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- [00:01]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
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B
Yay.
- [00:28]
A
Kathy Bates. Dolly Parton. Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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B
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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A
Some drink champagne, Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst of all.
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B
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, February 18, 2026. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and we have a full house today with executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:35]
C
Hi, John.
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B
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:38]
D
Hi, John.
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B
Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:42]
E
Hi, John.
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B
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:46]
F
Hi, John.
- [01:48]
B
So the story seems to be that we are sending assets like crazy to the waters off Iran. Two aircraft carriers, tankers steaming, as many as 25 tankers, a huge deployment of assets going to the Middle east. As we get these tweets and things from various Iranian officials saying they will never and they're not going to, and how dare you, and all of that. As though. Fascinating because. As though they have any cards to play. This negotiation only exists with the United States because Trump decided to initiate the negotiations with Iran to negotiate with himself over whether or not he actually needed to strike Iran, and Iran is doing absolutely nothing to keep him from going through with a strike on Iran. Apparently, the big offer on the table is that they will suspend uranium enrichment for three years, which sound familiar. It's not even suspending Iranian Richmond for. For 10 years, which I think was the. Was the terminology in the jcpoa. So we're actually. They're making a worse offer than the Obama Iran deal, it would appear. And Trump is like, hey, I've got all the military equipment that I need to blow you back into the Stone Age. And the Ayatollah is huffing and puffing and his various aides are huffing and puffing. So I'm quite understand the Iranian play here, but I, it's very hard to enter into the mind of psychopathic 18th century religious fanatics combined with 21st century totalitarian techniques. So I'm glad some ways that I, that I'm unable to penetrate that weird dual consciousness. What do you guys think?
- [04:05]
D
I think the worst part for them is that the worst part for the Iranians was that they made Vance say that they're not being cooperative and they're not being good faith in the talks. And that to me was, and genuinely that to me is really the worst sign for Iran and the most encouraging sign I've seen. Because whatever Vance thinks about intervention in foreign policy, especially military intervention, he's very good at speaking for Trump. He, you know, he backs his president, that's his boss, and he's good at getting on social media and, you know, and doing interviews and all that stuff and defending whatever Trump's position is and trying to explain it and all that. So, you know, if you're, if you're Iran, hearing Vance say they won't even acknowledge Trump's red lines, you know, that's his way of saying the president, president is insulted by these talks. You know, it sounds, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like he's just saying, well, you know, we haven't made much progress, but we'll get there. But really what he's saying is that they're, you know, it's a slap in the face and, and they have, and it's a warning, I think, from the Vance wing, when you have the wing of the administration that would normally bend over backwards for more negotiations. We already know that Vance, for example, supported a strike previously because he, he didn't want Trump to be left looking like he was all talk and no action and things like that. He cares about how the administration looks to Iran. So I think Iran is getting a warning from Vance and the Vance wing saying there's nobody pulling him back from attacking you right now.
- [05:44]
C
When you talk about echoing what Trump says, I mean, first of all, this thing has dragged on so long and there's been so many zigs and zags, zigs and zags that haven't gone anywhere but just sort of back, you know, reverse, little mini reverses. Of course, Trump over the weekend in within the same 24 hours, there was a morning where he said it would be good if the regime were toppled in Iran. It would be good for everyone. And then in the afternoon he said, looks like we're making some progress in talks. So I don't know how you echo Trump at the moment.
- [06:26]
F
Well, you know, Abe, to your point of the zigs and zags and all of this, you know, the best thing I've read on this was a column, I think it came out two days ago in the Journal by Walter Russell Mead, who wasn't advocating for any particular course of action on this, but just noted that the whole way this has played out over a course of months with Trump, A, he's sending the USS Gerald Ford to the region, which is actually the very instrument of Maduro's demise, but also prolonging this crisis where he is at the center. He has the power to make a decision that shapes world events and drives news coverage. How many podcasts have we done about this where not that much has changed? And he himself has several options at his fingertips. He can push for regime change. He can take a bad deal. He can let Israel make the first move and come in at the end like he did with Midnight Hammer. He and take credit for much of what was done. He can back off and let the mullahs survive. But through it all, he's the most powerful invisible leader in the world, controlling the fate of a nation. And Walter's point in the column is that this is where Trump likes to live. And it explains a lot about why we're seeing these prolonged negotiations in addition to getting our forces in the region, which increases his optionality. And that really did help me understand what we're seeing here.
- [08:17]
B
If his ultimate intention is regime change, if he is not simply completely at loose ends and making different, having different perspectives in the morning and in the afternoon, the future history of this moment might be that the Pentagon or his war planners said we really need six to eight weeks to get all of our stuff in place. So you just basically, since we started the clock at the beginning of January, you're going to need to vamp or you're going to need to keep this up while we get everything, while we line up all our ducts so that we can knock them down in a row. And Israel may need six to eight weeks to get itself prepared in some fashion or other in ways that we don't, we don't know. There is always that possibility that this is sort of built was, was baked in the cake the minute that he started going down the road with, I've had enough of Iran. I've had enough of their behavior starting at the end of December. But that this was not simply a Midnight Hammer kind of operation, which of course, the US had been had in their planning mix probably for years, some version of Midnight Hammer, or the Israelis in America together had had some kind of war gaming setup in which they said, well, if we do this and we do that, then we can. This is one possibility. We strike here and we strike there. And then you come in and you do this and you do that, and then we, you know, you soften them. We come in, we're in for 37 hours, and we go. That seems to me to be more likely than I had thought a couple of days ago, in part because of this movement of the tankers. So when you are deploying assets, ordinarily you send your big gun. Literally. The big guns of the Navy are the aircraft carriers. But if you're actually going to start moving in secondary and tertiary equipment, you know, bombers, that or materiel or stuff like that, that's not on the aircraft carriers, that may have other uses, including, I don't know, amphibious landings. I don't even know what, what all of that would be.
- [10:55]
E
The 150 cargo ships are the thing that she changed. It's not just a destroyer or two. It's the cargo ships that are the supply, that can have ammunition, that can resupply existing ships out there, and the fighter jets. I think the movement of 50 fighter jets was also indicative of a more serious escalation. And it's interesting to me, I think the Iranian regime's response, which is to start negotiating with Trump as if he's Obama, is a sign of weakness. I mean, suddenly they're talking about nuclear enrichment and uranium enrichment. No, we're past that because obviously they're not doing anything right now of the Operation Midnight Hammer and the fact that we're just off their coast. So suggesting now that if you just, you know, just let us do this, you know, with an oversight committee, and we'll do a little bit here and there. I mean, it's like a. It's like a husband telling his wife, I'll only cheat on you on the weekends. I promise it's not during the week. I mean, nobody's buying this anymore. And obviously, this is where Trump's canniness about keeping his opponent on the back foot and insecure about what he's intending is good. I do think that red line. I wonder how much the red line issue is for him personally fueling this, this increased talk of hostility. I think it bugs him when people say, that's just like Obama and you're look, you look weak and you have not followed through on your Commitment. And it is bad just from a sort of standpoint of what the US's role in the world is, to promise help to people who are being fired upon by their own government and then do nothing. So it's. You're right, it could have just been the time needed for the buildup in.
- [12:27]
B
1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, which I believe was August 5th, or something like that of 1990. We did not actually go to war until January of 91. And I'm embarrassed to say, because I was writing daily for the Washington Times at the time, and that, you know, round about November, I started to get impatient. Now, there was famously this moment when Margaret Thatcher said to George H.W. bush, don't go wobbly. You know, you're gonna have all this pressure on you to somehow not do what you know you have to do, which is kick, militarily, kick Saddam out of Kuwait. You know? You know you have to do that. I know you have to do that. Don't go wobbly. And it was looking like Bush was going wobbly. James Baker was traveling around the world trying to make agreements with this one, that one, the other one. And I started writing these humor columns about essentially evoking the whole idea of Bush the wimp and his weird use of vocabulary because he kept calling an Saddam to leave Kuwait. So, you know, I would write these things where it's like, today, George Bush said, saddam Hussein, you get your hiney out of Kuwait today. Get your tushy out of Kuwait, that kind of thing. And then meanwhile, in the course of these columns, Saddam is falling asleep, Saddam is taking a bath, Saddam is eating cotton candy. Wild Bush dithers. And that was incredibly unjust of me because, in fact, it took five months to assemble the coalition, to get everything in a row and to get our forces into the desert and to win the most overwhelming military victory that the world had ever seen in 100 days with fewer than 100American casualties. And that's why I point out that Trump, starting at the end of December, to say, okay, enough. Like, enough with you. What you're doing here is, you know, beyond the bounds of anything that is acceptable, you're bad, you're a bad regime. Stop killing people or we're going to come get you. And if that's a serious thing, and not just Trump blowing off steam, the fact that it would take two or three months for that to be executed, even though it meant, tragically, that Iranians, thousands of Iranians, had to be, were killed by their regime while we waited and while the world waited. It will have been worth it if the, if the exercise or if the military action goes properly. It's understandable that you don't want to go into a situation in which you're taking out a regime that has been entrenched for 46 years, that governs a nation of 90 million people, where it has shown, Ruth, unbelievable ruthlessness and an ability to tamp down revolutionary or regime change fervor inside the place time and time and time and time again, that if you're going to do it, it's going to have to be a major action with a lot of different components. Israel's going to have to be involved not only because they have the best intelligence and have the country sort of wired, as we sort of seem to understand it, but also because they will be the primary target. You know, I mean, our ships might be targets too, but they will be the primary target. They need to get their ducks in a row, protect themselves or have, or know what aggressive action they need to take that is defensive in nature. So this is a moment at which we could learn that Trump has learned on foreign policy that you don't just go off half assed that this is a different matter from extracting Maduro, right, Or, or, you know, or, or hitting Soleimani, or even doing Operation Midnight Hammer, which involved active American kinetic action for a day and a half. This is something else. And that if we're going to do it, we have to do it. We can't. We have to do it seriously. Now, that would actually be very reassuring if Trump had sort of has matured as president to the point at which he says, okay, if I have X purpose, here are the Y strategies to achieve that purpose. And I'm the only one who set the clock. There is no clock, in fact, for.
- [17:29]
E
It's always two weeks with him. So it doesn't.
- [17:32]
C
Right.
- [17:32]
B
But I mean, there's no clock for Iranian regime change. It's not like we need to get it done by, you know, by, by June or it's going to be too hot, you know, or, or, you know, or that that's when they're going to have their hundredth anniversary. You know, it's like in a movie or something. Like, it would be like, this is.
- [17:49]
E
The beginning of Ramadan. So, I mean, maybe he's timing it.
- [17:51]
B
To, I don't know. But, you know, it's always like it's, we have to do it now because according to the ticking clock plot, you know, in the third act, they're going to Bring the new weapon online, right? Top Gun Maverick. It's like we got to hit this facility before the new weapon goes online. And then they'll have the new weapon. There is no new weapon. There is not. This is a war of choice. If we actually go to war. And therefore, if it's a war of choice, you go at the time of your choosing. Let's talk about Aura Frames. Aura Frames, the solution to hundreds of photos that never make it past your camera roll. I can tell you this because right now in my living room, Aura frames are rolling photo after photo after photo after photo from my iPhone. 25 years, actually, of photos, six of them before the iPhone, but downloaded into my photo app nonetheless. And you get them. You use the app that Aura Frames supplies to move them from your photo app into the Aura Frames app, and then they appear right there in your home. Or if you want to give it as a gift in a friend's home, every memory, every joy, every moment that you have ever wanted to commemorate is there. Causing conversation, causing heartwarming moments, causing moments of laughter and embarrassment. All the things you get from photos, but they can be displayed right in front of you as part of your daily pleasure. And that's why I love it so much. I gave one to my associate, Stephanie. She has it rolling in her office right now. So you get free unlimited storage. You can add as many photos and videos as you want. You can keep adding it from anywhere, anytime, right with that app if you want to send it as a gift. Every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag. And you download the free Aura app or you can text photos straight to the frame. Actually, I haven't done that yet, but I hear it's amazing. Name number one by Wirecutter. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off their best selling Carver mat frame with Code Commentary. That's a U R A frames.com promo code commentary. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Nobody would ever accuse me of being a fashion plate, but I do know, because I am almost 65 years old, that a well built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. And that, I can tell you from personal experience, is what quantity quince does best. Premium materials, thoughtful design, and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on even as the weather shifts. During this cold snap, for example, I put on a nice thick quince sweater. I put on my puffer jacket, which I can wear when it's 50 or I can wear when it's 0 degrees and feel the same level of comfort. Quince works directly with top factories, cuts out the middleman. So you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. So look, refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's quincy.com/complyment, free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/complyment.
- [21:34]
C
But it seems to me Trump still has the option of striking in something short of a regime change operation. And I think that may be very appealing to him for obvious reasons. He could go at where they, where intelligence believes the Iranians have moved the nuclear program to. He could go after where the Iranians are building up their ballistic missiles. And he could at the same time, you know, hit a bunch of regime, all sorts of regime targets without planning a, I don't know, you know, like a historic, you know, without bringing in the discombobulator and pulling out the supreme leader.
- [22:34]
B
The discombobulator is the short game, right? That's the discombobulator if you're only going in for five hours.
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C
That's right.
- [22:41]
B
But he is obviously providing himself with a range of options with the fighter pilots and the carriers and the tankers and the other material that's coming in. So if, if he wants to go play a short game, he can play a short game. If he wants to play a long game, he will have the necessary equipment to play the long game. So again, a more. I don't know what you would call it. I mean, I was calling it mature, but, you know, he is almost 80 years old. That's not the right word. It's a more season season, classical projection of power, set of moves to keep your options open.
- [23:31]
D
And can we, can we just like, appreciate for a moment the fact that this is all possible? Like the fact that Iran has been so weakened by the US Israel strikes and the mini war and the fact that, you know, the US Was even able to put together a coalition to shoot down Iranian missiles and, you know, that included Europe and Jordan, you know, Arab states, European countries, the fact that Iran is just sitting there and they can't do anything to affect the timeline if Trump doesn't want them to. The options just sit there open and we all talk about them every day. And that is Only possible because Iran is at this point of almost historic weakness, at least since its 1979 revolution, where no one seems afraid of it and where they can't just quickly mobilize something into, you know, into the arena to, to, to protect its skies or anything like that. It's just kind of sitting there, waiting to know. And I, I kind of feel like that's part of what Trump likes about this as well, is that Trump could just walk around. You know, there was like the old show, How I Met yout Mother had this thing called a slap bet, where if you lost the bet, the other, the person you lost the bet to was allowed to slap you 10 times there or only five times, but they could be whenever they wanted. And the idea was that the five slaps were infinitely more painful than 10 right away because you lived in fear. Because anytime they were allowed to slap you and you never knew when the slap was coming, that's what Trump is doing to Iran, that he can just sashay back and forth around here, wind up, pull the punch back. And there's something about this also that is really demonstrating Iran's weakness. And I think that that's part of it, too. That's part of why he's not feeling that pressure. Because what's Iran going to do?
- [25:44]
B
We should talk about why Iran is weak. Because Iran is not only weak, historically weak in this circumstance because of Operation Midnight Hammer taking out the nuclear program and a lot of the ballistic missiles, it's weak because of the clearly, you know, fatal miscalculation of October 7, by which, I mean, this is true of wars. This is, you know, just reading about World War I, World War I being the classic that the people who start wars and lose them, as opposed to the people who start wars and win them, always operate on the basis of some horrific grand miscalculation in which they underestimate the degree of the response or the resistance or the, or the blowback. And there has rarely been anything as historically ruinous to the ambitions of an aggressor than the Israeli response followed and then joined in by the United states response to October 7th. Look, aside from the position that Hamas now finds itself in, Hezbollah is all but destroyed. I mean, it's still there, but it's a shadow of its former self. The Iranian backed Syrian forces are, you know, the Syrian government is gone. The, the Houthis are quiescent. The west bank version of Hamas, or the, whoever it is that speaks to Iran among the Palestinians on the west bank have gone silent. Iran's projection of power outside its borders through terrorist activity has essentially been quelled as far as we can tell. All of that a direct result if, if this were 10-6- still all of those assets would be in place, all of that forward projection power would be there and they could turn it on and off at will depending on what it was that they needed to do. Because massive measures wouldn't have been taken against these very carefully, decades long planned Iranian pre positioned assets around the Middle East. Hezbollah has been at work planting, you know, digging itself into Lebanon for 40 years. Hamas has been digging itself into Gaza for really 30 years or 35 years. You know, the Houthi, the Houthi timeline, I don't quite know. The Iranian terror proxy system has been in place for nearly since the regime began. It's all gone now. We don't really know how, what the circumstances are of, of Iran giving Hamas the green light on October 7th, if they did, if they didn't, or whatever. But this is a, whatever the case.
- [28:54]
F
They had built up this proxy that carried out October 7th. Whether or not they explicitly gave the green light. I think, and I think it actually goes beyond what you're saying, John, in that Hamas identified this vulnerability with Israel, of Israel underestimating its capabilities and they were able to exploit that on October 7th. What they underestimated was what we've seen from Israel since then. And I think they underestimated aspects of the American response as well, which is that Israel hit back not only at Hamas, but as you mentioned at Hezbollah too. Something like the pager operation. That thing was a decade in the making of conception and planning that was ultimately carried out that allowed not just Hamas to be taken out, but also Hezbollah to be crippled, its leader taken out in an operation. Israel had been developing, planning, conceiving, waiting for the right moment to execute these things. Iranian leaders taken out on their soil. So it does get right at Iran. And not only that, I think you could make a real argument that, that the chaos unleashed on American college campuses after October 7, which Hamas had a lot to do with, helped elect Donald Trump. That in turn led to a major weakening of Iran because he joined Israel in Operation Midnight Hammer. And also Trump took out Maduro in Venezuela, which forced, you know, which weakened Iran because Venezuela was, you know, gave Iran and Russia a foothold in the Western hemisphere. And so I do think the argument expense extends quite a bit beyond the Middle east to October 7, leading to renewed American leadership that is really weakening this regime. And that doesn't even touch the degradation of the currency, which led directly to the protest that began in regions of Iran that are typically strongholds for the regime because their money is not worth the paper it's printed on.
- [31:27]
E
Well, and the protests, I mean, there were some. There were sporadic protests even yesterday in Iran. So even with the government crackdown, people are still protesting. We know that one of the main negotiating points that the Iranians keep pushing and recently in Geneva, was the unfreezing of all the billions of assets that have been frozen. They need that money. And at the same time, you know, they're still sending out the irg, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to, you know, in the Strait of Hormuz to do their little battle scene exercises. So they're clearly, they're clearly trying to keep up their image of being a functioning regime, but they really aren't. I mean, the financial crisis is severe, as Eliana says, and that they. They have not. They've only temporarily stayed the population's desire for regime change as well. So all of these factors, I hope, are being considered when these negotiations, the most recent negotiations having been a kind of strange kabuki theater, really, if you think about who has the power and who has the leverage right now in the region.
- [32:32]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay, BJ Novak.
- [32:58]
B
Yay.
- [32:59]
A
Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad, and Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows, Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [33:30]
B
It appear, it would seem to me, again, I can't get into the heads of the mullahs, so I really can't. But it would seem just from their public statements that their strategy is to provide is to be a player in the effort to provide Trump with an off ramp from the military action that they don't know whether or not he wishes to take. The weirdness of them is that they are not more eagerly trying to provide that off ramp. This is where it gets into. You can't get into their heads because.
- [34:08]
F
I think part of it is projecting domestically because the hits they've taken to the nuclear program and on the international stage I think have weakened the regime internally. And part of this is domestic bluster aimed at a domestic audience.
- [34:31]
B
But what I say, what I mean is if they, if they think that Trump wants to announce that he's made a deal, they should sweeten the deal. Like they, they may be overestimating again or underestimating either Trump's resolve or his belligerence or overestimating what they think is his non interventionism. Because whatever you else you can say about Trump and again I commend to everybody, as I did yesterday, Todd Lindbergh and Corbin Teague's piece on the age of Trump in the March commentary. Whatever he is, he's not a non interventionist. I mean we jumped into Venezuela and extracted their president. We hit the Iranian nuclear program in a massive display of overwhelming military might at no risk to us. He's not a non interventionist. He tends to not believe in regime change except maybe now he kind of believes in regime change because well, I.
- [35:53]
E
Mean the Venezuela case is not exactly an argument that he believes in regime change. He's just. No, no, I'm not a similar regime.
- [36:01]
B
Yeah, no, but I'm talking about Iran now that you know, nobody told him to say help is on the way and the Mullah should be gone. Like he didn't have to say. He, I'm just saying that they, that they may as, as they miscalculated about Israel's resolve and abilities and all of that, they may be miscalculating based on their own hopes, wishes, desires and reading and advice that they get from Kadamites in Washington who are feeding them little pieces of information like Trida Parsi that he doesn't really mean that he's a non interventionist. He wants to, you know, he'll want to make a deal. He, you let him, you know, you just keep going and talking to him in Geneva that, that's good, don't worry about it like that. And it's like, okay, you can listen to Trina Parsi all you like, you know, because he's paying you what you need, you know, you're paying him what he, you want him to hear or some, some cutout is paying, paying him what you what, what he wants to tell you so that he keeps getting the payments but you can't go ahead listen, you know, and we'll see, we'll see what 150 ship. Whether 150 ships outweigh this, you know, soothing counsel that you can sort of, you can kind of weather this storm and that Trump will move on to some other, you know, fixation that he has. John, because he does have these two sides, right? He is mercurial and he is, you know, flighty. And on the other end, he's also the guy who can't not stop talking about the election of 2020 also like he does, he's got OCD qualities also and he fixates on things and doesn't let these. Like a dog with a bone, he won't let go. So we don't know what Iran is to him. Is it, is it something that's like, oh man, I really shouldn't have gotten into this in the first place, or is it he's, you know, he's got the bone in his teeth and he's gnawing and he's gnawing and he's not. And then he's really gonna, you know, work it through.
- [38:01]
C
When you talk about not being able to get into the mullahs heads, I think one thing we should consider and that we cannot overestimate is the possibility that this is about still to them, revolutionary zeal. The Iranian revolution was supposed to be, be a global Islamist revolution. It's it. The regime has been in place for almost half a century. They did manage to build up this sort of regional mini empire that has taken the massive hits that you've spoken about. The thinking could be, I think is likely to be, we are here and we are not going down without a fight. The purpose of this regime is to go global, is to change the world stage. And look what we have done so far and Allah is going to stand by us and we will keep fighting. I mean that's, you know, we talk about rational actors and non rational actors. Got to remember what this regime really is at heart.
- [39:28]
B
I agree. But you know, they also, you know, if their main goal, as they have said a million times, is not only the eradication of Israel, but getting Shiite control of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, which is what, which is sort of what the, which is what the regime's ultimate, you know, purpose is that they should, that they should be the dominating force in Islam. They sure haven't made a lot of moves on Mecca and Medina in the last, in the last 35 years. I mean, you know, they really haven't. And so, I don't know. I mean, they seem to be much more involved in self preservation and skimming stuff and sending things to bank accounts and all of that, like any entropic, declining, corrupted regime does. I mean, so, you know, they may, they may have a gloss of that, but they certainly haven't taken active measures to achieve their ultimate eschatological aim. Not scatological. Eschatological. Also scatological. But that would, you know, that's, that's a, that's a terrible thing to say about somebody else's faith. Anyway. All right, so moving on from there, where should, where should we move on to? Apparently, there was a big meeting last night of the Republican high command talking about the midterm elections and how to save them. And our friend Mark Halpern has a little briefer on what happened at this meeting at the Capitol hill Club with 75 people in attendance, hosted by Susie Wiles. Tony Fabrizio, the pollster, presented 25 slides on what the voters care about. The economy will be the issue in the election, said Fabrizio, which is like saying that air will be the chief issue in breathing. That's really helpful. Important detail messages that break through, banning stock trading for Congress, transparency and health insurance data, lowering prescription drug costs, and the Trump tax cut. So Fabrizio claims, get this, this is where you start getting into why you got to be careful listening to pollsters, that what Trump really ought to be talking about is banning stock trading for Congress. Is that an economic issue that will resonate with people who are upset because housing prices have doubled? Maybe. I don't know. That doesn't seem to be, it seems to me to be a side issue. Not, not, not, not the main issue.
- [42:12]
E
I think he's trying to find a way around affordability as a phrase that he uses since he already sort of blew up that opportunity during Mamdani's run for New York City mayor and, you know, called it, dismissed it and whatnot. They're trying to carve out a way to talk about the economy that claims some success for the administration's policies, ignores the still looming potential chaos caused by all the tariffs, and doesn't get too much in the weeds in terms of the instability that a lot of people feel, particularly lower middle class, working class parts of the coalition. So I think the uncertainty it caused in part by Trump's chaotic tariff policies is the one thing they want to avoid, but they need a different look. Nobody thinks these guys, congressmen should be getting rich trading on, doing insider trading as members of Congress. That is a very minor issue compared to the daily grind people are facing with energy prices increasing, housing prices remaining a little bit nuts. Now, the the economy obviously has shown some promising glimmers of recovery, but it's the general uncertainty that I think they've got to address. And he's pretty bad at that. He goes off script and just starts boasting about what he's done and that's not what people want to hear right now.
- [43:29]
C
Also, I think how can Trump go on a rampage against lawmakers trading stocks? I mean, if he does that, he's dead. I mean, with his family, dozen companies with his family's interests building all, you know, their fingers in every pot around the globe. You know, since he's, he's every crypto scheme, every whatever, every building scheme like he, he's in no position Someone, someone should do it. He's not the guy.
- [44:01]
F
This, this would have to be a candidate led message on that as opposed to a Trump led message and could be an effective one. And I think the takeaway here, and it should be obvious, is that Republican candidates do need a housing policy. I mean, this is really a problem and it's targeted at young people. A policy that, to remove regulation and allow the building of more housing that's affordable and that would be effective as well.
- [44:39]
B
Look, Trump is right about one thing.
- [44:40]
F
What they're going to do to address it.
- [44:43]
B
So Trump is right about one thing that he can't control, which is that in 2021, if you bought a house for $200,000 and you took a loan for $150,000, your interest rate was 3.5%. If you do it today, your interest rate is 6 to 7%. So the cost of buying a house hasn't quite doubled. The interest rate on your mortgage has doubled. So it's not quite, you know, that's a huge. So he screams about the Fed. He wants interest rate cuts, he wants interest rate cuts. He wants interest rate cuts because that's one thing that could happen that could start lowering housing prices, doing things like deregulation, which of course is actually a real way to deal with housing prices. That's very hard Federal, hard federal poll that something has to happen in 50 states. And like, you know, here, here in New York City, for example, one of the main ways you could lower housing costs, like, you know, if Zorami is actually serious, is to, is to end. There's a, there's a piece of city legislation called Local Law 11, which requires buildings to build and rebuild and rebuild themselves, thus enriching the housing trades and freezing markets because people find it hard to sell apartments when their buildings are being, are under renovation. And that kind of thing. But like, no liberal is going to do that. It's not going to help by November.
- [46:20]
E
But there's, there's a mess that can.
- [46:21]
B
Help by November is actually cutting interest rates. There's actually some reason to think that interest rates should be cut. I mean, the, you know, the inflation rate is low, you know, the employment picture is fine without being too explosive and all of that, but it's still only going to be on the margins. It's not going to be like lowering interest rates by half.
- [46:44]
E
But there is a message he could give. I mean, if you're just talking about sort of an overarching, appealing message on, particularly on housing, Elian is absolutely right. It's, you know, let us make more of you. We want people to be owners. We want an ownership class and everyone should be able to be an owner if they want to be. And that's. It hits at regulation. It hits it this demonization of landlords that we've seen from the left where people who might have a couple of apartments, they rent out, they will in cities like New York and elsewhere in D.C. here too, they will often rather keep their apartments empty than deal with the regulations, deal with the kind of tenants rights, people who will squat in their apartments for two years without paying a dime of rent, destroy the apartment and still be the ones that the court say, oh, that's fine, they don't owe you a dime, they are losing money. So they'd rather have an empty apartment then rent it out. So that contributes to the housing crisis. But for Trump to say we want to build as Eliana build, buildership and ownership are very positive messages. So even in an economy that has a lot of uncertainty, saying particularly to younger people, here is the path to ownership, here's the, you know, we have all these other factors, obviously interest rates being one, but let's get rid of the stuff that we can get rid of that prevents you from being part of the ownership class, there's no reason he can't do that.
- [47:56]
F
That's a classic Republican message, particularly geared at first time homeowners. And I think it also complements the message. J.D. vance is usually the messenger, but their message about family formation, that homeownership goes hand in hand with getting married, having kids, having larger families, and that these are policies that will allow you to do that, personal responsibility. And I think it could be a good message for them if they embrace it.
- [48:31]
B
And the right message there is also, look, this is where Trump's policies start smashing into each other, right? Housing Costs have gone up. Building costs have gone up. It's not just because of onerous regulations involving keeping your house up to ADA standards. It is Canadian lumber tariffs that are right now close to 35% on lumber. So the cost of building with wood has gone up, you know, 25 to 30%. And labor, because of decisions that Trump made. So if he's serious, he's got to cut those tariffs. And then, of course, he has this whole ideological commitment to tariffs, and he hates Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada. And so he doesn't want to do that. And so he is crosswise of his own affordability agenda. Tariffs are crosswise of an affordability agenda, period, because they make goods more expensive. So, you know, this is an interesting problem. And when Fabrizio comes to him and says, here's what you need to do to talk about the economy. Talk about Congress trading stock and having transparency on health insurance data, lowering prescription drug costs. Right? All. All of which are fine. That's not the economy. The economy is, how do I feel about my overall family's economic health? How do I feel about the bills that I'm paying? How do I feel about, you know, like, whether or not I can move into a larger house if, as you guys say, I want to have a third child?
- [50:23]
E
Well, this is why Trump is like the vague poster online, right? He sort of says something vague about the economy and expects everyone to know that that's the signal that things are good. But they are, as you say, John, living in the real world, people have a vibe about the economy and about what they can afford and about costs. And that is quite different from the message that they are trying to send.
- [50:41]
B
I mean, it's not even a vibe. You have your bank account. It's sitting there, right? You have your savings, your savings are sitting there. You have enough to cobble together a down payment. And then when you go into the market to see what you can get with your 10% down payment and the 90% you're going to have to borrow, the interest rate is 6.5%. And the house that you want to buy is a. Is smaller than your apartment that you are now renting or smaller than the house that you're now renting and cost twice as much as it would have four years ago. Like, that's not a vibe. That's just like, okay, no, I'm thinking.
- [51:22]
E
Vibe in terms of how people feel about their own income and about the possibilities in the future for future planning, not just homeownership, but can I afford to send my kids to summer camp. Can we go on a vacation this year? Can we do the things that we have generally felt are possible for our means but now seem beyond them?
- [51:39]
B
Right.
- [51:40]
D
Yeah. I think he'll do himself a favor just by even looking like he, he's trying to fix those things and cares about those things and is paying attention to them because his, his numbers on foreign policy, his poll numbers on foreign policy are hurting because people are answering the question to pollsters, is Trump paying attention to the things that you most care about in the negative? Right. They're, they are. People in the public are saying, I feel like he's obsessed with Greenland at the expense of, you know, paying attention to the economy. I feel like he's drawing up plans to kidnap people like Maduro at the expense of. I feel like he's distracted from me. And those are things, you know, to my mind, I think that's the public's way of saying we won't necessarily have a problem with, you know, shutting up. Nicolas Maduro. We don't have a problem. Well, the Greenland stuff, I think that the public really just does hate. But the Iran stuff, when you strike Iran and it's, it's, and it appears to be successful, it polls well. That's just the way American foreign policy works, if it appears, if it looks like a success. So he has this, he has, I think, an opportunity to, to bridge some of the gap without really being a magician and turning the economy around in, in several different ways. I think he just, he's, he is, there's a vibe there that he is, his mind is elsewhere, he's abroad. And if he can find a way to turn that around, he will probably see the numbers go up on both of those things, and that will buoy Republicans across the board. Remember, he did complain after the election. He did famously complain. You know, I'm sick of talking about the price of apples. I'm sick of hearing about the price of apples. He doesn't like to, but he's got to get back to the price of apples. And you might see everything level out a bit more.
- [53:40]
B
Two things. One is that he has a big opportunity, though I don't know how he's going to handle it. And it's a big opportunity. It's a jujitsu opportunity, which is that we have the 250th anniversary of the United States coming up on July 4, 2026, and Democrats are in a uniquely bad place to celebrate this country and its achievements and its, you know, and the glories of being an American and the singularity of the American political experiment because of their own ideological commitment to the idea that we stink and they don't know how to get out of their own way. They want to talk about how one of the great things about this country is that we get to talk about how we stink and, and we suck and everything sucks and white people suck and men suck and the economy is unjust. And that's what the kind of elites will do in the six to eight weeks before the 250th anniversary, which gives Republicans an enormous opportunity and a field to run on as patriots, advocates of the United States, supporters of the United States. But of course, the weird thing is that the woke right and people like that basically are exactly where the Democrats are on these sorts of issues and can and can overshadow that message. And Trump always has the ability to overshadow that message by saying America's great and Democrats stink and everybody who didn't vote for me stinks and I won in 2020 and you all stink and everything is terrible. So it's an opportunity that he could boot that. One of the things in 1976 when Ford, who was not elected anything, was the Republican nominee for president and Carter was the outsider Democratic nominee for president, Carter was 30 points up on Ford at the beginning of the summer of 1976. And then came the bicentennial celebrations, and I was there. And it was a huge national outpouring after a year after Vietnam, the loss in Vietnam and stuff. It was a huge national outpouring of love for country and love for America and the idea that our best days were not behind us and that we still had a future that we could look for proudly, too. And Democrats didn't handle it well. And it. Ford made up 30 points from the summer until pretty much until Election Day. Now, it wasn't. There were all kinds of reasons that that was the case. But that vibe, the vibe about what, what country do we live in now? This is a midterm, it's not a presidential year and all of that. But if, if Republicans could achieve the patriotic vibe this year and take advantage of the fact that the Democratic Party now believes that the United States is a net force for, you know, is a net force for bad in the world and that we, we say that we're not and all of that, that could have some benefit. But, you know, like I say, I don't know that Republicans are in a place to do that either. One. Two last points. One, according to Mark Halpern's report from this meeting. The, the only way Republicans will lose the Senate majority is if Democrats take 50 House seats. So I think that was supposed to be reassuring. I do want to point out that in 1994, Bill Clinton lost 52 House seats. In 2010, Barack Obama lost 63 House seats. In 2018, Trump lost 40 House seats. Now at 40, isn't 50, maybe this math is correct. So it has to be 50 in order for them to lose. What do they need to lose? They need to net. Democrats need to net four. Is that it? They need to net four Senate seats in order to take control of the Senate. In 2014, Democrats won, Republicans won nine Senate seats and 32 House seats or something like that. So I don't think that's a reassuring number. You know, I don't think that people should look at this and say that the Senate is out of reach for Democrats at all, though. I think that was sort of the, the intention. And I don't think that based on this report that Mark put out on Twitter, I don't think that they have an idea about how on earth they're going to make up the deficit that they're facing with, with voters, particularly with the polling where it is, where the generic number that is, will you vote for a Democrat or a Republican in the next election? Keeps growing. Last poll this week has it at Democrats plus seven. It's up from Democrats plus. Every poll shows the gap widening in Democrats favor on the generic ballot. So it's just interesting data that when Republicans are talking among Republicans, it doesn't sound like they have that much to offer themselves as, you know, with an agenda going forward. But yeah, if we win, if we, if we, if we, if we have a successful Iran move combined with what appears to be a successful move on Venezuela and all of that, that, of course that will have a, that will have a positive effect on, on Trump. I mean, America will have projected power. He will have these successes under his belt. And, and that will be something along with the bicentennial or. Excuse me, this. What is it? It's not the sesquicentennial. I can't remember what it's called.
- [59:19]
E
Semi.
- [59:20]
B
Sesquicentennial, I think Semi or bisexual Sesquicenta. Any whatever. It's 250. 250 is the, is the magic number.
- [59:29]
D
Happy anti disestablishmentarianism, everybody.
- [59:33]
E
Oh, you know, by the way, they.
- [59:34]
D
What they really should do, what I would love for them to do is for the 250 is they maybe get on cleaning up the. The sewage spill into the Potomac. Because that'll happen.
- [59:46]
B
We should. We should. We should. We should talk about.
- [59:49]
E
This is important because I like words. Semi quincentennial.
- [59:53]
B
Semi quincentennial. Of course. Okay. Thank you. Or. Yeah. Or Quinn. Millennial. Okay. Anyway. Okay.
- [60:02]
E
Sorry. Yeah.
- [60:03]
D
I mean, it would be nice to have a 250th celebration that doesn't have the. The scent of. Of the biggest sewage spill in the. In the region's history. But also as a serious issue, you know, people are walking past the water and walking past signs that say, don't go near the water. Like there's something very. You know, this is going to hurt. You know, we could talk about the economic effects of this. Also not going to be good for Virginia's tourism season. Right.
- [60:35]
B
It's.
- [60:36]
D
There are things that are really going to be affected here. I thought it was funny when there was a. There was a reporter who tweeted, this is not okay. There are 40 different rowing teams that practice out on the Potomac or something like that. And it's like everybody's worried about what they're specifically worried about. But for real, it is bad for all sorts of. It's bad for wildlife, it's bad for health, it's bad for. And it's going to be bad economically for tourism. And it's probably. And it really can hurt. The 250th can be a really big, you know, from a tourism perspective, also a huge draw. And it can hurt that, too.
- [61:16]
E
I could spend an entire hour complaining about D.C. water and sewer Authority. I won't. But they are completely culpable here and kept a lot of information from the public and from health officials about how serious this was. And now the repairs. Every time. Every time someone asks them, a reporter asked them now they say, oh, mid March. And they're diverting a bunch of it now to the C and O Canal. Yes. No fishing. They're telling people to keep their pets away from the water. The. The Potomac river is literally a toilet right now, or will soon be as it comes downstream. A lot of it was paused briefly when the river was. Parts of the river are frozen over, but it is a massive disaster. And that, combined with how poor snow removal was in this area after the recent storm, suggests that nothing works. It's the nothing works well. Or to steal AIDS phrase, it's worse than that all the time.
- [62:08]
B
My last historical analogy game. Presidents get undone by local environmental crises that they have no responsibility for whatsoever this happens time and again, that it creates a bad mood in various places and stories build. This story about the Potomac is not well known outside of the D.C. area, but it will be. And you go event after event. Hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon oil crisis, which of course Obama had literally nothing to do with. He didn't do it. A pipe blew 5,000ft under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and it was really bad for Obama politically. Yeah.
- [62:55]
C
And then they just kept counting every day. This is the 14th day that the pipe is burst. As if every day Obama is wasting.
- [63:06]
B
Yeah. And of course, hurricanes. It's like the president somehow is responsible for hurricanes. But people do get annoyed and upset politically when hurricanes do damage and it's hard for them to clean up and all of that. It's not a joke. It's a political reality that has knock on effects. And Trump and the Republicans are unlucky to be in power. Even when the Potomac river crisis involves a, you know, Democratic regime in Maryland and obviously a deep Blue City in D.C. and somehow shouldn't necessarily have the effect that it's having or might have. But you know, there's nothing you can do about it. If the weather is bad, it's bad for the party in power on election day. Like that's just the way things are. All right, we'll leave it there. We'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana, Abe, Seth and Christine, I'm John Pod. Horace. Keep the camel part.