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- [00:04]
John Pothorz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, March 3rd, 2025. I'm John Pothorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
John Pothorz
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
Abe Greenwald
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:41]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:42]
Abe Greenwald
And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:44]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:45]
Abe Greenwald
So maybe we make quick work of the Oscars creatively. I'm, as people know, I've been a movie critic for more than 40 years. I write movie criticism for the Washington Free Beacon intermittently now. And my favorite movie of 2024, Nora, did win five Oscars, including a four. First time in history for its writer, director, editor, producer, Sean Baker. So creatively, I am perfectly satisfied. I want to talk about two political moments, one, of course, being the awarding of the best documentary feature to a movie called no Other Land made by two Israeli Jews and two and two West Bank Palestinians. And of course, they took the stage to say Israel must not do any more ethnic cleansing. And I'm doing this for my daughter so she shouldn't have to live under the horrible circumstances of the monstrous life that I'm living that has led me at the age of 32, to win an Oscar and stand on the stage in LA being garlanded by the entire world. That's how horrible life is for Palestinians on the west bank who can find themselves on the Oscar stage. Oh, boy, how terrible for them. Gee. And then I want to finish up with Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar for the Brutalist. This is Adrien Brody's second Academy Award. For both Academy Awards, he plays a European caught in the Holocaust. In the Pianist, for which he won his first 22 years ago, he was. It's a true story of a. Of a man trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto who managed to stay in his apartment for two years, never leaving his apartment. Vladislav Spilman, the Pianist. And for the Brutalist, he plays a survivor of Buchenwald who ends up in the United States as an architect. Okay. Two Jewish Holocaust involved survivors. And so he is on stage and after talking about how, oh, him, himself and what about him and he and his career and careers and we need life and love in the heart. And everybody in the world is going get off stage already. He finally said, I dedicate this award to sort of like against anti Semitism. And then instantly he said, and race. I don't like racism. And I don't like othering. So I just want to point out that the one time that anything relating to anti Semitism, you know, what is this, 16 months after? 18 months after October 7th. I don't even know how many months anti Semitism mentioned on stage after an anti Semitic movie wins the documentary award. And this cowardly little twerp can't even just say, my movie is about antisemitism, which it is, and that I play Holocaust survivor and never again, which he couldn't. So that is Hollywood in 2025. Not that, by the way, no Other Land is a Hollywood movie and the Brutalist is not a Hollywood movie. This is what Hollywood has chose to decorate and what somebody who was looking for his next job thought was necessary, which is, he couldn't just say this movie is about a Jew who went through the Holocaust. He's also got to say it's about racism and othering and othering and racism and racism and othering. So piss off.
- [04:36]
Seth Mandel
I have to say that I was actually glad that he mentioned anti Otherism because the Otherish people have been persecuted for far too long and put down by society, and it's about time that they had a champion. So the Otherish community, they had their moment last night with Adrien Brody, the other comedy.
- [04:59]
Abe Greenwald
And I just have to say I love Honora, the movie that won, but both its writer, director, editor, producer, and its star, Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for best actress deservedly over Demi Moore, who was very good and wonderful in the substance, but. But Mikey Madsen's performance is a performance for the ages. Nonetheless, they both took time to pay tribute to the sex worker industry and to sex workers, because Honora, the title character of the movie, is a pole dancing stripper who does exchange sexual favors for money, though she's not explicitly a prostitute. Christine, not that I want to turn to you because you're a woman, but you are a social commentary columnist.
- [05:52]
Christine Rosen
I get the prostitute questions on the podcast.
- [05:55]
Abe Greenwald
I said to my wife, like, I don't like this mainstreaming of sex. This has been a thing now for 20 years on the left. And I mean, I know I have a friend who is an academic who's done legal work, who's written legal things about sex workers. The term sex worker itself is, of course, an effort to demoralize or remove from moral condemnation the job of actually selling your body for money and selling your, you know, whatever. So what do you make of this? And like, how. How bad is that morally, spiritually, for the country and the world.
- [06:39]
Christine Rosen
Well, I think it is bad. I mean, I. The only response to someone who wants to talk about sex work as a. As a legitimate form of employment for women is to ask them if they would want their daughter to be one, and you'll get an immediate and visceral and moral response. But I do think it. It reflects where we are as a culture. OnlyFans has made sex work mainstream, and it's made it. I mean, it's turned it into like a version of Uber for people. It's. It's. Most people don't make money on OnlyFans, but the ones who do make a lot, young women are flocking to it to try to. As their side hustle. Now, part of that is because we have demoralized and de. Stigmatized things like prostitution, which are extremely risky ventures for women to engage in. And I think that is too bad. But I wasn't surprised, actually. I think I've become a little jaded about it. But to see someone as intelligent and thoughtful an actress as Mikey Madison. She could have just said the first part of her remark, which was, thank you to the people in the industry who helped me understand what their job is like, and left it at that. But now there's this compulsion for everyone to praise the most extreme thing now, to look as if they're tolerant.
- [07:48]
John Pothorz
I mean, can I just say something? My problem with all the sex worker talk is that it's cleansing something. It's giving cover to something that is actually an awful, violent, not infrequently homicidal world for women who are preyed upon by male criminals. I mean, what on earth is empowering about giving cover to this? This is crazy.
- [08:21]
Christine Rosen
Well, these are the same people who would denounce Andrew Tate, too. That's the strange thing. There's a lot of contradiction in their moralizing and demoralizing.
- [08:28]
Abe Greenwald
Anora itself, as a piece of art, is a movie that is very unsentimental about its title character and her sex work. She is a greedy, grasping, transactional, cold person who the movie sets up as a Cinderella, as a kind of weird moment where she has a Cinderella moment where she's gonna get out of this scot free. That's the setup is a guy comes along who decides he's rich, he's crazy in love with her, and he's gonna take her away from all this. It's like Pretty Woman, right? And then it isn't like Pretty Woman. And I don't want to talk about what happens in Enora because it's so Fantastic. You really should see it. The second. Like, the second hour of Enora is the best American comedy made in the last 20 years. And so it must be seen to be believed. So I don't want to talk about it. But the movie does not treat Honora, the sex worker, as the hooker with a heart of gold, like Julia Roberts in, you know, who won't kiss. Right. Julia Roberts won't kiss her Johns, because that's the thing that she keeps for herself in the course of her terrible existence. Right. But Nora is a. Is a highly flawed, deeply, deeply flawed person for whom we nonetheless come to feel compassion because she got this glimpse of escape from the life that she was trapped in and then basically has it, the rug pulled out from under her. So as a. As a piece of popular art, it does not serve as a calling card or a message about how sex work is just another form of work in America. She is. She is diseased by what she does. Her soul is curdled to some extent, either by what she does or the fact that her soul is somewhat curdled is the reason she can do what she does. But then there's this PR campaign on behalf of sex work on the stage of the Academy Awards.
- [11:00]
Christine Rosen
Well, it's a major part of the Los Angeles economy. So, I mean, I think. And many of the people in the audience last night probably partake of it.
- [11:08]
Abe Greenwald
So.
- [11:08]
Christine Rosen
But you know, what's interesting is that at the same time that more and more people began producing, of their own volition, a lot of amateur porn and going on onlyfans and, you know, this sort of. This kind of professionalization of. Of and transactional approach to sex was when suddenly we see this discussion of sex workers. It's like, oh, well, there's professionals here, and it's an industry, and we need to protect them. It's like, actually, everybody's. The culture is pretty widely pornified, and there's plenty of people who will do this just for the kicks, as we've seen with people who later then try to run for office and have to explain away their amateur porn videos. So it's a strange. In a strange sense, they are trying to professionalize something that now people will do for free. And so There's a strange 10 there in terms of the market for this stuff.
- [11:53]
Abe Greenwald
But it is, you know, as the father of daughters, Seth is the father of daughters. Like. And by the way, porn doesn't just kind of like, distort and do deep psychological harm to the girls and women who participate in it. It does Deep psychological harm to the men I think in particular, who are its audience and its consumers. But in the case of like one as a parent or Americans as parents, this is yet another thing that one is now obliged to have conversations about because of the way people in the culture, you know, it's like people, you know, 25 years ago or whenever that was, people were like, why did Bill Clinton do this to me? I don't want to talk about what they're talk. I don't want my 7 year old to say, what did Bill Clinton do with Monica Lewinsky? What's on Monica Lewinsky's dress? Why do I have to have this conversation? You made me do that. And some of that blame attached to Clinton and some of it attached to Kenneth Starr was like, why are you even looking into this? It's none of our business. And now you've written this report that everybody has to talk about, about their children with like, thanks a lot. I'm spending, I'm trying to like protect my kids from the moral decline of the United States and you in some effort to kind of take it up as a matter of public policy, are making it worse. And so Hollywood is bad enough like why it needs to now contribute to the conversation that Seth, I guess your kids probably didn't watch that but might have had to have with his daughters. What do they mean, the sex work? What does that mean?
- [13:49]
Seth Mandel
My kids were, my kids were.
- [13:52]
Abe Greenwald
Your kids were reading Herodotus in Greek or something. So I don't know what they, what your kids were doing.
- [13:57]
Seth Mandel
My kids were scandalized. The only thing my kids were scandalized recently was the, the, the breast cancer commercial at the super bowl because my kids were still up and wonder and you know, asking questions about why there was like 60 seconds of as they said boobs on the screen and stuff. But they don't. The thing about they're not old enough to see the movie like Adora. They're not old enough to sort of be in that world. But they do see and they do know what happens in politics very much like what you're saying about Bill Clinton and all that stuff. I mean, I came upstairs the other day and was like, you know, a couple of my kids were home and I just said the oldest were home and I just said I have to go do an emergency podcast because of, you know, something that happened, you know, whatever. And, and my daughter asked what happened and I, I told her there was President of Ukraine was there. They were yelling at each other, you know, all this other stuff. And she's, you know, she starts going, wait, why were they, how could, how could they do, why were they yelling at you? I'm like, I gotta go explain. I'm telling you, I'm on my way to my, you know, and she's like, well, you know, but does it, does Trump really like Putin? You know, and all this stuff and yeah, you know, 11 year olds, when they hear it, as soon as kids hear, get an introduction to any sort of adult world thing, whether it's politics or sex or entertainment or anything like that, it sticks with them in, in their curiosity and so that, you know, going forward, it's like they love the fact that they know, have this, you know, this sense in their mind that there's something with Trump and Putin maybe and they're always going to bring. And so it's very hard to, when you see something in, in culture, like to get it unstuck from the kids, you know, but they don't just ask you once about it. In other words, they tend to incorporate it into their understanding of the adult world. And when that enters politics, that's just a mind.
- [15:57]
Christine Rosen
But that, you know, in a sense, your daughter's question is exactly the one that a lot of Republicans over the weekend were squirming and answering. Does, Does Trump like Putin? I would like a yes or no answer to that question or kids just.
- [16:10]
Seth Mandel
Get to the choice, you know.
- [16:12]
Abe Greenwald
Well, let's move on to that topic then because I do want to point out something that somebody said this morning. Let me find it. I'm sorry, I should have it like, as usual, I should have it right.
- [16:29]
Unknown
Up in front of me here.
- [16:31]
Abe Greenwald
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this morning, quote, the new US Administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision. So Trump may not like Putin or he might like Putin and Vance may or may not like Putin. But according to the Kremlin, as it reads what happened on Friday, America's foreign policy understanding is now aligning with Russia's foreign policy configuration.
- [17:07]
Christine Rosen
Well, Putin's vision board is China, the US and the Russia all as co equal powerful state actors who are more acting together than not, or at least not actively hostile to each other. I mean, didn't he, wasn't that the outline the three nations, Russia, China, U.S.
- [17:26]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but it wasn't just that. I mean, I think the idea of saying the defense, I think of the sort of the MAGA isolationists is they, they like or don't like anybody. That's not the issue. The Issue is what is best for the United States. How, how do we do what's best for the United States? Zelensky is coming here, he's being rude. We don't want to watch, see all this death or subsidize. We don't want to give him any more money. And then we're just going to have to figure out how best to go through this, doing it unsentimentally, The Kremlin saying, hey, you're on our side. So if the Kremlin saying, you're on our side, where is the blowback from the people who don't want us to say Trump likes Putin to say, no, Dmitry Peskov, you're wrong. We're not on our foreign policy configuration does not conform with yours. And in fact it doesn't. What is what? As Abe constantly points out, Russia is selling weapons to Iran to give to Iran to fire at Israel. We are on Israel's side. And the vice versa.
- [18:42]
John Pothorz
I mean, the vice versa.
- [18:44]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [18:44]
John Pothorz
The drones that are attacking Ukraine are. A good deal of them are Iranian.
- [18:50]
Abe Greenwald
Mid right. So if Trump said, I don't want to support Ukraine, but I'm going to be first term Trump and like hit Putin hard and levy sanctions again and, you know, make sure that he is kept in his box. He's not supposed to be thinking that he's getting anything positive out of me. I'm just sick of supporting Ukraine and I don't want to do that anymore. And Europe can step up or whatever. That's one thing. What we keep hearing from, from the kind of MAGA intellectuals is that this rebalancing that Trump is doing is good because Ukraine is affirmatively bad, is a bad actor. And Russia has a legitimate argument to make that the west has been threatening it through the expansion of NATO over the last two decades and is only doing what any rational nation would do, defending its interests and protecting its borders from an imperialist encroacher. So which way is Trump gonna go here? Is he implicitly gonna accept this MAGA intellectual John Mearsheimer view, or is he gonna say, this is not our deal, like, you know, Putin's done a bad thing, but we did all we could and now it's too much money and there's too many people dying. And I don't want my fingerprints on this. But we're going to keep sanctions on Putin because he's bad. He shouldn't be invading countries next. I don't think that's where he's going.
- [20:30]
John Pothorz
No, I don't think so. Either. And I think, look, he beat, in some sense, he beat the intellectuals to the punch in terms of sort of getting on the same page as Putin. When Trump and Putin had their long, wonderful phone call a couple weeks ago, Trump got off and put up on truth social. Putin even used my campaign term of common sense during our phone call. He's very happy to be seen as coming together with Putin, and he's very happy to try to rehabilitate Putin's image as well as a commonsensical figure alongside him who wants to do something about this little warmonger in Ukraine.
- [21:21]
Abe Greenwald
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- [23:17]
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- [24:58]
Christine Rosen
Made, I think, by kind of maga ish leaning types that, you know, this is all strategic. He's, he's disruptive of diplomacy because the old way of doing things didn't work, obviously. And one of the things they've pointed to is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced the suspension of US Cyber Command, attempting to stop a lot of Russian hacking. And that this is this great, thoughtful chess move because it shows Russia that we want them to come to the table and negotiate a peace with Ukraine. And so we're not going to continue to prosecute this part of a cyber war, which, which of course directly affects the United States in its interest because it's attacking us and American voters. But I just, I don't, I don't see that in the rhetoric coming right out of the White House and setting aside the fact that the strong country shouldn't behave like a bully. Bullying is a sign of weakness, not strength. And that both Trump and Vance should have not, you know, jumped on Zelensky, even though I do think Zelensky didn't behave well either. He should take some lessons from Netanyahu dealing with Biden and like, learn how to kind of soothe the ego of an important ally. I don't find believable that this is actually a strategy. I really think it's much more basic and instinctual for Trump. He doesn't like Zelensky. He thinks Zelensky is weak. And so he is. He's kind of.
- [26:19]
Abe Greenwald
Oh, I don't think he thinks Zelensky is weak. I think he doesn't like Zelensky because he asked Zelensky to go after Biden for him, and Zelensky said no. And his line then had to be, our phone call was perfect. I get along really well with Zelenskyy because that was part of his line of defense against the Alexander Vindman whistleblower claim that led to his first impeachment. Now he's in power, and now he can take his revenge against Zelenskyy for not doing what he asked him to do, which was to empower a special prosecutor to help make his election campaign in 2020 easier. That's just. I think what, what's really. I, I don't think he thinks Zelensky is weak at all, actually, compared to Russia.
- [27:06]
Christine Rosen
I think he thinks he's going to lose the war.
- [27:08]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, you have no cards. Where are your cards? You have no cards. And look, the Institute for the Study of War, which is, of course, run by your colleague and my, My. My friend Fred Kagan and his wife Kim, and it's really run by Kim, and Fred is a consultant to it. Granted, they are sort of aligned with Ukraine in the war, but they are the most reputable collater of information about what is going on in the war. And it is not true that Russia is winning the war. It is true that the war is in a position of egregious stalemate, but Ukraine is incredibly inventive in its counter strikes against Russian positions and making it unbelievably costly for Russia to remain in the battlefield. The idea that this is a done deal, that there's no more fight left in Ukraine or between Ukraine and Russia is not true. I'm sure that our intelligence agencies are saying the same thing. Europe is certainly saying the same thing. I think Europe would probably be perfectly happy if Ukraine were losing to cut its losses, too. It's just not that simple. And Trump wants to cut his losses in part because he wants to stick it to Zelensky.
- [28:43]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, I think the fact that Ukraine isn't. Isn't losing to that extent is actually driving almost all of what we're seeing, because I think that, that this sense that it's not necessarily a stalemate, but that it's like it's in a kind of status quo level of conflict and nobody's on the verge of winning. And that requires the west to, to say something and do something. Well, what you do now matters, right? Because they're kind of, you know, in this limbo state. So if you give Ukraine more support, it will affect Ukraine's ability to, you know, to, to, to push Russia out of some of its territory or whatever. If you abandon Ukraine, it will enable Putin to take more or to, you know, whatever. And, and so I think that the fact that you can't escape the fact that it really matters what the west chooses to do, putting that aside from what we should do or what our obligations are, the fact is what we do really matters. And therefore, there's a lot of. It's a, it's an, it's an emotional thing. It's like, well, if you decided to help Ukraine more, it would help Ukraine more. Right. It would make a difference for them. And so that pressure of what you do matters, I think, is, is starting to get to the Western leaders, not just here, but in Europe too.
- [30:10]
Abe Greenwald
Okay. The other problem here is to go back to Friday and the still, like, unbelievable scene in the Oval Office. I am struggling with the fact that as I read over the weekend, I read people that I respect, like Chris Caldwell and others saying that the blow up in the Oval Office was either engineered or was basically Zelenskyy's fault. Now, I take Christine's point that Zelenskyy mishandled the meeting. I don't think you can even, even in any way, shape or form argue that Zelenskyy did not mishandle the meeting. He doesn't want to be in Bragis like this with the United States. And he's been trying to figure out all weekend how to do something or anything to move beyond what happened, but not really.
- [31:10]
John Pothorz
Not really. I just want to say, John, he didn't. Right after that, you know, he went on Brett Baer, right?
- [31:15]
Abe Greenwald
But then the day. Yeah. But then finally who. Somebody slapped him in the face and said, are you out of your effing mind? Like, get, get a hold of yourself. And then all weekend he was tweeting, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Like, he went on Brett Baer because he was still head up.
- [31:32]
John Pothorz
But. But not. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- [31:36]
Abe Greenwald
No, but.
- [31:37]
John Pothorz
Which is what Trump wants. Like the Fonz Take it back.
- [31:41]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, okay, but here's.
- [31:43]
Christine Rosen
That's funny.
- [31:44]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but here's my. I was watching it in real time. I watched the entire thing as it was happening. And I'm trying to believe that people can believe that Zelenskyy made this happen, because it's like hearing someone talk about a play at second base where you clearly see that the second baseman tags the guy two feet from the plate, and then the other team says he was safe. I saw Vance pounce. I saw Vance pounce because Zelensky called him JD and start to get into an argument with him, with. With Vance about something that Vance had said and did not call him Mr. Vice President. And Vance saw his open. It was when Vance said, you're being very disrespectful. The confrontational moment was Vance's. And the thing that Zelensky could have done at that moment was say, I don't mean to be confrontational. We're friends. We're having a conversation. If I said anything disrespectful, I'm sorry. That, again, as I said on our emergency podcast, this is not his language. He was speaking English. He's not fluent in English and didn't know what the hell.
- [33:19]
Christine Rosen
He had excellent translators there. He really should have made translators also slow down the conversation and allow hot heads not to prevail. And in this case, I think it was a huge error not to have the translators going back and forth.
- [33:31]
Abe Greenwald
But. Okay, so what I'm saying is I watched. I saw it happen. I saw Vance make his move. I mean, I literally. I was watching it and saw Vance make his move. And now I'm reading all weekend from people who, of course, are supportive of the fact that America and Ukraine and Trump and Vance and Zelensky are now, with daggers drawn, say Zelensky did it. Zelensky was disrespectful, and Zelensky was this. And Zelensky meant it to happen, which is what. And that Zelensky was coached by Chris Murphy and Susan Rice, who apparently didn't meet him beforehand. That was a. That's one of those, like, pieces of Twitter telephone that goes viral that doesn't turn out to be true. Anyway, so do people really. I mean, people do seem to think that he was disrespectful. It was Vance, and I can't believe that they think that. I'm having trouble grasping the idea that Zelensky went in there hoping to bait Trump and Vance into yelling at him. I don't understand what the purpose of that would be. That's not what I saw. And I trust myself. I. That's not what I saw.
- [34:48]
Christine Rosen
Aren't some of them arguing, though, that it's not that he went in there with some carefully plotted way to piss off the president and Vice president, but that he went in with an attitude of, we're all equal here, and let's talk about what I need. And that the attitude that he presented, maybe what. And that, in fact, at the beginning, Trump was kind of, you know, listening, and they're going back and forth. The two moments were the one you mentioned about him calling Vice President Vance. JD but there was another moment that really got Trump angry, and that's when Zelensky said, well, if we don't deal with it over here, it's going to come to you. It's going to be. And that's actually where Trump's, like, sphere of influence anxiety was triggered. And he got very upset and was like, you don't have the cards. That's when I saw him become very emotionally invested in the conversation.
- [35:31]
Abe Greenwald
That's why, of course, he should have been speaking through an interpreter, saying anything. He wasn't saying anything controversial. It sounded obnoxious because he was speaking and he got his backup of what he said. In the case of somebody like Putin, the oceans are not gonna protect you, and then you're gonna feel it. He said, like, you're gonna feel it. And that's when Trump said, you can't tell us how we're gonna feel, which wasn't what he meant. Well, he wasn't talking about how you should feel or how he met a.
- [36:07]
Christine Rosen
Lot of feelings on display.
- [36:10]
John Pothorz
I'm an island of one here on this, I think, because I don't think he went there wanting a fight necessarily, or at all. I do think he wanted to challenge the narrative that Trump and Vance have been peddling about the war. And I don't think he wanted to do that in public, but he found himself having to do it in public from his perspective, because Vance starts talking about diplomacy and how diplomacy is going to work with Putin. And I think at that point, Zelensky wanted to, at that point wanted to say, well, this is where I want to challenge this narrative, this idea that diplomacy works with Putin. And maybe I'm too hot headed on this issue, but I don't know that there's not a role for him to do that, because I don't think he was going to get anything that he needed from Trump anyway. And Trump wanted him to get his signature on this mineral rights deal without security guarantees. And if the one thing that was left for Zelenskyy to do was to say in front of the American president and for Ukrainian ears and for the Kremlin ears was to say, we cannot trust Putin, I don't believe in treating Vladimir Putin as any other diplomatic partner, let the cards fall where they may, then he did that. And I don't see it as the same catastrophic mistake. I mean, it didn't help him. But I don't know, again, I've said this before, I don't know what would have helped him.
- [37:56]
Seth Mandel
I think there are also Europeans.
- [37:58]
Christine Rosen
I mean, he went to Europe and has been enveloped in a group hug ever since. So maybe that's part of it.
- [38:03]
Seth Mandel
Also minor things that contributed to, I think, I genuinely think the fact that I don't want to make too much of it, but I genuinely think the fact that Trump had just been corrected in the Oval Office by Emmanuel Macron did not help Zelensky in a situation where it appeared that Trump was being corrected in public in the Oval Office. Again, I mean, again, that's not right.
- [38:27]
Abe Greenwald
That's a good thing.
- [38:28]
Seth Mandel
That's not going to decide who wins the war.
- [38:31]
Abe Greenwald
But so Macron, two days earlier, Trump said, and you know what? Ukraine is paying back Europe for all the, all the goods that it gave Europe and it's screwing us. And then Macron said, no, no, no, no. That stuff we've given them, we don't expect. We're not getting paid back for. So that's what you're referring to.
- [38:54]
Seth Mandel
And then there's a, there was a bit of a news cycle about, wow, I can't believe the Mac Trump didn't.
- [39:00]
Abe Greenwald
Get into an argument.
- [39:02]
John Pothorz
By the way, Keir Starmer also corrected Trump a little bit along similar lines. So there's.
- [39:11]
Seth Mandel
So because might just be getting corrected.
- [39:16]
John Pothorz
Yeah. But throughout this process, the point is Trump is meeting with leaders before the cameras in the Oval Office and saying things that aren't true. And so Zelenskyy's the third one to show up at the one who's with the highest stakes to say, well, this is not exactly the case. I mean, that's what's happening. And that's why this whole Putin deal has been kind of in fantasy land up until that point.
- [39:46]
Abe Greenwald
I don't see how Zelensky didn't make a huge mistake. Sorry. I mean, so Mark Halperin had this guy who has an innovative way of doing polls, did a big poll came out on Saturday night, very interesting results. Big Numbers of Americans supported Trump and Vance. They were not upset by Trump's statement throwing. When he threw Zelensky out of the White House and said, come back when you want peace, 70% said that was appropriate. 62, 63% said that they thought that Trump was in the right or something like that. Like, the poll numbers are not good for Zelensky in that regard. And the numbers are big enough that even if the poll's a little dirty or taken a little quickly or whatever, there are plenty of Democrats in there who are saying the same thing, which probably isn't surprising, because if there's a confrontation between an American president and a foreign leader and the foreign leader has a thick accent and isn't wearing a suit and all of that, you're probably going to go with the president, even if. Unless you just hate Trump and anything that comes out of Trump's mouth. But Zelensky was not viewed unfavorably in the poll, either before or after people spent 11 minutes watching the confrontation scene. This is a matter we're like, totally obsessed and consumed with it. Most Americans don't care about Ukraine and Russia. They don't care. And they're like, yeah, Trump was right, he was disrespectful, but Zelenskyy seems like an okay guy. He's in front of fight, he's fighting for his country, but this, but that. So, in fact, it's bad for Zelensky. He doesn't need to be in a brogus with Trump. That's really bad. It just gives Trump more of an excuse to cut Ukraine off totally without, you know, by saying, look, he just behaves badly aside from everything else. So I don't think that there's any way to defend. The result is going to be bad for Zelenskyy and it's worse than it was on Friday. So therefore, he made a huge mistake. But I don't think that Trump won. In other words, in the weird way with public opinion, people are still thinking positively about Zelensky and Ukraine. Well, this, this.
- [42:12]
Christine Rosen
Sorry to interrupt, but this is actually where. If part of the Trump Vance show on Friday was for domestic consumption, then it was useful to the extent that they looked tough. You know, they, they're defending themselves in their own house, et cetera, et cetera, as you said about that poll. But people still care a lot about the economy and the price of eggs and all these. I keep, keep beating this horse. But Trump is going to have to. There's part of the Ukraine message, which is we don't want to spend money there. We want to spend it on the residents who were, you know, whose homes were destroyed in a hurricane in western North Carolina. We want to spend it on, you know, on Americans, on vets, on all these things. That is a pretty tenuous argument to make. If prices remain high for a lot of goods that people spend their monthly wages on, and if they don't care about the geopolitical context, then he's going to have to pivot away from these sorts of things. And he really has not been talking about the economy much lately. It's, it's, there's a lot of stuff going on now with tariffs, but he's not talking to the people who put him in office this time, whose main concern was the economy.
- [43:13]
Abe Greenwald
By the way, there is a very dark cloud on the horizon. It could be wrong, but the Atlanta Fed is now claiming that the first quarter GDP number is going to be negative and substantially negative. That there, it's gonna, it's gonna detail that the GDP in the United States in the first quarter declined by 1.5%. Now, Trump only took power 20 days into the first quarter, and all of that, and things can turn around. And maybe the Atlanta Fed is wrong. It doesn't seem to be comporting with other numbers, but it speaks to Christine's point, which is that he is going off in all directions, and he may not be talking about the economy because he doesn't know what to do. That's.
- [43:57]
Christine Rosen
Well, doge is another attempt, Doge is another attempt to say, look at how we're going to save you money. But that is not, I don't think that's going to be sustainable if prices remain high.
- [44:06]
Abe Greenwald
Right. So just to, just to put up, to sort of close the circle on what we were talking about here in terms of the fight with NATO and with Europe and with Zelensky and with MAGA here, I'm saying I have trouble understanding people who think that Zelenskyy was deliberately provocative and wanted to have a fight with. That doesn't make any sense. And I understand that people hate Zelensky the way they hate Trump. And so if Zelenskyy said, it's a nice day outside, they would say he's a crook and she should be thrown out of office or whatever, for whatever reason they might have for this. But we are rapidly approaching a position in which the United States, the President of the United States, is going to sit down with the president of Russia to dictate peace terms to a third country, and we're not even combatants in this war. And then I read really disreputable maga propagandists like Molly Hemingway and others saying things, and Laura Ingraham saying things like, oh, you want war in Ukraine, you're supporting Ukraine. So you chicken hawks send your sons and daughters to Ukraine. We do not have a single boot on the ground in Ukraine. In fact, the larger logic of our involvement in Ukraine is that if we help win wars against irredentist forces that are destabilizing the planet, it will make it safer for our children and our sons and our daughters 10 years from now not to have to go and fight a war somewhere. That's why you try to nip it in the bud. And if a third party actor like Ukraine is willing to stand on the front lines and pin Russia down and help destroy its military and its manpower and show its weaknesses so that we now know where they stink and how to fight them, if we ever have to fight them or somebody else have to fight them, that's a gift to us. And it doesn't cost us very much to provide support when they're the ones who are taking all the risk.
- [46:37]
Seth Mandel
And that's why I think this has exposed realism and realists in a, in a very particular way. Because in the past it was, you know, they, they were able to rally their ideology around the Iraq war in which we did have boots on the ground, we sent the military and, you know, lots, lots of people died. And that, you know, was sort of like a comparison in their minds to Vietnam. And so there was some sort of continuity in America, you know, running, chasing ghosts, chasing monsters, whatever. But, but, but if you're a realist, right, you would see what Trump did in his first term with Syria, right, which is punch Bashar Al Assad in the nose after he saw the tapes of the aftermath of Bashar Al Assad's chemical attack on civilians, you would see that as not warmongering, but realism, right? I mean, we didn't go to war in Syria, but we let Assad know that we didn't like what he did and we took a shot that didn't come back at us. And then there's Ukraine. And if you're a realist and you believe in the power structures and power politics above all, Ukraine is, as you said, almost, I don't want to say a pawn, but if we're looking at a chessboard, you know, they're the ones who are, who are walking through the minefield to learn where the mines are. And we're the ones back, you know, they're the scouts and we're the ones who are going to go through after. But also that this idea is that if we're not sending troops and you're against all American involvement in any way, shape or form, then it's not realism, it is isolationism. If you're only going, if you're, if you're going to be against giving aid to allies to fight their own wars that benefit us, that's not realism. And that I think has exposed these. A lot of realists were able to hide behind active wars in which Americans were fighting and now they don't have that anymore.
- [48:44]
Unknown
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- [50:02]
Abe Greenwald
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- [50:32]
Christine Rosen
But it's not we're but Trump. The Trump administration is also not classically isolationist. It's like hyper emotionally quasi isolationist. I don't know. We don't have a label for it yet because we are still sending, we're sending money and weapons to Israel. We're doing a lot of right.
- [50:47]
Seth Mandel
Well, well that's the thing. Trump himself is not that's the thing. He's not isolationist in that way at all. He wants to own Gaza. It's that what he's doing. What Trump does occasionally looks much more like the realism.
- [51:02]
Abe Greenwald
What? No, he's like an imperialist. He walked Panama Canal in Greenland and Gaza, but he's also in isolation. It's a. Whatever. He's a new. He's a new kind of creature. But I just want to say that it's very hard to argue with people who are arguing in bad faith. And I'm sorry, but if you want to have a serious argument about American foreign policy and your line is you're a chicken hawk because you're not sending your son to die in Ukraine, you know, once again, like, go blow. That's not a serious argument. Nobody is saying that we should have forces on the ground in Ukraine. That is, the Ukrainians don't want us on the ground in Ukraine. I mean, and this is the joke in part to me, which is that Trump keeps saying, there's too many people dying in Ukraine. I can't. Why. It's though all the death, and there's just so much death. And I think one of the things that Zelensky couldn't take in is the disingenuousness of this argument, because he's like, he knows if he were to say, I'm home, I'm coming home with a peace deal, he would be out of office in 12 hours. Because the Ukrainians are not ready to stop the war. We may think they should be. I mean, people keep saying they're running out of manpower or they're drafting teenagers to fight the war. Yeah, they're drafting teenagers who go, guess who drafted teenagers to fight in a war? The United States in World War II. The United States in Vietnam. We may not like the draft anymore, but if we were invaded by Canada and Canada had nuclear weapons, you know, Canada was rolling, that would be a short war. You know what I'm talking. I'm just saying if we were people are.
- [52:53]
Seth Mandel
They burned the White House that one time.
- [52:56]
Abe Greenwald
Right. But that. Right, that's. That's true. That's true. But it's. This is like people don't even know what they're talking about. And then people who do, like Molly Hemingway and Laura Ingram just like, push their idiot buttons by saying, you know, you shouldn't listen to those guys because they're happily sitting here not sending their kids off to Ukraine. That might have been, though. I think it was very ad hominem and bad. That might have been a semi legitimate argument to make during Vietnam. If you were, though, everybody who seemed to have kids of, you know, like, or during, during Iraq, it got harder to make. The one thing people would have loved to do with Bill Kristol was say, oh, you're a chicken hawk. Send your kid over to fight in the war on terror. And guess what? Bill's son Joe was in the Marines and fought in the war on terror.
- [53:53]
John Pothorz
You know what I mean?
- [53:54]
Abe Greenwald
Fought in the war on terror. And J.D. vance fought the war on terror. And if he wants to be an isolationist, he has more grounds than the rest of us on this because he did put his money.
- [54:08]
Seth Mandel
But you'll note that people say J.D. vance, you should listen to J.D. vance because he fought and he's against war, but not. You should listen to Tom Cotton because he also fought. You should only listen to the ones who fought, but also don't want.
- [54:22]
John Pothorz
Can I just bring up a small pedantic point on why I always hate this argument? Because no one sends their kids off to fight. If you're of age and you choose to enlist, then you do. No one says, okay, I believe in this war abroad, son, go fight for me.
- [54:44]
Christine Rosen
Okay, I've drafted sons and I can confirm this point. If I told them to go or not to go, they would still do whatever the heck they want to.
- [54:52]
Abe Greenwald
The fact is that until 1969, American youth did not have a choice unless they went off and hid into college. Right. Or went to college in the college. But, you know, they, they didn't have a choice. There was universal conscription in the United States from 1941 until 1969 when the draft lottery was instituted. So, yes, there was a world in which people's sons were being sent off to war without their say. With or without their say. So that's a real thing. It has not been a thing in this country for 56 years.
- [55:27]
John Pothorz
And, and by the way, I'll tell you this, in Ukraine, parents send their sons off to fight, and then they go off to fight. Fathers and sons are fighting together. 19 year olds with fathers who have fought the Russians before are now in battle alongside their father who has seen battle previously against Russia.
- [55:55]
Abe Greenwald
So, I mean, we aren't. I mean, it's an act of bizarre paternalist. I don't know what you even call it for Trump to be walking around saying the Ukrainians should stop fighting this war because too many Ukrainians are dying. It's their choice. It's their choice. Like, I'm sorry, it's their choice. Like, this is a ridiculous conversation to be having.
- [56:22]
John Pothorz
But also, also, I think there's.
- [56:23]
Abe Greenwald
Unless you think that you know, we, we are, we're the only rational people here. And, you know, know when this, when the jig is up, which is what he was saying when he said, you don't have the cards.
- [56:35]
John Pothorz
But I think there are a lot of Ukrainians that would be happy to stop the war if they had some sense that it was going to end on terms that didn't destroy their country.
- [56:44]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, Seth, I want to use this as a transition point.
- [56:49]
John Pothorz
Trump has given no indication that that is the case. That's.
- [56:52]
Abe Greenwald
That' so let's talk about a war that has stopped and that we now are told that's the war between Israel and Gaza, which has been in ceasefire for six weeks. And we are now told that Israel has accepted what they call the Wyckoff framework. Let's talk about what this means. The Witkoff framework is. War continues to be suspended between Israel and Gaza. Ceasefire through Ramadan and Passover. Passover ends on the 22nd of April. Okay, so this is now March 3rd, 22nd of April. The Witkoff framework. Israel is now accepted. It includes return of most of the hostages immediately and then at the end of the period, the return the. At the end of the Witkoff framework, return of the remaining hostages, who presumably will at that point be bodies and bodies only. And Israel has accepted it and Hamas has not. So Israel has now announced the suspension of all aid. It is blocking all aid henceforth, nothing going in to Gaza. And people are already starting to shout that this is a humanitarian war crime and all Hamas needs to do is release the hostages for the aid to come in, which now means we have a totally stark development here, which is Hamas releases the hostages and gets the aid. Hamas doesn't. It doesn't get the aid. Hamas, the ball is in Hamas's court. If you support, if you say Israel's doing wrong, you are effectively accepting the notion that it is legitimate for Hamas to hold on to the hostages. I think the moral, whatever moral balance, if there was a serious moral balance here, it is now entirely gone. There is no case for Hamas not to accept the Witkoff framework at all. If there ever was or if there ever could be. Like they need to defend. I don't even know what on earth nonsense these monsters could come up with and their, and their Kadamite defenders can come up with. But we're now in a position where Israel is making this very stark, like nothing's going in. So let the hostages out and we'll let. And we'll open the gates again. Am I missing something?
- [59:26]
Seth Mandel
I don't know. I mean, that's the long and short of it. But this is a case where, and there's others like this throughout the war, where Hamas essentially gets rewarded by the world for doing incredibly terrible things to their own people and not just to the Israelis. And what I mean is, you know, humanitarian law does not say you have to supply the enemy in wartime. That much is clear. The idea that Israel has to supply Gaza while it's at war with Gaza is. That's not even found in the text. I mean, that's just not a discussion. Question about whether Israel has to facilitate the arrival of humanitarian aid brought by others to certain places as sort of an open question. But the law says that it is up to the governing party of the territory. That is the first responsibility. In other words, it's up to Hamas to feed its people. This is how governments work. It's up to the United States government to feed Americans before it is up to the Canadian people to feed Americans.
- [60:36]
John Pothorz
Right.
- [60:37]
Seth Mandel
If Trump decided he just wants to stop growing all food in America and Canada wanted to bring in, ship in, you know, beer and stuff, that's. That's the analogous situation. What you say is that you're starving your own people. So Hamas has the responsibility. And what they're doing is they're being rewarded for hoarding the aid that they have. We know that 3,000 calories worth of food a day, we're going in for 16 months. And the other thing that happens is we mentioned briefly on podcast recently Dan Senor's talk with an Israeli journalist who mentioned that the average age of new recruits to Hamas was 16 and a half. This is something we know Hamas does. And this is another example of it, because Hamas uses child soldiers or whatever you want to call them, and the world rewards them for using child soldiers by blaming Israel for killing Hamas's soldiers that they recruit and send out into battle. So this is a constant theme where Hamas gets to do something that is their responsibility to do or not to do. And Israel is blamed for not circumventing Hamas and doing Hamas's job for it as a governing institution.
- [62:00]
Abe Greenwald
Right. But, Abe, so going forward, my point is here that there is now a very, very simple equation. Let the hostages out, you'll get the aid, we'll figure out what's going to go on with the war. But the, whatever, the aid is stopped. So since 90% of the aid goes to Hamas anyways, probably one of the ways that they are recruiting these kids is by saying, we'll give you stuff you know, look at all this, look at all this delicious, look at all these delicious cakes that you can have if you just join up and we'll throw. Put a gun in your hand, by the way. They're just cannon fodder. Like if you take a 16 year old and don't train him and you set them up against the world's best army, like you're just using that, that's just a, that's just literally like a human dummy being placed to take a bullet, you know, and to eat up Israeli bullets.
- [62:53]
John Pothorz
So, but, so I just, not only is it a stark choice and you're right that you're on the side, you are effectively saying Hamas is right to be holding hostages. But if you're someone who believes that there is starvation in Gaza, why aren't you outraged from that standpoint at Hamas? Just give up the hostages so you can feed the poor starving Gazans?
- [63:21]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, because they're not, that's the whole point. Right. In the end, this is all disingenuous. One, somebody wants Israel to lose and other people want Israel to win. They may not even want Hamas to win, they just want Israel to lose. And some people. Now you have a very, now you have basically a. There are people who are undergoing torture in tunnels or being kept as slaves by families or whatever. Let them out. Let them out or face the consequences. Israel is under no obligation under the Witkoff framework to continue with the ceasefire if Hamas doesn't agree to the terms. Hamas has yet to agree to the terms and I believe, I believe the war will. Israel remains in the tortured, unbelievably difficult position of if it restarts the war, it may be saying that it can no longer work to get the remaining hostages out because there's no deal. There's nowhere to go now and they have to finish this up. In fact, for the sake of the Israeli soldiers who are going to fight to finish off Hamas. Giving Hamas a couple of months to regroup and retrain and do stuff like that puts his other Israelis in harm's way by the, you know, by the thousands. And maybe that's a, that's a, that's a trade off that they can't make. But the suasion of the remaining hostages is emotionally, unbelievably burdensome. And I think Bibi would like it if Hamas accepted the Witkoff framework. Right? I mean, he would like it like that would be. He wants to get the hostages out. There's this disgusting idea that he doesn't. He is as desperate as anybody else to get the hostages out. And this is the one way that's left. There is no other way that is left. So he is now using.
- [65:27]
Seth Mandel
Every time they've gone, they've gone harder on Hamas. It has resulted, it has gotten results. I'm not saying that it's obvious that this is the way to get the hostage out, but we should remember that when Trump said all hell will break loose and then everybody got angry at Hamas, at the ridiculous song and dance they were doing with the hostages, that, that week, Israel got four extra, you know, bodies returned, whatever. Like there is. There is movement when they feel the breath on the back of their neck.
- [65:56]
Abe Greenwald
But, I mean, it's amazing because we're talking about this as though this is a legitimate negotiating position. They are holding and torturing people whom they kidnapped from a neighboring country. They have no. They are depraved, immoral monsters who deserve to die. And they're not dying. And we're actually there being negotiated with under international, you know, in the international fora. And that's congratulations to them for getting away with it thus far. But there is. They have no case. There is no case except that Israel shouldn't exist and that any Israeli deserves to die. And yes, there are sadly, hundreds of millions of people on earth, including people in high positions at the UN who believe that, but here we are. So Israel should get tougher. Not only should it choke off aid, there is now talk that they will destroy the electrical grid in Gaza. Some of the electoral grid in Gaza has been. Has been reconstituted. They're going to take it out so that the entire place is going to live without electricity. Is it bad? Yes. Is it going to be bad for them? Are they going to have trouble boiling water? Yes. Is that because they're holding Israelis hostage and that that would stop the minute that they let the Israelis out? Yes. They won't do it if they let the hostages out. They will only do it and get tougher and tougher and tougher and make life intolerable. They don't let those people out and their bodies out. That's it. And it's, you know, time enough. We. Stories are coming out now through Michael Herzog, the former ambassador to the United States, about the Biden administration's behavior that are even more. We don't have time to go into it. Are even more upsetting than the ones that we had already heard before. Anybody got a recommendation? Come on. Well, Lenora is my recommendation. That's it. So we'll go with Honora. It's very dirty.
- [68:17]
Seth Mandel
And I did say the other day that I like one of the other Oscar contenders, a real pain. Also, if you saw Kieran Culkin won last night.
- [68:25]
Abe Greenwald
He did. Yes.
- [68:26]
Seth Mandel
And he deserved it.
- [68:28]
Abe Greenwald
Made exactly the same speech that he made when he won the Emmy for succession. So if he wins something else, apparently his wife is gonna have to get pregnant. Is gonna follow the Mandels.
- [68:39]
Seth Mandel
This is great.
- [68:40]
Abe Greenwald
Getting pregnant and having babies so that he went away.
- [68:43]
Seth Mandel
He's a pronatalist. Kieran Culkin.
- [68:45]
Abe Greenwald
There you go. Okay. Well, so for so, yes, we got a real pain in Anora. And Anora is very, very, very dirty. And a real pain is not dirty at all. So just for Christine, Abe and Seth and John Pothor, it's keep the candle burning.