebody else does. There's only one site, there's only one winner. And if you get to build it, you win. And if they get to build it, they win. And if you lose, you lose. And the idea that there is a much more complex ecosystem in which you can lose some parts of your economic, you know, of the, of the entirety of the economy and then gain in others that offset the losses and may even be were down to your benefit, which is what free trade and a free market and a globalized economy provides. He doesn't believe in that. And so he is now going to put this in practice. And as far as I can tell, aside from his camp followers and this very weird crew of people who seem willing to disregard kind of like physics, like the elementary physics of, of trade rules, nobody thinks this is a good idea. I mean, well, I think there are people, I think there are people who.
- [45:16]
Abe Greenwald
Have come up a sort of different camp from, from the ones you just have discussed who have come to the idea that tariffs are bad. Threatening tariffs may not be that bad. May be useful.
- [45:30]
Noah Rothman
Right. Yeah. And I even I. That is a completely rational belief and there may even be some evidence of it so far that you sort of, as in all negotiations, you have to be willing to pull the trigger at the end or make it clear to people that you're willing to pull the trigger at the end to get them to sit at. Down at the table and try to make cut a deal with you that's better than the alternative. So he has to like, you know, play chicken and rebel without. You have to play chicken.
- [46:03]
Abe Greenwald
Gotta be a credible threat.
- [46:04]
John Podhoretz
And there have been some instances. Look at Mexico, for example.
- [46:07]
Noah Rothman
Yeah.
- [46:08]
John Podhoretz
Which under the socialist president Claudia Schonbaum has been very accommodating.
- [46:14]
Noah Rothman
Right.
- [46:14]
John Podhoretz
To Trump so far. And Trump has responded by being more lenient on Mexico than on Canada, which he's, you know, set to annex.
- [46:25]
Noah Rothman
Right.
- [46:25]
John Podhoretz
I just saw a report yesterday, I don't know whether it was confirmed or not, but I did see a report yesterday that Israel had said it was going to drop its tariffs.
- [46:32]
Noah Rothman
It is dropping all of its. Dropping all of its.
- [46:34]
John Podhoretz
There you go. So, so that means reciprocity. That means we won't tariff, but from Israel, which means my kids will still be able to enjoy bomba.
- [46:43]
Noah Rothman
But this is, by the way, hilarious about Israel and tariffs because this is like Bibi saying, don't throw me in the briar patch. These tariffs are a. The Israeli Tariffs, as Seth knows, like these are an overhang of 70 year old labor Party policy about how to build a domestic economy. And bibi is a 21st century economic growth person and he knows perfectly well that tariffs on American goods is stupid and has been stupid for. For Israel, is not helpful, is harmful to the, you know, domestic interests.
- [47:21]
John Podhoretz
Of that was always him different was he was a free marketer.
- [47:25]
Noah Rothman
The story of the Israeli economy in the 1990s and 80s and stuff was that Israelis would come to New York and they would go to Canal street and they would buy appliances and they would put them in shipping containers and send them and pay a little fee that at the, at the, you know, at the port it would take three months for them to get there. They would pay a fee at the port of Haifa, pick up their, pick up their appliances and install them. Because if they had to buy them in Israel, they cost three times if they went to a store in Israel. Like this is how stupid tariffs in Israel were so heavy. He got that that was nothing. That was like an easy, that was like an easy play for bibi. Why say 4 o'clock is so important is that this is where the trigger is pulled. Right. We're no longer. Or not. Maybe not. Maybe you won't.
- [48:14]
John Podhoretz
So who knows what he's gonna do. Remember when he wasn't sure who to endorse. I think it was in the Missouri Republican primary, I think for Senate and both candidates were named Eric. And so he remember, I'm for Eric. I'm for Eric. And he said, congratulations Eric or whatever.
- [48:33]
Seth Mandel
They both got it.
- [48:34]
Noah Rothman
I mean this is who we, this is our President.
- [48:36]
John Podhoretz
Like who knows what he's going to say. Maybe two weeks from now he'll say I changing my mind.
- [48:40]
Noah Rothman
It's also his deadline. Like he's the one who said April said nobody. It's not like the world said, you better 4 o'clock. The legislation says at 4 o'clock on April 2nd you are going to down the tariffs.
- [48:53]
John Podhoretz
Couldn't you see him coming out this afternoon and decided saying, you know, Liberation Day, it's postponed. We're postponing liberate. We're going to put it now be in June. You will be on D day.
- [49:04]
Seth Mandel
This is why he should have done it yesterday. He had an easy out if he had done it on April 1st.
- [49:09]
Noah Rothman
Right.
- [49:10]
Seth Mandel
And wanted to back out at some point anyway.
- [49:13]
Noah Rothman
Anyway. But if he does it, if he pulls the trigger, we are entering a new economic. Yeah, relatively unprecedented economic. The global economy and, and the consequences are, I'M sorry to say I don't, you know, I don't, can't predict the future. And you should really. Everything is very complicated, but it's going to be terrible. I mean, I mean, I think, I think our, our friend Cliff, as it has said, the best part, the thing about this is that you're trading is that you're making sure that there's a current pain in exchange for future pain. That is you're going to harm the American economy, make things more expensive, hurt consumers and harm the macro economy and make things worse for Americans in terms of their earning power and stuff later on down the road because of this delusion that somehow yada, yada yada, we're going to rebuild our manufacturing sector. Right.
- [50:19]
Seth Mandel
But pain builds character. And imagine how much character the American people are going to have at the end of Trump's second term. And in fact, maybe that's the trick. We can then become net character exporters.
- [50:34]
John Podhoretz
Well, but I think, John, you hit on it when your description of the Israeli economy in the 1980s and early 90s before Bibi became finance minister and started opening it up. When you think about all the countries that Trump targets with these tariffs, think about the European Union. It is heavily protected. It is heavily subsidized. There are huge types of internal subsidies and quotas that the EU has. My question is always, why do we want our economy to look like Europe's? Europe is significantly poorer than us. Right. Why would we want. He often talks about tariffs on India and there too Modi in India is lowering tariffs in order to respond. Why would we want our economy to look like the Indian economy? It's true the Indian economy is growing these days thanks again to some market policies from the, from Modi's party. But India was a basket case when it had a tariff.
- [51:36]
Noah Rothman
India had aside from tariffs, India was by many measures the most regulated, non totalitarian economy on the planet Earth for 40 years. Setting prices, setting with doing all kinds of things. A highly over regulated economy. Yeah. And so he is looking at, I don't think he's looking at those as models.
- [52:01]
John Podhoretz
His work, sometimes the model, the more sophisticated advocates of this policy say, say Vice President Vance, they'll say, well, countries get rich through import substitution. Right. So that is protecting the domestic market in order to induce domestic manufacturers and producers to sell out in the world. That's how countries get rich. And they'll point to a place like South Korea or Japan or the other Asian tigers who adopted this policy of import substitution after their economies were devastated in the Second World War. And they did. They became very wealthy again. We're already wealthy. We're the United States of America. We're a small percentage of the global population, but we still account for roughly quarter of the global economy, a huge disproportionate amount. We have extremely high per capita personal income. And it's true there have been people who have suffered because of, in particular the China shock, in my view, the entry of China into the global trading system at the beginning of this century. But is it really the case that we should adopt policies that developing countries used decades ago to recover from total economic devastation in order to help the people who have lost out through globalization? I'm not so sure that's the right.
- [53:32]
Noah Rothman
Way to do it. Right. It also doesn't make sense because using your examples, right, Japan and, or Vance's examples, or in Cass's example, Korea, Taiwan, right. Those were small population limited countries with limited economies that even if they had boomed in, in and of themselves, could not have generated internally simply by dint of their populations, a sufficient amount of explosive revenue to rebuild themselves into first world economies. That's why the Europe example is so important. Right, because the European Union is, I can't remember, is it 18, 18 countries or something like that? European? More than that.
- [54:20]
John Podhoretz
I think it's up to 24.
- [54:21]
Noah Rothman
Okay. But the European Union grew into the European Union because they did not have 27. 20, 27, right. Okay. NATO is 18 or I can't remember. Anyway, 27 did not have scale to grow with trade barriers lowered. In other words, according to them, we can lower trade barriers as long as we make the market large enough so that a good in Germany can travel somewhere else. And so far, because we have 25 different trade relations with 25 different countries, negotiating this and handling this is completely impossible. And so we need to have a kind of free market inside Europe to even approximate the scale of the American market, which of course is we have a free market in the United States in the sense that there are 50 states and there are no trade barriers.
- [55:20]
John Podhoretz
In the Constitution, States can't impose tariffs and duties on other states.
- [55:24]
Seth Mandel
Now, you know what, you know what else those countries like South Korea and Japan and the European Union countries don't have. They don't have the world's reserve currency.
- [55:36]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, right.
- [55:38]
Seth Mandel
We're not all trading on their currency, we're trading on ours. How all this affects our domestic economy also affects the dollar and therefore the global economy over and over again. I mean, we're just in a totally different position. It's not just that we're strong and we're already rich. We're the world's reserve currency.
- [56:01]
Noah Rothman
Right.
- [56:02]
Seth Mandel
We are behaving. We behave differently than South Korea and Israel, for that matter. Right. Which was able to. Israel was able to get back on its feet by manipulating its currency in ways that we couldn't. Why? Because nobody else was using the Shekel so they could have some fun with it. We don't have those. We don't have the opportunity to do that.
- [56:21]
John Podhoretz
I just want to play devil's advocate briefly. So what they'll come back and say is, well, you know, having the world's reserve currency is a problem. It's a problem for America. It has not actually helped America. It's a reason why we don't have as many manufacturing employees as we do. And remember when the Federal Reserve in the late 70s and early 80s raised interest rates to squeeze inflation out of the system? The policy that initiated by President Carter when he appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve and then maintained for many years at great political cost by President Reagan, that's when American manufacturing employment basically cratered. Right. I mean, and that was to help us maintain the world reserve currency. So they'll say this has been a problem for us. And they'll also say, in response to what I mentioned about us being rich, they'll say, well, you know, look at this study that came out that said the top 10% of Americans have 50% of the wealth. Right. And the rest of the country only has 50% of our net wealth as a nation. So when I say we're a rich country, beltway elite, Matt Continetti is talking about the bubble. Right. And so this policy is meant to help the people who are not part of the bubble somehow get richer. And if they have to redistribute the wealth by making costs, imposing costs on more affluent people in order to get money for working class and lower income Americans, they're willing to do that. But what. So playing devil's advocate to my devil's advocate, all I would say is, you know what? There are other ways to do that. Lower taxes, less regulation. Where the Rust Belt that is now the one of the main centers of the Trump coalition. What killed the Rust Belt? Liberalism. What killed California liberalism?
- [58:28]
Noah Rothman
So let's embrace.
- [58:29]
John Podhoretz
Model the blue state. Exactly. Let's embrace what used to be conservatism. And that will help people on the lower end.
- [58:36]
Noah Rothman
1, 11 final thing, because Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen said something that is kind of oddly profound. And profoundly mistaken at the same time. Right. He said America was not built to provide people with cheap flat screens. Right. That is not what the American dream is, is providing cheap flat screens. And that is true. And it is important to remember that America is more than the sum of your purchasing power and that it's a deeper and more complicated place. And we, we shouldn't simply be making these one to one. Boy, it's really fantastic to live here because, you know, Walmart, you can go to Walmart and buy 99% dollar flat screen. And on the other hand, Scott Besant is a billionaire and he can drop dead because you know what? There are tens of millions of people in the United States who are able to buy a cheap flat screen in order to watch television in their homes, who don't have a lot of money. And when you raise the cost of that flat screen and your flat screen, now Fritz is out because you bought a cheap one and it goes, it screws up or something like that, making that person pay twice what he paid in 2024 for a flat screen. You may think that this is a wonderful sacrifice in order to continue the American experiment. But that person who lives in the Rust Belt and is part of the overhang of the 50 year decline in manufacturing has just had his purchasing power profoundly affected in a negative way. So it is kind of also about having a cheap flat screen. It is about government not doing things to affirmatively harm you as you go about in your daily business. And it means nothing to Scott besant that his OLED will cost $9,000 instead of $7,000. But it may mean a lot to a lot of people that their, you know, LG goes from $125 to $250.
- [60:46]
John Podhoretz
I think a man cave is part of the American dream.
- [60:50]
Noah Rothman
There are plenty of women who watch flat screens. That's all I'm going to say.
- [60:54]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but just, yeah, that's, you know, that's having the ability to have a place where you can watch TV on a big television. That's kind of nice. Yeah, we want to make more people get there. And the question is, will this tariff policy, which we still.
- [61:10]
Abe Greenwald
Flat screen on every wall, a flat.
- [61:12]
John Podhoretz
Screen on every wall, a full lunch pail. Right.
- [61:15]
Noah Rothman
That's.
- [61:15]
John Podhoretz
That should be the goal. The question is, how do we do it? And will this tariff policy, the details of which we are still unaware, actually help us? And we can say that the jury is far from concluding its verdict.
- [61:32]
Noah Rothman
Right. Final, final thing to go through. Israel is now a moving is a major military offensive in Gaza has now moved down from Khan Yunis into Rafah. Move, move. Pop. The population has moved out of Rafah. Massive military strikes. I think the Israelis have developed intelligence inside Gaza that is giving them very precise targeting locations and an idea of where the Hamas remnants, the fighting Hamas remnants are and where the rockets are and where the launchers are and things like that. And it's, it's very interesting because clearly, basically the Netanyahu government and its new military leadership have decided that enough is enough and that either way, look at it, they either have to get this over with or that this is the only way to get the hostages out by like, by like causing Hamas to raise a white flag. Bibi has said, we will let you, we will let the leadership live if you let the hostages out. But every other form of negotiation and semi pressure and this and that, everything has stalled and there's nothing left to do but use this tactic, which has two benefits, one of which is it will mean that we will finally win the war and then, then, then they will reap the whirlwind because they're going to have to reoccupy Gaza and rebuild it or have some. Which is, which is hell in itself, but better than the alternative in their estimation, and is a way of restoring the idea that they got the first 80 hostages out from in November of 2023, which is causing so much pain to Hamas so fast, with such blinding difficulty, that Hamas says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Here, we'll let him out, we'll let them out. We'll let him out. Which is what happened, as I say, in November.
- [63:41]
John Podhoretz
And also remember, there are other elements at work where Israel also struck Beirut yesterday, fighting Hezbollah as it tries to reconstitute. And the American strikes on the Houthis are continuing and they are intense. And we moved another carrier group into the Indian Ocean as Trump ratchets up his war of words with Tehran. So I think the renewed offensive in Gaza can be seen as part of a larger story, which is the coming to the brink of a moment of decision on Iran, its nuclear program, and even the future of the regime, because Trump was talking about the whole regime in his latest comments as well. This is a story that actually could move the media off the fallout from Liberation Day later today, if it does flare up in the next couple of weeks, which it very well might. You know, the incoming chief of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had his congressional hearing yesterday. He might be in place relatively soon. I think that will also be a critical step toward reaching this point of no return when it comes to Iran.
- [65:00]
Seth Mandel
And, and the other factor, of course, is the protests in Gaza, the anti Hamas protests, which are the most significant they've seen since 2019, probably surpassing them. It's hard to know. But, you know, the point is that if, you know, for every Gazan that is willing to stand up in a coffee shop and denounce Hamas, there are a thousand Gazans who agree with what that person said. You know, that's, that's the, that's the barometer. But that's adding a bit of pressure on Hamas also, which is, it's coming from both directions. You know, yesterday there was video circulating about, of, of the execution of, of a, a, a clan, a Gazan clan's execution of a Hamas member because that, according to them, that Hamas member shot one of their family members earlier in the day while they were waiting on a line for flower. So this is, you know, that's a pretty significant thing. Which is, first of all, people who are not Hamas are still trying to get at the, are less afraid of Hamas and trying to get, you know, the food aid and distribute the food aid there. There's a challenge for the, the food aid monopoly that Hamas has developed, which is a significant thing. And the other thing is that they put a, they posted a video of it. I mean, forget, you know, somebody being identifiable on a video shouting, we want the end of the war. They posted a video of their execution of a member of Hamas. This is, that to me is, you know, the fear has somewhat lifted and all of this plays into it and the pressure that Israel puts on them is pressure coming from one direction and it allows the pressure coming from the other direction. There hasn't been in a long time, maybe really since the beginning of Hamas takeover of the Strip. The pressure like this coming from both sides.
- [66:55]
Noah Rothman
Even more important than that is it needs to be understood that these Hamas niks are not protesting in favor of releasing the hostages. And they're not saying, you know, we like Israel. These are the same people who are dancing and celebrating and coming out to celebrate the humiliation of the hostages who were released, who were thrilled on October 7th. They're just saying, get this war. We can't take it anymore. We're done. And you are the reason that this is going on. We're ready to throw down and say, uncle, and you better do this for us. There's no new peace. This is not an Arab Spring. There's no concord. There's no new understanding that Maybe there's a way for us all to live together in peace. They are. This is what total warfare is actually intended to do, which is to have the population say we now have to lie on the ground and, and wait to die unless you give them what they want. And what do they want? All they want is they want Hamas's leadership gone, which these people do too, and they want the hostages out. And they are going to be compelled by circumstance to reoccupy Gaza, which is something that nobody in Israel except a few lunatics actually thinks is a, is a long term desirable effect. But they're going to have to do it anyway. And that's the cost of the error that they made by, in the Concepcion, by letting hamas rebuild over 10 years without seeing that it was happening. That's the sin that Israel is going to have to carry. It's the thing that will mar and maybe even ruin Bibi Netanyahu's legacy over time historically. But, but inside Israel, the argument that keeps being made by the Hostages and Families Forum and all of that, which is, this is really dangerous. You're going to get the hostages killed. What you need to do is negotiate to get the hostages out. And the simple problem is there is no way to negotiate to get the hostages out. It's been 17 months of trying to negotiate to get the hostages out. And everything that can be done has been done. And they appeal to Trump. That happened on Sunday on 60 Minutes. These appeals to Trump and Trump has no way. Trump has done everything he can. He said, we'll buy you off. He said, we'll take you here. We'll do that. And there's no hope.
- [69:31]
John Podhoretz
So can I propose a recommendation strategy, please, for. Today I woke up to the very sad news that the actor Val Kilmer had passed away at the age of 65. In my view, a screen legend and someone who will be definitely missed. And I would, I want to know what Val Kilmer movies we would recommend. I'll just start, I'll just start by talking about his final major screen appearance. Replay or resurrecting the character iceman from the 1986 Top Gun in 2022's Maverick. And it's an incredible movie. It's a, it's Val Kilmer's performance. He, because of his illnesses, he could not speak. And so his encounter with Tom Cruise playing Maverick is just about 10 minutes long. Extremely. Not even that, probably, yeah, maybe even short, extremely touching, moving, part of an amazing movie, which by the way, in my view was one of the kind of catalysts of America's rightward turn. I think the response to Maverick and some other cultural touchstones early on showed that the country was moving back toward an embrace of patriotism and kind of earlier forms of cultural understanding. So I'm going to start off by saying, in memory of the great Val Kilmer, watch Maverick, I would say real.
- [71:07]
Seth Mandel
Genius, because you can get a look at what people saw early on, earlyish on in his career and the range as an actor. You know, he's a. A college genius and in university and. And he's part of a project that he, unbeknownst to him, is intended by the school working with the government to be turned into, you know, some sort of government weapon. And. And so he is, you know, he is a kind of slacker genius. We've all known them like the geniuses that don't really have to put a lot of effort into what they do and still come out the other side, achieving what they set out to achieve into kind of like he has to sort of teach himself to learn how to be a principled, you know, guy and believe in things and whatever. It's just.
- [72:07]
Noah Rothman
It's.
- [72:08]
Seth Mandel
It's great and he's great, and it's.
- [72:10]
Noah Rothman
An incredibly inventive performance. Imagine the best way of looking at it is imagine if Otter from Animal House were Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. They had the character, the wit, the looseness, the kind of hilarity and irresponsibility along with the unbelievable brain power. And at every moment, you completely believe that Val Kilmer, this wastrel kid who's so wacky, is also, like, the smartest person in the world. That's not easy to pull off.
- [72:47]
Abe Greenwald
I was gonna say Top Secret, which I saw in the theaters, which is a.
- [72:52]
John Podhoretz
It's a great one.
- [72:52]
Abe Greenwald
It's a strange Cold War comedy by the.
- [72:58]
Noah Rothman
By the Airplane team. By the Zuckers.
- [73:00]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, yeah. And it has a kind of comic sensibility that movies don't have anymore. And he's great in it. And he plays like, a singer who gets caught up in Elvis.
- [73:10]
Noah Rothman
It's an Elvis. What if Elvis were caught behind the Iron Curtain? Right.
- [73:14]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, Right.
- [73:15]
Noah Rothman
That's.
- [73:15]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, yeah.
- [73:17]
Noah Rothman
Fantastic. And. And. And. And unfairly maligned. And it was. What's interesting about that movie is it was his first movie like he had never been in anything before. He starred in Top Secret, and he is letter perfect and sings and he dances and he, like, you know, he's a romantic hero and he's. It's fantastic. Then, of course, you cannot finish off without talking about Tombstone. And Tombstone was this kind of, like, wreck of a Wyatt Earp movie being made at the same time as a much more expensive, much fancier Wyatt Earp movie with. With Kevin Costner that was a bomb. And Kurt Russell essentially took over the direction of this movie. He played Wyatt Earp, and Kilmer plays Doc Holliday in one of the most glamorous, witty, and, like, emotionally resonant supporting turns I did ever Like. It's a kind of legendary performance because it comes out of nowhere and he makes this unbelievable amount out of nothing. This part that is, relatively speaking, nothing. You know, this neurasthenic doctor who's just the sidekick to Wyatt Earp and blows everybody off the screen. He could have been an enormous star. He was probably the most talented person of his generation, of that generation of, like, Cruz and Hanks and this one and that one. But he had a lot of personal problems, and he was a very difficult person to work with, and he made bad choices and he starred in bad starring vehicles like the Saint and things like that that didn't do him any favors. And. And so his career just kind of crumbled by the year. By the year 2000. And then he had all these health. Health problems. But all of these movies, right, Top Secret and Real Genius are like early, early 80s. Tombstone is like the 90s. Yeah. And then. And then this sort of incredibly touching moment in, you know, 2022 in which he. In which we learn, among other things, this fantastic twist, Right. Which is that these terrible antagonists from Top Gun have become the dearest and closest of friends, which. A lot. Which. Which is one of the reasons that the movie is so. Yeah. Like, punches you in the stomach. Like a Top Gun movie. Makes you emotionally kind of like. Like, gets you emotionally. Wouldn't have expected that. So. Yes. So may his memory be. May Val Kilmer's memory be for a blessing. And we will be back tomorrow. So for Abe, Matt and Seth, I'm John Pod. Horiz. Keep the candle burning. Oh, before I do. Keep the gal burning. You guys have to wait a minute. Hold on. I'll be right back. Hold on.
- [76:20]
John Podhoretz
Where's he going?
- [76:22]
Abe Greenwald
Merch. Merch.
- [76:23]
John Podhoretz
Is he going to show us the T shirt? I hope he gets a FedEx package.
- [76:28]
Seth Mandel
It might not be coming back.
- [76:30]
Noah Rothman
I am back.
- [76:31]
John Podhoretz
Okay. I am back. There it is.
- [76:34]
Noah Rothman
I hope this reads because. I don't know.
- [76:36]
John Podhoretz
It does.
- [76:36]
Abe Greenwald
It does.
- [76:37]
Noah Rothman
Backwards. Okay.
- [76:38]
John Podhoretz
And you can see our logo there.
- [76:40]
Noah Rothman
Our. It's worse than that.
- [76:42]
John Podhoretz
This is why people should go to the YouTube page. You can subscribe and like our videos because then you could see the.
- [76:49]
Noah Rothman
It's worse than that shirt that you will want for, you know, this is different for your Passover stocking.
- [76:58]
John Podhoretz
And this is different than the clothes you usually model, John, which are, which I Quinn.
- [77:04]
Noah Rothman
Advertising. They're not advertising today. Sorry. Mention the brand.
- [77:08]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [77:08]
Seth Mandel
Anyway, it's actually a very, it's a very good Passover shirt actually, because as you read the Haggadah.
- [77:14]
Noah Rothman
Yeah. It can always be worse. Every page is like, well, it's getting worse. It's getting worse.
- [77:21]
John Podhoretz
But it was still enough.
- [77:22]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, but it's still enough. Okay. It should have been enough.
- [77:26]
John Podhoretz
Should have been enough.
- [77:27]
Noah Rothman
So we could we that maybe that'll be in our next shirt anyway, so. Yes. So once again, keep the candle burn.