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- [00:01]
Unknown Sponsor
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- [00:44]
Abe Greenwald
A.
- [00:44]
John Podhoretz
Thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
- [00:50]
Matthew Continetti
Expect a waste of for the best.
- [00:55]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, May 12, 2025. I'm John Pothorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:06]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [01:07]
John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [01:11]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:11]
John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:15]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:17]
John Podhoretz
I mean, there's so much, so much to talk about in the version of the world in which you succeed in winning a fight when you stop punching yourself in the face. Trump and China, the US And China seem to have announced some kind of a cessation in tariff hostilities, lowering tariffs mutually to 30% for three months or something like that. A battle that was started unilaterally by the United States, at least this phase of the battle. And apparently the Trump administration is now relenting on its own liberation. That's thing one, markets are surging. Everybody's very exciting. I just want to remind people that this didn't have to happen at all. That's the weirdness of it. Sort of like creating a crisis and then solving it part way temporarily, and then you get credit for solving a crisis. I don't really think that you're going to get credit for solving a crisis that basically even people who support the crisis understand was started by us. So am I.
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Christine Rosen
Well, the markets are giving him credit.
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John Podhoretz
Well, the markets are trying to figure out how to make money off the announcement. Like, I don't know that we should assume that anything is happening as the market's.
- [02:40]
Christine Rosen
I mean, I think steel is good for the economy in the sense that the embargo that we had with China since April is on pause at the very least. And it, it's of a piece of the deal struck with the United Kingdom last week where you have these arrangements. It seems like Trump wants to get to just the 10% global tariff and he's added onto that the tariffs related to fentanyl with bringing up the average tariff on Chinese imports to 30%, I believe the Chinese have lowered their tariff on American imports to China to below that. So I think it's going to prevent, it's going to prevent the trade stoppage which we were careening toward. And so I think that that's a good sign.
- [03:30]
John Podhoretz
Okay, hold on. If you set the house on fire and then you put the house out, and then you take a hose and you put the house partially on fire, you don't get credit for putting out the fire.
- [03:42]
Christine Rosen
Still better than the house burning down.
- [03:44]
John Podhoretz
Well, I agree. I mean, you're grading on a curve there. That's a pretty significant grade. The arsonist is the firefighter.
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Christine Rosen
Not saying he's not responsible for, okay, the, the chaos in the world trade, but I'm saying is this outcome is preferable to the outcome that we were about to get probably in the next couple of months.
- [04:08]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough, but how? I just, I just don't think that we want to spin this as good for the. It's, it's the. How's your wife compared to what Joke? I mean, it's like, is this good for the economy? I guess so. Didn't have to happen at all. Therefore, the lost two months and, you know, decline in the stock market of 10% and all that didn't have to happen at all in the first place. If we're back to this place and at some point people are going to go, you know, it's not good. Like a 10% across the board tariff on the entire planet is actually not good either. And so it's better than 100% or 160% on China. I suppose that's also not. I'm just saying it's going to be interesting to watch MAGA celebrate Trump's great triumph over himself. It's so great how he stopped punching us in the face.
- [05:03]
Christine Rosen
Well, I just want to, I want to point out that since Liberation Day, we've had this slow climb down. And as that climb down has happened, whether it's the pause, whether it's the exemption, whether it's the perceived momentum toward various deals, whether it's the announcement of the deal with the UK and now this announcement with the pause with China, as all of these steps have been taken, the stock market has recovered, the economic data has been okay, and Trump's disapproval rating, this is interesting. Trump's disapproval rating has been declining. So he was at like minus 11. He's now at about minus 6, minus. So what? Credit or no? And I agree he started this. Credit or no. I think that this is the right track for him and the country, as opposed to the kind of autarky that he set out in the beginning of the spring.
- [06:14]
Matthew Continetti
I mean, I'm actually, I'm a little discomforted by the fact that he keeps making these declarations, sort of aggressive declarations in this case about tariffs toward China and backing down. That actually creates a different unnecessary problem in addition to the problem that we've had over the period of this time that he was headed in the wrong direction. Then there is the issue that, you know, other leaders can really take his measure pretty simply now and say, oh, well, you know, he talks a big game and eventually he'll give up. Even if he says the day before he gives up, no, he won't give up.
- [07:00]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and the back down happens and he declares a deal. But all these are so far are frameworks for negotiations for a deal. And that's the other part that it's worth tracking if there is more backpedaling when you actually come to a deal. So he does like the theatrics of declaring Liberation Day and then declaring a deal has been made, but in each case these are just outlines and then the actual deal making, all of which could have happened without Liberation Day, could go forward. But I mean, I know they, I know the argument is it's some strategy on his part to sort of shock the system, but it's still not clear what we are getting from any of this yet. It might be too soon to tell, but the back down is real and not just on tariffs.
- [07:41]
Christine Rosen
I don't think the back down was Trump here. I really don't. I think the Chinese backed down much more quickly than people anticipated. Remember all, I don't know if they were just written a week ago, all the stories in the mainstream media about how China is ready to really sit up this trade. You know, Xi Jinping, he locked down the whole country. He can really take a lot of pain for years. Well, the fact that they went to Geneva and within 24 hours they came out and said, okay, we got something, we're both going to lure our tariffs, I think that's pretty remarkable. I have to say I did not have high hopes for this meeting. And even when they Trump truthed or posted on social media midway through that there was progress, I was like, okay, well, let's see. But the fact that they're both saying, okay, we're going to lower our trade protections down to this level for at least a 90 day period, and I have a feeling the period will be extended, means that the Chinese were at least as worried about the effects on their economy as Americans were worried about the effects on ours.
- [08:47]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but so what. I mean, that still gets to the point of what was. What is the purpose of the policy in the first place? I mean, I am very anti Chinese, as, you know, not the Chinese people, Chinese culture, the contributions of Chinese Americans, the beauty of the dream of the Red Chamber. There's all kinds of things I'm very positive about when it comes to China, but I'm very anti the Chinese Communist Party and its evil totalitarian designs on its own people in the world. But they didn't start this. So they're like, I'm trapped in a room with a crazy person. What's the least painful way to get out of this room? And then maybe we'll see in the long run how to how. I think this gets to Abe's point, what measure we take of Trump as this goes along, about whether we can just sort of either get back to zero or find some modality by which we can flatter him and flatter his need for victories in a way that we can mask our own victories as his victories and thereby get an upper hand on the United States. That's the tricky part here.
- [10:02]
Abe Greenwald
Well, it also should be seen in the context of what is clearly becoming this interesting divide on the right in Magaworld, where, I mean, we have all been pretty enthusiastic about some of the cultural efforts that the Trump administration has made. We talked a lot about several of them last week. But on the economy, he's not a free market person. I mean, now we should talk about the price control stuff. I mean, he wants to. He wants the state to control the economy at a level that no Republican before him has ever even suggested.
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John Podhoretz
Nixon.
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Abe Greenwald
Well, okay, Nixon. Yeah, but, but aside from this, that's a real. That's another debate that I think. We can't just see the tariffs in isolation and Liberation Day in isolation. We should look at all the other ways in which he wants to meddle and control and use the power of the federal government to. To impact the economy. And will it work? We don't know, but it's a very different philosophy from previous.
- [10:52]
Christine Rosen
Just to dwell for a moment on the divide in the commentary podcast than the divide and maga. China started this. I mean, we may. We started this by letting China into the WTO and giving them Most Favored nations trading status. But for 20 years, 16 years or so, they had a free ride. They took over the wto, they stole our intellectual property, they used their overcapacity to completely change the global supply chain system. Clearly their rise had some effect on American workers. The magnitude of that effect has been contested. There are studies that say it was quite large. Those are the China shock studies. There are others that say, well, in the end it all kind of worked out to the benefit of American workers in the American economy. Nonetheless, the rise of China is something that, yes, we allowed to happen, but they clearly have been exploited, exploiting. And so it was Donald Trump in 2015 who actually changed the consensus view about China's quote, unquote peaceful rise. And what we're seeing right now play out is another stage in this economic competition. I had the feeling that this was similar to the Geneva summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Of course, the two primaries weren't involved in this case in Geneva. But this is kind of the summitry of the 21st century. It's not about nuclear weapons. It's actually about trade and class and what type of economy we're going to have and how the west in particular America deals with the Chinese economy. Now how does China deal with its own economy? I mean, one of the reasons that I think China buckled so quickly is that China's economy is completely different from ours. I think we have a problem. We have a problem grasping that there are no consumers in China's economy. China's economy is completely driven by state directed investment into export, building capacity. And until China has a economy where the consumer, the individual, actually plays a sizable role and not just the consumers who live in the megacities, right, but the hundreds of millions of Chinese who live in rural poverty, right, have some agency in their own lives, this trade relationship is going to be a matter of geopolitics, right?
- [13:21]
John Podhoretz
Well, okay, so this was the game if we're going to play, if we're going to go back into 30 years of history, One of the reasons that American industry and American businesses were so excited about the opening to China and the application of what we now call the neoliberal consensus, bringing China into the fold was precisely this idea that this is the largest market in the world and it is rapidly advancing, industrializing the population. As when Deng Xiaoping said, it is good to be rich, right? Like suddenly it's like, okay, I want to sell there. Let's do whatever we can to get ourselves into that market early. And then we can. They will let them into ours, they'll come into, we'll go into theirs and everything will be great. And the Chinese did pull this switcheroo kind of where they were like, well, you have a fantastic domestic market and we're going to make sure that there's no domestic market in China. So you're right that there's a. This is a 30 year problem that some of us were warning about 30 years ago. And I'm going to play my old man card and say that in the early going of the Weekly Standard, the magazine for which Matt and Christine both worked and that I co founded, one of our signature moments in the first year of publication was the publication of an entire issue called China. The issue which was don't be seduced. They don't have rule of law.
- [14:58]
Christine Rosen
They don't.
- [14:58]
John Podhoretz
They have military designs on Taiwan. They want to destabilize the South China Sea. They have a gigantic Gulag system. This is not a Western country. They're a communist country. They will not follow the rules that we want them to follow. We need to be very, very careful with them as we go forward. And of course, all of those warnings were not heeded and we are where we are today. The question is whether the Trump approach, diagnosing stuff that was diagnosed by the neocons that every MAGA person seems to hate 20 years before Trump ever came down on the escalator. Whether the MAGA approach is a serious or unserious approach to dealing with this problem with China and China's own internal resistance to the effects of world capitalism and how it has designed itself to try to take advantage of the capitalist west without falling prey to the kinds of changes that capitalism should have wrought or should be making inside China itself. Whether they can successfully continue to run a command economy funded by the west, essentially, is what we're talking about here.
- [16:21]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and we should add the layer of, I mean, the Trump approach is to go it alone, America, alone in the world. That's why, you know, no wto the other. The other. There are other paths we could choose to still do what Trump claims he's wanting to do with China. You could use international organizations and throw the weight of the US behind them and reform them, which most of them need, and put some teeth into some of the negotiations that way. But the going it alone is the part that I think makes markets and people nervous because it is new. But it's also, you know, China has other options besides us in the world now. It has other ways to, you know, again, what it's been doing in Africa, it's been doing strategically for decades for a reason, and not in terms of consumer markets, but in terms of resources and infrastructure. So I think that we have to see this also as a question of whether global international institutions any longer are a path. And I know Maga says no neocons, and I think conservatives in general have largely been, I think, wisely skeptical of the role of international institutions. But he, he needs to articulate why the America alone policy is going to work. Because this back and forth and the chaos is not actually a sustainable way of doing business.
- [17:34]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that's a fair point, but let's face it, like, if you take the entire continent of Africa where they have made all these, you know, inroads in terms of belt and road and all of that, it's like an eighth of the, of the, of the GDP of the United States.
- [17:56]
Abe Greenwald
Right, but then add your.
- [17:57]
John Podhoretz
An eighth. An entire continent. I know, but I'm just saying that like they're having other people to play around with or like, or like rook or steal from or whatever. We're still, yeah, we're the biggest 800 pound gorilla. And like, okay, so that's Trump's leverage, right? It's like, I don't think we should look at this and say, you know, think about the China and the liberalizing world. Is the China's, you know, getting ahead of us and being able to do business in a lot of other places. There are no other places. I mean, there are, there are plenty of other places. Don't, don't get me wrong. But again, the trade off here was supposed to be that they got access to us. They were small at the time, but growing and they were going to develop a consumer market. We would get access to them and it would all come out in the wash. And they have done whatever they can. Despite this unprecedented world historical growth in the size of their economy and their GDP and all of that, they have managed to make the Chinese market a not particularly fertile place for us to plow. And they're here making bank. And so yes, there is. It's not that, that isn't something that should be dealt with. It was predictable that this was going to happen because people predicted it 30 years ago when, you know, everybody who, a lot of people who are now screaming about this were running off to China to try to figure out how they could do better there. Right? I mean, if you talked about the fights that took place over the liberalization of our policy toward China, those who were warning had no voice because the entire phalanx of American industry, from the nascent tech sector to old automobile, everything was like, let us in, we want to get in there. How can you stop us from getting in, you're going to let you know Germany is going to sell more cars there than we will. It's like no one's going to sell cars there. They're going to make our cars.
- [20:12]
Christine Rosen
Now I think the problem for Germany in the next 10 years is that the Chinese will be selling more cars in China, in Germany than Germans sell to themselves.
- [20:21]
John Podhoretz
Right, exactly.
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Christine Rosen
I don't want that future for the United States.
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John Podhoretz
Right, okay.
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Christine Rosen
That's why I completely support the tariffs on the BYD Chinese electric vehicles. Right, right. As long as that communist power party is in power in China, it's not good that they have this amount of.
- [20:36]
John Podhoretz
Influence and they have that. And of course they're also making those car according to international trade laws that they joined in and all that. They are dumping the cars. Right. They are making the cars at.
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Christine Rosen
I mean they can't. You can't say that we have to rely on international institutions when each of the international institutions has been corrupted by China, whether it's the wto, whether it's who. The UN of course, has been useless since the beginning. I mean, right after it acknowledged the state of Israel, it's been useless. So you know it. This is going to come down to the competition between the United States and China. And the question is who owns the future and who owns technology? And so if this is a, these trade negotiations and fights are a way to kind of force, force people to move their production outside China, even if pass throughs like in Southeast Asia or something, or Mexico, I think that's probably a net positive for the United States.
- [21:39]
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- [21:41]
John Podhoretz
You know, if you ask nine experts.
- [21:42]
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- [24:20]
John Podhoretz
Quint.com commentary okay, just to close the circle out on this. So the question then is, are tariffs the way to do this or is this the dumbest possible way to fight this trade war? And a lot of people think it's the dumbest possible way to fight the trade war, but nonetheless, here we are and we're just having a dispute over whether or not Trump will deserve credit for, as I say, having set the house on fire and then put out, you know, the put out one of the wings while slowly letting the other part continue to burn. We'll see what happens in three months. But we should let's get let's move on to Trump's domestic economic policy as expressed by this truth last night that he is announcing, probably as we're podcasting, the release of an executive order, which I don't think, once again, like a lot of these executive orders, he actually has the power to do by executive order to lower the cost of all prescription drugs by 80%. I don't believe the president can wave his hand and lower the cost of prescription drugs by 80%. There are many things the president and the administration can do to lower prescription drug costs in part by using modalities that he's not even talking about using in the truth. Right. Which is the government's purchasing power through its purchase of prescription drugs through Medicare and Medicaid. And whether he. That we. He can unilaterally set a price level for the government purchase of material that will effectively create this. That doesn't. That wasn't what was in the truth. Can't do it as a domestic matter. Doesn't have the power to regulate an industry that way. But it does suggest that he is going populist with this issue. That is extremely hard. It is in fact to be fair to him or to be fair to Republican. It is very hard to explain to people why Americans pay three to four times or they don't really pay because of insurance but why the list price of drugs in the United States is 3 to 4 to 5 to 10 times what it is in. In. In other countries. And you say that to an American. They're like that's not fair. I don't understand that. Why is that fair?
- [26:42]
Abe Greenwald
Because we don't have single payer health care like the European countries that negotiate these contracts with the drug manufacturers do. I mean it's that it is actually pretty simple to explain.
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John Podhoretz
It's that. And there's also that we don't ration. So we don't have rationing. Although you can claim that rationing a.
- [26:55]
Abe Greenwald
Lot of R and D which these other countries do not.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Christine Rosen
Can I just quote?
- [26:58]
John Podhoretz
But it's hard. It's hard nonetheless. It is hard. Right.
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Christine Rosen
I just want to quote from this RAND study that was published in 2008 regulating drug prices US policy alternatives in a global context. And it's right here. Increasing price controls in general price controls reduced life expectancy over time. The price control scenario simulated the effect of a 20% reduction in manufacturer revenue while holding consumers out of pocket prices. Constant price controls would have small negative effects on life expectancy for current cohorts but more significant negative effects in the future. And so I do think that this RAND is nonpartisan, you know, empirically based. These price controls have big consequences when it comes to drug companies and pharma in particular R and D. Right. And when we're sitting on this threshold, especially of the MRNA revolution, the potential for really life changing vaccines. These price controls could be deadly in, in the long run. We, I think Christine is right. We don't want our health care system to resemble Europe's. We don't want to resemble Europe in hardly any way. Maybe like I said a couple of weeks ago, more violin players in the parks. That's the only way the coffee is good, you know, but really, it's not. It's not something that we should be aiming towards. So I think this is very. It's bad policy. And the problem, of course, is that it's good politics. And.
- [28:28]
Abe Greenwald
Well, that's why. And RFK Jr. Is going to be at the ceremony at the signing for a reason. It is a lot of this. The subtweet of this is the MRNA stuff and the Maha stuff and all of the skepticism about a lot of pharma and vaccination in particular.
- [28:42]
Matthew Continetti
Well, yeah, you know, this will work to. If you're worried about big pharma innovation, price controls also. Shut it down or slow it. Yeah.
- [28:55]
John Podhoretz
It is beyond belief that the event that more than any other, I think, shaped the Republican or conservative resistance to aggressive Democratic efforts to find a New Deal after the financial meltdown in 2008, 2009, that gave rise to the Tea Party, that gave rise to the Republican revolt, that gave rise to Trump, even though it looks. The stages are much more complicated, largely involved the question of whether or not the government should have the power to impose price controls on American medicine. That was Obamacare. That was the entire fight over Obamacare. It united the right. It had an enormous political effect that is still going on. And now, essentially, Trump is adopting a key element of Obamacare, which is price controls, as his main health care policy. And it's only. What is it? It's 13 years since the Supreme Court decided that Obamacare was constitutional in one of the worst Supreme Court decision.
- [30:11]
Christine Rosen
I have a comment on that. But I would also say, of course, the intervening event was the pandemic.
- [30:17]
John Podhoretz
Right, Right.
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Christine Rosen
I mean, and that's. The pandemic seems to have shifted the public's views, in particular, the Republican Party's views on pharma. Right. In a way that there was always a populist kind of discontent about pharma, but now it is in the mainstream of the Republican Party. And the union of MAGA and maha, dating to last August, has proven to be a remarkably powerful force in modern American politics. And yet whether it's our new surgeon general designate or whether it's RFK appearing at this announcement for the price controls, or whether it's the fact that, you know, there's a measles epidemic going on right now and we're coping with it, we're not really full bore telling everybody to get their children vaccinated for measles. Right. You can see that it evident everywhere. Just on the Obamacare decision. I was thinking about this over the weekend because I was reading these articles about the Supreme Court justices, you know, standing up for the judiciary and the rule of law. Sotomayor gave a classically ridiculous Sotomayor speech. Justice Jackson had a comment. But, you know, Chief Justice John Roberts also made an intervention last week where he said, you know, it's the responsibility of the court to, of course, adjudicate cases. And then he added, while also checking the excesses of the executive and the Congress. And I said, oh, that's funny. That's really funny. Because in his decision on Obamacare in 2012, Chief Justice Roberts said it was not their job, it was not the nine's job to correct Congress's mistakes. And that's why we still have Obamacare and we've got, you know, we had the mandate until the 27 tax bill, 2017 tax bill. But it is a, it is just a noteworthy turnaround, I think. Yes, we've gone from checking.
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John Podhoretz
Yes.
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Christine Rosen
So letting them, let them make their mistakes to now it's our job to check the excesses.
- [32:27]
John Podhoretz
So let's. So the situation we find ourselves in then politically is there are opportunities for the Democratic Party in these wild shifts in Republican direction towards statism, toward anti free market, sort of anti liberalism in the world economy and stuff like that. And they're not going to take them. They're not going to take the opportunities. Because let's take what you mentioned about the pandemic and about China as an example. Trump's looking like he is willing to confront China. Biden spent four years talking about how we need to reorient our approach in the world in the 21st century, toward the Pacific, because the great challenges, the great challenges are in the Pacific challenges. But he didn't do much, didn't actually because means confrontation. Challenges mean confrontation. Challenges mean changes in policy. It might mean arming Taiwan. It might mean supporting the nuclearization of Japan. It might mean 10,000 other things, including trying to lever Indian financial power as a, as a manufacturing hub, as against China's power. But the Democratic Party is the party of international appeasement and doing things through these wonderful, you know, multinational organizations that, as Matt said, a lot are now in the pocket of China. Trump and the Republicans, therefore, have a free field. And we can talk domestically about some of this, have a kind of free field because they're the only ones who are willing to talk confrontation. I mean, Democrats are happy to talk confrontation with Trump personally or with, you know, institutions of MAGA like Fox News or whatever. But they remain the party of American wimpishness. I don't know how else to put it. Like, they remain a party that says America should not be exercising its power in pursuit of the American interest and in pursuit of the American taxpayer. We are citizens of the world. We're here to help govern the world and be friendly and fair and not make terrible mistakes that are mean to other people. And as a result, they can't negotiate this Trump atmosphere in a way that will allow them, as would conventionally be the case, to take on the other side of the argument on the tariffs with China. They don't have language to talk about that themselves because they're not free marketeers either.
- [35:27]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I mean, that's the big upshot of this, is that the free market position is shrinking and doesn't really have much of a foothold in either political party in the age of Trump. I mean, there are still free market Republicans. They're being, you know, obscured or defeated in some of these debates internally because of Trump's own decisions and position. And so it's created a politics where Trump is announcing this executive order to reduce prescription drug prices, which, you know, probably won't stand in court and is going to be challenged, but nonetheless, it's a political move for him while the Democrats are, you know, trying to break into ICE facilities. Right. I mean, that's the contrast that's happening in American politics right now. And I'll just say that it's very similar to, as we brought up already in the podcast, to Nixon. You know, I mean, when Nixon wins that reelection in 72, this idea of a new majority was very much current. And in fact, Patrick Buchanan wrote a small book called the New Majority, which came out in 1973. And the idea behind the new majority was kind of drawn from Disraeli in the 19th century British context, where you'd have Tory men and Whig measures. Right. You'd have these people who are conservatives, and yet they would basically co op the liberal program and thus cement their authority. Now, now we kind of have, you know, Republican men and MAGA measures, where it's, it's, it's people who are Republicans with an R at their end of the name, but they're adopting maga, economic nationalism and populism. And it's meant to kind of put in place the pillars of the coalition that elected Trump last year. I'll just say that things did not end well for Nixon. And the takeaway of the conservative movement from the Nixon years was actually that you needed to have a president who was grounded in conservative principle, both in foreign and domestically, and that was Reagan. But that lesson has been forgotten over time.
- [37:53]
John Podhoretz
Okay, well, it was half. Sorry.
- [37:56]
Matthew Continetti
But also, I mean, you know, Trump has imported, certainly this time around, other foreign policy aspects of the Democratic platform, namely trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
- [38:15]
John Podhoretz
Well, trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran and negotiating weirdly with ourselves when it comes to an adversary that speaks Russian, because of course we have. Which was very much the case with detente, in which the United States was kind of, again, negotiating with itself over what we were willing to accept as part of Russia's or Soviet Union's strength, because they didn't really have any negotiating power with us per se. And we actually had negotiating power with them that the Nixon administration and the Ford administration hated. Right. Which was the imposition of certain kinds of restrictions on the Soviet economy through the Jackson Vanek Amendment that limited Soviet economic exports and stuff like that because of their treatment of Soviet Jewish immigration matters. And the administration, rather than saying, look, you need to deal with us because we got these lunatics over here in the Senate and they're like, make. Let the Jews out and maybe we can, like, make good deals together. They go. They were angry about it. They didn't like Jackson Vanek. They didn't like being able to use the American system as a lever against the Soviet Union. And what did Trump do this weekend? He frustrated with the fact that he's not. That the peace deal between Ukraine and Russia is going nowhere, turns once again to the person that he seems to feel like he can pressure. Zelensky and says, go for a ceasefire anyway, even if Russia says it's not going to cease, you should do it. Just do it. Don't wait for them. It's like, what are you taught? Why are you negotiating with yourself? Like, why. Why is. Why are you giving Ukraine unilateral negotiating advice? That's not. I thought you were the art of the deal guy. Their lever is that they're not willing to end the war. And so you're saying, end the war, end the war yourself. And we're going to get to Gaza in a minute because this is about the administration, just to fill in the.
- [40:28]
Christine Rosen
Details on Ukraine, what the developments are there. So Zelenskyy was meeting with the European leaders in Kiev to discuss more European support when there was this ongoing argument, you know, Putin said that there would be a ceasefire during the victory day celebrations in Moscow. Zelensky has been calling for the 30 day ceasefire in concert with the Trump administration and the Europeans. Then Putin kind of pivoted and said, well, I'm going to send a team to Istanbul this, this week to begin negotiation, resume negotiations between Russia and Ukraine over a potential ceasefire. And that's where Trump intervened on Truth Social, saying, let's have the meeting, let's do it. That's right. It'd be crazy not to. Then, very interestingly, Zelensky, in another sign that I think he's beginning to know how to operate under this administration, said, I'm going to go to Istanbul and I'm challenging Putin to come to me and let's have a face to face meeting. And that's where things stand as we record this on the morning of Monday, May 12. Russia has not given any signal that Putin will go to Istanbul. Very unlikely that Putin will go. And so then it's a question of how Zelensky will play it. Will he go? Will he make a show that Putin is not beating him? Is he doing everything he can in Trump's eyes to suggest that he wants to have a cessation of hostilities right now? I think he is. And that's the key, because the more that you can show Trump that it's Putin that's the obstacle, the more likely you get continued military sales to Ukraine, which are happening. We just authorized more patriots for their defense. And also the continued intelligence support, which, as I've mentioned before, Frederick Kagan and my colleague at AEI believes is absolutely essential. And then finally, the possibility of additional sanctions, US Sanctions on Russia, which will be necessary.
- [42:40]
John Podhoretz
Right. Again, the question I was just going to Trump's own psychology here, which is staging interventions on Putin's behalf effectively toward Ukraine, which is a version of him negotiating with himself. And that this is a weird herald back to how we handled Russia about the Soviet Union. We were more powerful than they were, our economy was twice their size, all of that. And then we failed to lever our authority with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. But rather kind of, we're having an argument, internal domestic argument, over how confrontational we wish to be with, with the Russians rather than, rather than accepting the confrontation and then functioning within it. That was, that was the weird detente conundrum that never really quite made any sense. And so just to move now south down to the Middle east, we have three things going on at once, right? We have a nuclear negotiation with, with Iran, Simultaneously, we have movement in Gaza. The announcement of the release of the Israeli American hostage, Adan Alexander, which apparently will either happen today or tomorrow. And Steve Witkoff, who was negotiating everything, you know, including whatever, including whether or not Trump gets a plane from Qatar, which we're going to have to talk about in a minute, too, saying that he doesn't see why Israel is going on and what we need now is a ceasefire with Hamas and. Enough, enough already. Pretty much, says Steve Witkoff, flush with the triumph of getting a single hostage out if he wishes to deem that a triumph. Another situation in which somebody. Trump, is giving Hamas credit, effectively in a tweet, without naming Hamas for its good faith efforts in releasing a person that they have no right, that never had any right to hold, and whom they've been torturing for 560 days, along with another 20 Israelis who are sitting there in hell, still alive and, and, and, and increasingly hopeless. And Steve Wyckoff is now essentially staging an intervention into Israeli politics by saying, it's time to end this thing. Let's just find a way to a ceasefire. It's pretty staggering. Again, why are we negotiating with ourselves? Like what, what is the point? Hamas is on the ropes and is nearly about to die. The only thing that is keeping them alive is the fact that they are holding the hostages. We can maybe figure out a way to negotiate with them, to get them out, to get the leadership out without being killed. That's the lever that we have. But on the one hand, we're unilaterally negotiating with ourselves over Iran, and we're unilaterally negotiating ourselves over Gaza.
- [46:08]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I mean, Alexander News. While, of course, cheering for him and his family and the potential release of future hostages is another sign that America is separating itself from Israel's national security challenges. The first sign was the announcement that we would negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. The second was our ceasefire with the Houthis. And now we have this, the direct negotiation with Hamas over hostages, in particular, Idan Alexander, who had been very important in kind of Trump's conception of, of, of the hostages, as the media reported, ports, you know, the last living American hostage. Though I've seen some people on social media quibble with that designation. That's certainly how the American political class thinks about Adan Alexander. And this is troubling for supporters of Israel in the United States. You know, the question is always daylight or no daylight between the United States and Israel. Are we going to have a policy where we stand with the, With Israel? We have its back. We are prepared to support what the Israeli government deems is necessary for the security of the state of Israel. Or like during Obama and to an extent under Biden, will there be daylight? Will there be separation between the US Government policy and the Israeli policy? Now with the Trump administration, we see this delinkage that I described just a moment ago. While our ambassador to the United States, ambassador to the state of Israel, Mike Huckabee, is saying there's still no daylight, Trump himself has publicly tweeted that he and Netanyahu agree on every issue. This is a post from a couple weeks ago after their last phone call. Certain officials in both governments are saying, don't, don't worry about this. We're still supporting Israel. But at some point, the rhetoric and the reality diverge to such an extent, you have to begin to wonder. This is also the case that as Trump embarks for his trip to the Middle east in a few hours, after we, we talk here this morning, he's not going to Israel. He's going just to the Gulf. And it's been reported that when he's at the summit later this week, he'll be meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, in addition to the King of Jordan and the new president of Syria.
- [49:01]
Matthew Continetti
So, and there's also the suggestion out there that the administration no longer is the ask from the Saudis is no longer to normalize relations with Israel in order for Saudi to proceed with nuclear work.
- [49:23]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. For us to help them with their civil nuclear program and kind of a hedge, as we've talked about on the podcast, against the Iranian nuclear program. Right. So there, so there are these points of departure. And I think this is a place where supporters of Israel and Congress really need to, really need to step up when they aren't, you know, trying to combat hit pieces published against them in New York magazine.
- [49:48]
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- [50:28]
Christine Rosen
Minutes.
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- [50:47]
John Podhoretz
We should have a conversation now about the Air Force Q issue.
- [50:53]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, Air Force Q.
- [50:56]
John Podhoretz
You like it?
- [50:57]
Christine Rosen
Don't tell General Flynn. Maybe that's how we stop it.
- [51:04]
John Podhoretz
First of all, I don't actually understand how this can work. Can we talk about. So Trump has said, very proudly said last night, we're getting. America's gonna get a fantastic new plane entirely for free. And Democrats are whining about it. That's how. Basically, yes, you should add the other.
- [51:30]
Abe Greenwald
Person who's gotten this deal, Erdogan. This is the other group that Cutter gave Erdogan the exact same deal. Exact. Probably not as lavish a plane, but still.
- [51:40]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so just to, just to deal with the question of whether or not this plane, which was originally going to be given to the non existent Trump library and is now going to go to the Trump library after the administration is over, there is no Trump library and therefore he will be able to use the plane, according to what we're reading, after the administration is over, as his own private plane. It's Trump's plane until such time as it is parked at the Trump Library that will never be built because he's not. He doesn't care about the Trump library. I mean, I guess maybe they'll build a part of the deal wing. Yeah, we'll see. He made no moves to build a library. He isn't, you know, maybe he'll build a library. He was planning his will pay for it. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Anyway, Air Force One is one of the most technologically advanced pieces of equipment on the planet Earth. It involves continuity of government. In the event of a nuclear war, it has communications facilities on it and communications apparatus on it that we don't even know exist on the planet Earth. In order for us to take this plane from gutter, we are going to have to take it, disassemble it piece by piece by piece, make sure that there are no listening devices or intelligence features in it that the gutteries will have put on it, and then reassemble it and then assemble it in some fashion in which we can then install all of the stuff that you need on Air Force One for it to be Air Force One. So that the President can communicate in case, you know, Washington D.C. is knocked out in a nuclear exchange. I don't think this is ever going to happen. These planes are built by, have been built and passed by American defense contractors who are interwoven into our national security apparatus and system. People who have incredibly high levels of security clearance in order to build craft like this. How we involve gutteries in it, I don't even begin to understand. And therefore we get right smack dab into the emoluments issue. Why on earth would he want this? What does he care whether the government spends $600 million on a new Air Force One or not? He doesn't care about.
- [54:11]
Christine Rosen
Wants a new.
- [54:12]
Abe Greenwald
He wants the plane. Right.
- [54:13]
Christine Rosen
He wants a new plane.
- [54:14]
Abe Greenwald
And Boeing delayed.
- [54:16]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, he put in the order for the new plane during his first term.
- [54:19]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [54:20]
Christine Rosen
And Boeing has now delayed the arrival of the new plane until 2027 at the earliest.
- [54:25]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [54:26]
Christine Rosen
In another example of the bureaucratic demosclerosis that is preventing us from re reviving our power. Right. The same thing that's harmed our defense industrial base. Right. That backlog all our weapons stocks. These big, these big defense contractors, you're right, they're entirely woven into our national security. And yet they couldn't get Trump's plane to him when he wanted it. Right. And so now, sensing another opportunity, and the second Trump administration is a land of opportunity for the cutteries, right? They come along and they say, we'll give you the plane. And look at this plane. It's a palace in the sky, Mr. President, it is beautiful. I mean, it's really decked out. You're going to love it. And he's like, okay. And his lawyers, the Trump lawyers, his.
- [55:20]
John Podhoretz
Lawyers, his lawyers among them, okay, this among them, guttery among them, this is.
- [55:26]
Abe Greenwald
The part that I think is going to stick in the crowd. A lot of Americans who otherwise would be like, he needs a plane. It's fine. Pam Bondi used to be a lobbyist for Qatar, as have several other high level figures in the Trump administration. So this idea that she is somehow objective, if he actually wanted to make this happen, he would appoint an outside independent person to look at the legality of it, who would then issue a report. But to have Pam Bondi, who five minutes ago was cashing checks from Qatar, saying that this is totally legit, that it is not. That is not how we do things.
- [55:56]
Christine Rosen
So here's why I think that, that John is right. And this probably won't happen, though. You never know. Right? And that is Laura Loomer is against it. And so when you have Laura, yeah.
- [56:10]
John Podhoretz
When you look influencer, Mike Waltz is.
- [56:13]
Christine Rosen
Gone, who is very influential in MAGA world and in the White House. She came out with a very strong post saying this is not a good look to accept this play. And there are other people. Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary and now Fox personality, big following online. He also said, so there's a split, I think, among Trump supporters whether this is a good thing or not. And of course it's not a good thing. And so I have a feeling that there's a wedge here that could prevent it from happening. But just to kind of broaden the aperture a little bit, the connections between Qatar and the Trump family and Trump's main aide Steve Witkoff and his family are pretty remarkable when you consider the world. Liberty Financial, I think, is the name of the, of the crypto company that Trump, the Trump Coin and the Melania Coin have and its connections with Qatari financing. The Don Jr. Is very close up to his partner, Omid Malik, who has connections to the cutteries, whether it's in Don Junior's companies or whether it's in the new executive club that they're, that they're launching in Georgetown. So when you, when you look at all of this, these connections, you have to be troubled. And you also have to acknowledge that the second the Democrats get a gavel in Congress, this will be the scandal of the day. I mean, this will be a huge story about the connections between the Trump family, between Wipkoff and the cutteries. And if this plane actually comes into the president's possession, I mean, you have this, you have Cuttergate, right? And there's, you know, maga's flexing right now. They've been in this flex mode ever since they won last November. But this could be a huge blow to Trump's presidency and Trump's movement if the Democrats are able to exercise their investigative powers to show what's going on.
- [58:37]
Abe Greenwald
Here and poor judgment, it shows poor judgment on Trump's part. That's actually the thing. Unlike the crypto stuff, which many people don't understand, a big old, almost half a million dollar plane given to us by a foreign government, that's pretty clear to most people. That's not, that's poor judgment. And I'm still, I still think it's the security issue that's the greatest problem there, because you're right, there is no way we should put our president, whoever he or she is, into a plane built by a foreign government that's just not safe. That's unwise.
- [59:07]
Matthew Continetti
It also, by the way, as a window into like his psychology. It's the exact kind of thing that he goes for every time, which is like, they're giving me something. This is great. And it broadcasts exactly how anyone can get to him with just what is in relative terms to the kinds of things that the US Spends on and even his own personal wealth. It's a pretty petty gift, you know.
- [59:38]
John Podhoretz
In relation, the issue of how to deal with foreign potentates presenting gifts to the President or his people is a very long standing problem with American diplomacy. If I remember correctly, Richard Allen, the first national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, was undone because somebody gave him three watches, came to his office, presented him with three watches, which he then put in a safe in his office and locked it because he didn't know what to do. Like it was a gesture. He can't accept the watches. You know, that's a bribe. He can't accept the watches. He doesn't know what to do. They haven't worked out. It's just the new administration, they haven't worked out how they're handling these matters. He puts them in the safe locks, it forgets, becomes a huge scandal. Nine months later, three watches. Okay, so we're now 40 some odd years later and the President is accepting a plane from the people who are hosting Hamas in their hotel in the Five in the four in the Five Seasons, in the Four Seasons Hotel in their capital, negotiating for them, paying for anti American centers on campuses, spending billions of dollars over the last 20 years to change Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, all of that. And so the word is in the Constitution. The word is emolument. This is one of the unquestionably impeachable and convictable offenses in the Constitution. And Trump is playing, you know, I only have one term. I'll do whatever the hell I want. And if he wants to get impeached three more times, please go right ahead, Mr. President. Follow this path. It's really great. It's almost as though the Biden and Trump families are locked in a fascinating dance in which when Hunter took the money right from the Middle east and from China and took $10 million or something like that, everybody else, everybody reared in horror at the idea that the President's son or the vice president's son could like take advantage of the presidency in this matter. And this president's children are like, What a loser. 10 million, 5 billion. That's what I'm saying. If we're going to be selling access to our office. This is America, God darn it. We're going to get five, $10 billion out of these guys. They got it. They got it to lose. We'll take it. We'll take it in crypto. We'll take it in a plane, we'll take it in a club in Washington. They are playing with fire because it matters what the Democrats have on you. If the Democrats get the gavel in 2019, in 2027. Right. It matters whether it's junk or real. I mean, there's a real charge, I believe, no, Rothman didn't believe. I believe the Ukraine charge in the first impeachment was junk. And Nancy Pelosi, I think, thought it was junk also and didn't want to pursue that impeachment. There is not a single Democrat, and there are probably some Republicans who will, when 2027 rolls around, if they get the gavel, be like, we got to look into this very seriously.
- [63:14]
Christine Rosen
A couple, a couple of things. I mean, the first thing is that, you know, there is an outside chance, not a likelihood, but an outside chance that the Democrats could win both chambers of Congress next year. Now, interestingly on that question, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she is not interested in running for the Senate. And so I think that was something of a relief to many Georgia Republicans and to many people at the Republican Senate Committee. But there is, you never know. Right now, Trump would not be convicted even if The Democrats get 50 seats or 51 seats in the Senate next year. But it does make a big difference as to how the trial would go. Right? Because Trump's first two impeachments were held with the Republicans in control. Though I guess the second one, the trial happened with the 50, 50 Senate because it was after this, wearing it. Nonetheless, it's just a different thing. And you don't, you don't want that happen. And the second point is, we're at this, you know, a little bit over 100 days into the second Trump term. And I continue to believe that there are two different ways this term can go. I mean, there's a way that you could see a pretty successful term. At least I can. But if the Democrats win even the House next year, the last two years of Trump's second term will be very ugly. I mean, I mean, we kind of had a preview in 2019 and 2020. And I don't, I don't see why, if you were a Republican, you would do anything that would make that likelier or make it potentially uglier. And the cuttery plane, it seems to me, is something that would make but okay things bad.
- [65:05]
John Podhoretz
This is very important because it goes to opportunity cost questions, Christine, by which I mean a cleaner Trump administration forces the Democrats to do what? Defend Harvard, defend dei, defend transports, defend.
- [65:23]
Abe Greenwald
Illegal immigrants committing crimes in this country.
- [65:27]
John Podhoretz
All of this ground, and would give them no offense, would give them very little in the way of offense. That would throw Republicans on the defensive and the gutter stuff from stem to stern, as Laura Loomer herself suggests, throws them on the back foot. And it's. It's the worst. It's not the only example of it, probably, but it's obviously the worst. And it, and it extends over five or six different issues. That's why it's so horrifying. It extends over Hamas, it extends over Iran, it extends over crypto policy.
- [66:05]
Abe Greenwald
And the economy. The economy, actually, if the economy is booming, a lot of people are willing to overlook a lot of the details of things like, like, you know, even potentially impeachable offenses. But the economy is not where he's going to want it if they do lose the House and possibly the Senate. I mean, that's. People are not super. However much his, his negative ratings might be declining a little bit, people are still not optimistic right now. And that's actually what he needs. He needs some feeling of optimism and momentum to, to allow him to do these bold, potentially unconstitutional things. And then the smackdown, then he goes into defensive I'm the warrior for you mode. I just don't. There's so many own goals here. Just so many own goals.
- [66:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Matt, you have a recommendation?
- [66:51]
Christine Rosen
I do, John. Thank you. I'd like to recommend a book that has just been published called Melting Point, Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land by the author Rachel Cockrell. I forget actually how I came across this book, but it is probably the best book I've read this year so far. Melting Point is a Family History. It's a look back at Rachel Cockrell's family history. She's British, but as she was uncovering her family history, she came across a much larger story, a story about Zionism, about the beginnings of the Zionist movement, and then also about a early split in the Zionist movement, the division between the followers of Theodore Herzl, who believed that Israel was the only place for a Jewish national home, and then the followers of the playwright and man of letters, Israel Zangwil, who, when told, basically informed by the British government that Israel was not in the offing, that Palestine was not the place for Jewish National Settlement and then offered instead a part of Uganda, Kenya. Zangwill seized on it and he split a group separate from the Zionist Congress called the ITO or the Jewish Territorial Office, which began a decade long search for a place other than Israel for the Jews to settle. And Cockrell's great grandfather was his right hand man. And we then divert to one potential place where the ITO wanted to settle, which is Galveston, Texas. So a lot of the book is about the Galveston Plan. This plan organized with the Jewish American financier Jacob Schiff to settle as many Jews as possible in Galveston of all places. About 20,000 plus actually arrived there in the beginning of the 20th century. Then the book veers back to England and her great uncle's relationship with Zev Jabotinsky. And we get into Japotinsky's warnings, I mean, just amazingly passionate and of course, completely prescient warnings about the fate of the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and why it was so necessary to leave and to go to Israel as quickly as possible possible. And the innovation of the book, which is completely gripping, is that there's no narrative. It's told entirely through primary sources, newspaper articles, oral histories, speeches, book extracts. And the net effect of it is that the deeper you get into the story, the more you become kind of immersed in the world. There's no kind of authorial voice mediating this narrative. And so I've just been blown away by the portraits of the early Zionist congresses and the way in which you get to kind of perceive in real time figures like Herzl and Jabotinsky and Weitzman and Zangwill, who I really did not know much about other than his authorship of the Melting Pot play. You get to actually see how Theodore Roosevelt reacted to the play's debut in Washington and how he jumped up from his seat and also spent a lot of time apparently flirting with Zangle's wife from the newspaper accounts. Anyway, Melting Point is just an amazing book. I really recommend it. I think that you'll be as entranced by it as I was.
- [70:35]
John Podhoretz
So it's Rachel Cockrell. I think that's C O C K.
- [70:37]
Christine Rosen
R E L L E R E.
- [70:40]
John Podhoretz
L L. Yeah, British writer. She is.
- [70:42]
Christine Rosen
This is her first book.
- [70:44]
John Podhoretz
She's 30 years old.
- [70:45]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, it's her first book. And it's pretty amazing. Not just for the story, which is kind of incredible. I mean, I'm barely touching the surface, but just the technique, you know, and it makes. It actually opens a whole kind of world for nonfiction where the ability to kind of put together a story just through primary sources has not really been done before in quite this way. And anyway, as a historian, it excites me as well.
- [71:15]
John Podhoretz
Melting Point by Rachel Cockrell. Great recommendation. We'll be back tomorrow. For Matt, Christine and Abe, I'm John. Pod Horiz. Keep the camel.