Loading summary
Transcript154 lines
- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
What does the future hold for business? You know, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. A bull market, a bear market, rates rising, rates falling, inflation's going up, inflation's going down. You need a crystal ball. But of course, there is no crystal ball. And that's why 41,000 businesses have future proof their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one Cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing your books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards, more time on what's next. If this were the kind of product commentary needed, we would take it in a heartbeat. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com Commentary the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Commentary netsuite.com Commentary this.
- [01:22]
Lifelock Ad
Episode is brought to you by Lifelock. It's tax season and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [01:54]
Matthew Continetti
Hope for the best, expect the worst. Some preach and pain. Some die of thirst.
- [02:05]
John Podhoretz
No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [02:13]
Matthew Continetti
All for the best.
- [02:15]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, April 10, 2025. I am John Bodhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [02:27]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [02:28]
John Podhoretz
Washington. Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [02:31]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [02:32]
John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:35]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [02:36]
John Podhoretz
So the problem with doing a daily podcast at 8 o'clock in the morning is that you say all kinds of things that you assume will hold true until 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And after spending a whole session yesterday talking about the durability of the tariffs and how long they would last and what would happen. And then, of course, Donald Trump backs off the tariffs in a huge way, except for China. Right. Basically goes back to the baseline of his 10% across the board increase in tariffs with a 90 day pause so that he can continue to enjoy the sucking up of foreign leaders who will come to him and tailor make their relations with the United States on trade on a case by case basis if indeed that happens altogether. So this is just a warning label that who knows whether by the time you listen to this, everything that we say this morning will be null and void by the time you hit play.
- [03:36]
Matthew Continetti
In our defense, yes, this applies to every podcast that records in the morning during the Trump era, because you really don't know what the day.
- [03:45]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. So you should really only record a podcast at 11:59pm Because I do think that the days of the covfefe late night tweeting seem to be over.
- [03:55]
Matthew Continetti
Those seem to fade.
- [03:56]
John Podhoretz
Yes. So at least if we recorded, as I say, just at the turn of the day, as night becomes morning, maybe we could recap the day a little, a little more, more healthily. But here we are.
- [04:11]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I also say further in our defense, it's not as if we haven't said all along that he could pause at any second.
- [04:19]
Matthew Continetti
You were skeptical from the start. On Liberation Day, you said, let's see if this actually happens. Now, they did go into effect on midnight.
- [04:28]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [04:28]
Matthew Continetti
Yesterday. But then in the afternoon they lasted about 15 hours. In the afternoon, Trump announced the 90 day pause on all countries but China. And I think that's relevant. We should also say that the 10% global tariff is still in effect, as are the more sectoral tariffs. So the ones he's announced previously on steel, aluminum, copper, autos. Right. So those are in effect as well. So it's not as though the tariff war or trade war is over by any means, but the China piece in particular strikes me as very important.
- [05:07]
John Podhoretz
Right. So politically, he said people were getting yippee. Some, Some yips.
- [05:16]
Matthew Continetti
Getting the yips, getting out of liner.
- [05:19]
John Podhoretz
Trying to throw the ball to, from, from, from, from the catchers, from the catcher's mitt to the yips is a baseball term. Right. For people who suddenly develop weird neurotic inabilities to do certain things out of their love.
- [05:35]
Matthew Continetti
But it also alludes to the classic song Getting Jiggy with it.
- [05:40]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [05:40]
Matthew Continetti
So again, Trump's portmanteaus are always unique and humorous. To some.
- [05:47]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. To some. Okay, so the market went down, I think 5,000 points at the Dow at its lowest, and then it recovered about 2,700 yesterday. From its five day, whatever it was.
- [06:02]
Matthew Continetti
Five day, best day since 2008. It recovered about two thirds of the drop since Liberation Day came into view a month ago.
- [06:13]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so one thing to be said about this is as people I know, and this is going to sound very conspiratorial and like the sort of thing that will drive every manga person crazy, but that investors that I know said that the only way to solve this trade war was for the markets to show discipline. By which he meant the markets had to respond in a disciplined fashion to what Trump was doing by cratering themselves effectively. And that from bonds to stocks to all kinds of things, investors basically said, you are driving the planet into penury. You better watch what you're doing. We're responding the way that we have to respond. And that because that happened, because people weren't, because mostly people weren't like saying, oh, this is a real buying opportunity at 42,000 or 41,000 or something like that. The message that Scott Besant, I guess the Treasury Secretary who was representing the more moderate position here, though, that all things being relative, as you say, Matt, there's still a lot of tariffs out there, was able to say, look, Mr. President, you know, I'm with you, but there are going to be knock on consequences from all of this that have all sorts of other political ramifications, including the very difficulty you're having this very day trying to get House Republicans to do what you want them to do on the big one, big, beautiful budget.
- [07:51]
Matthew Continetti
May I am in that slightly?
- [07:53]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [07:54]
Matthew Continetti
I think that Trump was willing to see the stock market go down quite a bit.
- [07:59]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [08:00]
Matthew Continetti
What alarmed the White House, it seems to me, is overnight activity between Tuesday and Wednesday on the bond market.
- [08:08]
John Podhoretz
Right, but that's what when I say the markets, I meant.
- [08:11]
Matthew Continetti
Well, and just to elaborate, you know, I meant both when, when Besant came out, when Trump came out to announce the pause, the 98 pause, and then Besant came out to explain it more to the press. My, the little James Carville that sits on my left shoulder started squawking one of his more famous lines back from the 90s when he famously said, you know, when I die, I want to come back as the bond market because it has the ultimate veto in the world. And I think that's what we saw overnight, Tuesday, Wednesday, because the yields on the American, on our 10 year treasury and our 30 year treasuries were going up, which is not supposed to happen typically in a panic America, yields go down because America is considered safe haven for assets, you want to fly, you want to fly to safety. And that's the US treasury market. In this case, people were selling Treasuries, possibly even Japan, which holds quite a bit of them, and yields were going up as a result. And that had the potential to trigger a global run on U.S. treasuries. At the same time, we're trying to refinance our massive debt. And if that had happened, then the Federal Reserve would have had to step in to prevent a global financial crisis, which is exactly what Trump does not want to do now. Right now, Trump is trying to pressure the Fed to cut rates and limit its activities. So I think that was the message that Besant and that Jamie Dimon were sending privately and then Dimon publicly as well. And that got Trump's attention. And so he, he paused as a result. So this is a fascinating example where the break on America is our national debt, our huge national debt that we're really not addressing in any significant way. It's not only constraining the Trump trade policy. And, you know, in a good way we might, those of us who are free traders would say, but it's increasingly going to constrain our defense policy as well.
- [10:21]
John Podhoretz
So the point here is that we've been talking about how one man tanked them all. One man is doing all these one man things, and he is not an island, and he is doing what he can to be an island or to sort of use the powers of the executive branch in very questionable ways to get things done that he wants to get done. But there are exogenous pressures. The place there haven't been exogenous pressures on him that one might have expected are from people in his own party for the most part, who are alternately grateful to him, worshipful of him and terrified of him. But yesterday, politically also, he didn't get what he wanted from the House of Representatives, which is arguably the most the more slavish of the two bodies in terms of its makeup.
- [11:25]
Christine Rosen
Christine, sorry to interrupt, but before we go into what's happening in Congress, I think we need to spend one more minute looking at what happened yesterday in terms of Trump and his claims and what he actually did, because we're getting two, we're getting mixed messages out of his own administration. Bessant comes out and says, oh, this was the strategy all along in the morning.
- [11:46]
Matthew Continetti
And that's my quote.
- [11:47]
Christine Rosen
Trump later, right, wandering around and he's like, you know, people are getting yippee. They freaked out. So I changed course. Course. So there really was no Strategy, which is, I think, what was revealed by yesterday's remarks by his own. By his out of his own mouth and others. And so that actually means that while he blinked this one time, if it really is only a pause and he tries this again in 90 days, the uncertainty that actually was fueling the bond market anxiety will return. The whole reason we are a certain good place to store wealth and to. And to, you know, tag your currency to ours is that we're stable. What Trump is doing is arguing to the American people that instability is the new normal and that this will shake things up in a way that benefits Americans. The Republican Party now has to make a choice about whether that's true, because what they're hearing from their constituents, many of whom are small business owners who rely on supply chains that involve lots of overseas parts, are saying, actually, instability isn't what we voted for. That's not what we wanted. So what is going on if he, I mean, I'm curious if you guys think he's going to, in 90 days, do the whole thing all over again that he did now?
- [12:54]
Matthew Continetti
Well, I think a lot depends on what happens over the next 90 days. But the first thing I'd say is, you're absolutely right. I was hoping we'd spend a little bit of time talking about the post hoc rationalizations of the policy, because they've made my day. I mean, I was just rolling on the floor whether it was Besson saying this was the plan all along, or Trump saying, you know, people were getting yippee, or Caroline Levitt was great. She came out and she said, obviously, you and the mainstream media haven't read the Art of the Deal.
- [13:24]
John Podhoretz
You know, Stephen Miller, oh, Stephen Miller, this was the greatest act of economic leadership in world history. He said something very, very akin to that, with his unblinking, you know, peculiar expression on his face.
- [13:44]
Matthew Continetti
Very loudly. Everything he says is very loud, very loud. But so one, a century from now, you know, the Freud of the 22nd century is going to look back on the Trump era and explain to, you know, the. The remaining human, the remaining Homo sapiens, you know, we'll all be in the zoo. 10,000 humans who remain 100 years from now, and, you know, all the robots will be. Will be running the show, but the Freud of the 22nd century will write a book about how Donald Trump is unique in cosmic history for having the ability to have no responsibility for his actions. In fact, not only that, whatever he does is praised to the skies. It's great. I've never, I've I don't know. There must be historical precedent. I actually spent some time thinking yesterday. It's like if we were living during the Jacksonian era, would we have the same type of responses to Old Hickory's actions? Maybe it's just a consequence of our social media age that this is what we live in, but it is a sight to behold. And I'm sorry if I sound nihilistic, but for me the only response is to kind of be amused.
- [15:08]
John Podhoretz
Well, can I go to my. Go to, you know, place of safety.
- [15:14]
Matthew Continetti
Sure.
- [15:14]
John Podhoretz
And offer some pop culture analogies?
- [15:17]
Matthew Continetti
Yes. Okay.
- [15:19]
John Podhoretz
So perhaps one of the great satirical television sitcom characters is Larry Tate, Darren's boss on Bewitched, the head of the advertising agency for which Darren works, and a genuinely great caricature of a spineless American businessman who all he wants to do is get a contract from a company that they want to do advertising for. And the classic Larry Tate routine is that Darren having to deal with the consequences of some magical mishap by his which wife or her family comes up on the fly with a slogan to explain why there was an elephant in his living room and how it might tie to the client's business. And he says something, and Larry Tate says, that is ridiculous. And the client says, I think it's brilliant. And Larry Tate says, it's a brilliantly ridiculous idea.
- [16:24]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [16:25]
John Podhoretz
Or a ridiculously brilliant idea. And this happens again and again and again because the issue, of course, is the ends and not the means. It's such a good joke that basically there were 200 episodes of this show that turned on the same joke. Just use the same joke over and over again. The show ran for a decade or whatever. That is in small bore what we see from the Republican Party and the Trump camp followers, right? It's. He is the most resolute, commanding person, stands on principle. He doesn't care what liberals say. He's gonna own everybody. He's doing this for the American people. And he's like, well, everyone got a little yippee. It's like he did it. That's his whole thing was to get them yippee. So that they would. He could announce it and then he could pull it back. It's unbelievable. What, seeing a lot of it. Yeah.
- [17:21]
Abe Greenwald
A lot of the. Especially around like the pro Trump media, the post lifting justification that was like had the tone of yet the left still. They just don't know. They still don't get him. They still think he doesn't know what he's doing. It's so Funny to watch the left misjudge him.
- [17:42]
Christine Rosen
Well, but to get back to the nihilism that I think Matt is correct to raise, the difference between someone like Trump and someone like Andrew Jackson, for example, is that Andrew Jackson actually had fought in real wars. He, when he had something to prove as president, he didn't need sycophantic, you know, praise and clapping for every little thing he'd done. He'd actually done things. I do think that our modern presidents who haven't served in some capacity, who haven't risked in some capacity their own lives on the battlefield in the way that all of our, most of our previous presidents did in previous centuries, it gives them a different sense of personality, a different sort of understanding of what they're doing. And he is, he's, he's notorious for thinking that the stakes of whatever he does, even though a million people have done what he's done before as a businessman, for example, and done it better, the stakes are always just so much higher when it's Donald Trump in the room. And that is his narcissism, which we've discussed many times. But when it comes to making policy that has global implications, I, it was good to see him blink. It shows he actually isn't completely off.
- [18:42]
Matthew Continetti
I think that's the key point. And, you know, I, I don't want us to devolve into an hour of Trump bashing, but because I'll just give him credit that he does change his mind. So in some ways, he is like FDR in a few ways, but in this way, in the sense that FDR always said, if something's not working, we should just abandon it. And clearly, you know, he went to the brink of a global financial crisis. That's what forced him to cause this reprieve. But he did. He did stop the, the other element here is, as Christine mentioned earlier, is what happens in the 90 days. And I'm also fascinated by the fashion metaphors that have sprouted over the past 24 hours, because we've now kind of turned the United or the White House is now like Donald Trump's big and tall store. And all the, all the countries of the world, the 50 countries or 70 countries, they're lining up outside and the president is promising them tailored, tailored deals. Right? Not off the rack. That's what he's been using, all these fashion, not off the rack. These are going to be tailored deals for every country. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said yesterday. These are bespoke. They're bespoke deals. So Each country is going to come into the tailor shop and they're going to get the unique treatment, you know, the deal that suits them the best. And I think that people aren't paying enough attention to that metaphor because in my view, this will not end up being about trade alone. I think these countries are going to come into these negotiations, they're going to find that the Trump team also wants to talk about defense expenditure, also wants to talk about mineral rights, also wants to talk about what have they done, what have this country done for the United States lately. And so the process of negotiation is going to be much more complicated, I think, than simply saying, well, if you lower your tariffs and you eliminate non tariff trade barriers, then will keep the present tariff rates on your ex, on your exports to the United States. I think it's going to be much larger. And it involves Trump's main goal, which is essentially changing the entire structure of the post war system in ways that benefit directly benefit the United States. For the United States is no longer being a superpower who is benevolent in many ways, looking out not only for its national interest, but also the interest of its allies, opening its markets in order to encourage the prosperity of its allies, basing troops in forward deployments to protect the security of their allies, not really expecting anything in return. That was the case for about 80 years. And Trump's second term is about ending that system and turning it into something where America is paid for what it does.
- [21:54]
John Podhoretz
You know, for some, April is the cruelest month, but I don't think so. April is the month that we bring ourselves back to life. We put our old jackets away, we do a big spring cleaning, particularly if you're Jewish, you're cleaning up the house for Passover and when you finish that deep cleaning, you put the jackets away and you get your summer clothing ready for use. We're prepping for warmer days ahead and the most satisfying thing that you can do might be to refresh your bed. I have just done so with new bowl and branch signature sheets. Made with the finest 100% organic cotton, these sheets feel buttery to the the touch, breathable to sleep in and get softer with every wash. They are the perfect foundation for your best sleep this season. A perfect accompaniment to that effort to restart, to renew, to revigorate and to restore yourself to the joys of outdoor life, summer living and a general sense of well being. And I can say this because I just got them and they're fantastic. They are really fantastic. I can tell you this because put them on the bed. We use them for two days. My wife and I immediately we felt a difference. Softer, better. Then gotta say our cleaning lady came, did the wash, put the old sheets on and they weren't as nice, weren't as comfortable, weren't as fresh, weren't as weren't as soft. So they're made better, they're made different so you can sleep better at night with that Hundred percent organic cotton. Finest on earth. Crafted by artisans who earn the pay and respect they deserve. Designs and colors for every bedroom style and mattress size. These all season sheets have a breathable unmatched softness to start. They get softer with every single wash. Perfect foundation for ball and branches, airy bed blankets, cloud like duvets and so much more. And there's a 30 night worry free guarantee so you can try the sheets for an entire month. Seriously, wash style, feel them for yourself risk free. And if they don't change the way you sleep, you can send them back for a full refund. So upgrade your sleep during bowl and branches annual spring event For a limited time, get 20 off at bowlandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A N--B-R-A-N-C-H.com commentary to take 20% off site wide for a limited time. Exclusions apply. See site for details. Hey everybody. Vacation season is upon us. Spring has hit New York. Got some warm weather, got some rain. But it's just making me think about the summer and the fun that I can have. Fun my wife and I can have. We got a trip planned for Wisconsin in July. Other stuff we're going to do with our family later in August. And this year I'm going to treat myself to the looks upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices. And the premium luggage options and stylish tote bags they offer are perfect ways to carry all of my Quince goods. My sweaters, my polo shirts that I just got from Quints and those like everything else you get there priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How? By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So for your next trip, treat yourself to the looks upgrades you deserve from quints. Go to quints.com commentary for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary okay, if that's the case, then the uncertainty that we were discussing about what happens over the next 90 days and following does not go away ever in his entire term. So the consequences of this effort at a revolutionary rebalancing so that we essentially become like a 19th century empire without holding territory in which our entire policy is based on a very rigorous understanding of our national self interest and an idea that every other country in the world is basically a net competitor and that we are to visit our power on them or to exploit the resources of weaker countries for our own benefit. That's just 19th century imperialism. And then the Brits of course layered that over with the idea that they were also supposed to bring just and competent administration to their civilization. Civilization in general. But even if you weren't talking about civilization in a positive frame, that they would at least run these places well and do well by them by imposing British common law and stuff like that. And that's not of any interest to him whatsoever. But, but, but aside from that, this is not going to, to calm this market discipline that I'm talking about here at all. In fact, it means that every single day from now until he finishes his presidency, everything is up for grabs economically in relations between the United States and the rest of the world. And the uncertainty, that thing you're talking about, the bond markets, he got spooked by the bond markets this week. That won't stop. The bond markets will still have to calculate whether or not the United States. If Trump is gonna act as though our reserve currency is something that is a hindrance to us rather than a benefit, then we're gonna stop being the reserve currency as we almost did in 2008. I mean, people forget. One of the conditions of the financial meltdown was the idea that we could not meet our full faith and credit obligations of our, of our bonds because we were developing a balance of payments deficit and that we were going to break the buck, we were going to not be able to pay dollar for dollar on our debts in the middle of a crisis. And we could have a situation in which people say, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go into crypto. I don't know what they'll do. But he doesn't get the benefit of calming. This is like a momentary. He took a Mylanta and the world, you know, took some Pepto Bismol and the world stomach calmed down from or you know, Zyrtec.
- [29:08]
Matthew Continetti
Cause that refuses.
- [29:09]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, not Zyrtec or whatever he likes.
- [29:11]
Christine Rosen
He likes having that sort of power, too. That's actually the problem, is that I don't think it even. Even his vision for what the global order will look like when he leaves office is. Is as coherent as you make it out to be. I don't think he has any sense of, like, imperialism. Even America first is vague enough that it can shift to. To fill in whatever momentary impulse he has.
- [29:33]
Matthew Continetti
He wants other countries.
- [29:34]
Christine Rosen
It's much more rapacious. It's like the locusts that move over crops, take what they can.
- [29:39]
John Podhoretz
They have to pay. It's.
- [29:40]
Matthew Continetti
So he said it to Bibi in the meeting, you have to pay. You have. You have this trade deficit with the United States. I'm putting on these tariffs, and we'll figure. And we pay you and we give you defense aid. You have to pay. That's all it is. It's very simple. The question, of course, as you say, is how do these countries pay? You know, what does it mean for.
- [30:03]
Christine Rosen
Israel doesn't understand trade deficits. They're not a bad. It's not that simple.
- [30:07]
Matthew Continetti
Like, maybe it means that they have to pay for our aid. They have to. They pay back for the US Aid. I don't know that. That it's that simple. It's everyone else who benefits from America has to pay. And I just want to make one other historical point about what John was saying. This is also fdr, by the way. I think one of the great lessons of Amity, shla's classic the Forgotten man, is that one reason America didn't grow out of the depression in the 1930s was that there was a form of capital strike where business. Business people just didn't know what to do because FDR and the New Deal were so discretionary and arbitrary in many cases. And when that happens, then businesses pull back. I think it's similar to what happened also during the Obama presidency. Why was growth so slow during Obama's presidency? It was because American business was like, this guy hates us. We don't know what to do. These regulations will come out randomly from the executive agencies. So we're just going to hold back now. Trump, of course, says he wants to keep taxes low. He doesn't like regulation. Right. He wants to unleash American energy. But the trade policy is the one area where he does express this discretionary authority that can be extremely disruptive to business planning, and that's a major overhang during the next three and a half years.
- [31:42]
John Podhoretz
Israel is an interesting exception to the world system because we do provide Israel with direct aid. There are very few countries to which we provide direct nation to nation aid. Egypt and Israel are the two largest recipients. This is something dating back 46 years to the Camp David Accords. This direct subvention. Now, it's not really a subvention. It's a form of national industrial policy, because 95% of the money that is spent giving Israel aid is spent inside the United States to support domestic suppliers of the, of the military weaponry that we give them. But nonetheless, we don't have that with 200 other countries. What we have is trade, which is not government to government, right? It is businesses to businesses. It is people to people. It is consumers to producers. It is, you know, is. And so he is, in a weird way, inserting the government into private relationships that the government is permitted, under our understanding of national security and others to monitor and oversee. Right? To determine, for example, in the 1980s, that we needed to watch very carefully the Japanese tech company Toshiba, because Toshiba was getting very footsie with the Russians and the North Korea and the. There was stuff going on and there was a question of whether or not American high tech secrets or high tech secrets in general were going to flow to our enemies. And so there is a whole national security exception to this that is very important, that the economy can't run everything and that we do have our national security, our national survival at stake. But, I mean, we don't have that with East Timor or, you know, as we now know, Lesotho. We don't have that with Lesotho. And there we are hammering Lesotho. It is, it is nonsensical except ideologically where it is, as this is where, Matt, even if, Christine, you're right, that Trump doesn't know from the rebalancing and all of that, but this prejudice or this set of assumptions or assertions in his own head about how the world should be and what the proper relationship of America to the world should be has very large, very large consequences that aren't, you know, that are frankly, not nonsensical and are deeply injurious.
- [34:43]
Christine Rosen
He doesn't ask that question. That's actually what Vance talks about. When Vance talks about America. It's entirely transactional for Trump, I think. I really think it's what do I get and what's the least I can give you? What is the deal? This is, it's entirely transactional, which is not leadership in the sense could be business leadership. But I think it's why he has. No, he's not using. He's using emergency powers. He created an emergency for which he was using emergency powers with this tariff. I mean, the whole thing is like the snake eating its tail. So when I hear Vance talk about what he sees, the future of America in the geopolitical context, that's what he's talking about. I don't hear that from Trump.
- [35:18]
John Podhoretz
No, you're right. I'm just saying that what he does can be constructed over time. Sort of like Charles Krauthammer coming up with the Reagan Doctrine. You can construct in the consistency, whatever the consistency is, between his actions domestically and abroad, economically and in foreign policy. You can say that there will be something that historians will be able to point to, to say these were the defining set of ideas of the Trump years. And we are getting some sense of what those are.
- [35:49]
Matthew Continetti
Think about where we are now, though. Where we are now is, yes, there's a 10% global tariff, but there's a 125% tariff on China on the second.
- [36:00]
John Podhoretz
Largest economy in the world.
- [36:02]
Matthew Continetti
The second largest economy, which is an adversary of the United States. Right. And which people have been criticizing now for about a decade as being too powerful and as being having too much leverage over America in terms of certain critical industries and commodities and so accepting personal motivation. There is a trend with Trump where all the zigzags sometimes end up in a pretty understandable place. And what we just had yesterday is the decoupling with China that people have been talking about for a long time. Is it going to be a soft decoupling? Is it going to be negotiated or is it going to be a hard decoupling? 125% tariff on imports from China is pretty hard decoupling. And that. That is going to be painful for many people in the United States, not just the consumers, Right, who might see price increases, but also the business people that will. That do business with China. That will be painful, but it may be also a forcing mechanism to separate the two countries to end this relationship called Chimerica that was really benefiting China more than it was benefiting, in my view, the strategic position of the United States. So right now there's an opportunity actually to, To. To make the best out of the situation, whereas 24 hours ago, in my view, we were headed toward a calamity.
- [37:58]
Abe Greenwald
But is there a circumstance whereby Trump backs down from this as well?
- [38:05]
Matthew Continetti
Sure, absolutely. What happened in 2019? Right. So in the first trade war tariff, man came out In December of 2018 trade wars are good and easy to win. He imposed the tariffs on China. They reached that phase one deal, if you recall, in I think, December of 2019. That deal, of course, was superseded by the pandemic. China got some relief out of the deal, but not a lot. And many of the tariffs were kept by the Democratic administration of Joe Biden. So I do think Trump is open, as always, as Christine says, to negotiate with China. But from what I understand is that's not happening. And China's retaliation on the United States decreased the chance of a negotiation happening.
- [39:06]
Christine Rosen
And TikTok, where he's flouting what Congress told him to do.
- [39:09]
Matthew Continetti
TikTok's over, but TikTok's over. It ended. They had a deal ready. I think a bad one because the deal, as I understand it, would have allowed ByteDance to keep the algorithm.
- [39:19]
Christine Rosen
Right.
- [39:20]
Matthew Continetti
Which is the secret sauce. Yeah, but that's done. China canceled that. So we're in this place now. As I was saying, look, as the real danger is if the trade war with China and the hard decoupling becomes a physical decoupling.
- [39:37]
John Podhoretz
But that's not, that's not the only danger. I mean, the danger remains the danger that was represented by his backing down yesterday, which is uncertainty flight to bonds. I mean, we are, we are now locked in a trade. If the only trade war had been this trade war with China, by the way, I don't know that the last week would have gone all that differently. If he had started Wednesday by announcing that we had, we were going to have 125% tariff on China. I don't know that the market wouldn't have gone down 5,000 points and that there would have been a flight to bonds and that Scott Bessant wouldn't have said, you better back down. He could vet. That could very easily have happened. Irrespective of everything else that happened and could still happen. We don't know what the response of the world market is going to be. And even more important, we don't know what the consequences to the American economy in 2025 are going to be by making the supply chain goods that Christine mentioned a lot more expensive for American companies that do actually make things inside the United States, which is what this is supposedly all about. So I just harming American manufacturing by eliminating some of the goods that they need or making them pay more than twice as much for the goods that they were buying three weeks ago.
- [41:02]
Matthew Continetti
Right. So futures are down right now in stocks. But when I checked that number just now, as you're speaking, we also got the inflation read from March, which was below expectations, 2%. So this is all a dynamic process, as we, as we've mentioned before. It's, yes, there's this trade war, there's this hard decoupling going on with our adversary, the People's Republic of China, but there's also fiscal policy involved. There's also what's happening to inflation. A 2% inflation read in March may incentivize Jerome Powell now that he doesn't have to worry about a meltdown on US Treasuries to cut rates in the next. In the next meeting. And that would be a boon. That's what Trump wants.
- [41:45]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [41:45]
Matthew Continetti
So there's so much at work here. Well, it's hard to make any definitive judgment.
- [41:51]
John Podhoretz
Right. It's so complicated.
- [41:53]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [41:53]
John Podhoretz
And it's so big. And, you know, this is the other thing, maybe I mentioned that we can go back to the retreat into the safe sphere of American politics. The MAGA line over the last week has been everything stinks and no one has jobs and everything is terrible, and people are in their basements and young men have no war. Everything is horrible. And the United States, we don't make anything anymore. And we don't this and we don't that, we don't everything. And we are, in fact, the world's second largest manufacturing economy. Number one. And number two, the per capita income of the United States in 2023 was $82,000 a year. Under other calculations. That's a generous calculation because these are complicated numbers. It's around 71 or $72,000 a year. Okay. If I told you 20 years ago that the per capita income in the United States would double from where it was 20 years ago, because it was somewhere in the mid-40s, 20 years ago, you would have thought I was a crazy person. And in fact, we went through the financial crisis of 2008 and basically had a stagnant decade. And we're still here. We are. And the picture of the economy that is being drawn by Trump and his friends and the people who want to advance his economic agenda is a false picture of the American economy. It is distorted, it is fake, it is wrong.
- [43:20]
Matthew Continetti
It is.
- [43:20]
John Podhoretz
It is weirdly, propagandistically anti American. And facts and truth cannot be denied forever. That's what the market discipline thing is about. Like, the markets are a collective, not collective, communitarian, let's say, effort. If you put them all together to sort of measure what people think, where money is going to be and how to make money over how to protect your money and then maybe how to make some at the same time. And it can't, it can be distorted a bit over time. But like, this is the invisible hand. This is the rational workings of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people making decisions based on observable reality.
- [44:08]
Matthew Continetti
And the model, the function of ideology. Right. And you see it play out. I mean, there was a post put up by one of the more major MAGA figures, Jack Posoviek, yesterday. It was a picture of a kitchen from. Looked like the 1980s. And he said, look what they took from you. And it was just a picture of, you know, I remember kitchens like this. It was kind of, you know, it was like wood paneling, walls and kind of the thick rug and the sofa with, you know, the protector over it and then a fridge and a sink and, you know, wooden cabinets, small four person wooden table. And I looked at the picture. Who took, who took that? That's still there. I don't, I don't. I mean, there are obviously people who live in poverty in the United States, a smaller number, by the way, but the kitchens now for a lot of people are 20 times better.
- [45:04]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that's why I.
- [45:05]
Matthew Continetti
It's ideology.
- [45:06]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. That post, I think it got like 200,000 responses. But it's a Rorschach test because some people are looking at it and saying, is this a joke? Like, are you saying this is what we need and that we've lost? Because I think so. Or was it a double wide trailer? Are you saying Americans can't live in a double wide trailer anymore? You said this is the kitchen that Americans. That is the kitchen that Americans at the lowest rung of the economic ladder do have in the United States. That kitchen.
- [45:44]
Matthew Continetti
And probably a better one. The microwaves are better.
- [45:47]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. But I mean, who took that kitchen away from whom? I don't understand, like, that's what Trump wants. What I thought MAGA wanted to help people move out of, into nicer kitchen. That's why I still don't understand what that was about. It was fascinating watching.
- [46:03]
Matthew Continetti
I think it speaks to the deep psychologicalness, nostalgia that does motivate a lot of the Trump movement.
- [46:09]
John Podhoretz
Because when I saw who would want that kitchen.
- [46:12]
Matthew Continetti
Well, because people have, people who have memories of childhood. Yeah, that was. Childhood is nice.
- [46:19]
John Podhoretz
There wasn't even a, When I was.
- [46:20]
Matthew Continetti
A child, that's what my kitchen looked like. So, yeah, I liked that kitchen. I was happy as a kid.
- [46:26]
John Podhoretz
Speaking broadly here, I understand there wasn't even a window not happy now.
- [46:30]
Christine Rosen
But the nostalgia for the Trump generation goes back to the 50s and this idea, because the other thing that's often attached to this is none of them.
- [46:36]
John Podhoretz
Lived in the 50s.
- [46:37]
Christine Rosen
If you were a man and you could have, you could be raising your family, could have a wife at home, you could have this kitchen, you could have this whole way of living, that's.
- [46:44]
John Podhoretz
Not a good, affordable.
- [46:47]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. If you go back and look like, you know, so many people were having like three or four kids in one bedroom. So they talk about having this, you know, suburban house, like. Yeah, but they did with less. They did not all have televisions and all the sort of technology that we do now. Most didn't have central air conditioning. If you lived in the south as I grew up in, like, that was horrifying. You didn't, you actually lived at a very, a much lower standard of living. And so, and that was just the norm. So this idea, this, this, I think nostalgia is the right word, but it's a kind of weaponized nostalgia. Now when we start turning that nostalgia into economic policy, it does not work.
- [47:23]
Matthew Continetti
Or the people talking about, you know, all the great factory jobs we're going to have, you know, producing Nike shoes here in the United States, you know, I mean, look, I understand that high skilled manufacturers were hurt by the entry of China into the global trading system. And I know people whose jobs were shipped overseas or shipped to Mexico. And that's, that's painful, you know, but do we really want to create a self sufficient economy where we have people bolting iPhones together? I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me. It's driven by an ideological construct of what is good for the human being that is not, that is not reflective of reality.
- [48:12]
John Podhoretz
That goes back to Jackson. We like to play these historically. That goes back to Jacksonianism. So I would say there were two works of culture in 1987 that spelled this out interestingly from wildly different ideological perspectives. One was Bonfire of the Manatees by Tom Wolf. The other was Wall street, the movie made by Oliver Stone. And in Bonfire of the Vanities, you'll remember, Sherman McCoy is a bond trader. I believe he's a bond trader.
- [48:40]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [48:41]
John Podhoretz
And there is a whole where Sherman Coy realizes he cannot explain to his kid what he does for a living and that this is a new thing in life, that in fairness, none of.
- [48:55]
Christine Rosen
Us can do that either.
- [48:56]
John Podhoretz
No, no, I'm aware. I'm just saying it is, it's a brilliantly satirical moment where this guy who is doing something that is making him where he's going broke on a million dollars a year, as he says in the course, cannot tell his six year old. You know, when I go to the office, I screw, I take a screwdriver and I ratchet something in. And at the end of the day there's a car at the end of the assembly line. He is doing something abstract and, and, and, and complicated and it doesn't produce anything. And so that's one thing. And there's a monologue in Wall street that Martin Sheen delivers to his son Charlie because he's a working man and Charlie has gone to work on Wall street about how he makes things. And he. We make things and we used to make things in this, now we don't make any. You're not making anything. You're just spinning money around and we need to make things right. So that's 1987. That's actually before the financial meltdown in 1987. And it was an anxiety in the United States that we were moving to this post industrial economy in which the nature of how money is made, moved and done had become increasingly abstract and that it was hard for people to have their minds around what on earth was going on. And that is a real thing and it remains a thing today, 40 years later. Let's go back to Andrew Jackson. You mentioned yesterday the fight between Andrew Jackson and the national bank run by Nicholas Biddle. Andrew Jackson could not grok the notion of money. He did not understand the idea that a piece of paper could stand in for good. You could tell him, you could tell him a thousand times he couldn't get it the way I don't understand crypto or the way there's a whole kind of all bunch of things in our economy now that I do not get. I don't understand how they work. I don't understand the logic behind them. But that the idea that you could, rather than forcing people to take an object and trade it for another object, that you could have a symbolic representation of that object and give that symbolic representation of the object to some other person who would then maybe give you an object back and would accept this piece of paper as a version of the object that it didn't want.
- [51:27]
Matthew Continetti
With interest.
- [51:28]
John Podhoretz
Right? With interest. Right. Okay.
- [51:30]
Matthew Continetti
The critique of credit and interest is thousands of years old.
- [51:33]
John Podhoretz
Right. Okay. So, but I think centrally, and this is an empire of wealth, John Steele, Gordon's like seminal book on the construction of the American economy, that Jackson's problem was he was sort of like the last pre modern man and that he was. What are you talking about? I don't understand. If I give you a cow, you give me a pig. That I understand. I give you a piece of gold, which is a physical object that is deemed to be worth value. I give you a house. Okay, what we have now is something very weirdly. These are similar problems now. We barely even use cash 200 years after Andrew Jackson and people outside of the lowest quintile don't use cash anymore. Effectively we have moved entirely into the world of abstraction. But this feeling that things that aren't real are happening gyrating inside machines and that we don't really understand what on earth that actually is. Like, how many people, how many times in my life have I had a successful businessman explain to me what a put is? Many times. And I could not today, I could not today define a put.
- [53:06]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, it is a tricky one, I'm just saying.
- [53:09]
John Podhoretz
But everybody who does this for a living put is business 101 on Wall Street. It's one of the, it's one of the tools you use to do X, Y or Z. I can't. I'm an intelligent person. I do this podcast every day. I do reasonably well managing my own money. But I don't understand the abstractions of the economy that have made people extraordinarily wealthy. But I do understand that if you make an iPhone and you sell it for twice what you made it for, that Apple can make a trillion dollars or that Tesla can make a trillion dollars, cuz that's a physical. Everybody can get that. And that Trump is the last industrial economy man, let's put it that way. Like he is the last man who's like, I don't think it's fair that we trade together and that you get more of my money than I get of your money. And if you say to them, but that's not the way it works, because we're there, we're getting goods that we're buying and it's like, I don't care. I don't even know what that means. Why do they have. Why, why, why aren't we getting more of their money? Because it's not about the money. Well, yes it is. You know, it's. This conversation is, it's why it's effective. It's why populism works. It's because you are, you are ratcheting back to literal, literal, literalness.
- [54:40]
Christine Rosen
Like it's passionate oversimplification. That's why it works.
- [54:44]
John Podhoretz
Right? But it is literal. In other words, you know, people say I had this now, now I'm really getting like going far afield, but know a whole bunch of people in my life who are like, reflexively pro choice, right? Reflexively pro choice. And they didn't, they didn't understand what the hell you're talking about when you talked about what the moral quandaries were about life and when life started and abortions and all of that. And I, I myself am very, have very complicated feelings about this. But these are people who, women mostly, that I knew who like, were. This was just sort of axiomatic to them. And then they got pregnant and then they went in for the ultrasound and they're there and they're eight or nine weeks or something and they see this lima bean with a heartbeat and because they've seen it and it's in their own body, right? And that there's this creature inside their own body suddenly this thing that they were unable to understand abstractly, which was the argument for life. Not that a lot of people don't then discard this, but that it comes home to them. Not that they then start protesting outside abortion clinics or vote, you know, or vote for, you know, six week abortion bans. But the world, because they can see, becomes real. Because we're used to, we think abstractly, but a lot of people don't. You know, we think we live, intellectuals, live in a world in which they play around with abstractions that aren't really abstractions but are, you know, iterations of reality. And many people need to see it, hold it in their own hands or see it with their own eyes before they can believe that it.
- [56:35]
Matthew Continetti
Well, this is the classic problem of facing all command economies, which is the knowledge problem, which is, yeah, you can see the physical fabs, and it'd be great if there were more factories in the United States, but you can't see the other dispersed benefits and you can never possess enough knowledge of the economy to actually effectively control it. So the flip side of me saying that, you know, the Trump trade war with China and the global tariff needs to be set in the context of all of his other policies is that we don't know how the trade policy will interact with the, with the other policies as well. And the shock could be negative. Could it be that the tariff policy could absorb all the benefits of the other side of the policy? We don't know, I mean, just how complicated it is. One result of the past week was that the oil prices crashed, right? You say, oh, the oil prices crash. Well, that's a good thing because maybe gasoline will be cheaper. Yeah, sure. But also means that US Producers aren't going to start drilling because they now have to deal with their backstop. On the other hand, it also means that Russia is hurt because Russia's economy is almost completely dependent on the price of oil. So there's just no way and Iran. So there's just no way to take in all of these different factors. And so this is why Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell say it's just better to kind of step back and let producers and consumers interact on their own because somehow, magically, theoretically, it ends up benefiting everybody in the long run.
- [58:28]
John Podhoretz
I want to just kind of just.
- [58:29]
Abe Greenwald
Mention something about the, the various populist arguments you see, particularly online. There's, you know, some about, like what type of work is available. But the one that I come up against most often is, goes something like this. My father worked in a store. He was at his the highest amount of money he made was $30,000 a year. With that, he fed me and my sister and my mother stayed home and she made meals and they put us through school and still had enough for retirement. And that's gone. That's the one that comes up again.
- [59:15]
John Podhoretz
And again and it's a delusion, right?
- [59:19]
F
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Therapy can be a source of support for any area of your life. It could be time to shift the focus from doing it all to knowing that we're better when we ask for help. I've benefited from therapy several times in my life. I have no difficulty thanking my therapists for the help that they have given me. And I am proud to be someone to recommend therapy to people who are in need of help that they can't get anywhere else. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient. Serving over 5 million people worldwide, you can access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties. And you can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Build your support system with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com commentary today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com commentary.
- [60:37]
John Podhoretz
Because the person who worked in a store who made $30,000 a year when that kid was a kid ended up making way more money over the course of his lifetime. For the most part, rising expectations was a real thing. Now inflation in the 70s ate into it. All sorts of things ate into it. Some of those Kinds of jobs went away or they didn't go away. But that's the problem with the freezing in time thing. It's like in 1957, you could own a house with one salary and your mother could stay home and all of that. But houses were 750 square feet in size. They had one bathroom. Right. Number one. And number two, the United States had 60% of the world's industrial output and therefore its workforce was uncommonly well paid because nobody else on the planet was working. And we were producing everything, including services, like the guy who worked in the store. And that ended up.
- [61:35]
Matthew Continetti
And half the workforce we have today wasn't in the workforce.
- [61:39]
John Podhoretz
Wasn't in the workforce at all. So the workforce was smaller. So the pressure upward, pressure on wages. Right. And all that. So that's why it's so complicated. And one defense of Andrew Jackson as against Donald Trump is that when Andrew Jackson became president, the United States had existed for about 50 years. Right. And so Andrew Jackson was the guy who said, oh, the Supreme Court doesn't like when I do X, Y or Z, let's see them enforce it. That was a thing that this country had to go through a lot of things to create its set of traditions. How we were going to enforce laws, how the bodies of power were going to interact with each other. We had to go through all that. And we've come out the other side. We're almost 250 years old now. And the weird thing about Donald Trump is that he doesn't believe in anything that happened before 2015. And he doesn't take any wisdom from anything that happened before 2015. And it turns out that one of the reasons that we have this jury rigged system that we have, some of which is really great and some of which has been pretty bad, I will acknowledge, particularly in the arrogation of power by the executive branch in terrible ways that he is now advancing is. It's great to come in this later because there's just much more information about what works and what doesn't work. So he's going to start out, start a trade war. We stopped trade wars because they were bad, not because they were implicitly immoral or terrible, but because the consequences and results of them were injurious to us. And so we didn't want them anymore because we lived through them, you know, and so he, it's year zero for him. Like year zero was when he came down the escalator and he has to learn all these lessons himself. Like he didn't have to go through the last week, everybody on earth was telling him this was what was gonna happen. And then it happened. He's like, well, you all got the yips. It's like, okay, but you know what? That's what everybody understood was that the yips would happen not because we're all geniuses, but because the country's been around long enough and the economy's been around long enough that its responses to things are noble based on an enormous amount of prior data.
- [64:07]
Christine Rosen
But this is why he is the perfect populace. He's completely ahistorical. He has no interest in history. He has only interest, as Matt says, in nostalgia. Nostalgia is not history. Nostalgia can be easily manipulated, weaponized, you know, turned into ideology or policy in his case. And that's why he, and he's very literal minded person. You know, I mean, that's actually, and his skill as a businessman I think has helped that. That's been an aid to his, to him in some arenas, but it's not, it's not a strength as a president deciding complicated economic matters.
- [64:39]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so very quickly to the big beautiful bill. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, had to pull the big beautiful bill or the budget resolution from Congress last night, I believe. Right. Because Republicans, some Republicans in the caucus thought that there wasn't, there weren't enough spending cuts. So he's now either going to go back again today or something like that.
- [65:04]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, there's a vote is planned again for today.
- [65:07]
John Podhoretz
Okay. So I don't think he would plan another vote again today if, if there weren't some indication that he had to let people vote no in order to let them vote yes or some, or they, not that, not that they needed to vote no, but that he needed.
- [65:19]
Matthew Continetti
To remember he can lose more than one vote.
- [65:22]
John Podhoretz
Right. So all I'm saying is like this is an interesting, I believe Bessant and others said, or our friend Mark Halpern says in his newsletter today that 25% of the reason that Trump backed off is that the tariff stuff was complicating the budget resolution politically. That, that he, the message wasn't helpful to Johnson saying to his people, okay, look, we got to move forward here because they're like, we don't know what the hell is going on. And with the trade stuff and all that, I don't know what's, what's happening. And so, you know, we're going to need to enshrine some budget cuts also because the Senate, they're all, they're all wusses and they won't cut the budget enough and all of this. And what's interesting about all this is that there are no numbers. Like, there's no, I mean, there's. These numbers are all illusory. There's no bill. There's no setup. There's no, we don't know where they're going to come.
- [66:18]
Matthew Continetti
No, there are numbers. The House budget plan called for mass major cuts. Right.
- [66:23]
John Podhoretz
But I'm saying.
- [66:24]
Matthew Continetti
And then the Senate plan called for fewer cuts.
- [66:28]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [66:28]
Matthew Continetti
And the debate is whether the Senate plan was a floor or whether it was a ceiling. And the holdouts in the House say, well, the Senate is just going to, you know, pull the rug out from under us again.
- [66:42]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [66:42]
Matthew Continetti
And that's the ceiling. And we need more cuts to our budget because our debt is so great. And that. Right. The vote was postponed. It wasn't polled. It was postponed yesterday because Johnson still hasn't been able to convince enough the holdouts to back it.
- [66:59]
John Podhoretz
I want to explain what I mean when I say that there are no numbers. I mean that what happens is that they come up with this, these essentially these kind of resolution papers that say we're going to cut X or you're going to cut. Yes, but that, those are number, those are gross numbers. And like, what are you going to cut and from which departments are you going to. How are you going to cut? What's the time frame of the cut? Is it a year? Is it five years? Are you projecting outward? Is there, you know, like all of that stuff. It's much less sophisticated than it seems in that sense. And then at some point you have this kind of. These two chambers agree and then these kind of, you know, the, like the, the, the soothsay. The magicians go off into a room for three months and write 28,000 pages that figure out how to, how to actually allocate this money at a, at the level that supposedly is, is, is agreed to. So it's all a kind of shadow, a kabuki game in a weird sense about what it is you can say you voted for in this, which won't even necessarily reflect where all this comes down when, when they all actually have to vote on the budget itself, not the budget resolution or not the initial negotiation tactics. But, but still, once again, I think Johnson is showing his. Johnson showing deep skill or tactile, tactile ability to understand when to pull back, when to go, how to handle. He is, he has some very innate connection to this caucus.
- [68:45]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. I mean, they need this vote today because they're scheduled to go on break for Passover and Easter for two weeks. If they don't get the vote today, it will be considered a blow to Trump. Maybe this inflation number will help things and spur some momentum. But as we've been talking about now for years, there's a group of House Republicans who think that our debt problem is the overriding issue and the political system isn't serious about it, and they're willing to, to vote against it. Now, so far, it's really only Tom Massie of Kentucky who votes against these things. As I said. Now, with the two special elections having occurred, there's a little bit more room to lose additional votes, but it's up to Trump and Johnson to, to get it over the finish line today, I think.
- [69:35]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so last thing, because we're running long, but Trump announced yesterday these two executive orders that are, are effectively, if these things are tantamount to pieces of legislation, these executive orders are tantamount to bills of attainder, bills of attainder being unconstitutional pieces of legislation that are aimed at individual, individual people. You cannot do that. You cannot. Bill of attainder is unconstitutional. So if Congress says, you know, we, we should send Matt Continenti to jail, Matt can go to court, and the. Any court would find that unconstitutional because you can't do it that way. But he has issued these executive orders, one thing totally within his power, which is these two figures. Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs. Miles Taylor, a Homeland Security official who wrote the famous anonymous email about how Trump was a child and then published it as a book, and Chris Krebs, who was in, who was in charge of cybersecurity and under Trump, and then said the election had been fairly decided in December of 2020 and was fired by Trump. So he has pulled their security clearances, which he is permitted to do, but he has now. He has directed the Justice Department to launch investigations of Taylor and Krebs to see, you know, on a fishing expedition to see what they can get. Get on the two of them. This is very, very, very bad. There's no justification for it, except politically. And there's one great political justification for the Miles Taylor thing, just in Machiavellian terms. Trump is sending a message to the entire Trump administration that ain't nobody going to publish no op ed in the New York Times under the name Anonymous and attack him. And if that happens, he doesn't care what anybody says. He is going to sic the Justice Department on you, and he will cost you $500,000 in legal bills to defend yourself against this onslaught. So just don't do it in the first place, it's really bad. It's injurious to everything about our body politic. But politically, it's sound, I think. I mean, in a deep, cynical way, it's sound. And of course, you know, remember during.
- [71:47]
Matthew Continetti
The campaign, whenever asked about his comment that he is his voter's retribution, he would respond, you know, doing well will be my best revenge. Yeah, well, maybe that's partly true, but he's definitely out for retribution, whether it's big law or whether it's the Biden officials that he's stripped of security clearances, whether it's General Milley and anybody associated with the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and now in this case, two individuals. And that's what's really unique about these executive orders. It's not going after a law firm. There was another law firm that he went after yesterday. It's two named individuals in an executive order. And I think that's why both men have grounds to, to sue and to, and to treat these as bills of attainder.
- [72:42]
John Podhoretz
I mean, I don't think this has ever been chat. This has ever been taken up as far as I know. I don't think anything like this has ever been done before. Bills of attainder obviously attach only to Congress and the.
- [72:52]
Matthew Continetti
It's a pushing limit. Right. Because, you know, he could, he could have just stripped them of their security clearance, as he's already done to so many people, and that wouldn't really be a big deal in the broad scheme of our recent history. Yeah, but naming them and then saying that they should, that the security agencies, our agency should investigate them through an executive order is, I think, wrong and, and probably illegal.
- [73:20]
John Podhoretz
And by the way, just to close the circle on this 2026 House elections in 2026, he is get, I mean, I know we don't want to go through this again and everybody's get whatever, but he is handing Democrats, should they have an expected decent night on November 2026, he's handing them 25 different vehicles to hamstring those last two years and to impeach him again. Now, maybe you look at that and say, well, you know what? They don't do it. No, you know, it's really sweet, but, you know, some of this stuff yesterday where this whole question, I'm sorry, there's a, if you can hear it, there's a ambulance outside my window. So I was just gonna say quickly that there's a lot there in the. What, how many people sold stock who knew that he was gonna suspend the, you know, he was gonna, he was gonna suspend the tariff.
- [74:22]
Christine Rosen
Although the Democrats, Democrats who have Nancy Pelosi's portfolio in their history should probably be cautious about going after INS investigation.
- [74:32]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, the bottom line is, as we said on this program since before the election, if the Democrats get the House of Representatives, they're going to impeach Trump again. It doesn't matter on what. They're going to find something. But I'm saying they're going to do it.
- [74:45]
John Podhoretz
He's given them, but he's given them. Unlike, I think.
- [74:49]
Matthew Continetti
Well, I think that's one reason he's pushing the envelope is he says to himself, why not?
- [74:53]
John Podhoretz
I got two years.
- [74:53]
Matthew Continetti
Because two years, that's why it all comes down to the election next year.
- [74:57]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [74:58]
Christine Rosen
This is egregious, though. And I think, I mean, if we had more time, we should spend more time on it. Because if you're, if you're a MAGA person, flip the president's party, find someone on the right who, who did something that was considered brave by the right and horrifying by the left and think about what the reaction would be if Joe Biden or Obama or any Democratic president singled out in an executive order for punishment by the justice.
- [75:22]
John Podhoretz
That's what they say. To be fair. To be fair. Again, this all goes back to the blame attaches to Obama. Why? Because I still think that the weaponization of government, I mean, weapons is a long term thing, right? And McCarthy era, whatever you want to talk about. But there was this moment in 2010 when the IRS started going after conservative nonprofit organizations. That was the crossing of a Rubicon. And you can date a lot of things from that to this. They, they took executive authority to places that it was, was not supposed to go. And once you open that Pandora's box, you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Let me just mix metaphors.
- [76:05]
Christine Rosen
Spot on journalists too, we shouldn't forget.
- [76:07]
John Podhoretz
And they spot on journalists. And they, yeah, they, they tortured James Rosen and you know, I mean, just like over and over and over again, this is what's unprecedented, is naming Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. What is not unprecedented is using the powers of the executive branch to go after people and organizations, though in a different way. And certainly that is something that Biden and Obama did very happily, just as Trump is doing it happily now. We'll be back tomorrow. For Christine, Abe and Matt, I'm John Pakords. Keep the candle.