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- [00:00]
James Kirchik
Foreign. Expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best.
- [00:23]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, June 22, 2026. I am John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:35]
Eliana Johnson
Hi, John.
- [00:36]
John Podhoretz
Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [00:39]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
And Commentary's Washington Commentary columnist, James Kirchik. Hi, Jamie.
- [00:47]
James Kirchik
Hi, John. How are you?
- [00:48]
John Podhoretz
I am terrible, thank you very much. I mean, I'm good. I had a good Father's Day. I had a lovely time. Everything else is going to hell. J.D. chamberlain is having a really wonderful time in Switzerland bringing peace for our time. Latest developments as we start are that it's great that we're going to be giving Iran money. If we give Iran money, because we're going to make them buy our farming products and feed the Iranian people and enrich our farmers, thus giving new life to the. We are going to sell ourselves the rope to give to them to hang us. As Lenin said of the useful idiots of the early 1920s and the capitalists who wanted to do business inside the nascent Soviet Union. He's also very excited. I don't know if you noticed this. He's extremely excited because this. They're creating a deconfliction mechanism to deal with the ceasefire in Iran, in Lebanon, that A, doesn't exist and B, this mechanism, it's a really fantastic mechanism because even though Israel is one of the two combatants in Lebanon is not part of the deconfliction mechanism. So there are two combatants, it's Hezbollah and Israel. Lebanon is not a combatant the country, because Lebanon is actually not fighting. And if it were fighting, it would actually be fighting Hezbollah. Nobody else is fighting. It's Israel and Hezbollah. And they're creating a deconfliction mechanism, I guess, just to pressure Israel not to do what Israel has to do, or something like that. So we have peace for our time. Everything is great. It's really cool because we're talking to the Iranians and no one's ever, oh, and finally they're going to let IAEA inspectors in. Well, guess what? The 2015 JCPOA deal between the Obama administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran featured IAEA inspectors going into Iran. So we will have bombed Iran for, you know, six weeks and done everything that we did and have every effect that we had, and we're going to end up giving them money and our way out of the nuclear peril is to have inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency who were there a of lot 11 years ago. And so it's really just sensational. What a negotiating triumph for our Vice president. I am and the administration, I am blown away. I really, really, really would love it if he. I'm going to put my apartment on the market and I would really love it if JD Wanted to buy it because I would price my apartment at like $20 million and then he would say, no, no, no, no, no, it's 30 million. And then he would pay me 30 million.
- [04:13]
Eliana Johnson
Well, if you make it Witkoff, because Witkoff would offer whatever and then the Qataris would bail him out if he needed, as has happened before.
- [04:20]
James Kirchik
So.
- [04:20]
John Podhoretz
Right, okay, so then I would get 40 million from the Qataris if the Qataris were involved anyway. It's an enormous embarrassment. I don't know how you can look at it any other way. By which I mean even if there are good reasons to do what we're doing, like we have to, our munitions have run out, we don't have any more targets. We need to do something to get the straight open to prevent an American or worldwide recession. Even if you believe that all that is necessary, how we are going about this is about as badly as you could possibly go about it, I believe. Unless somebody wants to argue with me.
- [05:01]
Seth Mandel
Well, my only quibble with you, John, would be I think we can take issue with some of Vance's rhetoric, but I do think blaming him entirely is a mistake. I think this is what Trump wants to do. Trump wanted to bring this to a close because of the political calendar. And in doing so, he decided to concede quite a bit to the Iranians. In fact, this deal stipulates that they will not negotiate on the nuclear issue at all until there's peace for our time in Lebanon, the removal of the US Naval blockade and the release of their frozen assets. And meantime, so they get quite a bit of relief before they even begin negotiating on the nuclear issue, which I think is their goal, just to forestall all negotiations on the nuclear issue that will go on in perpetuity. In the meantime, it's shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has not resumed at pre war levels, which is what they're supposed that that's the only thing that they are bound to do that does not happen. So every time the President makes a threat, every time Israel drops a bomb, you know, defensively in Lebanon, they cite that to maintain a chokehold on the strait, I think they will go back to exercising some degree of control over the strait. And I don't really think the president's threats, which, you know, he was threatening Iran over the weekend because Hezbollah murdered four Israeli soldiers and said, you know, if they don't comply, they won't even have a country to go back to. I don't really.
- [06:52]
John Podhoretz
He also threatened them. He also said, like, basically, he said he was going to shoot their plane down when they left Switzerland.
- [07:00]
Seth Mandel
They won't have a country to go back to.
- [07:02]
John Podhoretz
They won't get back. No, they won't. They won't. They won't get back to Iran.
- [07:06]
Seth Mandel
But. So I don't think his. His.
- [07:08]
John Podhoretz
That's a. That's a credible threat.
- [07:09]
Seth Mandel
His threats of resuming the bombing are really credible until after the midterm elections. So. But. So I think it's, you know, I do think that the vice President believes in what the. In the strategy the president has turned to, but I think it's a little bit of a mistake to bl. Do, you know, to point the finger at him entirely.
- [07:30]
John Podhoretz
It's just. I'm only using his words. So take it as the administration strategy. And he's selling the administration strategy. And his way of selling the administration strategy is to make a series of arguments. And the arguments are horrific. That is to say, they echo Neville Chamberlain. They echo every bad negotiation that the United States has ever been in with a totalitarian country that we have or that the west has been and that we have come out on the losing side of. And it is as though he does not know that. They don't know that. There. There are things that they could say and do which they say, you know, got to get shipping going. We are. We are. You know, we've done. We've done as much damage as we think is necessary to make it clear to the Iranians how serious we are. And we are willing to negotiate for a period of 60 days on the nuclear issue to get them to give us the nuclear materials or to destroy them. But, you know, we're not happy about it. And we're not, you know, we're not dancing and celebrating and saying, this is really cool because of the first time in 47 years Iranians and Americans are talking together, which, again, this is something J.D. vance said, as though there weren't direct negotiations between Iran and the United States from 2013 to 2015 between Zarif and our Secretary of State, John Kerry, and many, many, many subgroups of.
- [09:05]
Eliana Johnson
Well, but also this. I mean, this is something that we should, you know, harp on because the US And Iran recognize each other's existence, right? So it's not like when we say, oh, it's historic that Israel and Lebanon, that the Israeli ambassador has met the Lebanese ambassador in public, in daylight, in Washington, and Rubio has his arms around them or whatever. This is. This is. We talk to the Iranians all the time and have been talking to them since the nuclear issue cropped up in the 90s. There is communication between us and the Iranians. They use this talking point against George W. Bush by saying, well, we should try diplomacy. That's what Obama was doing. He was trying to. We tried it Bush's way, and now we're going to try the Obama way, which is diplomacy. As if there wasn't diplomacy between the US And Iran. As if, like Bush just. He didn't have them in. He didn't have them in his contacts list. He got a new phone and he couldn't transfer. I've done this, too. You go from Android to an iPhone and then it's a whole thing, you know, to move your contacts over. No way to get in touch with someone from Iran in the modern world. And so finally, Obama did, because he's on this WhatsApp chat, you know, with so and so and so. It's ridiculous. We talk to the Iranians. We talk to everyone. We negotiate with. So do the Israelis. We talk to everybody. There's constant communication. It's just a different form. But the, the idea that the Iranians don't know what we want them to do and what we want them to know, and we also don't know that information coming from the other direction, that's preposterous. And I think people need to recognize that because it's used as a talking point to defend any kind of deal, as if we never saw their face before, we never heard the sound of their voice before, and all that stuff. And of course, you know, you're going to hear things you don't like, because we're trying something new and all that. None of this is new. Diplomacy with Iran isn't new. People have done it before. And so it just has to be done responsibly like anything else.
- [11:20]
John Podhoretz
JD so JD Vance is saying it because he is desperately trying to come up with a reason why this negotiation, this night is not like any other night, because on this night, we surrender reclining, whereas other nights we surrender standing up, were sitting up. Jamie. So that's, I think, what Vance is trying to do, whether he knows it or he doesn't know it. I was having conversation with somebody who's been talking to people in the administration who are defending what's going on with the deal and why they're doing it and all of that, which it all goes to the idea that we're going to do this 60 days, whatever. And then, as Eliana sort of alluded to, maybe the Iranians don't do what we want, and then we go back to war. On a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being we will go back to war at some point after the 60 days, and zero being we will never go back to war during the Trump administration, where would you, from 0 to 100, put that number?
- [12:33]
James Kirchik
I think I'd put it around 30, 35, just because Trump is so unpredictable. But I do think that this ultimately was about what Eliana said was the political calendar in this war from the beginning. And I understood this and maybe other people did or did not. It was always going to be about Donald Trump's political pain threshold. Like, if the US had accomplished everything we had wanted, God willing, inshallah, in two months or six weeks, that would have been great and we would all be happy and Trump would have declared a victory. There was no scenario in which this was going to be an extended campaign, because ultimately this is about Donald Trump, his own personal political fortunes. He might talk or talk a tough talk on Iran, and he's certainly done, let's be clear, he's certainly done more than any US President to degrade their program. But that doesn't mean that he was going to be willing to risk his political legacy in terms of the midterm elections or a long, protracted, potentially very difficult military campaign, I don't think he was ever going to do that. And so if there's a scenario in which, let's say there's a flagrant violation of the terms, and the President is presented with an option whereby he can do something quick and fast, lightning, send a message, I think that's, that's a possibility. But in terms of engaging in another kind of protracted campaign, military campaign is difficult for me to imagine.
- [14:11]
John Podhoretz
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It's understandable that you don't cease your activities until you've signed everything on the dotted line. But supposedly this memorandum of understanding was signed Thursday that obliged them to open the Strait of Hormuz. That was like the we were going to end our blockade on them. And they were going to open the Strait of Hormuz, and then the negotiations were going to go to how we're going to negotiate over the rest of whatever is going on between us. So the provocation goes on. Trump is saying, I'll blow you out of the sky. You won't have an effing country left to go back to. And now he's just like anger in, inside out. He's just sitting there in his office with head steam coming out of his head and no potency like this is. Those tweets are an expression of impotence, not of power. You don't say what he's saying and then get no concessions from the Iranians and then go back and say it. That's like the worst thing that you can possibly do anyway. So should we move on to the question of Israel? Because, of course, last week, J.D. vance started laying the groundwork for blaming Israel for everything that's going to go wrong. And now the Hezbollah aspect of this peace deal. Just pull back and think for a second. Iran says Hezbollah is the main issue. The Lebanon. Lebanon is now the main issue. What the f. Why is Lebanon the main issue? We and Israel bombed Iran. We bombed Iran. We, you know, are closed, blockading their ships. We in Israel decapitated their leadership. VAs with Hezbollah and Lebanon. That's Israel defending itself against an Iranian proxy firing missiles and drones into Israeli territory. Iran is changing the subject by saying, you can't make any more peace with us on the war that we're fighting with you unless you make this other thing happen over here. That's crazy. I mean, it's also Iran essentially implicitly acknowledging that Hezbollah is part of its military structure. And Israel is now in a position where they have now exposed that Iran has this major tunneled drone facility built in the side of a mountain. They're in an electoral campaign in which Bibi Netanyahu is going to be fighting for his political life, and they cannot let that mountain stand. They are going to blow up that mountain in southern Lebanon. They're going to blow it up. It's going to happen. I don't know when, but it is going to happen because Bibi will win three seats. You know, Bibi's party won't make the electoral cutoff in Israel if they don't blow up that mountain. Talk about handing everybody an issue to beat him up with. And then Iran says the deal is null and void, and then Trump has to go back to war or not. And, JD what they can now do is say, this is all Israel's fault. We told Israel not to. And Bibi's reckless, and he blows up apartment buildings, and now he blows up mountains and whatever. So that's point two here. And Vance says, and then I'm going to stop monologizing. I hear from all these hawks that Israel doesn't like the deal. Well, that shouldn't matter to us. I just want to make clear I don't like the deal because it's bad for the United States. It happens to be bad for Israel. Most things that are bad for the United States are bad for Israel. It's bad for the United States that we're surrendering to the Iranian logic that they get to keep Hezbollah safe. That's also bad for the United States. It indicates the limits of our influence or our power or our ability to work our will on a country that we went to war with. But, you know, this idea somehow that he is gonna tag people like us with being Israel first when he is America, when he is America last, and he is now effectively representing Iranian interests at the negotiating table. As far as I can tell, he's the one who should be in shackles. He's the one who's coming out and expressing Iranian talking points as though they were American talking points. But that's where they're going.
- [22:19]
James Kirchik
Can I just. I found his attacks on Israel, the Israeli government over the past week, just extremely gratuitous and completely unnecessary. And it seems like he's doing them to appease Tucker, frankly. These are being. He's saying these things to appeal to that Tucker audience. And, you know, this has gotten to the point now where it's very clear that this is who J.D. vance is. This is who he's appealing to within the Republican Party. And it worries me because he's a political animal. And he wouldn't be doing this, I don't think, if he didn't think that it would help him, if it wasn't politically advantageous. And I think we like to tell ourselves that the Tucker wing is not that big. It's exaggerated. There's a lot of bots. There's a lot of foreign influence. He doesn't have a lot of subscribers. The fact that J.D. vance is going out of his way to say these things again and again and again says to me, either he's so extremely online that he's just completely lost any sense of reality, and I don't really think that's true, or. Or he's reading the room, he's reading the GOP primary, he's reading where the party is, and he seems to think that these attacks on Israel are politically advantageous to him.
- [23:31]
John Podhoretz
Well, okay, so Magro, go ahead.
- [23:33]
Seth Mandel
One thing, quick. Yeah. I think this, this goes to show that again, Trump allowed in agreeing to this peace deal. One of the most damaging things in the deal was linking Lebanon to everything else, and it was important to Tehran, which is now citing Hezbollah's attack, Israel's response to Hezbollah's attacks as a reason to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. And I think it goes to show that one of Iran's goals was precisely what is happening, which is to drive distance between Washington and Israel, Washington and Jerusalem. That was the point. And that is what's happening. And that is why it was a huge mistake to have any linkage here. But I do think there's room. Like, you're right, this is who Vance is, but it is not who Trump is. And I do think Trump will come back around after the election.
- [24:40]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah, well, he's, he's indicated as such that he's not, so he's not 100% comfortable, I think, with how far out on that angry at Israel limb JD has gone because in the past few days, he, he's been talking about Bibi and Israel and he's been saying things like, Bibi is a warrior and BB is great and, you know, all that stuff. And so Trump has a way of talking about even allies that can be critical, but also with a kind of almost weird, you know, uncle type love, you know, a fatherly love, some, some sort of avuncular, you know, affection, and where it sounds like, ah, I'm on this crazy guy, he's crazy. What's he doing? He's bombing buildings in Lebanon, whatever. But 10 minutes later, he'll be out there saying, Bibi is, you know, a warrior and all this stuff. And I, I, I, I see this happening. The fact that they're happening simultaneously is very interesting because instead of leaving the floor to JD at the same time on the same day, you might see each of them give a speech in which they talk about Israel in very different terms. And one is the president and one is the vice president. And I don't think that he loves the extent of JD's Israel rhetoric. I think he would like him to rein it in a bit. Obviously he could get him to do that, though, is the other thing. Right? He could, theoretically, he could text them and say knock it off or tone it down, and he's not doing that. So it's interesting because he doesn't Trump doesn't want the message from this administration to be Israel is bad, they're ruining everything. But he's not stopping that message from getting out. And he could.
- [26:37]
Matt Ebert
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show podcast Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [27:12]
John Podhoretz
When you get momentum, you step on the gas.
- [27:15]
Eliana Johnson
That's how you get separation from everybody else.
- [27:17]
James Kirchik
I was at Harvard Law School. I looked up, let me tell you something.
- [27:20]
Matt Ebert
There's kids in my neighborhood putting in Sheetrock that are smarter than you.
- [27:23]
James Kirchik
AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical
- [27:27]
John Podhoretz
blue collar trade skill.
- [27:29]
Eliana Johnson
And the guy just looked at me
- [27:30]
John Podhoretz
and he said it's bloody impossible.
- [27:32]
James Kirchik
So I asked him this question.
- [27:33]
Matt Ebert
I said, it's impossible. Unless that's podcrash with me. Matt Ebert Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts, from the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders who worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the best leaders podcasts from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:50]
John Podhoretz
Jamie, you pointed out that he's trying to talk to Tucker, right? Or he's trying to appease the Tucker Wing. But okay, we don't even know what that is. We don't know what the Tucker Wing is. According to the spring survey of the Reagan Institute, which does quarterly surveys of public opinion, 51% of self described MAGA Republicans say they wanted the US to install new leadership in Iran, while just 25% preferred a peace deal. Now, I've got to confess, this number surprised me. Like, I would expect that people who Republicans who don't define themselves as MAGA would be like 80, 20 regime change. This is twice as many Republicans who call themselves MAGA would like the Iranian regime to be replaced as want us to negotiate a peace.
- [29:49]
James Kirchik
When was that poll?
- [29:51]
John Podhoretz
It was taken June 2nd or something like it was before the deal.
- [29:55]
James Kirchik
Yeah.
- [29:56]
John Podhoretz
The Democrat numbers, by the way, are literally flipped the other way. But it's a serious survey. It's like a, you know, like they do this May 26th, June 3rd. Okay, so 1555 respondents. It's generally thought of as a credible survey. Now Trump changes his tune. Maybe MAGA Republicans believe, you know, that he needs to have his head and they're following him and they'll follow him where he goes. But their instinct is not the Tucker instinct. They're left to their own devices. They support regime change. Now, Trump doesn't says he didn't want regime change, though that was never really entirely credible. Why would you blow up the entire leadership of a country if you didn't want new leaders and therefore a new regime to come into power?
- [30:51]
Seth Mandel
I mean, at the same time, he's bragging that we have regime change.
- [30:55]
John Podhoretz
Right. He says we have regime change. Right. And Vance is sort of going along with that by saying we're talking to very reasonable people. Not like before. They're so reasonable. They're really, you know, we're really able to talk to them. Vance himself says he's like never been in an international negotiation. Like, how does he know whether they're more reasonable or less reasonable than the prior regime? From everything we can tell that this new regime, this iteration of the Islamic Republic, is likely more hardline than the Mojtaba and Vahini regime is more hardline than the prior regime. But fine, whatever. What do you make of that? What do you make of the fact that the Republican party's hardliners, Trump, favoring hardliners, aren't following the Tucker line?
- [31:52]
James Kirchik
I mean, I think on foreign policy in particular, voters can be fickle. We saw that with Donald Trump when he came into the election in 2015. Right. This was a party that was still, you could say, George W. Bush's party, John McCain, Mitt Romney, those are the foreign policy views of that party. And he gradually really turned the party in a non interventionist direction. And I think JD Vance is singularly focused on power and becoming president of the United States he got the opportunity to be vice president, he took it, and he's basically gonna do and say what he needs to appeal to the president, who's his boss. But when given the opportunity, he will go out there on the limb and he will say what he really thinks. And that's what he's been doing the past week and a half, two weeks, making these gratuitous attacks on Israel, basically showing his true skin. And I think that that's what he's gonna. He's gonna try to do what Donald Trump did in 2016. Right. Which is sort of impose his own policy views on the party. And I don't think it's gonna be as successful just because I think Trump is a singular political talent and for all the reasons that make him unique, for better or worse. But that's kind of how I read Vance and what he's doing.
- [33:11]
John Podhoretz
So he's making a bet, and he's actually making a bet that I think, though, to my distress, isn't unwise. If you have to make a bet, like any person who was a serious candidate for the presidency, as Trump himself said when he started running, has like a 20% chance of winning. That's. You have to get to the nomination. So it's like a 20% chance of winning. So he is aligned with a certain view in the party, and what he needs is for the Republican Party to keep moving in a direction favorable to him. You would ordinarily say that he would want to move to where the Republican Party was to get the electorate, but everything's in flux. And he's betting, I think, on views of Israel that we've already seen totally transform the Democratic Party, that that's going to happen with the Republican Party over the next year, year and a half, two years. There are little bits of evidence that younger Republicans, you know, are feeling negatively toward Israel, though way more. They feel way more positively than young, younger Democrats who are like now 80% hostile to Israel. But of course, a young people tend not to vote in primaries. But it's also the case that he needs movement, he needs this to happen because there are going to be forces in the Republican Party aligned against this attack on, on Israel.
- [34:44]
Seth Mandel
I don't. I'm not sure, John. I mean, he is the sitting vice president and he's in the pole position for the nomination. So, sure, I think people will challenge him for the nomination, but he's. He's the favorite. I'm not sure how much he really needs. And he will use his position as the favorite. To, to shape and mold the party in his image in the, in the same way that I think Trump has done in a, in a lot of.
- [35:16]
John Podhoretz
So I think he's the favorite by default, not because the party. I mean, I don't know. Again, these are all like guest surmises based on nothing. His polling as the favorite is not as good as it should be. His numbers are not as high as they should be. They're in the 30s or the 40s, not in the 60s or the 70s, which is what you might expect they would be as the potential leader. So I think there's a lot more room there and that he still needs to look. George H.W. bush, who was the vice president to the most successful president of the post war era by many reckonings, had seven people running against him and he lost Iowa and he almost lost New Hampshire to Bob Dole in 1988. That was, he did not walk into that nomination. Bush, that was a hard pull and he had to work really hard to win. And Vance is weaker than he is and not as politically savvy as he is and does not have the relationships with the Republican Party that Bush had. Now, you don't have to have that much now the way you did then. But I don't think you should look at this and say Vance has it so strongly that he can start shaping the party's future. He's got to win the party over first. And that means that generally Speaking, like George H.W. bush did, he moves toward them and he becomes anti abortion, he becomes a gun nut, he becomes, you know, he becomes a social conservative out of nowhere, having run himself eight years earlier as a moderate, you know, who was standing against tax cuts and everything that Reagan stood for. So he had to switch and win over people. And Vance will have to win people over. Like, it's not, he's not just going to take it. The party won't let him take it. There are all these people who, this is their last shot. Like, if Glenn Youngkin ever wants to run for president, he's gotta do it now. If Doug Burgum wants to take another shot at running for president, he's gotta do it now. Like, you know, there's no reason for them to simply cede it to Vance unless they, you know, they don't wanna take their shot and lose. So that's where I think we're in. We're in disagreement. But Israel is in a lot of peril here because it matters that the vice President of the United States is setting it up. As the fall guy for the defeat in this war or for the defeat of this negotiation, which is the other way of looking at it. Right. We don't think that there's ever going to be a peace deal signed. Right. Like, we don't actually think at the end of the 60 days, Trump and Mojtiba Khamenei are going to sit down together and sign a document at the
- [38:29]
Seth Mandel
end of the 60 days, we're gonna get another 60 days and another 60 days until after November, in which case we might get something different. But nothing's gonna happen at the end of 60 days.
- [38:37]
Eliana Johnson
Okay, well, they have to sign something. Cause what are the Iranians going to eat if not the corn grown by American farmers that J.D. vance has promised them?
- [38:48]
John Podhoretz
That is very important. And you know they are gonna get. I mean, the incentives for the Iranians are growing by the hour. So maybe they should sign. I mean, this in a weird way. People who are hawks have been sort of like hoping that the Iranians would figure out a way to tank the deal to force Trump's hand to actually win the war that he started and seems to be walking away from. But the Iranians seem to have wised up and are not going to handle hand the continuation of the war to the Iran hawks on the silver platter. Jamie, you're a Europe person. As the 2000 year old man says, you love Europe. You have a locker in Europe. Keep your stuff. So this amazingly weird thing just happened. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, resigned today and as I recall, two years ago he won the largest landslide in British history. I think he won four. The Labour won 417 mandates.
- [40:02]
James Kirchik
Yes.
- [40:03]
John Podhoretz
And now he's the seventh. He will have been the seventh prime minister in 10 years, though the other six were all members of the Conservative Party.
- [40:14]
James Kirchik
Right.
- [40:15]
John Podhoretz
What the hell is going on?
- [40:18]
James Kirchik
Well, the landslide's a bit overstated because you have to understand, Britain has a first past the post system similar to our congressional system. So while they may have won a lot of individual seats, that doesn't mean that they actually had a huge percentage of the vote. I think they only got something like 34, 35% of the national vote. But the way it translates into their system is that they get all these many, many seats.
- [40:43]
John Podhoretz
They have a large overhang divided among four parties. So it's not like the Conservative got. It's all like the servants got 60% of the vote.
- [40:51]
James Kirchik
No, no, of course. Right, right. He got a plurality. Yes, they got a plurality, but it wasn't like this massive. I'm just saying in reality, it's not as big as in public perception as you might think. He really started becoming unpopular, really months into the administration and there were some unpopular decisions that he made that we won't get into here in terms of domestic politics. And like, for instance, not sort of cutting a winter fuel allowance for elderly people and poor people and stuff like that. And it started going downhill. But you've seen this broader, just political fragmentation in the uk and this is a country that used to have three parties, the Tories, the Liberals in the center and Labor. And now it has, you could say six parties, maybe even seven, depending on if you count the Wealth Nationalist Party. And then the main insurgent party is this Reform Party, right, which is Nigel Farage's party. It was the UKIP many years ago by getting Britain out of the uk. Now that Britain is out of the uk, the main issue is immigration.
- [41:56]
John Podhoretz
Out of the eu.
- [41:56]
James Kirchik
Sorry, out of the eu.
- [41:58]
John Podhoretz
Excuse me, out of the eu.
- [41:59]
James Kirchik
Getting Britain out of the eu, which they've accomplished. And now the issue is immigration. And there's been a number of incidents, crimes involving high profile, crimes involving migrants that reform has sort of jumped on. And there have been. I was in London actually a couple weeks ago. There was this massive rally that this sort of provocateur named Tommy Robinson, who's kind of a former football hooligan, who's sort of become a political activist, far right political activist. They held a rally in downtown central London, really going after Keir Starmer from the right, but also within his party, he's being attacked by the left. Jeremy Corbyn, he actually did a very good job when he took over the Labour Party way back in 2020. He expelled Corbyn and kind of the Corbynites out of the party. But that created a lot of residual bitterness on the left. You've seen the rise of the Green Party, which is the other kind of surprising party that's emerged from nowhere. The Green Party has now become a kind of quasi Islamist eco leftist party. It's led by a Jewish gay guy named Zach Polanski, who's just. He makes Brad Lander look like a right wing revisionist Zionist. Okay. In terms of his, you know, his personal relationship with the Jewish community, put it that way, and the extent to which he's willing to go sell them out for political power. I mean, his co leader, the deputy leader of the party, is a guy whose wife is basically covered head to toe in a baya. Right. So this is not going to. This sort of alliance here between progressives and the reactionary Islamist right. And you're already seeing that the support for the Greens is really collapsing because I think these sort of internal tensions that were obvious in such a pairing have become too much for people to take. But yeah, I mean, Britain has now become a basket case and it's probably the most politically unstable country in Western Europe. I mean, France, they have governments that kind of collapse and fall. But Macron is, you know, staying in power and whatnot. Whereas as you point out, this is, you know, the next prime minister will be the eighth in 10 years.
- [44:15]
John Podhoretz
These are Italy numbers. These are like Italian.
- [44:17]
James Kirchik
Yeah. And Meloni has actually been. Meloni has been the longest serving Italian prime minister ever. I think she's been there for three and a half years.
- [44:25]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so what's, I guess, of interest to us is the degree to which we can. You pointed out domestic problems, you know, these weird, you know, that he, he's a Laborite, but he was sort of continuing with some austerity. Labor voters were like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you being, you know, you're like, you're like Boris Johnson. Light.
- [44:50]
James Kirchik
Right.
- [44:51]
John Podhoretz
But of course, last week this independent report came out, the low report, the rape gang inquiry report issued by an MP named Rupert Lowe with one of the girls who, 13, 14 years ago was groomed and raped in the city of Rotherham as part of this investigation, where it turned out 1400 girls had been groomed and raped by Muslim gangs. This report, which is incredibly incendiary, says.
- [45:31]
James Kirchik
Yeah, and Rupert, I'm using to say Rupert Lowe, he's more to the right than Farage. He started his own party called Restore.
- [45:39]
Eliana Johnson
Restore.
- [45:40]
James Kirchik
Because reform isn't enough. We gotta restore. And they wanna deport millions of people from the uk. This is an extreme right wing party. He had a falling out with Farage. Let's just be clear that this is not some kind of independent incident.
- [45:52]
John Podhoretz
Okay, but that's why I'm asking. I'm not saying that the inquiry is to be trusted or not trusted because the numbers in are. Are not credible.
- [46:00]
James Kirchik
No quarter of a million
- [46:04]
John Podhoretz
girls were, were groomed and raped. And that's not true.
- [46:09]
James Kirchik
That beggars the leaf.
- [46:11]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Particularly in a. You know, it's not like Britain is a country with, you know, billions of children.
- [46:17]
James Kirchik
No.
- [46:18]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so. But the question would be to what extent is the complete incompetence, indifference or refusal to act on the part of the labor government toward Islamist provocations? Obviously, to us it's very important to talk about the Islam against the Jewish community in London and Golders Green and various other places. But also just in general, this idea that the police are favoring, that they are not prosecuting or arresting Islamists. They've been told to stand down when there are Islamist marches and things like that and not to engage. And of course there was this death of the. There was complicated death.
- [47:13]
James Kirchik
A young white boy who was stabbed by a Sikh. A Sikh, I guess you would.
- [47:18]
John Podhoretz
A Sikh. Right.
- [47:18]
James Kirchik
A Sikh who had a. And he was in police custody while dying. Yeah. And it's become this sort of big controversy in Britain which is, you know, why did we get all worked up about George Floyd thousands of miles away when here's a white kid dying in police custody and no one cares about it?
- [47:34]
John Podhoretz
So from what you can tell, does this Islamist crisis inside Britain, is that a reason that Starmer has fallen or.
- [47:47]
James Kirchik
I would say it's the immigration issue more broadly. And that certainly encompasses the Islamist issue. Certainly. And you see a lot of these voters. I haven't seen the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the voters who are going to reform, maybe not half, but a large number, are former labor voters. They're from the north of England. They're working class people. They are culturally conservative people, patriotic people, and they feel alienated. And this has been the case across the Western world. Right. Is that people, working class white people who used to vote for left wing parties primarily on class based economic issues, have been drifting to the right because of cultural alienation. That's certainly the case with the rise of reform. And you've seen, I think, the very talented leader of the Tory party is a young woman named Kemi Badenoch. She has a Nigerian background. She's been very, very outspoken about this and on anti Semitism. And I think she's a very talented person to watch. I think she recognizes that this is a real problem and she has a very delicate job ahead of her because she has to be able to critique the kind of left wing insanity on this issue and the excesses which, by the way, her own party contributed to. I mean, immigration was highest under Boris, by the way. Okay. So her party is complicit in this, but she has to also make sure that she doesn't go too far, that she's making common cause with the Rupert Lows of the world. And so far I think she's done a very good job of that.
- [49:18]
John Podhoretz
Okay, let's move on to two other pieces of news. I want to talk about number one, which is like a comedy of errors, is the reflecting pool controversy and crisis, where the decision was made to reline the reflecting pool on the Mall in Washington to make it look better for the 250th anniversary of the country. And that people were already complaining about it because it was too blue, whatever it was, that they drained it and they relined it and it was too blue.
- [49:56]
Seth Mandel
They're complaining because Donald Trump did it and spent $14 million to do it and make it look nice.
- [50:02]
John Podhoretz
So. But it doesn't look nice because the liner is coming, because the. Whatever they used.
- [50:09]
Seth Mandel
Here's the point now, there's.
- [50:10]
John Podhoretz
Whatever they used is cracking and breaking and floating up to the top. And there's. And it turns out like when you change one surface for another, you may, and you try to then deal with the algae problem, you may kill off one kind of algae, which will then allow algae, being a parasitical or whatever you call it, like a situationally parasitical thing will. A different kind of algae will spring up that is resistant to the treatment of the first kind of algae.
- [50:40]
Eliana Johnson
I think Michael Crichton wrote a book about this.
- [50:42]
John Podhoretz
Did he? Is that. Are you joking or is that.
- [50:45]
Eliana Johnson
I'm joking. But it sounds like, it sounds like
- [50:49]
John Podhoretz
the plot of, you know. Yeah, like of Day of the Triffids, you know, where. Yeah. Plants, outer space, plants eat everybody. But no, what's of interest to me here is Trump's decision to try and say that the reason that the reflecting pool has become a crisis needs to be drained again and realigned again is that it was sabotaged and that a 250 foot gash was put in it by saboteurs who want to make him look bad. And I'm sorry, somebody tell me that's not insane. The mall is the most visited national park in the United States. And if you lived in Washington, you know that at 4 o' clock in the morning there are a hundred people around the reflecting pool, just as there are a thousand people at noon or 2000 or 5000. It's never that there's nobody there. There's always somebody there. And there are probably. And there are iPhones and there are this and there are that. If somebody came into the reflecting pool and cut a 250 foot gash in the lining to make it peel off, we would know. And they arrested one guy who picked a piece out of the water and said that he was a saboteur. And he said, no, he saw it floating in the water and he picked it out and to see what it was. So tell me how crazy.
- [52:27]
Eliana Johnson
What a likely story. He just was wondering what was floating the reflecting pool. But wasn't the guy who cut a 250 foot gash? I mean, he was riding by on
- [52:39]
John Podhoretz
a bicycle, he saw something floating in the water. He probably read about how the reflecting pool was, was, you know, a disaster and it was like floating there on top and he pulled it out. I don't know.
- [52:50]
Eliana Johnson
Anyway, what I, what I don't understand is, is why we don't have, why we don't know what's going on. Because it, like you said, it's the, it's the most, it's the most visited place and it's standing water. So it's not like you have to check specific tide patterns and, you know, which fish are migrating to which part or whatever. It's, you know, it's the man made lake or whatever. And it's just funny to me that, that he could even get away with saying like, oh, well, it must have been sabotage. And people like, okay, well, you know, but I mean, it's right there. How do we not know what's, that's what I don't understand.
- [53:32]
John Podhoretz
If you go on social media, as is always true with Trump and his reality distortion field, clearly millions of people are just accepting his explanation at face value. I mean, I would too. You would, the President wouldn't say that somebody was sabotaging the reflecting pool if it weren't true. Right. You can make a mistake. You can say, we did this and we put this line. It turned out that we have to do it a second time because it didn't work. Right. That happens. Everybody renovates their house or something and something went wrong. And so you got to do it again and do it fast before July 4th. I just think the question of the metaphorical quality of the renovation of the reflecting pool turning into a disaster is just too, it's too rich not to be kind of, you know, it just seems to have a valence where he wants to be celebrated for how he is fixing up Washington and beautifying America. And meanwhile, all of these things have been happening over the last two months that are making him look bad, including the way he's ended the war and so he's getting this bounce back and pushback from nature itself or something.
- [54:55]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah, well, I do think it's part of the failure of the concert that they set up and, and all that stuff. I do, I, I do really think that there's, you know, it's getting to him that he wanted to do this stuff in his head for America 250. And all he wanted was, you know, American colors in the reflecting pool, whatever, and he wanted this pro America concert. And then everybody started dropping out. But he's not managing anything. I mean, obviously, you know, I don't know where the buck stops on a reflecting pool specifically, but he, he, he is starting to look like a reverse Midas touch guy where, if you remember a few months ago, there was a. The massive sewage spill in the. In the Washington area that went into the Potomac and that threatened to legitimately. I mean, you know, those of us who live not too far from there or from, you know, you know, where the water trails off. There are signs, you know, in other states around D.C. don't, don't go in the water or whatever for a while. That, that threatened initially to ruin the July 4th stuff too, because it had to be cleaned up very quickly. And they said they didn't even know how to do that and, you know, whatever. So he, he is starting. There is starting to be a kind of America 250 curse on Trump the way there used to be, you know, the Sports Illustrated cover curse or whatever. You know, you didn't want to be the guy on the, on the COVID of the video game for that year. It meant you'd have a bad season or get hurt or something like that. There is something happening here that feels like it's beyond anybody's control, but it's too far gone now for him to, you know, the, the sewage spill, the concert, all this stuff is. It happened already. So I think maybe just cut it at. Cut the, you know, cut your losses at the UFC fight.
- [56:48]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so two more things. One, we haven't talked about Zoram Hamdani coming out and sort of using the language of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist theorist, to describe and adapting it to the idea of the monsters who are trying to interfere with the good working order of the people. And the monsters being monster, being apac. And this attack, supposedly by aipac, though this is an interesting projection because it's actually in reverse of the three candidates for the House who are primarying sitting Democratic congressmen in the city that he is supporting. Daria Chevalier, Brad Lander. And then there's a third whose name is eluding me.
- [57:40]
Seth Mandel
Claire Valdez.
- [57:41]
John Podhoretz
Claire Valdez. So he is. And he is, if you live in New York, he is now literally the. The airwaves on New York 1 and whatever local news and everything is ads with Mamdani with the three of them. Selling the three of them at once as his team. So I believe it's thought that Lander is gonna win. Internal polling that we've heard about in that race shows Lander winning by an extraordinarily comfortable margin over the sitting congressman, Dan Goldman, who is viewed as too pro Israel. Though in my book, I wouldn't call him pro Israel at all. But beggars can't be choosers when Lander is an anti Zionist Jew. And then you have these two other candidates
- [58:33]
Seth Mandel
who are literally lunatics, right? DSA lunatics.
- [58:40]
John Podhoretz
Lunatics.
- [58:40]
Seth Mandel
Like, like, like they don't believe in prisons. They want. They don't believe in deporting criminal aliens. They're. They want to put criminals back in public housing. You know, they teach transgender queer studies in colleges. You know, they went to Columbia, et cetera. They are nuts.
- [59:04]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, they salute Hamas and Hezbollah, like all of that. Like they openly.
- [59:07]
Seth Mandel
Some left wing group wouldn't endorse Darieliza Avila Chevalier because she refused to condemn Hamas.
- [59:16]
John Podhoretz
Right. Okay, here's what I want to propose to you. If all three win, and supposedly Darieliza is not going to win again, internal polling shows that Abdul. It's maybe a tight race, but Adriano Espailla has been there for a long time and he is playing the Hispanic card. And it's very interesting the Hispanic card is playing because he said he's literally running commercials that say he's the first undocumented immigrant to serve in Congress. So he's running as an illegal alien. As though that's a positive. Just to explain where New York politics has gone in the Democratic Party, like, you wanna praise yourself for being an undocumented immigrant anyway, but he's a longstanding whatever. Okay. And it's a Hispanic district, so this is a hard for him.
- [60:10]
Seth Mandel
He's chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The Institutional Democratic Party has gone in hard for him. Hakeem Jeffries is campaigning hard for him. So this is a race that pits Hakeem Jeffries against Zoran Mamdani in the same way that Mamdani's race pits the Institutional Democratic Party against the dsa.
- [60:29]
John Podhoretz
So that's what I want to go to. And talk in general or Jamie, like, if he scores this trifecta, and these three candidates, when, remember they're primarying sitting congressman, he is the new kingmaker in the Democratic Party. This will represent not the kingmaker.
- [60:51]
James Kirchik
He will be a power center. And what he's doing. And I think it's surprising to me that more Democrats haven't woken up to this. There's a term for what he's doing. It's called entryism. And it is when a far left organization attempts to infiltrate and basically take over a mainstream group, almost like a parasite and a host. And the communists did this, tried to do this a lot on the American left in the 30s, the labor unions, the 30s, 40s, 50s. It happened in the early 1980s with the Labour Party in the UK. It was beaten off. It was successful under Corbyn for five years when he was four and a half years when he was leader of the Labour Party. So this is what they're trying to do. And the DSA hates the Democratic Party. They hate Democrats. They hate Democrats more than they hate Republicans. If you listen to them, read their documents, listen to their rhetoric, Democrats are corporate owned, billionaire, Zionist slaveholding jerks. I mean, that is really the rhetoric that they use when talking about the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party, they don't understand that this is a hostile takeover from a movement that really shares very little in common with the Democratic Party. If you actually look at the manifesto of the dsa, what they believe in, they're not Democrats by any stretch of the imagination. The things that they stand for are so far to the left. And I think just the Democrats have not. Look, I think it's a sort of similar process that's been going on that went on a decade ago. Perhaps you could argue with the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party, though I would say that this is more extreme, okay, that the distance between the DSA and the establishment Democratic Party is actually, I would say, larger, bigger, wider than what MAGA was with the kind of GOP establishment.
- [62:41]
Seth Mandel
And there's an important piece published this morning about this. It's a profile in the Wall Street Journal of the political consultant who is launching several of these candidates, including Graham Platner in Maine and Dan Osborne, the independent candidate in Nebraska, Summer Lee in Pennsylvania. His name is Dan Morath. And of course, of course, okay, he's a DSA guy. He's a Yale Law School educated and he's a Jew. Yes, a Jew and a Yale Law School educated prick who is waging a war on the Democratic Party. That's what he has set out to do. And so he is supportive of Mandani and all these other people. But it is a profile that is very much worth reading. My favorite detail being that his fiance, who's doing this along with him, Lian Phan, wears an engagement ring that contains a tiny little comb that she uses to brush his beard.
- [63:49]
John Podhoretz
How lit?
- [63:50]
Eliana Johnson
How.
- [63:51]
John Podhoretz
I don't even understand. This is like a Dakota ring. Like you press a button and a combination. We need a Spectre gadget, Infinity Stone, you know, is it a Green Lantern ring? This is a very weird detailed. Because I don't know how big a comb you could fit inside a rig anyway. It is a gray profile and it is indicative of the destruction of the two party system over the last 20 years for many complicated reasons. But essentially this kind of freelance. The creation of the freelance political freebooter consultant who goes around, finds people, says you should run for office, sets them up to run for office, and then runs their campaign, makes millions of dollars off their campaign, whether they win or lose, and then moves on. And his, his bailiwick or his. There's an ideological component to it, but there's also a business component to it, which is running insurgent campaigns. That, that, that take means you raise a huge amount of money in grassroots direct fundraising online and you make millions of dollars. You take a cut, 15% cut of
- [65:08]
Eliana Johnson
the ad and you create.
- [65:10]
Seth Mandel
By the way, the best part of the article is aside from the tiny comb used to brush his beard, it says, in New York, Moraf worked as a campaign manager for state Senate candidate Debbie Medina, or Medina. Her 2016 admission that she beat her son as a child with a belt derailed her campaign. And he went on bragging about what a great job she did. So, you know, these are the people he's. He's recruiting and defending and running for office.
- [65:40]
Eliana Johnson
Okay, you, you built, when you do this stuff, you build a mailing list that you then sell to the DNC for $1 billion.
- [65:49]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And then you. And you keep it. And you also keep it for your own use for other races. Okay, one last thing. And then I have a recommendation. Alan Greenspan died today or yesterday at the age of 100. And it is hard to recall what a gigantic figure Alan Greenspan was in the United States for close to 20 years. And also how he was the most. He was universally believed to be a towering genius until the entire structure of how he conducted himself at the Fed was blown to smithereens by the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and destroyed his reputation forever. And I don't know of a story like this, except people who get into criminal sort of like the Woody Allen Harvey, like people who are like lionized figures who then get into criminal trouble. He did not get into any crim trouble. But it's a sort of how the mighty art fallen. He believed that he had the ability to tweak our economy constantly in little bits of ways here and there and the other place and save the world when it needed saving and all of that. And then it turned out that the entire structure of his approach led to essentially led to the financial collapse. He wasn't solely responsible, but he played interesting. He played an interesting role in the incompetent efforts to save the economy in 2007 that led to the meltdown of 2008. Final thing recommendation Last night, much to my amazement, I watched a straight to Netflix movie called Voicemails to Isabel starring Zoe Deutsch, who people who is a sort of Netflix star. She's in some movies. She was the star of a movie called Set it up, which was a romantic comedy made for Netflix seven or eight years ago and much to it. This is an extraordinarily inventive piece of work because it is a tearjerker rom com. It literally puts together a plot about a woman dealing with her grief over her sister's death from cystic fibrosis with a crazy rom com plot in which voicemails that she is leaving to her dead sister end up on a guy's phone a thousand miles away from her, who falls in love with her listening to the voicemails and then goes to find her and of course doesn't tell her that he heard it and the complications ensue. Right? It is actually genuinely tear jerking and it is actually genuinely funny and clever and I'm gonna be very interested to see how this does because there hasn't been like there's been one successful rom com in the last five years which wasn't good. Anyone but you with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. This is a very, very clever and unusual piece of work written and directed by someone named Leah McKendrick. And it's also, it's quite dirty. So if you don't like sex comedies, it's not. It's the talk is dirty. But so I do want to warn people like not to watch it with their 7 year olds or their 8 year olds but or older. But it is, it is really an unusually good direct to Netflix movie. Those movies, as you may know, are usually absolutely horrifically bad. So it not being horrifically bad alone is amazing, let alone that it's pretty good and it actually is very emotionally effective and laugh out loud funny at certain points. So that's Voicemails to Isabel on Netflix. Jamie Kirchick, thank you for being with us.
- [70:17]
James Kirchik
Thank you for having me
- [70:20]
John Podhoretz
and thank you for your brilliant column in our July August issue. Why don't you just tell people about it just for a second, and then we'll go.
- [70:28]
James Kirchik
It's about this group of people who I think we all identified with at some point called the Never Trumpers. And I still technically, I guess I'm still a Never Trumper in that I never voted for Donald Trump, and I never would under any circumstances. But it's really about the people who sort of are defined by continue to be defined by the kind of Never Trump identity and how they've basically gone from being Never Trump to Always Democrats, and how I find that to be a really sort of sad and pathetic trajectory.
- [71:02]
John Podhoretz
It's a really great piece. So we'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana and Seth, I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the candle burning. Sam.