Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:18]
Jon Podhoretz
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
Christine Rosen
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, July 15, 2025. I'm Jon Podhoric, the editor of Commentary magazine. Let me just ask you today, if you don't have anything to do, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. You have no idea how helpful it is surfacing. The podcast for people who don't know it's there helps the algorithm educate itself to the kinds of people who might want to hear our wisdom or our foolishness or combination thereof. So that would be really helpful. I've asked you over the last month to help us on YouTube and you've been really wonderful. So if you could do that, that would be great. If you can't, it's understandable because who wants to waste your time doing that? But you know, sometimes maybe people don't mind. So that's Apple Podcasts give us a going five star review. And by glowing, I mean say nice things about executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:29]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:30]
Jon Podhoretz
Our social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:33]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:34]
Jon Podhoretz
Christine has never gotten a bad review as far as I know.
- [01:36]
Seth Mandel
That's not true.
- [01:39]
Jon Podhoretz
Apple podcast very favorably disposed toward Christine, less so toward me. Abe, also a big, big winner, as is senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:50]
John Continetti
Hi.
- [01:51]
Jon Podhoretz
John Continetti and I, controversial figures among the people who say we love the podcast but you talk too much. Shut up. But if you love the podcast, why do you than complain about the podcast? But you know, whatever, this is life. You know, people are full of paradoxes, as is Donald Trump, who has now revealed a new paradox in the Donald Trump paradox universe. Basically coming out against Foursquare, against Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and doing something interesting, which is to say he basically said he was wrong, which he has never done in his entire life since Roy Cohn told him never apologize for anything. But he kind of said he did something that he has never done before in his professional career, which is that he said he was wrong by way of a story about him and Melania. And he said, you know, I come home and I'd say to Melania, I just had a wonderful conversation with Vladimir about peace. And Melania said, oh, really? He just firebombed another city in Ukraine. So Melania, the conscience of the Trump 2 administration, who knew, of course she did grow up in a country that was behind the Iron Curtain. So she has reason to know what life is like under the jackboot of Russians, or at least under the spiritual jackboot of Russians. Nonetheless, kind of interesting. He is now essentially giving Putin 50 days not to have the United States turn wholeheartedly on him with a gigantic tariff, which is less important. We do very little trade with Russia, but can have ancillary consequences to other trading partners. And of course is going to send arms to Ukraine with the fig leaf that Europe is going to pay for it. This is not just a fig leaf though, because this also represents a gigantic change in his general ideas and attitudes about foreign policy. Because this is part of the new pro Trump, excuse me, the Trump pro NATO pro boy. The Europeans are serious about their defense now. So I like them. Trump. So these two are sort of going hand in hand in tandem. He had a love fest yesterday with the, with the Secretary General of NATO in the White House. The guy who said called him daddy or something a couple weeks ago. Was that what he did? He said, you're our daddy.
- [04:32]
John Continetti
NATO daddy, NATO daddy.
- [04:35]
Jon Podhoretz
Once again, we have a radically different administration, this administration, from the first administration. There's just no way around it. Although there is continuity because of course Trump was, in policy terms, very tough on Russia during the first term, but rhetorically not. And now the rhetoric is turning. He's basically said Putin's played me for a fool. He thinks I'm an idiot. Now that was not smart because now I'm going to go for his joke.
- [05:01]
Seth Mandel
He did. I'll push back a slight bit because he did keep Trump being very savvy in this regard. He did keep that another fig leaf for himself and that was to repeat his, his understanding that Russia was going to win this thing long term, that they are still, they still are the ones who are more likely to be the victors in this war and he just wants the killing to stop. But which is consistent with what he's always said about the Ukrainians ability to win the war. He also, that must have through back channels or whatnot gotten on back on board. People like Elbridge Colby, who also put out a social media post saying, yes, this is a America first. This is, this is showing exactly what we are concerned about, which is making Europe pay and whatnot. So he did, he, he did thread a needle there. But I, but I feel like he left open the opportunity to change his mind again if, if Russia gives him some sort of signal, which is unlikely to happen.
- [05:57]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, you know, I'm reminded because I'm old and I can only think about Things that I went through 40 years ago because they're fresher to me than like what I had for lunch yesterday. But during the Reagan administration, there were fights inside the Reagan administration on matters of policy that would emerge publicly, particularly between Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and George Stultz, the Secretary of State, about the use of American power, about whether or not America should involve itself here or involve itself there. What, what. What permitted the use of American force. Dueling speeches that these guys would give and that would end up inside the White House, kind of in the speechwriter's office where I worked in 1988, and through the words of the president, finally, there would be some kind of resolution that would place the president generally on the side of guarded acceptance of the idea that America needed to be more, not less, involved in the world and how to do so. You mentioned Bridge Colby putting out a post supporting the president's words. The fact that even that is noteworthy is an indication of the fact that what people thought when they came into the administration was that this would be a repeat of Trump won, that there would be total policy chaos, and that the way to maneuver was to establish your own beachheads inside departments and various other places. And Bridge Colby, being the undersecretary for Policy at the Pentagon, could actually take his ideas and put them into operational action, like holding back arms and things like that, stopping shipments to Ukraine on his own say. So that sort of thing. Well, that's over. Trump is establishing policy day by day by day by day. White. This White House is as firmly in control of policy as any White House has ever been. We keep talking about from Obama onward, how policy kept getting centralized in the White House away from the cabinet departments. Then it kind of spun back to the cabinet departments. During Trump 1, Biden brought it back into the White House in a big way. Like, does anybody even know who the secretaries of the cabinet departments were? It was clear that all these decisions were being made inside the White House.
- [08:38]
Seth Mandel
They rarely met, so it didn't matter.
- [08:39]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, right. And once again, the decisions are pretty, pretty centralized inside the White House on matters of the most. The key policy, not only foreign policy, but obviously immigration policy and spending policy, and how the Cabinet departments themselves are to be managed, which we can get to in a minute. But I think it's interesting to.
- [09:06]
Christine Rosen
I wonder how far this is going to go on both Trump and Putin's part, because this is. It's a new chapter now. And I don't see Putin backing down because Trump's opened his eyes not immediately, certainly. And I wonder how far Trump is going to go in response. I do believe now that that, and I wasn't sure at all of this up until, you know, last week or so, that Trump's whole diplomatic effort with Putin was not in deference to Putin. I don't think he had, I don't think it was about an affection he had for him. I think he was, he was, he was really just trying to avoid US Involvement because he's understandably doesn't thinks, all things being equal, better to resolve things without military means than with. And the clock ran out just as it did with Iran.
- [10:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, you know, the other thing, I wonder if. Oh, sorry, no, no.
- [10:27]
John Continetti
I wonder if the two are affected by each other or for Iran, the success of the Iran strike or the perceived success of the Iran strike influence Trump in this way at all. Because I kind of feel like with Iran there was a breaking of a spell. You know, it was like Tucker saying, well, you can't bomb the buildings that make up Iran's nuclear program because then thousands of Americans will die. You know, and Trump did it anyway because obviously that was a ridiculous, you know, catastrophizing of the situation. But Trump did come up as a guy who was nervous about Iraq war style things too. He did, you know, he criticized, you know, the Bushes on stage with one of the bushes in 2015, 2016. Right. So he, I wonder if there's a spell that's been broken now where Trump has put into practice the idea that America actually has a lot of, of potential moves at its disposal in each of these cases. And they don't actually all mean nuclear war, that you don't actually have to, you know, go to World War 3 with Russia and that he can actually, he listened to his military advisers on Iran who said, look, we've been running this play in practice for a very long time. Our guys can do it. When you say go, they can drop, you know, this, this complex B2 bomber flight over Iran, all that stuff. They can do it. They'll nail it perfectly and they're ready for it at any moment. And he believed them and they told him the truth. And he sees that.
- [12:10]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, so I think you're, this connection is deep. Clearly the high watermark for the restrainers, the anti Ukraine involvement people and the people who generally speak in Tuckerist language, though I guess they don't necessarily speak the language that says that, you know, Israel is committing war crimes inside the United States and that anybody who serves in the IDF should be thrown into Guantanamo Bay and we should all wear brown shirts and start throwing rocks through Jewish owned businesses. Which is, I think, next week's Tucker Carlson podcast. But the high watermark for the people who are in that general camp was the meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky, JD Vance and Trump where Zelensky didn't know that Trump was bait. He said that Vance was baiting him, said, no, no, J.D. i don't think you really understand. And then J.D. vance played the, you know, Captain Renault game of how dare you speak to me in this tone, you whelp, you're insulting Donald Trump. And then Trump fell for J.D. vance and said, you don't have the cards. You don't have the cards. You don't have the cards. They disinvited him from dinner. He flew back to Ukraine. I guess we all expected that day that, you know, this was pretty much the end of Ukraine's war. Not immediately, but sort of over time that, that the United States was withdrawing any kind of favor from Ukraine. And that didn't happen. And the story of how it didn't happen, we're going to have to leave to be told another day when people get out of the administration. But first of all, Zelensky did not let himself be moved by the effort to turn everything into a personal insult. And he was insulted and he supposedly insulted Trump. The stakes were too high. The, the, the costs would have been too great. And Zelinsky plotting, put his head down and said, okay, what do I need to do here to get this train wreck off the track and to put a new train on the track and do something? And he agreed to this rare earth deal and he went to NATO and they came up with this structure which Trump essentially endorsed yesterday, which is he'll get all the weaponry from NATO, so NATO will buy it from the United States. Naito will give it to Ukraine. Trump can say he's not spending a nickel on defending Ukraine, though he is going to allow the use of American weapons which will be bought by somebody else. And then Trump can then say, boy, Europe is really stepping up to the plate and being tough guys. So, yeah, I'm going to say it. All you jerks out there like Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a very formidable person. This did not have to be the way that this was going to go. He could have gone home, licked his wounds and sought and said, well, we're really, that was the worst experience that anybody has ever had in the Oval Office and in public, and we're done and we better figure out how we can negotiate, save ourselves. And he did not do that. And he and whoever else figured out a way to get beyond what was one of the most jaw dropping public events in American history.
- [15:50]
Seth Mandel
Well, he, that, that is important because if you look at his statement this week where he expresses gratitude for this effort on behalf of the Trump administration to work these deals with the weapons, there's a dignity to it that wouldn't have existed had he succumbed to the impulse to grovel, which is what JD Vance clearly wanted him to do with his weird, you know, enforced gratitude campaign in the Oval Office. And he didn't do that. He also was extremely savvy in dealing with European leaders who Trump likes now because they've, they've committed to spending more on their own defense, which is a big, you know, a big part of his coalition wants to see that. So he can point to that. He can point, as you say, to this, this weapons deal, which America is not paying for, but Naito is. But Zelinsky has played both of those angles extremely effectively and very quietly. He's done that, you know, I mean, not for people who follow Ukrainian policy very closely. But I think that the fact that he chose not to engage the Vance wing of the Republican Party after that moment was crucial because now when he expresses quite gratitude, it's not groveling. And that's important.
- [16:56]
Jon Podhoretz
Hey, everybody, it is summer. It is thrilling to be summer. And it is time for me to talk to you about quints. I am the last person to chase trends. Conservative Jewish magazine editor. Not a trend setter, not a trend follower. But I am all about stuff that fits right, feels good and actually lasts. And I keep coming back to quints. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become my everyday essentials. You know this, I've talked about the sweaters. I just bought a whole bunch of lightweight shirts for summer. The kind of stuff you I'll wear on repeat, like breathable flow knit polos. Those are the ones I bought. Crisp cotton shirts, comfortable, lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners. And the best part, everything with quints is half the cost of similar brands. By working with top artisans, cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups. And quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quints. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order. And 365 day returns that's Q-U-Y-N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com commentary.
- [18:40]
Seth Mandel
Amazon Gasta Menos son riemas.
- [18:43]
Jon Podhoretz
He was done bad by the Biden administration in many ways. I mean, obviously Biden rhetorically supported and, but, you know, slowed the roll of arms and slowed this. And so they said he was supported but didn't, wouldn't give this and wouldn't give that and wouldn't give the other thing. And then came the genuinely boneheaded decision to try to involve zelensky in the 2024 campaign by having him make what was effectively a campaign appearance in September of 24 in Pennsylvania to shore up Biden's vote with, I guess, Ukrainian Americans or you know, people with Slavic last names who, you know, live in Pennsylvania. And, and he was then of course very much trying to figure out how best to keep tight with the Biden administration when they said, oh, you'll come here and you'll do this and you'll do that. He did. Wasn't his choice. It was a very, it was a pretty loathsome decision by the Biden people or whoever it is who made the decision to involve, you know, this vital world thing to sort of take it, put it into the realm of electoral politics by having the person that America was supporting effectively become a, you know, make a campaign stop for, for Biden. And that more than anything, I think internally gave the restrainers the juice to say we don't want to support this guy. He went and made a campaign speech for Biden or he went and toured, you know, an arms fag, whatever it was, he toured in Pennsylvania in their company. And so he's not our friend, he's their puppet. And so we shouldn't be doing this.
- [20:36]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, but it was in combination with, you know, Biden really made such an effort to bask in the reflective glow of the Ukrainian fighters glory without giving them what they needed. You know, this is the Biden is the guy who said I'll get you out of the country. Russia is going to invade. And then when Ukraine stood in fight the next State of the Union address, which, which came soon afterward, Biden made this soaring thing. Putin's army came up against the Ukrainian fighters, you know, and they never saw anything like that. And he embraced, he, he, he tried to sort of make himself part of this effort against Russia without, actually, without, without while keeping the stakes low for him and while, while being cautious. And I, and I think that that sickened A lot of people.
- [21:38]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, it's interesting though, because it turns out, as is often the case, that sometimes when you just stand still. I of course, was very supportive of the idea that we should send heavy, you know, arms to Ukraine in the form of Abrams tanks and planes and stuff like that. But I noted that David Petraeus, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or whatever the hell it was, said, one of the things that we've learned about Ukraine is the 21st century. Warfare really has revolutionized the battlefield. No one's ever going to use a tank again. Drones mean that tanks are now useless. And, and it's literally they're just sitting, sitting ducks for very low flying, you know, long aircraft controlled by long distances in which pilots are at no risk of, of being injured. And the entire war plan of how you're going to fight in the 21st century is going to have to change. And that means that, you know, maybe it was lucky that we didn't send too many tanks. Not that we're ever going to use tanks, apparently. Like, they're, they're, they're not good. They're very, you know, very easily dispatched, apparently. But it's sort of interesting that all these tectonic plates that are now shifting, right. The cold notion was always said was you can't win. You know, what we now know from American air superiority in all sorts of places where we did not in fact prevail in wars is you can't win a war from the air alone. You've got to take and seize territory and depends on what your aims and goals and missions are. If your aim and goal mission isn't to take over a country or, you know, oust its government or take territory or something like that. Yeah. 14 plane sortie over Iran that destroys its nuclear program is done entirely from the air. We won the Balkan war from the air. You know, I mean, it's, There are places as long as you, as long as your purpose isn't classic conventional hold and take and seize territory, which is what the Israelis are dealing with, is the conundrum of what it is they want in Gaza, where, where they want to be when the war ends, how much territory do they need to hold and keep to keep them safe? And then they don't want, they pulled out of Gaza, they don't want to reoccupy Gaza, but they're going to have to take some of Gaza in order to keep Gaza pacified. Obviously that's a ground matter. That's where you have to have troops and men and you have to protect, create protections for them against being sitting ducks or guerrilla attacks and stuff like that. But it is an interesting thing that one of the reasons why when Trump says you don't have the cards to Zelensky, he's in an old mindset and he may have himself. That's where I think Seth's right. He may have himself had. Go ahead.
- [24:52]
Seth Mandel
I was gonna say that's. But that's Russia's. That's also the Russian mindset. They are, they are fighting that kind of war. They are seizing territory and wanting to hold it and kidnapping children and doing all that.
- [25:01]
Jon Podhoretz
Three months, in three months, according to what I read last night, and I haven't been following this as closely as I should in the redoubtable website pages of the Institute for the Study of War, which does daily updates on this. But in three months, Russia has taken exactly six miles of Ukrainian territory. Let's just think this through. It's firebombing cities, it's trying to kill civilians. It's kidnappings the ground offensive in Russia, which, you know, the idea is, oh, no, clearly Russia's going to grind Ukraine down. It's not going to be able to fight back. Six, three months, six miles. Imagine if I said to you that, you know, we were fighting the battle of the bulge and that we got, you know, three months, we got six miles like that. That's horrifying. Like, that means that they're failing on a scale, military scale that, you know, is, that's like the Russians around, you know, Stalingrad or whatever. It's, it's, it's. They dug themselves in and the, the Nazis couldn't get into Stalingrad. And, you know, that was like 18 months or one of those showdowns during World War I, you know.
- [26:19]
John Continetti
And it's also a why, you know, you don't freak out as much when you say the war, when the war keeps going on, right? A lot of people who, A lot of people are like, why do you want more Ukrainians to die, right? Why don't you, why don't you want. I want the war to be over, right? But Ukraine staying and standing and fighting is figuring out how to fight Russia, right? It's like, don't, you know, they, the war itself is changing. The Ukrainians have figured out how to develop what are basically like remote control radio controlled drones that cost, like you could get them that. That would cost what you would think they'd cost at target, right? They figured, they have figured out how to, like MacGyver together things that float through the air and then drop and explode and they're cheap and they are not going to win, you know, a world war. But, and they're not very, and they're not intimidating, like, they're not, they're still not, you know, scaring Russia off. But they figured out within these like, we can just like toss these kind of, you know, drone version of spitballs at them. And they have to protect their back flank and they have to protect, they have to keep troops here because they don't know what's going to happen. Or they have to move their ships out of this dock. They can't keep their ships docked there anymore. That's a big difference. There's radar on that ship, there are weapons on that ship, there are reinforcements on that ship and that ship has to leave now. Right. I mean it has figured out how to, you know, how to run a kind of democratic insurgency you would call it.
- [28:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [28:04]
John Continetti
And that has also been eye opening for everybody involved as well. But it, as long as the Ukrainians continue to be creative and nimble in this way, it's not, the war is not static, it's not linear. It's not just Russia keep taking and people keep dying. Ukrainians are finding weaknesses to fight back and those weaknesses and those skills that they're gaining are actually going to be useful to the wider west also.
- [28:33]
Christine Rosen
We're all learning this, they already are because the Ukrainians found that the US made drones didn't work or didn't work very well. That was one of the problems. So they had to come up with all this stuff. And the government Zelensky freed up, lifted every possible potential restriction on the production of this stuff. So there's all these, there's all these homemade, I mean not home startup drone factories that just popped up into existence and did all this incredible trailblazing stuff about outsmarting the radar and the sonar of the Russians, you know, because they, they needed new weapons because they didn't, because they weren't getting from Biden the defensive weapons they needed to counter the Russian glide bombs and all this stuff. And so it was just necessity. They came up, all this up and now the US wants to buy Ukrainian made drones because of the ingenuity.
- [29:42]
Jon Podhoretz
Two things about that, one of which is that this is a very bloodless and horrifying way to put it, but it is very good for the United States that U.S. allies go to war because they test our weapons out in real world battlefield conditions where we only can do that in war games. And with simulations. So if we've learned that our drones don't work very well, we wouldn't know that unless we actually had to go to war using those drones and then discovered that, you know, unless we were specifically targeting an individual terrorist somewhere or other, that in battlefield conditions, these would be pretty lousy. So the Ukrainians have taught us that, the Israelis have taught us how to maneuver in urban settings and what kinds of things we can expect from air defenses. So remarkably. And that's with US technology that, again, we haven't had to use that. Trump is now moving on to the notion of a nationwide air defense that cannot be dismissed in that sneering, gross, liberal bubble way that the proposal of, you know, the Strategic Defense Initiative represented when he first started talking about it. Reagan, sorry. In the 1980s. So we. We have. We have allies that are testing our technology out and fighting 21st century battles from which we can educate ourselves so that we not only remain the most powerful, we spend the most money, we have the most weapons, we have all this. But, like, to know, maybe we shouldn't build any more tanks. Maybe we need to go in another direction with the way we spend our money. Or, you know, the Osprey is really good, but this is really bad. Or the F2, the B2 is good, but the B. Whatever, I mean, however you want to slice it, there are these tests going on, and that's one thing. And the other thing I think to note about all of this is, as Seth said, why are all the Ukrainians dying? The Ukrainians are dying because they are agreeing to die. Ukraine is not surrendering to Russia. Just like is the case in all wars. If Ukraine surrendered to Russia and said, do what you will, let's stop here, we're done. We're not going to fire. You know, we're done. The war would be over and the Russians would take over a lot of Ukrainian territory, and they would. They would basically turn Ukraine into a vassal state, but the killing would end. And the Ukrainians do not want that. And when you hear restraint, when you hear Tucker and other people saying, oh, so. So the Ukrainians are dying and we need to stop that. It's like, who the hell are you to say what the Ukrainians should do? Tuck, you don't care about the Ukrainians. You're full of shit. You don't care. You want Russia to swallow up Ukraine? Ukraine has. Ukraine has spent the last 150 years dealing with being a neighbor of Russia, which bites into it, steals its food, steals, you know, like, creates famines kills off millions of Ukrainians, suppresses the Ukrainian language, takes it in, takes pieces of it. They, they are not going to give up to Russia after they got their freedom when the, when the Berlin Wall fell. And you're, you're complaining about how these stupid Ukrainians don't, you know, are letting themselves die is an act of, I would call it patronizing, except that it's so disingenuous because they wouldn't if every single Ukrainian were dead.
- [33:27]
John Continetti
What concern trolling on a grand scale.
- [33:29]
Jon Podhoretz
If every Ukrainian were dead tomorrow, Tucker Carlson, you know, would eat a liverwurst sandwich and, you know, take a walk in the woods with his gun. I mean, he wouldn't shed a tear.
- [33:40]
Seth Mandel
But there is, there is a challenge going forward, I think that both the Iran bombing and the situation in Ukraine pose to those of us, to the American people to decide. And that's the, the rebuilding of our own military industrial base, which is since post Cold War has been a constant battle. And that's where I do have some concerns about the Trump administration being the, being the people who can get that done. Congress obviously has to fund it, but we do need to upgrade a lot of our weapons. We need to think about what the Chinese navy looks like versus our Navy right now. We need to think about all the ways in which we've, we've sort of enjoyed a long peace and not rebuilt our weapons and defense systems, knowing now that we do as a points out with the drone warfare in particular, how new battles will be fought. And so that's where I think we'll again see an administration internal battle about both how much to spend on that from the America Firsters, but also where we're focusing our energies. The Elbridge Colby Colby types are looking to China and thinking about those future conflicts which are very important. But, but how we will actually get that done in a country that doesn't seem, that has a very strong isolationist tendency still is. We've got to think about that and how Trump will lead on that question.
- [34:55]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, let's talk about spending then and spending and the Trump administration and all of that. There is an increase in defense spending in the one big beautiful bill. However, it is not sufficient to the day to replace the weaponry that have been, have gone out the door to Israel and Ukraine and other places. But it's not nothing. And so it's important to point out that that is there and that there is a strong caucus of people inside the Republican Party led by Tom Cotton and others who are very, very fixed and focused on this notion of the rebuilding. And then actually now that we have some idea about how to, how to rebuild, that may be more efficient. We may, and, and there may be new defense contractors to start playing around with since Boeing, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas were the two leading defense contractors of the 20th century. And Boeing seems to be going the way of all flesh, as far as we can tell, in terms of the degradation of the, of its product. And we have all these companies starting to make drone and do this and do that. Who knows where we'll be in, in 10 years and who's going to be making what. But very important thing happened last night around 5 o'. Clock. The Supreme Court, in a decision that is not policy driven, really has allowed the Trump administration's mass firings at the Department of Education to go forward, in effect staying a lower court's injunction on the question of whether or not it was permitted to lay these people off, at least on a temporary basis. And it did not issue a reason for its decision. There is a dissent of some kind, which I haven't read by, of course, the three liberal justices. But effectively, I think the argument is this. Congress created the Department of Education in 1978, or I believe Department of Education has existed until 1978. It has a certain budget and it has a certain number of employees. And the Trump administration that Congress created the, created the department and funds. It does not require the Trump administration to employ four or five thousand people in the Department of Education. That is executive prerogative, how it's staffed, who runs it, how it's organized. It is not that is the Congress appropriate, authorizes and appropriates the money. The executive branch runs the executive branch and they have decided that they want to do it with a lot fewer people. For those of us who have spent from our, the time that we started voting in 1980, that would be me on this podcast to the present day who have longed for the abolition of the Department of Education. This does not abolish the Department of Education, but it does say the Department of Education. What it does is mostly extremely unhelpful and bad. And the people who are there coming up with ways from the morning till night, if they actually do any work to implo, you know, to employ and put into place bad practices, bad regulations, bad policy that tilts education to a liberal, leftist, pro union, anti democratic, you know, small D perspective. Yay. Good going. Like, we don't need more dear colleague letters. We don't need the, we don't need you walking around, you know, writing letters Demanding that a school prove that it is doing what you want it to do ideologically, or you're going to, you know, know, take it to court. Not even that you're going to win in court, but you're going to take it to court and all of that. And this is a remarkable fight that the administration has engaged, engaged in at, at the State Department, for example. Right. And the State department, there were 1300 firings at the State Department over the weekend. As our friend, my, my old friend Byron York did, did a little digging and discovered that basically, you know, State Department has grown in personnel from, I don't know, by 300% since 1980. There. I think there are. I want to find the numbers if I can. I can't remember 22, 23,000 people working at the State Department and 1300 of them got laid off. You know, I'm sorry that people lost their jobs. I don't mean to sound cavalier about that, but I'm going to be cavalier about that because, yeah, so what, you know, every. People lose their jobs in reorganizations and rifts and reductions in force and all of that. That's, that's a thing. So no one's done this before, as far as I can tell. I mean, yeah, Biden did a little bit. Obama did a little bit. Gore did a little bit. But, you know, the actual going at it and then continuing the fight, I think, because then there's a blowback and then you kind of quietly drop it. That's not what's happening here.
- [41:06]
Seth Mandel
Well, I think it's. It's telling how shocked people who think the government, the federal government in particular, should just constantly expand to meet the needs and new demands of each generation, how shocked they are to be reminded that, I don't know, about half the country just has never felt that way. And I think that's where, especially with Department of Education, it employs about 4,000 people. So reducing it even by half, that's still several thousand people working these sort of federal policies, a lot of which have to do. I mean, under Biden, it was about, there were student loan forgiveness. There were, you know, their Pell grants, their special education grants. There's all kinds of things they distribute. But it's mainly federal government money flowing to local schools. And they often tend to spend a lot more on areas where teacher schools and districts where teachers unions are quite powerful. Teachers unions, let's everyone remember the largest they give. They're the largest owner of the Democratic Party. They were huge supporters of Joe Biden's administration. They do a lot of damage to America's schoolchildren. So there is a, there's a political aspect there that I think is one of the reasons for alarm when it comes to the Department of Education. But in all of these cases, in the reduction in force, the idea that federal employees had some sort of tenure or protection different from those of us in the private sector who have lost jobs and been fired. And as you say, John, none of us, no one should celebrate anyone losing a job. And that's not what most of us who want to see a reduction in federal government spending are wishing. But that, but the sense of entitlement that's been revealed by not just some of the employees, but by the people who think the federal government should expand is I think, useful and good for voters to think about when they go to the polls in the midterms and again in a few years to elect a new president. Because that is actually the more American sensibility to say, you know what, the government doesn't need to be involved in every local decision. And that is particularly true with schools, I think.
- [42:57]
Abe Greenwald
Hi everyone, I'm Matt Ebert, CEO and founder of Crash Champions. Welcome to Pod Crash. On Pod Crash, we'll dive deep with industry leaders and game changers. And because we want to uncover their secrets to success, we're going to explore everything from building trust, building a rock solid team to champion blue collar work. And we also want to talk about creating explosive growth in your business. You'll hear actionable advice, real leadership and business lessons along with what's worked for these incredible people throughout their career. We're even going to go in depth into what I call a champion's mindset. This is the very philosophy that I use to champion people and and take Crash Champions from a single shop to over 650 locations today. And now I want to share that information with you. Watch or listen to pod crash on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [43:52]
F
Hey, this is Donny Deutsch. I host the podcast On Brand that comes twice a week. We give you two for the price of one. One day a week we do our big interviews with our big personalities. Some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment, culture and business. And on the second wave, we do what we call our brands of the week. These are the brands that shaping the zeitgeist. Who's up, who's down. And you can really enjoy both of them. So tune in twice a week to On Brand. You can get them anywhere. You get podcasts, Spotify, Apple, anyplace else. We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you.
- [44:25]
Jon Podhoretz
I just want to correct myself. So I got. I got the numbers crazy wrong. But what Byron York discovered is that in 2007, there were 57,000 employees at the State Department. In 2015, there were 72,000 employees at the State Department. And in 2024, there were 80,000 in the State Department. So between 2007 and 2024, the State Department has grown in personnel numbers by 23,000 people before the, quote, devastating cut of 1300. So 1300 people lost their jobs out of 80,000 employees. Just to give you a sense of the hysteria over, oh, a million people are going to die. That literally was said last week that USAID has saved a million lives, and now a million people are going to die because USAID is being shrunk. Whenever you hear numbers like that, just reach for your, you know, like, just.
- [45:36]
Christine Rosen
Right.
- [45:37]
Jon Podhoretz
Unbelievable. Unbelievable. A million people are going to die because USAID is, like, smaller.
- [45:43]
Christine Rosen
Like, it is a PR challenge, though, for the administration because the media covers this, you know, like it's Gaza. Like, you know, when normal people lose their jobs, we don't see them on the front page with their boxes of their belongings, you know. You know, it's happening as we speak, by the way. Right. But we don't, you know, all over the country, but we don't. We don't see them moving their things out crying, hold on. But the way that, that, that these, that these. This is covered in the papers is like, they're bringing you stories of the destruction of families and lives and communities.
- [46:28]
John Continetti
And also the legal resistance that Trump faces reinforces his point, doesn't it? Right? I mean, there are a lot of people out there who are open to, he shouldn't fire them. But then when you say, oh, the President can't fire them, people go, what do you mean he can't fire them? What do you mean these people can't be fired? Why can't they be fired? That doesn't make any sense. And it's almost like it drains some of the sympathy for it because you're like, oh, I get. Now I understand why this is such a fight. Like, wait a second, I can be fired. They can't be fired. That doesn't really make sense. I don't want anybody to lose their job. But it's kind of ridiculous to tell the President that he can't fire.
- [47:13]
Jon Podhoretz
Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, said two very interesting things. She said, the President cannot abolish the department. He's not abolishing the department. He would like to abolish the department. I assume all most Republicans would like to abolish the department. He is reducing the size of the staff of the department department. Her equating reducing the size to its abolition is a classic Sotomayor. I don't know if it's willfully stupid, if it's that she's dumb or that she's factitious and demagogic, but that's not for me to decide. Many people have different opinions about Sonia Sotomayor and her love level of intelligence. One thing that she says in this decision is that the federal government has been involved in education and played a large role in our education system, you know, for, you know, 100 years or hundreds of years. And that is simply not true. Farm of Education was created less than 50 years ago, and I believe in like 1961 or 1962 or something like that. I'm looking for the site that I saw yesterday, which I can't find. In the 60s, the amount of money that flowed from the federal government to states and localities as education spending was $11 million in a single given fiscal year. So $11 million because education was a local responsibility and was until the creation of the Education Department. And guess why the Education Department was created? Anybody? Anybody want to guess? It was a sop to the teachers unions by the Carter administration to create a federal bureaucracy to enhance the possibility of getting federal dollars to flow to teachers and educators and to administrators and to administer, and to be fair, to administer certain laws where education was implicated, like, you know, civil rights laws, where there were things that were going on there. But it is a. It is a. Was a disjunction in American history when the federal government became a major funder of American public school education and played a large role in college education. That was a new thing, not an old thing. And it's. You may consider for 48 years of precedent or 47 years of precedent, I mean, out of 250, I don't know how much of a precedent that is necessarily. But again, we're not talking about abolishing the department. We're talking about a department, a runaway department, that does things that is structured to do things that are ideologically inconsistent with the goals and aims of the party and the person who won the presidency in 2024, and he is therefore permitted to put his fingerprint and his stamp on how that department does business, because that's what representative government is about.
- [50:46]
Seth Mandel
And the last 20, 30 years of mismanagement of the departments in the Department of Education that I think a lot of Americans do support. The Office for Civil Rights, the things that were enforcing civil rights legislation and even handed colorblind way those had all been, have been distorted for decades. I mean most notably under Obama, but even before that. And so this, these, these weird prosecutions on college campuses, the just the amount of money flowing to college campuses that as we've seen, have led to a faculty, administration and student body that, you know, are not behaving, upholding American values. All of those things I think have turned the public against them. This idea that these are somehow warriors for children's education, that plus the money, all the money that's going to be left and some of it. Look, red states will suffer too. I think Mississippi gets a large proportion of its money from the federal government, but so does Detroit for, for its schools. That will have to be made up for by the state governments themselves. And, but that's actually again, constitutionally, that's how our system is supposed to function. The federal government isn't supposed to be funding all of these local institutions institutions. And so that's up to local school boards and local, and to state legislatures and to governors to deal with those issues. And, and states that have done that well serve as models for everyone else. So I think there is again, an opportunity here. It's not the kind of rhetoric you'll hear from the Trump administration when it's cutting, you know, federal workers. But there's an opportunity here too. If you're in a red state and you lose your federal funding, you know, maybe some more charter schools are a good idea. Maybe you want to encourage all kinds of new forms of independent education so that this is not the apocalypse that I think it's Abe correctly says is being described by the media in particular.
- [52:32]
John Continetti
And if it is, then it deserves to be right. If losing your federal funding. Right. Means that your entire, your entire model for state governance collapses and you can't educate the children in your state, then what you weren't, what were you doing? Right? What was the model? There was no model. When I covered education, local education, early in my career, I covered these, what would happen is a local, a school district would, would pass a budget and then the budget would be voted on. You couldn't. In the towns, the town, the voters in the town couldn't vote on the, the town budget, but they could vote on the school district budget precisely because it was their property taxes funding the whole thing. So they vote on it, they vote it down because nobody likes taxes. This budget would fail. What happens then is the budget gets kicked to the city council. The city council decides how much money must be dropped from the school budget, but doesn't tell them where to drop it from. So it just says, all right, you went over by this much, whatever cut, you know, 90 grand from here, whatever, whatever it is, and they kick it back to the board. And the school board then applies those cuts. And in 100% of the cases, not 99% of the cases, in 100% of the cases I covered, the things that got cut were after school sports, libraries. I watched school districts close their own libraries. You know, people say, like, oh, Republicans don't care about libraries. What's going to happen to libraries? I watched the teachers union go around closing libraries. And what happens when that happens? Right, that if you don't have these after school programs also, parents can't work as much. Right. Somebody has to be there for the kid. It's more expensive for, for the costs. Just like kind of snowball for everybody. These programs are really important, but also they're, they're doing this because they, they negotiate vast state contracts that say, you know, you really, every school district has to have a superintendent, and every school in that school district has to have a principal and a vice principal. And it's like, well, what do you think? What do you expect is going to happen if you have, you know, if you have to have every school with two in school officials making six figures and the superintendent making, you know, also six figures, but higher versions of that, you know, so it's written into these contracts. So the, the, the idea of decoupling their dependence on the federal government from this stuff is that what the federal government has done is just basically been a kind of bailout, a kind of backstop. They do whatever they want. They fund whatever they want. They pay people whatever they want. Because when a public union sits down with an elected official, nobody there is to, nobody's there to negotiate on behalf of the person whose money it is, which is the taxpayer. Right? Private sector unions, private sector unions, you have workers go to the owner and say, it's your money, I want more of it. In public sector unions, they go to the governor, they say, it's their money, I want more of it. And the governor says, yeah, well, sure, because you're going to kick back, you know, a certain amount of that to my reelection campaign. And that's that. And so this is, that's what a lot of people don't really understand about this is that the government is just being used as a, as a piggy bank for awful predictions practices, not just inefficient, but awful education.
- [56:15]
Jon Podhoretz
What's important about the federal, because you're talking about what happens at the state level that is empowered by structure at the federal level that says what these school districts need to do is write a report about this, they need to staff this and that and the other thing in order to create bodies that can write a report about that, about whether they're in compliance with this federal regulation or that letter that we've asked or this thing that we've issued or something like that, which of course then empowers the bureaucrats inside every school system to hire people to help them report things to the federal government. And where does that money come out of? Not only, not only does it come out of after school sports and does it come out of libraries, it comes out of the number of teachers, oddly enough, that can be hired. Or, or it simply layers on a new layer of, you know, bureaucracy, which of course is, as everybody knows, just a wonderful way to run a run a school is to have way more.
- [57:20]
Seth Mandel
Principals and school administrators have their own union too. Let's. It's not just the teachers union at the table. It's also that vast administrative bloat that has taken over every public school system in the country.
- [57:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. So again, this Supreme Court ruling does not say that in the end these employees will be permanently fired. It stayed an injunction, I believe some version of staying an injunction against their firing and said that it can go forward. And obviously the liberal bloc is opposed to it, but on these factitious grounds that, that reducing the number of employees is a form of abolishing the department. And while it is correct that the Republican Party wants to abolish the Department of Education, it is not abolishing the Department of Education. And that it wants to doesn't mean that it is doing it. And that is the Sotomayor, you know, sort of like factitiousness.
- [58:21]
Seth Mandel
No. Well, she's correct. She's correct to say if you want to destroy it, Congress has to do, do that. But that, but that's not, he's not trying to destroy. So she's wrong, but she's correct on the principle, which is, yes, Congress is.
- [58:32]
Jon Podhoretz
She trying to impair its ability to work its will on every local school system and the college and the college loan program and stuff like that. Is he is, is the administration's policy to weaken the federal government's control in that way? Yes. Is he allowed to do that? Yes. You know why? Because most of that stuff is regulatory, not legislative. Almost everything that the Education Department does, it does based on regulations that it itself wrote, not based on legislation that Congress passed. Now, the rules that it writes are supposed to be fulfillments of what the legislation that pays for it ask for. But that's subject to interpretation. That's the whole point. That's why we have regulations instead of having laws. It would be better if Congress wrote all the laws and the administrators simply administer the laws. But that's not as we. As now. We've had this huge fight in the Supreme Court about how big the administrative state should be and what deference there should be to the regulations written by, you know, written by executive branch departments. And we are moving away from the idea that those are granted legislative deference or the Supreme Court is moving radically away from that. Okay, anyway, last point and then we should go. We talked yesterday about the threat to the Netanyahu government posed and that how, you know, people are saying they want, you know, Bibi should fall, he wants to prolong the war in Gaza. And that the actual threat to Bibi's government has literally nothing to do with Gaza. I mean, it does in the larger sense, but it literally has nothing to do with how, what the policy is on Gaza or Syria or whatever it is about the draft law that might or might not exempt yeshiva students who are members of haredi communities from military service. And two small parties, not the evil, supposedly evil parties run by the two guys that everybody in America has learned their names and now hate school because they're, because they're so terrible, Smotrich and Ben Gavir, though, that it's not their parties. Two little parties that have existed for a long time that have bounced between, or they used to bounce between labor and, and sorry, Likud governments, because they only want one thing. They want money and they want their kids to be exempt from the draft. And so two of them are pulled out of the government because they're not being allowed to see the legislation, the draft legislation. And the, the cabinet minister who is in charge of this, Julie Edelstein, who was, who is kind of anti, who was very much their antagonist, is like, screw you, you're not seeing it. We'll pass it or we won't pass it. And they've pulled out of the government, reducing Bibi's government from a majority 68 seats to a bare one seat majority of 61 seats. So here's the irony. None of this is about Gaza. And it is very hard for anybody to defend these parties and what they're doing because as there are people dying in Gaza, 20, 19, 20, 21 year old kids who are dying today in Gaza because of these guerrilla attacks on them and everybody else is serving and these yeshiva kids are not serving. And the level of hatred toward them that is growing by leaps and bounds even inside the right is very powerful. And I, you know, and the thuggish behavior that they display is very potent against them. But just so people understand, if you see if the country were really committed to the idea, as most secular Israelis are, that the haredeem need to be drafted the way their own children are drafted, what they would do tomorrow is go into coalition with Bibi. Just as they said they would go into coalition with Bibi over Iran. Gidon Sar said he would go into coalition with Bibi to strike Iran. If America prevented, said they didn't want Israel to strike Iran, they should go into coalition with Bibi for a week, right? Make the government 90 seats and then pass a law that ends the Haredi exemption. Guess what they're not going to do? They're not going to do that because they, they have this desperate hope that they could somehow lever this into Bibi's falling.
- [64:00]
John Continetti
It's kind of like when they, when people say, you know, oh, the government's going to fall because Bibi doesn't want a two state solution or something like that. And then it's all like, it's always, it's always envisioned to be these external issues, right? It's like, well, well, maybe Biden can undermine Bibi enough to get, you know, Obama, you know, maybe he can get Livny in the coalition. Obama really wants Livny in the coalition because there's going to be peace. And it's like you pull down the coalition, it's not falling because of, you know, negotiations for a Palestinian state falling over the war. It's, you know, this is a country with its own domestic politics and policies and issues. And the only other thing I'd say about the, the Haredim exemption is that there were arguments. You know, our friend Lielle Lewitz has made this argument in the past, in past years pre October 7, 2023, that the, the army didn't, the Israeli army didn't necessarily need the haredim to sign up en masse. They didn't necessarily need them, but there was a feeling that they needed some, I don't know if you want to call it skin in the game or something, but there, there had to be A way that the haredim could be part of Israeli society in a way that would make people stop complaining about the draft exemptions. That didn't necessarily mean ending the draft exemptions. And it was a need. And the, the, this was a pre October 7 thing. And I think the prevailing idea was people were generally convinced by that argument with one caveat. And they said the social, the social contract basically was, but you better be there when we need you. Right? The argument that we don't need you right now is a rational argument. And therefore maybe it's not worth splitting Israeli society over it if it's not necessary. Maybe, maybe we should pick our battles and be choosier about picking our battles. But you better be there when we need you. And the post October 7th world is increasingly, it has not gotten less, it has gotten more this way as the war has gone on and Israel has called up 350,000 reservists, whatever it is, and that they need them now. Israelis feel they need them. They have reservists who are spending all their time away from home and doing extra, you know, reserve duty. Not extra necessarily, but you know what I mean, they're doing more reserve tours. And it is, you know, it's, it's fraying society in a different way because, you know, fathers are, are, are gone and businesses are closed and whatever. It's just a lot of stress. And I think that they're saying right now, like, well, if you don't want to fight, then what are you doing exactly to ameliorate this situation? But here's the thing. We need you. We now need you. We now need the numbers, we need the people themselves, the manpower themselves in some way, shape or form. And we're not getting it. And we're starting to say publicly that people are, are dying because of it, who shouldn't be dying.
- [67:24]
Jon Podhoretz
And the ultimate irony here is if the government were to fall and new elections were called, as we said it would take till October or something like that for the elections to actually take place. And Bibi, by the way, can run a 61 seat majority. Like look at Mike Johnson. He's passed the one big beautiful bill with a two seat majority. Bibi can have a 60. You have 61 seats as a majority. I mean, there is the possibility that one of the other religious parties could pull out. I don't think that's going to happen because they're not going to want to be blamed for it. But you know what happens in the savage irony here that doesn't follow My utopian scenario of a coalition government that comes together to pass a universal draft law, it is that when push comes to shove and there's an election and the parties distribute the way that they distribute, the government that will come into power is the government that will make a deal with these two small parties not to evade passing a draft law. In other words, if Naftali Bennett, who was one of the people who could win the premiership or premiership, or a more liberal person than Naftali Bennett did, they would have to negotiate with the small parties and just like labor did for 30, give them what they want in order to get 61 seats. So the joke here is that would make Bibi fall, which is the dream of the Bibi derangement syndrome camp in Israel, and the Haredi draft law wouldn't pass anyway, so. Because that's the one non negotiable thing for these parties. And Bibi has managed over many decades now to keep this from coming to a boil. And it's now started to come to a boil. And maybe he'll figure out a way to keep the boil down. Like, hey, what are you doing? Like, we have a war going on. Sit down and shut up. We're not going to draft you now and we'll deal with this later. You know, you're already. You're already unpatriotic pieces of garbage. But we'll let. We'll leave that to one side until we can finish this up with your claim that you need people to study in Yeshiva in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah, which is basically where this whole ludicrous thing comes from. We. So there will be no solution to the problem by Bibi's government falling. This will still be the hinge issue that would get a different government into power. So congratulations, everybody who is enjoying seeing Bibi suffer, because you're gonna suffer, too. Don't worry, you're not gonna get what you want no matter which way this goes. All right, we've gone too long. Sorry. We're back tomorrow. For Christine, Abe and Seth, I'm John Pot. Horace, keep the candle.