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- [00:01]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak. Yay. Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [01:08]
B
Some drink champagne Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's.
- [01:15]
C
Going Hope for the best Expect the.
- [01:19]
A
Worst Hope for the best.
- [01:23]
B
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is a snowy or post Snowy. Monday, January 26, 2026. I am Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. Nine inches here. And right near me is executive editor Abe Greenwald, I think, who has the same nine inches. Hi, Abe.
- [01:43]
D
Hi, John.
- [01:45]
B
And our senior editor Seth Mandel there in Maryland. What's.
- [01:52]
C
Yeah, I don't know the total, but it was enough to block us in.
- [01:58]
B
Okay. And Christine Rosen, our social commentary columnist in D.C. you got a total?
- [02:06]
E
I think we had about five inches of snow and then several inches of sleet. Like it was just a lot of sleet. So it's kind of like an angry snow cone out there right now. So we're still digging out.
- [02:16]
B
Well, I got a daughter in northeastern Massachusetts, northwestern Massachusetts, northwestern Massachusetts, who got about 17 inches and one in central Pennsylvania who got about 24. So we have an entire northeast socked in and apparently cold weather and snow and the horrors of these conditions were not enough to still protests in Minneapolis, leading to this absolutely horrendous tragedy on Saturday and redoubling the protesters passions and determination in the wake of it, this shooting of 37 year old Mr. Alex Preddy. And so I'm not gonna. My general predisposition is to trust law enforcement when it says that officers had a reasonable fear of, you know, being harmed and all of that. And I watched 20 different videos, as far as I can tell, several times and this appears to be a completely unmerited and insane event. All in the course of. All of which took about six seconds. And the initial claims, unfortunately by our leading officials in, not only federal officials in, in Minneapolis, but also in Washington. From Scott Besant, the Treasury secretary. Why he's even talking about this, I don't know. To, of course, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, under whose jurors, under whose aegis, Border Patrol and ICE are both making what are clearly patently false claims that either at the moment she made them, she had no reason to make them since she did not have the evidence in place. She's saying that they were in fear for their lives. He was brandishing a weapon, which he was not. And Stephen Miller saying that he was a domestic terrorist looking to murder. Put that's the senior White House official for policy. Can't have the administration of a government of, you know, the executive branch defaming and slandering a person who was just shot and killed unjustly by law enforcement. Just can't. I don't know what the consequences are going to be, but you just can't.
- [05:05]
E
Well, but we have. Before we had Alexander Mayorkas looking the American people in the eye repeatedly saying, there is no crisis at the border. And a lot of us, including all of us on this podcast, said, you can't do that. That's a lie. And the articles of impeachment were, I believe, drawn up against him, although it went nowhere. You can get rid of Kristi Noem, which is exactly what the Trump administration should do. She has become a liability. She has repeatedly lied to the American people in a situation where her only job, her only job is to calm things down, assure the public that a thorough investigation about the use of lethal force will. Will commence. And instead, at every opportunity, she's preened for the cameras. She's, you know, blatantly lied. She's exacerbated tensions. And the same thing is true, unfortunately, about Democratic officials in Minneapolis and in the state of Minnesota. And both of those things are true. We have a situation where there seem to be no adults in the room trying to calm tensions, no going through the procedures that have to take place in these situations, which is to take each case on its own. This is now going to be collapsed with the previous shooting, and it's all become this extremely volatile situation, which is what partisans and extremists on both sides of this want to see happen. But the American people, I think, and many elected officials, both on the Democratic side and the Republican side are starting to say enough. So the question is, and we'll see, we can. We should discuss some of Trump's reactions over the weekend, too. He Also seems to be signaling that he doesn't like the optics of this, at least, even if he doesn't want to acknowledge that perhaps things have gone too far in Minneapolis.
- [06:42]
D
John, I just want to say on the. I'm more or less exactly where you are on this shooting. I do want to add one thing, which is I've watched a bunch of the video, and I find it completely inscrutable. Even when they're slowed down, when they're from different, it's very hard for me to tell who is who at any given moment, what's happening, who's moving toward or away from, who's reaching, not reaching, what's going. And so I just want to say that, you know, it is possible that the law enforcement erroneously feared for their lives in this scramble, which is a different story. I mean, it's still unsuspecting, obviously.
- [07:31]
B
Obviously, something happened where somebody was in fear of their life, and somebody responded by discharging a gun. And then there were nine more shots in the next two seconds. So it's not that they sought to assassinate Alex Preddy. Like, that is not what happened there. It is a. It's five seconds of chaos. So I'm certainly not making that claim or case. When you have incidents like this, almost every incident that we know about, logically, including the famous ones that make people go crazy, Breonna Taylor and Amadou Diallo and other cases, what happens is a rolling series of errors that leads to the catastrophic death of somebody who was not, in fact, a threat, which we learn afterward. What makes this different is the fact that instantly people who should be quiet are opening their mouths. Kristi Noem was not on the scene. Bavino, who is the. The Border Patrol head who was on, was not there. They were not there. They did not know what happened. What they're supposed to say is, we are going to get to the bottom of this and then keep their lousy mouths shut until there is some ability for us to understand what the timeline is. Instead, they go out, they slander the guy, they say he was an assassin, and then they say, well, we need to conduct an investigation that is immoral. It's inhuman. And I speak as somebody who was very supportive of the notion, for example, in the 90s, that Rudy Giuliani, as mayor of New York City, made this determination that he was going to support NYPD when it came under attack, no matter what, and that he was gonna say where he, you know, he said, we're gonna find out what happened, but I support the NYPD and I don't see anything wrong with Kristi Noem saying we're gonna find out what happened. But what we're doing and what we're doing to apprehend illegals who are threatening Americans and, you know, are here illegally is entirely justified. And, you know, and I make no apologies for what we are doing or something like that. That is not what they've done in the Renee Goode case and in the Preddy case, they have decided in some weird analog to what they think Trump does with, you know, politicians and other people, they have decided that their, Their, Their. Their game is to talk trash about the dead person. And maybe that functions effectively to provide people who want to support them with a narrative so that they're not left out hanging on social media with people attacking them. But, but as a matter of simple, like, human conscience, I don't know how Christine Ohm got up this morning. I mean, I don't know how, you know, this is something. If I had done what she had done, like, I'd be haunted for the rest of my life. It's like John Profumo, who was the famously caught in a sex scandal in Britain in the early 60s and had to resign, spent the rest of his life working in hospitals as an orderly in order to make up for the shame that he had brought upon himself in his name. She's pretty close. She's pretty close to that being the sort of thing that she should do to recover from this. And so is Stephen Miller, who arguably. One last point, and then we should talk about Trump. They weren't elected to anything. Noem. So when Trump does what Trump does. Trump submitted himself to the judgment of the entire American people on three occasions. He won twice and lost once. And everybody knows who he is and how he talks and what he says. And so he has a kind of. I don't say he has a pass, but his behavior has been evaluated by the American people, and they have decided in the aggregate that they accept that he is who he is. Nobody chose Kristi Noem except him, and she was confirmed by the Senate. Nobody chose, you know, the Bovino, you know, nobody. They are not. They do not have his. Some slight immunity from, you know, in other words, like you say you were, you're Trump, so you behave like Trump. Kristi Noem was the governor of one of the Dakotas. She shot a dog and proudly wrote about it in her memoir. And she stands there and nobody gave her leeway. She doesn't have leave to do whatever she wants to do or behave and she is choosing this course. And that's one of the reasons why I think he can offload her without any difficulty whatsoever.
- [12:58]
C
Yeah, I think you can offload her without any difficulty. But then you get to the larger problem of he's never going to offload Stephen Miller. And I, and this is that, that's really where this stuff is coming from is, I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of the, the source, the, the, this, this, the source of the, you know, of the spring. It's his, this is taking, you know, following the creek back to its source, is following it back to Steven Miller. And, and so I don't know if, look, obviously if he replaces Kristi Noem, somebody else may not say the stupid things that she's saying and that may help. But there's, there's, there's a defiance toward the public that is spring that on this issue that springs from Stephen Miller. And Trump has shown no sign of wanting to rein him in. And I'm not really sure, you know, Trump is going to want to rein anybody in in that sense because I don't, I don't know that he wants to admit defeat, so to speak, on an immigration related issue. This is one of the things we're going to find out, right, whether the, his signature issue, whether he is, is willing to back that he's backed down on tariffs, which was another one of his signature issues. It's entirely possible that he has reached the point where the PR mess is so bad. But, you know, immigration is the number one Trump thing and he is extra resistant really to reining in the people around him who, you know, keep whipping this up even when still Stephen Miller goes on TV and behaves much worse than Kristi Noem on a regular basis. You know, and we haven't seen any effort within the administration to say to Stephen Miller, we'll just stop going on CNN because you're making us look like lunatics.
- [14:45]
E
Well, Miller, Miller frames this for Trump's consumption as if you back down, then the left wins. This is a, you know, this is a, this is an existential battle for which immigration is one piece. So is birthright citizenship. So are a number of other domestic policy issues he, he thinks are important. And so Trump doesn't like weakness. He doesn't like to look like he's lost a fight. And I think if, if Miller continues to frame it as if you back off because there is an easy off ramp and it's not just getting rid of completely ineffectual and incompetent Kristi Noem, he could say, as he should say, because the vast majority of the American public agrees with him on this. Trump can look have a speech tonight in the Oval Office and say to the American people, we want to work with every governor and every mayor of every city to do what the American people elected us to do, which is to deport the people who are here illegally, who have broken the law. That is what we're trying to do. We are being thwarted. Tragedies are happening. People are clashing. We are calling on the responsible elected officials in each state to work with us, and we will have a task force and we're going to do these independent investigations of what went wrong in Minneapolis. These are the things a competent leader would do in this situation. A crisis manager would advise him to do this if he was a corporate CEO and any of this had happened on his watch. The problem is that Miller knows what Miller strokes that ID every day. And that is what has been a driving force in Trump 2 in a way that it wasn't in the same in Trump 1. So I worry that that's if he's taking a lot of advice about strategy from Stephen Miller on this. Miller's telling him, do not back down. Do not back down. People like strength. People like strength. And Trump, I think, has just woken up to the fact that a lot of people don't like this expression of federal power and strength, even if they agree that the law has been violated and they want a safe border.
- [16:32]
B
I agree.
- [16:32]
D
He can, he can offload Noem anytime he wants.
- [16:36]
B
Should.
- [16:38]
D
But we should note, as a general aspect of Trump's style in office, he's fine with anyone from the administration shooting their mouth off about anything, whether it's Vance or Hegseth or Noem or Miller, whatever, as long as they add in that Trump's the greatest, this is the greatest president in history, and that you don't cross him and that he's not playing games and this is what he's doing, everything for the American people and so on, and everyone's out there sort of freelancing or doing fan service. And he tends to have no problem with that. Generally. He's, in this case, he's got, he's.
- [17:17]
B
Got to do something. Well, so.
- [17:19]
C
And also the other, the other aspect is that he's now got Republicans publicly uncomfortable. That's, that's, that is that may actually have an effect that, you know, normally he's got the party behind him. He's, he's always got 90% of the party behind him. But, you know, James Comer coming out and saying, well, I don't know, maybe they should know, go somewhere else. And, and gun groups yesterday, I mean, that was, that was one of the reactions that I had when I saw that is that, you know, what are, what are the, the gun rights groups going to say? Because Preddy was a legal gun owner and a legal carrier and he did not draw his weapon. And although you want to tell people, obviously, if you're armed, don't run at federal agents. But, but the fact of the matter is gun rights people are going to see that and say if he did, if he didn't do anything wrong with that, then they're telling me he was shot because he had a gun in a holster in his back. And that is chilling for, you know, for people who are concerned about the Second Amendment. So they've started saying so, so that, that is the, that is something that Trump is facing now that he wasn't facing in any degree, even with Renee Goode. It's, it's, it's, it's louder now among Republicans in Congress and among conservative pressure groups that this is, this is one thing that might be able to move him just because the noise, it increases the noise and the bad PR because it's coming from the right to, and.
- [18:52]
E
His other incompetent cabinet member, Cash Patel, was implied on, on television over the weekend that if you, that your First Amendment rights and your Second Amendment rights are, can be compromised if you, if you have a concealed carry, then you shouldn't go to a protest. That was completely wrong. He has no idea what he's talking about. And I think it's good that the NRA and also local Minneapolis gun rights groups and Minnesota gun rights groups have already issued statements saying he, you know, you're, you're discouraged from, from getting in the face of law enforcement when you take a concealed carry class to get the license. And that's all true, but legally, he did nothing wrong and he did not brandish his weapon. So that's Kristi Noem just telling a blatant lie.
- [19:34]
B
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- [20:54]
A
Commentary I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak. Yay. Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [21:53]
B
Well, so I don't think Kash Patel doesn't know what he's talking about. I bet you if you went through Kash Patel's media appearances over, you know, the seven years that he was sort of like a pundit figure type. He knows perfectly well what concealed carry is. And he probably defended the concealed carry movement, you know, which has been through, I mean, major First Amendment, Second Amendment litigation in the courts, you know, was for like 10 years, whether or not. Whether or not a city or a state could limit Second amendment rights on, you know, on its own behalf or whether or not you could do it the other way. So I think he was just reaching for whatever argument he had to hand and said, well, you know, if you're gonna. Don't go into a situation with law enforcement with a gun. You know, what's going to happen. Which is, by the way, something that is commonsensical, right? I mean, it's like, it's something that your mother could say, what are you crazy? Like, what are you going into with the street and directing traffic and doing stuff and you have a gun in your backpack? Like, nothing good is going to come of this. But that's not why he was saying it. He wasn't, like, giving practical advice to people. He was saying, don't expect that you won't get killed if you are legally carrying a gun. I mean, I'm sorry, you can't say that if you're the head of the FBI. I mean, you can say it. He said it. Kristi Noem said what she said. But I think the politics here are so fascinating because I believe the administration made a catastrophic error here, and it was in an effort to capitalize on a political scandal that it thought would be helpful in a time in which they're looking or feeling headwinds going into 2026, which, of course, is the Somali fraud in Minnesota that got so bad that Tim Walls had to announce that he was not running for another term in office, a case that's been around for seven years. Eliana's not on today, but of course, it's like one of the major. Something that she and her father at Powerline Blog have been writing about and paying close attention to for, you know, since 2018. But it finally exploded into the national consciousness, and it's a big story. And somebody convinced Trump that the thing to do here was to capitalize on it and maximize the political effect of the Somali scandal by saying, well, you know what? There are all these alien. There are all these, you know, immigrants, legal and illegal, who seem to have gotten a lot of COVID money and other kinds of money and stole all that money. And so we need. So this is a great time for us to flood the zone in Minneapolis with a lot more Border Patrol agents and, like, make hay. Like, let's, let's bring the cameras to Minneapolis while we go and arrest Somalis and others. They did it for political reasons. It was going on already to some degree, but they doubled or tripled the number of people on the ground in a city that does not have a massive problem that, you know, like a crisis problem that needed a zone flooded. And it's also a very left wing city. And if you want the public to support your efforts to crack down on illegals, even in blue, you have to do it with some finesse. Because when you show people facing down masked Agents, it doesn't look good. They're wearing masks. You know, it. It's weird. You can't make their faces out and they look like. It doesn't look like anything that happens in America. And so even. And it's not as though Trump supporters and very right wing people who tend to support law enforcement obviously are very anti immigration or like, you know, like immigration restriction or the effort to impose it. They are also very suspicious of federal power. Conservatives are suspicious of federal power and the exercise of federal power. We just went through this four or five years ago with COVID where it was like, what do you mean you're shutting down beaches? What do you mean you're blocking playgrounds? What do you mean you're shutting down schools? What do you mean you're arresting me if I try to buy, if I try to walk on a beach? Who the hell are you? What's going on here? And that was just a blink ago, that the excessive exercise of plenary power, or whatever you want to call it, was making people on the right very, very uncomfortable and angry. And now we're being asked to defend and support stuff that you can now see with your own eyes is, at the very least, extraordinarily questionable.
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E
The MAGA coalition that brought Trump back in 2024 did contain some conservatives who would agree with that message. What I would say is happening now, that's interesting, is the demand for accountability. When something went wrong, I think a lot of people would have continued to sort of say, I don't like the masks, I don't like the roundups. I don't like the kind Kristi Noem and the social media campaign they wage against immigrants. But you know what? We reelected this guy because we wanted him to fix this problem. He's fixing it maybe with a little, maybe a little too rough around the edges. But when something goes wrong, as it now has twice, and American citizens die, even those voters want accountability. And I think it's the accountability question that the Stephen Millers of the world have no concern for whatsoever. And the political equation matters a lot for Trump and obviously for Republicans.
- [28:15]
B
But.
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E
But the American people want accountability, and that's what turned them against the Biden administration was the lack of accountability. And it's happening again here, justifiably so. We are a pragmatic people who, when something goes wrong, we just want answers. If you don't give us answers, if you lie to our faces, if you claim that we, you know, the technocrats will solve the problem, we start to get annoyed and I think that's a really healthy impulse. I'm very happy to see it re emerging a little on the right now because it's been dormant for far too.
- [28:42]
B
Long, by the way. It also. Another thing that's going on that is very, very discomfiting is that the behavior of these Border Patrol agents at these scenes. So there is some controversy happens and the local authorities show up. And in this case, I think it is Border Patrol, not ice. Cause there's a whole. They're two different agencies. And Noam sent in. The story I've heard or that Eric Erickson is telling is that. Is that Border Patrol was sent in because ICE actually Tom Holman and said, you're going to like, we don't want to be. Stuff is going on here. That's not great. So she said, well, who's. Who. Who in my. Who in my. Under my command, like, can I trust more to do what I want them to do? And it was Border Patrol and local police come in to establish a crime scene, which is standard procedure. Like, if a thing happens and something like this happens, the evidentiary. These feds are in the cities, but the cities are still the city. They're still. They're still sovereign. I mean, there is federal supremacy law, but they want to. They want to set the crime scene, you know, create the perimeter, establish the, you know, freeze the evidence, get. Because that. It's their city. And the Border Patrol people were saying, go away. We're not cooperating with you. You. This is our crime scene. And I don't know. I don't like the sound of the Minneapolis Police Department chief. He seems like a. I mean, I'm sure I wouldn't like him. But when he. Or when state officials in Minnesota say, hey, wait a minute, you don't. That you don't make crime scenes.
- [30:36]
E
This is a.
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B
This is a local thing. Again, we're conservatives. We are supposed to understand that localities and states have, you know, you know, the federal government has a certain level of supremacy, but it doesn't have supremacy where some, you know, some Border Patrol guy says, get out of here. To a cop who is a mini Minneapolis cop who can go anywhere. They don't get to tell Minneapolis police they can't. They can't walk onto a crime scene. What kind of, what kind of. What kind of craziness is that?
- [31:15]
E
Well, this. This is also then points to the responsibility, irresponsibility of local and state Democratic officials who actually have told their local law enforcement not to cooperate. And to take that to an Extreme. And so we do see protesters, as we did last in Minneapolis, attacking cars in the parking lot of a Home to Suites hotel where they believe ICE officers and Border Patrol officers are staying overnight. And you don't see a lot of aggressive local law enforcement because there is this sensibility, probably from the top down, certainly from the mayoral office down, that they really don't belong there. And so we're not going to help when we have, when there's a situation that clearly calls for local law enforcement. So there again, that tension is still the responsibility of the Trump administration, which is sending federal troops into local localities to calm that situation. That's his obligation because it was his choice to send them there.
- [32:06]
B
Right. Now, let's go to the politics of what I say. It was a catastrophic error when I said, you know, Trump sent in the surged, the administration surged the forces in order to make hay out of the Somali fraud story. Now this is why it's a catastrophic error. He has saved Tim Walls's bacon. I mean, I don't know what Tim Walls is going to do. He already said he's not going to run for office, but he has flipped the script. Walls. Walls is now the righteous face of resistance to this fascist takeover of an American city and the moral conscience of our time, talking about ice ripping 2 year olds from their mother's arms. And Jacob Fry, an extremely embarrassing local politician, getting to, you know, get all high and mighty and all of that. And now he has handed Senate Democrats a huge weapon to use in the 2026 fight that they're waging uphill battle to win the Senate. But they're saying the budget bill that the House voted on that was to prevent the shutdown and that they were pretty much going to rubber stamps is now being torn up because they, because Democrats in the Senate will not vote for more DHS permanent Homeland Security funding. There was 10 billion extra dollars. They're not going to vote for it. And they're going to block the bill. And nobody is going to blame them for the shutdown. I mean, obviously Republicans will blame them for the shutdown. The 40 percenter, 35% of people who say that whatever Trump does is good and whatever the Democrats do is bad will be on the administration side. But in this case, he has just handed them a truncheon so that they can shut down the government again and he can get blamed.
- [34:06]
C
And in fact, he's probably has Tim Waltz regretting that he, that he backed out of the 2026 race because if he had, if he were still Running the Somali scandal would, you know, it's obviously been subsumed by this. And people would be saying not only is he a shoo in, but he's going to run for president. Not that he would be a, you know, not that he, he would have a shot, but he would, he would be somebody we're talking about now that would. Saying he's a shoeing in 2026 for re election. You know, a governor that keeps getting reelected.
- [34:37]
E
He'd.
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C
He would obviously be running for president. Right? Obvious. I mean, it would, but it doesn't. But it was. But it's one of those things that he's now a national figure with nothing to do. So it is interesting to see will choose to do with it and what Minnesota officials will choose to do with it. But it is such a reversal that you, you know, that he has, that the timing of this has gone from, you know, walls being kind of swept out of public life, you know, in.
- [35:07]
B
A way with really into public life being swept. Right.
- [35:11]
C
Brought him back in, grabbed him and pulled him back into public life.
- [35:15]
E
All these water metaphors, Seth. Yeah, I love them.
- [35:19]
B
I mean, I do. I do think that. And this gets to the Stephen Miller question that Seth brings up. He's not going to offload Stephen Miller, his senior director for policy, too important to him and all of that. Miller's advice is terrible. It's politically terrible. I mean, immigration is his best issue by far, and it's turning against him because Miller does not know the difference between we're shutting the border down and we're going to invade major cities. We've shut the border down. There are no net, there's no net increase in illegal numbers in 2025, reversing three years of Biden getting 6, 7, 8 million people crossing the border. A huge triumph. Policy triumph. But he doesn't know where to stop. He doesn't know. He doesn't know how to take credit for something. He is like, this is a war and we're relentless. We're going to go on. You know, it's like Sherman, you know, it's. He's going to like, burn the south down. And it is. This is very bad advice that he is getting. And the Republican. And the one thing that could get Miller out is literally if, you know, a delegation of people that he kind of trusts on Capitol Hill goes to him and says, you gotta get. He's killing us. He's killing us. We're now in danger of losing the Senate. You wanna lose the Senate? You're already Gonna lose the House, probably you're gonna lose the House. You wanna lose the Senate? Here's what happens if Trump loses the Senate. Just to lay it out, he won't be convicted when he is impeached, but the Senate gets to set the terms, the majority leader of the Senate and the Senate gets to set the terms of the impeachment trial of the. And that could be a six month schedule. Could be a six month trial. You know, every sort of like BB's, you know, prosecution, they have a couple hours a day, you know, they set it up so it's, you know, like 2 to 4 so that it can hit the evening news, you know, they can just drag him and other. And by the way, he's not the only one who will face this. Like if no one's there and the Democrats have the Senate, you know, they will have hearings about her. They will have hearings about every single thing that happens. Will it feel like overkill? Maybe. I mean we're talking about something that's a year away from now, but I don't know if it'll feel like overkill or not. Like, you know, and he very responsible Trump.
- [38:09]
C
He says, he says to Republicans, yeah, don't lose the midterms or I'll be impeached. We've been reading the stories that he's literally telling them this and their response back to him, I assume would be, you know, heal thyself, like if, you know, let us win. Yeah, we love doing the midterms, if you will let us.
- [38:30]
E
I think, I think, I don't know. This is a crazy theory and it's probably not true, but the reason I think he likes Stephen Miller is because Stephen Miller is his ideological soul piece. Because Trump isn't that people think of him as an ideologue, but he's not. I mean, he's a Democrat for most of his life. He's, he embraced this wave of populism even though he has a lot of non populist tendencies, starting with his own personal taste and things. But Miller is this consistent zealot in his presence. And you know, I think Biden had a version of this to his detriment as well, where he allowed a couple of ideologues in the policy making role who will not compromise. And if your head of domestic policy is an ideological zealot, you're going to have this problem regardless of what your views are. And Miller, you. There's a complete, complete through line with Miller. It's not just closed down the border, which I think Trump and the American people were on board with it, was, let's hunt down and get out of this. This is a war against illegal immigrants and we have to capture everyone. And once we've done that, we're also going to make sure that anyone born in this country has to go through even more obstacles to become a citizen. Birthright citizenship isn't legal. I mean, he has a whole plan. And Trump is not. Trump is more pragmatic than Miller in that regard. If he listens to the political advice that I think you're suggesting, John and Seth, that he should. But Miller is. That's what happens when you put a zealot in a policymaking role in the White House. And it's happened on the left and we're seeing it now on the right.
- [39:57]
B
I mean, you remember, what did he say? He said, I'm going to build a gigantic wall with a big, beautiful door. Right? Miller doesn't think there should be a door. So fine. And Trump has it. This is something he said in 2016. It's now 2026. So his views may, may evolve, but have evolved or whatever. But I'm just. Now it's just a practical political consideration. Washington is thrown into chaos. The, you know, liberals are off their back foot. And the problem is that the rhetoric that they use, which is so insanely offensive, I mean, Tim Walls said yesterday that someone is going to write a. There's going to be an Anne Frank in Minnesota who will write her diary about her time. Like, Anne Frank wrote her diary. Like, go get stuffed, you fourth rate piece of filth. Anne Frank lived in an attic and died of typhus and Bergen Belsen at the age of 15 as part of 6 million people slaughtered. Like that analogy is, he should, like, be, you know, he should be, he should go and clean bedpans for the rest of his life. You know, like Christine Home for something like that. So their rhetoric is just appalling. But when they say, but when they start saying things like when relatively grounded, even though crazy anti Trump people like Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic is saying, yes, this is fascism, of course it's not fascism. But if you get this credible plot line that says you're sending in these federal troops into cities, they're masked so nobody knows who they are. And then when they misbehave, they set up a phalanx to make sure that nobody has eyes on them, that they are going to conduct their own investigation, which you can't trust will be true and that they will therefore, you know, basically allow Lawlessness in the name of state power. It's not fascism in any real understanding of what fascism is, but it's pretty un American. And, like, it's not instantly dismissible. The Anne Frank analogy is more than instantly dismissible. The, the way the federal government is behaving now is beyond the pale and is raising questions about the legitimacy of the, you know, of the, of the use of executive power. Kind of like during COVID I mean, it's not that dissimilar from how we started feeling about COVID Like, what is the Centers for Disease Control getting involved in? Rent and how. And whether landlords can evict people or pay rent. The Centers for Disease Control. Did somebody, like, change all the rules of sanity to say that the people who are, like, testing us for disease get to set housing policy? You know, then you go, okay, oh, boy. You know, like, these Democrats, they just, they can't help themselves. They just want to take charge. And this is the same here. And it's not, as I say, I just don't think it's dismissible.
- [43:30]
C
Well, by the way, on the Anne Frank stuff, tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I'm bracing myself for a full day of those, of, of the comparisons and things like that to come, because we're probably going to have to deal with a full day of it. But also, you know, this goes back to something that Kristen Soltis Andersen said recently in the Times when she was, you know, she conducted polling and she was interviewed about the polling, and she said that there's the what and the how. And the what is immigration and cracking down on illegal immigration, and the American people like that.
- [44:12]
B
What.
- [44:13]
C
But then there's the how you do something. And right now, the how, Right now what's. What ICE is doing is what the American people interpret as the how. Even though, yes, there are Border Guard, there's, there's a whole immigration system and all that. Right now, what's in people's faces is the ICE stuff. The ICE is the how of anti immigration or anti legal immigration enforcement. And that, that is, that blankets, you know, that smothers any sort of good how, you know, that people might be thinking, you know, that people might otherwise support that. This is, this is the face of not just, it's not just the face of these operations to go in and get people who overstayed their visa or committed a crime. It's the face of the word immigration or immigration enforcement. It's the face of that phrase, and that's going to haunt the Trump administration and make it impossible to make any headway.
- [45:19]
B
I mean, it's literally like seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. I mean, if we just go really naked and, and cynical here, which is this was an unalloyed win, political win for the Trump administration that put Democrats on the defensive because the if they said, look, we closed the border and aren't we great? And Democrats start to complain like, oh, you like an open border. Like, like you put them in a corner, you corner them. The American people don't like open borders. That's. And now they have muddied every positive argument. As you say, the how has muddied the what, John, when you talk about.
- [46:00]
D
How Trump said he was going to build a big border, beautiful wall with a beautiful door, had he not muddied the win here, they could have capitalized on securing the border to moving on to legal immigration reform. I mean, that would be the logical next step. You know, we've taken care of the illegals. Now let's. Now let's talk about paths to citizenship and all the rest the of.
- [46:30]
B
Right. But as Christine says, Miller does not believe in legal immigration. Right. He is a zealot. He does not believe in legal immigration for which his parents, his great grandparents and Olam Haba are looking down and are not very happy with him.
- [46:47]
E
And to harp on the accountability point again, which I think is a message that resonates with Americans, Trump proved the lie of the Biden administration over and over again. The Biden administration said, well, what can we do? We'd have to change the law in order to actually enforce a safer border. Trump did what he did by just enforcing existing law, and that is a separate thing and people are happy with that. What we're seeing in Minneapolis, what we're hearing from the Stephen Millers in the administration who want to get rid of birthright citizenship that involves a lot more changing of law or a more aggressive use of federal force in, in localities. Which again, as we to get back to your federalism point, John, is really not something conservative people of conservative temperament like to see. So it is that sensibility. I think we'll see what Trump does in the, in the days to come with this because he's clearly starting to listen to whoever among whomever, among his political advisors have started to say, you got to think about what the optics of this are for the administration going forward. You know, you could just say, leave Minneapolis to all the, all the illegal immigrants we round up. We're just going to send to say to safety the, to sanctuary cities. I would like to see some sort of discussion of the whole sanctuary city idea because it too is a challenge to the, to federalist principles, whether or not a city can declare itself not willing to enforce any sort of federal law.
- [48:11]
B
Abe, can I just, can I just make a point? Because I was looking into this just before the podcast on the sanctuary city point, which is that at the moment the Supreme Court has, has by dismiss, by refusing to hear a case that the 9th Circuit had decided in 2020 and 2021 has essentially authorized the existence of sanctuary cities. So, and there is apparently there are cases in the federal system that are, that the Trump too is going to trying to bring up to get that decision in 2021, which was not a decision, it was simply not granting cert. So that the case was not heard by the court and therefore the lower court's rulings were allowed to stand that there is apparently movement on that front. But we'll see what, we'll, we'll see what happens there. Anyway, I apologize for.
- [49:09]
D
No, no, I was just gonna say.
- [49:10]
B
That I just knew a fact that's so I was very excited. Yeah.
- [49:16]
D
I would, I would be more excited if I knew one. So I was just going to say that sort of everything we're talking about and sets bringing up the difference between the what and the how, I think points to the key difference here between Trump's first term and this one is that all throughout his first term, while everyone was calling him an extremist and extremism policy wise, he was not at all extreme. He really was not uninspired and sort of, you know, kind of lost here and there, but not extreme. His conduct was consistently extreme this time round policy and certainly and its implementation matches his conduct. And I think that is, that's what's sort of turbocharged everything.
- [50:13]
B
Well, two things. So let's move on. One is the just now as I'm, as we're podcasting, Israeli President Herzog has taken off his hostage pin because Ron Givli, the body of Ron Givli, the last remaining hostage remains have been recovered in Gaza. And this brings to an end the more than 800 days of captivity or hostage or Israeli bodies in the hands of Hamas. Apparently, when the Israeli forces that found his body recovered it, they did something very beautiful which is that they, they sang a song, what you might call a hymn really, but a song called Anima Amin, which we sing it morning prayers every, every morning. It is the say Seth. It's the, it's the Reese, it's the partial restatement of Maimonides is 13 laws of Jewish faith. But it. And Anima Amina's. I believe with all my heart that the Messiah will come and that we will be redeemed, effectively. It's one of the most beautiful parts of the liturgy. And it's. I don't know. I'm very moved. I haven't seen it, heard it, because we're on here doing this podcast. But, but there was something very elevating and civilizationally elevating by the, in the knowledge that, you know, this effort was, you know, made to find him. They found him and the ants. And the immediate response was to, to restate the fundamental principles of Jewish faith.
- [52:32]
E
Yeah.
- [52:32]
C
And we've said it all all along. You know, we talked about the issue of faith in this and, you know, we're. The amount of hope and, you know, the, the feeling that, you know, when the, when hope is crushed, when, you know, when, when there were hostages that were alive for so long and thought we might get back and felt like we got to know their families, you know, and I mean, the public, not even just personally, I mean, you know, people who are in the public sphere, and then they, and then they don't come back alive, you know, the, the, the crushing feeling and whatever. And each time Israel has really responded this way, which is I, I believe, you know, I, you know, it's, it is, it's a statement of the hope is not wrong. The hope is never a mistake. It's not a mistake to keep hope alive. So it has been inspiring to see that, because the response, you know, dead or alive, has always been, you know, that's the one thing you can't give up is, is that, is that hope and that belief. And also, you know, just as a sort of practical matter, this is. Unless I'm wrong, and I don't think I am, the first time since 2014, since the summer of 2014, that's 12, almost 12 years that there has been no hostage in Gaza, no Israeli hostage in Gaza. Avira Mengitu was. Mengistu was a young Ethiopian man who, with some. They said some, you know, mental illness struggles. And he hopped a fence in 2014. He just, he packed a bag and he went to Gaza and he started climbing the fence. And, you know, nobody really understood what was going on. They tried to stop it. The Israelis tried to stop him. And then immediately they sent, you know, they, they went to the Red Cross and they said somebody just jumped the fence, you know, whatever. And, you know, they could, they could sort of, you know, almost see him disappearing into Gaza. And he was there for a decade and Hamas held him. And there was one other that was, was held in 2015 in, under similar circumstances. But so since then that's, that's, you know, a dozen years since there has been no Israeli hostage in Gaza, no body being held by Hamas over Israel's head. And there is something that I think a lot of people just don't realize, which is, you know, three years before Avera Mengistu went missing in Gaza was, you know, the. All, all the Gilad Shalit, the, the trades and the backlash and the debate over, you know, the, the prisoner swaps and all this stuff. And it was barely, you know, again, two and a half years or whatever it was since that landmark hostage deal that Mengistu went missing in Gaza. And so there wasn't much of a reprieve. What we're really seeing is the fact that since Hamas has run Gaza, there's basically always been hostages, there's basically always been bodies. Right. Hamas really took it over in 07, was working on an 06. We're really looking at the history of Hamas run Gaza being. And, and that means post, you know, the, the pull out from Gaza meaningful, you know, since Israel left Gaza, you're really looking at a place that has been holding Israeli bodies hostage. And so, you know, I'm sure people, there's no way to know. You know, hopefully it stays that way and all that other stuff. But there is a sort of break in the clouds in a sense of the weight that the Israelis have been ever since Hamas took full control of Gaza. They've basically had, you know, held bodies over their head. And that, you know, tells you something about the conflict also. And you know, about when people go, oh, it didn't start on October 7, 2023. No, it didn't. There have been, they've been taking hostages into Gaza for decades. And you know, there's a rare moment where there isn't one. This is the rare moment. It's much rarer, especially with Hamas running Gaza, for there to be no Israeli hostage there.
- [56:48]
D
It also.
- [56:49]
E
Go ahead.
- [56:50]
D
I'm sorry, should there be a resumption of fighting, it will look very different. It would be the first time Israel would be fighting without concern for what Hamas might do with a hostage or multiple hostages being held over Israel's head.
- [57:10]
B
And of course, Hamas patron, Iran, Hamas funder and its organizer and its sort of boss in some ways, is going through a massive crisis of its own. That interestingly enough, rewind the clock to 2014 and they Mengistu goes over the fence and they send him back in, they send him back to Israel. They're like, we don't need you here. And October 7th doesn't happen. Let's just say October 7th doesn't happen or some version of Hamas doesn't engage with Israel. The result of Hamas engaging with Israel on October 7th is that the Syrian regime has fallen. The, you know, Hezbollah has, it's not been destroyed, but it has been wildly weakened. The entire strategic position of Israel in the Middle east vis a vis this seven nation axis of evil, or seven party axis of evil, let's say, has been, you know, revised and overrun. And now the Iranian regime has found itself in a position in which now it seems to be inescapably accepted by all parties that at the very minimum, at the very minimum, 5,000 people were killed on the evening of January 8 when they blacked out the Internet. And some numbers have it at 30,000 and some numbers have the injury totals at almost unimaginable levels for a, for like a single 48 hour period. Like, you know, hundreds of thousands of people injured or something like that. This is apparently by common understanding probably the worst single massacre in modern times. And according to intelligence reports, the Hotel Khamenei said do whatever you, you know, put this revolt down without mercy and do whatever you want. Let go, let loose. So Donald Trump, Trump administration tried to retreat from its promise that it was going to intervene if there was a massacre by saying that Trump had prevented, or Trump himself said he prevented the hanging of 800 people. Again, that may be like literally true, although apparently it's not. Apparently those hangings did, did continue. But I mean, so even if it had happened, so 8, 800 weren't hanged and 5,000 at a minimum were murdered. That's not really much of an exchange. And there are carrier ships and carrier carrier steaming toward the shores of Iran right now. There's apparently division in the administration about, about what to do. And there is some concern on Israel's part that it is not in the proper position at the moment to help or deal with the possible consequences of a real fight between the US and Iran because Israel doesn't have sufficient numbers of interceptors for ballistic missiles. And if Iran has more than they think that might, and then they fire them at Israel, there is, you know, Israel will be undefeated. You know, a ballistic missile is an eight minute trip from, you know, from Iranian territory to Israeli territory. And if they don't have sufficient ability to Shoot them down, you know, who knows what the damage could be? But the point here is that now everyone is acknowledging this except, you know, everybody who said that what Israel did in Gaza was a genocide. And as I think, as a friend of mine said, according to the most rigorous count, in the course of the two years of the war, of the active two years of the war in Gaza, 35,000 Gazans have died. And it's very possible that that number of Iranians has been killed by their own regiment, were killed by their own regime in 48 to 72 hours alone, with nothing stopping them from continuing on. Where's the UN and that being the goal, where's the. You. I don't really understand. All civilians. All civilians, of course, but I mean, where, where. I mean, the meteor talking about it, where is, where's the scene? Where, where's the. This has happened in full view of the planet. Does that not indicate the degree of astounding hypocrisy and vile anti Semitism that is the result of claiming that Israel's conducted a genocide against, against Gaza when it's likely that the numbers are going to show at the end of 2026 that there are more people living in Gaza at the end of 2026 than there were living in Gaza on October 6, 2023. That's some genocide. Congratulations on, you know, Israel's usually pretty good at doing things like this is the worst genocide ever. But what do you call it?
- [63:12]
C
Also there's clear, like the Times has a story today and they talked about the, you know, having, you know, they having authenticated videos of violence against protesters. And so, you know, I remember, you know, when we were talking about the supposed famine in Gaza and the pictures that they were using, right, The Times used a photo of, of a boy who had a congenital disease and who looked the way he did and you know, again, a tragic case, but looked the way he did. Not because of starvation, certainly not deliberate starvation. And it turned out that he was used actually to replace the first picture that the Times was going to use on the COVID because the editors found out that the first person they were going to use was also the same situation. This was not what. And he said to them, this is not what your story is claiming. Your story is claiming that starvation is causing this. And you put a picture of something that was not caused by starvation. That's misleading at best. And they ended up using another picture that they didn't realize was also of the same case. Why was it. Would it have been difficult for them to get a picture of a child who was starved nearly to death if that were happening. No, they were getting pictures. They couldn't find a picture, a verifiable picture of what they were accusing Israel of. And now you're reading the story and you're going, you're the Time story today. And seeing, see, they can verify these things when they need to, and they can get them when they need. It is much harder for the Times to get a hold of verifiable images from Iran right now than it is than it was during the war in Gaza, because they had stringers sitting around in Gaza with cameras waiting for any moment to take a photo. And so that's the other outrage here, is that the things that Israel was accused of, once you looked into them, they fell apart. And they're talking about, you know, having authenticated these images from Iran. And so we don't even wonder if it's really what's going on in the picture. Right? They're not even making a claim that we have to interpret what we're seeing. We're just watching videos of people with guns, shoot people without guns.
- [65:46]
B
So that's the outrage stuff. And now there's the policy question, which is, are we. Are we going to act? And I think there are two levels of that question which are. Which are not answerable yet, which is, are we going to act to strike regime sites and things like that as an expression of outrage at this insane, monstrous act of, you know, mass murder, or do we have a strategy that involves doing that that will also help topple the regime? And I think that's the question here that is not clear yet is whether or not they have a strategy to topple the regime, using the military action as the trigger to get forces inside the country to say, we've got to get away from the mullah, you know, we've got. We've got it. We've got to knock the mullahs over or we're. Or we're toast. And, you know, that's what we don't know. Obviously, we can strike them at will and strike sites at will. Is that a sensible thing to do without a regime change or regime destruction, really? Forget regime change. That term is too loaded. The idea being this regime cannot be allowed to continue to exist, and therefore whatever follows it will, you know, whatever follows it can hardly do worse than what they've just done. But I don't think we know the answer to that question. It's what's hanging over this whole decision process, which seems Very odd because according to what I'm reading, the forces inside the administration that are calling for a diplomatic solution as opposed to a military solution are not lining up the way you would think that they would line up. That Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff are trying to work a diplomatic solution and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, which you would expect, and J.D. vance, whom you would not expect, are on the side of a military solution. So the fact that these cross currents are happening inside the administration is itself very interesting. And at some point maybe we'll get a better sense of what on earth is going on there. So that's where we are. Quick recommendation. I've only watched the first half, but HBO and HBO Max are running Judd Apatow's documentary Mel Brooks the 99 Year Old man, which is a four hour documentary about the life and times of Mel Brooks, who is still alive, is interviewed in the course of the documentary. Astonishingly alive and vivid and with a, you know, memory works. All a lot of it is about how Brooks has this has spent his life telling these stories over and over and over again on talk shows and things and anecdotes from his life. And they show, they show him telling one single story like over five decades to Jack Parr and Johnny Carson and then to Merv Griffin and then to Dick Cavett and then on the stage of the Wynn Hotel in a show that he did that I went to see actually in, in 2019 when he was like 91 or something like that. But you know, he is the most delightful person who ever lived and it's a fascinating life story and it's a very sprightly documentary. And of course he is the author of our, of our theme song, which is that Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst is the, is the title music for one of his, his second movie, the Twelve Chairs, which he explains he and only he believed to be a masterpiece when it was, when it was finished. But, but so we have a, we have a deep connection to Melvin Kaminsky and his and his life story and the only really like startling moment that sort of like pulls you up short is a moment where Rob Reiner is, is interviewed about, about, you know, meeting Mel Brooks when he was 4 years old and there you see Rob Reiner and it's just heartbreaking to see. And Mel Brooks last week said that he was glad that Carl, Rob Reiter's father had died when he died so that he would not have had to see what happened to Rob at the hands of his grandson. So that's a lot. Little external, sort of like moment of shock and horror. But otherwise it's just compulsively watchable. So that's mel Brooks, the 99 year old man. And we'll be back tomorrow. So for Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John, but Horitz keep the candle burning.