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Hope for the best, Expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the.
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Worst Hope for the best.
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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, December 11, 2025. I am Jon Bud Horitz, the editor, Commentary magazine. And yes, we are in the season of giving. And that is why I'm going to take a second to ask you to give and give generously to commentary, Inc. The 501c3 nonprofit that publishes Commentary Magazine, that produces our website and that produces this daily podcast that you are listening to right now. We exist due to the benefaction of our givers, our subscribers, our donors. Your eleemosynary generosity is crucial to our continuing our work. And you people have really stepped up. Immensely grateful. I think what we do here is important. You, if you're listening, probably think that what we do here is at least valuable enough to listen to. So I ask you very humbly to go to commentary.org donate and give and give generously. You can also just go to our website@comMENTARY.org and click on the donate link at the top on the top menu. And we will be very, very grateful for your support and your continued patronage of our podcast, our magazine, and our effort to advance the ideas that we are so committed to. And by we, I mean Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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B
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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B
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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E
Hi, John.
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B
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [02:07]
A
Hi, John.
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B
So we've seized a Venezuelan oil tanker after we've been firing on Venezuelan boats. Donald Trump has told, explicitly told Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro to get out of Venezuela. Give him a deadline of tomorrow. I don't know what he's going to do after tomorrow. We have here what appears to be.
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An activation of the policy that is laid out very vaguely in the National Security Strategy released at the end of last week, which is the revitalization of the Monroe Doctrine, in which the United States asserts its primacy over this hemisphere and therefore is policing its bad actors. Seth, you noted that the seizure of the oil tanker is a.
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The justification provided for it is different from the justification for the firing on the boats.
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D
Yeah. This is not a drug, a narco terrorism claim. This is a claim of the Venezuelans helping Iran skirt oil sanctions. The boat that was seized has been a trouble boat in this regard for several years. It has been saying the boat itself is sanctioned. I believe the, the, it's owned by a Russian. And, and it's been flying falsely under different flags. It flew allegedly under Guyana's flag with no permission from Guyana today or whenever it was seized. And so, you know, this has been, the boat itself has been a vehicle for helping Iran skirt sanctions. And it has not been involved previously or at least not been caught. I think with Venezuela. It has just, it's the boat itself, the operator of the boat, et cetera. Venezuela, seeing that boat in Venezuela, of course, it changes its name, right? It's like on Twitter, people change their handle and stuff like that. The boat has changed its name, it changes its flag. It does all the basic things that you would expect a ship to do when they're trying to avoid being seen. But they were caught, docked in Venezuela, and they were boarded soon after they left Venezuela. This was not, you know, this was something the US Was ready for. They caught them, they knew where they were, and as soon as they were out into the waters, they boarded them, they put helicopters, and they did, you know, a whole regular seizure mission. And so the boat itself is a connection between Iran and Venezuela. And this Russian, you know, someone who's considered a troublemaker on the Iran issue by the US And Venezuela, it's one of those things that connects three major, you know, points on the, in the, you know, in the. Call it an axis or whatever it is. But this was, I think, something the US Chose to do specifically because it represented three different, you know, branches of this, you know, tree that they're working with. Venezuela, Iran, and to some extent, Russia.
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C
See, I got to say, I think to my mind, this is really still all about Venezuela. And if the Trump administration can justify.
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Shooting on boats with.
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Charges of trafficking drugs, it'll do that. If it can. If it can justify seizing an oil tanker, saying that it's, it's evading Iranian sanctions, it will do that. Because we don't fire on drug boats from other companies. We don't seize any of the Russian shadow fleet that evades oil sanctions on Russia. So it's not, I don't think this is a piece by piece.
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Policy. I think the justifications, the larger truth is about squeezing the regime out, and they're just going with whatever they can to tell an individual story in each case.
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A
That may be true. But what came to mind for me when I saw this event was the national security strategy, which asserted a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which was, it had a couple of aspects, but the first was denying outside powers hostile outside powers, including China and Iran. The ability to establish military forces or control key assets or to influence locations in the Western Hemisphere and also to control migration and stop drug flows in the Western Hemisphere. And I said the other day, you know, well, this is just a document, but this to me suggested that the administration is serious about this. And this puts, you know, lead on the target and.
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Suggests to me the administration is prepared to take action to assert this Trump corollary and make it a reality.
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B
Which is very interesting because it's in a weird way the opposite of what Trump often does, which is bluster, and then try to sort of scare people into going along with his will, lest he be crazy and do things like shoot down boats and seize tankers. Here we're shooting down boats and seizing tankers. And it's not as though.
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You know, this has become like a major talking point of the Trump administration. These actions are going on, but they're going on and they're still. They talk about seven or eight different things. It's like it's not, you know, it is like speaking softly and carrying a big stick. He's going around. He is targeting for removal a regime on the planet Earth. Something that he says he doesn't. He has said repeatedly since 2015 he doesn't think we should be doing. And that I believe the National Security Strategy says we shouldn't be doing. I don't agree that we shouldn't be doing it. I'm all in favor of the United States in the proper set of circumstances, working to dethrone and unseat illegitimate regimes which this is right. Stolen elections for 10 years. Illegitimate elections with a fraught, with an illegitimate leader who is messing around with migration, messing around with oil prices and messing around with drugs. I'm all for if you get an opening or there are ways in which you can hasten the possible conclusion of that regime or at least tie it up in knots and make its effectiveness much less potent. Great. That's just not what I thought the Trump people were for. They're not, in their logic, their language, including in the National Security Strategy, is still semi non interventionist.
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E
But this, this is actually where there's a strange contradictory impulse going on in the administration, which I think you're correct to point to a couple of things. You know, it's funny that the Monroe doctrine was that 1823 is like being brought up over and over with this, but the Monroe Doctrine was presented to Congress first. They brought it, the administration brought it before Congress and was like, this is our new plan. And then similarly, with a Lot of the corollaries, that's something that Trump hasn't really done well with these incursions. And the recent defense bill is holding hostage or threatening to hold hostage some money for Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War's travel budget, if they don't produce the video, the full video to Congress to show what's going on with these boat strikes. So I think one of the challenges here is that if this, we used to do this with clandestine force, right. The CIA was running around South America and Central America doing all kinds of mischief in the, in the 70s and 80s. That's one way we have traditionally used that sort of power that you're describing, John. But if we're going to do it out in the open and say, and have an administration that says we don't have to report about this to anyone, you just have to trust us that we're doing this for drugs. But then evidence and reporting comes out that, well, it's actually not fentanyl, it's cocaine. It actually wasn't coming to the US it was probably going to Europe. And so questions are raised which are perfectly legitimate. This administration is sowing doubt in the American public's agreement with these policies because they haven't laid out a strategy beyond saying this is a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. So I think they still do owe both Congress and the American people some sort of strategic explanation for why. Why, why Venezuela? Because there are plenty of other nations that are hostile to the US that are doing similar things that we have no strategy, no involvement in right now. At least that's non clandestine.
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B
Okay, two things. Number one, you're right that they owe us an explanation because that's the country that we live in. I don't know that they're sowing doubt among the American people or not. From what I can see in terms of what polling has.
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E
Generally speaking, three.
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B
Fifths to two thirds of the country are supportive of the boat strikes.
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E
But we, but not necessarily further, they.
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B
Don'T like the second tap. But if you think that they'll say, well, no, you can't seize an oil tanker. Seizing an oil tanker is not, you know, like they're not killing anybody. They literally boarded an oil tanker saying you're doing something illegitimate, where it's essentially, that's a police action, even if it's.
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E
Regime change is what we're talking. Will Americans support regime change?
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B
Well, I mean, again, fair enough, but I mean.
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The regime change.
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That'S the problem here, which is they're not saying they're on the one hand, they're not saying they're for regime change, and on the other hand, Trump's saying leave by Friday. So I don't see the American people rising up and saying, you can't say leave by Friday. Who are you to say leave by Friday for a sovereign nation, you know, down there at the, you know, the northern tip of South America? I don't think Americans seem to be trying to sort through. They don't seem to like the second strike. They don't like the idea that there were some people in the water and then we shot them. You know, we went back and shot them. That's the one thing polling suggests the country is, is divided on. But I assume that part of the reason that this has been going forward is that they are seeing.
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In the numbers, they are seeing serious American support and they don't have a lot of policies on which they have majority support in American polling currently. Immigration and this. It's about it like everything else is in the 40s and 30s.
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A
I do think if the President were to make a speech to the American people laying out the rationale for his policy and why he wants to remove Maduro from power to, and explaining how many refugees are reaching American shores because of his policies, the scope and nature of the drug problem as a result of the Maduro regime and the rationale behind the seizure of this tanker, that the American people would support the policy. And I think even without the President making the public case, as he should, to the American people, they kind of do support the policy. And I think the difference between this and other foreign adventures is that American troops aren't being sent over there, they're not dying, and that this. And I do think it's different having it in our hemisphere. The guy is closer than others. This isn't a far flung adventure in the Middle east sent to build schools and democratize a country.
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B
Although I guess if you probably asked the ordinary average American on the street where Venezuela was, they wouldn't know Venezuela from Argentina. I mean, they might know because it has an A at the end and it sounds Spanish that it's somewhere south of the border. But I don't think that there's sophisticated knowledge of Venezuela. The speech is a gimme because we have this communist regime in a country that a rich country that became a poor country because the communists took over, nationalized everything, turned it into a narco state and have a suffering population that has been denied its franchise now pretty much for almost a decade, with elections that go one way and then are stolen after the ballot boxes are closed. And they're bad actors, they, they, they play footsie with terrorists. They hope they're officially and egregiously anti Semitic. There's all, I mean, a speech about why Venezuela is bad and why that regime, why it is morally just for that regime to be ended I think would be pretty, you know, would be, would be pretty favorably received, be a weird moral frame for Trump to use in a foreign policy speech because he doesn't really usually go there, but his frame would be truth.
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A
His frame would be this is our hemisphere, this is our neck of the woods, we run the show. We don't like this guy. He's sending people and drugs to our shores and he's got to get out.
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C
Right Then, then, then he owns what, what comes next. I mean then, then he has to have this showdown.
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B
Well, that was always the problem in the first term, you know, when he appointed Elliot Abrams, my brother in law, to be, to sort of essentially try to negotiate a way out for Maduro from the, from Venezuela because of the election that got Juan Guaido, you know, won by somebody else. You know, there weren't sufficient teeth to, to, to give Maduro any reason to fear that bad consequences were coming. So now, now there's real spine here now that, that can also cause somebody like Maduro to stiffen his spine in response and say I'm not going anywhere. And you know, this is, you know, Yankee imperialism and we will fight until the last man or he can accept a bribe and go, I, I don't think we have any idea what's actually going to happen here. It's just, but you know, I do.
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C
Think I had said, you know, if Trump were to make that speech, then he owns it. But I actually, I actually thinking about it, I think we're already past the threshold where this, this has to. Trump basically has to get Maduro out. Now if he doesn't, this was all.
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Maduro will have outwitted or outlasted the U.S. i mean.
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When you take such a bolt, when the US Takes such a bolt, we have so many ships down there and we're doing so much.
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And Maduro just stays in place and then we just pull out and say okay, on to the next thing.
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That would be a horrible outcome now.
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E
But they're in an interesting historical irony, right, because the original Monroe Doctrine was meant to stop puppet regimes being installed by meddling European powers, particularly Spain. And so if we are saying this is our hemisphere, but then we're seen to be installing our own puppet regimes which again taking us back to previous decades where that was often the claim he the ownership of the problem does continue. However, the strategic importance of having someone in power there who isn't allied with Iran in particular and China also is. Is useful. I mean that's actually something I think American people would totally support.
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B
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I don't think it would be fair to say that were the Maduro regime to be replaced by a regime led by opposition leader, a Nobel Prize winner, Maria Machado, that that would be a puppet regime.
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E
No, I'm not saying that either. I'm just saying that there would be plenty of people who would claim that. I don't think it would be correct.
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D
But even more than that, that's, that's the, that's the other key point of this, which is that in terms of regime change, which is that there isn't a, that there is a, there's an opposition infrastructure in place that can catch the, you know, the ball as it falls out of Maduro's hand. And that's not Iraq. One of the problems. One of the problems, right, it's not Iraq. One of the problems with the regime change idea is that, well, what are you going to do when you get rid of Gaddafi in Libya? Oh, it's, look, it's chaos in Libya now. There's a coup in Mali because the Libyan chaos, you know, weapons are spreading across the continent. You know, all this stuff Venezuela is not that. I'm not making the case now for. I'm just saying, you know, Maria Vachado, the, the Nobel Prize winner, she. There, there is something symbolic, by the way, about her escaping in a boat. She's in hiding in Venezuela. She escapes in a boat. She gets to Oslo at 2:30am she has this big reunion. She has this reunion with her children, by the way, she hadn't seen her children, three children, I think it is in two years. She hugs her mother who was there, like in a wheelchair. She has this. It's a big Spectacle and at 2:30am she's out there, you know, with, with Norwegian politicians, waving to the crowds, climbing over barriers, all this other stuff. But besides for her, there are other Venezuelan politicians who can, who have beaten Maduro in elections. Right? You go to elections and Juan Guaido can beat Maduro. So Maduro has to cheat. What was it? Edmundo Gonzalez, Is that the name of the candidate?
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B
No, I mean, he has won an.
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D
Election, keeps losing, and they're not necessarily charismatic, Nobel Prize winning people. It's. There's clearly something there in Venezuela that is prepared to take over for Maduro and kind of wants him out. And in a way that projects the idea of stability post regime change that we usually aren't able to see.
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B
But that's one of the reasons that I said that, you know.
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We are with George Washington. Do not believe that we should go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. If there are circumstances in which you have teed up for you.
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A perfect catenation of circumstances, including a structured opposition that has won at least three elections that were then stolen, that does have an infrastructure, as you say, that can take over on day one. And where the regime is a bad actor aligned with the worst people in the world and is doing bad things to the United States, you should probably do what you can to get that regime out and then that will enhance American power. The idea that America is a force for good and for the world order and is willing to risk some capital for a better result in a better world. You don't do that with a regime where you have no hope of getting it out, or with, with a country that isn't in the middle of doing very provocative things. But if, if the occasion.
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Presents itself, you know, there's no reason not to give it a go. I think Abe's concern, which is what are the after effects if Maduro isn't ousted.
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Has always been the problem with interventionist foreign policy aims regarding regimes in power and whether you should try to oust them, which is, there's also a. The cost maybe to the after cost of failure may be too high to risk.
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C
There's also a Russian dimension here. Venezuela is a close ally of Putin and Trump is, I think, failing again to get any sort of peace deal out of the Kremlin here. And so then what happens if you end up in a situation where Putin says the US couldn't do anything about US.
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Invading.
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Taking over Ukraine, they couldn't even stop our ally in their own hemisphere.
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You risk Sort of leaving.
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The global stage in this much worse place, which would be a terrible thing considering that I think Trump really reestablished with the Iran strike, America's role in global national security.
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E
Well, which is why the China and Russia situation right now with regard to this administration introduces an element of incoherent. If we're thinking about this as what is the overall vision of America's role in the world? Because there is a contradiction there. You cannot say in our hemisphere we're going to have these principles, but outside of it are greater threats. We're just going to leave them to their own devices.
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B
Okay, let's move from Venezuela to electoral politics in the United States in advance of the 2026 election. There are two things I want to point out. We mentioned that, you know, Jasmine, I think we mentioned that Jasmine Crockett, the congressman from Texas is now running in the Senate race to against John Cornyn in 2026. Cornyn, seemingly weak in part because Maga doesn't like him.
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But Crockett displacing Crockett, a very weird radical, not so politician replacing a pretty conventional Democratic.
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Frontrunner for the nomination in Colin Allred.
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She's coming in. She told Elaine Godfrey of the Atlantic, who was doing a profile of her that she was canceling the profile. She was withdrawing permissions from Elaine Godfrey for writing a profile of her because she heard that it wasn't going to be friendly. She daily says like absolutely bananas things. I assume if you're a cordon and you're in Cornyn's headquarters, you're doing a jig and a horror, you know, he said so Irish, Irish, Irish clog dancing like you you couldn't assuming that he can survive a Republican primary, you couldn't have asked for a greater present. Meanwhile, so there, there's that craziness. Then the secondary craziness comes in New York City. And so the first post Mamdani candidacy has been announced inside the Democratic Party. A primary challenge to sitting Congressman.
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I was going to say Ron Goldman, Dan Goldman in basically in in Brown brownstone Brooklyn as we call it.
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By Brad Lander who is the, who is the controller of New York City. Very left wing.
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Assemblyman.
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You know, Jewish, anti Zionist.
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You know, basically ran, you know, basically said if you vote for me, you should. You can also vote for Mamdani and I'll get out of his way. He just put out his first ad announcing his candidacy to run again primary Goldman.
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And it's insane like it is. He's walking along the streets of South Brooklyn.
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Animated bluebirds are flying next to him. And the whole theme is though, even though he is progressive and what his, his role model is Mr. Rogers, because we really can all work together. And then you hear the Mr. Rogers theme song and then you see the animated bluebirds again. And then you see some footage of him protesting against Israel and then you see him coaching his son's, his kids Little league team in Prospect Park. And the ad is jarringly demented.
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But it's not for me, right? It's not aimed for me. It aimed at Democrats in brownstone Brooklyn, see if they can get them to come out and vote against Dan Goldman, who became famous for being an MSNBC resistance figure.
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Rich boy Levi Strauss heir, but you know, not a radical. And Lander's basically saying he's an oligarch who has bought this seat here in Brooklyn and I'm going to depose him. So I'm bringing these two up to say.
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While we look at 2026 and we see the Democrats in like the catbird seat, all this bad polling for Trump, all that.
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I don't know where, I don't know what they're doing. Like I don't quite. Again, they know their party better than I do. A Mr. Rogers with a keffiyeh, a Jewish Mr. Rogers wearing a keffiyeh would not strike me as being the forward looking message that you're gonna get yourself into, you know, the majority in the House with. But I could be wrong.
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A
We. I think you're right, John. I mean what occurred to me was in 2024, the takeaway to us again, not the target audience was Democrats were too far left. They lost the plot with trans and you know, teaching your kids 16 genders at school and 42 races or you know, whatever. They lost the plot with normal people. And they would have to course correct in 2026 and 2028. And the choice of Jasmine Crockett and the Goldman versus Lander, I mean that's presenting Democrats with a choice. Okay, Neither one of them is for me, for us probably, but for Democrats, like that's a choice. Do you want, do you want bad crazy or do you want really bad, really crazy. And Lander is to be clear, like a J Street Jewish voice for peace.
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B
Oh, J Street, yeah. J Street's too far too right wing Democrat.
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A
Lander, like who he was the Jews from Mamdani. I mean that is who Lander is.
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B
An anti Zionist Jew. I mean let's just you know, like out.
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D
Pulled the city's investments in Israel bonds.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, look, I think it may not matter for 2026.
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But it will probably matter in a presidential election.
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And to me, it's just like, which, what does the Democratic Party want to be? Something that would appeal to normal people or something that probably won't appeal to most normal people. And yeah, in a really bad year for Republicans, like, okay, it may, may not matter at all, but like, in, in close elections, it will matter.
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C
I don't, you know, I think just.
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D
Want to say that if they need a moderate, Joe Biden is eligible.
- [33:55]
C
Trump, Donald Trump blew the doors off political aesthetics years ago. Like.
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B
Right.
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C
You know, so to me, I haven't seen the ad, so I can't comment on it directly, but the idea that it exists and that it would appeal to people is, Wouldn't shock me. I mean, you get the Trump administration, you know, throwing out AI memes constantly and doing. I mean, it's all gotten very weird fantasy land. Throwing anything out there, seeing what people respond to, seeing if people even get. Get it. You know, it's, it's, it's like auteur campaigning now. You know, it's, it's, it's a whole different, it's a whole different flop.
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B
Ator one of the virtues, one of the virtues of open campaigning is that you really do get real world tests of whether or not messages that are floating around in the ether that intellectuals or policy people put out and say, this is really the way of the future. People pick them up, candidates pick them up, they sort of toss them out, and you see whether or not they hook people, whether people get hooked on them, or whether they're big failures. You know, in 1988, Richard Gephardt tried to become the Democratic nominee for president by running on an explicitly protectionist platform. It was an understandable play. Right. Liddy Dole tried to run in 1996 on a basically pro choice Republican platform. Let's see. Let's see whether or not. But there's whether or not the things have moved and like that, the public response to this. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
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E
There's a new. I'm sorry, but there's a new dynamic here compared to those that era, and that's that certain messages might land with one constituency, but then. So then they become instantly culturally coded for the opposition in a new way. And then a new dynamic emerges. We're seeing this emerge with the word affordability. We're seeing this emerge with things as ludicrous as font choice in government documents. So the culture war happens.
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A
So Rapidly talk about that.
- [36:10]
E
By the way, we have to talk about fonts because I love font discussions because I'm a nerd. But, but I do think that the difference is that now so you know, affordability is Mamdani coded. So I think that's in part why Donald Trump hates talking about it, because he's like, that's that guy's thing. I'm going to do my own thing because my group hates this because this guy liked it. And so the cultural coding happens instantaneously, rockets around social media and then creates an opposition that in those earlier eras didn't exist. I mean, I thinking back to Mitt Romney being, you know, with the dog on the, the dog on the car thing that became symbolic Republicans long term than it did for Democrats. Democrats were like, he's terrible with his binders of women. But we remember that because we look back on that era and say they were demonizing a totally decent human being who is running for office. So I think the coding is important to remember here with, especially with social media and AI.
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B
I mean, so where this matters is.
- [37:09]
This. There is no Democratic Party, there is no Republican Party, right? We understand this. There's no centralized thing, local, state or federal level called the Republican or Democratic Party. Fundraising, citizen, Supreme Court decisions, regulations, all of that have meant that everybody is an independent actor and an independent player. You're Brad Lander, you're Zoran Mamdani. Zoran Mamdani comes out of nowhere, raises $9 million. The party would have done whatever it could to snuff him out in his crib 15, 20 years ago. They don't need trouble. They don't need this kind of trouble. If they had the means and the motive and the ability to stop him in his tracks for somebody more conventional, they would have done so. There are no such guardrails or blocks or anything like that. So will Brad Lander manage to use his animated bluebirds to raise money against Ron Goldman? Maybe, maybe not. But there's no one to stop him. There's no one to say except for sort of like people who say this is ridiculous with your, you know, your like Snow White with the birds flying around your head. So you're ridiculous. Maybe that'll culturally be the message. Or it'll be like, well, that's cute. My kids like that commercial. It's got, you know, the birds that help Snow White clean up the house. I don't know. So Jasmine Crockett knocks Colin all the race. Cuz he looks at her, he says, she's so Crazy. She's going to raise five times the amount of money that I'm going to raise. What do I need to like fight and struggle in an uphill battle to win a Senate seat in the state of Texas for a Democrat that, you know, basically it's probably a 15% shot to win if you're the Democrat in that race. I'm not going to like spend my year on this if this attention getting lunatic is going to be able to get low dollar donors to throw money at her. And I'm going to struggle in that respect. I'm just leaving the plant, the battlefield. Like Allred was a good, was the best candidate that the Democrats could have gotten to run for that seat, assuming various things might happen that would make it possible for a Democrat to win. But he, that doesn't matter. He's not exciting enough. He's not. He's not crazy enough.
- [39:40]
A
Well, this, I think Crockett's entrance into the race and Allred's departure also speaks to the nationalization of these elections that really should be more local in that all red left in part. And you mentioned Crockett's fundraising advantage because Crockett has national name id. And why does she have national name id? Because she's made a spectacle of herself supported by others in the Democratic Party by being a far left extremist and going on national television. This is all supported by the Democratic infrastructure at CNN and MSNBC and AOC and Bernie Sanders. And that has made her a potent fundraising force.
- [40:26]
And she gave a quote to somebody I don't know. It may have been for the Atlantic piece, I can't remember.
- [40:34]
And I want to pull it up because it's in our, in our newsletter this morning where she talks about why she is in the race. Hold on. Talk.
- [40:46]
B
Okay, so the thing is bad candidates are bad candidates no matter what party they can be in. And in 2022, Donald Trump backed a whole bunch of bad candidates in Senate races and screwed up the Republican chances in 2022 where Democrats performed a lot better than anybody thought they would because the candidate quality was so lousy. So it's not as though you can't have a party pick. You know, Democrats public isn't crazy. They don't like crazy. You know, they don't like crazy running backs who say they're schizophrenic. They don't want them to be the senator from Georgia. And I'm not sure the Democrats in Maine are gonna want this walking psychopath with the beard to be there. Maybe he'll win the nomination. But, like, people in Maine are not going to want that guy over Susan Collins, who's at least sane. So you can win, get halfway there. Then you have to face a plebiscite of the actual public and not just, you know, the 20% of people who turn out for your primary and see what, what, what, what happens, then.
- [42:00]
C
They'Re.
- [42:00]
B
Not showing the flag with the, you know what, this is a serious business. We can take the House and Senate and set ourselves up for 2028. Again. There is no Democratic Party, so there's no way to do it nationally. But the way. But it's not like people are like, okay, it's sane time. We want to say that Trump is crazy. We want to say that he's old. We want to say that he's also losing it. We want to show that he doesn't know what he's doing and that he doesn't know, have anything to do on the economy and all of that. And instead, you're gonna get a bunch of leftist lunatics.
- [42:36]
D
You also get a certain amount of momentum when you have this with the Tea Party. The argument with the Tea Party was that in addition to Sharron Angle in Nevada, Nevada, excuse me.
- [42:51]
You also got Marco Rubio in Florida. Right. There was always, you know, for every Jim DeMint, there was, you know, somebody else who, you know, stuck around and was considered, you know, part of the, you know, part of the core and the future of the party. So I think Democrats are looking at it in a similar way, which is, you know, we're not going to win.
- [43:15]
E
What?
- [43:16]
B
The party apparatus was still a real thing in 2010, and there is no party apparatus anymore.
- [43:24]
The question of whether it's a net.
- [43:26]
D
Gain to have the grassroots explode like that is a complicated question because you lose winnable seats, but you may produce stars. And I think a lot of Democrats think AOC is a star and maybe Mamdani is a star and, you know, and stuff like that. And they might be willing, not that it's their choice, but that when they look back on it and they say, was it a net plus or a net minus? They might say, we're going to lose. We were going to lose the Texas seat anyway. It doesn't matter if we lost it with Jasmine Crockett. Look at all the energy in the Northeast or something like that.
- [44:02]
B
It's very easy to do an ad for something when you're sitting as you're recording the ad wearing the product that you are supposed to endorse. And in my case, that is a quince Mongolian cashmere sweater. That's what I am wearing at this moment. And at Quint's you can pick one up for 50 bucks when you'd normally drop $200 or more on the same thing. Plus wool coats that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. I myself have a quince puffer that I'm wearing over the sweater when I go out on these cold November days. By partnering directly with trusted factories that maintain high standards for craftsmanship and ethical technical practices, Quince cuts out the middleman and markups. That means premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. So you can give luxury pieces without the luxury price tag. So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com commentary free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com commentary I'm Oliver Darcy.
- [45:24]
D
And I'm John Passantino. We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter Status. And we're bringing that same report and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Powerlines. Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud. No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis.
- [45:50]
B
That isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via.
- [45:54]
D
Our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes. My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [46:14]
B
Oh my God. That's power lines. Presented by Status.
- [46:18]
D
Follow power lines and listen on Apple.
- [46:20]
B
Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast.
- [46:29]
The problem is that, you know, the people have lost their shirts. Assuming that a, that an insurgent, that a mayor from New York might have a national profile that would give him an incredible ballast. I still, you know, we still have to see what Mamdani does as mayor. But you know, there was this idea in September and October as he was heading toward winning that he was a gift to Republicans elsewhere in the state. If he starts to try to implement some of this, there are five Republican seats up for grabs you know, in the House there's a gubernatorial race in New York and having him with the reins of power.
- [47:12]
Could be the gift that keeps on giving for Republicans in his state. And not the opposite, not, not the wave of the future stuff. But, but, but, but, but sort of like what Christine's kind of the bet the blowback will be how Mamdani serves to help Republicans save themselves from disaster in the House by not losing those five seats in New York state that were the reason that winning them meant that Republicans held onto the House.
- [47:43]
E
There's also and Eliana they Free Begin has a great scoop on this. Even the more moderate seeming Democrats who should be on the bench for 2028, such as Governor Westmore, there are a lot of problems with whatever vetting is going on for candidates on the left in the same way that we have been struggling with that on the right with some of the crazier MAGA types who want to come to public office for their own gain. And this story about Westmore, I find these fascinating because anyone who runs for public office should expect a level of vetting where everything is their resume is the first thing to get peeled back. But that's not happening anymore. That's another structural and actually a, a huge structural failure on the part of the media to do that sort of vetting. Oppo research happens obviously, but these folks are gaining and I think Gavin Newsom is going to have the same problem as he emerges as a, as a front runner. He has a ton of skeletons from his time in California and But the.
- [48:42]
D
Walk in closet for all his skeletons.
- [48:44]
E
Exactly. Well, okay, so let's talk about Trump changing the rules. I'm not. That's, that will be the test. People like Moore, people like Newsom, if.
- [48:54]
A
Trump is overlooked, trumpeted everybody knew everything about Trump with the Democrats and we can get into the details of more. Everybody should go read the great richly reported story by Andrew Kerr at the Free Beacon. This was like truly a labor of love by, by Kerr. I think the lack of vetting of Democrats is of these Democratic candidates like Moore is a product of the increasingly partisan nature of the media where the vetting just doesn't take place as it should. And when it's done, it's increasingly done by publications like the Free Beacon where we've been working on this story for six plus weeks and a. There just aren't that many outlets that can devote that amount of time to reporting like this anymore. And when you do it, it's going to be a right of center outlet like The Beacon rather than the New York. And the story about Moore is about. He's already been caught in a series of lies, untruths about his biography. The guy has a sparkling resume. He's a football playing Johns Hopkins graduate who became a Rhodes scholar and served in the military. He's. And he's African American. He's the candidate, you know, Democrats that, you know, centrist Democrats fall in love with. And this is about his lying, shading the truth around his graduate degree that he claims to have received from Oxford, where he said he received it in 2003, elsewhere in 2004. Now Oxford said it was 2005 and his thesis is nowhere to be found. You should go read the entire story because it's too detailed to get into on a podcast.
- [50:39]
B
But, you know, it's interesting because a resume inflate. Politicians inflating their resumes and saying they've done things they haven't done and all that. That's, that's like, that's an age old problem. Used to be very easy to hide because there were no centralized records of anything. And so people said that they had graduated from schools they hadn't graduated from, or that they'd gotten degrees that they hadn't, or that they had military records that they didn't have and all of that. And it could take 20 years for that stuff to start bubbling up. I story about whether or not John Kerry had performed heroics during the Vietnam War as a member of the Swift Boats. You know, it literally took 35 years to come out because people were too scared to look at it seriously when he was just a senator because it's like you were questioning a war hero's record and you're not supposed to do stuff like that. So. But, but it was very hard to do that stuff now. And now you can. Everybody can be vetted instantaneously or destroyed instantaneously just because they wrote a tweet 15 years ago that can take you out.
- [51:59]
And it is amazing that somebody like Westmore, after all of the trouble he had while he was running for governor about resume inflation. I mean, there was all this stuff about how his business, he had a business that wasn't really a business or it had either had collapsed or he claimed it was five times the size that it was. He claimed to have had successes in working for the mayor of Baltimore that he hadn't had. There's all kinds of stuff. And people who do that do it.
- [52:29]
A
Yeah, they didn't. They never do it. Just once he said he was Born in Baltimore and he wasn't when he was running for governor, he said he was admitted to the National College Football hall of Fame and that is an organization that doesn't exist. And he said he had been awarded a bronze star and he hadn't been. He is the new Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota who inflated his resume all over the place and he said I'm a knucklehead at times. But somehow all the knuckleheading landed in his direction. All the lies were on in his favor. And with Moore it's exactly the same. And the problem is when these guys land, national politics are bigger than state politics, it's a much bigger deal. And when the Klinglights get on these guys, when they step onto the national stage, it just doesn't work. And I suspect it will go the same way for Moore as it went.
- [53:26]
E
For Tim Walls and voters.
- [53:27]
D
I think that's a really important point.
- [53:28]
E
I do think the tweet thing is that you said, John, in some ways actually highlights that voters still care about lies about military service and lies that speak to character and judgment. A Tweet when you're 20 might be overlooked. Vulgar language is now constantly overlooked because our politics is entirely vulgarized. But to say you earned that you're battle tested and earned service medal and to lie about that, that's huge. The same. Even some of the puffery on the, on the resume matters because we are, we do still like to believe in the conceit that we're a meritocracy. And Democrats in particular love to emphasize that in any candidate who is like Westmore, you know, non white and the struggle and look at this is the real America that matters to voters. I mean didn't in his election. But Elian is absolutely right and Waltz is a perfect example. And in fact his bumbling in general, I think helped cover for how much voters didn't like that about him. Moore's not going to be able to cover himself in glory after this, right?
- [54:30]
D
I mean what else is there is the question. And I think that's, you know, that's the point that there's always, you know, it's not that this stuff is going to get recycled, it's that you're always going to find if somebody's a habitual liar or whatever, you're always going to find more. And what else, you know, what else is in there should give Democrats pause, presumably. Although as John, as you mentioned, it's not like they have control over who runs and who doesn't run. And, and all that stuff. But they're going to have to. They're going to have to decide whether they learn something from the Tim Waltz fiasco, which was that these little things were in front of big things, and the more you dug, the more you found. And that would be the same thing for Westmore. And also, I would just say that I don't know how you win the south if you've lied about College Football hall of Fame.
- [55:18]
B
I want to point out also that. But the case to be made for publications like the Washington Free Beacon.
- [55:27]
And others is made by the fact that they're willing to do digging where other people never dug. And by which I mean, give you an example from the 1980s in New Jersey. New Jersey had a candidate for Senate who was the greatest resume candidate in the history of the country, practically Pete Dawkins, Heisman Trophy winner, brigadier general, I believe, ended up as a brigadier general, like, heroic war record.
- [56:04]
Retires from the military, goes to work at Lehman Brothers, is on Wall street, becomes the candidate, I think in 1988 for either Senate or governor, I just can't remember which. I think it's Senator against Lautenberg.
- [56:20]
And his candidacy is destroyed by the fact that the New York Times begins to campaign and the Wall Street Journal a little bit, begin to campaign against him relentlessly on the grounds that he was mean to his underlings at the investment bank.
- [56:39]
And didn't know what he was doing because he had gotten into investment banking in his mid-40s. And they did article after article after article about how he was mean and he was so mean to people and he didn't know what he was doing and other people at the firm didn't know he was doing. And they succeeded. I mean, it was a long shot candidacy in some sense because he was a Republican running in New Jersey. But. But the relentlessness of the attacks on Pete Dawkins were really, really quite stunning. Now, move forward in time 15 years and there's New Jersey and there is a very, very problematic governor of New Jersey in Jim McGreevey. And does anybody in the mainstream media go after Jim McGreevey? No. Jim McGreevey is running for.
- [57:30]
Running for reelections. Governor, he's been having an affair with his bodyguard.
- [57:38]
And, you know, everybody knew it and everybody knew all kinds of crappy things about him and there was nothing, there was no reporting about it today. McGreevey couldn't get away with this. I don't know if McGreevey could get. And then, and then there was this like, incredible thing where he quits the RA. You know, there's the famous McGreevy Lautenberg flop where, where he quits and they install somebody else. They figure out in late October that they can change the rules and install somebody else to run who could win. The retired Frank Lautenberg. So if I, if I have my, if I have my.
- [58:16]
D
That was a different election.
- [58:19]
B
Forget it. Forget for. Anyway.
- [58:20]
D
But yes, I mean I was, I.
- [58:22]
B
Was, I was, I was in a Democrat.
- [58:25]
A
Yeah.
- [58:26]
D
I was in the newsroom. I was in a New Jersey newsroom when he made that announcement, when McGreevey.
- [58:31]
B
Announced that he was a gay American.
- [58:33]
D
And like the, the room was like the, the, the, the mood in the room was like, yeah, I thought this was going to be a news conference, but there was going to be breaking news. And it's like that everybody knew. It's everybody exactly how you describe.
- [58:47]
B
Yeah. So. But my point is that there was no, it was all one sided investigations into candidates.
- [58:56]
Came. If there were investigations into Democratic, they were done kicking and screaming.
- [59:03]
You know, a generation or more than a generation ago by the, by the mainstream media. Now there isn't really a mainstream media in the same way. And there's all kinds of places that have all kinds of incentives to look into everybody, including citizen journalists or amateur journalists or you know, people who, who hunt and pack and forge. But I, you know, I don't know you're going to get a Westmore again. Like we'll see. Maybe Westmore can survive all this. But I don't know that you can now expect that you can start lying, you know, in 2005 about your resume and 20 years later think you can run for, run for president. I, there's just too much watching going on.
- [59:47]
C
And there are digital records, you know, I mean that's the thing.
- [59:50]
B
Digital records. Every newspaper article about everybody is who's, you know, basically been alive since 1980 is accessible with a click of a.
- [59:59]
C
You know, imagine Joe Biden's career.
- [60:03]
E
I was thinking about that. Yeah.
- [60:04]
B
Yeah.
- [60:05]
C
I don't know. I don't know. You know, had it been launched I don't know how many decades later and him, his trying to get away with his anthology of tall tales and inflation. Resume. Inflation. I mean, forget it.
- [60:21]
D
Yeah, the digital records, top of the class, every class.
- [60:27]
A
The digital records played an important role in reporting on Tim Walls because the central claim that everybody latched onto, but it originated in a Minnesota publication that Wall said he had been, you know, at Tiananmen Square when he was home in Kansas, you know, on the farm or Whatever.
- [60:53]
Came from local old news coverage that was archived on newspapers.com and we@ the Beacon. I saw this line in the local news story and went to newspapers.com and plugged in and you could find pictures of, of Tim Walls in local news coverage back in the day and show, like the guy said he was standing down a tank in the square and here he is home in, you know, Beaufuncle, Kansas.
- [61:23]
B
Yeah, it's a very. So it's a different and so, you know, while we talk about how awful it is that everything is online.
- [61:31]
There are there. There is a form of antisepsis created by transparency. Yeah, transparency that is, that is valuable. And that.
- [61:41]
When we say things like everything was better in the old days, really, it wasn't. I mean, it was different and maybe there were better.
- [61:48]
E
That's why the bombast of people, that's why the Jasmine Crockett, Donald Trump style approach to this radical transparency that's been foisted on our politics is to just boldly lie, to say, no, that didn't happen, or no. And actually that bluster with certain people, certainly with Trump, maybe we'll see with Crockett, that goes a long way. I mean, saying don't believe what your eyes show you to be true. And again, add to that the layer of AI slop. I think that's why we're seeing the embrace of that in politics so much. It's just a kind of blustering through the transparency, trying to persuade people, coding everything that it doesn't matter if that was a lie, it was done on your behalf. That we see. We're gonna see a lot more of that in the years ahead.
- [62:28]
D
Yeah, they've also realized, like, Trump also discovered, I mean, not discovered, but, you know, he's so good at branding. He knew, going that branding matters, you know, most. And he had his, you know, 99 name recognition. The guy had his own, you know, Muppet on Sesame Street. And so, you know, he was Donald Trump, the business guy, the business success. And, you know, there was plenty of reporting. There was. I mean, the New York Post go, you know, go back through the archives of the Post, you know, tracking Trump through the years, the stuff that he said to reporters there and the stuff that they've discovered. There was this trace, but it was also like he was just so good at. He, he established himself using, you know, one word, businessman. And then it was like he was immune to some of the, you know, anything that undermined it. And there's also this sense of things being baked in and that's what happened. That's part of what happened with Biden.
- [63:22]
E
Right?
- [63:22]
D
I mean, we've. I think the country knows that Biden had fibs, you know, pretty regularly. And it got to a point where it was like, ah, that crazy Uncle Joe, right? I mean, it was like, it was, you know, he had this like, avuncular nature where it was like, all right, it's Biden, Biden being Biden, you know, whatever. And Trump was Trump being Trump. And so there is, there is that, that is the, that is the loophole which is like, if you can sort of make it part of your character that you're, you know, you're goofy or you bloviate, you can actually still kind of skate in on the theory that what people really want is, you know.
- [64:04]
B
Honesty, which is really horrifying because it's like the worse you are, the better off you are. You know, sometimes when people lie to enhance their resumes, it's out of shame, like, because they, they want people to think. Because they're not shameless, because they want people to think well of them. Westmore wants people to think that he was a brilliant Oxford scholar, as well as a heroic military veteran, as well as a young go getter politician who tried to help people in Baltimore, as well as having been a great football player. And it's all this. I'm a hollow shell there has about it this quality of like, fill me up. I'm throwing all this stuff at you so you will think better of me because I, I'm. There's something I'm lacking that I need to. I need to.
- [64:56]
E
Well, I don't know if that's the case. I mean, you're giving him a. A lot of benefit of the doubt, I would say. You know, we used to, in the 20th century, we feared the Manchurian Candidate, like an empty shell being filled up with a radical ideology and destroying us from within. But now the, the real concern is the Instagram candidate. I mean, they're all Instagram candidates. They. They create a self. And then as Seth says, just.
- [65:16]
B
And it's all starting. That's all surface, right? Very quickly, I want to make a recommendation. Now we're getting into, like, weird recommendations of things that nobody should ever recommend. Yesterday I recommended the Bible, for example. The end of our.
- [65:30]
E
You should always recommend.
- [65:31]
B
I know, but it just so happened that last night, sitting with my 15 year old who had never seen it, I watched one of the two or three movies I've watched more than any other in the course of my Life. And that's probably true for most people in America for complicated reasons. And that is It's a Wonderful Life, which I watched. There's no reason to recommend It's a Wonderful Life. Interesting story because it came out, it was not a box office success. It was the first movie that James Stewart made after his genuinely heroic experience as a pilot in World War II, where he flew 56 combat missions. And Frank Capra's first movie after heading the Office of War Informations Documentary Propaganda Bureau in which they made the why We Fight series. And this movie, like the Best Years of Our Lives, made in the same year as the Best Year of Our Lives, is a. Is a remarkably dark and melancholy story about America in the wake of World War II. We always, we think now the greatest generation. People came home and they went to college on the GI Bill and they bought houses and they had families and the baby boom happened and all that. But if you look at these contemporaneous cultural documents, the mood, and particularly movies made by veterans of the war, not what you think it is, it's, it's not, you know, we were heroes and everything is wonderful. It's. This is a movie about a disappointed man living who was not a veteran, who was 4F because of a childhood injury, who lives in a town that he wants to hate. He hates and he wants to escape. And life conspires to trap him in this small town where he is struggling to survive against a kind of, you know, rapacious oligarch. And of course gets trapped in this amazing loop where because he is suicidal, an angel comes to show him what the world would be like had he never been born. So everybody knows that, right? Most everybody has, has seen just. It knocks the stuffing out of you watching this movie. It is so sad, it is so exuberant on the one hand, and it's so sad and nerve wracking. And it does feature and that's the only reason I really want to recommend it. Well, I've written about this movie probably more than I've written about any other movie in the course of writing for, about movies for more than four decades. But I do think that James Stewart's performance is the greatest American film performance. Without question it is. His performance as George Bailey is the highlight of American film acting. There's never been anything like it. He never did anything like it. It has all the, you know, it has all the colors of the rainbow. It has all the emotions of all of life. It, it is, he is you, you are him. He is tearing your hair out. He is making you, like think well of him. He is making you understand that the depth of his anger and self pity are problematic. It is astonishing to see. It's amazing to me to watch it at the age of 64, maybe on the 20th viewing and still find it so, so gut punching and even harrowing in a weird way. And yet. And then of course, the end is just, you know, it just. It earns this ending. And why it was a failure when it came out, I have no clue. Except maybe, maybe it was too hard for people to take. I don't know. But it's there. It's there everywhere. It's there on Netflix. You can watch it in colorization. Don't watch it in the black and white because it is amazingly beautifully photographed and anybody have anything to add on the It's a Wonderful Life front?
- [69:32]
No. All right. Because I could talk about it forever. But anyway, so I'm not going to.
- [69:37]
D
I agree that It's a Wonderful Life.
- [69:40]
B
There you go. It's a strange title for the movie, you know, because it's a movie about somebody who learns that his life is wonderful. But what you're watching is a movie of somebody who thinks his life is lousy. So it's a, you know, it's a weird. It's one of the reasons, like it seems like it's gonna be like A holly jolly Christmas from the title and it's something very, very, very different. Anyway, all right, so It's a Wonderful Life is my recommendation. We'll be back tomorrow for Eliana Seth, Christine and Abram John. But Horde's Keep the Candle Burning.