Running Government as a Business

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Running Government as a Business" Release Date: March 28, 2025

Host/Author: Commentary Magazine

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Introduction

In the March 28, 2025 episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast, hosts John Podhoritz and Abe Greenwald, alongside panelists Christine Rosen and Seth Mandel, delve into the intricate dynamics of running the U.S. government with a business-like approach. The discussion navigates through internal Republican Party challenges, administrative inefficiencies, the impact of special elections, and the interplay between government operations and public perception.

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Republican Party Dynamics and Special Elections

The episode opens with Abe Greenwald addressing recent turmoil within the Republican Party, particularly focusing on the withdrawal of Representative Elise Stefanik's nomination for the U.N. ambassadorship.

Abe Greenwald [01:46]: "The withdrawal of Representative Elise Stefanik from the U.N. ambassadorship is a significant blow, reflecting internal Republican anxieties over impending special elections."

Greenwald explains that the GOP House leadership's concern stems from unfavorable polling data in districts previously secured by Republicans, jeopardizing their slim majority. Stefanik's decision to remain in the House until 2026 aims to preserve this majority amidst mounting electoral pressures.

John Podhoritz [06:43]: "The messaging from the administration about saving $800 per taxpayer feels disconnected from the everyday struggles of Americans still feeling economic strain."

Christine Rosen offers a counterpoint, suggesting that Stefanik's withdrawal may not be part of a broader conspiracy to marginalize neoconservatives but rather a strategic move born out of administrative oversight.

Christine Rosen [08:37]: "This might be another example of the administration not taking sufficient precautions before making significant appointments."

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Administrative State and Bureaucracy Challenges

Abe Greenwald critiques the entrenched bureaucratic systems within the federal government, tracing their origins to policies introduced during Robert McNamara's tenure.

Abe Greenwald [20:34]: "The administrative state's layers were built using private sector principles that don't align with the government's unique responsibilities, leading to inefficiencies and systemic issues."

He highlights the complexities of managing vast federal programs like the IRS, Social Security, and Medicaid, arguing that these cannot be streamlined solely through business-like approaches without compromising essential services.

John Podhoritz [26:30]: "The slash-and-burn tactics employed by administration appointees are destructive, particularly when they overlook the human elements essential to these bureaucracies."

Seth Mandel echoes concerns about the administration's overestimation of savings from administrative cuts, suggesting that the promised financial efficiencies are either exaggerated or mismanaged.

Seth Mandel [35:08]: "The disproportionate chaos caused by these administrative overhauls doesn't translate into tangible benefits for the public."

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The Elon Musk Influence and Government Efficiency

The podcast delves into the involvement of figures like Elon Musk and the Doge Guys in government operations, questioning the feasibility of running the federal government with private sector methodologies.

Abe Greenwald [21:57]: "Elon Musk's critique of the government's single checking account system overlooks the unique financial obligations of a national government."

John Podhoritz reflects on Musk's comments, emphasizing the importance of secure and efficient communication systems in governmental operations.

John Podhoritz [46:38]: "Building a government system that's actually secure and mobile is essential, yet it's a longstanding structural problem that remains unresolved."

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National Security, Deportations, and Media Perception

The discussion shifts to national security concerns, particularly focusing on deportations and their portrayal in the media. Abe Greenwald expresses skepticism towards reports alleging wrongful deportations tied to executive orders.

Abe Greenwald [52:35]: "We all witnessed these deportations, and it's not a matter of competing narratives—there's a clear truth about the administration's actions."

Christine Rosen underscores the media's role in shaping public perception, often portraying deportations as authoritarian without acknowledging the legal frameworks involved.

Christine Rosen [52:24]: "This is not about choosing who to believe; the facts are evident to all witnesses involved."

John Podhoritz provides examples of media misrepresentation, illustrating how initial reports can paint deportations in a misleadingly negative light until deeper facts emerge.

John Podhoritz [55:27]: "Many deportation stories initially seem like authoritarian overreach until you uncover the procedural justifications behind them."

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, the hosts emphasize the complexities of managing government operations with business efficiency while maintaining accountability and safeguarding national interests. They advocate for a nuanced understanding of administrative challenges and caution against oversimplified solutions that ignore the government's multifaceted roles.

Abe Greenwald [74:45]: "Running government as a business isn't just about cutting costs; it's about effectively managing a system that serves millions with diverse needs."

The panelists conclude by inviting listeners to engage with future episodes, promising continued exploration of pressing political and administrative issues.

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Notable Quotes

• Abe Greenwald [01:46]: "The withdrawal of Representative Elise Stefanik from the U.N. ambassadorship is a significant blow, reflecting internal Republican anxieties over impending special elections."

• John Podhoritz [06:43]: "The messaging from the administration about saving $800 per taxpayer feels disconnected from the everyday struggles of Americans still feeling economic strain."

• Christine Rosen [08:37]: "This might be another example of the administration not taking sufficient precautions before making significant appointments."

• Abe Greenwald [20:34]: "The administrative state's layers were built using private sector principles that don't align with the government's unique responsibilities, leading to inefficiencies and systemic issues."

• John Podhoritz [26:30]: "The slash-and-burn tactics employed by administration appointees are destructive, particularly when they overlook the human elements essential to these bureaucracies."

• Seth Mandel [35:08]: "The disproportionate chaos caused by these administrative overhauls doesn't translate into tangible benefits for the public."

• Abe Greenwald [52:35]: "We all witnessed these deportations, and it's not a matter of competing narratives—there's a clear truth about the administration's actions."

• Christine Rosen [52:24]: "This is not about choosing who to believe; the facts are evident to all witnesses involved."

• John Podhoritz [55:27]: "Many deportation stories initially seem like authoritarian overreach until you uncover the procedural justifications behind them."

• Abe Greenwald [74:45]: "Running government as a business isn't just about cutting costs; it's about effectively managing a system that serves millions with diverse needs."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the podcast's exploration of governmental management through a business lens, highlighting the tensions between administrative efficiency, political maneuvering, and public perception.

Transcript

[John Podhoritz]

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto.

[Abe Greenwald]

Friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a.

[John Podhoritz]

Finger so I can get in more.

[Abe Greenwald]

Squats anywhere I can.

[John Podhoritz]

1, 2, 3.

[Abe Greenwald]

Will that be cash or credit? Credit.

[Seth Mandel]

4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion.

[Abe Greenwald]

That does the heavy lifting so you can do.

[Seth Mandel]

You get [e-mail] compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.

[Abe Greenwald]

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[Christine Rosen]

Hope for the best Expect the worst.

[Abe Greenwald]

Some preacher pain some die of worse no way of knowing which way it's.

[John Podhoritz]

Going Hope for the best Expect a.

[Abe Greenwald]

Waste Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, March 28, 2025. I am Jon Podhorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.

[John Podhoritz]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

So there are penumbras and emanations from the Republican Party of trouble. The biggest, the most interesting, is the withdrawal of the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York from the ambassadorship at the United Nations. We are told happening because the GOP House leadership is so worried about the special election to replace Mike Waltz, now national Security Advisor in Florida, that their own internal data in a poll taken by Tony Fabrizio, who was Trump's pollster and one of the leading Florida pollsters, shows the Democrat in the district in the race leading by three points in a seat that Waltz won by nine. And with the House majority at one or two, they cannot afford to lose one more seat. And so Stefanik has taken the, you know, taken the banner for her party and said she would stay in the House through the remainder of her term through 2026 to preserve the House majority. Now this has occasioned a certain amount of counter conspiracy thinking among the those of us who are hawks and pro Israel people and all of that because she is of course, one of the most resolute pro Israel voices in the House and a one time colleague of Abe's at the foundation for, excuse me, Foreign Policy Initiative when she was a younger, bright young thing out of Harvard. And now there is this, you know, is this somehow part of the overall Tuckerite Don juniorite van site effort to extirpate the neocons, so to speak, from the Trump world and try some of which we'll know when we find out whom they named to replace her, whether which camp gets gets the UN So that's one data point. The other data point which Christine alluded to yesterday was the loss of a Republican loss of a special election in Pennsylvania in a state Senate seat again in a Trump district special election, the Democrat beat the Republican and not good polling for Trump this week. I mean basically he's at 43% approval and he's underwater on the most important issues like the economy, like he's 16 points underwater or something like that. So while all the, all of Washington is fixated on Signal Gate and the national security implications and the scandals and what's going to happen and our head's going to roll and all of that, all of which seems to be a one sided conversation because the only people who are saying that heads are going to roll are Democrats with no and liberals with no in into the administration. The administration clearly is not intending for heads to roll and again might be part of a battle inside the administration on the part of the Vance Jr. Tucker wing to go at Mike Waltz in particular for not towing the restrainer line here. So but the fact is that Doge has moved fast. Everything's moved fast. There's been a lot of fast movement. There's a lot of stuff going on and maybe it's starting to look chaotic to the American people and maybe they're not seeing the results that they want to see, which is Trump focused like a laser beam on the economy. Or maybe the way that Trump is focusing on the economy, like the tariffs and other things are not positives in the eyes of enough people to suggest that he deserves credit for the measures that he is willing to take and the focus that he is willing to put on, on the most important issue to them, which is the economy and their own personal finances. Since of course, as we said yesterday and the day before, if those tariffs go into place on automobiles, there will be an inflationary effect on the price of automobiles. And that is the largest single consumer good that any American buys.

[John Podhoritz]

So, you know, it struck me, I was watching some clips from the Doge, Elon Musk and The Doge guys interview Doge men. I guess I should say the Doge talking to Brett Baer on Fox News. And it really struck me that there was part of their messaging that maybe isn't landing in the way they might think. Because if people are still feeling like the economy is either chaotic, uncertain and they are still financially struggling. Weekly reminder. Working class people don't like tariffs. They never have. So people going out there and saying this will be good for you comes across not only is condescending, but it's also wrong. But when they were talking about the amount of money that Doge saving the American people, something like 800 some odd dollars per taxpayer, I suddenly recalled all those lectures we heard from the Biden administration about how inflation isn't that bad. And this is too soon to say that that's the messaging, inadvertent messaging of the Doge guys. But there was a little hint there if I was thinking, if I'm struggling and still kind of going paycheck to paycheck, and I'm still worried about the price of groceries and now I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to afford to repair or buy a new used car, that message doesn't help me, it seems out, because I'm not seeing an $800 check in my mailbox tomorrow, however much I might still share the goals of a smaller government and less bureaucratic waste. So that 30,000 foot focus that they have right now on eliminating bureaucratic waste has to translate into something tangible for the American worker. And it's not going to be with tariffs. And it's, it's, I mean, perhaps with just rising economic waters, but that will take time. So those special elections in a way are an opportunity for voters in places that were strongly supportive of reelecting Trump to say, eh, we don't like the direction things are going even as his country's going in the right direction. Numbers are still quite high, I think.

[Christine Rosen]

With regards to pulling Stefanik here. I think something less sinister is going on than a sort of shift in the ideological direction of the foreign policy team. I think this is another example of where you see the other side of an administration like Trump's that doesn't take care in advance when doing things. I mean, there were people that said, look, you don't want to keep pulling nominees from Congress because of this very potential. And now here we are. So I think it's more that taken.

[Abe Greenwald]

It'S worth pointing out, I believe the number is three. I think three House members became members of the Trump Cabinet, Waltz, the Labor Secretary, whose name I keep forgetting, and a third, Collins, the Department of Veterans Affairs. I think there are three House members aside from Stefanik. So they had pulled four House members. And after the November election, the Republican majority was 5 or 6 or less. And the idea would be, well, okay, you can pull them from a seat that's a majority Trump seat because the special election will just go to Trump. But that's a, that's a bet you're.

[John Podhoritz]

Making and it's not. The polls are not showing that. I think that's where Abe's absolutely right, that perhaps they assumed that that would be the way things work. But those are, I think in a lot of those districts, those were previous Democratic voters who switched to Trump and they're now unhappy with their choice. And expressing that in some of the polling data, although it's obviously that's, you know.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. But it was reckless. Right. Sort of politically reckless. You wouldn't do it if The Senate were 5050. You would of course not pull senators into the Cabinet. It's too dangerous to do that if you're in a. Depending on where you are.

[Seth Mandel]

It looks like, by the way, the, looks like the third was supposed to be Gates.

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, okay, fair enough. Right? It's supposed to be, it's.

[Seth Mandel]

Okay, so there's two, there's two House members in. But Gates resigned.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. Okay, so there were, but they, but they chose four. So. And as I say, it was a kind of hubris to do that because anything can happen, clearly, in the Walt seats, something of, of the anything can happen variety appears to be happening. Either the candidate who was replacing Waltz, his name is Fox, or something is not good. I mean, Ron DeSantis is indicating that he is not a good candidate, though. I think he has a personal feud with the guy. And then the polling is what the polling is. So I.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, off year elections are often bad for the administration, for a new administration. And so this is another thing they should have seen coming, which is you have to price in the fact that there's often a snapback against the new administration. Right. We know the midterms often go against the administration and there's a reason for that. But because of the buildup to that, for the same reason, the off year elections can do that too. Democrats struggled. I remember when Obama came into office in 2008, he rode this wave. And then the next year the Democrats lost Virginia and they lost New Jersey governorships and they started freaking out. And so, you know, and New Jersey, by The way does this to Democrats every off year. It scares them in some way every off year. So there's always, there's always, it's like spotting the other team points that, that off year election right away. And this happened with, you know, Republicans. The, the talented Mr. Ripley left the Republicans, expelled their talented Mr. Ripley from Congress from. In New York, lost that seat to a Democrat. I don't remember his name. But the guy who was sort of had this made up. What.

[Abe Greenwald]

Not Tom Suozzi wasn't.

[Seth Mandel]

Tom Swazi is one who won the.

[Abe Greenwald]

You're referring to George Sanchez.

[Seth Mandel]

George Sanchez. Thank you.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. Right.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah. And like Santos, Santos.

[Abe Greenwald]

Santos, Santos.

[Seth Mandel]

And that was, and that was, you know, and that was something that Republicans were like, well, you know, I guess it's so bad we have to, you know. But that was another seat that was a Republican seat went to a Democrat. Democrats probably going to be able to keep that seat as long as they keep a Tom Suozzi like person in that whatever. The point is that this is, you know, Republicans have been giving up seats and then losing the special elections behind them, which is really something they should have expected to happen a bit more and not assumed that they would hold a seat because it was theirs.

[John Podhoritz]

Well, the Florida Congress, the 6, I think is the 6th congressional district seat. That is also another example of these risky special election moments because this, I think is much more a proxy war about Middle east policy because what we have is that we have a Muslim Democrat who's very anti Israel. He thinks there should be no, no American support for Israel running against, I think Fine is the other guy's name, Randy Fine, who's a state senator from Florida who should be far ahead but isn't. I mean, this isn't, this is a red seat. So. But there are a lot of the battle is turning on Americans support for Israel and the Palestinian issue. And that's become an interesting proxy war on that particular topic. So I think, and again, if Republicans, if the party is careful and cautious and learns from their mistakes here, they're going to have to shift course. But I mean, I think it goes back to Abe's broader point about them not thinking ahead and now reacting. It's a very reactionary administration in terms of what it's done or not done for the gop.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think that you have a reality distortion field problem, which is to say there's a lot of differing pieces of information, but then there is one mega piece of information. The differing pieces of information are this polling that is freaking Democrats out That says they're in their lowest position in relation to the, to the public in, in half a century. The polling is all looking like they, they, they care about things that the public doesn't care about or the public is actively repulsed by the things that they, they care about. And they have incredibly low numbers. And Republicans now in polling outnumbered Democrats for the first time in almost a century and all of that. So that's, that's like the bad data for Democrats. But the data, the, not data, but the actual results, the electoral results in the United States showed Trump winning by a point and a half. Now he won all the swing states, but he won by a point and a half. And the Republican brain trust is acting like he won by 20. And they are making moves, fast, radical moves in Washington like it was 1981 and the incumbent president had been defeated by a 10 point margin and had lost 40 states. And the rubber is meeting the road. They did not have a mandate to do some of the stuff that we love that they're doing, they didn't have a mandate for. And Trump, because he wants to say, I won a victory like never before. And his entire hypnotized band of followers is walking around talking about how this is the new where this is for the next 100 years we're going to dominate everything and we're going to get rid of the rhinos and we're going to get rid of the Democrats and we're going to get rid of the federal workers and we're going to do all this. And the, the, the referendum by 155 million people did not say that. It said we don't want Kamala Harris, we don't like Joe Biden. Trump survived this. We're going with him. Let's see what happens. And they just may, what we may have seen is a very serious overplaying of their hand. Maybe Democrats are foolish to be sort of like demonizing Elon Musk and seeming to try to make Elon Musk the target of everything. Or maybe they know exactly what they're doing and that this is actually a very successful way of maneuvering into the present.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, I think the Democrats disarray is part of the over estimation on the administration's part. Part of the, the sort of hubris is that the Democrats look, you know, completely disordered and chaotic within their own party right now. And so I think that's another thing that's making Republicans feel like, well, there's nothing standing in our way. Who's going to stop us? Chuck Schumer is going to stop us. And that if Democrats can find, you know, one, one leader with a voice, it would, you know, would Turn around the 1.

[John Podhoritz]

The Democratic Party right now though, is in this interesting spot because what, the only people trying to consistently share a vision for the Democratic Party are not politicians. It's this kind of Ezra Kleinish abundance agenda. Democratic intellectuals who aren't extreme on most of the social issues recognize the defeat that occurred in the last election, but also are completely, I'm sorry, but utopian in thinking about what can actually be accomplished. Because everything they're complaining about, not getting done is the result of the sort of insane administrative state and bureaucratic overregulation that Democrats themselves have long supported. But they do have this consistent message which I think will resonate. It's the message that Abe has had far, far before Ezra Klein, you know, coined it in his book. But why does anything work? Nothing works. Why don't things work? That's actually, I think, where a lot of the American people are. And it is not a, it's not a politically ideological position. So if you can, the Democrats are smart. They'll get back in that lane. And whether or not they're actually capable of, of changing things, that sort of change looks different from what Doge is doing. And I do think that's why Elon Musk, calmly with guys in suits, sat on Fox News last night and seemed very businesslike because they, they recognize at some level that, that the, you know, smash and grab sort of move fast and break things is not really where the American people are right now.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah, Musk, I just must, because I watched at least the Doge portion of the segment. Then Musk spoke one on one, which I didn't really watch. But what Musk was saying was his message was we're fixing servers, we're putting data that's floating around on paper into digitized form. We're making it more likely that people will get paid, not less likely. We're fixing systems, we're consolidating where there is excess and so on.

[Seth Mandel]

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[John Podhoritz]

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[Seth Mandel]

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[Abe Greenwald]

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[Seth Mandel]

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[Abe Greenwald]

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[John Podhoritz]

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[Abe Greenwald]

See full [e-mail] there is a long tradition, dating back to the introduction of Robert McNamara into the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the idea that the way to make government work is to bring in highly disciplined business executives who can bring innovative business techniques created by the private sector, pull them in, apply them to government and make them work. How is that? That is essentially how the administrative state that Christine mentioned was built, was using, bizarrely enough, the principles that Robert McNamara used at the Ford Motor Company to start creating layers of bureaucracy inside the federal government that had not yet existed, that now three generations later have calcified into this, into these structures that if you listen to the Doge Bros. Last night, they found horrifying. As they're going in like, I don't understand why there are 1400 people in. Is it the IRS whose job it is to get computers for other people? There are 1400 people in the I'll get you a laptop division of the IRS. Why are there 1400 people?

[John Podhoritz]

Sweet gig though.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, I couldn't quite understand what was being said. It seemed to be like they changed the computers, the provisioning of the computers and it changes and they need other changes. There was something, it was not making logistical sense to me. But what they were claiming is these kind of gigantic internal bureaucracies that do nothing and that they're just going to clear that brush away the problem is, and going back to the McNamara model, as they said, like no one in the private sector would have this number of people doing that number of things for that. But the government is not the private sector. For example, the IRS is an organization that every single person in America has to deal with. There is no private sector group or business or anything that has 333 million people under its aegis. There is no private sector business that has every person over the age of 65 in its database to whom it must distribute money on a weekly basis or a bi weekly basis. And not just over 65 people in health reasons and in Social Security reasons, but also people on Social Security disability, which is another tens of millions of people and people on Medicaid which is another tens of. And the complications of Medicaid being half paid for by the federal government and half paid for by the states and there is no profit to be had in it. So you can't organize it on the basis of how do we do this so that there is a profit to be found or to do it in a way that is most efficient for our company's good workings. The most important thing in Social Security is getting the check into the hand of the Social Security recipient and you. And this is true Trump pushing the button. It's very fine for people to understand this, but you allow effectively for a certain level and degree of fraud in these programs, because it's the only way you can ensure that the person who needs to get the check gets the check. Like, you can do what you can to clear up the database and clean up things and make sure the checks aren't going to people who shouldn't get them or aren't being cached by living relatives when they're dead and all of that. But if you start tightening those controls or playing games with those controls, you will start sweeping in or bringing under the aegis, people who are, just, by the definition of how regulatory intensification works, you're going to start bringing in 10 million people who need their Social Security checks who aren't getting them. And that's what is not understood when I was listening to them talk, which is, the federal government is not run to make a profit. It can't be. And it is a very complicated business because it involves everybody. And Tesla involves 5 million car owners, and the federal government involves 333 million people. And then whoever is like here on a green card and still pays taxes and all of that. And it's a fundamental misunderstanding, not that I don't think that good business practices can be brought to bear on federal things, and that you shouldn't do what you can to break up and decalcify the administrative state. We've been writing about the administrative state and its evils for 15, 20 years now. It's a major issue. It's a major issue for everybody on the right who is intellectually serious. But that's not really what's going on here. They're going in, they're saying, oh, my God, there are too many people working on the irs, whatever, and there's a reason that they're there. Maybe that can all be reformed, but it's not. What it can't be to make sure that the IRS turns a profit. You know, you can lay off a department because then it's going to be really good for the stockholders. And the bottom line, when you go to your stockholders meeting, there is no stockholders meeting except the presidential election every four years.

[John Podhoritz]

But this is where there's an attitude clashing with the competence of actually doing what a Lot of conservatives would want to see, even if Trump, even if they don't like Trump, they're glad to see some change in this, in this particular arena. But there have already been stories of recent Trump appointees going into agencies starting to do those sorts of investigations, like, all right, where can we, you know, cut waste? Where why are there 5,000 credit cards but we only have 2,000 employees. You know, they're just going and starting that process, and then Doge comes in and just cuts them off at the knees, including firing some of their IG type, you know, employees. And so we just had the announcement yesterday that they're going to do that at hhs. So, again, this, the slash and burn sort of approach, however nicely they're talking about it now, is very much an engineer's mindset for a problem that is a human problem. I mean, these bureaucracies are staffed with tons of people who have figured out ways around a lot of the rules and regulations, some of which lead to fraud, but others of which probably help the American citizen get through a day and, you know, make sure they have their Social Security check. So it's just, it's interesting to me to see the slight shift in tone among the Elon Musk types at the same time that, remember that the message Trump keeps saying from on, from on high is punishment, revenge, vengeance. It's, I'm going to go through, and anyone who's, who's committing fraud, anyone who's here illegally, any of my enemies from previous years, I'm going to get rid of all of them. And I think that's a really, really energizing message when you're running for president. And it certainly won him the election and kept his base very close. But it is not a way. You can't govern that way. And our friend Yuval Levin has a wonderful piece the other day in National, I think the National Review, arguing just that, like, this is not the way to govern. Once you get the power, then you have to think about more than just revenge.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right? One thing that Musk and one of his deputies said that they were horrified by and then again gets to where maybe they're confused and, and, or again, the difference between running the federal government in the United States and running everything else is must said. And then we discovered that the entire federal government has one checking account. And Brett Baer said, really, it has one. One checking. There's one checking account. There's one account and it has about $800 billion in it at any given moment. And there's one checking account, and what the hell kind of way is that to run a government? So I was listening to this and trying to figure out what. What they were talking about, because, of course, the federal government is a four, $5 trillion cat operation, you know, and what does that mean? And there's, you know, money comes in because they sell bonds and, you know, Treasuries, and that goes into the treasury, whatever. And then I real. Then I. Then I had been reading about Mike Johnson and John Thune trying to figure out how to do the tax and reconciliation bills and the question of what happens, whether they could do it before the debt ceiling crisis hits. So now I'm bringing in 17 different, almost incomprehensible things. But Johnson said something interesting. He said, we're not going to know when the debt ceiling is hit until around June, because that's when we get all the money in from the 2024 taxes. So the federal government will collect or, you know, get through the April 15 deadline, and everything will be accounted for. And then by June, they will know that the pot of money that the federal government has, which is the aggregate take of the federal government from the US Economy, paid in the part of the US Economy that pays into the tax system, and they don't know how much it is. And it has to go into one account, let's say, in some fashion or other, so that that money can be pooled so that the Treasury Department can know when the federal government runs out of money. I say I run a nonprofit. There are moments I once ran a small business, same problem, like, you need your receipt. It's not just what you're billing or what you expect to get. You need to get what you're going to get in. If you're going to have to start paying bills out, which is what the debt ceiling is, right? We have to pay interest on our debt, and we'll run out of money to pay the interest on our debt. So that money has to be pooled and aggregated somewhere so that the Treasury Secretary can say, well, it's coming on August 11th. Or, you know what? We have three more weeks. This has actually happened, like, every year. They're, like, now we found some change in the couch, and we have three more weeks before we hit the debt ceiling. So there's a reason that that account that Musk was talking about, that struck him as being unbelievably dangerous or bad management or bad accounting that wouldn't exist under any other circumstances, in any other place at any other time, and has nothing to do with economic probity and good management. It has to do with the way the federal government has decided to deal with the fact that it is a net debtor institution. That that's largest single outlay is payments on the national debt. Because we borrowed all this money and we have to pay our, we have to, we have to meet our debt obligations. And so there is a naivete or something in the way these guys who've never worked for the government and it's good, like you should come in and take a fresh look, fresh eyes. But they didn't come in with fresh eyes. They came in. Whether they came in with a flamethrower and then are trying to clean up the mess afterwards or something like that.

[Christine Rosen]

There's something here of the Burkean, you know, what did he say? That a liberal is walking in the field, sees a fence and says, let's tear it down.

[Seth Mandel]

Chesterton's fence. Yes.

[Christine Rosen]

Oh, it's Chesterton, sorry. And the conservative says, hold on, maybe it's here for a reason.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

You know, and they're missing the reason. Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, the problem is I don't like big government. I don't like the fact that we're a net debtor. I don't like the fact that this is the way things work. And if there were any kind of national consensus on making radical changes to it, that would be the most exciting development of my lifetime. But far from moving in that direction, which Republicans were trying to do for like 10 years and say, we gotta watch out for the deal, we're about to hit a cliff where the government.

[John Podhoritz]

Paul Ryan, you sweet, sweet, sweet Paul.

[Abe Greenwald]

Ryan and Yuval and everybody are like you. We're going to hit a seal. We're going to hit a point at which federal outlays are larger. The demand for federal outlay, the federal obligations out are larger than the money that we take in. And the government will go broke meeting the payments that are automatic. Right. Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. And that's going to come in 2032 or 2035. And then there's gonna have to either be massive slashing of benefits or massive tax increases all at once simply to make sure that the government doesn't collapse. And everything went in the other direction. We tried to have this conversation, people were talking about it, it was sort of in the air. Obama and Ryan had a session at Camp David to have a kind of debate over it and all of that. And then Trump came in and said, I'm not cutting anything, I Social Security forever. All these guys are stupid. I'm going to give everybody whatever they want and spend whatever I want. And now he's brought in Musk to sort of see if he can find change in the couch cushions. But we don't have any consensus on what I just said.

[Seth Mandel]

But that's also the thing. Like, the change in the couch cushions is an important part of this, I feel like, because the savings are not huge. And so the, the disproportionate chaos being caused by Doge versus the money that they are supposedly saving. You know, they keep revising their savings. They'll put like, you know, we saved $8 quadrillion on federal tennis shoes the other day, and then it turns out they only saved $5. You know, like, it's, it's a constant review. It's like the economic numbers, the constant revisions, and what you're seeing is a lot of shakeup, a lot of uncertainty. Right. I mean, it's not just, it's. People are like, you know, I don't know how safe my job is, stuff like that. And we can talk about whether that's really that sympathetic a position from the perspective of the public looking at federal government workers who are protected by all these things and all that other stuff. But the larger point is that there's a swirl of chaos and nobody is actually seeing any difference. Well, like, there's no measurable savings at all. And therefore it's unclear if anybody's going to know that Doge was ever here. Besides, for all the people who are anxious, who are full of anxiety.

[John Podhoritz]

Well, and before Doge, this is another thing about strategy. Before Doge, federal workers were an abstraction to most Americans unless they knew one or were one. Now you have the very abstract numbers that Seth is correct to point out are constantly being revised and changed. And so people sort of tune that out. It's an abstraction. But all over the media, you have stories of human beings who lost their job, threats of, you know, kids are dying of this in Africa. And we are, we've made this horrible choice. It's going to lead to millions of drug supply beings.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right?

[John Podhoritz]

These are human stories. People understand those as not abstractions. Now, they might be very biased, and I, and I certainly think many of them have been wrong, but they are telling a story. And the other side is showing us weird spreadsheets. And that's, that's again, that's, I think, why they sat down with Brett Baer last night.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right? So all sympathy and then they start sort of saying numbers where I thought, okay, you know what, you've, you've really gone in the wrong direction here. He Musk said flatly that there is $500 billion a year in fraud in the federal government. I don't know where he got that number from. But again, federal budget of 4 trillion, 5. I don't even know what the federal budget is. It's 5 trillion, 6 trillion, 4 trillion. So that's like 10%, right? It's like close to what he's saying is 10% of the federal government's money is lost to fraud. Not, it's not lost because of mismanagement, it's lost because of frauds. If that's true, and we know enough to know we can't take it at face value. So going after fraud could be a real thing. Going after the size of departments because of the size of personnel, that's not fraud. Fraud is somebody submits a, somebody submits a voucher for something they didn't do and gets paid for it and then collects the money. That's the COVID fraud. That's the, you know, that's the seeds of justice fraud in Minnesota. That's the fact that maybe what Doge should be doing is focusing its attention on clawing back the COVID fraud. The way the Madoff special manager or whatever his title was, Spent 10 years clawing back and getting back from people who had profited from Madoff. The money that Madoff had stolen from his unsuspecting, the people that he had defrauded. If there's that much fraud. And Musk could come back and say, I found $300 billion in fraud that I have returned to the federal government that could keep Republicans in power for a generation. That's like a, an a mind boggling amount of money. But laying off 20,000 people at HHS, it's good, it's fine, it's bad, it's good. We don't know. I mean like that's not, that's just a sort of like. And particularly with that psychotic running hss, HSS who is announcing this, like, who's he laying off? Is he laying, he's laying off everybody who like is like in favor of vaccines. So he can put in this guy who lost his medical license in Maryland to be the man who is the surveyor of vaccine strength. Like I don't trust him to be laying people off. I mean, I'm sorry, he was confirmed, but now he's confirmed. But now he's going to, he's going to, without any supervision, lay off 20,000 people. Like, he shouldn't be able to lay off his housekeeper. You know, he and his friend. Did you hear Tucker Carlson yesterday, the day before yesterday, said he would never fly on a plane if he knew that the pilot had been vaccinated.

[John Podhoritz]

Oh, please. Do you know, only flies private. Come on.

[Abe Greenwald]

So he can make sure that his private pilot wasn't vaccinated because, you know, the vaccine has a, I don't know what it is that, that Bill Gates's microchip could be over. Get into the mind control, control and then crash the plane. This is where these people are like, I, I, they are, like, in powerful positions. You know, I thought Sam Britton at, you know, the nuclear waste guy who was stealing luggage, he was bad. That was bad.

[Seth Mandel]

But he wasn't getting everybody else in the government to steal luggage.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, but I'm just saying, like, I, you know, so they keep focusing on things and then everything starts going off haywire. And that's maybe where we can spend two minutes talking free once yet again about the Signal scandal, because I've never seen anything like this. The press is treating this like everyone's going down and it's Watergate 2.0 and all of that. And the parties, the party in power doesn't care that much. So who are they talking to? If Trump wanted to fire Waltz, he would fire Waltz. Look, Rumsfeld went to George W. Bush in 2003 or 2004 when Abu Ghraib hit and offered to resign. And Bush said, no, I don't want you to resign. I'll let you go after the election if we win. I don't need the destabilization. Trump isn't even saying that. He's like, Mike learned a lesson, whatever. And then we hear all this like, oh, everyone in the Republican Party says they screwed up and it's terrible. They screwed up and it's terrible. But they won't say it on the record. And the sort of, the national security press is pulling out their hair and going crazy, and nothing is going to happen. There aren't going to be any investigatory committees. The House isn't going to convene one. The Senate's not going to convene one. When these guys come in to testify, the minority in the, the minority in the House and the Senate, among the Democrats will yell at them and scream at them and ask them questions. And I don't know if there's any more to be gleaned from this. And the American people are getting the information they need to say the Trump people are too reckless. And Trump is just once again like running the government in a really reckless and dangerous way. And we can't trust him or we can't trust his party. And when we have a chance, like in Pennsylvania to vote, to show some flag about where the country should go in the future in a special election, maybe we're going to say, watch out, we're going to vote for the Democrats.

[John Podhoritz]

The one danger here, I think long term for Trump shrugging and acting as if this was not a big deal is what it means for the people who are working for these people who work, you know, the people who work for Hegseth, the people who waltz is bossing around. This is a perfect example of an elite following one rule for itself and enforcing another set of rules on everyone beneath them. Because we all know that if a low level person at the Pentagon or elsewhere had done what these guys had done, they would probably be relieved of their duties, they would probably be fired, or at the very least publicly reprimanded, they would suffer consequences. And again, part of the Trump messaging was there are two tiers of justice. I'm treated one way, you know, the Biden crime family is treated another. Well, here's an example. And again, it won't, it would have to take more than just this one little scandal. If these accumulate though, and there seems to be one rule for, you know, for himself and his, his appointees and then everybody else is subjected to the rule of law. That's not going to go over well, not just with the American people who might ignore a lot of these stories, but for the people who work in for this administration, I mean, that's a, that has a worrisome effect, I think. If you're an employee. What are the rules now? Can you, can you start like chatting on signal with your friends about what's, you know, what you just saw in your Pentagon briefing? No, you can't. But now, you know, those other guys can do what they want.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, I mean, I am not denying the severity of the problem. I'm saying politically it's very interesting because we are, we are now in a world in which there are one these one way conversations. And the one way conversations are, this is a, this is a national security disaster of historic proportions. But the people in power don't act like it is. Now maybe that's just kind of foolishness. It's like pretending that Vietnam is going well when it's going badly and that this is going to come to back and bite you and bite you in the tush or it's Russiagate again in the sense that it is people who hate Trump working themselves up into a lather and trying to figure out ways to get at him through this. And I would caution them to where, because I'm telling you right now, it'll take three minutes to find out that Tony Blinken was on signal sending heart emojis to his Chinese counterpart. I mean, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. They didn't. Did they violate op operation? You know, opsec? Yeah. Was OPSEC violated during the Biden administration? You know, it was. The problem here is the devices and the fact that our behavior with these devices has outrun our capacity to control and contain ourselves. Not that there's something uniquely bad about Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz that they don't know how to use their phones.

[John Podhoritz]

Then, then put Elon Musk on that problem. Like build a government system that's actually secure, that's mobile. That's. That does. Well, not go ahead, but like someone.

[Christine Rosen]

No, I mean, you know, then, then, then signal becomes X. Yeah, right. Not Elon Musk.

[John Podhoritz]

You know what I mean? Like, solve that. That's actually a long standing structural problem for secure communication in a mobile digital age that the government's way, way, way behind. And our.

[Christine Rosen]

Actually, I just have to bring, for the sake of both sides ism here. Like when you talk about how, you know, there are people, the government, the administration, saying it's no big deal and you know, that's bad. And I agree. And I was thinking, and I know Afghanistan came up earlier this week when the Afghanistan pull out debacle happened, not only did the administration say it's no big deal, they said this is the greatest airlift in U.S. history. And the sympathetic media celebrated with them. So this is better than that in terms of like, you know, the.

[Abe Greenwald]

At least better than that. Because it wasn't a failure, it was a success. The mission wasn't compromised and the missiles hit the Houthis and the, the after effect is the problem. Like did they blow Israeli human intelligence by, by, by Hegseth saying, you know, we know where, we know what bedroom. I can't remember his name.

[John Podhoritz]

They did. Israel says that they did.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right? No, I can't remember the name of the guy who was, who was going around.

[John Podhoritz]

What does that mean for sharing future.

[Seth Mandel]

They're going to dare Jeffrey Goldberg to release the names of the Israeli intelligence.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right?

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, but, but I think that the X factor here is where the media goes with it. Because right now there's a, there's like a running feud between the media and Pete Hegseth, and it's left over from the campaign because while it may feel otherwise, we've been at this administration for like two months. So, you know, so it's, it's all actually very recent. And, and the, the, the media has taken a few different angles. One of, and one of the things that they're clearly doing is trying to find one that will upset either the administration enough to fire Hegseth or to disrupt whatever is, you know, circling the wagons around Hegseth within, you know, to lower his support within the administration. And so they did the Israel story. And I'm not saying it's a, I mean, it's a real story, it's obviously. But I'm just saying in terms of what the media is doing, they're looking at this from a bunch of different angles. And then yesterday was also the, you know, the pilots are angry. Our, our, our pilots are angry. They don't know if they can fly, you know, whatever. And so there's saying, you know, maybe they'll care about a military person, you know, a military revolt, maybe that, that will make that, you know, something like that. So I think that they're going to exhaust those angles. But it feels less like Russiagate and more like this is between the media and Pete Hegseth and feels very, very much a target on his, his back, specifically, in a way that the others in the chat are just simply not.

[John Podhoritz]

With, with one cautionary note there, which is that I think there are people in the military who are concerned about their safety being at risk if they're a pilot or if they're, if they're somebody who's sent into battle in on any sort of mission that requires confidentiality or secrecy, that the guy who's in charge of the Pentagon is chatting on signal and doesn't even realize a journalist is on there. I think they see this as a lucky miss that it didn't fall into the wrong hands. And the fact that the Trump administration won't even acknowledge that. I mean, there's a sense in which if you're putting your life at risk for your country as an enlisted member of the military, you want to assume that the people in charge are not making dumb mistakes, like literally a mistake that a teenager does, you know, on their group chat.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. And that's the ultimate, the ultimate thing that you're saying there is the problem. The problem is we're back to the can't anybody here play this game? Doge is cutting 20,000 jobs without knowing what the jobs are. Hegseth and Waltz are doing things with Chats they shouldn't be doing. One assumes that when Trump said he was only going to hire the best men in back in 2015, when he said, oh, the best man. I'm going to hire the best men. Some of these are very impressive men. Waltz is a very impressive person with a very impressive resume. He did something unbelievably boneheaded that he's lying about. Hegseth is lying about what he did. Obviously, these are war plans. Saying they're not war plans is just like. I don't know how people lie like that. It's kind of. It's kind of amazing. It's like the scene in Dumbo, this movie from 1962, where Jimmy Durante is trying to take Dumbo the elephant out of the circus. And he's leading him. Dumbo is right behind him. And somebody says to Duranty, where are you going with that elephant? And Duranty says, what elephant? And then he looks to his left and he looks to his right. You know, the elephant is right behind him. I mean, you can't say that you didn't release the war plans when we can see right there that you released the war plans.

[Christine Rosen]

By the way, I have to say, the amazing thing about how a lot of the right wing media is treating this.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

Is they're saying, who are you gonna believe? A liberal journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, who hates the Trump administration, you know, or this very serious security national security team? And I mean, come on, it's not a question of who you're gonna believe.

[Abe Greenwald]

It's there.

[Christine Rosen]

It's there. This is not. There aren't two competing versions of something that no one witnessed. We're all witness to. We're all witnesses to it.

[Abe Greenwald]

And I want to. I'm glad you brought this up, because.

[Seth Mandel]

What are you going to believe, Jeffrey Goldberger? Your lying eyes.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. But you bring this up because there is an area in which I do not believe the reporting and that I am willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on. And that is the horror story reporting about the deportations. Do I believe that one or two or three people might have gotten swept up in the trend to Aragua deportations? I do. I would wonder why that person was like, in the room when the dice came in. It was just hanging out with the trend Iragua people when they swept them up. Do I believe that could happen? Yes. Do I think that that's a crime? Yes. Do I do. I believe probably they do pro. They should have followed a different due process system, I suppose, although I don't know how you do, how you roll up a mob without a surprise effect or whatever. Okay. I don't believe that the State Department in the person of Marco Rubio is violating the rights of people and that someone was just deported because she wrote an op ed hostile to Israel. And I am not going to accept the talk of this pro terrorist bar and its lawyers and the people who have been trained to be its lawyers. I will give the State Department and Marco Rubio the benefit of the doubt over them because they're showing me nothing except they're whining. And I do not believe that Mahmoud Khalil is innocent and I do not believe that those people do. I think I'm not competent to judge what exactly the due process provisions here would, how they would come into conflict with the national security Act of 1952. It's not really my job, but I'm not. There are horror stories I'm going to believe and there are horror stories I'm not going to believe, and this is one I am not. I'm choosing based on the behavior of liberal journalists and the people that they are married to and that they listen to and that they went to college with and that they have brunch with and that they, you know, and that they go to, to help them negotiate their wills and whatever I am not going to trust. They're simply taking whatever is being thrown in their ear and saying, look at this authoritarian, monstrous administration and it's trampling on the due process rights of people who are not Americans who do not have a right to be in the United States and who, and who they have isolated on and said, we're going to deport so and so. There's got to be reasons. And maybe those reasons are classified. Well, maybe they've been picked. Yeah, go ahead.

[John Podhoritz]

I was going to say that there have been a couple of cases where the immediate supporting your argument, which I think is correct, that the immediate media reaction is another example of Trump being an authoritarian, sweeping people off the street, shoving them into a paneled van, and you never hear from them again. Their lawyer can't locate them. There was a, there was a case recently of a woman who was described in the press as a Russian dissident, and she was coming back from a conference and she's a scientist, and then she was denied entry and they're going to ship her back to Russia and there she will die. I read this, initially I thought, well, that would be. That sounds terrible. And then you just spend, I don't know, half a day and another little bubble of information comes up which says, well, actually she was trying to smuggle frog embryos into the United States States in some, like, effort to, I don't know, bring. This is something that's. Obviously there's all kinds of restrictions about what you can bring into the country after you've left and come back. And particularly so if you're here on a visa where you don't have the same sort of expectation as a citizen. And so, you know, they, they're like, no, you can't come in here with these frog embryos. You're not allowed to have those. And so it was actually a very basic story. People get turned away at customs for those reasons all the time. I was on an international flight recently and there were this couple with a massive number of suitcases. And I was like, oh, they're not getting through. And sure enough, off they took him to that little mirrored room in Dallas and never to be seen again. You know, so we have processes for these. But the problem is the media assumes it's the authoritarian story every time.

[Christine Rosen]

So all these stories are coming up now on. On X constantly, right? There's. There was that one. There's the Tufts op ed writer who is supposedly being deported. Deported just for writing habit. And everyone's reacting, including a lot of conservatives who want to seem. Who are not Trumpy and they wanna be reasonable. And they're all immediately expressing their outrage. And I'm thinking, Covington, this reminds me of the Nick Sandman video, right? Where you see that. Then everyone's first reaction to the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Let's remind people what that was. So there was a pro life demonstration, right? Wasn't it a pro life demonst. And Nick Sandman is a high school student.

[John Podhoritz]

He was a high school student. They were wearing MAGA hats.

[Abe Greenwald]

There was a guy drumming. There was a Native American.

[John Podhoritz]

Oh, no, he's not just a peaceful Native American. He's a known obnoxious activist who's always popping up and trying to infiltrate other people's, you know, peaceful demonstrations.

[Christine Rosen]

There were all sorts of people on the scene that you couldn't see from the, from this clip.

[Abe Greenwald]

So there was an angle that showed.

[Seth Mandel]

Black Hebrew Israelites on the corner shouting at them. That were in none of the pictures.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, yeah. That showed Nick Sandman smirking at the guy with the drum who was yelling at him.

[John Podhoritz]

He was in his screaming, smirking, right? Yeah, well, he was Angry.

[Abe Greenwald]

He was smirking. He didn't hit him with a. He didn't hit him with a stick. He didn't throw him into the path of a car. He was smirking at him. People went on Twitter and said, I'd like to punch that smirk off his face.

[Christine Rosen]

Punchable face, kid.

[Abe Greenwald]

He should be killed. You know, all of that. And it turned out that the video had been selectively edited. Nick Sandman is richer to the tune of eight figures, I believe, probably in terms of the settlements that he got for the. From CNN and others that are.

[Christine Rosen]

Washington Post. Wasn't it?

[Abe Greenwald]

I don't remember Washington Post.

[Seth Mandel]

I'd like to get. I mean, I'd like to give an example of what we're talking about here in the. In the context of the. These deportations. Right? There's a guy named Mamadou Tal who was at Cornell on a visa, and he was an instigator. He celebrated the October 7, 2023 attacks. He was an instigator on campus. He was at one point suspended for his activities. He. And so it became clear that when the Trump administration came in and were going to be doing these deportations, that they were serious about it. Mamadou Tal was gonna be near the top of that list. He was a big fat target. He was just one of those guys who was loud and brash and made himself seen being disruptive. And he fit all the categories and was here on a student visa. He sued the administration to prevent his own deportation before he was. Before the deportation proceedings actually began. In other words, he tried to preempt his own deportation by suing the administration to block the executive orders that Trump signed that have anything to do with the immigration. One of them was Trump's executive order on combating anti Semitism. So, Mama, do tell, who had, you know, led these protests, celebrated Hamas, all this stuff, got suspended for all this stuff, sued to, To. To block the executive order combating anti Semitism on campuses and stuff like that. This was a. An extraordinarily chutzpadic move that you almost had to admire. But it's obviously insane to sympathize with somebody who understands that he is going to be deported and therefore tries to sue an executive order that has nothing, that doesn't set any new rules or laws. Now, it turned out that his visa had been revoked, I believe, the day before he filed the lawsuit. So we're talking about a guy who's like, the Trump administration went through the normal process. They revoked the guy's visa. The next day, he sues them to block an executive order on anti Semitism because it discusses the possibility of, of deporting people. And the media responded by reporting that this guy was being targeted for retaliation, that he's being deported because he sued the Trump administration. And what happened was, you know, as I said, his visa was the day before, but the reporting was, my God, what kind of fascist state are we living in where if you sue the Trump administration over an executive order, he's going to deport you. When, of course, the, the, the, the events were in the entire opposite order, and the Trump administration in this case had its T's crossed and its eyes dotted completely. And their one, one sense of frustration from this is that the administration didn't even say that. Like, I'm saying that here because I wrote about the case and, you know, whatever, and some other people are saying, but, like, there's nobody from the administration saying, saying that until they have to respond in court. So if you pay attention to court filings, it's like, oh, the visa was revoked the day before the administration, they tell the judge that, but there's no one messaging that to the public. And so all you hear is, this guy sued the Trump administration and now he's being deported for suing them.

[Abe Greenwald]

I can explain that. I can explain that because their political interests are now in conflict with the interest of, say, people like us who would really like a kind of ballast for our efforts to defend them. If they are behaving in ways that require a defense, which is they think that it is a winning item for them to say, yeah, we're deporting trend and we're going to do it again and we're going to keep doing it. And you guys cry. Cry tears, Lib. Go ahead, cry. Everybody in America knows these guys are the worst people in the world. And you know what? Even though they don't say this implicitly, if five or ten people are dragged in unfairly, that's really too bad, but the security of the country requires it. And this sometimes happens in criminal justice where people get, yes, it's terrible, but cry. You go cry and tell us that because of that, we shouldn't be doing this. Now, it's not a great argument as a matter of law or as a matter of helping us with debating points. Is it a great populist argument, law and order versus Democrats being on the side of terrorists and criminals? It sure is. So they actually don't have an incentive to do what you want them to do, which is say, we're being careful we're dotting our I's, we're crossing our T. You're wrong. And, you know, we're going to wait to see what happens in court and we'll see the case is dismissed and all of that. They actually want to use these controversies as a political accelerant to their benefit and as opposed to the Doge stuff, which I think is starting to backfire on them. I'm not. I think this has a. They have a lot of rope and they have a lot of string to play out here in their favor and that the, the media blind spot is not understanding what it looks like when they say, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. These people are in El Salvador and they shouldn't be in El Salvador. They're Venezuelan. It's like, okay, congratulations on missing the point. If you're trying to win a political war against your foe.

[Christine Rosen]

Like, I don't know. I don't know. I agree with you that that's what they're doing and that's the idea. I do think the media gets a hold of a handful of cases that they, that the administration truly screwed up and they're genuine sob stories and they might be. It's, it's, it's bad. It is bad. It changes the framing.

[Abe Greenwald]

I don't know that it changes the framing. That's what I'm saying. Because again, high crime, when you're in a high crime atmosphere, if that's what people believe and the story is the cops went too far and did X, Y and Z. The public doesn't care.

[Christine Rosen]

This. They do. I mean, look, look how, look how the public shifts whenever there was a high profile NYPD or LAPD abuse case, like the whole, the whole country's mood on the police, you know, like, like would sway.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, it depends on what time you're talking about. In the 1970s and 19. We know in 19 1985, all of New York celebrated when a guy told. Took out a gun and shot four people on a subway train. I mean, that's what I mean. Like things you're not supposed to like or want people start making allowances for if they feel like they're being directly threatened.

[John Podhoritz]

But I think what people like is Homans isn't that. Yeah. Tom Holmans saying one thing he can do is point to local officials and say they are literally not letting us do our jobs and getting these criminals off the street. We have to just go in and raid and sweep them all up because they are actively working against us. They're being told by their mayors, the police force is told not to help us. In fact, to shield these people, the. The liberal judges are doing. And actually, that's been happening for a long time. That's at least a message that doesn't have to get into the details of justifying each individual deportation, but does, again, speak to people's totally valid concern about how the system has completely protected illegal and often criminal elements under Biden. But he's kind of disappeared and said, why do we keep. Why do I have to keep seeing an Ice Barbie, Kristi Noem with her expensive watches standing in front of prisons? I don't want to see that. I'm actually on board with a lot of their policies. I am sick of that. But the optics of that.

[Abe Greenwald]

One thing is right. Yesterday, Marco Rubio, who is a very good politician, people should remember he is a very good politician, he may not have won the presidency, but he is a superb politician, came out and did exactly what you're saying. He said, yeah, I deported the, the woman from tufts. We've deported 300, more than 300 people here from State. We've done it. We're going to do more of it. And don't think that you're going to intimidate me out of doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it properly and in, you know, within the bounds of the law. And come, go ahead, come at me. Like, trust me, I know I'm right and we're doing the right thing. Now, that doesn't sort of like, make the calm down. We're all being calm. That's sort of in the middle there, but, yeah, I see. I think Homan kind of looks like a goon myself when he goes on tv. Rubio is a better spokesman for this.

[John Podhoritz]

Because I like them both for different reasons.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay, okay. But anyway, I just think. I just think it's an interesting. The. When the principal isn't worried, meaning when Trump isn't worried, when the LA cops get into trouble because of the Rampart scandal or, you know, stuff happens in New York because of cops, a lot depends on how the senior management reacts. They go, oh, nothing to do with this. We're going to form a commission and we're going to try to get to the bottom of this because it's all very scary and we're so worried and we'll never let it happen again. Or are you Rudy Giuliani in the mid-90s and say, I'm with the cops, I'm with the cops. All right, you want to you want, you want to tell me so? And such and such happened. He didn't, it didn't hurt him politically. You know, there were like three bad, really, really bad police cases in the 1990s under Giuliani's, you know, there was the Amadou Diallo case, there was the case of the guy on 39th and 8th, I can't remember the three cases specifically. And Rudy's general opinion was we are not stopping with our aggressive efforts to make the new people of New York City safe and we're not going to join you jackals in turning and saying that the cops are bad, the cops are good, the cops are front line, the cops are the best thing that ever happened to you. And I'm not listening to all of these people. And it politically was successful because that's what people wanted. If they hadn't wanted, it wouldn't have been successful. And I think, you know, if you take the LA example, a lot of people in LA thought the LA cops were bad already. And not just activists like ordinary LA people dealing with the LA Police department thought that they were incompetent and lousy and it took them four hours to show up at your house if you told them that there was a crime that had been committed and stuff like that. And so the LA police chief, Daryl Gates, during the, you know, during the Rodney King stuff was an out of touch, bad spokesman for his department and sort of like was totally cashiered as a result. So I, I, it all depends on how, on what the situation is, but I think they think it's a winning issue for them. Maybe you're right, Abe, that it won't be and that it'll, it'll take a turn.

[Christine Rosen]

No, I mean in general, John, I'm with you on giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, but I'm open to the possibility that they are making some major screw ups somewhere that could be exploited.

[Abe Greenwald]

They can, and they are certainly making major screw ups. I'm being cynical in talking about this as a matter strictly of how the American people will react and will they be sad to hear that there were, you know, people swept up in a dragnet? I think so. But what if the people swept up in a dragnet, you know, were citizens and they had their rights and their rights were trampled on because they should have had a due process hearing, unlike the illegals who don't need a due process, whatever, but they were still in an apartment, like smoking fentanyl, doing fentanyl with the people in Trend Nicua. There's a reason they were, they were thrown into the back of the truck. Yeah, that.

[Christine Rosen]

I agree. If that's the case, that's not going to do it. If it's something, if it's something like just, you know, grossly unjust.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

Maybe with some video in it. Then, then, then we got it, then we had a situation.

[Abe Greenwald]

Fair enough. Look, anything can happen. And I'm not, I'm not denying it. I'm just saying. And in this case, when I say that I give them the benefit, I'm not even particularly saying I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on the trend Iragua stuff necessarily. That's a law enforcement. That's actually sort of like when law enforcement do dragnets and they, you know, they do stop and frisks or they do, you know, everybody's getting stopped to be breathalyzed or something like that, people get very pissed off and it's really not fair. And, you know, stuff like that always ends up being people being accused of abuse when you tighten and all of that. I'm now really talking about the visa stuff and the, and the deportations of the, of the terrorism supporters. And I see absolutely no reason to believe a single word that is being said by their lawyers. That is a bar that exists and has existed in this country for 30 years to defend terrorists on American soil. And there are dozens of them, and a lot of them are being trained at this place at City College in New York called Clear, and there are programs to fund them through the Open Society Institute. And this entire bar exists as a construct to do what they are now doing. It's almost as though the ducks were set in a row so that if there was going to be a Hamas attack on October 7, and there were going to be campus protests and stopping things in the street and all that beginning on October 8, that there were going to be a phalanx of lawyers ready when the federal government woke up and decided to take this seriously and started to go after them with the Met, with the modality that is the easiest and cleanest, which is revoking their visas and sending them home. It's just too quick, too fast, too well organized for it to be happenstance. You know, it's not like there's that guy in a room and a schleppy guy in an office in Brooklyn, and someone calls and says, please, my husband has been taken into custody. I can't find a lawyer who will take care of him. Please, Mr. And then he has a whole redemption arc and, you know, saves him and then he's married. He stops being a drunk and he saves his marriage and Denzel Washington plays him and wins an Oscar. That's not what's happening here. This is a organized effort on the part of a deliberately designed sub part of the New York State bar that is at work here. Quick announcement before we go. We are going to reinstitute the Commentary Ask the Commentary podcast feature that we have done intermittently, but we're going to try to do it every week on Fridays. Ask us questions. We'll try to answer them. You can send your questions to podcastometary.org ask us about, you know, what kind.

[John Podhoritz]

Of do we have trenda agua tattoos.

[Abe Greenwald]

Or I don't know what you can ask us anything. We could we're only going to be able to take two or three questions a show. So but, but happy to hear from you. Love to engage with you and thank everybody for, for your continued listenership. So and have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the new baseball season until Monday. For Christine, Seth and Abe, I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the candle bur.