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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
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- [00:27]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best.
- [00:32]
Matthew Continetti
The wor Some preach and pain Some.
- [00:36]
Noah Rothman
Die of thirst no way of knowing.
- [00:39]
Matthew Continetti
Which way it's going Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, March 31, 2025. I am John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:59]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:00]
Matthew Continetti
And Washington Commentary columnist and Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Matthew Catenetti. Hi, Matt.
- [01:09]
Noah Rothman
Hi, John.
- [01:10]
Matthew Continetti
So it's a good Trump, bad Trump weekend, and God knows who's which. One of the two sides, the Janice Head figure of Trump we should credit. On the one hand, he comes out and says he's really mad at Putin and there could be more sanctions on Russia because Putin is dragging his feet on the ceasefire that he wants. He's very angry and there are going to be consequences. And then, you know, 24 hours later he says Vladimir Zelensky is pulling out of the rare earth steel and he's very angry and better not pull out. And he's never getting into NATO and he should know he's never getting into NATO, which anyway, so one Saturday, one Sunday. So that's good Trump, bad Trump. So good Trump, bad Trump also surfaces. I don't know where the good Trump part of this is, but goes on Meet the Press with, with Kristen Welker and floats the third term. There are ways. There are ways there can be a third term. There are ways. There are methods. There are methods and ways that there can be a third term. As we know, there is only one actual method for there to be a third Trump term, which is a revocation of the constitutional amendment limiting the president to two terms, which requires, as constitutional amendments do. I'm trying to remember the specifics. Two third vote in the House, three quarter vote in the Senate and 38 states to ratify. All three things would have to happen before 2028 for Trump to be allowed to run for a third term. And you know, I could go, you know, I could win the Boston Marathon by 2028, but I highly doubt that that will happen.
- [02:58]
Noah Rothman
If you work hard enough.
- [02:59]
Matthew Continetti
If I work hard to Wish, and I wish hard enough.
- [03:05]
Noah Rothman
You can do it, John.
- [03:07]
Matthew Continetti
And maybe Trump can wish hard enough so people are like, trying to think about what he could do. He could sort of do a Medvedev, right? Like Trump steps down, Vance becomes president, and then somehow hands the presidency to Trump. Although I believe that any interpretation of the, of the constitutional amendment would say that Trump cannot serve more than two terms, even if he somehow becomes vice president in the third term. Whatever.
- [03:30]
Noah Rothman
But point is, note on that. Yes, Legal Eagle points out that the 12th Amendment says that anyone ineligible for the presidency is ineligible for the vice presidency.
- [03:41]
Matthew Continetti
Right. Okay.
- [03:42]
Noah Rothman
So anyway, he couldn't do that method.
- [03:44]
Matthew Continetti
So many people are telling Trump that he could have a third term. So, I mean, you could just look at this and count it up to. All he wants to do is, you know, just sort of like throw. He just wants to throw the world into perpetual. Like he can just make any conversation happen, distract people from the ongoing this or that or the other thing. And we should all. It's all nonsense and Narskite and we should pay no attention. The other is that he's insane and like a power hungry authoritarian lunatic and likes Putin because Putin figured out how to get elected in 2000 and basically remain president of Russia now or the dictator of Russia for life in 2025. And that's what he wants. And the problem is with the, with pooh, poohing that second option, he is a little insane. So you can't just say that he doesn't mean it. And therefore, though it's ridiculous and our system will not allow it to happen, he could throw systems and things into quite a good deal of chaos and take the Republican Party down with him if it's compelled to spend these years talking about something that is absolutely bat guano crazy.
- [05:05]
Noah Rothman
So, okay, can I, can I. I.
- [05:08]
Matthew Continetti
Am now done with my.
- [05:09]
Noah Rothman
You've now destroyed the Republican Party.
- [05:11]
Matthew Continetti
Yes, I haven't. I also won the Boston Marathon just.
- [05:19]
Noah Rothman
To make sure that we get off.
- [05:20]
Matthew Continetti
To a great, great start.
- [05:23]
Noah Rothman
So he, Kristen Welker asked Trump about this third term because some Trump supporters, and I emphasize some, have floated this idea, mainly Steve Bannon, who has talked about it on his podcast and then gave a speech at CPAC where he also floated the third term for Trump. So Welker asked the president in the phone interview about it, and as you say, he said, well, many people are saying, and there are ways, there are ways to do it now. There are no constitutional ways to do it absent the, the revocation, the annulment of the 24th Amendment. So there's that way or there's violating the Constitution way. And this is troubling because the danger here isn't so much, well, the, there's the Trump troll, right? And that's how he governs and that's what he likes to do. And he's raising this in part, I believe, in order to maintain something of an edge over Republicans as he moves into lame duck status. Right. Second terms, second term presidents are almost either initially lame ducks from the moment they take the oath, or certainly lame ducks after the midterm elections. So by saying the third term, he's keeping Republicans in line. The danger, though, and I do agree with you, the danger is that this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, much like the Stop the Steal campaign became a self fulfilling prophecy after he lost the 2020 election. And there, that's, you know, that's bad for the constitutional order. And I also believe it's bad for the Republican Party because I don't think the American people are not going to embrace this at all. And when Trump says he has the best polls for A Republican in 100 years, I believe he's referring to the fact that his approval rating among Republicans is the highest. That may be true, but there's also the rest of the country, the other half of the country. And as we can already see beneath the surface of his approval ratings, he can lose support pretty easily if he diverges from his main mission of closing the border, reducing prices and making the world a safer place.
- [07:51]
Abe Greenwald
I don't think that he's as, I don't think he's thinking about it as strategically as all that, to be honest. I think he's got the idea, someone put the idea in his head at some point, maybe casually. And he likes, as John says, to throw out little pieces of chaos to have people chew on. And I also think it's very damaging. And I also think he's giving his critics and detractors exactly what they had warned about, exactly what they had said was going to happen. And it's going bad. I mean, I think he's, there's not a lot, you know, when you talk about the good Trump, the bad Trump, he's supposed to be this great deal maker, right? And you look at what's going on with both Putin and Zelensky seems to be getting, he seems not to be getting what he wants from either one of them. He's not getting the mineral deal from Ukraine because he changed the terms of the mineral deal. He's not getting the Ceasefire, yes, from Putin. The market is reacting very poorly to the constant tariff whiplash. So it's another distraction, I think, but a dark one.
- [09:30]
Matthew Continetti
Look, I would like to say that in his defense, or the way to defend Trump, if you want to defend Trump, is to say all of the authoritarian stuff is what Steve Bannon called the. What do you call it, the oceans of bull that, that they were going to throw out that he thought was the great strategy, like drown the media and the establishment in nonsense and distract them with nonsense so that you can then go down the middle and do whatever it is that you wanted to do. That was what he spelled out in 2016, 2017, in the brief moment that he was. He actually held a position of power in the White House. The problem is, at some point, it's not really bull anymore. Like, it is what it is. And we are, we have actually active policies now that are being reacted to all over the country. And a kind of, I think now growing predisposition among, in the judiciary, one or two or three judges staying. Various things that go on is one thing. And you can have a fight about whether or not Judge Boasberg overstepped his authority to yell and say you should turn planes back, or these district judges making nationwide injunctions and all of that. But the number of things that Trump is insisting that he has the power to do with executive orders could be creating a disposition in the federal judiciary and not only among Obama appointed judges, to say we have to kind of put a temporary pause on everything because the evidence so far is that they are not being careful and they are not to be trusted, that they are dotting I's and crossing T's as they are attempting to enforce these executive orders. And the latest, of course, is this, what appears to be this discovery that at least one person caught in the Trenda Aragua dragnet is a legal resident who had a tattoo that resembled a Trenda Aragua tattoo, but isn't a Trend or Aragua tattoo, and is just sitting there in El Salvador in a prison. And that's one person. And one person out of hundreds, but one person out of hundreds is how a judge is supposed to rule. Right? It's like you're. It's like you can't say, well, you know, 249 of these are fine. And so one total act of unconstitutional seizure and, you know, taking someone's rights away and all of that, that's overwhelmed by how wonderful the other deportations are. That's why we have due process. And so they are I feel like walking into a situation which they have overestimated their power. They've overestimated their popular support in certain ways, and they are creating the backlash that will freeze all of their. Man. They're really getting off to a fast start and doing a lot of great stuff and paralyzing themselves because of their sloppiness.
- [12:56]
Noah Rothman
I think it's important to recognize where the backlash is coming from. And certainly there's a backlash in the court system. And I do believe that some of these executive orders are overridden. I mean, take the one he signed about election integrity the other day. Now, I believe in election integrity. I believe in voter ID nationwide. I believe even in having paper ballots as a backup nationwide. But I also believe that the Constitution leaves voting rules to the states, and so there is going to be a big legal discrepancy there that will be adjudicated by the court system. So the judges are the main break on Trump so far, even as we're beginning to see some resistance in Congress as well on trade and on foreign policy, the two places where there was resistance from Republicans last time. However, I think it's important to look at the CBS poll that came out just yesterday, which showed that President Trump's approval rating is at 50%. Now, he has a 50% disapproval rating. These are the overall numbers. But that 50% approval rating is the highest approval rating ever. The. For him.
- [14:12]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [14:13]
Noah Rothman
And while, and while he is underwater in places like foreign policy and the economy, he maintains huge approval on his immigration policy. So I continue to believe that the electorate is giving Trump Runway here and that until they turn significantly against him, not the markets, not the judges, he still has reason to think that he.
- [14:38]
Matthew Continetti
Has political capital to spend, and particularly on this. So I mentioned the trend or agua case, and this one guy, right. Okay. So that is the deportation policy, according to CBS, is supported 5,842 by the public. That is a, that is a very high. It's not 70. Right. I mean, there were things like, like on gender, on the gender stuff. Where, where, where. So it's not, you know, it's not landslide numbers. It's not like, I mean, there are numbers that should be enough to scare Democrats.
- [15:15]
Noah Rothman
60, 40 is pretty good.
- [15:16]
Matthew Continetti
6040 is pretty good. But it does suggest that there is some, there are some ways to fall, conceivably. And the point about the. One of the reasons that people both on the left and on the right when they come into power, don't swing for the fences is the fear of the Horror story. So Reagan, who hasn't swung for the.
- [15:40]
Noah Rothman
They all swing for the fences when they.
- [15:43]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, what I mean is like in the early 80s with Reagan, X, Y and Z happens, they start doing, you know, there's a recession, they start doing stories about the disaster to the family farm. And this is the end of the family farm. And there's no family farm. The family farm is being murdered. The family farm is being killed. And the 82 election was very bad for Republicans. Now Reagan came back and won 49 states. So for Reagan it wasn't in the end a particularly harsh judgment. They didn't lose the Senate, they lost seats in the House, but they already didn't have the House. But it was a kind of message of that the public can do whatever. And people are sometimes anxious about like fundamentally shifting policy because you are handing, you could hand your enemies like anecdote, attack anecdotal attack material that can rally them and help them with their fundraising and push you and create media stories and create narratives that the, that the Congress can take up. Now to be fair, there is no Democratic majority in Congress to start investigating Trump. But you know, there could be at almost any moment like you could, you know, there are 435 members of Congress. Somebody can die in a car crash, somebody can get, have a heart attack and have to quit. Elise Stefanik had to stay in the House in order to preserve a third party.
- [17:13]
Noah Rothman
Special elections tomorrow.
- [17:15]
Matthew Continetti
Two special elections tomorrow. Elise Stefanik had to not become UN Ambassador to protect this tiny Republican minority in the House, which by the way, we can talk about a little bit. Cuz I think that's not so terrible for her, which we can discuss. But you know, by the end of summer there could be a, I mean Republicans faced this in the first George W. Bush term when they had a 50, 50 Senate and one senator demanding a $25 billion payoff. Basically, Jim Je killed the Republican majority in the Senate by announcing that he was going to caucus with the, with the Democrats. With the Democrats because he wanted this money spent. That was just, it was like he was a milkman.
- [18:03]
Noah Rothman
It was the dairy lobby. He needed to protect the dairy lobby.
- [18:06]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, exactly. So I mean that there is precedent in the last quarter century for an incredibly close. Well, there's chamber going the other way in the middle of a term.
- [18:17]
Noah Rothman
I mean, there's also precedent for second terms turning sour. Right, right. Think of a second term that went well. The only one that comes to mind is Roosevelt. Second of four. Right.
- [18:28]
Matthew Continetti
Reagan's. Reagan's had horrible Controversy.
- [18:32]
Noah Rothman
Well, yeah, I wanted to fill that in because you talked about Reagan's dip in his first term due to the recession and then climbing back up to his amazing reelected 84. But the second term didn't go well. And I mean.
- [18:44]
Matthew Continetti
Well, it went well and badly. There was. It was a very, very mixed. Yeah, you had Iran Contra, you had.
- [18:50]
Noah Rothman
Tax reform, but then you had Iran Contra, you had Bork, you had the stock market crash in 87.
- [18:56]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [18:56]
Noah Rothman
And then, of course, again, he recovered, and by 88, 89, he's the man who continues to be, you know, worshiped by a great many Republicans.
- [19:05]
Matthew Continetti
So. So life is long history, political history can be measured.
- [19:10]
Noah Rothman
I think that's the point. You know, I also think it's interesting. Trump is taking huge risks here in this second term and just on the tariffs for a second. You know, as I'm reading all of the coverage of Liberation Day tomorrow, Wednesday.
- [19:28]
Matthew Continetti
Is it tomorrow?
- [19:29]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, I think Wednesday, April. It's either April 1 or April 2, Tuesday or Wednesday, when these reciprocal tariffs are going to be imposed. And there's still, as always, ambiguity about how many countries will be tariffed, what the level of tariff will be, will there be exceptions? I keep thinking back to Nixon's announcement of the New economic policy in the summer of 1971, where Nixon, in order to stanch the decline of the dollar, well, the Russian gold and inflation basically tries to create an autarkic United States by severing the relationship of the gold to the dollar and imposing wage and price controls, in many ways creating the modern economy. That was a huge shock to the system.
- [20:22]
Matthew Continetti
It's worth stopping there and going back and reminding people what that is, because you're referring to it as though it's something that people. People need to understand that 54 years ago, the President of the United States announced nationwide wage and price controls. I mean, think about what that means. That means that the federal government took control of how much money people were allowed to have their salaries raised and took essentially managerial control of how much prices could rise, rather than leaving them to the free market, as the country had to transition away entirely from the gold standard. And this was a Republican, famously, supposedly a conservative Republican, taking the most radical economic step, certainly since fdr, and by some measures more radical than many of the elements of the New Deal. So that happened. So that was Liberation Day of its own.
- [21:22]
Noah Rothman
Right.
- [21:23]
Matthew Continetti
It took 10 years for the wage and price control thing to kind of work itself through the shock, to work itself through the system. America was in an economic calamity. Because of this, the heavy hand that Nixon laid on the economy for seven or eight years of. That's where we come to the idea of uncertainty in some ways and the effects of uncertainty.
- [21:47]
Noah Rothman
I mean, short term, it was a success for Nixon because he was able to suppress inflation ahead of his reelection.
- [21:53]
Matthew Continetti
In 1970, which was a huge reelection.
- [21:56]
Noah Rothman
Which is what he wanted to get that huge majority. But long term, it was terrible because as we all know about wage and price controls, they don't actually solve the problem in inflation and they cause scarcity. And you also had the Arab oil embargo as well, and it was stagflation for much of the 1970s. Ironically enough, you know, one of the people in charge of setting wages and prices was Donald Rumsfeld. But the. The parallel, I think, between that moment in 1971 and what's coming up today is. Is very strong. And again, the. The business class, the elite, hated the New Economic Policy for good reason. Milton Friedman said in his memoirs that the New Economic Policy was the worst thing Nixon ever did, far worse than Watergate or the Daniel Ellsberg files or the Brookings Institution. But that was the worst thing he did in Milton.
- [22:59]
Matthew Continetti
Well, he didn't blow up the Brookings. Brookings wasn't blown up. So we can't blame him just because he considered blowing up the Brookings Institute institution.
- [23:09]
Noah Rothman
But you know what? The economic nationalists in the working class liked it. And I have a feeling we're setting ourselves up for another divergent reaction to this tariff policy in the coming months.
- [23:20]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, which tariff policy? Because we got. We got three or four.
- [23:24]
Noah Rothman
That's tariffs. That's. Yeah, that's our future.
- [23:26]
Matthew Continetti
Right. We got cars. We got reciprocal tariffs.
- [23:30]
Noah Rothman
Yeah.
- [23:30]
Matthew Continetti
We got China. China. We got. So there's a lot of deal. There's a lot of different tariffs. We're not quite clear what we're being liberated from.
- [23:39]
Noah Rothman
Trump is like, here's a tariff for you and for you and for you.
- [23:44]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, the levers are constantly going to go up and down. Right? Because now he says, well, he may ease off on China a little bit to try to get them to play along with the ByteDance TikTok situation. There's always. He's always got. He's always got a connected aim with these tariffs. Right. He's always willing to suspend lower, to claim some victory with some party along the way.
- [24:19]
Matthew Continetti
I think that, Matt, you're saying that the economic nationalists, and clearly the economic nationalists in the. Sort of. In the maga. Economic nationalist intellectual camp, though, of course, I think Somehow that's a.
- [24:35]
Noah Rothman
Well, I'm talking more. I meant the hard hats in the Nixon era. Right.
- [24:39]
Matthew Continetti
I don't know. Right. I don't know that in 2025 we have any evidence that tariffs are popular because so many people work in so many industries and businesses that are going to be affected by the tariffs as they've been laid out systematically, that the, the intensity of the disgust with the tariffs on the part of people whose livelihoods are threatened by them is going to outweigh a general sense that, yeah, we're giving it to the foreigners.
- [25:11]
Noah Rothman
I want to be clear. Yeah, I don't support terrorists.
- [25:14]
Matthew Continetti
No, I understand.
- [25:14]
Noah Rothman
I don't think, and I don't think that they're politically popular as tariffs, but I do think that the people appreciate, especially working class people who have been losing ground in the global economy appreciate a president who seems to be sticking up for them. That's what I mean. It's not, you can look at these polls and you're right, the tariffs poll, not, not well, but over the overall sentiment of, you know what? I don't, and maybe I don't agree with everything he does, but he's still fighting for me. That, I think, does resonate.
- [25:50]
Matthew Continetti
Look, I know I'm literally no reason to disagree and it would be foolish for anybody to disagree. And if people in the media elites don't understand how Trump's appeal works and how it is that they need to factor it in as they think about how to talk about him, then I don't know what to tell them that this is his secret sauce. That is, this is it. But when the rubber meets the road, people, people have relatively inelastic incomes in that sense. And if things start going haywire because of tariffs, I'm not even talking about whether their 401ks look good or bad. I mean, you know, day to day pricing and all of that, then, you know, then he's not going to be immune from the idea that, well, I mean, he's on our side and I get that he's on our side, but things are pretty crappy. So they're not going to, they're not going to hate him, but they are going to start losing confidence that he knows what he's doing.
- [26:50]
Noah Rothman
This is, you know, this divergence, I think, between what makes economic sense and what Trump believes makes political sense is showing up in areas, other areas as well. Because also over the weekend we had these reports that the administration is floating an increase in upper income tax rates. And this, of course, violates every tenet of supply side economics that has been the dominant economic paradigm of the Republican Party since 1981, since Reagan's first year. And the Reagan tax bill. But I think the people pushing it within the administration, and I bet you that JD Vance is supportive of this policy, believe that this is the way to inoculate any charge, inoculate the Republican Party from any charge that it's the party of the rich anymore. And so, again, I think that people going into Trump too, expected, oh, we're going to have some, we're going to go back to Trump 1 economic policy. We're going to have some tariffs, sure. But overall, we're going to have a huge tax cut and we're going to have deregulation and we're going to have cheap energy. And the combination of those three things is going to boost median incomes, especially among working people. What we're seeing now in Trump, too, is we're not going to have those other things. Maybe not. I mean, that tax bill probably will get through, but that tax bill itself is not going to be the kind of classic Reaganite idea, at least if this report is true. It's going to be a Nixonian idea of, of working class politics and, and again, turning the Republican Party into something very different than what us on this podcast are used to.
- [28:41]
Matthew Continetti
My fear there. So what you're talking about is the idea that they will either that. So if the, if the tax bill is left to die, the, the largest single thing that happens if the tax bill is left to die is that the top tax rate goes from 37.
- [29:03]
Noah Rothman
Yeah.
- [29:04]
Matthew Continetti
To 39 and a half percent. Right. Which is an almost 10% increase in the taxes on the apple.
- [29:11]
Noah Rothman
And, you know, can I just add. Yeah. I think the threshold is important. You know, I've always been very sympathetic to the idea that then Speaker John Boehner floated during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011 of the millionaire bracket. Right. Creating a separate bracket for people who are millionaires and then keeping that rate at the Clinton rate, which is about 39.3, 9.6%. Right, I know, I know.
- [29:38]
Matthew Continetti
There are right now, I think people, 400. What is it? It's, it's around the issue. Right.
- [29:43]
Noah Rothman
But I'm saying for the millionaire and yeah, I know that there are plenty of people who are in that bracket that are like, well, you know, what if it's going to help reduce our deficit or that's, that's right now, though, the threshold is 400,000. That's significantly less than a million. That's going to hit a lot of more people. And sure, those are affluent people, but it has a much bigger bite. And let's remember that's, this is the policy that's being floated. If the tax bill passes, if the tax bill does not pass, it's a tax increase on everyone, including working class people who standard deduction had doubled thanks to the 2017 tax bill. So it's very important for Republicans to get the tax bill through. But what I'm saying is if they do keep the upper income tax rate, or rather they allow it to rise, that might not have the economic effects that they want. Right?
- [30:42]
Matthew Continetti
Well, that's the central problem. So Trump trumpets that the 2017 tax cut that he, he did really steward it. But it's, so it's the Trump tax cuts created the greatest economic growth the world has ever seen, which is not true. But. Okay, but that's what he claims. But the way that this works is that the tax receipts in the United States are generated wildly, disproportionately, I mean, beyond any idea of proportion by the upper income tax taxpayers. 50% of the taxes in the United States are paid by the top 2%.
- [31:23]
Noah Rothman
And I think even more people.
- [31:24]
Matthew Continetti
And if you raise their taxes, you create this disincentive complex. It's hard to describe because the idea is what people aren't going to work and try to make money just because taxes go up 10%. It's not, that's not the way it works. They defer income, they shelter income, they do various things. And then the net result of raising the taxes on them is that the tax receipts that the country receives decline. And so Trump, by cutting taxes on the wealthy, ended up getting massive, a massive inflow of money into the federal government.
- [31:59]
Noah Rothman
I just could just add before Abe intervenes, this is the same thing with tariffs. You know, Peter Navarro, Trump's tariff Bengali, said over the weekend that, look, we're going to have liberation day. We're going to have trillions of dollars of revenue coming into the United States. Well, that, that is the static scoring that Republicans always critique when it comes to tax policy. Because when you put, when you raise the price, right, that means people are going to buy fewer imports. This is, of course, another argument for tariffs that the administration uses all the time. But if they buy fewer imports, that means less revenue to the Treasury. So someone needs to get a napkin and draw the laugher curve on it and remind the White House of the supply side insights that have given us an incredible economy for some 40 years.
- [32:58]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, except you know, the thing is here where we're coming up with these very, very realistic critiques of these policies, but these are critiques that Trump has kind of signaled already he doesn't care about. He said things like, I don't care how the market reacts. There was a recent dismissal of what.
- [33:22]
Noah Rothman
Did he say about whether the prices go up? Yeah, but that was garbled. The media garbled that he meant that he didn't care if prices on foreign cars went up because he wants people to buy American cars. Right, but you're right, he, he is a believer here. And when you're a second term president, you can, you can do what you believe. That's usually why the second terms go so badly so quickly.
- [33:48]
Matthew Continetti
Right. Look, I think the central problem here is that Trump wants to take credit for results. So one of the things you learn is if you say, okay, look, that first term you effectively put in a supply side tax cut and you had these really positive results. So of course, in the second term you're not going to do an anti supply side tax policy unless you're Donald Trump. And so you claim to have had this great success eight years earlier with this policy and then you're going to put in a policy that is the exact dead reverse. But if it, but so what you should have learned was that this way works and the other way won't work if this way. By definition, it's like if, you know, if this way works, then if you put the table together the other way it'll be upside down instead of right side up. But that's, he just wants to be able to claim a win. And he, and the policy stuff is divorced from what's in his head. Like that's, it's an incredible liberation. It's a kind of nihilism. It's not nihilism in the philosophical sense.
- [34:56]
Noah Rothman
It's like, it's the will to power.
- [34:59]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, but it's also like he says this will work. This other guy said, that'll work. That worked then maybe this will work. Now, in the end, I'm the, I'll be the most successful.
- [35:12]
Noah Rothman
In the end, he believes that the global trading system is a failure. Right. And he is set to tear down that system and replace it with what he believes is going to succeed. And though the metaphor may be strained, what occurs to me is he is approaching the international economy in the same way that he's approaching White House renovations. Okay. First term, he comes in the White House. He kind of hated the house. He gave a lot of stories about how it was old. He actually set in motion some renovations, I think. But if you remember, there was this huge problem with flies when he came into the White House in the summers. And Obama, when he was giving interviews in his last year, was always, like, swatting flies. And so Trump solved. Solve that.
- [36:06]
Matthew Continetti
Right.
- [36:07]
Noah Rothman
And he just met. He lived in the White House for four years, and he went to, you know, Bedminster. Mar. A Lago is fine. Okay. Now, second term, he is changing the White House, the Oval Office. If you look at the pictures now, it is like. It is like his old office in Trump Tower. Pictures everywhere, flags everywhere. He's now got the deck, a copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging near. Near his desk. And what happened to the Rose Garden? He decided the Rose Garden was too muddy and it wasn't a nice place to socialize. So they are laying gravel. They're creating, like, a brick floor. You know, I don't. I'm sure, you know, I don't want Trump supporters to say, I got the stone wrong. I'm sure he picked out a very beautiful stone for the patio, but he's turning it into the patio. He's acting like someone who's going to be there for a while, which might raise some eyebrows. But more importantly, he is shaping this space according to his vision in a way that he did not do in his first term, and that is the same thing he is doing to the global economy. The potential problem is that he lives in the White House and it's his office. So it's really only he and his employees who are affected by the renovations. But you change the global economy, and millions are affected by it.
- [37:38]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I think it's an excellent metaphor, because I think he thinks of them as the same.
- [37:44]
Noah Rothman
Of course.
- [37:44]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [37:46]
Noah Rothman
Because they're his.
- [37:47]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [37:47]
Noah Rothman
It's just like they're his boxes. They're my boxes.
- [37:50]
Matthew Continetti
They're my boxes. I mean, I am amused by the horror that has been greeted with the idea of taking the Rose Garden and turning some portion of it into a kind of pavilion that the chairs can sit on. Right. And he said that in the Rose Garden. I've been, you know, I wrote speeches for Reagan that were delivered in the Rose Garden that I went to the Rose Garden to listen to. And, yeah, like, you know, the Rose Garden, they put chairs on the grass and, like, if it rained, they sink. You know, mud. Women walking in heels. It's really not.
- [38:24]
Noah Rothman
You mentioned that in every.
- [38:27]
Matthew Continetti
Right. He's right.
- [38:28]
Noah Rothman
He is right.
- [38:28]
Matthew Continetti
Like, what? You can't renovate The. I mean, it's not the Rose Garden, isn't the Parthenon. You know, it's not the Coliseum.
- [38:37]
Noah Rothman
It's a very old house.
- [38:39]
Matthew Continetti
Architecturally significant. It's just. It's a nice setting. You walk out of the Oval, you go through the double doors of the Oval Office right out to your podium, and people are sitting there. And it was all what you could see if you were president outside your window. And so it was the Rose Garden. And so he doesn't care about roses, so he doesn't need a rose garden. Whatever. That. That's fine. And it's sort of like he can't. Everything he's doing is okay. But. Yeah. The global economy is not the. Is not the way to renovations. And other presidents have. You know, Nixon had a bowling alley. I think Ford had a swimming pool. Like, there was a bowling alley that turned into a swimming pool. I mean, they're in the basement. There have been.
- [39:20]
Noah Rothman
And I think there's a golf simulator there.
- [39:22]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. I mean, but there was literally somebody had a bowling alley that was then turned. Or a swimming pool was turned into a bowling alle.
- [39:29]
Noah Rothman
Carter sold a yacht.
- [39:31]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. Because. Because the president can't go out and have fun. So, you know, so Nixon liked to bowl, apparently. Anyway, whatever. These are the delightful.
- [39:43]
Noah Rothman
I'm going to pull up Milton Friedman and say selling the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, was the worst thing Carter ever did. It was worse than Iran, worse than Afghanistan, worse than the rabbit. He should. We should have kept that boat.
- [40:01]
Matthew Continetti
All right, so let's move on from. Move on from the good Trump, bad Trump stuff to the. To the bad stuff. Bad stuff. So Columbia University's interim president, Katrina Armstrong, negotiated this deal sheet with the administration on what it would do to have its $400 million of funding restored that the White House had cut off on the grounds that they had violated the civil rights of Jewish students and others. And a week later, Katrina Armstrong is fired and an interim president. Claire Shipman, the president of the Board of Trustees, is made president of Columbia University, which has eerie similarities to the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency, by which I mean the. Claire Shipman is a freelance journalist who does not have an advanced degree in anything, has never run any institution, does not have any experience running a 16 billion dollar or $30 billion endowment, is somebody I know slightly and find extraordinarily personally unimpressive, which does not make her unsuited to be president.
- [41:25]
Noah Rothman
She does have one quality.
- [41:27]
Matthew Continetti
Yes.
- [41:28]
Noah Rothman
And I can attest to this. She is Columbia University's favorite alumnus by far. Ever since I showed up on that campus in 1999, the administration, multiple administrations of Columbia has have not stopped talking about how wonderful Claire Shipman is. So it was not a surprise to me at all that she got this position.
- [41:53]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, when she showed up at the hearing, I mean, they had an anti Semitism hearing, specifically with Columbia. And my friend, Commentary contributor David Shizzer, who was at the Columbia Law School, was sitting next to her Orthodox Jew, to Manou Shafiq, the then president of Columbia. And on the other side was Claire Shippen. I was like, what the hell is Claire doing there? I had no idea that she was president of the board of trustees, Columbia. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, people in the course of your professional life, and then every now and then, they emerge somewhere and you're like, what the. This was one of the what the moments.
- [42:30]
Noah Rothman
But I think it's also a karmic moment, okay? Because as a Columbia alum who has been watching as the administration praises Claire Shipman for decades, well, my alma mater has never recognized my existence on this planet. I felt nothing but joy that she's getting this job because it is the worst job on the planet.
- [43:00]
Matthew Continetti
There is no good way to manage this job. That is the story of October 7th and the aftermath. I mean, the only good way to manage the job would have been for Minou Shafiq to shut down the protests in the middle of October by standing up, making a speech on campus and saying, we are here to protect Jewish students. We are here to protect. Everyone has the right to freedom of speech. No one has the right to suppress anybody else's speech and speech. And what's more, if you make. There is. We have a code of conduct about how we talk about matters of sensitive import and impact on people on this campus. We are a private institution. We police ourselves and we police what we believe to be civil conduct. We will not be hearing people say, we hope that their countrymen are murdered and that we support their murder and stuff like that, and we will take steps for it, against it on October 22, 2023. She could have done that. I don't know what would have happened. It couldn't have been any worse than what happened to her over the course of the next six months, including her final defendant. Or eight months where she had to be humiliated in front of con twice and then sit there and have the encampments built, and then she didn't know what to do about that, didn't know whether to Bring the cops on campus or not bring the cops on campus. And then she herself was finally kind of led into what will now be, I imagine that sort of a position of semi lifelong disgrace, having been this person. And now Katrina Armstrong follows her in a obviously good faith effort to figure out how to get Colombia out of this trap that it found itself in because Trump had won the election. And she is taken and crumpled up like a piece of paper and thrown away like garbage by the. By the out of control university that is now obsessed with the idea that it's terrible that this monstrous little twerp who doesn't even go there anymore has been deported or is on the way to being deported. And now Claire Shipman takes the job. Somebody who has said that the charges of anti Semitism against Colombia are ridiculous. So what is she gonna do? The other thing is maybe she's gonna like they now have to. She's an interim president, so maybe they're gonna find a new president.
- [45:36]
Noah Rothman
So my.
- [45:39]
Matthew Continetti
Oh, I have a people that in 1950. Who is the president of Columbia in 1951?
- [45:45]
Noah Rothman
Dwight.
- [45:45]
Matthew Continetti
Dwight David Eisenhower. Here's where we've gone. One of the greatest Americans like 1951 and now we're in 20. Claire Shipman. Oh, how to tell your boss how to be a woman. Let's go on Morning Joe and tell everybody how to have a nice encounter group so that you can you. So that you can push forward your agenda for a woman led.
- [46:09]
Noah Rothman
Female empowerment's not at the top of the Middle Eastern studies department's priority list. So that, that might be task number one for her. But, you know, there are a whole bunch of possibilities. My classmate Julia Stiles, you know, it's true her film career is picking up again, but you know, this would be a nice job. My other classmate, Joseph Gordon Levitt, maybe.
- [46:32]
Matthew Continetti
He, maybe he was written and directed several feature films.
- [46:35]
Noah Rothman
He's a very intelligent person and a great, great talent. And why not? But put him there too. And here is what I think is happening, though. Behind the scenes there's another alumnus, my least favorite, Barack Obama. And I would not be surprised if people are trying to say, hey, you know, Eisenhower was the president of Colombia before he became president. Why don't you become the president of Colombia after you're president and you can straighten this all out. And we know his views on the Middle east, so they're probably consonant with the board of trustees.
- [47:15]
Abe Greenwald
He needs that like a hole in the head. He would. He's not taking that. He wants to produce Netflix series and you know what?
- [47:24]
Matthew Continetti
You're not supposed to. You're not supposed to produce porn on our podcast. This is like. This is like you're writing fan porn for me. Obama. What if Obama became president of Columbia? This. This is my. Would be my dream. Come just to watch. Just to get popcorn. I only live a mile and a half from Columbia. I could just go on the subway and stand in front of the gates and just eat popcorn and watch it sink into the Hudson.
- [47:54]
Noah Rothman
It would not. I mean, it wouldn't be pretty. I would say that. I mean, the. The embargo of many students on applying for Columbia, I think would it would increase if Obama became the president. But it just seems to me to be a logical choice here. Plus, that would then enable Obama. You know, it's interesting because Obama has not really become a visible voice of the resistance so much, you know, three months into Trump, too. But if he were the president of Columbia, that would give him a huge platform to continue the unending war between Trump and Obama.
- [48:34]
Matthew Continetti
I would just like to say that I believe Barack Obama will become president of Columbia around the time that I win the Boston Marathon. I don't think he is a very sensible person at the. At the very least, least you could say about Barack Obama that he is a very sensible person who. Who understands his moments.
- [48:56]
Noah Rothman
I'm just riffing here.
- [48:58]
Matthew Continetti
I'm really enjoying it. The answer is that it will be the president of a small college with a decent endowment that has been managed fairly well, who is too stupid to know there's a bit in how to succeed in business without really trying the most. The wittiest of satirical Broadway musicals, in which. Which is the story of how a window washer rises to become CEO of a company in a week by using a man a how to manual. Right. And so the whole idea is he gets himself into a position where he becomes appointed a vice president. There's a key moment. It's like at the end of the first day, he gets appointed by. It's like three days as he's been working as a window washer and he gets appointed. He's like, I've been appointed vice president. He looks at the book and the book says, this is a wonderful thing. Unless you have been appointed vice president of advertising, this is the one job you cannot take as vice president of advertising. And then the head, the CEO, says, finch, I'm making you vice president of advertising. So this is Obama. Like, Obama is not taking. Obama doesn't need the manual, and he is not going to take the job because he understands that the job of Columbia is in how to succeed terms, the job of vice president of advertising, the one from which you cannot succeed and that everybody will use you as the, you know, as the, the target and the person to blame everything else on.
- [50:32]
Abe Greenwald
Well, look, we should say because, you know, we ran through a lot of the Trump's problematic policies and nonsense at the top of the show, it's his administration that's now made it so hellish for Colombia, whoever it's gonna be, they're still gonna have to deal with the Trump demands.
- [50:54]
Matthew Continetti
Right. Well, and again, what we're seeing here, and this is important because it's a generational thing. I mean this is going to take a generation or longer to sort of work itself through. But the decision to say enough to universities and it's been said just saying enough, that's how the grants are made by NIH and NIMH and all of that in which we're learning things. Like every grant that the federal government gives to five year study of a medical thing that's being done at a research institution, 50% of that goes to overhead, the institution's overhead, for example, 50%. So federal government gives a researcher at Yale $20 million to do a five year study of a potential cancer mitigation method. Right? $20 million. 10 of it goes to Yale's overhead. Where's that money going? What is yelling to pay for the electric bill to make sure that there are enough test tubes. They also have people giving hundreds of millions of dollars directly to the medical schools and to the research institutions themselves annually to have the classrooms named after them and stuff like that. Federal government is a gigantic slush fund for private institutions of research on college campuses. And the administration has said enough. Maybe again like also it's sloppy and they're cutting things that shouldn't be cut and they're doing. But the point here is that somebody has said enough, has said enough on the on Jews, has said enough on Title six, has said enough on, on the way in which this incestuous relationship between these funding mechanisms in Washington and the recipients of the funds are intertwined and, and revolving Dorish and all of that. And I don't think that stops even when if a Democrat wins in 29, there's a kind of form of oversight that is going to be implemented one way or another over the next four years that will not that you were not is not going to go away because its effect is going to be so positive by which I mean it's going to turn out that the amount of waste in this system is beyond numbers that we can even have possibly imagined. And so, you know, of all the things that have happened that are importance to me personally, but I think in terms of rebalancing the American relationship to its elites, among other things, this is maybe the most important because it has long lasting consequences. This, by the way, also goes to the, maybe we could talk a little bit about this. The, before we go, the, the loss. The law firm, the executive orders about the law firms, which are clearly extraordinarily distasteful. Like they're, you can't, they're isolated. As Jed Rubenfeld says in a very, very good piece in the Free Press. It's one thing to say you can't, you know, you are ideologic. Your, your firm ignores this and doesn't do that and doesn't do the other thing and then adding in and you hired, and you hired Mueller. So I'm denying your security clearance because you hired Mueller. Like one, one is arguable, the other is inarguably unconstitutional and viewpoint discrimination and gets you out. But I think even here you can make the case that this is an enough moment that Big Law decided to throw in its hand 10, 15 years ago with the left. It won't hire conservative, it won't, it won't hire conservatives as first years. It won't hire conservatives as partners. It will not take on pro bono cases to help conservatives. All these conservative organizations that we are very fond of have had to be the main institutions of the bar, fighting cases for religious liberty, gun rights, various other things because Big Law wouldn't take them on. Look at what happened to Paul Clement, arguably the single greatest litigant at the Supreme Court. Literally the single, the single most successful. The guy that you want to argue your case at the Supreme Court, who is a partner at. I can't remember which firm argued Dobbs One had to leave his firm, though.
- [56:02]
Noah Rothman
We should know he's now arguing on behalf of some of these law firms.
- [56:07]
Matthew Continetti
Well, okay, so, so I'm not. Fine. I'm just saying. Yeah, his firm, whichever one it was, I can't remember, had to fire him.
- [56:15]
Noah Rothman
Big Law is very hostile to conservatives.
- [56:18]
Matthew Continetti
Because they, also, because they were worried that it would harm their business to have the guy who won the Dobbs case as one of their, as one of their, as their key litigation partner.
- [56:28]
Noah Rothman
Also because their business is all tied up with the government like so many big businesses.
- [56:33]
Matthew Continetti
Right. So, like, this is another weird enough moment. Like, I understand that the administration's gone way too far. And this is Trump being psychotic, don't get me wrong. But there is a kind of moment of the way that this has all happened over time, is accreted over time. The building up of the liberal establishments, control of all these institutions over time. This is the first moment in our lifetimes when there has been a kind of enough.
- [57:03]
Noah Rothman
The 50% of the country, and I'm rounding up by now, but the 50% of the country that voted for Trump will not be ignored any longer. And it has a very different view of the role of government, of the importance of universities, of American foreign policy, of American economic policy and international economic policy than the people who live in, in and around the nation's capital. And however this shakes out, as you say, John, I don't think it's going to be temporary. Right? I mean, even if there is a Democrat in the White House in four years from now, they're still going to be dealing with this, this shift that happened as a result of the incredible failures of the Biden administration.
- [57:52]
Matthew Continetti
And just to, just to put a bow on that. So Biden wins in 2021, promising to restore normalcy after Trump's chaos, and he introduces a new level or a new kind of chaos on top of Trump's chaos. And so Trump is now peeling back Biden chaos and some Obama chaos. But the idea that then they can play that card again, that in 2028, Democrats are going to run in 2028 saying, well, that was crazy. Come back to us because at least, you know, we're not crazy like that guy. It's too soon since Biden to make the argument that, that a restoration of normalcy comes from electing a Democrat to make a different case.
- [58:43]
Noah Rothman
It's not even just Obama that is being repealed here. What was one of Trump's first acts? Undoing the original affirmative action executive order that LBJ had signed.
- [58:56]
Matthew Continetti
Right.
- [58:56]
Noah Rothman
To a great extent. This is the Trump 50%, the Trump party undoing a lot of the Great Society.
- [59:06]
Matthew Continetti
And by the way, we should also mention in good Trump, in the good Trump moment over the weekend that I forgot to mention that he said he's getting angry at Iran again. He's getting angry at Iran. He wrote them a letter. I'm sure it was a beautiful letter and that they're dissing him and bombs may start falling.
- [59:26]
Noah Rothman
The bombers are at Diego Garcia. The number of our strategic bombers that are there has increased.
- [59:33]
Matthew Continetti
And we had another raid on the Houthis last night. And so we are, we are in military conflict, active military conflict in the Middle east right now, while JD Vance is saying he didn't know that it was cold in Greenland. By the way, maybe the first moment since the bad, unfair couch stuff back after his appointment in August as the. As the vice presidential nominee that I thought Vance really looked like a fool was this trip to Greenland which. Where he said, well, we have to respect the president's desires. The president's desires must be respected. And my God, it's cold here in Greenland. And the fact that they went around trying to find a house for Usha Vance to like, knock on the door and say, hi, I'm Usha Vance, and literally no one in Greenland said she could come to their house in the beautifully named capital city of Nuuk. Nuuk. I know that, Matt. You are sympathetic to territorial.
- [60:42]
Noah Rothman
I'm about to suggest. I'm just saying I am sympathetic to territorial expansion, but, you know, there are ways to go about it. Okay.
- [60:49]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [60:50]
Noah Rothman
And I would prefer that we don't invade Greenland. I just wanted to say that on the record, I do. I would prefer that. And maybe that would be more of our, you know, ex. Soft power diplomacy in order to increase these ties between us and Greenland. And I do think that this trip did not achieve its intended goal. We can say so. I do urge the administration to not. Not dismiss the objective of having Greenland as part of the United States, but changing the means by which we approach it.
- [61:30]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, the meaning by which we approach it is that we go around house by house with a checkbook like in the movie Local. Here it should be like the movie.
- [61:39]
Noah Rothman
I also think some.
- [61:40]
Matthew Continetti
We show up, we say, how much?
- [61:43]
Noah Rothman
Yes.
- [61:43]
Matthew Continetti
Really? How much? Literally, how much you want? A hundred billion. Every single person gets a billion dollars. There are 35,000 people living in Greenland or something. 45,000. Every one of you gets $5 million.
- [61:56]
Noah Rothman
What's Denmark's structural deficit?
- [61:58]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, well, that's right.
- [62:00]
Noah Rothman
Let's add it to our tab.
- [62:01]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, there we go. I mean, that's buy it. What the hell is he doing?
- [62:07]
Abe Greenwald
But. Or I mean, look, okay, what about we just negotiate our increased presence there and increased military operations we don't actually need?
- [62:17]
Matthew Continetti
Well, that would be sane. Yeah, that would be the sane thing. But the MAGA nuts have decided that they think this is some kind of a winning item for JD Vance to be walking around in a parka saying, it's cold here. So if it's so cold and there are five people living there in a city called Nook, like, I don't Think America's gonna go, I really need that Greenland.
- [62:43]
Noah Rothman
It's not high on the American people's priority list. There are sound strategic arguments.
- [62:50]
Matthew Continetti
Panama is Panama.
- [62:51]
Noah Rothman
They know. Look, I mean, what's, you know, it's very interesting. What's the least popular thing Trump has done? The Gulf of America.
- [62:58]
Matthew Continetti
You know, Is that right?
- [62:59]
Noah Rothman
Yeah, like that rate's the least popular.
- [63:03]
Matthew Continetti
Right.
- [63:03]
Noah Rothman
So, you know, like I said at the top, he has a defined set of issues here. I, I forgot. End wokeness. That's number four.
- [63:12]
Matthew Continetti
Oh, yeah. And I think like that goes in with the enough. The enough part actually, if you used enough as a kind of umbrella. The wokeness thing is enough. Enough with the self reeducation sessions. Enough with telling people that they're racist. Enough, enough, enough.
- [63:30]
Noah Rothman
And like this order, just finally, this order about the Smithsonian that he signed, you know, I think most people will say that seems totally reasonable. Now, again, you know, how do you go about it?
- [63:41]
Matthew Continetti
Embarrassed to say I don't know what that order is.
- [63:43]
Noah Rothman
Oh, it was on Friday. I think it was among, you know, there's so many. They're actually on today, March 31st. There are two executive order signings on the calendar. Two different separate sessions. But I think it was on Friday where he signed one telling the Smithsonian to go over all its materials and make sure that they present information objectively, fairly and without any political correctness. And I think most voters would say that's common sense, you know, and that goes into the enough.
- [64:19]
Matthew Continetti
Okay, so I got, I just want.
- [64:20]
Abe Greenwald
To say also, you know, this gets to John's point about how there's no, you can't go back. There's, there's going to be. There could be no version of, of an automatic reversal of the enough moment. And I think it's not just because it's too soon after Biden, it's that you can't put the number of Americans who now that there's more Americans now who identify as Republican than as Democrats. You can't just put them back in a box. You know, this is, it's a new reality now and that's, it's a new reality going forward. That'll change, it'll shift. But that is a new reality. It's a new landscape.
- [65:02]
Matthew Continetti
Right. Okay. So because of Matt's bringing up the, bringing up the executive orders and the number of them, I want to just, I want to make a last minute Hail Mary recommendation. This weekend I went to see a comedy show with my wife, as people may know is a manager. Is a manager. Of comedians and comedy talent. And one of her. One of the people she manages is the very brilliant comedian Chris Redd. And he was appearing at the. At a. At a club called Levity Live in. In Nyack, New York. And he was fantastic. But one of his openers was a comedian named Eagle Wit, who was. I'd never heard of and was spectacularly good. And Eagle Wit sort of did this whole bit about how, I don't like Trump. I voted for Kamala. I'm a Kamala guy. But, you know, the thing about Trump is the executive order is like, there are so many of them, man. There are so many of them. You know, at one point or other, you're gonna like one of them. There's one of them you're gonna like now. I was like, I don't like that. I don't like plastic straws, man. Plastic straw.
- [66:15]
Noah Rothman
That's the opposite of Gulf of America, right?
- [66:17]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, right, the opposite.
- [66:18]
Noah Rothman
People love them.
- [66:19]
Matthew Continetti
America. So my recommendation is go look up Eagle wit on. On YouTube. He's really a wonderful comedian. And Chris Redd. But, but, but Eagle Wit, this was one of the more inventive sets that I've heard talking about politics. You know, it's like, hey, it's one of those, hey, I'm a liberal and I'm a Democrat. But, you know, like, that really was, like. It really was, like, the first really good joke that I've heard about Trump and the executive orders. I know that's not like, there's like, a huge, inexhaustible font of material about Trump and the executive orders in the comedy space, but nonetheless, Eagle Wit, you tube spelled like the bird and Wit with two T's. So we'll be back tomorrow for Matt and Abram John Pot Horat's Keep the Candle bur.