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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Podhoretz
Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:14]
Abe Greenwald
Thirst the way of knowing which way.
- [00:18]
John Podhoretz
It'S going Hope for the best, Expect.
- [00:21]
Christine Rosen
The worst, hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, January 6, 2025. I am John Pod Horowitz, the Ed editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Podhoretz
Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:41]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [00:42]
John Podhoretz
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [00:46]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:47]
John Podhoretz
So much to talk about. After weeks of slavish desire on the part of extraordinarily MAGA people and extraordinarily liberal people, Mike Johnson, the former and current and future speaker of the House, won his election for speaker on the first ballot, thus negating, like I say, like days, if not weeks of, oh, the Republicans are in disarray. They're in disarray. Apparently, it took two phone calls from Donald Trump to quell a three vote loss for Johnson, which would have meant that he didn't survive the first ballot and then probably would have survived the second. So that story is kind of over. It is over.
- [01:40]
Abe Greenwald
It's over.
- [01:42]
John Podhoretz
As Henry Olson would say on Twitter, that was fun. Nothing like spending a week with a disarray story that doesn't flower into something bigger.
- [01:55]
Abe Greenwald
If, you know, if I can note, you gotta love the press corps because they tried to turn a Republican's in array story into a Republicans and disarray story by framing Johnson's election as warning signs ahead. Warning signs ahead. And yeah, of course there are warning signs. I mean, the kind of the chaos caucus, the holdouts made it clear by not voting until the very end of the vote that there were enough members who are dissatisfied with Johnson to call for a new vote in the, in the new Congress, according to the new rule adopted by the House Republicans. Then the pressure campaign by President Trump came on and switched the 2, 2 of the votes for members other than Johnson. And that allowed Johnson to win with one dissenter, of course, the irreconcilable Thomas Massey of Kentucky. So the Freedom Caucus conveyed their message, but at the end of the day, it was clear that the House Republicans and President Trump wanted to start this new Congress off on a good foot. And they did. And so the press had to say, well, you know, trouble ahead, trouble ahead. Of course, this is Washington. There's always trouble ahead.
- [03:20]
John Podhoretz
Right. Well, we're going to get to the trouble of the last four years and the valedictory efforts to explain away what happened to Joe Biden and the Biden administration later in the show. But. But it is weird to point out that there is a PR campaign going on, a kind of retrospective of the past four years being conducted by the mainstream media that is comically favorable to a clearly, disastrously failed administration, by which, I mean, we could talk about the policy reasons that there were failures, and maybe we would disagree with Democrats and liberals about those. But Biden lost a real Biden and Harris lost a reelection effort. And therefore you have to treat the presidency as everybody treats one term, presidencies, as a failure. And you wouldn't really know it was a failure based on a lot of this coverage. All of which comes back to the point that we are living through a hilarious delegitimization crisis in the mainstream media. That there was literally. Oh, go ahead, Abe.
- [04:33]
Christine Rosen
There's one exception, but relates to something we're going to discuss later in the show. So I don't want to jump too far ahead, but universally now, I think pretty much all press cover the Afghanistan withdrawal as a disaster. And that wasn't the case at the time at all.
- [04:50]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so the point I was going to, the point I was going to make is that there is one major American journalistic institution that is in a condition of decent health, and that is the New York Times. And literally every other major journalistic institution of my lifetime, of the six more than six decades of my lifetime, is in a state of crisis. And all it does, all they do, day in and day out, is deepen the crisis that they are in with descriptions of America, the politics of the United States, the condition of the United States, the condition of the world, the condition of Israel, the condition of crime, the condition of. They are describing it in ways that ordinary, rational people, literate people who read and want to pay attention to the news know is not true. And that's why I'm struck by this period, because I myself wrote a book in 1993 about the first Bush administration and its decline and fall. And I don't think that my conceit that the Bush administration that had essentially committed suicide was even remotely controversial or that anybody would say that the Trump's. The Trump defeat in 2020 wasn't the result of Trump's own failures leading to his loss or Jimmy Carter now being valid, you know, now being a key.
- [06:22]
Abe Greenwald
Point, John, because this, this process you're describing also apparently works retrospectively. You mentioned the New York Times, or as I call it, the Jimmy Carter funeral report, because every single day I get about five articles explaining to me why Jimmy Carter was not as bad as you may have thought. And you also get the tracking of the Carter state funeral. And I have to say there is a contrast and I think it illustrates what you're talking about because for those of us who were around when Ronald Reagan died in 2004, 20 years ago, when Reagan's casket was moved from place to place, there were large crowds gathered to follow it. That's not the case with Jimmy Carter. He was moved in Georgia. His remains were moved in Georgia over the weekend. And the Post and the Times treated this as a state funeral, which it is, but didn't really get the populace out there. And it's a rebuke, I think, to the messaging that we're seeing from the media, the same messaging that's saying, oh, Biden, what are you talking about? This was a great administration. Interestingly enough, it's the same writer, Peter Baker of the New York Times, who is both attempting to revise Carter's reputation and writing in the New York Times yesterday that, you know, Biden has left this country in a fantastic place, even if Americans are so inconsiderate not to recognize it.
- [07:49]
Matthew Continetti
Can we also say just a brief word about Speaker Johnson? Because I feel like he is a very old school character in a new political universe and there are a lot of people are having trouble grappling with how he goes about doing what he's doing. He's very quiet. He's like the night manager character, right? He's Jonathan Pine or whatever his name was. He's just quietly doing what he needs to do. But he's doing it fairly capably considering what he's the caucusy has to wrangle. And it's striking to me that the media, which has been also spending a lot of time giving praise and attention to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has not really gotten their heads around who he is and what he does. He's still sort of mysterious for someone with such an important public role third in line to the presidency. And I feel like that is part of what you all are discussing. It's this inability to understand the new political universe and to understand the actors in it, apart from first term Trumpism. And they're going to really struggle, I think, in the coming Congress to, you know, this, this huge big bill that the Republicans want to get, pack everything into and pass. If that succeeds, there will be a lot of political reporters who will be flummoxed as to how that gets pulled off. If it does.
- [08:57]
Christine Rosen
You know, I just want to say I think that's A great point because it goes to the biggest problem with the media doing what they're doing, which is that they miss the story. So they're missing the story on Johnson and they missed the story from the start on Johnson. Remember, when first appeared as possible speaker, the stories were that he's some sort of crazy extremist. That was, that was the. And from the initial framing, they were never able to give us the news.
- [09:26]
John Podhoretz
Well, you know, Johnson's not, I don't think Johnson is mysterious. I think that Johnson is a polite, reserved, temperamentally very level even. Maybe this is a weakness on his part because he doesn't see the anomaly.
- [09:52]
Matthew Continetti
In our current political environment.
- [09:53]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's, see, okay, so John Thune, who will now be the Senate Majority leader, not very different. The people who want to imitate Trump are all the Republican back bench. Right. I mean, if you think about it, maybe with the exception of Jim Jordan.
- [10:14]
Abe Greenwald
Well, there's one other character in this drama which I think also changes the rules of the game. And it was Mickey Kaus who pointed out on Twitter the other day, you know, we thought someone was going to be over the top and crazy and making pronouncements and interfering with everything, but we didn't realize it would be Elon Musk. Right, that was a very good point. That is Musk has become Trump 1, whereas Trump 2 is Trump's version of a statesman so far and kind of in the back and doing the right thing.
- [10:46]
John Podhoretz
But if you think about it, so the Republicans that are famous for being divisive or, you know, tough or Massey now sort of going for that role, but Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and all, and you know, Matt Gaetz now gone, they are not representative of the general political direction or, or comportment of the Republican Party in Washington. They're, they're imitative. But as Matt has been pointing out during the entire fight over Johnson's vote, the vast majority of the Republicans in the House would have been perfectly happy to just sail him through. That's why he only got lost one vote out of 219. And certainly that's true of the Senate, where people are can be very provocative or can be very pointed, but their demeanor is not revolutionary or bomb throwing or something like that. The world has now left that in the hands of not only Trump too, the unelected richest man in the world, but in the hands of Trump. And it's kind of maybe after all this time freed them up to kind of put their heads down and do their jobs, which is where the this grand bill or whether there's going to be one big bill or two big bills that they pass.
- [12:34]
Abe Greenwald
Well, it's going to be they want to do one, they want to do one. That's the headline out of it. And I love the name Mega Maga. We've had Maga Ultra Maga and now Mega Maga Transformers movie. Yeah, I don't know. Omni Maga comes next, I guess. But Mega Maga apparently will be one bill passed through reconciliation that covers everything from the border to energy to of course, the big enchilada, which is the tax code and the renewal of the TCJA, the Trump tax cuts of 2017. There was a fight, as you say, John, not a fight, but a disagreement over whether this should be broken up into two bills, which would allow the administration to score some early victories if they did just one reconciliation bill covering energy and the border and maybe some deregulatory things, and then left the tax code piece, which is going to be very complicated, to another bill for the fall. Trump decided this weekend that instead there will be an attempt at one bill. And I think the reason that they're attempting one bill is because with a narrow margin like you have in the House, you want to kind of stack up all of them, the musts in one bill so that the centers really don't have much wiggle room if they end up not being satisfied, say with the increase in the mortgage interest deduction, as some of the suburban blue state Republicans are really arguing for. Well, Speaker Johnson can now say to them, look, I did what I could, but are you really going to vote against this bill when it includes border wall funding, when it includes opening up new lands to energy drilling, when it includes getting rid of a lot of the wokery that's been put in place? And I think from a strategic standpoint, when the real question is what can pass the House, this does make a little bit of sense.
- [14:32]
John Podhoretz
I think also politically and over the long term, it does something that is salubrious for the American political system, which is that the Republican agenda should this work will be the policy of the United States from the get go in the Trump administration. And so the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 elections in which we will see who succeeds Trump and who rivals Trump will largely be run on the record that will have been established in the very early days of Trump's term here. And they'll stand or fall based on the, based on the policies on the border, on Taxation on deregulation, on the things that are in the mega manga bill. And we've been confused about that and how to judge the politics in the United States precisely because it's been so hard for policy to get made. We've seen how in the case of the Biden administration, its steps both in 2021, as Abe mentioned, Afghanistan, which was August of 2021, and then some of the legislation that was not only in 2021 but 2022, you know, was what told on them when they had to go before the American people in November. That's a good thing. It is a good thing for it's not maybe not be a good thing for the country that the Biden Inflation Reduction act was passed, but it left Americans in no confusion about what it was that they were. But this is being asked to vote on.
- [16:29]
Matthew Continetti
But this is where the media's role is fascinating because they to Abe's earlier point about stories, it's not just stories that are tilted by ideological slants, but ones that are never reported out. And it was only and the immediate lead up to the election and now just after that the mainstream media has had to acknowledge that say like one electric charging vehicle station has been built when you know, multimillions of dollars were spent on this, that the people who were promised broadband still haven't gotten it. And I think that's why you see people like Senator Chuck Schumer going on cable television and saying the reason we were rejected wasn't our policies. It's that the people just haven't felt how good our policies really were for them. We're long term thinkers. And it's, I mean it's ridiculous but I do that's the piece where we'll see how this the mainstream media versus all the alternative media that Trump spent a lot of time campaigning on during the election, how that will report on policy because that's not a strength of the alternative media. I've got to say that's where old school mainstream media that has reporters who go to the hearings and report on what's going on on Capitol Hill matter and they are not going to like anything coming out of a Republican dominated Congress. So we'll see how they treat that in the Trump term.
- [17:36]
John Podhoretz
Tickets also worth pointing out that the first Trump term at the beginning of 2017 was a wreck and a chaos. And clearly that's not going to be the case here now. I mean, you know, basically comparing the two, it's apples and oranges. He was president. He survived the four years of the pursuit of him and all of that. But if you go back to January 2017, you had the controversy over Michael Flynn and his phone calls with the Russians and basically being ousted after three weeks as national security advis. You had the Muslim ban at the, you know, in the first week causing the crisis at the airports. You had weird stuff going on with Jim Comey. You had people calling for the in for the adoption of the 25th Amendment on the day that he was sworn in as president. You had the Pussy Hat riots or excuse me, they weren't riots, but protests, you know, the weekend of the inauguration. And this is a very orderly. As the Johnson victory suggests. We're in a much. We are is like, it is like turned totally on its head. Now.
- [18:42]
Matthew Continetti
Don't underestimate Republicans ability to snatch defeat from the Johnson victory.
- [18:47]
Abe Greenwald
I think it's two different things. I mean, I agree with Christine on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory on the, on Mega Maga, because that's going to be a big battle and it's going to be fun to watch. But on what you're talking about, John, on the transition, I do think there's a real difference. And I think part of the difference was revealed in an interview that Susie Wiles conducted with Mark Caputo, the Florida based reporter who's now with Axios. It's his first story. He got a scoop with an interview with the incoming chief of staff, Trump's campaign manager. She, Susie Wiles is now the, well, she will be in two weeks the first female chief of staff in the history of the United States. And it's a fascinating read because what basically comes across as Weil says, look, two things. One, I listen to Trump, I listen to what he wants to do and then I take it as my job to do it, which is very different from a lot of the people who surrounded Trump in the first term where they were using Trump as the agent of what they wanted to do. So you have this field reversal now where actually the people around Trump want to do what he wants to do and take it as their job. Maybe they disagree. And that's the second point where she says also she goes, look, I never say what I tell him to other people. All of our conversations are completely between the two of us. And I do not want my disagreements with him amplified in the media. And that ethos, I think has carried into a lot of the people who are part of the White House staff in this, in this incoming administration. And of course, that was not the case in the first one. Where all of the disagreements were revocal and were played out on the front pages. So I do think the difference maker here is Susie Wiles, or at least partly Susie Wiles has a lot to do with it, or as Trump calls her, and I was reminded in the interview, Trump calls her the Ice Maiden.
- [20:43]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [20:43]
Abe Greenwald
So I think it's a great name.
- [20:44]
John Podhoretz
I mean, the interview is very short and therefore, you know, very easy to digest. And I think the point that she is making is we are going to be everybody below Trump in this administration. This is going to be a no drama administration. You make the slightest trouble and I am kicking you out on your ass. That's basically what she says. I don't want to hear, I don't want to see anything coming out in the media and I will find you and I will hunt down and chop your head off. This is a different kind of administration. We are not going to play out, as Matt says, we're not going to play out our, our drama in public if she can pull that off. And of course, she and Chris Lacivita, who ran the campaign, did pull it off. And there were real efforts in 2024 to, to bring Trump chaos back into the campaign. Right. There was this moment where Corey Lee wa brought back in from the cold to do something or other. And you know, you're always hearing about what Donald Jr. Is doing and what Tucker Carlson was doing and all of that, but it didn't take. And so there is now a history, a two, two and a half year history, of Trump apparently recognizing that it is in his best interest to have a team that is calm and that is orderly and organized. And that's why he wanted her as his chief of staff.
- [22:25]
Christine Rosen
But it's also, I think, the fact that if you look back, a lot of the drama that came during Trump's first term, that came from Trump himself, I think came as a result of his pushing back against people within that he knew wanted to shape him in a way that he didn't want to be shaped. So if he doesn't have that, it will reduce his reckless instincts to fight back.
- [22:54]
Abe Greenwald
This is the dual character of Donald Trump. He is both the most important person in the world and a commentator on his status as the most important person in the world. And so you're right, if these debates are playing out inside the West Wing, he's going to start commenting on them through his social media. And that, of course, makes the story even more intense. We had a reminder of this. It's not nearly as bad as it was eight years ago. But there was a, I found humorous reminder of this on Friday evening when President Elect Trump announced the appointment of Morgan Ortegas as the deputy special envoy to the Middle east for peace. And so this envoy position was established by Trump. He put his friend Steve Whitake off as the envoy. And apparently Trump was subjected to a lot of pressure from senators and others in the national security community to put Morgan Ortegas, who's a very, very nice person, very smart, very accomplished national security professional also in this office as the, as the deputy. But Trump's passive aggressive announcement has to have reached a historic milestone in because I've never read an announcement for a position where the person making the announcement, in this case the President elected the United States says, and I quote, I'm, I'm not doing this for me, I'm doing it for them. The them, the them is unidentified here. And then he comments, he says that Ortega's fought him for three years, it's not clear what he's referring to. And then served in his State Department, which she did as the spokeswoman. But then he puts in Perens pompeo with an exclamation point. So not sure what he's saying there. And then he ends this personnel announcement by saying let's see how it goes. Which again, not what you're used to in personnel announcements, but very much Trump. And so he's going to be the same. The difference is the structure around him, which is recognizes he is who he is and let's actually try to do what he wants to do, which is unlike eight years ago.
- [25:08]
Matthew Continetti
So let's magnanimous and wildly egotistical is preferable to just, you know, insanely reactionary, I would say.
- [25:16]
Abe Greenwald
And also funny. Can't leave that out. That was pretty funny.
- [25:18]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Let's talk about the week that he is now about to face. So we are recording this on Monday morning at 1pm you are. My guess is most of you will be hearing this after 1pm Eastern time. The Congress convenes to, to accept the results of the Electoral College and formally, essentially formally name Trump the incoming President of the United States. Which of course is we're four years to the day after the riot at the Capitol. The attempt to interfere with that process. Kamala Harris as the President of the Senate will be accepting the Electoral College papers and enshrining her own defeat as Al Gore had had to do himself a quarter century ago. And that there is something very moving about that. This famous thing that trumps horrible conduct on January 6, and the monstrous conduct of the people who rioted at the Capitol, interfered with, which is the peaceful transfer of power in the United States over the course of the last 230, what, 234 years, 233 years, or whatever it is that had never been interfered with before. So. But he will be, he will be named that later today. And then at the end of the week in a New York City courtroom, Judge Mershon will sentence him for his conduct in the supposed, in the so called hush money case, the case that was almost universally derided when Trump was indicted on these 31 or however many charges it was of writing these checks to Michael Cohen to reimburse him for the payments to Stormy Daniels. Mershan had the choice to say he was not going to do this because the would be in the best interest of the United States that the President of the United States not have this hanging over his head. Mershan chose, of course, not to do that, thus demonstrating that Trump's attacks on him as a wild partisan who does not have the interests of the country at heart are probably more accurate than not, in my estimation. His conduct of the case itself was shocking. He allowed in all kinds of testimony and things that should not have been allowed and seemed to be beyond the bounds of any acceptable way of proceeding in these matters. And so Trump will enter the White House on the 20th of January with this semi shadow. And I don't think that's the point.
- [28:34]
Abe Greenwald
Right. I mean, that was the point as.
- [28:36]
John Podhoretz
That'S the point of the whole thing. Yeah.
- [28:37]
Abe Greenwald
In lawfare, the process is the penalty. And the reason that Mershand just did not just dismiss this case outright is the whole point of this effort was to make Donald Trump a convicted felon, the first convicted, so they can call him the first convicted felon to be the President of the United States. And the reasoning, Mershon says, well, you know, I've listened to the briefs from the Trump side, but the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity from last year does not apply here, he says, because Trump isn't the president yet. But that's of course, a complete misreading.
- [29:16]
John Podhoretz
Of what the Supreme Court said.
- [29:18]
Abe Greenwald
The Supreme Court said when the, when he is president, which was the case at the time of these payments, as we discussed recently on the podcast, you do have to kind of consider, well, is this within the official capacity or is it not within the official capacity? There's some kind of room here. And then for a completely, you know, egregious and politicized case, such as this, it would be much easier for the judge to say, look, he didn't want this to come in and interfere with his duties as president. So I'm saying that it was a part of his official conduct. And so this case is dismissed, end of story. Instead, Maran said, no, I have to. He's not the president yet. So we're going to have a sentencing hearing which he does not have to appear in person for and which Mern telegraphs, I'm not going to sentence him to any jail time, but he will still be labeled or his political opponents will continue to label him a convicted felon.
- [30:14]
John Podhoretz
So the holiday rush is over.
- [30:18]
Unknown Speaker
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- [32:34]
John Podhoretz
The case is. Go ahead.
- [32:36]
Christine Rosen
I was just gonna say, I mean, it's true that the point of lawfare is the process, but Trump uniquely made the process work for him. Massive pain in his life. But it, it, you know, his, his mug shot was instantly iconic. His, the, the, the fight that he had to put up brought his base right to him, that they were never going to leave him. So he's a, you know, as in so many things, he's unique here. This is not a process that works on him. And we'll see what happens with the sentencing. I mean, he's gonna, he's gonna, his team's gonna fight this as well.
- [33:26]
John Podhoretz
Well, look, I mean, because of the, the decision, the Supreme Court decision, I don't know, it's not clear to me what the process is by which the appeals would work. This is a state case, not a, not a federal case. And so we have a, we have a, you know, difference of how you proceed in these matters. But the idea that a guy serving as President in 2017 says to his associate, okay, look, make this go away. I need you to make this go away. And I will, you know, I'm figure out how to reimburse you for the money that you're going to pay to make it go away. That he was doing that, whether or not he was doing that because he did wanted to stave off embarrassment or, you know, quiet. Quiet his wife from being angry at him. Fact is, he was president United States. As Matt said on Friday, there's no vacation from president. There's no, you've got, no, you don't get time off. You know, of course he was doing it in order to move it to the side so that he wouldn't have to think about it. It's as open and shut a matter relating to this presidential immunity description by the Supreme Court as one can imagine. And why, why it is that it has been in the federal. I don't know, Minha, or sort of the federal. Sort of the way, the way the federal government works that you're not. You cannot force the President of the United States into a legal proceeding while he is president because he has something way more important that he has to be doing for you. Right? I mean, there are political things, impeachments, you know, special counsels investigating you and that sort of thing. But the legal stuff has to wait until he is no longer president because it is too distracting. And so Mershon is basically saying, I don't accept that argument, but that's ridiculous. I mean, it is the argument. There is no counter argument. Of course, he didn't want to spend two years, you know, like, litigating things with, with Stormy Daniels because he was the President of the United States. I revile his behavior in many of these ways. And I am, you know, I do not find him an admirable person. But I don't know how you look at this specific case. It's crap, right? It's one thing that they managed to ring 31 convictions out of. Right. Which is just a simple, you know, monthly payment schedule that he got indicted for every single month. And he couldn't. He needed to pay attention to the Abraham Accords or to whatever. And obviously Democrats wanted to distract him and wanted him to be tortured and tormented by lawfare and wanted it after his presidency was over in order to prevent what has now happened, which is that he has been elected for a second time. And they did things that ended up helping to get him elected, as Abe points out. Ben Domenech, our friend on Twitter over the weekend tweeted out something that he had put on Twitter. I think in 2022, early 2023, he said, Donald Trump is running again and he will lose. Bet on it. And then he said, and then he quoted that, and then he said, and a month later, they raided Mar A Lago and that is what got him reelected. The irony there is that the Mar A Lago raid was legitimate. That was a legitimate. That of all the cases against Trump was the legitimate case that he had mishandled classified information, not as president, but in the aftermath of his presidency, and was therefore subject to, you know, potential criminal prosecution on that case. But because of all this other stuff, the American people in the Republican Party certainly, and Republicans put them all together, smushed them all together and said all of it is, all of it is illegit. All of it is a political pursuit.
- [37:57]
Abe Greenwald
You know, I agree there is definitely, you could see the most legal arguments for that case. But what's happening in Korea has made me much more. More wary about all of this stuff. I mean, when you see what's happening in Korea, where the criminalization of politics has reached such an apogee now that you really expect every single Korean president to end up in jail after their term of office. And we have this constitution and during.
- [38:29]
John Podhoretz
Their term of office.
- [38:30]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and now, currently there's this ongoing constitutional crisis which, you know, the, the president declared martial law, then he was impeached. Now there's an acting president. Over the weekend, parts of the security services tried to arrest the former president, but that was kind of rebuffed. And so now they're going to try again. It's a huge mess. And it leaves me with the attitude, which I guess is a conservative one, that the precedent that applied to every single president prior to Donald Trump, that, you know what, we're not going to prosecute former presidents. We're just going to let them go. And Gerald Ford did what he had to do in pardoning Nixon in order to maintain that precedent some 50 years ago. That was good. And it was violated in the past four years. And it's, I think, one piece of the Biden legacy that will continue to be examined and criticized in the months and years ahead, especially if now, having seen that precedent been dismissed, the Republicans begin to turn the machinery of the judicial department and our institutions against their political enemies. That does not end up in a good place, as we're seeing in Korea.
- [39:46]
John Podhoretz
And let's talk about the. And then we can move on. But let's point out that the situation of Trump and these cases and Biden and the Democrats, that Mershin is going to give the Democrats bragging rights over saying convicted felon President Trump, congratulations. I mean, I wish MSNBC the heartiest of congratulations as they fall off a cliff into the ocean of ratings lower than the commentary magazine, daily podcasts, daily list.
- [40:31]
Abe Greenwald
We're almost over 7,000 subscribers to our YouTube channel.
- [40:34]
John Podhoretz
That's on the YouTube channel. And trust me, when I see these numbers of what they get on the day side, we have more, we have more listeners than they have viewers in the demographic that is desirable to advertisers. And if, you know, all their contributors on the Nicole Wallace show want to say, Trump's a felon, Trump's a felon. Trump's a felon. For four years. They should only enjoy. They got what they wanted. You know, they didn't get the 25th amendment. They also got what they wanted when he was, when he lost in 2020. And that wasn't sufficient unto the day and led them into continuing with their paranoid lunatic behavior toward him that, as I say, had the interesting consequence of helping get him reelected. And now, like Paul Krugman after 2000 and after the Florida case in 2000, Paul Krugman said, I will not refer to George W. Bush as president. He is not a legitimate president. I will not call him president. He is not allowed to be called president in my house. I will throw you out of my house if you call him president. Good. Live. Live like that. Go ahead to sort of see how crazy most of America, including most Democrats, think you are by obsessing over this matter that was effectively litigated by 150 million voters who made the decision to reelect Trump to a, to another term. After you spend four years on this and eight years on this, let's say. So Mershon is doing, Mershad is doing Trump another favor maybe by, by keeping this like this burr in their saddle that they'll, that they will continue to kind of pick at forever. Okay, let's move on to the Biden valedictions. So as Matt, as you said, Peter Baker has been trying to figure out a way to memorialize this administration. But that's not where the heart and the meat of the matter over the weekend really was. There are two pieces, two, one major performance in the New York Times Magazine and one in the Washington Post. New York Times Magazine. Lulu Garcia Navarro interviews Secretary of State Tony Blinken and David Ignatius in the Washington Post does a piece on National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. And they are both incredibly revelatory. I would say that Ignatius piece is more revelatory about the world that Trump has now just destroyed, which is to say the world of the foreign policy establishments, sense of itself and the planet earth and the sort of liberal mindset of Washington journalism and think tanks and all of that, because it offers a portrait of Jake Sullivan, now 45 years old, that would make you think that Jake Sullivan was a kind of combination of jfk, Henry Kissinger, Mike Myers and Einstein, having been the national security advisor in the most unsuccessful foreign policy presidency since the Carter presidency, number one. And then it is Blinken, the Secretary of state who hangs himself. Not that Lulu Garcia Navarro, who is a repulsive and repugnant anti Semite, by the way, doesn't hang herself. But it is what Blinken says in the interview with Lulu Garcia Navarro.
- [44:30]
Abe Greenwald
I think if the New York Times ever does face budget cuts in Lulu finds herself out of the job, there's a place waiting for her at the ICC because she seems, she seems ready to be for the prosecution against the state of Israel and the Jewish people based on this extremely tangentious yet revealing interview with Secretary of State Blinken.
- [44:50]
John Podhoretz
So I'm going to read a couple of quotes from the interview, which I think probably a lot of people who are listening to this did pay attention to, and then ask you guys to interpret what you think Blinken is about. The thing that the thing that made the greatest headlines or is the focus of a lot of shock. Is Blinken quite Almost in a kind of airy, weird way saying, you know, whenever we pressured Israel to let up on the gas in Gaza or criticize Israel, Hamas figured that that meant that they didn't have to return the hostages. Quote, whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we've seen it. Hamas is pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. This is the Secretary of State of the United States says that the policy that they pursued, which was an effort to achieve a ceasefire and return the hostages, had precisely the opposite effect.
- [45:58]
Abe Greenwald
But he doesn't subscribe the policy to him. That's what was so funny about his formulation is that, well, you know, whenever there was daylight between the United States, perception of daylight between the United States and Israel, Hamas would pull back and the negotiations would end or be paused. Well, okay, the next step then is to say who was creating this daylight between the United States and Israel. It was the United States. It was President Biden. It was the administration that Blinken is part of as Secretary of State.
- [46:32]
Christine Rosen
Because, I mean, but this is what was so confusing about the interview is that he's his, he, he himself was at cross purposes here. He's trying to make that point while trying to defend himself against her, you know, for. As to why he did they. They didn't scold Israel more. So though he formulated it saying, well, because public daylight seems to give Hamas a green light, what we said to the Israeli administration in private was different from what we said to them in public. So he was trying to weasel out of everything.
- [47:13]
Abe Greenwald
Except, except Kamala Harris was there saying, I've studied the maps. You can't go into Rafah. And Biden was walking around in the woods in Camp David saying, stop, it's gone too far. It's gone too far.
- [47:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, he. Okay, so here's what, here's the exchange. Okay. Garcia Navarro says to Blinken, there were moments when it seemed like you were trying to draw red lines in public, telling Israel not to go into Rafah, for example, and then they did. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu never seemed to listen to you. And here's how Blinken responded. No, I disagree with that. And again, I mentioned how we've gone at humanitarian assistance from day one, and that's been a perennial and ongoing efforts throughout this time. When it comes to Rafah, we had deep, deep concerns about a direct attack and the use of the 2,000 pound munitions in densely populated areas. What Israel wound up doing in Rafah was very different from what they were planning to do before we engaged with them. So he is saying that they convinced the Israelis to go into Rafah more effectively than the Israelis were intending to. The Israelis would have used 2,000 pound bombs. The Americans prevented it, and then Israel went into Rafah and destroyed Hamas. Well, it would have been nice if they had said that at the time. Right. What they said at the time was, as you say, they said, we. I've seen the maps and you can take Rafa.
- [48:39]
Abe Greenwald
And then Israel paused and.
- [48:41]
John Podhoretz
No, four months. But it was. She said the map stuff two weeks before they went in.
- [48:48]
Abe Greenwald
Well, right. It was late. Right, yes.
- [48:50]
John Podhoretz
So. So the point is they did pause because they didn't have the munitions that they wanted. Why would they have wanted to use 2,000 pound bombs on Rafah? Because Israel has a citizen army and it would prefer to kill Palestinians than to lose Israeli soldiers. Right. They, they were put in a position where the United States was saying, you send in your troops into those tunnels, you send them into harm's way, you do all that. And at the beginning of the war, as Blinken says in the interview, the Israelis were like, we're not doing that. We're just going to go in and we're just basically going to blow up Gaza. And America said, don't do that. That would be really mean. And in the end, Israel realized as it was fighting this war that it needed to do what it needed to do in Rafah differently from the 2000 pound bomb method. But it decided that. It decided after eight months or nine months that they had a better way of clearing the brush.
- [49:58]
Matthew Continetti
But this, this interview, I think, revealed something else unintentionally as, as Blinken and Sullivan, in his own way, in his interview, did the same. They frantically try to create a legacy out of the disastrous, you know, last four years. Worried, I think, a little bit about which cushy, you know, foreign policy think tank job they'll, they'll end up in. But this shows the Democratic Party's absolute disarray when it comes to the Middle East. And you can see it in the, even the comments and the commentary about Blinken's interview in particular. People are furious with him. Obviously, we on. If you're pro Israel, you're furious at the Biden administration for plenty of legitimate reasons. But their fury is that he didn't, you know, prevent what happened in Gaza. And that anger is, is still quite strong. And we will be seeing repercussions of it for the, for the Trump administration. But he's desperately trying to continue to strike this unstrikeable balance between his left, anti Israel, left wing flank and where the Biden administration tried to uncomfortably sit for the last four years.
- [50:58]
Abe Greenwald
He does. But I do think this pairing of interviews was revealing on another level, especially when we consider the ice, what I assume it would be. The second quote John wanted to read, which was when Blinken says to Lulu, hey, by the way, how about let's talk about Hamas. Why isn't anyone saying that Hamas should surrender now and lay down all of its weapons and release the hostages? This moment where Blinken sounds like the greatest living American, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, like finally, the Secretary of the United States saying, yeah, it's on Hamas, all of this is on Hamas. And I think he did that one, because he was really annoyed at Lulu, which he should have been, and two, because he believes it. But you know, who doesn't believe it? I'm making a guess here, but I think it's right. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
- [51:47]
John Podhoretz
Right. And that's what we learned from the Ignatius.
- [51:49]
Abe Greenwald
When you read the Ignatius interview, a profile of Sullivan in relation to the two Blinken interviews, there's the long one with the New York Times and then a shorter one, not, not as newsy with the Financial Times that also appeared over the weekend. You see that policy was made out of the White House and it was made by Jake Sullivan and his deputy John Finer. And they are much more, let's say, Obama when it comes to Israel than Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And that is bad. And that is why the pro Israel community turned against this administration, because of Sullivan and Feiner.
- [52:27]
John Podhoretz
I think it's really important to point out that on this podcast and elsewhere, Bret Stephens, others In the early six, the first six weeks or eight weeks of the war after October 7th, this opinion that the Biden administration was bad on Israel was not the opinion that we felt. We thought that Biden understood the stakes, the nature of the threat that he had said, we have Israel's back. And then, and this is the thing that's missing from both these interviews. And then the Democratic Party's political machine began to grind its gears about Israel defending itself and attempting to extirpate this.
- [53:15]
Matthew Continetti
And Biden also wasn't going to settle this dispute between Sullivan and Blinken because we have a sense that maybe that's part of the problem too. The power vacuum at the top was how involved was he in the policy making decisions from the get go?
- [53:27]
John Podhoretz
Well, what condition, what mental condition was He. Exactly.
- [53:32]
Christine Rosen
There's, there's a flip side to this, John. What both pieces did contain was this assertion without any evidence that the Democrats paid an electoral price for not reigning in Israel. Right.
- [53:48]
John Podhoretz
Well, Ignatius says that. Yeah, he says that openly. He says clear where his sympathies are. He says. Well, he says Sullivan, you know, and he claims that Sullivan had Israel's back because Democrats suffered electorally from the administration's policies on Israel. Therefore, by definition Sullivan deserves credit for not what? I don't know, for not taking calling Israel before the International Criminal Court or something like that, which is preposterous. Now let me just quote the overarching thing. And this is where talk about Tony Blinken today as I sit with you, he says to Navarro, I think we hand over in America in a much, much stronger position, having come through the economic crisis, having come through the health crisis and having changed much for the better our position around the world because we made those investments in alliances and partnerships. Does anybody believe that? I mean, yes, I know that's the line that was being proffered that Biden solved Covid and that, you know, the economic crisis that he imparted, that he deepened for two years with his insane spending has now quieted down to some degree.
- [55:19]
Christine Rosen
But they're also both interviews that they're Sullivan and Blinken are big on touting the administration's China policy. That was a right.
- [55:28]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, Sullivan. So if we go on to Sullivan, he says about of himself or Ignatius says of Sullivan that he understood in a way that Ignatius himself was just not visionary enough to understand.
- [55:49]
Abe Greenwald
No one is smart as Jake Sullivan.
- [55:51]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. By the way, he says, can I just, I'm going to just make a, make an honestly embarrassing family point here. But he says at the astonishing age of 34, Jake Sullivan became the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, thus proving himself to be a world historical genius. Here's the point that I'm going to make. My brother in law, Elliot Abrams became Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights at the age of 31. So you know what? People in politics get jobs young. I'm just saying, like Jake Sullivan is getting credit for being head of policy planning at 34. I think Paul Wolfowitz was head of Policy planning at the Pentagon at the age of 38 or something like that. So you know, this is, this is, this is the kind of grading on a curve. Oh, he's so amazing.
- [56:42]
Abe Greenwald
But he also, he was a doctor scholar, John.
- [56:46]
John Podhoretz
He was a Rhodes scholar degree. He has a law degree. I know.
- [56:49]
Abe Greenwald
So smart. It's just, you know, the entire National Security Advisor.
- [56:55]
John Podhoretz
I'm just saying would never in a billion years occur. Have occurred to anybody to praise somebody for their youth necessarily holding a job. When, you know, look at. Look at the results. When he was the director of policy planning, that Russia policy that he helped implement during the first term of the Obama administration, that was a winner.
- [57:15]
Abe Greenwald
And then he tried it again. And they talk about it. They are, yeah, I tried to get. But you know, just on the Ukraine stuff as well, he goes, well, when we found it was in May 1, I just have to start by saying the Afghanistan.
- [57:28]
John Podhoretz
Both.
- [57:29]
Abe Greenwald
Both Lincoln and Sullivan defend the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is clearly kind of the origin of all of this chaos in some way or another. So the p. The Ignatius piece then slides from the defense of Afghanistan to the transition. As Ignatius writes, it is two months later we got signs that Putin was intent on invading Ukraine, making no causal link, which clearly there was. But.
- [57:58]
Christine Rosen
Except to say. And I actually. No, no, I forget which one this is in. Had we not left Afghanistan, we would have been bogged down in ways that would have inhibited.
- [58:12]
John Podhoretz
Yes, Blinken says it, but Sullivan and. And praise for the administration's process before the invasion because Sullivan created tiger teams and the declassification. Right.
- [58:27]
Abe Greenwald
This is what I wanted to talk about. They make a big point, several paragraphs about how prior to the invasion, the administration thought that the way to stop the invasion from happening was to create these tiger teams which would then declassify all the intelligence, kind of saying, nanny, nanny, boo, boo, Putin, we know you're going to invade, so don't invade. And if you recall, several years ago now, Kamala Harris even suggested in public that this would be a deterrent effect, disclosing all this declassified information. And of course, this policy, too, utterly failed. Utterly failed. And neither. So then the invasion happens, and then they go into how we rush to the defense. And part of this declassification may have thwarted the Russian attempt to seize the airport outside of Kiev. But neither of them mentioned what the actual policy was at the time of the invasion. The policy was to evacuate Kiev and the Kievan government and take Zelensky out of Ukraine, just like the Afghan president had fled Afghanistan when the Taliban were marching in. No acknowledgment of that. And it was not Jake Sullivan or Anthony Blinken who stopped that policy. It was Zelensky himself, just like it.
- [59:42]
John Podhoretz
Was the Israelis who said, we're not.
- [59:44]
Abe Greenwald
Going to listen to you.
- [59:45]
John Podhoretz
We're going to take the enemy. He said, I don't need a ride, I need weapons.
- [59:50]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I need ammunition.
- [59:51]
John Podhoretz
That's what he said. And the Israeli comparison, by the way, is very important because they. So there's this praise by Ignatius, who is a whole. Who is a fool of the intelligence diplomacy. Right. This was very innovative. It was so innovative that Biden was saying things like, we know you're going to invade now. So Biden declassified. Biden can do whatever he wants, by the way, as president. He doesn't have to declassify anything, anything that he want. He classification flows through his person as the president. So he's allowed to say anything. But when he said that, how is that a deterrent? You know how it's a deterrent. Let's go to Israel. Israel kept sending messages to the Iranians, has for the last 10 years, sent messages to the Iranians of all kinds of like, we have you penetrated. We know what you're about. We know where your nuclear scientists are. Oh, one of them drove out of his driveway. Boom, we hit him with a bomb. He's dead. We got all of your nuclear documents. We seized them, we got them out of there. We have them here. We know what you're doing. We know what you're saying. We know what. And the Iranians. This did not thwart the Iranian designs on Israel or the efforts to get Israel. So what did Israel do? It killed the head of Hamas in Tehran in their custody as he was visiting for a funeral. So what did the United States do with its intelligence diplomacy? Did it do anything to deter Putin through action, through things that could have been done? Like how about.
- [61:39]
Abe Greenwald
Go ahead. Yeah, one example that again, Ignatius reads the wrong lesson from in the piece, but the one example was in the fall of 2022, we're beginning to get a lot of reporting that the Russians were considering the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine when the. The Kyivan, the Ukrainian counteroffensive was making such gains. Right. And the. This is. Is framed as, again, a victory of diplomacy where the administration kind of leapt into action and there were calls to counterpart in Russia, but with Austin's counterpart, the Defense Secretary's counterpart in Russia, and the CIA director was also. Bill Burns was also telegraphing to the Chinese and to others saying this would be a bad decision. But if this was all the case and it worked out the way it did, and the Russians were at the brink of using a tactical nuclear weapon and did not. The reason they didn't wasn't the diplomacy, it was the deterrent. Threat because yeah, sure, people were communicating to Xi Jinping to say to Putin, don't do this. And apparently he did. But what Austin told the Russians was, if you do this, we will destroy the Russian army in Ukraine. It was a military threat that got.
- [63:06]
John Podhoretz
Them to back off.
- [63:07]
Abe Greenwald
It wasn't the diplomacy. And yet it's framed in here. Once again, this is how the art of diplomacy works. No, it's. You actually used our deterrent capacity in a way that got the Russians attention. And that has not been the case ever since.
- [63:24]
Christine Rosen
I have a. I haven't. It's worse than that. Regarding this very thing. One hour in and the Ignatius piece. Yeah, the piece itself is dangerous because in Sullivan's explaining lengthy defense of Americans, Russia, Ukraine policy, the message is Putin has us scared to death of, of. With his threats of using a nuke. We have material evidence. We scrambled around to verify this and that to, to be, to, to share it with other people. At every step. We were petrified. That's bad.
- [64:07]
John Podhoretz
Well, you know what? But it's helpful at this remove because the behavior of the administration in supporting Ukraine has been as baffling as its behavior in supporting Israel in some degree, even though it's much more unambiguously supportive of Ukraine. We kept saying, why aren't you arming them more? You say you want them to win this war. Stop saying they can't have a tank or that they can't have anti aircraft weaponry or that they can't have F16s or whatever. Why are you doing that? It doesn't make sense. And so it turns out it's because they were chicken.
- [64:55]
Christine Rosen
But we infer.
- [64:56]
John Podhoretz
And they did not believe. We've always inferred it. But this, they didn't need to come out and say this makes it explicit. In other words, it wasn't like, well, we can't let them have these. They won't be able to use them and they may provoke an international incident. They'll be incompetent with them. We can't really spare them. You know, what if they use them up and then they need more and we don't have enough? There were always these, always these excuses, but the answer is that they didn't have the stones to go all in with Ukraine. And I know that sounds vulgar or it sounds whatever, but there is some really big thing there that I don't entirely understand that I think gets to what Biden and the Biden people in the foreign policy establishment are like, which is that there is something and I'm going To use the word. And you could. There is something unmanly about the way they conducted themselves over these past four years. Blinken saying, I make no apologies for. Where is this? Hold on. I make no apologies for ending America's longest war. This, I think, is a signal achievement of the President's. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan. That's an important achievement in and of itself. Americans were not dying in Afghanistan when we pulled out of Afghanistan. There had not been a combat death in Afghanistan, I believe, for 18 months before we pulled out of Afghanistan. And then there were combat deaths in the pullout. There were 13Americans killed in the pullout. You can't say that. I mean, you can say whatever you want, but. So Americans deployed in Afghanistan at very low cost for 20 years apparently was too much for Biden to take. He couldn't handle it. He wanted to end it. You know what? That's not the leadership of the planet that we are told in these two pieces. They were. That these guys were trying to show.
- [67:06]
Matthew Continetti
This is both on domestic, on his domestic record and on his foreign policy record. I mean, they're trying to wrap it all up in these final few weeks, but really, you could just write an entire book just called All Hat, no Cattle. They're boasting about stuff they never did. And if these things happened in a positive way, it was in spite of what they chose to do policy wise, not because of it.
- [67:27]
John Podhoretz
And, you know, all had no cattle is a very good way to put it. And, you know, I feel it's okay for me to say this about Biden and Blinken and Sullivan because like them, I am not a combat veteran. I did not serve in the military. And I think that they. You know, I would be loath to say such a thing. I would be loath to say such a thing about Lloyd Austin in some odd way, because of course, these are people put their lives on the line for the country, serve the country. I, I think that these guys have about them the quality of the baby boom and slightly post baby boom sense that, you know, Marshall showing Marshall strength and all of that is really high bound. And then before that, it's not really where we are.
- [68:19]
Abe Greenwald
You notice Austin is not doing any of these kind of legacy interviews, which is interesting on its own. I don't. I don't have a theory why, but, yeah, he's absent from this attempt to kind of turn the Biden administration into, you know, Team America, World police levels of success.
- [68:42]
John Podhoretz
Let me just ask in a final valediction for Tony Blinken. Because we were discussing on our infamous text chain what we made of Blinken in this interview. And slightly. I've known Tony Blinken for 30 years. He's not a friend of mine, but he's an acquaintance of long standing and he's a nice guy. He's actually a very pleasant nice guy, very interesting to talk to. And the confessions about Hamas and how America's daylight caught gave Hamas reason to not to have a ceasefire and to hold the hostages put me in two places at once, one of which is that it's as though he was seized by he somebody gave him sodium pentothal and he blurted the truth out, which means either he knew he's known the truth from the beginning, which would be horrendously contemptible, or that the defeat of the administration and the fact that it's all coming to an end has clarified something for him that he could not have seen because it was too painful to look at, which is that those hundred people who are now the subject of this frantic diplomacy in those tunnels are on his conscience and they're still. And he says, you know what? If the whole world, he basically says as mass, if the whole world had come down on Hamas and not just Israel and maybe us a little bit, but very haltingly, maybe something would have been different here. But that's a weird kind of excuse when you are the Secretary of State. It's a weird excuse because you could have come down on Hamas more and you could have, you could have said we're going to give Israel, you know, a green light to do everything and destroy everybody and kill everybody. And they didn't. I don't know whether that's admirable or contemptible. He struck me. I used this word already about Ignatius, but there is something in this piece of the fool of a kind of world historical fool. This interview with Lulu Garcia Navarro will be something that historians will study as an example of how it is that people reconcile themselves to the failures that they must be credited with.
- [71:29]
Abe Greenwald
I want to say one thing which is that for almost a year, Blinken's home, which we learn in the ft, you know, is also home to two young children and his in laws who are helping care for the children, was heckled by a pro Palestinian mob that sat across the street, which was seemingly insulated for a time by the National Park Service, which in itself was a scandal until Governor Glenn Youngkin removed them. And there's no mention of that any of the pieces, but it clearly affected him. And so this was a moment where he spoke the truth. And so it makes me believe that the word to use is kind of sad. And I wonder actually what Secretary of State Blinken in a Hillary Clinton administration would be, would be, would have been like if had October 7 happened. Because we know that the Clintons have a much more realistic view of the realities of the Middle east than Joe Biden does. And so I'm not, this is not excuse for the policies or the apology, the apologies for it, but it did just make me think that, you know, history is so contingent. Blinken, under a different president could have been a very different secretary of State.
- [72:51]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I think the sad characterization is correct. I watched the interview. I don't know if you guys watched it as well. Yeah. And if you watch it, it's particularly revealing because he looks so uncomfortable as, as he has, by the way, throughout his entire service in this administration. I think he has some personal affection for Biden, clearly a deep degree of loyalty. I agree with John. He knows the truth. I don't know when he. He knew the truth. I don't know if it was from the start or if he came around to it. And he looked like someone who could not say in full robustly what was on his mind. We got glimpses of it, but he never really came. The closest he came was to saying if the world had come down on Hamas instead of Israel, that would, that would have been something. And he said something like, I'm paraphrasing. I wonder why that is. I don't know why that didn't happen. There's an answer.
- [73:58]
Abe Greenwald
Oh yeah, yeah, I think he knows.
- [74:00]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, he knows, right?
- [74:01]
Christine Rosen
Exactly.
- [74:01]
John Podhoretz
He knows he's always invoking his stepfather, Samuel Psar, a survivor of the Holocau. And having guaranteed that he understood that he had a historical role to play in ensuring that there be no second Holocaust. He said that in his confirmation hearing. He knows not that Pisar is not himself has their moral ambiguities about Pisar's own history as a thinker and a player in foreign policy and in economics. But he knows Sullivan, I think comes across as an entirely contemptible figure in the Ignatius piece. And as I say, we're going a little long. But Matt, I wonder whether you agree with me that the Ignatius piece itself has a, has a larger valence because it is the last. We're not going to have another article like this for at least four years. The full throated kind of brain dead internationalism, you know, sort of unish world Bankish globalization ish view that Ignatius, the lead foreign policy writer for the, for the Washington Post, presents here in By Lionizing Jake Sullivan.
- [75:29]
Abe Greenwald
Well, it's still the view of many in Washington and it's a marker in the debate that's going to begin about Democratic foreign policy. And it's a brief for Sullivan's case to be the next Democratic Secretary of State. I mean, when you look at how he's championed in this piece where Ignatius compares him to Henry Kissinger, Zbig Brzezinski, George Kennan, I mean, you have to say that somehow Sullivan retains the loyalty of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, which is going to set him up for bigger and better things, as is the case usually in Washington, where you fail upward. And so I take it as a warning, this piece and a kind of a, a call to action for those of us who think this type of liberal internationalism that we've seen play out for four years has been an utter disaster for the world and brought us to the brink of a global conflagration. So that's kind of how I read it. I don't, I don't think actually that these sentiments and mentalities are going to go away.
- [76:42]
John Podhoretz
Well, Christine, if they're not going to go away, will Sullivan be viewed four years from now by the Democratic Party in 2028 as it seeks to recapture the White House and the administration? Will Sullivan seem like he's too conservative for the party? I mean, that, I think, is that, that's, that's the missing element here is that Ignatius basically says, you know, they did what they could do, but, you know, that Israel stuff just killed them. You know, and maybe if Sullivan had, you know, been able to.
- [77:19]
Matthew Continetti
But the, the credentialing, the foreign policy credentialing pipeline has yet to produce a true extremist that would reflect the activist wing of the Democratic Party right now. That's not to say that within four years one of them won't come out freshly minted, ready to be AOC's advisor on whatever policies she wants to run on. But there, but that there is an inherent conservatism in that credentialing pipeline that I think we'll still see some more Sullivan type people coming out of it. Also, he has four years to rehab his reputation, so we'll see where he goes. He could always go.
- [77:51]
Abe Greenwald
And his wife, his wife was just sworn in to the 119th Congress.
- [77:55]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, she is a Congress. Congress.
- [77:58]
Abe Greenwald
She is humorous and charming according to David Ignatius, as well as brilliant like her husband.
- [78:04]
John Podhoretz
I have not heard I have not heard much said in the way of her deep charm among the people who worked with her when she was a.
- [78:14]
Abe Greenwald
Republican she was the recipient of the single best diatribe of the 2024 campaign when the immigrant Lily Tang Williams led into her over white privilege and liberal condescension.
- [78:31]
John Podhoretz
Yeah and not living in the district.
- [78:32]
Matthew Continetti
Was it in the district yes something.
- [78:35]
John Podhoretz
Something to behold that was great but as I say I that that I was struck by the charming and and delightful characterization and David Ignatius himself being a person of limited charm and and and and very very very limited delightfulness his red in my limited experience of him his rendering of the charm and qualities of others is something that one should not necessarily take at face value.
- [79:03]
Abe Greenwald
It's a charming way to end the podcast.
- [79:05]
John Podhoretz
Yes we will end the podcast with that so I'll we'll be back tomorrow for Christine Madine of I'm John Podworth keep the camera.