Serious Trump and Weird Democrats

Summary

Summary of "Serious Trump and Weird Democrats" Episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Release Date: November 22, 2024

In the "Serious Trump and Weird Democrats" episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast, host Jon Podhoretz, along with co-hosts Abe Greenwald, Christine Rosen, and Matthew Continetti, delve into the tumultuous dynamics of the Trump administration's transition, the Democratic Party's internal challenges, and the broader implications for American politics. The discussion is rich with insights, critical analyses, and notable observations about the current political landscape.

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1. Turbulent Trump Transition and Cabinet Appointments

The episode opens with an in-depth analysis of the chaotic nature of President Trump's transition into his role, particularly focusing on the abrupt withdrawal of Matt Gaetz as the nominee for Attorney General and the swift appointment of Pam Bondi in his stead.

Matthew Continetti highlights the departure of Gaetz:

“[Gaetz] was making the point that this is not only a completely different political approach for Trump… It is relentless.” [02:00]

Jon Podhoretz elaborates on the significance of Bondi's appointment:

“Democrats do not have a leg to stand on to oppose Pam Bondi's appointment as Attorney General, with the exception of the fact that she was an election denier in 2020…” [05:49]

This swift replacement underscores Trump's determination and decisive, albeit unpredictable, political maneuvers. Pam Bondi's qualifications and her support from influential figures like Jeb Bush are discussed, positioning her as a strategic nominee likely to gain Senate approval.

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2. Democratic Party's Struggles and Candidate Critiques

The conversation shifts to the Democratic Party's internal conflicts and challenges in presenting a unified front against the Trump administration.

Christine Rosen critiques Kamala Harris's campaign:

“She’s practicing attorney. She knows how to prosecute... But she's also walked a fine line on the election denial stuff because she is not under indictment or has not been disbarred…” [09:18]

Matthew Continetti questions Harris's effectiveness as a candidate:

“If you have a candidate who can’t do an interview with someone that her campaign hasn’t paid, how on earth would she have been the President of the United States?” [25:35]

The hosts discuss the Democratic Party's reliance on established figures and interest groups, suggesting a lack of fresh, dynamic leadership capable of addressing the electorate's evolving concerns.

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3. Election Legitimacy and the "Stop the Steal" Movement

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the contested nature of recent elections and the prevalence of election denial rhetoric.

Jon Podhoretz reflects on historical election controversies:

“There has been no successful prosecution of a 'my votes were stolen' that has flipped the results of the election… It would be really nice if this stopped.” [16:07]

Matthew Continetti compares past election disputes:

“2024 seems to be the least kind of contested presidential election this century... Let’s have it stop.” [16:07]

The hosts express concern over the lingering impact of unfounded election fraud claims, emphasizing the need for restoring trust in electoral processes to maintain democratic integrity.

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4. Media Influence and Campaign Finance Concerns

The role of media and campaign financing in shaping political narratives is critically examined.

Jon Podhoretz raises issues about campaign fundraising:

“Where did that money go? A lot of it was stolen. A lot of it was grifted.” [23:26]

Abe Greenwald comments on media complicity:

“But Matt's also right that it's a scandal for the media because you have these media figures who were accepting donations to their pet organizations…” [24:54]

The discussion highlights potential misconduct in campaign financing and the media's role in either perpetuating or challenging these practices, suggesting a systemic issue within political financing structures.

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5. Future of the Democratic and Republican Parties

The episode explores the evolving identities of the two major political parties in the United States.

Christine Rosen asserts:

“The voters who voted for Trump… care about the deterioration of traditional American values. And that’s not what Trump stands for.” [41:51]

Matthew Continetti discusses the Democratic Party's reliance on interest groups:

“If you don't have a Democrat in 2028 who does that, they'll be in trouble.” [36:11]

The hosts debate the challenges both parties face in appealing to a broader electorate while maintaining their core bases, pointing out the difficulties in balancing traditional values with progressive agendas.

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6. Economic Policies and Their Political Implications

Economic strategies and their effectiveness in garnering voter support are evaluated.

Jon Podhoretz critiques Trump's tariff policies:

“Tariffs are inflationary by, as a matter of fact, they raise the price of goods, and the price of goods is then passed on to voters.” [57:22]

Matthew Continetti emphasizes economic performance as a decisive factor:

“The key move for the Democrats now is to throw the interest groups under the bus.” [36:11]

The conversation underscores the importance of tangible economic improvements over ideological battles, suggesting that voters prioritize their financial well-being over partisan rhetoric.

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7. Reflections on Political Authenticity and Leadership

The need for genuine and relatable political leadership is a recurring theme.

Christine Rosen reflects on candidate authenticity:

“She never learned... she just parroted what her people tell her to say and doesn't seem authentic.” [38:06]

Abe Greenwald comments on voter disillusionment:

“This, these, the administration needs to respond to your problems now because you have problems and you have issues.” [53:06]

The hosts argue that authenticity and direct engagement with voter concerns are critical for political success, highlighting the shortcomings of current candidates in meeting these expectations.

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8. Concluding Thoughts: The Path Forward for American Politics

In wrapping up, the hosts express a sense of urgency in addressing the nation's political fractures and the necessity for strategic leadership to navigate the complexities of modern governance.

Jon Podhoretz emphasizes:

“It's our moment. He's moving aside and it could have been disastrous.” [35:07]

Matthew Continetti concludes:

“This is the same problem with the Republican Party and MAGA influence… That will be a challenge for them.” [39:37]

The episode closes with a call for introspection and proactive measures within both political parties to bridge divides and foster a more cohesive and effective governance structure.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Jon Podhoretz: “Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast.” [00:52]
• Matthew Continetti: “It's one of my favorite Movies, little known but underappreciated, called Noises off.” [03:23]
• Christine Rosen: “She doesn’t seem authentic.” [38:06]
• Jon Podhoretz: “Tariffs are inflationary by, as a matter of fact, they raise the price of goods.” [57:22]
• Matthew Continetti: “This is why our colleague at the American Enterprise Institute… the key move for the Democrats now is to throw the interest groups under the bus.” [36:11]

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Conclusion

The episode "Serious Trump and Weird Democrats" offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of American politics, emphasizing the need for stability, authenticity, and effective leadership. Through incisive discussions and critical reflections, the hosts underscore the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for both the Republican and Democratic parties as they navigate an increasingly polarized and complex political environment.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.

[Jon Podhoretz]

No way of knowing which way it's going.

[Christine Rosen]

Hope for the best. Expect the worst.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, November 22, 2024. I am Jon Pott Hortz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

The Trump transition is not working the way anybody would have thought the Trump transition was going to go, by which I mean that the appointment of Matt Gaetz was withdrawn by Matt Gaetz eight days into Matt Gaetz tenure as an appointee to be nominated to be the Attorney General of the United States. And then three hours later, his successor as nominee, Pam Bondi, was named. And we talk about all what happened there. But Matt has been making this point, I think, since the cabinet names and other names first started servicing, that this is not only a completely different political approach for Trump, which is to say that it's the opposite of chaotic. Even though the nominations may be startling and often sort of breathtaking, not necessarily in a good way, but it is relentless. It may not be organized, but what we're gonna get is that by December 1, all of the major appointments are going to be announced and ready to be on the Runway. And Trump clearly knows what he wants and knew what he wanted right after Matt Gaetz was gonna go. And apparently he told Matt Gaetz to go yesterday morning. It was not g decision. So we. This gives us clues and hints to the seriousness, I think, with. With which we should take the incoming administration. It's not going to be, oh, Omarosa is coming in. Should we give her a desk over there? And. And anyone can walk into Trump's office and nobody has any say over his schedule. And something else very significant as well.

[Matthew Continetti]

Can I put on my John Pot Horiz hat and make pop culture reference and use it to explain politics? Because as you're describing this, it's not.

[Jon Podhoretz]

The odd couple then you can't see before 1950.

[Matthew Continetti]

It's one of my favorite Movies, little known but underappreciated, called Noises off, which is based on a Broadway play. And it's about the backstage shenanigans to a show that's going on, a theatrical production. And what strikes me is, in the first Trump term, all the chaos was in front of the House. It was all on the stage, in front of the curtain. People were watching it. Whereas what happens now, and I think we saw this during the Trump campaign in 2024 as well. There's still chaos, there's still a lot of improvisation, a lot of impulsive decision making. But it happens behind the stage, backstage, it happens behind the scenes. And I think the Gates pick was an example of this. Something that happened very quickly, spur of the moment, on Trump Force One, not Air Force One yet. And you throw it out there. And it is one of the fastest retractions of a Cabinet appointment in American history. And immediately, you have a new nominee within a few hours, Pam Bondi. Now, what's interesting about Pam Bondi is she's also from Florida, but she's been around in Florida for a lot longer than Matt Gaetz. And I have a test that I'm applying to some of these Cabinet choices, and I'm going to call it the Jeb Bush test. And if Jeb Bush tweets in approval of a nominee, as he has done to many of the nominees that Trump has put forward, they are almost certain to pass muster with the Senate. And sure enough, Jeb Bush congratulated Pam Bondi, who I think was first elected AG of Florida right after Jeb left the governor's office. But clearly someone that Bush knows well in Florida politics. And so I think here we have the person that in all likelihood was probably Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, first pick for Attorney general, and now she's getting the nod as the second pick for Attorney general.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Democrats do not have a leg to stand on to oppose Pam Bondi's appointment as Attorney general, with the exception of the fact that she was an election denier in 2020 or like, was somebody who was arguing the case that the vote was stolen in Pennsylvania and stuff like that. But I just want to remind you that there was a. The early sign of the chaos in the Clinton administration. Now, I'm going back 31 years here, was that they had terrible trouble filling the attorney general slot. The first choice, Zoe Baird, had to withdraw because she had an undocumented immigrant. She wasn't paying her nanny's taxes. Then the second choice, Kimba Wood, who was a Federal judge in New York. It turned out that she had been a Playboy bunny, which apparently at the time was tame these days, was disqualifying. And then they hit on Janet Reno, a person with very limited qualifications for the office, because what she was was also from Florida. From Florida. The state attorney for Miami Dade County. Not even a statewide official. She was a local. This would be like appointing Alvin Bragg to the Cornel West Cabinet as Attorney General or something like that. But it was the third choice she sailed through. And, you know, she served eight years. She was a terrible attorney General, but, you know, and was responsible for decisions so catastrophic that they sort of led to the creation of the entire right wing paranoiac worldview that turn against the Justice Department.

[Matthew Continetti]

Right, yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. Because of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the decision.

[Matthew Continetti]

She did inspire one of the greatest SNL skits, however, which was Janet Reno's Dance Party, where Will Ferrell played Janet Reno.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. So we thank her for that. But I'm just saying that in the annals of the. Well, we can't. We need a more experienced person for attorney general. The Democratic Party and it's, you know, and the person who took back the presidency for the Democratic Party for the first time in, you know, two decades did have an attorney general with fewer qualifications than Pam Bondi, who was, after all, the Attorney General of the state of Florida for, I think, eight years. And again, I'm not happy that she is an election denier, but the president himself is an election denier and that does not seem to have been. Disqualified him before the American people.

[Christine Rosen]

She won his trust, it sounds, mostly because she helped him during the first impeachment proceedings. This is where I think it sounds like they became close. And she is a true Floridian. She graduated, I think, from University of Florida and then Stetson University Law School. She's practicing attorney. She knows how to prosecute. She has the legal experience that Matt Gates clearly did not have. She also has. Her demeanor is really interesting to me. I mean, she doesn't kind of play, you know, she's very blonde and people are calling it Legally Blondie and Bondi and all this stuff. And that's hilarious. She's clearly quite tough. I mean, she's been tough in her campaigns. She's. She's well regarded among, you know, in private, in the private practice she went to recently. And she clearly really walked a fine line on the election denial stuff because she is not under indictment or has not been disbarred like many of the.

[Jon Podhoretz]

That is an excellent point. That Is an excellent point because she. Right. I mean, you know, she's not Rudy Giuliani. She. Trump was allowed to make cases in courtrooms as anybody is, even if they were crappy cases. And as I say, I don't think that we're in a position now to say that people who held this view are. Can be denied office when 78 million Americans decided that holding this opinion was not sufficient to deny somebody.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think the experience is crucial here. I mean, one of the many reasons that the Matt Gaetz pick struck Republican senators and others as kind of mind boggling was he had never practiced as an attorney. He had gone two years.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Two years.

[Matthew Continetti]

I'm sorry, two years. And so you look at, I mean, compared to Gates, Pam Bondi looks like, you know, Judge Learned Hand, you know, like a legal mind who will be recognized in the annals of history, you know, so I think that helps her a lot. I mean, she's got a resume. People can look at what she's done as a prosecutor, as an attorney. And yes, the 2020 stuff will come up on the Democratic side, but I think Republicans won't have any problem.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Do you think we would cite Learned Hand if his name hadn't been Learned Hand? Wouldn't we have another.

[Matthew Continetti]

She did write a book on the Constitution that I hear is pretty good.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I know, but still, if they try.

[Christine Rosen]

To bring up election denial during her confirmation, I mean, there's a pretty. Mark Elias and Casey, what's going on in Pennsylvania should certainly be at least one response rhetorically to that argument.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. What if Kamala had won and had named Stacey Abrams Attorney General? Stacey Abrams, who sort of initiated the era of the large scale election denier.

[Christine Rosen]

Yes.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think election denial, I mean, has been adjudicated. Not in the sense that. Not in the same. I'm not referring to the results of the election itself. I mean, the political utility of attacking it, I think is it's kind of a dead letter now.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And it's also a dead letter. It's also a dead letter because the two people who have, who have gone down this road in 2024, one of them being Carrie Lake, who lost a race by five points, so therefore looks as more psychotic than she may even be. And I think that's, you know, that's probably base kind of psychotic for seeming to claim that you can lose an election by five points and have it stolen. And Bob Casey, as you mentioned, the senator from Pennsylvania 5 was running for his fifth term as I think fourth or fifth term as senator, lost the race every Person who did those kind of mathematical tallies of what the outstanding vote that had yet to be counted among provisional ballots, that it would had to have broken 9010 in his favor for him even to approach parity with Dave McCormick and nonetheless insisted on a recount, a statewide recount, that he could have said, nah, don't do that.

[Matthew Continetti]

He was running for his fourth term.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Fourth term.

[Matthew Continetti]

It's interesting. He was elected in 06, defeating Santorum, Rick Santorum. And also elected in that 06 class was Tester and Sherrod Brown. So those 06 Democrats have been kind of cycling out all at once anyway.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So. Yeah, so. And it's important, I think, that. Christine, you mentioned Mark Elias. So Mark Elias is a very effective, very cagey, canny lawyer whose business it is to do election law. There are people like this on the Republican side. Ben Ginsburg famously was the guy you turned to in a close election on the Republican side to help you figure out what was and was not possible. But Elias has become a grifter, meaning that he basically is there to seek out credulous people who cannot cope with the fact emotionally that they lost an election they wish to have won. And clearly gulled Casey into believing that there was a strategy for him to take this back. Based on Elias's own very complicated experience with the Al Gore, Norm Coleman race in Minnesota, which we can go into, or not. I mean, that's a very problematic case in which the entire race was decided on 350 ballots that were found in the trunk of a car six months after the election. And Coleman could have. Coleman basically said, oh, the hell with it. Now I'm not going to go on with this. And did not insist on continuing the lease litigation, which could easily have continued. But Elias gulled Casey into two weeks of, I assume, highly compensated, very well billed, you know, fighting that had no hope or prayer of success. And these two things together, combined with the fact that Trump didn't have to start making this argument about, you know, the election being stolen from him anywhere. Maybe we're going to move off this now. No, there has been no successful prosecution of a my votes were stolen that has flipped the results of the election. With the exception of the Frank and Coleman race, which was 16 years. 16 years ago, 2008. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And while I think talk about what it did for Trump, and I think it did some things for Trump that we haven't quite factored in, it would be really nice if this stopped. It's not helpful. Creates lingering bad tastes, bad memories. It confirms or like, advances the paranoia of people. What do you guys think?

[Matthew Continetti]

Well, I agree. I mean, it's not helpful to the legitimacy of our elections. And this is a striking moment. I mean, Harry Enton, our friend at cnn, points out that this is really the kind of, with the exception of the two Obama elections, but even then, the first Obama election kind of gave birth to the birther smear. Right. The idea that Obama is not a legitimate president or was not a legitimate president because he was born outside the United States. A conspiracy theory that was of course, propagated by former and future President Trump. So Really, I mean, 2024 seems to be the least kind of contested presidential election this century in the view of Harry Enton. I mean, because you think, just look, you think about 2000, right. That was the Florida fiasco. 2004 really inaugurated the idea that presidential elections were somehow illegitimate because of conspiracy theories. That was the whole die bold conspiracy theory out of Ohio embraced by the left in order to show that somehow Bush cheated. Also in that cycle was the, the strange kind of lump on Bush's back during one of the debates. And the left was saying that Bush was getting, you know, information, messages from here. Yeah. Dick Cheney or something. That was 04, 08 and 12. That's Obama. Right. 16 was Russian. Russian collusion.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Russia, Russia, Cambridge analytica.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yep. And 2020, Trump, it was Stop the steal. So here, finally, a quarter of a century in to the 21st century, we have an election where, I mean, pretty much everybody agrees Trump won. He, Trump, he won by over 2 million votes. His total seems to have like drifted slightly below 50% of the total now. But it's, I mean, if you round up, it's 50%, 48 for Trump. And that's, I think, a good moment to kind of turn the page and enter another political era.

[Christine Rosen]

But those there are these two conceits that the last several elections have had because they were close, because they were so close. Obviously the election was stolen is one. But I have a mandate once I've won is the other conceit that both sides have certainly Biden overplayed. And, you know, there are some signs that Trump's second term they could do, they could make the same mistake. This was still quite a close election. It was not a landslide. And the rhetoric coming out of the right right now, very happy that they won is what they're expressing. But they're also a little overconfident about what the American people actually told them they wanted.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think the mistrust of election results has been supplanted by more obvious semi cons hoaxes to actually mistrust this election cycle in part, I think, is what has happened.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I mean, the same Biden's infirmities.

[Abe Greenwald]

Biden, the COVID up on Biden's infirmities and how the switcheroo happened and how the media colluded with the White House on this, that I think has sort of taken up the paranoia oxygen. Right?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Matthew Continetti]

Except it's true.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right?

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, that's my point. Right, Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So it's not right. It's not paranoid if it's true. When you have something legitimately true. It's actually, it's a comfort zone to people who maybe, maybe they really like the wheels within wheels and the conspiracies within conspiracies, because that's more fun and it's more like 24, it's more like a Homeland or a television show about this. But I do have to say, yeah, the Democrats supplied a lot of fodder that was legitimate and particularly in the wake of the election results, when the question is, what did they get for it? What did they actually. Now I think that the case has to be made that the switcheroo was necessary. And there's one key piece of data to suggest that this is the case, which is that there are these maps. They're pretty staggering, right. They show the country shifting six points to the right in aggregate nationwide, but not in the swing states where the swing right was like two, two and a half percent. And so the Democrats contested Harris and the Democrats fought in the swing states. And they did a pretty good job in the sense that what happened in the rest of the country didn't happen in the same way in the swing states where they were fighting. They limited Trump's gains to a measurably, a measurable but not overwhelming number. Had that not happened and the swing states had followed the pattern of the rest of the country, it wouldn't have been an Electoral college wipeout, but certainly those Senate seats probably would have.

[Matthew Continetti]

There'd be more Republican senators, there'd be.

[Jon Podhoretz]

More Republican senators, and Trump would have won by 7 to 10 million votes as opposed to the 2 million votes that he won by.

[Matthew Continetti]

I still think, though, we need to recognize just how bad a candidate Kamala Harris is. And my latest evidence for this proposition is an email that arrived in my inbox, maybe yours, yesterday afternoon from the Harris Waltz campaign asking for money on November 21st. And it's a reminder that Kamala Harris raised $1.5 billion for a campaign that was two and a half months long. Right. Or what? Three.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Three and a half months.

[Matthew Continetti]

Three and a half months long.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Matthew Continetti]

100 days. Over 100 days. Three and a half months long. And she ended the campaign $20 million in debt. So much so that she has to kind of send out the mass emails in a desperate move to get small dollar donations. What small dollar donor would give money to reimburse the Harris campaign after we're still digging through the detritus and seeing that she was paying people for interviews? That's never happened in American politics. She was paying Oprah the Revver, now the call your daddy people. She was paying them for the interview. There's actually kind of a scandal here with Kamala Harris's spending that I don't think has been recognized or treated. So, yes, Biden probably would have done worse than Harris, all told. But in some ways, even Biden, who is struggling, I mean, he was struggling at the White House yesterday when he greeted the Boston Celtics, he may have actually been a slightly better candidate even in his dilapidated state than Harris ended up being.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, I think that's an arguable. I mean, obviously you can't run it again. It's all counterfactual. But you bring up something that I think is very interesting about the media going forward, which is, yeah, a billion five was raised in an amount of time. No one has ever. There's never been anything remotely comparable to the fundraising juggernaut that this campaign that hadn't existed four days earlier had created. Where did that money go? A lot of it was stolen. A lot of it was grifted. There are vendors, there are going to be invisible vendors. The reports to the FEC and stuff like that, it takes a long time for those to go through. People don't really send them in or they delay saying stuff like that. Is this something that the New York Times, which spent two and a half years desperately trying to get Trump's tax records and got them in violation of every understanding of the personal privacy of an American citizen, that was violated in that effort that his apparently his niece, you know, handed off in a felonious act that for some reason was never properly charged, since our tax records are like our deepest private property. Nonetheless, there it is. It happened. New York Times spent two years on this. This may be the biggest political finance fundraising scandal that we have ever seen.

[Abe Greenwald]

But Matt's also right that it's a scandal for the media because you have these media figures who were accepting donations to their pet organizations. You know, and then sitting down with the candidate whose campaign donated to them.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But that's why, I mean it's, it's that it didn't happen to, so it didn't happen to the Washington Post or it didn't happen to the New York Times, should, you know.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, by the way, let's, let's see the cleansing.

[Christine Rosen]

I was gonna say we don't know that there weren't versions of this.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right?

[Christine Rosen]

With the, I mean that's why the.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Joke about it, it's like the Jeffrey Epstein cover up.

[Matthew Continetti]

You mean take a moment to speculate what would have happened had she won the presidency. I mean if you have a candidate who can't do an interview with someone that her campaign hasn't paid, how on, how on earth would she have been the President of the United States? I mean that's why by feeling on election night was kind of this relief. It wasn't excitement or any, it was just kind of like, well we don't have to face four years of Harris who had a billion and a half dollars and it ended up in 20 million in debt. Someone points out in one of the newsletters, I think it was Josh Barrow points out in his newsletter you have a candidate who was running positive bio ads about how she was a prosecutor, she was combating the cartels. She knows, you know, she's not afraid to call out the criminals like Donald Trump in her ads or she's got it, she's got a gun, she says.

[Jon Podhoretz]

She'S got a Glock.

[Matthew Continetti]

And then on the weekend before the election she's asked about a high profile criminal justice proposition in California which would have actually repealed some of the pro criminal defendant rights measures she had advocated for. And she says I'm not going to talk about that now because it's right before the election. I'm not going to tell you what I think. Well, you're trying to be the president, you have to tell us what you think.

[Christine Rosen]

But this is, and this, but this disconnect was throughout all, almost every issue on her campaign. I was raised in a middle class family. Well, she's spending like a drunken sailor in her campaign. Like she doesn't spend like a middle class person spends. And the same thing with everything about her self presentation and her very deep blue, very wealthy, very highly educated California base was clear to people and she should have just leaned into it and said here's what I've learned even though I'm not like you. And she, you know, she never learned.

[Matthew Continetti]

I mean the mind, the mind reels Although one of our friends on Twitter x said, you know, starting to miss Tim Walls a little bit because at least he provided some comic relief. Yeah, I just watched the clips of him coming out on stage and, you.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Know, if you bring his hand, are you putting his hands on his heart?

[Matthew Continetti]

For those of us watching on YouTube.

[Christine Rosen]

Money doing cameo videos of his best.

[Matthew Continetti]

What did we live through? I think that's the question that some Americans will be thinking about during the holiday season. What just happened? Beginning in July of 2024 through election.

[John Podhoretz]

Day, this episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Argument against interest I want to mention one thing because Christine mentioned the line, her most notorious line. And Sunday night, as I think I told you guys, we had our commentary roast. We roast a notable figure in America or among American jewelry, whatever. This is something we've been doing for 14 years now. It's our major fundraiser. And this year the challenge was set very high because we decided to roast Natan Sharansky. The man who spent nine years in the gulag for the crime of wanting to emigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union and then got out, went to Israel, has been a sterling figure for for the last 40 years. Many people think he is the greatest living Jewish hero. And so the joke of the roast was, how do you roast Natan Sharansky and our columnist, Mayor Soloveitchik, Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik, who is in commentary every month with his Jewish commentary column and is one of the wittiest men alive, turned to me and said, of course I agreed to speak at this event because when will a rabbi ever notice to accept an invitation to speak? But you know, in trying to think of how on earth I was, I'm supposed to roast Natan Sharansky. I find myself silent. I can think of nothing to criticize him for in any way, shape or form. And I didn't know what to say. So I dug back into time immemorial, through the great moments in Jewish history. And I found the thing that we say when there is nothing else that we know how to say. I come from a middle class family, he said.

[Christine Rosen]

It brought down the house, too.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And it was. It was a genuinely great moment. And that. Yeah, that thing, like, in two years, you're gonna say, kamala Harris, what the hell was that? Yeah, what the hell happened there? How did this happen?

[Abe Greenwald]

And it already feels like that, though, doesn't it? It already feels that way.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Totally feels that way. And I was going to say argument against interest is that we obviously not fans of the Biden administration in almost any way. I mean, I honestly cannot think of a single thing that I think the Biden administration did with the.

[Matthew Continetti]

Our East Asian alliances.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay.

[Matthew Continetti]

That's the word. I give them that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay. Okay. That's the one thing. Okay. But not our ideological, strategic, tactical, pro America, whatever, cup of tea. And when in the beginning of January 2023, we began saying there is something wrong with the president, there is something off about the president as he is not acting like a person who is fully in control of his faculties, you people would have easily, if they were paying attention, dismissed us as being partisan or ideologically hostile. And so we were going with this cheap argument about his cognitive decline and all of that. And I feel like we could have saved the Democratic Party if they had listened to us. And I mean, not. We weren't the only people saying it. I'm not saying that. Obviously, there was a cannon.

[Christine Rosen]

Voters were telling them this in polls.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, 66% of the American people said, he's too old. You need to run somebody else. You know, something like that. But, I mean, we were sort of documenting it. People were documenting it. And the gaslighting was pretty amazing. I mean, Joe Scarborough went to see the president in April of 2024 and said he'd never seen anybody sharper. This was before he would crawl on his hands and knees to Mar a lago to lick Donald Trump's boot after Trump winning the election. Because when you sell your soul in this way, you can keep reselling it. But, I mean, there's no way that that was true, obviously. And he was just part of a gaslighting machine. And the ultimate result was that the world in which Joe Biden could have said at the beginning of 2023, I'm not running for reelection. I said I was going to be a bridge to the future. I have saved us from Donald Trump. Let's have a process by which we determine who the next president of the United States should be. Within the Democratic Party is an entirely different world. I don't know that Trump wouldn't have won. I don't know that they would have picked a candidate better than Harris. There's no way of knowing the party was still enthralled to every liberal shibboleth that you could possibly imagine that Harris was hit with. What candidate wouldn't have said the things about trans that she said or the things about or been bad on Israel and the Middle east and the war on terror the way she was and all that? That's all I think.

[Abe Greenwald]

But you know what? I think if Biden were sidelined earlier or before the fact of the campaign itself, it would have incentivized the idea that he's gone. Now we need someone really of the left here. People are tired of the old establishment Democrats now. This is our moment. He's moving aside and it could have been disastrous.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It could have been disastrous and it could still be disastrous, because that's my bet on where the Democratic Party goes now is not that it's going to shift to the center. The example of Seth Molten in Massachusetts is making it. It pretty clear that any candidate who sticks up his head and says, I think we went too far on some of these things is going to get street action, not all that dissimilar from the maga. Street action against candidates who were. Who did not sufficiently toe the line on Trump personally. That is now going to be leftist. Or for the Democrats, it will be leftist orthodoxy that if you try to move away from, you are going to meet the kinds of difficulties that no political candidate running for reelection wants to face. A primary challenge, controversy, people raising money against you, that kind of thing. That's why it's so important what's happening with Seth Molten as a kind of example of what's gonna go on in 25 and 26.

[Matthew Continetti]

This is why our colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Rui Teixura, writes in his weekly Liberal Patriot newsletter that the key move for the Democrats now is to throw the interest groups under the bus. If you don't have a Democrat in 2028 who does that, they'll be in trouble. You know, I mean, it's may have been Patrick Graffini who first pointed this out to me, but every successful president and presidential nominee runs against their own party. You can go back. I mean, really, you can go back to Reagan, who in 80 was running against the Nixon, Ford, Kissinger establishment. Right. Clinton, Carter. Carter was, yeah, Carter came out of.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Nowhere coming in to clean up this, you know, this disgusting stable. And it wasn't just the Republicans that he was right.

[Matthew Continetti]

Going to be cleaning up after McGovern. Right. And you had a kind of this. Oh, he's a southerner and he's right. So Clinton Then in 1992, running against the liberal mentality on welfare, on crime, on affirmative action. Bush in 2000, he's the compassionate conservative, unlike the Gingrich tough guys who wanted to cut your benefits. Obama in 08 defeating Hillary Clinton because she was for the Iraq war, she was the Democratic establishment. And of course Trump in 2016, who was not only against the Republican establishment, he was against the entire system of politics. So.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And Biden run in 2020, 20, 19, 2020, was all these new Democrats that seem to be dominating the party. They're all crazy and I'm sane. They're all listening to what they're saying.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah. I mean, it helped with. Right, it helped with having the Sanders there. But nonetheless, I still think for the Democrats, if you're going to have a successful nominee in the future, it will be someone who, like Seth Moulton, will be able to challenge some of these groups and gain credibility. And if you think about Harris, right, she never said that she differed with Biden or the Democratic Party on a single issue. And when she admitted it to Sunny Hostin on the View that she couldn't think of a single thing that she would do differently than Joe Biden, whose approval rating in the exit poll was 40%, she doomed her candidacy.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But this is the question. Is there a Democratic Party or are there only interest groups? Is the Democratic Party, as we understand, is a formal structure called the Democratic party. There are 50 state parties, there's a national party that raises money, all of that, but that party is a shell. And the shell is populated, dominated and controlled by the interest groups. So I don't know how you run against the interest groups because there's no body that's not in one or another interest group that you can swim. There's a body of water to swim in.

[Christine Rosen]

No, no, but they're winnable. There are a ton of up for grabs votes in each election now and that's this, this same rule applies.

[Jon Podhoretz]

You gotta get to the election.

[Christine Rosen]

Right, right. No, but like the MAGA vote, this is the same problem with the Republican Party and MAGA influence. Like there, there are a lot of people who vote one way or the other and aren't pro MAGA and aren't pro, you know, extreme left interest group. And this election showed they will shift. I mean, Asian American voters, Hispanic voters, I mean, you see younger voters, even they are registering his independence. They don't feel any loyalty. And so when you have a candidate who is a shell herself and just parrots what, you know, her, her people tell her to say and doesn't seem authentic. Yeah, they'll go Trump, we'll go with Trump. But the Republicans have this same challenge in the next election cycle for president, which is they've got to put someone up who can persuade those people to stay. And that will be a challenge for them, especially on the culture war issues, because they came in the fold this time, but that doesn't mean they're there to stay.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. So we have two different bodies of. So the Republican Party was also a party of interest groups in a different way, though, because the Republican Party was a sort of, not an alliance, but sort of a cohesive sort of, if you like America and you think government is too big, you lean toward the Republicans. If you're like, if patriotism and then there are other secondary things, or gun ownership, pro life, that kind of thing. But if you believed in free markets and you thought the government was too big and too intrusive and that you believed in the military and you believed in the projection of America, you were a Republican. And the Democrats became increasingly the identity politics party. Whereas if you were, if you were a minority, you were, if you were a Democrat, if you were, if you had this, you were that. You know, if you, if you were, if you were engaged in the effort to expand rights, that just meant that you were a Democrat. And now the Republican Party, no. Doesn't have its interest groups in the same way because of this colossus figure that broke down the ideological discipline of the party.

[Christine Rosen]

The voters who voted for Trump in the Cambridge University researchers just released this report. They were motivated. Like something like 80% of them care about the deterioration of traditional American values. And that's not what Trump stands for. I mean, he sort of says, make America great again. But his whole thing was, you know, a lot of his supporters are like, burn it all down and start from scratch. So there's.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I don't know. I don't know. Seth, Seth, our colleague now on vacation this week. Seth wrote this piece, which I think other people have pointed out. But he was like, the secret of this election is that Biden ran in 2020 saying, I want to restore normality to America after this incredibly disruptive, crazy period that was not only characterized by Trump's leadership, but also by Covid and all of that. And that who was the Normie party in 2024? Was Trump the abnormal person or was the party that said girls should be in boys should be in girls locker rooms and a 6 foot 2 inch swimmer with a man's body should be winning all the awards in collegiate swimming in the United States because, you know, that's only fair. They started seeming weird, right? The attack on Tim Walz's attack on J.D. vance for being weird was the great boomerang of 2024, because J.D. vance wasn't weird. I mean, I have problems with J.D. vance, but he wasn't weird. Tim Waltz was a little weird. Tim Waltz is like saying he did things in Vietnam he didn't do. You know, he did things in the military that he didn't do and that he. All that kind of stuff. And there's J.D. vance who was like, yeah, I served in the military. I have these views. I have. I have a wife and three kids. Go to bed, kids, you're really cute. My, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like he didn't seem like the accusation.

[Christine Rosen]

There's still. He had to shift a lot of his views to conform to the MAGA way of looking at the. There is an opportunity here, if you're a conservative for an entire several new generations of voters who care about a kind of new traditional values thing. It's not, it's secular, interestingly, it's not really about faith in the way that, you know, the sort of religious right was before. There is an opportunity. I just, I don't have a huge amount of confidence that MAGA isn't going to squander that. That's my concern.

[Abe Greenwald]

But it's like, you know, what's happened is the Republicans can now say to Americans, do you want to just order off the regular menu? Like, you know, you could just get the food as it comes with the, with all this, the normal sides that you'd pick, you know, you don't have to eat the vegan. We're not worried about your allergies or your this or your these prob. You know, you could just, you may not love it. It's not the best restaurant, it's not the best. But like, it's a big menu and there's stuff you'll recognize. There's food you can eat here.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I'm saying that the Democrat. Lucille.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not for long, by the way. Right?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, yeah. But I do think that the Democratic Party's problem is that the. Is that there is a gigantic vote in the middle. And this is. But how you get to the election where you can be the kind of person who can say, I hold the middle, I am the one that is more reflective of the kind of country that you want to live in. I don't know how they get there through the primary process because I think the groups of the Democratic Party are the party and they will control the money, they will control the street action, they will control the local delegate selections and things like that. And as I say, Seth Moulton, I think is the pregnant example here, which is, you know, does he make it to, does he make it through the primary process in 2026?

[Matthew Continetti]

So to kind of just take it back from speculation and thinking about the here and now, we mentioned on the podcast the other day that the Democratic caucuses in Congress have essentially maintained the leadership that led them to defeat in 2024. So there's no change there. And then I'm kind of fascinated by this emerging race for chairman of the Democratic National Committee because some of the names that are being tossed about are so old that it just speaks, I think, to an exhaustion in the party. You have, you know, Martin O'Malley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland. I don't, he hasn't been governor in 12 years, maybe or 10 years. He's thinking about running for chairman of the DNC. You have Rahm Emanuel, right. Former mayor of Chicago, ambassador to Japan, definitely somewhat former chief of staff to Barack Obama. He's thinking of running again. Somebody who's just been around for so long. I'd expect in a, in a party that knows what it's doing and that has a sense of purpose and mission to have more younger voices emerge in races such as this or in House leadership races. And we're not seeing that at all. I mean, who's really leading the resistance right now? It's Elizabeth Warren, you know, saying 74 years old. 74 years old. Saying that we have Bernie Sanders, 80, 83 years old.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Matthew Continetti]

So that's kind of for me in the here and now a sign that the Democrats don't have their act together. But of course, you know, the pendulum always swings back.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It's just, it will swing just a.

[Matthew Continetti]

Matter of how long it takes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It's just a question of whether or not, I'm just saying Trump. Seth's point was that Trump was the more normal of the two candidates. That's the amazing thing that the Democrats allowed to happen. This disruptive figure who gives the two hour rallies, who is it?

[Matthew Continetti]

He?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Harris couldn't answer a question. She gets the nomination without having to run for it.

[Abe Greenwald]

And Trump was also arguably more normal than Biden.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

Not just Harris.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think you should depersonalize it, though. It's not really the person.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[Matthew Continetti]

It's the views. And so when we talk about the most effective ad of the campaign, it's the Kamala is for they them. Donald Trump is for you. So it's less about Trump the person and his normality. I mean, he's so larger than life and everything. But it's about the fact that Donald Trump is like, yeah, I'm not going to spend taxpayer money for gender reassignment for illegal immigrants in prison. You know, I mean, that's a kind of gimme, you would think, in politics. But Harris never had an answer for it. And when you look at some of the surveys about what the Democratic Party stands for, John Byrne Maddock Murdoch, who's at the Financial Times, is a data journalist who's very sharp. He points out that over time, the number of people who say that the Democrats stand for the working person has collapsed, whereas the people who say that Democrats stand for the rights of cultural minorities has increased and this has spiked, while the Democrats are now the party of people with college degrees and higher and who do pretty well. So that's the real shift, is that the Republican Party of Trump is the party of basic neo traditional America. And as Christine says, it's not necessarily even religious America, that there's a heavily religious component. It's just that, yeah, you know, we don't think that you should defund the police. We don't think that you should reorganize society on this gender ideology that says there's no such thing as biological sex. Right. We don't think that you should force feed students in K through 12 and in higher education. This just Marxist mumbo jumbo. That's kind of where the party is. And it's helped, it's helped the party in the age of Trump.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Christine Rosen]

And that was what the media, that's where the media should have helped Harris by highlighting some of the way that message was landing. That Madison Square Garden rally. The only thing that anyone talked about afterwards in the mainstream media was obviously the joke about Puerto Rico. But Trump at that rally said, we will get men out of women's sports. We will make sure that that was one of his big applause lines that night. Nobody reported on that, but voters heard that, his voters heard that. And the normie voters definitely heard that message.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But I think that's that all of this together, taken together, goes to maybe something much, much simpler than what is it about trans or this or that. Democrats and liberals started to argue, I think from 2015 onward, things that when you reflected on them for more than two minutes. Were crazy. Let's have fewer cops. Is crazy. Let's have fewer cops because cops are mean to black people. And every day black people are getting assassinated by the police. And then our friend, publishing in Commentary and elsewhere, Wilfred Riley, tallied up the number of black people shot by cops in 2018, or something like that across the United States. And it was nine people. And so people kind of know that because I think they figure, you know, if a cop is shooting an unarmed civilian every single day in the country, like, there would be a news story about it every single day and would like, you know, and so they're like, wait, that doesn't pass the smell test. Closing schools and having people sit six feet apart when the word is that the virus. You have no evidence that the six feet is the six feet. And I know that was under Trump, but somehow we knew that Trump didn't really believe in it, but he was just pushing it. That doesn't sound right. And then you keep going to the. That doesn't sound. Suddenly you have this architecture, which is these people are building a crazy house. I don't want to live in. I want to live in a rational, like, girls are girls and boys are boys. Stop telling me that that's not true.

[Abe Greenwald]

There's another part of it which is that it's very easy to buy into crazy ideas when you don't have much else to worry about, which is why wealthy liberals still buy into these ideas. Right. But if you're in the rest of the country and you have experienced the American economy over the years, the inter. Those intervening years, you're off the crazy stuff. You don't, you're not going to, you don't have time to buy into the crazy anymore. This, these, the administration needs to respond to your problems now because you have problems and you have issues. So these are. I think that it's a total luxury to buy into these credits.

[Matthew Continetti]

And I think this is where maybe I do agree with Christine. It's that, you know, there's a danger, I think, for the Republicans in not recognizing that the main reason they won this election was the inflation and the economy and the cultural stuff is part.

[Abe Greenwald]

Of it, for sure.

[Matthew Continetti]

But that Trump's main. And the foreign policy stuff is part of it, too. Right. But Trump's main mission here is to get the economy to a place where people feel is there, that their life fortunes are improving and that you have rising incomes with stable prices. And it was the lack of that under Biden and the Biden administration's refusal to admit it. I mean, up to the day of the election, the Biden folks and the Harris folks are saying, the economy is great. It's the best economy in the world. We're doing so much better than Europe. Think about that for a second. How the heck does a person living in Michigan know what the economy in Europe is like? They don't work in Europe. There's no way for them to compare other than to have some economists tell them, well, according to this chart, our economy is much better than Europe. Voters are thinking about what's happening to them, not what's happening to them vis a vis some third party. So that, I believe, drove the election more than anything else. And it would be a mistake for Trump and MAGA to say, well, now that we have this, we can embark on our goal of completely seizing the institutions, tearing them apart, deconstructing the administrative state. Okay, that's one of your goals. But if you do that instead of addressing the economy, then you're going to run into trouble in two years.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And, of course, the question, the big question here, because I think we can all agree that Trump has to perform for the Republican Party to solidify the gains of this election. People have to think that this presidency was a successful presidency, which they did not believe in November of 2020 when they voted him out, I think largely because of COVID obviously. And that's an irreproducible crisis, let's hope. But they're going to have to feel that he improved things materially, and therefore the Republican message or the party that he took over or whatever has answers that the Democratic Party demonstrated it did not. And it's an open question about whether the economic agenda of the Trump administration can get anywhere near performing that way. And I say it's an open question, because if their signature economic policy is going to be tariffs, even if the tariffs have positive consequences in some fashion or other in certain elements of, you know, making countries lower, you know, do stuff so that they don't trigger the tariffs or more jobs, more plants are located in the United States than in China or in India, aggregate over time. Tariffs are inflationary. They are just inflationary by, as a matter of fact, they raise the price of goods, and the price of goods is then passed on to voters. And he has a catch 22 because he loves them, because they're fantastic. It means essentially that you think you're taxing essentially people in China so you don't have to raise taxes in the United States to fund the government and do the things that you want. But the way the system of our economy works is that in the end, a good is a good and it's paid for by the person who buys it or he won't buy it, in which case there is no economic growth. Or if he buys it and it costs 35 cents more than it would otherwise because the tariff has raised the price of it, you get inflation. So either you get low growth or you get inflation, or you get a combination of the two. And so we are where it's very unclear that what if the tariffs end.

[Abe Greenwald]

Up being like the wall of 2016?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, I think he built some walls escape. Right. That he put some tariffs on. But of course he said he wants to do a tariff right. That says. Right. Which is, I guess, like the wall. But that's why I say the jury is out on Matt's absolutely like the Occam's razor reason for this election going the way it went is that the inflation killed the Biden administration off and that making sure that it doesn't come back or that it keeps going down and that economic growth that people see measurable increases in the wages or those wage increases aren't eaten away by inflation is his sole economic challenge. Now he's got a huge one coming because the tax cuts of 2017 expire at the end of 2025, and the entire tax code is going to have to be written again because of the expiration of the tax cuts. And that's also going to be something no one's even talked about. That is. That is like a massive, mammoth thing to have the entirety of the structure of the tax code.

[Matthew Continetti]

We can fix that on Monday.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, good.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yes, we'll deal with the tax code on Monday.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, we're going to fix.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah, we didn't talk about this, so I'm springing this on John, so you can, like, cut. Cut this out if it's not. But we were talking about a recommend, and since we talked about the roast, can I make a very meta recommend, which is there was a delightful young man who came to our roast and he took it upon himself because he's a podcast listener, to create an X account for our recommendations so that people could find them. And wait, I have it here. And he made. They made this, like, graphic of us for those of you.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. So if you're watching on YouTube, you can see the graphic. Yes.

[Christine Rosen]

And it's just he performed this really lovely podcast public service, and I regret that I do not recall his exact name. So I apologize for that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

We will tell you it on Monday.

[Matthew Continetti]

We'll get it, we'll find out his name.

[Christine Rosen]

But I feel like we should recommend the, recommend the Recommendation X feed because it's a great place to find everything we recommend on the daily. And he.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yes, so that is right. It's omentaryrecommends on X and he. And he puts out. We don't have one today, so maybe I should just throw one in.

[Christine Rosen]

Go for it.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Off the top of my head, I'm worried that I'm bidening out and that I mentioned this earlier this week. So if I did, I apologize, but I don't think we've done our recommends this week. So I may have talked about it somewhere else. There's a book by the actor Tim Matheson. Tim Matheson, best known as Otter in National Lampoon's Animal House. Eric Stratton. The book is called Damn glad to meet you, which is of course Otter's signature line in Animal House. And it is a memoir. It is a pretty stunning portrait of guy from a horrible family kid. It's two drunken parents. But he, at the age of nine or ten is seized with the idea that he wants to be an actor. And he lives in Los Angeles and he starts going on auditions and he starts getting cast and stuff. And he, it's about a person who almost makes it at every stage of his career. He almost makes the leap into the A level but he never quite does and he's perfectly aware that he never quite does. And first it's television and then it's. And then it's movies because he has this incandescent, you know, like star making performance that he can't really capitalize on and he makes bad choices and he has messy personal life and it's, it's about somebody who gets a six or seven decade career and has this one sort of iconic performance but is basically a struggling journeyman in many ways for the entirety of his life. And the great story in the book is about how he goes into the Marine reserve because he is in the late 60s and he is going to be drafted. So he goes into the Marine reserve and his key thing that he realizes he has to do is make it make make sure that nobody knows that he is on TV shows. Because if his fellow recruits and if his drill sergeants know that he is some kind of prissy Hollywood boy who, you know, thinks he's so high and mighty that he gets to be on tv, his life will not be worth a plug Nickel. And so he hides it, and he hides it. He hides the fact. But he had just been in a movie called Yours, Mine and Ours, which is a movie about a two, two couple blended family, sort of like the Brave Bunch only have 12 children. Henry Fonda is the father and Lucille Ball is the mother. And there was going to be this moment where Lucille Ball did a number with all 12 kids on the Ed Sullivan show and Tim Matheson cannot go because he is in basic training. And so he says, I can't go. And they're like, okay. And then Lucille Ball calls Bob Hope and Bob Hope calls the Marine Corps commandant and says, can you get this kid out so she can go do this show with Lucille Ball for three days in New York? And it happens. And he spends months in terror. Now they're all in basic training, so they're not watching the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday night like everybody else in America. But he spends months terrified that they're gonna find out because he got. Not only was he on tv but like he got leave to go be on TV in this number. And then they do find out through some different modality, and they do in fact, beat the absolute crap out of him. But it's an interesting story because he says, I was anti war, but I wanted to serve my country. And. And I never really figured out where I fit on the ideological spectrum. The book's called Damn Glad to Meet you. It's by Tim Matheson, and it's a story of a very singular American career. I do have a particular fascination for these kind of like second rank showbiz memoirs. So I'm letting you know that if you haven't figure that out already, so that, you know, maybe much of the detail in it will be of the incredible.

[Christine Rosen]

I love how tolerant we are of our weird literary fetishes because you guys are so tolerant of my dystopian Japanese fiction. We like the memoirs.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. The science fiction. I did download the Book of Skulls, Matt Robert Silver, which you recommended earlier this week. So I'm going to read it on a train today. Anyway, so we did. We're not going to do recommends, but because of Christine's Hail Mary play to recommend the Twitter feed recommends you. Now, there will be something for that lovely gentleman to put up today. And we will. We will cite his name on Monday.

[Matthew Continetti]

And thank him again when we fix the tax code.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, we're fixing the tax cut on Monday. And so until then. Yes. Yeah. Everybody write down one good idea. So until then, for Abe, Christine and Adam, John pod horse.