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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why Lifelock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [00:45]
No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
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Christine Rosen
Expect the worst Hope for the best.
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John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, November 12, 2024. I am John Bob Horitz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. If you are not aware, we are now making this podcast available as a video podcast on YouTube. Just search commentary Magazine podcast. Usually it goes up around noon every day. So you can not only listen, you can watch. You can watch instead of listen, you can not watch at however you prefer to do it. It would be really nice if for these purposes and you went to YouTube to do that. If you would like and subscribe. That is very, very helpful to our financial future because the more likes and subscribes you have, the more you are exposed or made visible to advertisers and the sorts of people who will come in and help us continue doing what we're doing. So that is our YouTube channel. Just search Commentary magazine or Commentary Magazine podcast or just Commentary. And we will pop up there. And by we, I mean Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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Christine Rosen
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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Matthew Continetti
Hi John.
- [02:19]
John Podhoretz
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.
- [02:23]
Seth Mandel
Hi John.
- [02:26]
John Podhoretz
Donald Trump, neoconservative. I throw this out to you. We have been talking all weekend about the great mentioner floating names for major foreign policy jobs that suggested a war for the soul of the Republican Party and the conservative future in the realm of foreign policy. And the three foreign policy picks made so far are, I wouldn't say beyond my wildest dreams, but they're certainly happy dreams that I woke up to. And they're not dreams. So we have Elise Stefanik at the un we have Representative Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State who had that on their bingo card on Friday. Matt?
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Seth Mandel
Well, Rubio was always in the mix for Secretary of State. I remember speaking on this podcast, John, saying that if anyone was listening to Continenti, they would put the more idealist candidate at State at idealist slash hawkish candidate State and then a more realist one at Defense. We have not heard who Donald Trump will select as secretary of Defense, but I just want to talk about the three national security picks. So so far, so Rubio at State, Waltz at National Security Council, and Stefanik at the UN what does this show? It shows a Trump foreign policy that's going to be very pro Israel, that is definitely going to try to combat antisemitism and to be tough against the Iranian regime and support Israel in its fight for survival. It shows an administration that's going to be tough toward China, not let's have Taiwan declare independence on the second day of Trump's presidency. Tough, but tough in the sense that we recognize that the People's Republic of China and the Communist Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party, are threats to the United States and that we need to have a more aggressive or at least more a deterrent posture in the Indo Pacific as well as on certain trade issues. Three, not good for Ukraine. So all three of these nominees will have voted against the supplemental Ukraine bill that was under such controversy in the spring. And so also against that bill was Rick Scott, the senator from Florida, who is kind of engaged in this last minute attempt to become the next GOP leader in the Senate. So what you have there is kind of the basic matrix of Trump foreign policy, which is pro Israel, hawkish on China, but definitely more America first when it comes to continued aid to the Ukrainians and I think headed in the direction of trying to find some type of settlement between Russia and Ukraine that might be impossible. We don't know how it will survive contact with events. But that's just the general tenor I'm getting when I look at these very impressive nominees.
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John Podhoretz
Okay, now I want to take a step back because I don't, I think it is wise to be worried, if you are a supporter of the war in Ukraine, about where the, where Ukraine is going and that, yes, Rubio and, and Waltz both voted against, and Stefanik voted against this aid package, which, by the way, also featured aid to Israel, which was kind of striking. But Waltz as recently as last month, gave a speech that was pretty hawkish about Ukraine. I'll just quote a little from it here. In terms of Ukraine, look, it is a different strategic focus on ending the war versus this vague notion of what does winning look like. I still cannot get a clear definition from the Biden administration. Are we willing as a nation, and if we are, he should make this case to expel every Russian soldier from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea. How much will that Cost. What will that take? I think they should be exceeding US commitments, not in parody of it. Enforce the darn sanctions. Russia is selling as much oil and gas, actually at discount rates through India and through China as it did pre war. Now Putin's war machine is on its back foot. It literally won't be able to afford. I've had analysis come to me with this from different agencies. You get that price below $50 a barrel. He's struggling. He's a gas station with nukes. Not only Russia, but Iran too, for that matter. There are a couple of other things he said. So on the one hand he's saying, look, we can't just do this forever. And on the other hand he's saying, let's make life really hard for Putin. Russia is on the back foot. This is not. Ukraine is not really in our national interest. Ukraine is, you know, Zelensky is corrupt. I mean, there's this whole world of foreign policy views relating to Ukraine that could have been evoked by the choice of a national security advisor and a Secretary of State that were not evoked. And we had that tweet exchange or tweet, sort of like complimentary tweet thing over the weekend where Dave Smith, this sort of libertarian, anti Israel pseudo comedian, said something like, now we're going to get those neocons and those hawks and we're going to crush them under our boot and they're going to be thrown into the garbage dump of history. And Donald Trump Jr. Said, 100%. 100%, I'm with you. Whereupon his father appointed Elise Stefanik. Marco Rubio, who ran in 2016. It's a long time since 2016, but ran in 2016 as an explicitly neocon foreign policy candidate. And Mike Waltz, who at the very least is a hawk. Now, again, not Ukraine is a Ukraine plays is in a different category here for unfortunate reasons, but so much so that like our old colleague Sora Bimari, in an effort to shoehorn these new choices into the place that he would like them to be, says, this is going to be a Jacksonian foreign policy. It's Jacksonian. Now, this is a category, of course, that Walter Russell Mead of the Hudson Institute has been sort of pushing that there. That there are these two trends he created. He did create. That's right. Fair enough.
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Seth Mandel
He created the concept.
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John Podhoretz
So all the Jacksonian foreign policy means is that it's sort of nationalist and unemotional, and basically it's an advancement of American interests that is perfectly willing to use force and bomb the hell out of people and stuff like that. As long as we don't go in and try to write constitutions and talk.
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Matthew Continetti
About no hearts and minds. No hearts and minds.
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John Podhoretz
No hearts and minds.
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Seth Mandel
Or the slogan no better friend, no worse enemy.
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John Podhoretz
Exactly. Okay, so I don't. Maybe Rubio has moved into the category of the Jacksonian. Maybe Elise Stefanik. I mean, if that's Jacksonianism, maybe we're all Jacksonians a little bit. Certainly after Iraq, we are. We are all a little more cautious about the advancement of democracy as the primary focus of American foreign policy.
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Christine Rosen
That's an important point because that's what's actually happening here, which is that a lot of the people who talk about this stuff, especially online, in the Don Jr. Dave Smith vein, are people who take one thing that happened and build other people's ideologies and their entire ideological worldview out of this one thing that happened and keep them trapped in amber for the rest of time in that one place. So, for example, I was in college when the Iraq war started. So we are now at a point where everybody is not the same at the same place that you. That people think they were. Right. Like, it's like I've had people, I've had people just, you know, from like the New Republic just tweeted me that, like, I my responsibility about my responsibility for the Iraq war because I worked at Commentary, so obviously, you know, when I was in college at Russia, you.
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Seth Mandel
Know, I've been looking for someone to blame. Now I finally found out for 20 years I wanted to blame to someone else. And now I know who I'm going to name.
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Christine Rosen
I was hiding in New Brunswick, New Jersey. But, but this is a, this is what people do. And so there's a, there's a sense of like not moving beyond the Iraq war on the part of its opponents because they were subject to.
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John Podhoretz
On the right. Yeah, you're mentioning the right. Exactly. Everyone on the right is evil because everybody on the right supported, I mean, except for this one category of sort of libertarian. It was a very, very small crew of people in 2003.
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Christine Rosen
And though. And that crew felt that they were mistreated, right. And so they've sort of held on to that. But the world is not like everybody's political ideology is not built off of the Iraq war. And so they're taking, they take this. And now you said yesterday, John, you mentioned that to you it sounds a lot like neocon means pro Ukraine, the way that, that, that our, you know, people in the party who don't Like Ukraine use it. This is the problem. They jump from a specific example that's happening right now and say this is what neocon means or this is what Hawk means and things like that. And they just sort of forget that these are worldviews with nuances and complications.
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John Podhoretz
Well, Abe, Abe, you as our, as our Ukraine correspondent, having recently been, I think in August, right, You were in Ukraine.
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Abe Greenwald
July.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, July. And you, you certainly probably do fit the category of somebody who believes that, you know, neo neoconservatism, such as it is, which is, it's a very peculiar set of circumstances we can joke about a little later. But that, but that, yeah, Ukraine is a test case about what, what the United States means to the world going forward, not just ideologically, meaning that we defend freedom and we oppose this kind of tin pot, neo Stalinist authoritarian guy in Moscow, but, you know, support a country that wishes to be a Western democracy, wishes to be part of the west, against the depredations of the East. So how do you, how do you.
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Abe Greenwald
First of all, the MAGA folks who were saying no neocons were expressing their dismay last night while we were doing our cartwheels. I remain agnostic, to be honest, about what's going to happen with Trump in Ukraine, in part because he has a record of being willing to stand in a different place from his supporters. I'm not saying he will definitely do that in this case, but I think the picks speak to something. I think the fact that Putin is now in a complete embrace with North Korea raises the stakes for the US Means something specific to Trump. Even though Trump says, I get along with Kim very well and all the rest of it, we'll see. I think Zelensky is going to have to be very careful here because he has been now made into the bad guy by the, by the MAGA folks who hate Ukraine support and who hate the neocons. One misstep on his part and they're going to be screaming their heads off. I think what's funny, ironic at least about the framing of neoconservatives these days on the part of these folks is that during the Iraq war, the slam, and it was largely informed by antisemitism about neocons, was they just want to go to war for Israel. That was, you know, they just want war in the Middle east for Israel. Now you've got the people who are saying, no neocons, they're pro Israel, they want to back Israel to the hilt. And they're all about two different groups.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, there's two because Dave Smith, comic Dave Smith, who is as funny as a heart attack, is very anti Israel.
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Seth Mandel
And Tucker doesn't want us to do anything against Iran.
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John Podhoretz
Right, right. And of course, Tucker is now explicitly pro Russian. I don't know if you know this, but they have just a beautiful subway system that's really beautiful. And Ukraine is run by a cockroach. There are all Jewish.
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Abe Greenwald
So there are all sorts of fractures on the populist. Right.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah. I mean, I think the key analogy here is Trump won the first term and what we're seeing is something very similar to it, except better managed. I mean, you look at how quickly these names are coming out. John, remember, go back eight years. What did we have instead? We had this long, drawn out process where people were filing into the lobby at Trump Tower and you had the camera, the stationary camera there all the time. Who's going in today? What's going to happen? We had the dinner between Mitt Romney and Trump in New York City and that famous photo of the two of them looking at the camera together. Contrast that with what's been happening in one week since the election. I mean, he's once Trump said that Susie Wiles was going to be chief of staff, the names started flowing. And now you have Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy. Okay. So that's the directing policy within the White House. Then you have Tom Holman as the borders are running immigration policy from the White House in collaboration with Miller. Now the national Security administrative posts are being fitted in as well. And the overall picture of it, though, is very similar to where we were at the end of Trump's first term, which was a brash America.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Matthew Continetti
Two caveats to that, though. The loyalty oaths are still extreme. You must, you know, the vetting for loyalty to Trump is still. And again, that he's allowed to do that. He.
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Seth Mandel
Well, okay, well, that's a difference between the first one and the second one.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Matthew Continetti
Because Christine, Christine Noem at Homeland Security is not a good choice.
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Seth Mandel
Well, dogs better watch out. The dogs better watch out.
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Matthew Continetti
That strikes me as if he's trying to be. If you want to give him credit for being strategic, that's so that Homans has no one to stop him from what he wants to do as czar. He needs someone who's rather weak and ineffectual in Homeland Security so that he can just steamroll her.
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John Podhoretz
I don't know what, I honestly don't know that Noam is a good or a bad choice by which I ask.
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Matthew Continetti
Republicans in her Home state, what they think of her. And you might.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, it's a border state.
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John Podhoretz
It's a border state. That's right. We got to keep those problem. Those Canadian.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah. Immigrants, Those Canucks.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, look, people make choices. Christa Dome is well within the normal range of nominees for cabinet jobs. She is a governor. She's like. That's a classic thing. Usually somebody like her would probably get Interior. Right.
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Matthew Continetti
That would have made me happier.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Seth Mandel
I think you're right, Christine, though.
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John Podhoretz
I think you're right.
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Seth Mandel
This is. This is going to allow Miller and Tom Homan to exercise a great deal of authority on immigration policy. Working with noam, who will be there. Of course, you know, DHS is a sprawling agency, but what's the difference? Who was in charge of DHS in the. At the beginning of the first term? John Kelly. Not. Not a fan of Donald Trump, as we've come to learn. Yeah, but this is a crucial difference.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. The important point about the difference between one and two. Again, I said this the other day, which is that Trump is now the single most experienced person to assume office as a new president. If you take this as a new presidency, there has been no one except Grover Cleveland who knows more about being president ever in history than Trump, because he was president before, whether you like it or not, and you don't like the way he did things. And this transition is fascinating because, remember, he hired all these people he didn't know because he didn't know what he was doing. And he said, I don't know what I'm doing. Condoleezza Rice said, you know, it was really great. There's this guy, Rex Tillerson. He's really good. He's like, okay. You know. And then it turned out all Rex Tillerson knew about was the Boy Scouts. His entire world frame, outside of his professional life, at whatever company he was running, was that he was the chairman. Boy Scout. Exxon. I'm sorry. Yeah, Exxon.
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Seth Mandel
Remember, that was the other draw, was that he was one of the few Americans to know Putin personally.
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John Podhoretz
That's right. Okay. I'm just saying he ran Exxon fine, but, you know, his passion was the Boy Scouts. He didn't know Kelly. He didn't know all these people that he had appointed because he literally got into politics in 2015, and he hadn't spent 20 years going to Lincoln Day dinners and meeting this one and meeting that one. And then over time, he's like, I don't like this guy. I don't like that guy. That guy. And what's more, to weirdly defend him on the loyalty stuff. They were disloyal, they were unpleasant. They said they talked smack about him behind his back, that that White House was a. That White House and the senior Cabinet officialdom that was not appointed directly by him was a viper's nest.
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Seth Mandel
They thought they knew more than he did.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Seth Mandel
And they came into office with him with their own agendas, some of which overlap with what. What Trump wanted to do, but in other cases diverged incredibly. And that's not the case this time. Now. Now we're in a situation where Trump has remade the Republican Party and where he knows that he's going to take people who have expressed loyalty to him, even through the worst chapters of his political career. And so that, I think, will make for a more effective administration, at least at the outset.
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Matthew Continetti
Well, and he. Weirdly, it makes for a more traditional administration, because that's always what a president who comes in with a little bit more of a mandate, then they have to deal with the rest of factions within their own party, and he's gonna have to do that. He didn't really do that the first time because he was so out of left field as a winning candidate for president.
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John Podhoretz
Again, to defend him a little more, which is, of course, not something I ordinarily do. The idea that what you are supposed to show to the person who is in the White House is not only loyalty, but a tradition of loyalty goes back forever. By which I mean, when George H.W. bush was staffing his administration, which was, of course, the third Reagan term, he did not want people who were Reaganites because they were not loyal to him. What he wanted was people who had backed his campaign in 1980. He had changed. He had changed over those eight years. He was no longer the liberal Republican alternative to Reagan, which is what he ran as in 1980, but when they were staffing the White House in November And December of 1988, the question was, what is your Bush experience? Not, oh, you did a really great job in the Office of Legal Counsel under Reagan with Mies. I'd really love to talk to you about being White House counsel or being this or being that. It was. Were you with us in Iowa in 1980 when Bush was the ideological solution to the problem posed by Reagan and I mentioned. And what did Clinton do when he came in? He picked his best friend from kindergarten to be his White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, because he wasn't a Washington person, and he had McLarty. He had I don't know that whoever that character was that Kathy Bates played in Primary Colors. I can't even remember her name. He had all these people. Vin Vince Foster, who was Hillary's law partner. That's who he brought because he needed people loyal to him. And Trump was in a position where he couldn't even do that because he was so divorced from politics. It is not unreasonable for somebody to want the people who are going to work for him to say, my first loyalty might be. My first loyalty is the Constitution. And I swear. No, but my first loyalty is to you. And I'll be thankful that you gave me the job. And I'm not going to walk around like people that I have great admiration for, like Jim Mattis nonetheless, saying, this guy is an idiot. I'm here to control him on behalf of America. And, you know, once Trump got the sense of what it was that that entire cohort of people was doing, was he wrong to say, I don't want you around me? No, of course not.
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Seth Mandel
I have to interrupt you because it just occurred to me that I misgeographied. No. She is the governor of South Dakota.
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John Podhoretz
We've had this problem.
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Seth Mandel
Not the governor.
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Christine Rosen
South Dakota's North Dakota.
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Seth Mandel
I feel doubly embarrassed by this because, of course, the governor of North Dakota. Yeah. Doug Burgum. And so I feel just terrible. And I just want to make sure that I corrected myself those of your.
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Matthew Continetti
Strong feelings for Burgum. So we forgive you.
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Seth Mandel
Now, of course, has not been appointed anywhere so far. We see this. There's a lot.
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John Podhoretz
There's a lot left to do.
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Matthew Continetti
There's commerce point about loyalty.
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Christine Rosen
Well, you also need a second position.
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Matthew Continetti
Is the one that is going to be.
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Seth Mandel
That is so ag. Dod. Those are the two big ones that are still out there. And a lot I think will depend on those. And it's not clear that they're any closer to naming candidates for either position.
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John Podhoretz
Treasury. Also treasury and Treasury.
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Seth Mandel
But though I think everything's trending toward this man. Yeah. But we'll see on that. You know, just a word on the process. Again, I contrasted with the Trump Tower camera eight years ago. Now, this is very much managed. It's, you know, the Mar A Lago patio is active. You have Elon Musk there all the time. He's now being referred to as the first buddy, which I find hilarious. My, I just if, you know, snl, they had a funny skit last week. If they want to do another funny, they should do my buddy and me. Those old, you know, that Old.
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Matthew Continetti
Yeah, my buddy. I remember that. Yes.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. Well, Dana Carvey, you know, Dana Carvey moved from Biden to Musk without a, you know, from being 100 years old to being 50 years old without a breath.
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Seth Mandel
You have these different, I'd say, influences over Trump's decision making that are not limited to, you know, the libertarian comic on Twitter. It's a mistake to take this one tweet and Don Jr. S exchange with him and say, oh, there you go. That's going to be the whole administration. At the end of the day, it's. The administration will be Trump. And we, we lived through that for four years. We're going to live through, I think, a better managed version beginning in January.
- [27:46]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US Based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.
- [28:16]
But it's more, it's more important than you're letting on because Trump is a black box, right? He is somebody who is impossible to pin down ideologically. And again, this, I think, goes to what Abe was saying about Ukraine. He had four year or two years, two and a half years to separate himself from the war in Ukraine. He had two and a half years to say, I don't like Zelensky or whatever, or Putin is somebody, you know, you gotta reckon with him and he's got a nuclear weapon and you, da, da, da, da, da. And he has played his cards very close to the vest on this larger question. He could, it was a gimme. He could have said it. He could have said, this is something stupid that Biden has done and we're wasting, you know, valuable resources and let NATO do it. Let NATO pay for it. Let NATO do everything. It's near them. They're the one who, they're the ones who are threatened. So let Germany, you know, do it. And he never gets, he never goes. That doesn't mean he's not going to go there. I would say more likely to go there than he is to go, you know, like say, you know, go, go ahead and you can, you can blow up, you know, all of, all of southern Russia.
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Abe Greenwald
But a couple of points on this, just to add to this part of what informs my agnosticism on the question is the agnosticism of the Ukrainians that I talked to while I was there, including parliamentarians who were not by and large saying the things that people are saying over here about Trump in Ukraine. Their attitude is Biden has said all the right things and done precious little, frankly. And America does what America does and we always hope for the best. And we're not so sure that Trump is going to be a move in the wrong direction. And part of this, I think, will have to do with the more Ukraine gets sort of decoupled from the Biden administration and its history, the more room there will be, I think, for Trump to be able to take some more forward leaning positions. Right now, it's so closely associated with the Biden administration's and its failures that we may be in a different place with it.
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Seth Mandel
I agree with it. And I would just add, you know, I'm thinking a lot of Nixon in 60, 69. Right. Nixon's elected in 68 saying that he is going to end the war in Vietnam. Right.
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John Podhoretz
He has a secret plan.
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Seth Mandel
Peace with honor is how it eventually become. I think Trump is in a similar position vis a vis Ukraine today. He wants the war to end. Trump doesn't like war. We know that he ran as the peace candidate now for two elections. But in order to achieve a settlement, just like Nixon, you may have to escalate to de. Escalate, Right. If Putin is not forthcoming at first, that means with the team that Trump has, oh well, maybe we're a little bit tougher to show that he does need to recognize that he's not going to get everything he wants. So I would, I would look through what's happened, what's going to happen in Ukraine through the similar prism that Nixon's goal was always to extract the United States from Vietnam. But in order to do that, of course we had things like the, you know, Christmas Day bombing and the Cambodia. Cambodia, a very controversial operations that eventually did produce Nixon's desire outcome and that.
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Christine Rosen
That also informs what we think about the hawks as well and who he's hired in the whole neocon debate too.
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Seth Mandel
Right.
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Christine Rosen
Because he wants an end to wars. And that doesn't mean. But he doesn't, he knows that doesn't mean you just send a diplomat and have them talk and then come back in a week and have them talk again. In Trump's first administration, you know, they did this outreach to the Palestinians with a, you know, a sort of economic peace style deal. Whatever. Palestinians said nigh. I don't like It. And they said, okay, well, moving on, we're going to go to Riyadh, we're going to touch the orb, the sphere or whatever.
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Seth Mandel
We're going to touch the orb. Right.
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Christine Rosen
Abbas, you missed your chance to touch the orbit, but I have, I'm going to touch the orb with somebody. I'll go to the orb with someone else. And so, and then, you know, we had the Abraham Accords type of negotiations come out of that, which was like, let's just talk about how we can make this situation strategically better in the Middle east without giving the Palestinians a veto. You can miss your turn when it comes to Trump, he moves on. And so that is, you know, part of the, the renting of garments over Marco Rubio being Secretary of State is this belief that people have convinced themselves that these supposed neocons just want war itself and that war to go on forever. But the whole point of what Trump is doing is that the previous administration's policy was war forever. It doesn't matter what the intent is. The point is that practically speaking, in the real world, the effect of it was ongoing war. Trump bringing in people.
- [33:55]
John Podhoretz
You've just said something incredibly important in two realms. And Abe evoked this in talking about what the Ukrainians said. The war between Russia and Ukraine has lengthened and deepened and become more of a kind of trench World War I situation because the United States supplied enough materials and enough help to help Ukraine reach a stalemate. And in Israel, and with the war in Gaza, Biden was on Israel's side and said all the right things and supplied them with weapons and then said, you're killing too many Palestinians. You're not letting enough food aid in. You know, the maps say you shouldn't go into Rafah and extended the war through its policies by another six months. Now it's, now it looks like it really is coming to an end. There's an offensive the Israelis are conducting in Jabalia in the north of Gaza. A thousand Hamas next surrendered yesterday. They killed another couple thousand. They are giving up, it would appear. And what happened was there was a point at which Israel said, we cannot, we cannot be handcuffed like this, and we do have enough to do what we have to do, and we're going to just have to suffer the slings and arrows of this finger wagging. But the Biden administration, which also wanted to be a non war administration, pulls us out of Afghanistan. All of that has ended up extending and making immensely worse both of these wars that Israel and Ukraine have fought. So the de Escalate. To de escalate is a classic war strategy. Like, that's what Israel is doing now in a weird way with Hezbollah and with Iran, which is they're saying fafo, like, don't. Don't think that we're not able to make your existence impossible.
- [36:06]
Seth Mandel
So, and I would just observe, shut it out. The third Iranian attack on Israel has not yet happened.
- [36:16]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [36:16]
Seth Mandel
And even in the days before the election, it seemed that the Ayatollah had directed his forces to prepare for such an attack. But since Trump's election, it has not happened. That doesn't mean that it won't happen in the coming weeks, but it hasn't. And here is another way in which Trump resembles Nixon, because Nixon, of course, really loved the madman theory of foreign relations, where you got all of your enemies confused and uncertain because they didn't know what. What the crazy Nixon would do. And who evoked things the same way.
- [36:53]
John Podhoretz
And who evoked that literally? John Bolton.
- [36:58]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [36:58]
John Podhoretz
He said, oh, yeah, that guy is an idiot. And I didn't like him. And he was real, but they thought he was crazy. And so he was very useful to me because he was standing at my side, and they all thought he wanted to start World War Three. And that gave me some leverage with them.
- [37:17]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [37:17]
John Podhoretz
Well, that was a very.
- [37:19]
Seth Mandel
Trump said about him, his own relationship with Xi Jinping. Yeah. He said in the final weeks of the campaign, something like, yeah, he doesn't know what the heck I'm going to do. Right.
- [37:29]
John Podhoretz
Well, he.
- [37:30]
Matthew Continetti
So he will bookend the weaknesses, provocation of the Biden term with chaos strategy, perhaps. I wonder. I mean, one of the things that's interesting, and this applies both to domestic policy and foreign policy, is the disarray on the left right now and how they're trying to formulate response. Because one thing that's interesting about this conversation is that we're talking about Trump like a regular president. And the whole conceit on the left is that he is not a regular person. He's not a regular leader. He's a fascist. And we've gone through all these things, but if they choose to cover him as an exception to the rule, they're going to miss a lot of what got him reelected in the first place. And I think that's especially true on foreign policy because they've been extremely dishonest, the mainstream media and their coverage of the failures of the Biden administration on foreign policy. And I think they're going to. I fear they're going to evoke the World War Three, chaos agent thing that they did in the first term. And they're going to be wrong. And they're going to miss what a lot of Americans see about this, which isn't we're going isolationist, white supremacist, fascist, but that people are sick and tired of certain aspects of the way America has conducted itself abroad. And he might pull back on some of those. We might not like it, but the American people might generally approve of that. They will miss that story if they choose to cover him as the resistance rather than as an oppositional.
- [38:45]
John Podhoretz
We should move on to the question of Israel and also the antisemitism and Jew hatred explosion of the last week because the Jewish community in the United States, something very important happened last week that people have not taken the full measure of, even though people have been writing about it. It's obviously a particular interest and importance to us. Let's say that the Jewish vote had come in on election night 80, 20 for Harris, that Trump, who had been walking around for a year saying, you're crazy if you vote for a Democrat and I'm the best friend Israel has ever had, and any Jew who votes for them should have their head examined that people are going, oh, no, you can't say that. Even we said that. Don't say that. That's. That's not the right way to talk about that.
- [39:36]
Matthew Continetti
We said Israel won't exist. I mean, that was a little.
- [39:38]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I know we said Israel won't exist, whatever, but we don't really know how this is going to shake out because it's very hard to extract the data properly. But the argument that I made in June, that polling was showing the possibility that the Jewish vote could make a measurable difference in the state of Pennsylvania now apparently has the virtue of having been somewhat true. An Orthodox Union exit poll showed the Jewish vote in Pennsylvania being 48, 41 for Kamala. That was a. That was a doubling of Trump's Jewish vote in the state between 2020 and 2024. Now he won. I think it's going to end up being a point and a half or two points in Pennsylvania. So it's not like that turned the tide. Right. But everywhere that Jewish Americans voted, the vote for Trump close either went up by a third and possibly by about 50% when they actually get to the precinct, by precinct counts of exclusively Jewish precincts. I bring this up to say that imagine that none of that had happened and that Trump is talking on Thursday and Friday about who he wants for his Cabinet. He picks three openly Conservatively, Zionist people in these three of the four major foreign policy jobs. Would that have happened with an 80, 20 Jewish vote for Harris? Maybe, but maybe not. Trump is very transactional. And he may think that even though he didn't get every Judah vote for him and all of that, that the Jewish community delivered for him or that he has made a change in American politics, not only among Latinos, which partially explains the Rubio pick, by the way, which we haven't even mentioned, is that he did. He has now elevated a Cuban to the highest, you know, to the highest job in, outside the president and Vice president, really, in the United States. And there will be a lot of pride among those who feel that way.
- [41:59]
Seth Mandel
Deservedly so. And also, you know, with Rubio as Secretary of State, the shift toward the Western Hemisphere as a focus of American policy.
- [42:10]
John Podhoretz
Venezuela.
- [42:11]
Seth Mandel
Venezuela and Cuba. Yeah. Will be real. I mean, some of the headlines coming out of Cuba in the past month have just been horrifying. I mean, the power is out.
- [42:21]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [42:22]
Seth Mandel
You know, degradation of the rule of law, that the click, the Communist Party click is still running things. Awful.
- [42:28]
John Podhoretz
Maduro just stole his second election.
- [42:32]
Seth Mandel
I mean, so I, I think, you know, it's funny because when Bolton was national security advisor for Trump, he came up with this concept of the, the triangle of terror, I think is what he called it was Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as, you know, basically forces for evil in the Western Hemisphere. And there was some move to try to affect positive change in all three countries. Of course, got into the mess with Juan Guaido of Venezuela. Nonetheless, I think with Rubio, you not only have someone who is very pro striat, someone who does still have a belief in American exceptionalism. You know, he has, he has moved toward Trump on almost everything, but he has retained a view of American exceptionalism throughout. And he talked about it at his speech, during his speech at the Republican Convention. But you'll also have a focus now toward Latin America. And this is very important, not only because Latin America is important and tied up with so many issues. Immigration, drug trafficking. Right. I mean, just national security. But because it's a recognition of the importance that Hispanic voters are now playing in American politics, and particularly in the Republican Party. And it's, it'll be, it'll be something, something to see. I think it's a great achievement.
- [44:02]
Abe Greenwald
By the way, this point about Rubio in Latin America. It's also another complicating fact in the Ukraine question, because Putin is deepening his ties with these, with these bad regimes. I mean, they've been longstanding ties, but he's using them to work his will in Ukraine in various ways, including training grounds and importing troops and the rest of it. So this is another complicating factor that leads me to think, let's see how this all comes out in the watch.
- [44:35]
John Podhoretz
I just don't want to under rate or underestimate the meaning in the Middle east of the choices that have been made here. And remember, the thing about the UN job is it has no power except rhetorical. Its power is entirely rhetorical.
- [44:51]
Matthew Continetti
And whether or not that's very, very important with regard to exactly right.
- [44:56]
John Podhoretz
And depending on who you pick, right, you pick a Pat Moynihan, and he's there to make the Zionism is racism speech, and the world changes, and he makes himself a senator of power in American life for another quarter century. You have Nikki Haley there fighting the fight on Israel very extremely eloquently. Then we get Linda Thomas. Anybody know who she is? She was. She's Biden's UN ambassador.
- [45:35]
Seth Mandel
Ever heard of her?
- [45:36]
John Podhoretz
She's got another name. I can't even remember what her.
- [45:39]
Seth Mandel
Greenfield. Greenfield. Because I was mixed them up. It's Linda Thomas. Greenfield.
- [45:48]
John Podhoretz
Thomas.
- [45:48]
Seth Mandel
Okay, now you're gonna refuse me for.
- [45:51]
John Podhoretz
The rest of the day, but the very fact that I could not summon up her name in is a mark of the way in which the Biden administration pissed away a natural American advantage to have a voice articulating an American exceptionalist view in the world. And least Stefanik, as we have seen, when she gets going as a prosecutorial voice, as she did in that hearing with the three college presidents, is a sight to behold and a force of nature. And there is. That is all the UN job is now. There is nothing else to the UN job now except fighting on behalf of Israel. Nothing. America. Trump doesn't want to use the un. He's not interested in the multilateral view that the UN can serve some useful purposes in negotiating climate change and all of that. It's all about Israel. He picked somebody who can fight that fight and waltz and Rubio just go to X. I retweeted it. There is a piece of footage of Rubio in the hallway, I guess, of the Hart Senate Office Building, either in the Capitol or in the Hart Senate Office Building, where somebody says, do you support a ceasefire in Gaza? And he's like, is that camera on? Are you on? Are you taping this? Because I want you to hear me now. And then he says, hamas must be destroyed. They must be extirpated. Or removed from the forces of history. He stopped, he yelled, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing that he did. And that's one of the reasons that I maintain a special interest in this issue. For obvious reasons, but nonetheless, even if you, even if you're not there, you know, as something that Florida better than.
- [47:52]
Matthew Continetti
That, because the person questioning him was like a kindly looking grandma, but she had a keffiyeh on or something. And so she was not super aggressive. And he somehow was firm, forceful, but not overly aggressive in response. It was actually quite impressive.
- [48:06]
John Podhoretz
That's his reacted.
- [48:08]
Christine Rosen
One of you want to say the reaction, you know, tells you a lot because the day after these three picks for the administration, the line on the commentary podcast was, it's even better than that.
- [48:20]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, look, I mean, you look the proof, you know, you can't, you can't deny the evidence of your own senses.
- [48:27]
Matthew Continetti
In a year just.
- [48:29]
Christine Rosen
But I will, but I will say one more thing about on the Jewish vote situation is that, you know, I think what Trump was trying to say in, in very clumsy ways was why don't they care about this stuff more? Right? That was really his frustration, right? Like all the Israel stuff, they keep voting the same way and the anti Semitism stuff and the stuff on campus, why don't they seem to care about all this stuff? Right? And if they don't care about this stuff, then I'm not going to staff my administration according to these concerns either. It's not a punishment necessarily situation. It's like, well, they don't care. Why should I care? We had a few moments of that in his first term where he would come out with something like the executive order about civil rights applications for Jews on campus. And you know, he got called Stalin for that. And his response, like in private was like, well, why, why am I, why am I doing, like, why do I put myself through the. So there's, there's that. And, and so what you have is nationally. I don't know what the Jewish vote is going to look like nationally, but what you had is in certain places where they definitely care, they came out and said, we care. And that's why when I wrote about this before the election, I mentioned there's a liberal Catholic writer, Michael Sean Winters, who says that, you know, for the Catholic vote, which doesn't really exist anymore because the Catholic vote has become so reflective of America, the American vote at large, he said, you have to distinguish between the Catholic vote and Catholic votes. And in this election, I think that's what we've seen with the Jewish community, there are lots. She's going to win the Jewish vote. Jewish votes nationally, still, he didn't flip the Jews. But in Pennsylvania, where it mattered, in New York, where there's a concentration of Jews who care deeply about this, in places where it was about the Jewish vote and not just Jewish votes, there was a change.
- [50:40]
John Podhoretz
Abe Foxman, former head of the Anti Defamation League, when asked why, as the head of the Anti Defamation League, his views did not more precisely reflect the opinions of the Jewish American community based on polling on social issues, why he didn't speak out about abortion and this and that and what was his thing. And he said, I represent Jews who care about Jewish issues. I represent the Jews who care. That is what the Anti Defamation League is about. So your formulation is exactly right. And Trump is transactional. So when he said, why am I wasting political capital on this community, that is among the leaders in talking about me as though I am a devil, he was not wrong. He wasn't wrong in the naked political sense, which is I'm supposed to get. If I'm giving, I'm supposed to get back. And that's why I say it matters in exactly the way that you formulate it. Because where you can see the Jewish vote and there are maps and things like that, now that you can do all this mapping with primary, with big data and fast computers and chart makers and all that, you see these shifts in Beverly Hills and Pico Robertson in la, in Brooklyn, in Broward and Palm beach county, and especially in Pennsylvania, a wholesale shift toward him. And as I say, I think that probably was the cherry on top for the decisions that he made here, that if it had gone the other way, that he would have been. He would have heard Don Jr. And Dave Smith saying, what are you being nice to the neocons for? Or something like that. And maybe he would have taken that more to heart.
- [52:45]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, well, more, it's more important that the candidate looks good, one, two, that they perform well on television, and three, that they share Trump's general worldview, which, as you say, is not the kind of conceptual framework that is often attributed to Trump. It, it differs in some key aspects. We're running close to the hours, so I just want to shift and talk about the Democrats very briefly. Kamala Harris came out of hiding yesterday. Yesterday was a very somber occasion, of course, Veterans Day. And so the president and vice president went to Arlington National Cemetery. Joe Biden, lame duck Biden is actually kind of nice president. He gave a nice speech about how it's been his honor to serve as commander in chief. It's amazing. I don't know what happened to this man, but if anyone who's watching or listening us wants a moment of amusement, they need to look up. The photo of Kamala Harris sitting next to first lady Jill Biden, because you.
- [54:03]
Matthew Continetti
Would need an ax to cut through.
- [54:06]
Seth Mandel
On their faces is like classic reality tv, you know, contestants who are just holding it all in to prevent each other from, you know, a physical assault. So I thought that was very amusing. And then secondary. Amazing thing of the day is, you know, we had a long discussion throughout the campaign about how much money the Democrats were raising. Kamala Harris raised a billion dollars. And now, amazingly, somehow The Democrats are $20 million in debt. And we've had this series of reports on what Kamala Harris was spending money on. And the most remarkable thing is $1 million to produce the Oprah town hall, which had no effect on the election.
- [55:06]
John Podhoretz
I want to quickly say that I think this is maybe a bigger story than people realize, because $1 billion went through this organization in three months. If it is true that it was a billion, maybe it was only pledges and they didn't have as much as they say. I don't know, although I think they reported that to the fec. I guess that's one of the ways we have a sort of check on this number that we were told there is no way that a considerable amount of that money wasn't grifted and stolen. You can't spend a billion dollars in three months from a standing start. It's actually not feasible. Even if you spend $500 million on advertising, there's another $500 million. And, you know, there's a movie called Brewster's millions, or there's the billion the bill, the million pound banknote by Mark Twain, which is the guy who has to spend a million pounds in order to get more money at the end of the month.
- [56:03]
Seth Mandel
Oh, I like Brewster's Millions. That's a good example.
- [56:05]
John Podhoretz
This is also good. Yeah. Like, you cannot. It's not so easy to spend a million dollars in 30 days, it turns out. I know it sounds crazy to say that, but we're talking about a billion dollars. And I think stuff is going to happen. I mean, it's very possible that someone said, put a million dollars over here on the line that says how much we had to pay to stage the Oprah town hall, and then we'll move it over to the Cayman Islands. I'm serious about this. It's like Hollywood accounting. There was this guy, David Beagleman, ran Columbia Pictures, was kiting checks and writing, signing, endorsing Cliff Robertson. You know, forging Cliff Robertson's name on a check so he could get a hundred thousand dollars because he was a gambling addict and he needed money to go, you know, do it play at the tables in Vegas. That's a lot of money. A pool of money like that. And you have kind of the classic liberal grifter world where they're used to getting hundreds of millions of dollars out of governments and kind of disappearing them.
- [57:11]
Seth Mandel
Look, there were stories after Obama's 2012 campaign about potential foreign money that had been injected into his campaign through small dollar donations over the Internet. Free Beacon wrote about that in Clinton's 96 campaign, of course led to Thompson's campaign finance hearings. What's amazing about this is we could have similar stories, potentially similar hearings for a losing campaign.
- [57:36]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [57:36]
Seth Mandel
So solely Harris could do that?
- [57:38]
John Podhoretz
No, it's. No, but it's like, it's like the producers. Maybe that's the whole point. They wanted her to lose because you can raise 150% of what you need and then you can, you can pocket the other 50% anyway. I don't know. It's. It. That is not, that story is not over. I mean, I think people will want to turn the page and I don't know, Republicans would be wiser to focus on the future than sort of like spend a year. But the federal.
- [58:02]
Matthew Continetti
Right, here's another massive griff. That was tons of money that was wasted fraudulently. Black Lives Matter and nobody want. I mean that story is massive as well. And you occasionally hear little follow ups, but nobody wants to hear that story.
- [58:17]
John Podhoretz
Well, there is a, there is $800 million hole in New York City called Thrive NYC, which was a public health and mental health initiative during the de Blasio administration run by Bill de Blasio's now ex wife. $800 million. And nobody knows where that money is. No one knows where it was spent. Nobody knows how it was administrated or where it was handed off to. You saw no measurable difference in anything relating to the things that Thrive NYC was supposed to do. This is a, you know, this is the MAU Mauing the flat catchers theme that Tom Wolfe wrote about in his famous essay about people who live off the urban grift. A progressive urban grift. And again, like there is a Federal elections commission that could, if it wanted to, assert its usefulness by trying to figure out what happened there. But you know, it probably won't tell Elon Musk.
- [59:20]
Matthew Continetti
Tell the first buddy to get on that. That's part of tomorrow efficiency.
- [59:23]
John Podhoretz
Tomorrow we are going to talk about Amsterdam and the upcoming soccer match in Paris and all that stuff. I keep like advancing in episode. We're going to start there unless, of course, unless we get tons of news today that make it impossible for us to start there. But, Christine, you have a commentary recommends?
- [59:43]
Matthew Continetti
I do. And so I have two caveats. One is that I never. I broke my own personal rule here because I never watch a documentary unless Abe Greenwald has recommended it because I generally don't like documentaries. But Abe is always spot on with his recommendations. I'm always like, he said that, but I don't know in 10 minutes. And I'm like, Abe is so right. So this time this is not a recommendation from Abe, but I feel confident enough because I enjoyed this so much to recommend it. It's called the Last of the Sea Women. It's on Apple tv. And this is. I watched this in the lead up to the election because I wanted something that had nothing to do with politics, might be potentially calming and just was just completely away from all the news I was generally following. And this really fit the bill. This is a documentary about these older women in Korea, South Korea. They are divers. Jokingly, people call them real life mermaids, but they harvest seafood for their livelihood and they do it without oxygen. And they are old. But they are also hilarious and bawdy and really kind of not adorable in the way people like to infantilize older people. They're tough and they are doing something that's a dying art in their region. And it's. It's a kind of fascinating examination of them as people. But they're these amazing scenes. The underwater cinematography is incredible. The score for the whole documentary is very spare and beautiful. And you just see these women diving down without oxygen, harvesting, you know, spiny sea urchins and stuff. And then they, you know, motorboat back. They used to rowboat, now they use a motorboat. One concession to technology and they have to pry out the seafood, sell it. It's their livelihood. But it really is a beautifully done examination of a dying way of life. It pivots halfway through to talk about issues like the nuclear waste that was going to be dumped in the ocean and whether and how they kind of galvanized. They're not political, but they became politicized by this. But that's handled with a light touch. There's some. A couple islands over There are these young women who are trying to revive the art and they're making it popular on Instagra. And you think, oh, this is going to be some clash between the. The old and the new. But they get. They meet up and they get along and it's. It's. Again, it's very charmingly done, but for me it was just. It was a really wonderful respite from. From political news. And it is just gorgeously filmed, particularly the underwater scene. So my recommendation is the Last of the Sea Women on Apple tv.
- [62:09]
John Podhoretz
I do want to point out that we are so. We are. We are so worldly on this podcast that we range. You love. You just. These are Korean. You love Japanese speculative literature. I'm not recommending it, Matt. A passionate. A passionate interest in the Far east and Japan and I just, you know, we don't get into this as much as we might otherwise. Although the Japanese government is now in a huge crisis that we don't really have much reason to talk about, but it's part of the incumbency cris. Crisis on. On Earth and the Japanese Prime Minister just survived a. Somehow managed to survive a political crisis.
- [62:53]
Seth Mandel
We have to talk about Amsterdam before we get to Japan.
- [62:56]
John Podhoretz
I know, I know, but I'm just saying I just want people to understand that. That we. We have interests all over the. All over the planet, all over the globe.
- [63:04]
Matthew Continetti
We contain multitudes.
- [63:05]
John Podhoretz
Yes, we do so. And we will be back tomorrow. So for Abe, Seth, Christine and Madam John Pad Horitz Keep Campbell.