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- [00:00]
Seth Mandel
Foreign. Expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die at first no way of
- [00:15]
John Podhoretz
knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, June 25, 2026. I am Jon Puthoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as is senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:35]
Eliana Johnson
Hi, John.
- [00:36]
John Podhoretz
Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [00:40]
Noah Rothman
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today, the founder of the Commentary magazine podcast, senior editor at National Review, and author of the newly released book Blood and Progress, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah.
- [00:55]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:56]
John Podhoretz
Noah, I want to start by bringing up Blood in Progress and offering a comforting theory about what happened in New York on Tuesday. But maybe it's just delusional.
- [01:14]
Seth Mandel
Here's my I could use some comfort.
- [01:16]
John Podhoretz
So Blood in Progress is the story of the rise of the use of political violence on the left in the United States over the past quarter century and the default to political violence by people, particularly on the left.
- [01:34]
Seth Mandel
A century and a quarter.
- [01:35]
John Podhoretz
A century and a quarter. But I mean the present day period that you focus on begins in 1999 and then you move forward from there. A lot of people say that the reason in the United States that we have not had political violence, as has been a common root in other countries, is that we have a representative political system through which our disagreements and sometimes our really, really florid disagreements can be addressed, dealt with, and then move on to actual political action in state capitals and in legislatures and in city halls and all of that as affirmed by the people who participate in the political process. So my comforting thought is this. What if the introduction of the Democratic Socialists of America, the people who, including winning the other day, the organizer of qad, the Columbia University,
- [02:44]
Noah Rothman
the group is called Columbia University, Apartheid, Divestiture, and it is the umbrella group that, you know, oversees all of the Israel hating anti Semitic groups on that campus.
- [02:58]
John Podhoretz
Right. And so Darieliza Villa Chevalier is one of the founders of the of kuad. She lead so she is a street organizing, law breaking, America hating monster. But now she's gonna be in Washington as one of 435 members of Congress and not sitting in a back room coming up with dark plots. She's actually gonna have to she's gonna have this job in politics, delivering things to her constituents and stuff like that. Is this a better way? Does the bringing into the political system of these radicals that are outside the political system, is there a way in which that could be viewed as an answer to the problem that we have seen in the rise of political violence, or does there. Does their presence inside our political system threaten? Is it like introducing cancer cells, which literally one single cancer cell can metastasize into a full blown body condition that leads to death?
- [04:30]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, so it's possible. And I don't want to dismiss the prospect that actually serving in government tempers activist energy and acts as a moderating influence. And it's definitely true on the municipal level. One of the reasons why I wasn't so terrified of Mamdani's rise is because municipal politics definitely has that effect. The ideologues can only get so far. The job of governing a city is very quotidian. Balancing parochial interests within municipal borders is grubby work that compels you to compromise your values. It's less the case in Congress. Do we anticipate that she's gonna be doing real significant committee work? Is she gonna spend a lot of time in her constituent offices? I mean, maybe, but we know that performative politics gets you quite far in Congress. You don't necessarily have to be an effective legislator to be an effective political poll. And the degree to it, the rapidity with which we're seeing Democratic establishmentarians make peace with their new socialist overlords. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy. This morning, Senator Van Hollen endorsed EL Said in Michigan. They know which way the wind is blowing and they are putting up zero resistance to what is essentially a very hostile takeover, admittedly so, from those who are executing the takeover. So. So I'm less sanguine about Congress as a moderating influence on these people. I think it's more of a platform.
- [06:03]
John Podhoretz
So let me offer one other example. So Claire Valdez, one of the other socialists elected defeating, actually not defeating an incumbent, Paul. She won an open seat, but she said two interesting things yesterday that people were making fun of on the social media platforms that I don't think they should necessarily make fun of. She said that one of the things she would like to do is get rid of the TSA and end PreCheck, meaning for pre. Check. Okay, so.
- [06:42]
Seth Mandel
But within what? Within the context of what? Nationalizing the airline industry.
- [06:47]
John Podhoretz
Right, Nationalizing the airline industry. Now you're laughing. Okay, you're laughing at the thought of nationalizing the airline industry or getting rid of precheck because it creates two classes of people at airports. I don't think that raising this as a populist issue is bad politics. And often these conversations that come from the far reaches of the political ideological spectrum can start sneaking in to our conversation by which I mean, a, it is annoying for a lot of people that they can't, you know, that they're on some incredibly slow line and then the other line is moving way faster. And there may be reasons why they don't want to spend $85 on getting TSA PreCheck and they don't have $85 to spend on TSA Precheck. Similarly, all we hear for the last three years are these terrible stories about fights on airplanes. And we've all had the experience of being on a plane and then they have to change the crew and then your flight is canceled and you're at an airport and it's 7pm and you have to go home and come back in the morning and they rebook you two days later. And all of this creating a populist, being somebody whose expression of populist rage is to rail against the way we fly around the country, I don't think is bad politics. It's not like saying, you know, I don't know, it's not like saying you want to seize the means of production. It's like, hey, this is really crappy the way we do this and we all don't enjoy it, let's do something to fix it.
- [08:37]
Eliana Johnson
But sometimes it's just why we need to seize the means of production, isn't it?
- [08:41]
John Podhoretz
You mean that's an excuse? Is that what you're saying?
- [08:43]
Eliana Johnson
That's an excuse, yeah.
- [08:46]
John Podhoretz
Owning the airlines isn't the case.
- [08:48]
Eliana Johnson
The airlines are bad. And so we need to seize the means of production is sometimes the second half of that sentence.
- [08:55]
John Podhoretz
Well, you know, the weird thing about the airlines is, of course, until 1979, the airlines were very strictly regulated by the federal government. We deregulated them and prices crashed. Americans don't understand the degree to which, if we still had a regulated airline industry, a plane ticket in 1978, like cross country, you know, round trip plane ticket in 1978 could cost as much as 1,000, 1,200, $1500 in $1978.
- [09:30]
Seth Mandel
I was going to make that point. And most people don't know it. They only see the pictures on the Internet of these glorious restaurant quality cabins. And they say, whatever happened to that? And it's like, well, you know, you fly a lot cheaper. I mean, the other question is a
- [09:42]
Eliana Johnson
character in a book I read last weekend walked downstairs into the lounge on his flight.
- [09:49]
John Podhoretz
Yes, I remember a piano bar on the plane that I took from New York to San Francisco when I was 11 years old. A 747 and there was a piano bar on the plane, but of course it sounds glorious.
- [10:04]
Seth Mandel
Until you realize that the story of deregulation is the story of populist economics that allowed air travel to be enjoyed by many more people, which is just the opposite of what they're asking.
- [10:14]
John Podhoretz
50 years of it. When it comes to 50 years of it. Right. People, as you say, not only don't remember, they don't know the basis by which, what led to the world in which they can say, oh, my God, last week I paid $250 round trip to go from here to St. Louis, and this week I'm paying $325. That's outrageous, when, in fact, those prices were pretty much set by the federal government 50 years ago at a much higher price.
- [10:44]
Seth Mandel
This is, to me, the populism of the coddled and the comfortable, because it's a matter of salience. If you remember, during the Biden years, they attempted to make a big populist issue out of ticket prices. We have to make it easier for the, the proletariat to access Taylor Swift concerts. And there's a monopoly on ticket sales in this country, and it's, it's creating vast inequities. And that was salient to nobody, save those who were already persuaded by the socialist populist arguments. So I just, I question how many people will be. And by the way, I don't have pre check. I fly probably 20 times a year. I glide through those lines. I have never encountered a problem. If I'm waiting, it's five minutes. I don't feel the need to fork out cash. And it is obnoxious. The TSA PreCheck system where you can just pay a little bit of money and suddenly you're no longer a terrorist threat. It makes no sense. I get it. At the same time, I just wonder whether this is a, a real winning issue for the, the, the quiet majority out there.
- [11:44]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, I, I'm with you, Noah. I don't think these are winning populist arguments. The, the voters who, you know, it's a small number of voters energized far left voters who propelled these three candidates to victory. The number of voters in these districts who actually went out and voted was small. And there was a failure of their opponents to mobilize, to let people know what the stakes were and to get out there. But the far left is really energized, and Zoron has played, you know, Zoran's rise has played a big role in that. But these voters were predominantly wealthier and white, you know, by the way, really,
- [12:32]
John Podhoretz
really wealthy and white. As if you look at the composition, the makeup of the Brad Lander, Daniel
- [12:41]
Noah Rothman
Goldman race, Lander as well as the Darieliza Chevalier voters.
- [12:47]
John Podhoretz
But this is so two neighborhoods in South Brooklyn. Brooklyn Heights, where I lived for four years, and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, America's first suburb, as it was called. Settled when after Fulton built his ferry, his first ferry in 1842. One of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the United States. 19th century houses, houses cost $10 million. Expensive apartments. There is no poor area in Brooklyn Heights. There is no poor area in Brooklyn Heights. Cobble Hill, little different, but pretty close to the same thing. Lander won both of them. He won Cobble Hill running away. Now, that race was not run on any economic principles. Right. It was just mostly about Israel, as it happens. What does that tell you? First of all, 10% of eligible voters voted in that primary. Oh, of all eligible voters, there are 550,000 eligible voters in that district, which has 750,000 residents. 550,000 voted. 55,000 of them voted for Lander. So it's a tiny number. Right. At one point, you know, this is a. Brooklyn has two and a half million people in it. 50,000 voters decided this congressional district since there's not going to be a Democrat, a Republican rival. So it's tiny. And the makeup is not what you're hearing. It's not downwardly mobile, ultra educated people. These are already successful people.
- [14:40]
Noah Rothman
And this idea, you cannot live in
- [14:41]
John Podhoretz
Brooklyn Heights without that.
- [14:42]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, right. But in this ideology that weaves together a framework of the oppressor and the oppressed with socialist or communist economics. And that worldview is an elite ideology that springs from Darieliza Avila Chevalier's Ivy League campus. This is an elite ideology straight from KUAD and Morningside Heights. So I don't really think this is a vast populist movement.
- [15:24]
Seth Mandel
I mean, the demographics here are pretty consistent across the board when it comes to these socialist primary elections. Even Mamdani's first primary election. Cause there were two. He underperformed where? In New York City's poorest and blackest districts. The same is true of Janice Lewis George in Washington D.C. primary polling said that her opponent would perform better with older black residents, long timers who care about crime, who care about tax rates, who don't want to see the tax base ejected into the suburbs. It's the transients, the students, the people who lived there only less than 10 years, according to the polling in Washington D.C. and probably a lot less than 10 years and who aren't going to be around long. That's the demography.
- [16:06]
John Podhoretz
That is Richie Torres. Richie Torres in the Bronx, a pro Israel, gay Hispanic congressman, smart as a whip, very impressive. One of the poorest districts in the United States, one of the poorest urban districts in the United States. There aren't rich people in Richie Torres's district. He had a DSA challenger whom he wiped out the floor with. So again, that speaks to the fact that it has now become axiomatic that these rich white liberal people who go to elite universities are acting against economic interest. And that's a very important thing because a lot of capitalist thinking were like probably democratic capitalism thinking suggests that people will understand that their life success has something to do with the system that has allowed them, that has created the opportunities for wealth and success that we have. And there is clearly that is fractured. That is no longer the case that you can say, well, look, you're 45 years old, you make half a million dollars a year. You probably want your taxes lower because you see that you don't get the services that you would want for the taxes that you pay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And therefore you're going to start edging over to the right to protect your financial interests. That is not happening with this class of people which is staying where they were when they were in college and is not moderating them. You know, age, there's that line, right? If you, if you're not a socialist at 20, you have no, you know, you have no heart and not a conservative at 40, you have no brain. Well, that none of us 40 part isn't working.
- [18:04]
Seth Mandel
No one here had a heart.
- [18:05]
Noah Rothman
So my dad used to say this all the time when I was growing up. And I'd say, well, what does that mean for me? You know, I'm a cold hearted, yes, monster at the age of 13.
- [18:16]
John Podhoretz
Me too. Maybe all of us, we're all like that. But no, but the point is that it tells a certain truth, which is okay, you get up and then you own property, you're paying property taxes, you have kids, your kids go to school. You want the schools to be better, you're worried you need public safety because you might get robbed or your kids might get mugged. All of that will incline you toward a certain type of politician who will speak to those matters. And here we have a world in which that is just that connection between and why.
- [18:52]
Eliana Johnson
What's the ultimate lesson? They're not growing up.
- [18:57]
Noah Rothman
Seth, I was about to say that These people are living in a state, many of them, of perpetual childhood, delayed marriage. They're either not having children or having them much later. And that's combined with a collapse in civic education.
- [19:16]
Seth Mandel
I mean, that's gonna sound like a pejorative.
- [19:18]
Noah Rothman
Continenti wrote his Wall Street Journal column on last week that the perpetuation of the American system actually depends on people being educated about what is unique and special about it.
- [19:31]
Seth Mandel
That sounds like it's an insult. But Seth's claim that, you know, they're, they're not growing up, but it's really not, it's an objective assessment. If you think that you can just abolish prisons and get rid of police, as Chevalier maintains, and just get rid of borders. I mean, you, you're living in a world of abstractions in a way that is only sustainable if you have very little contact with the harsh realities that we all navigate on a daily basis.
- [20:00]
Eliana Johnson
And there's a role being played here by our top universities. These are very educated people who, because they're very educated, know nothing. That, that's more of a problem than I think people, you know, the, the, the rest of the population should see it's not just, oh, they're woke or they're getting indoctrinated into liberal thought. They, the hour. If you are highly educated these days, you will come out and live the rest of your life as a teenager. That's a problem.
- [20:35]
John Podhoretz
Darieliza Avila Chevalier is a perpetual graduate student, right? He is literally a graduate student. That's the other thing some of the dissertation graduates do.
- [20:48]
Eliana Johnson
The Trump administration would go after, you know, somebody on, you know, one of these pro Hamas organizers and they'd be like, oh, well, they have a green card because they're 33 year old graduate student at Columbia. And then you go, wait a second, why, why is, why are all these middle aged activists at Columbia taking class? What is it about this, this milieu, this, this, this environment that keeps people sort of trapped? There's a, there's this, there's this, this force that's keeping them in place. You know, like that ride a great adventure that, that used to spin around so fast, it kept you stuck to the wall and you didn't need to buckle yourself in.
- [21:32]
Noah Rothman
I love that ride.
- [21:35]
Eliana Johnson
That's Columbia. No.
- [21:36]
Noah Rothman
And so she's doing her graduate studies at cuny, the City University cuny.
- [21:42]
John Podhoretz
Excuse me. Yes.
- [21:43]
Noah Rothman
And yet she was a Columbia undergrad. And the Free Beacon actually did a report on. When you're a graduate student, you teach undergraduates. And her class is on black Diasporic Deconstructing Modes of Power, in which she teaches about whiteness, the prison industrial complex and the genocidal practices of the nation state. So this is what her voters are learning about in her class.
- [22:20]
John Podhoretz
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- [24:51]
Seth Mandel
I got two out of three.
- [24:53]
Noah Rothman
I was about to say, so far I'm failing great on that. But I mean, this goes back to Buckley and Kissinger. You know, Buckley saying he'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. And Kissinger saying, I forget exactly what the term terminology, his terminology was, but that the fights in academia are so heated because the stakes are so low.
- [25:16]
John Podhoretz
Right.
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Seth Mandel
So I wrote about this for NR with respect to Chevalier, but I'm sure it's broadly applicable that particularly when it comes to her claims about Israel as a genocide and what Gaza represents. It is a very elaborate metaphor, but they don't mean it as a metaphor. When she described in this debate with Espelot how Gaza, the situation in Brooklyn and Gaza are very similar to her insofar as it's basically ethnic cleansing in Brooklyn because of market dynamics for property, that all these people are being pushed out. The people who aren't her constituents, by the way, the long termers, black residents, what have you, those people are being pushed out and it's just like Gaza. And it's a sort of thing that you can only comprehend if you see this as a very metaphorical, highly abstracted analogy, but they don't mean it as an analogy. And to bring it back to blood in Progress, this is where her far left, socialistic, violently inclined constituents get all mixed up in their head because they see, they use this metaphor all the time when they describe systemic oppression, systemic violence. What they're describing is the banalities of daily life or constitutional governance, the aspects of which they don't like, but they respond to it or it licenses in their heads very literal expressions of violence as a remedy to what they regard as systemic oppression.
- [26:40]
John Podhoretz
I mean, it's a classic sociological trope in the United States to say things that are not true, but metaphorically emotionally resonant. Right? Like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique saying that living an upper middle class suburban life in the United States as a woman in 1963 felt like being in prison. Now that's insane on its face, but for people who are looking for some expression of their frustration with the fact that their lives aren't going where they think their lives should go, it obviously bore fruit. It was something that connected to people. When somebody says because you can't afford an apartment in Park Slope, that or you're a black or Hispanic person who lives in a neighborhood that is getting more expensive, you're there, but your children can't move back to your neighborhood because others have moved in and raised the rents, that that is a form of ethnic cleansing. It's patently untrue and offensive and A sort of disgusting thing to say that cheapens the real ethnic cleansing that goes on all over the planet every single day. But nonetheless, in part cause it's so caricatured and part because it's so outrageous, it connects to people like it gives them a dopamine rush to say, yes, I'm being ethnically cleansed, I am oppressed. That is something that they want to feel. And it is a very interesting. It's one of the things that populism, even though this is not quite popular, does for people, right. It creates the victim structure. And so the victim structure of conservative populism we've been Talking about for 15 years, this stuff here, which is not populist in the classic sense because we are talking about very well to do people voting for it, but it's populist emotionally, if that makes any sense. It says everything is going wrong every or it's a way of dealing with the fact that we all feel like something is fundamentally going wrong in the United States. We can't quite put our finger on it. We have 10,000 different explanations for it. I mean, yesterday I was having converse two different conversations with two different people who said, I just don't know how much long. I mean, this could be it, America could be finished on different from different perspectives and with different reasons for America being finished. It feels like something has run off the rails. This is the explanation for what's run off the rails. And of course that's where populism always gets to you start blaming the Jews no matter where you are. In the course of human history, if there's a social decay, social disorder problem and there is a tiny Jewish population somewhere in the vicinity, the idea is that they are a disease that has come in, they brought their disease with them and now it's spreading to you. And maybe extirpation or exile is the solution to cure you of the disease to which you have become susceptible. So that's where you connect some of this to some of that. No sane person thinks based on the facts that a genocide occurred in Gaza. The population of Gaza today is the same as the population of Gaza was three years ago. The number of people who live, who are Gaza, you know, the number of people who died in the war in Gaza have been replaced by births. It is the same. That genocide is a reduction in the size of a population through killing, through deliberate mass killing. There is no genocide in Gaza. Now every Democrat in the country is going to have to say that they believe that there was a genocide in Gaza to stave off a rival to the left. They're gonna say it, it's not true. Like you could say, by the way, Israel's occupation of Gaza is illegal, or Israel's occupation of the west bank is illegal, or Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights is illegal. There is no genocide in Gaza. Factually, you can attack Israel for all sorts of other things. But this is the thing you're going to have to say, not, I oppose aid to Israel because Israel acts unjustly toward the Palestinians. You're going to have to use the word genocide to stave off the dsa. And that's a very interesting development. It's like the Grover Norquist tax pledge, except it's about saying something that is factually untrue and slanderous and anti Semitic.
- [32:06]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah. And I want to point out, by the way, that Antonio Reynoso, who was one of the losers.
- [32:12]
John Podhoretz
Brooklyn Borough President, right?
- [32:14]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah, Brooklyn Borough President, who was one of the, the candidates who lost to these, you know, the DSA slate, whatever you want to call it is. He called it a genocide and Claire Valdez is appoint. His opponent was like, well, you didn't call it a genocide until this campaign started. And I thought that that was a really interesting back and forth because she's right and that's a fair response. But what she's saying also is you didn't become a fully anti Semitic lunatic until you filed for election to the House. You, you, you retained your sanity while you were Brooklyn Borough President, but now you have to be, now you have to pretend to be as crazy as me and you're just pretending. Everybody here knows I'm authentically psychotic. And I think that that's, that's the debate going on between Democrats, which is like, well, you're just saying the right thing to get elected. But the right thing is like the Earth is flat and aliens founded this, this, this planet 1200 years ago and all sorts of stuff like that. And it's like, well, you didn't say the Earth was flat until you started running for Congress. And that's when, and that's really what you're describing, which is the, the, it's not so much an ideological position, but it is in order to run as a national, even though a House member is not tech, it's not a national office. But, you know, on the national scene, you have to shed whatever remaining sense of shame you had before and you have to be part of something that is, that requires you to act in such a shameless manner. That's the graduation to national office who
- [34:19]
Seth Mandel
won the 2020 election.
- [34:22]
John Podhoretz
Right, right, right. No, the same phenomenon or the crowd is recognized. Yeah, yeah, but and often, by the way, and I think this was true, this has often been true in politics that making someone say something that they do not believe and know to be untrue is the way you get them. You compel them to your side. And it's doubly satisfying because you know, they don't really think it, but you bullied them into conforming with what you're demanding of them. And it is a political, it's a political fact of life. George H.W. bush was a pro choice politician in the United States, ran as pro choice in 1980, in 1988 in order to secure. And then he obviously was the vice president to a pro life president who nonetheless did absolutely nothing to advance the pro life cause. In 1988, Bush is running for president. He says, boy, am I pro life. You won't believe how pro life I am. I am Mr. Pro Life and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and I'm going to do the other thing. And he went to the pro life cause and he basically said, I am changing who I am to satisfy you. They loved it. They, I think they liked it better than, than pro. Someone who was pro life from, from birth. The convert is going to be more determined to follow the rules than the person who had these ideas from the get go. So.
- [36:16]
Eliana Johnson
Right. Well, it's an acknowledgment. I need you.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Eliana Johnson
That's, that's a powerful thing. But also it used to be considered enough if people, it used to be considered almost a benefit if somebody didn't, if you didn't think they really believed it, but they said it anyway, that was enough for the, you know, for that caucus, which is what you're describing. Right. I think about Obama and gay marriage. Obama said marriage is between a man and a woman. Everybody said he doesn't really believe that. And Obama benefited greatly on the left from the belief that there's no way he could possibly believe this, that this is just what you have to say. And one of the things you're seeing about the DSA and its success today is that you don't have to say anything. You don't just have to say a normal brained thing and assume that people know you don't really believe it. You have to say all the crazy things.
- [37:22]
Matt Ebert
I started with one shop, no college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [37:56]
John Podhoretz
When you get momentum, you step on the gas.
- [37:59]
Eliana Johnson
That's how you get separation from everybody else.
- [38:01]
John Podhoretz
I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah blah blah. I looked up, let me tell you something. There's kids in my neighborhood putting in
- [38:06]
Matt Ebert
sheetrock that is smarter than you.
- [38:07]
Eliana Johnson
AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.
- [38:09]
Seth Mandel
It is never going to disrupt physical
- [38:12]
John Podhoretz
blue collar trade skill.
- [38:13]
Seth Mandel
And the guy just looked at me
- [38:15]
John Podhoretz
and he said it's bloody impossible.
- [38:17]
Seth Mandel
So I asked him this question. I said it's impossible.
- [38:20]
Matt Ebert
Unless that's Podcast with me Matt ebert watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts. From the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. Eric I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:34]
John Podhoretz
Eliana let's let's talk about speaking about crazy things. Let's talk about what happened yesterday in Washington at the lunch that Donald Trump had with the Republican Party.
- [39:45]
Noah Rothman
Let's turn to the Republican Party's problems. Yes, where the President was supposed to sign a housing bill that had bipartisan support. The White House was touting it as the President went up for lunch, a lunch with Republican senators on Capitol Hill whereby the President announced that he would not sign, he would not, in fact, sign the housing bill, which was significant not just in and of itself, but because Republicans had hoped to campaign in the midterm elections on this housing bill as part of their broader affordability message and the reason the President cited that he would not sign the housing bill. By the way, there were setups everywhere for the President to announce this, to cite it, to tout the legislation, was that the Senate will not pass his voting the SAVE act, for which they don't have the votes. And that has been communicated to him several times. This is the demand that voters show proof of citizenship in order to vote. The President very much wants the Republican controlled Senate to blow up the filibuster, again for which they don't have the votes. So he proceeded to a lunch with Republican senators at which he got into an altercation with the lame duck Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy over Iran war powers and not much else happened.
- [41:39]
John Podhoretz
The most interesting social moment, I would
- [41:42]
Noah Rothman
say the takeaway from this is the continued deterioration of the President's relationship with the Republican Senate caucus on the Hill because he's now deprived some of these vulnerable senators of an issue that they could have campaigned on. And there's immense frustration, I think, among the Senate caucus that he's not hearing what they have to say, that they simply don't have the votes. Well, they don't want to blow up the filibuster and they simply don't have the votes to proceed on this SAVE Act. And by the way, FISA remains expired. He had also insisted on attaching the SAVE act to reauthorization of FISA. 702.
- [42:39]
John Podhoretz
What struck me socially about this meeting is this one detail which I think is actually novelistically telling, which is that Cassidy from Louisiana said at some point, I mean, that's not the way it works, brother. And then Trump said, I am not your brother. So it's like, okay, let us now have a moment at which Trump reveals his true face. Cassidy is not his brother. Nobody is his brother. No other Republican is his brother, meaning somebody to whom he has some form of potential vestigial but natural loyalty. That goes both ways. He took Cassidy down in part because Cassidy wasn't whom he wanted Cassidy to be. Cassidy uses a completely banal Southern informal form of address and Trump loses his temper because Cassidy is sort of like trying to get at his level and he's the colossus bestriding the narrow world. And Cassidy is a little pipsqueak by his, you know, at his legs. And you know what? That might have worked as a form of discipline in 2017 and might have worked last year when the primaries were coming and people were scared by him, by the thought of him doing to them what he did to Cassidy. It's not going to work now
- [44:22]
Seth Mandel
if
- [44:23]
John Podhoretz
he's nasty to them. You know, this is degrading and eroding. He's got a 33, 34% approval rating. He's lucky they want to meet with him. Often when presidents are in a position like this, the people who are running for office want to run the hell away in the other direction and not have their photographs taken with him.
- [44:47]
Eliana Johnson
Part of what has confused him into the state is, oddly enough, the fact that he lost his second presidential election because that made him the presumptive nominee for four years while Joe Biden was president and kept him the leader of the party. And so he has been for a decade now the leader of the, of the Republican Party. And now he's a lame duck. But he wasn't a lame duck when he was in his first term and he was running for reelection because he was running for reelection, and he wasn't a loser when he lost because he was immediately thought of as the leader in opposition. And especially, especially when, soon after Biden's victory, some of these cases started being brought against him and he was, you know, forced to in Monday. Every Monday he's got to be in court in Florida, and every Wednesday he's got to be in full in court in Manhattan or whatever and immediately sort of became that martyr figure. But he had another run in him, and he was just assumed that he was going to and be the nominee by most people. And so he hasn't been in a situation where he has nothing left to throw at you now. He is a lame duck approaching his final midterms. That is the, the mid, the day after the midterms. This is going to kick up, I think, into a much higher gear because this is the last time, first of all, because there's going to be a blame game. Republicans expect to lose in the midterms. That's not even necessarily all Trump's fault, although some of it is going to be Trump's fault. But they're going to lose in midterms. They're going to need somebody to blame, and they're going to have a lame duck in the Oval Office to blame. That's part of it. And the other part of it is that he has nothing left to threaten because he's not going to be a kingmaker and he's not going to be the king himself. This is the first time that he really has been. He can be, but he doesn't like playing that role.
- [46:50]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [46:51]
John Podhoretz
He doesn't want to be a king maker. He doesn't think anyone should be a king except him. So the problem, the other problem that he faces, he's facing the Senate yesterday, right. He wants a, or the administration wants a supplemental defense spending bill which is, by the way, vital for the country. We need to replenish our stocks of munitions and do some things that we learned that we have shortcomings in because of the war in Iran. And it's gonna be a hard pull through the Senate. And he's got Rand Paul sitting there as one of the senators who will obviously vote against it. Cuz he votes against all spending, supplemental bills. And he's now negotiating what the people who support the war in Iran think is a defeat. And he has his vice president out there kowtowing to the Iranians and he is using rhetoric friendly to the Iranians. You think that they're enjoying watching this? I don't even mean because politically he's put them out on a limb because they supported it and he quit. I mean that they think he's wrong, they think he's doing wrong. They're not gonna go out and openly attack him for the strategy that he is pursuing. But they're not, they don't like him. They're not gonna like him anymore if they ever did. And so I think like this is, I don't know what the consequences of this are, but this is just, there's a kind of sense that things are degrading and kind of rotting in Republican world. And what happened yesterday is yet another step on that road. It's not just the reflecting pool that is crumbling and it's not that someone sabotaged it that it's crumbling. Something natural is going on here. And so that's my. I just wanted to read one thing to you guys because I think it's interesting in this context from the opening of the Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan book Regime Change, which is a pretty remarkable piece of work. Even if you say to me, well, Maggie Haberman, we shouldn't listen to her because she won a Pulitzer for the Russiagate story. As I said last week, and Eliana said, I've known Maggie Haberman for 30 years and she is one of the best reporters I've ever seen. And I worked with her at the New York Post and she is a formidable person. Jonathan Swan is a good reporter. They clearly nobody has yet found a single thing in this book to say that what they have reported is untrue. Anyway, on.
- [49:54]
Noah Rothman
And after this, I'm gonna argue why I don't think Trump is a Lame duck.
- [49:58]
John Podhoretz
Okay, okay. Just let me just. History is full of ironies. They write. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White house in the 2020 election and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return that has made him the most consequential and feared president of our lifetimes. Had Trump eked out a victory over Joe Biden in that election, he would have begun his second term in a sorry state. The pandemic was warping the economy. Inflation would soon arrive. There is no reason to think that Trump would have been the exception to the approval ratings of every world leader being dragged down by the results of the pandemic. And he also would have done what Biden did, which was pulled out of Afghanistan, though maybe not in the way that Biden pulled out of Afghanistan. And of course, they then used Lawfare against him in a way that boomeranged him backward. But I just think. And, Eliano, you can now argue this, that that juice, that gas that got him to the White House a second time and through 2025 has. That tank is getting close to empty, and he is running on fumes with his own party. Now, tell me why I'm wrong.
- [51:24]
Noah Rothman
I believe that his relationship with the Republican Senate is absolutely strained. There's immense frustration with him. But I think it's noteworthy that Trump did take out Bill Cassidy, he helped take out John Cornyn, the congressional candidates he's endorsed. His endorsement still carries enormous weight, and I think that will likely be true in the 2028 race. Trump is special. Trump is different as Maggie and Jonathan Wright. And I don't really think that he will be treated as a lame duck because he will continue his endorsements, his rhetoric, his tweets, his stump speeches. He's got a hold on the base of the Republican Party, and I believe he will continue to carry sway with the party. He will not recede from the public scene. I don't believe in the way that previous presidents have. Obama, Joe Biden, who's still kind of around, but he's frail and diminished. And I think he will continue to throw his weight around and have influence even if he is a lame duck, even if he is not the president, and even if he is technically a lame duck. I just think he will continue to wield enormous influence in the party until he is actually in a coffin.
- [53:09]
Seth Mandel
Well, here's. I agree with that. He will not recede from the scene voluntarily, ever, until he dies. I agree with that.
- [53:16]
Noah Rothman
But let's say one more thing actually, Cassidy fought with him and Cornyn speaking out against them because they literally have nothing to lose. But Thune remains quite muted. And the Republican Senate went on to vote to reject the war powers resolution that the House passed. And the Republican senators, even if in private they're frustrated, they remain quite muted in expressing their disagreements. Trump blew up the housing bill. They said very little about it. He, he could even veto, you know, he could possibly veto this bill. And we're not hearing very much about it. And I think that will continue to be, that will very likely to continue to be the dynamic because Trump is
- [54:03]
Seth Mandel
different, I suppose, let's say in November 2026, right after the midterm elections, Donald Trump's intervention to these primaries looks really dumb, like Texas falls, let's say, and maybe some other races at the lower level. And it's kind of, it's very much a 2022 scenario in which Donald Trump's hand picked candidates drop the ball everywhere, cost the Republican Party a wave election. That's what drove Ron DeSantis into the race for president. It wasn't really, you know, the Mar A Lago rig was in August of 2022, but it wasn't immediately after that raid that there was, there was a rally around effect among flag effect among Republican voters. But Republican establishmentarians and politicians made a calculation there that was pretty transparent that this guy's done and it was wrong. Inaccurate calculation. But I can foresee another similar set of circumstances leading enough Republicans in positions of authority and very tight majorities in these chambers to say, well, I'm going to go my own way. What other inducement is there? Where's the deterrent effect here? I mean it's quite Trump will do his utmost to ensure that that doesn't happen and he may succeed. But I can envision a condition in which there's a power struggle at least for influence within the Republican Party over the base.
- [55:23]
John Podhoretz
Look, we know, I think we know, as sure as we can know anything about next year, that if the Democrats win the House and certainly if they win the House not by three votes or something like that, that Trump will be impeached. Now, we don't know what the condition is going to be in the Senate. It's still, I think likely that Republicans hold onto the Senate. So the impeachment will not lead to a removal. But if Democrats do succeed in taking the Senate, which you can come up with a map where this happens, it'll be the result of two things, one of which is Trump's continuing decline in popularity, which will harm him and prove that he has not only doesn't he have coattails, he has sort of anti coattails, and that this election will be a referendum on him, that he will have lost and Democrats will then prosecute the impeachment. Which they did not. Really. Which Republicans really did not in 2019 and in 2021. Right. They did not. They treated it as though in the Senate, as though the trial, as though it were a joke. A Democratic Senate with an impeachment could have that impeachment run for six months. Or if you follow the Israeli case, guess what? We just passed the six year mark of the cases against Bibi Netanyahu. Bibi Netanyahu has been in court for six years. Six years, you want to talk Kafkaesque? Six years this, this, this trial has been going on. Okay, so come to 2028, he's got a 30% approval rating. He may have this hold and sway on his base. But then you, then you basically have Republicans with a complete Hobson's Choice, which is you go with him because he's too scary not to go with. But you are chaining yourself to a sinking rock, the bottom of which is the Marianas Trench. And if you run away from him, he may start coming after you. And that's the sort of nightmare scenario the only thing that could save roll against, which is why you're hearing some glee, is that the rise of the Democratic socialists overtaking the conventional Democratic Party obviously gives Republicans renewed counter life that they might not otherwise have had. If the Democrats just remain the generic Democrat running against the Trump Republican Party as it is, in sort of senescence and decline, they could clean up maybe. But if their resurgence surging literal communist wing starts taking over the means of production, then Republicans have a new way of, a new way of fighting. So again, next year could be the most interesting political year of our lifetimes. I'm not kidding. We're gonna see things that we may never have seen before.
- [58:52]
Eliana Johnson
May you live in interesting times.
- [58:54]
John Podhoretz
May you live in interesting times. Noah, you wrote a piece on National Review yesterday about how Marco Rubio entered the chat of the Iranian.
- [59:11]
Seth Mandel
He already did the DSA as a hate group.
- [59:13]
John Podhoretz
Right. That was my first time he entered the chat. Right. He entered the chat and basically is trying, it appears, to do some form either of cleanup or a rear guard action against the Kushner Barrack Lutnik wing that is basically saying to Iran, what do you. Thank you, sir. May I have another? Give us a sense of what you think Rubio might be up to.
- [59:41]
Seth Mandel
Listen, I have no idea what he's up to. I wish I knew what he was up to. But I like it. I like what he's up to, so I'm just gonna keep encouraging him to do it. He was on the tarmac in the Middle east speaking to reporters on Tuesday evening. His time in which he said a lot of the right things, the things that I've been dying to hear from Donald Trump or J.D. vance or any of their subordinates for a very long time, since the MoU was executed by the President a week and a half ago or so. He said, you know, the whole Lebanon thing, Hezbollah, Israel, that's a quote, unquote, separate process from peace talks with Iran. And you quote, you can't have the end of hostilities and conflicts in the region as long as Iranian proxies are launching missiles and drones from Iraq and are participating in terrorism like Hamas did and Hezbollah did. That was republished by the State Department's communications organs. Subsequently, when speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, he said that, listen, there's no deal in which we're going to accept that the Straits, the Strait of Hormuz will have a tolling regime on it, which is something the President has also said, albeit only recently, and that the whole world is against a mechanism like that. And also that the United States would defer when it comes to Iran's missile program to their America's, quote, unquote, long standing allies in the region who reject the notion that Iran should have prohibitive offensive ballistic missile capabilities. All this could be reassuring on the one hand, because at least somebody within the cabinet level officials in this administration are still thinking clearly about the threat to Iran and why it needs to be treated as a distinct conflict from the entirely different conflict that Israel is prosecuting in southern Lebanon. But it's not true. So it's not really reassuring because the policy that he's articulating is not the administration's policy. It's Marco Rubio's policy. And he's not. He might be in the room, but. But he's not making policy. Not according to these statements. Israel is tethered into this agreement to which it's not signatory. Article 1 ensures that there is no separate process between the Israel campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the MoU negotiations for a durable nuclear accord. The ballistic missiles are not addressed in the MoU. In fact, the President came out and defended Iran's right to defend itself against all the enemies in the region who, by the way aren't firing ballistic missiles at Iran. And also that, you know, this toll in the waterway system. Yes, I think it's America's goal to ensure that the free and open maritime navigation is preserved, even if they won't do so with the threat of force in the strait. But after 60 days, it is not explicit that the strait will not be a, will be a toll free zone. It's almost implicit in the language as, and I'm persuaded by analyses of this language that it was the Iranian version that got included into the MoU that allows for an Omani Iranian tolling regime in the Strait of Hormuz. So the Secretary of State is saying a lot of the right things. Reassure me, but only briefly because then you, you know, you take a breath and you look around and you realize that he's not making this policy. He's just articulating sort of an alternative version of what this policy should be and would be if Marco Rubio had not fallen out in favor of J.D. vance. This is the J.D. vance Iran document. It's not the Rubio document.
- [63:11]
Eliana Johnson
I get the impression that what Rubio is doing is preparing the ground for the reintroduction of reality, which is. That'd be nice, you know, not so much that he's. Not that he's making policy at all or changing what, what Trump and Vance say they expect of the Israelis. But as I wrote the other day, there is no universe in which this sustains. There is no universe where in an election year where Bibi, Netanyahu's primary rival, although the polls have other, you know, had Gotti Eisenhut rising above Naftali Bennett. But let's. This is this. The main debate has been between Bennett and Bibi in which Bibi's main rival says, here's what's happening on the northern border. People are dying because of these new rules of engagement. We're not doing this. We're not extracting injured soldiers safely. We're not. All this other stuff in an environment in which the IDF just found a drone hangar underground, I don't know, eight miles from the border, probably capturing, by
- [64:27]
Seth Mandel
the way, for the first time, intact Iranian Shahid drones. That's an intelligence coup that we should be celebrating and, you know, making the most out of, but we can't. We've deprived ourselves of the opportunity to enjoy victory.
- [64:38]
Eliana Johnson
Right. And in an environment in which Israeli leaders and intel officials have been saying, you know, we, the Hezbollah had these October 7th style plans to conquer. They called it conquering the Galilee and all that stuff in this environment, there is no way that this stays the way it is. Once Naftali Bennett said that publicly, Israel is going to change its behavior. It just has to. There just is no way it's going. They're going to sit with their hands tied. And I think Rubio is just kind of softening the ground again for the reintroduction of reality, that this, this is just not how the world works. And you can hope it and you can beg it to work that way, but it's just not how reality works. And therefore, when Israel reintroduces reality, let's not all be shocked and let's not all think that this is, you know, this is. This is Israel, you know, trying to undermine America. He's just trying to, you know, if
- [65:42]
Seth Mandel
I like that, and I think if there is any motive here that's surreptitious, it might be that. And it might also be staving off the inevitable prospect of Trump and Vance blaming Israel for the failure of the MoU and depriving Israel of its last friend on the planet Earth. So what happens to J.D. vance's magical mystery tour when Israel reintroduces reality, or reality is reimposed on the administration by circumstances that we haven't foreseen?
- [66:15]
John Podhoretz
Well, we don't know the answer.
- [66:16]
Seth Mandel
He's going to fight back against it. No, he's not going to sit back and take it.
- [66:19]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so that's why I get back to what Rubio is doing and why this is a wild card moment. Either he's doing it with Trump, say so, or he's not. Meaning Trump actually doesn't mind the introduction of complete chaos in the way the United States is approaching these matters. Rubio is talking to these countries. Vance is talking to these countries. Vance is saying this and that and the other thing to these countries. Rubio is saying this and that and the other thing to these countries. Trump likes the chaos. He's fine with the chaos. So, Yashir Koach, to Donald Trump, he has introduced policy chaos into the most important foreign policy moment of the 2000s. With no ability for the American people or the American Congress or the planet to have any effing clue what on earth he is up to? And is it good that someone in the United States is saying what Rubio is saying and that it's not left to this, gee, wow, 47 years, the Iranians are suddenly nice people, which is as deranged as you can get, right? So it's good someone's saying it but it's not good that we are speaking with two voices. That is not good.
- [67:49]
Seth Mandel
It's even worse that one of those voices is describing conditions that do not exist. Marco Ruby was talking about a document that does not exist.
- [67:57]
Noah Rothman
I was about to say no. Yeah, I'm not sure, because I believe that in fact, and this is based on some conversations I've had with Israelis, that Israel is, in fact being constrained in Lebanon and Iran will begin to charge tolls in the Strait. Look, we'll know in 60 days, but they've issued a statement, and I firmly believe, like, the plans are underway for them to do that. The document is the document. It allows them to do that. So, you know, we can't fill the reality we wish into being right.
- [68:39]
John Podhoretz
Well, I think where we stand right now is that there is no document. The MoU isn't worth the paper that it was docusigned. The MoU obliges Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, and it's half open and half closed. There is the very real possibility that Trump, who does live in a bubble, is literally being lied to by the people who are negotiating this, who are telling him that the Iranians have said to them, oh, we know we've lost and we're just crying uncle.
- [69:25]
Seth Mandel
By the way, that's also applicable to our last topic in the U.S. senate. There are plenty of people who are in Trump's ears saying, Mike Lee saying, all you need is the will and we can fire the parliamentarian and get rid of the filibuster and the SAVE act becomes law and the Republicans romp to victory in November. That's what he's hearing.
- [69:42]
John Podhoretz
Right. All right. Well, look, the basic situation here is that what is going to rise and fall and is going to control the Republican Party's future is Trump's approval rating. Just watch Trump's approval rating. If it stays in the 30s, every Republican politician in the country is going to run away from him. The only discipline he has is siccing his base on them. But the base is now, I don't. It hasn't lost control of the Republican Party, but it has lost control of the conversation. And we'll, we'll, we'll, you know, I mean, once again, watch the space we are in. We are in very weird waters. And the, all the, you know, and Trump and the Republicans are going to seize on the rise of the dsa, in my view, the way they seized on immigration in 2018, thinking that the caravans and the, you know, the right, you know, the invasion from Mexico was going to save their bacon. And I just don't think that that is the case. You're going to be able to take three or four candidates of extreme views and make the entire party responsible for it and turn a tide back. That will be a national tide about the President and his behavior. Could be wrong. I've been wrong before, I'd be wrong again. But that's, I think, what we are going to see and what will not be particularly successful. Anyway, we've gone on too long, so I'm sorry to have kept you so long. Noah Rothman as ever, thank you for coming back and joining us everybody. Blood in Progress by Noah Rothman Buy it now if you haven't bought it already. And for Eliana and Seth, I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle burning.
- [72:04]
Eliana Johnson
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Seth Mandel
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Eliana Johnson
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