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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary. Go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary Hope for the expect the wor some.
- [02:25]
Abe Greenwald
Preacher pain some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst.
- [02:38]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, October 30, 2025. I am John Pot Hord, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [02:51]
Christine Rosen
Hi John.
- [02:52]
John Podhoretz
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [02:55]
Matthew Continetti
Hi John.
- [02:57]
John Podhoretz
Washington Commentary and columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.
- [03:00]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [03:01]
John Podhoretz
And Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [03:05]
Seth Mandel
Hi John.
- [03:07]
John Podhoretz
So Donald Trump just met with Chinese Premier Xi and once again seems to be trying to Unravel the crisis that he kind of made and claims to have had great success doing so. As far as I can tell, they seem to have postponed all of their conflicts for a year. He's lowering tariffs. Xi is going to allow rare earth minerals to be exported. He's going to buy some soybeans. Very big purchase of soybeans. Very exciting. And capping this trip, that, on the one hand, seems to have been a great success because he reestablished his ties with Japan. He made it clear that he was a friend of South Korea, which is complicated country ideologically now for him and for us. And yet I can't get out of my head the idea that he, he dug a hole that he is now trying to fill, or that he made a worldwide planetary confrontation, that he is now trying to calm down, and that if you go back and rewind the tape, what would this year have been like without the tariff stuff? You would have had a year in which he did Doge, had a year in which he did border enforcement. You had a year in which he brought this remarkable series of attacks and ceasefires to Israel and Gaza, got Europe once again to agree to play a vastly larger role in its own defense. So I don't know what the positive is of the tariff stuff and how much, even though it does seem to be his deepest and longest lived policy bias or conviction. I just feel like he would be in if he had, if he had gone down a different path and not gone down this path, he would have been a happier and more and more successful president.
- [05:40]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I think we should distinguish between his trade practices vis a vis our allies. So Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and his trade practices vis a vis our competitor or adversary, China. And so we all knew that Trump was going to try to gain some leverage over China, especially with regard to China's support for Putin's war in Ukraine in a second term. And so just look at kind of the components of the tariffs. The tariff that he agreed to lower after meeting with Xi Jinping deals with fentanyl. It's a tariff that he put on China because of China's role in composing the precursor chemicals of the fentanyl that comes and pour poisons so many Americans. Conversely, China, in response to American export controls, instituted this policy of the rare earth restrictions a couple of weeks ago, which led to Trump's threat of the 100% tariff, which also seems to be on pause as a result of this deal. I think if we just take a step back, Trump as a political figure, I mean, There are many different aspects of his, of the phenomenon, but one is this centrality of China. He was the first candidate really in 2016 in either party to talk about China as an adversary. He moved to a much more conflictual posture toward China in his first term. The tariffs that he imposed on China in his first term were maintained by his Democratic successor. And in fact, Joe Biden's China policy was led by people who are hawkish on China, much like the people who staff Trump's first term. I think in the second term, Trump has taken a different approach. He's, he's trying, in my view, Trump is trying to prepare the country for war. Not necessarily that we're going to go to war with China, but what would we need to do if we did go to war with China? One thing we would need to do is make our military less interested in green energy and political correctness and more energy and more interested in war fighting. And another thing we would have to do is we'd have to increase our energy dominance, which she's doing, and we'd have to reduce our dependence on these critical supply chains. So the Trump administration has been taking all these stakes in war related industries for like steel or rare earths or uranium and nuclear technology. And so he's doing that while trying to have some type of better relationship with Xi. And I think that's what he basically achieved in this meeting. Here's the asterisk though. Trump has always gotten along pretty famously with Chairman Xi in person, but when it comes to follow up, it's not has been as successful. And there was a phase one trade deal that China and America struck in 2019 that Trump was equally rapturous about. But within a month or so, it was clear that China was not following up on its promises in that deal, one of which was purchasing more U.S. ag products. So that's a similar promise that Xi Jinping made to Trump today. And we had Covid. Right. Which was kind of, you know, China's gift to the world. Right. So I think this was a very successful trip for President Trump, but it all requires the follow up and the compliance of China to the deal. And that I think is far from certain.
- [10:03]
Matthew Continetti
Well, and on the, on the issue of seeing China as a rival, there are, if there were the most vague parts of what even Trump himself said and we should. Matt's absolutely right. Wait until Scott Besant does the actual detailed readout of what was agreed to. We learned this lesson before with him, you know, the he sort than a cavalier waves like oh, well, we'll do some more chip sales to China. That's going to. That's going to not fly with the more hawkish members of the GOP who worry about those sales. I, obviously, I'm on the record as opposing the administration actually meddling in private business and investing in private business the way we have. We've talked about that on the podcast many times before. But he didn't get a deal on. On China's relationship with Russia. That's another thing that nobody brought up. TikTok, which is my hobby horse, but is another national security issue as well. So there were some things that they obvious danced around that do have serious national security implications. So it'll be worth watching in the weeks to come whether, when we have more details about what China agrees to and as Matt says, whether they will actually fulfill their obligations of the agreement going forward. I don't think Taiwan came up much either in this discussion.
- [11:11]
Christine Rosen
So those are all at all as well.
- [11:13]
Matthew Continetti
Right.
- [11:15]
John Podhoretz
Well, something else did come up or came up just minutes before the meeting was to start, which is the Trump announced the resumption of American nuclear testing after 33 years. And that is a very pregnant policy announcement. You can view it in 15 different ways. You can view it as something relating to North Korea, which is continuing to do very aggressive testing. You can view it as a slap to Vladimir Putin, who not only holds this nuclear threat over the West's head in the form of a possible use of a theater nuclear weapon in the war with Ukraine, but has been making noise, as he has for the past 10 years, about an intercontinental missile, submarine missile, called the Poseidon. Either he calls it the Poseidon or we're calling it the Poseidon. It's not entirely clear to me that supposedly would have the ability to fire on the continental United States from thousands of miles away underwater. And so his announcement is an announcement. Or it could be about China, which of course has never been a signatory either to the major nuclear deals. Right. Which are the SALT and START deals with the Soviet Union because its arsenal was too small. It wasn't even considered worthy of discussion. You know, we were talking about thousands of warheads between us and the Soviets, and China had a couple hundred or something like that. China is rapidly advancing. It is clearly trying to reach some form of parity, I gather, with the United States in terms of the number of warheads that we have and announcing testing, which is a very provocative thing to do because of. And this is where Trump's, you know, having no interest in observing Niceties and norms has a creative, has its creative aspect, which is that we haven't tested in 32 years because the Cold War is over. Why do we need to test? We can do all these simulations now. So we don't need actual physical tests of advanced nuclear weapons. And you know, they're gross, they're icky, the nuclear weapons, bad. You know, we don't like them because they're scary. And you know, Oppenheimer said they would destroy the world and all of that. And here we are 33 years old, 33 years later, our nuclear arsenal is old. China and Russia seem to be modernizing theirs. This is obviously a field in which we should not be falling behind anybody. And the, the, for him to say, you know what, I don't, I don't want to do all this simulation, let's go blow some, let's go blow some shit up. We're America, we're going to go blow some shit up and then we're going to scare the hell out of you when we want you to come to the table and say you don't want your, your, when you want to play around with the threat of a nuclear umbrella. But that's another thing that happened on this trip, all out of the blue.
- [14:49]
Matthew Continetti
But is testing because was it, Russia was testing nuclear capable range missiles, not nuclear missiles. So I think that there's some question about whether Trump misunderstood what they're testing. But he is actually on this score. I got to say, he's not really breaking any sort of convention. He's pushing a norm because the weapons testing agreement was that we, that we and many other countries send out to, was never ratified. So it's sort of, everybody's been following it, but it hasn't actually. It's not like he's breaking a treaty agreement or something. He's pushing the envelope in the way, John, that you're exactly right, that he says, I think what everyone's going to point to is that this was one of the itemized things in Project 2025. So here comes nuclear Trump. I actually think he, I agree that it's, it's a more strategic sort of bluster move. Whether it'll have the effect he hopes, I don't know. But it's actually not as norm breaking as some of the other things he's proposed.
- [15:40]
Abe Greenwald
It's absolutely the right call. America desperately needs to modernize, update and invest further in our nuclear deterrent, which has long been kind of our trump card in, in foreign policy, especially at a time when Russia brandishes the nuclear threat constantly and did just test this nuclear capable hypersonic the other day. So I think this move, this announcement was a brush back to Putin. I think it was also a kind of calling card for Kim Jong Un, whom Trump was desiring to meet and was planning to stay longer in Asia to meet with rocket man, but was clearly rebuffed. You know, Trump made the crack that North Korea has a lot of nuclear missiles but apparently not many phones. But it was clearly the North Koreans had no desire to meet with Trump and in fact have been becoming closer and closer to Russia as well. It was kind of a way to perhaps get Xi Jinping a little off balance and to sit and to suggest to Xi Jinping that we are very much aware that China is doing a lot on its nuclear program. So again, this is all part of this larger geopolitical conflict or pseudo conflict. You know, whether you call it Cold War two like Neil Ferguson does or what, what it boils down to is China is rising, China is rising rapidly and Trump is trying to position America in a place where we at least maintain some type of foothold in, in, in the global power structure. Maybe not as much in Europe, maybe we're not as active militarily else far away, but definitely when you look at the Western Hemisphere, when places like Greenland, Venezuela, the Panama Canal, when we look at threats in the Middle east and Iran and then kind of trying to get our relationship with Japan in particular in a very good place, he's creating a new type of international system in response to China's rise and China's alliance with Russia.
- [18:22]
Christine Rosen
I'm very curious to see how this plays out domestically, the announcement of the nuclear testing. We know that on the liberal side and in the media it's going to be another five alarm fire and they'll update the Doomsday clock and all the rest of it. I'm more curious about what the maga, we don't want any more war crowd will say about this, who also say that we should be, we're wasting our time worrying about Ukraine helping Israel because we need to think about China. You know, I always have this suspicion that then when it comes around to actually doing something about China, they will also say this is no good. I voted for a president that said he wasn't going to take us into any more wars. So I'm curious to see how this repositioning the preparation for war, as Matt puts it, how this flies on the maga, right?
- [19:33]
John Podhoretz
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- [22:16]
Seth Mandel
But there's also another element of the trip which is that he's talking about. He's clearly considering the allowance of Nvidia selling these chips to China and these AI Chips. And that would he. I mean, right now he would. They would have to make an allowance because it's. It's not, you know, it's not. It's not legal now. But he would. But this is something that people see us as having an advantage in. I mean, there's no question that the Blackwell chip is, you know, considered far and away the most advanced of its kind. And so there is a question about whether we are. You know, I don't want to make. I'm trying to avoid making a joke about selling it for magic beans, but there is a concern that, you know, there's an opening here for, to. To sell China our far superior AI technology or our chips for the soybeans, you know, and for the resumption of the soybean purchases and all that other stuff. But that is something that also is hard to know down the road what it's going to mean because, you know, we don't. China is not going to take it now and then tomorrow surpass us and everything. But that chip is a, you know, that is, you know, again, no pun intended, but that is a real bargaining chip. That is a chip that should not be, you know, just given away. And so I don't know if Trump is dangling this in front of Xi in order to keep the negotiations going, in order to keep things going, in order to get the soybeans and whatever, and he's just dangling it so that everybody stays at the table and seems happy or if he's really considering it. And that's one thing we don't actually know from the reports of the. Of what they talked about. We don't know exactly where he is on that.
- [24:12]
Matthew Continetti
He described himself as playing the role of. The US Government will be playing the role of referee in those discussions between Nvidia and China and the chip stuff, which is odd because there are a lot of literally laws.
- [24:24]
John Podhoretz
You know, everybody's presuming that Nvidia wants this market, and of course, obviously, it's the world's second largest market. But China has a history of intellectual property theft of. On a scale the world has never seen before. If I were in video, I would be very, very cautious about letting China get its hands on. On my intellectual property. That is the. That is sort of like the new internal combustion engine. Imagine you have the patent on the internal combustion engine. You're just going to give it away to, you know, a potentially hostile country. You know, China's got honey traps all.
- [25:09]
Matthew Continetti
Over San Francisco seeking this information in other ways.
- [25:13]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, there's a question. If China's going to get it, China's going to get it eventually by stealing it. So why not kind of be the honey trap yourself by selling it to them?
- [25:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, there's. Okay, well, that's that and there's that argument.
- [25:28]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [25:28]
John Podhoretz
But it is very complicated issue. But it's very hard to assign to Trump a systematic view that he is attempting to put into practice. He's an instinctual politician at best. But for ever since the end of the Iraq war, the big question has been how is American foreign policy going to move forward past these models of the past that haven't quite, didn't quite work out the way we thought they were going to? And you put a lot of this together and you start seeing, as Walter Russell Mead would say, a Jacksonian foreign policy emerge that precisely gets at what Abe is talking about in terms of not the liberals, but the right. Trump is not a pacifist. We are firing on ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Seventy people have died in these raids on these drug ships. He struck Iran. He is clearly perfectly willing to use force. He may not want to have major boots on the ground. He may not want to, you know, rebuild a society that's broken. Though he does seem to be tempted by some version of that with Gaza. You know, from Mara Gaza back in February to whatever the 20 point plan might lead to now, not so much.
- [27:16]
Abe Greenwald
Building, rebuilding the society. When you has said that you want to move the people out. It's more, it's more.
- [27:23]
John Podhoretz
And they can come back and work.
- [27:24]
Abe Greenwald
And rebuild the land, create a wonderful hotels.
- [27:28]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, they're going to be so many hotels you're going to need to work after they leave.
- [27:32]
Abe Greenwald
They can come back later.
- [27:33]
John Podhoretz
But I'm just saying he. Is that the American Conservatives magazine's image of Trump or this weird the horseshoe where the pacifist left meets the isolationist right? Trump is not there. He's nowhere, nowhere mappable on that matrix.
- [27:58]
Abe Greenwald
The isolationist right is not happy these days. They're very angry at Trump's Middle east policy that sent them into weird intellectual contortions. And of course, the endless leaks that portray, you know, Trump, Trump's anger at Bibi and the perils of Pauline attitude in the press that at any moment Trump's relationship with Israel is going to crack up. That's, that's comes from the isolationist right. And they're also very, very concerned about our posture in Latin America and in the Caribbean. And you're seeing more articles now from people from the non Interventionist dabish side warn about further entanglement with, with Venezuela. So they're not happy right now. A couple, two more points on the, on the Xi meeting, actually, three, first, someone mentioned that about Taiwan. This is interesting. You know, there was some speculation that in order to get either cooperation from China on lessening purchases of Russian oil or reducing barriers to American purchases of rare earths, that Trump would reach some kind of accommodation with, with Xi Jinping on Taiwan, even perhaps say that American policy did not support Taiwan independence, which would be a shift from our long standing position of strategic ambiguity where we recognize both countries. And because of the Taiwan Relations act, act of Congress, we do say that we will assist Taiwan. There's some, you know, wiggle room about what assistance means, but that we will assist Taiwan in the event of an armed incursion by the People's Republic of China. That doesn't seem to have happened. That wasn't part of any of the reporting. And as Abe says, there's reporting that says that Taiwan didn't come up. So what that means is that Trump, in my view, wisely is maintaining the status quo position on Taiwan, which is the position of strategic ambiguity. And secondly, on the nuclear testing, you know, when we talk about the computer simulations and we don't have to do these tests because of the computer simulations, I was immediately recalling Mitt Romney's Project Orca. If you remember, Project Orca was the massive supercomputer.
- [30:39]
John Podhoretz
This is me bringing up Project Orca.
- [30:43]
Abe Greenwald
It's one of my favorite memories, the supercomputer modeling that was going on about how Mitt Romney would close the gap, the narrow gap, it seemed, in the final days of the election. And it was based in the, I think in the Boston Garden. And on election Day, Project Orca fizzled out. Could it work? Right. And so similarly, four years later, right. Remember Robbie Mook, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager from his base in Brooklyn, you know, where he's really in touch with the United States saying that we've run a gazillion computer models and they all show us winning this election in a landslide. Sometimes the computers are wrong. Wouldn't it be nice to know if the hardware actually functions right? So I think that's important that we actually test these things. And then final point on the, on the XI summit, one other lacuna, it seems, and again, I don't know if there is. It's been lost in the reporting, but there were high hopes, perhaps misplaced hopes by my friends who believe. I know it's unfashionable in human rights and democracy that Trump would bring up either Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher who has been unjustly tried and imprisoned by the Communist Party in China for, for years now, and who's old, or Ezra Jin, who is a Protestant minister leading the largest underground Protestant church in China, who was taken under house arrest just a few weeks ago and who is the father in law of, of my friend Bill Drexel, who's a scholar at the Hudson Institute. It doesn't seem that that came up. And I've long thought that as Trump does try to create this new global situation where America can cope with China's rise and not become a second rate.
- [32:52]
John Podhoretz
Power.
- [32:54]
Abe Greenwald
That he's often just left one of our key tools in the toolbox, and that is the power of our ideals and the endemic democratic freedom and what America really stands for. This was crucial to Reagan's pressure on the Soviet Union. And Trump has just has an allergy to it. And so I think that's unfortunate. Maybe, maybe I'll be surprised and after we record this, we'll find out that goodwill jester Jimmy Lai has been released. But I am skeptical.
- [33:24]
John Podhoretz
I don't, I don't think that you, you know, I think you understate the case. In his case, he thinks that this is immature baby talk, that this is not the way nations go. At nations is to complain about how they treat their own people. I mean, he famous or notoriously said to Bill O'Reilly during a Supreme Supreme Court a Super bowl interview in 2017 or 2018, oh, our hands are so clean. Like, this is what nations do. They do things. They treat people badly. They have bad human rights records. And if that's gonna get in the way of your making a deal, then you're just being, you're just being a neurotic, infantile work gummer upper that this is, this was, this is all nonsense. This is not the way, you know, let's, let's all get real. You know, we do bad things, they do bad things. We'll move on from that. I think this is a terrible and horrible misunderstanding of the differences between the, you know, free world and the non free world and everything that we actually do stand for and the soft power that it grants us. But that, that is where he is in that sense. He is where the, where the, you know, old right is or whatever you want to call it. The sort of not, not maga because they're sort of moved. Whatever the isolationist right is. It's like, you know, human Rights was always used as a weapon and as an excuse to warmonger. And we're in no position to lecture anybody and nobody should lecture anybody and everybody should leave everybody else alone.
- [35:24]
Seth Mandel
Well, I said that in Riyadh, right? I mean, that was, that was, that was a big moment in Riyadh when he was like, you guys have built a new Middle east not by telling each other what to do and getting involved in each other's affairs. And it's like the irony of saying to Saudi Arabia, like, good job not getting involved in your neighbor's affairs and stuff like that. But he was saying that fairly recently. We should also note, by the way, that J.D. vance was asked about this last night. The Vice President was at a Turning Point event. And he took questions from, you know, from the audience. And, you know, one of the reasons that I, you know, was watching was because I had once I knew that he was going to be taking questions from the audience, I said, who's going to be the first to get up there and say, hey, why is Israel telling you people what to do, blah, blah, blah, and see how that works with the new right? And there was a question that was Phra raised sort of like that. And I. And Vance's answer was interesting. Not necessarily not good, but interesting. In, in, in it's opening a window into how he's trying to manage this. And it has to do with, you know, with the non interventionist part as well. He focused on the non interventionism part in his answer where he said, you know, the President, the United States does what's in America's best interest. That's what America first means. America's best interest. It doesn't mean we're not in the world. It means what is the best interest of Americans. And therefore, when Israel's interests and America's interests align, our policies are going to align. When they don't, they won't. And he said, then he said, you know, there are a lot of people out there who said the President is going to get us into a war that's going to kill 100 million people and start a world war with Iran and all this other stuff. And they were wrong. And not, you know, they don't want to admit that they were wrong. But the President said, no, we're going to bomb a nuclear site and bring our boys home. And that's exactly what he did. These were, this was what J.D. vance was saying, bomb the site, bring our boys home. And that's exactly what he did. And so that, I think, gives you a window into how the isolationist right or the non interventionist right is going to deal with this problem as it comes up. J.D. vance right now is in a position where he, he can't freelance ideologically. He's the vice president and to Donald Trump, no less. But Trump, in simply doing these things and therefore putting his vice president in a position to have to defend that and to tell people, calm down, not everything is going to be the new Iraq war. He, Trump might be shaping things in a better way, even though he doesn't really believe in the ideology behind that better way. He just might be helping people, like people who would follow J.D. vance rather than Marco Rubio, develop better foreign policy habits. That's a possibility. The other, the other side of the answer though was that, you know, he didn't engage in the, you know, in the some, the questioner phrased it as Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And, you know, why we're doing this and why, you know, and the questioner said something the effect of their, their religion believes in prosecuting ours. There was like a weirdly phrased sort of Jewish Christian tension in the question also. Vance avoided that entire part of the question. So these are two things that we don't know how they're going to deal with when there's like when the Trump cloud is lifted, you know, and when the, when they're allowed basically to say exactly what they believe, but how is he going to deal with those questions are not going to stop. And also, what does it mean ideologically for the non interventionists and how will the non interventionist right have changed without maybe even realizing it has changed just by supporting the president?
- [39:31]
Christine Rosen
Something fascinating and to me extraordinarily entertaining happened on the non interventionist right over the, over the course of the year. If you recall, after Trump decided to send the bombers in and take out Iran's nuclear facilities, the non interventionists said, ooh, the neocons are upset. They wanted a bigger war, they wanted regime change. They didn't want this to stop. They're really upset with Trump. All of it was nonsense. We were beaming, we were ear to ear smiles. We couldn't have been happier, right? And then as time went on and then Trump backed Israel to the hilt, ended up going over there. You know, there was that extraordinary day where he was at the Knesset and all the rest of it. Now they're saying they captured him, the neocons captured him. There's more and more pieces, like there's a piece at Unherd about How this the Florida hawks have now gotten control of Trump's foreign policy via Rubio. You know, and there's all these Trump supporters who now are formally revoking their Trump vote because the neocons captured him. And you can turns out he's just another American president that can't say no to Israel.
- [40:56]
Oliver Darcy
I'm Oliver Darcy.
- [40:57]
John Passantino
And I'm John Passantino.
- [40:58]
Oliver Darcy
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter status.
- [41:07]
John Passantino
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.
- [41:12]
Oliver Darcy
Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter, and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
- [41:21]
John Passantino
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [41:30]
Oliver Darcy
My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [41:47]
John Passantino
Oh, my God. That's Power Lines presented by Status. Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.
- [42:01]
Mark Halpern
I'm Mark Halpern. I want to let you know that two Way Tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere, is now available as an audio podcast. Each weekday, I'll be joined by special guests from the worlds of news, politics, politics and the media, along with members of the two way community for conversations like no other. It's the best way to stay informed at the end of your day or first thing in the morning every weekday. It's a show like no other because we involve the community. We hear from people from around the country, around the world. They're part of a conversation. There is no other platform like this, and I hope you will find it to be not only different than everything else, but more meaningful as you become part of a special community around the program. So listen and follow two Way tonight with Mark Alperin on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, or any other major streaming platform.
- [42:50]
Seth Mandel
It's the retired Yankee fans in Florida.
- [42:54]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, no doubt. Look, my point is that the ideas that were being proffered as possible Trump doctrines were not workable because isolationism is not workable if you're going to have the largest economy on earth in the most powerful country on Earth. It doesn't. It doesn't follow Logically, that you would therefore be able to kind of absent yourself. You absent yourself, you make yourself a target. That's sort of the story of the 1990s holiday from history. We made ourselves a target that we didn't even know we were making ourselves a target for, which was, you know, radical irredentist Islamism. Can't do that. You have to be involved in the world because your economy depends on it. Maybe you're aggressive, that's the tariffs. Maybe you're conciliatory. That's not imposing the tariffs or suspending the tariffs. Whatever it is, you're not staying out of it. There's nothing to stay out of. You have, you know, I don't know what, what, what percentage of the world economy belongs to the United states. If it's 15% or 12% or 13%, it's a lot. And so we are, we're in it.
- [44:20]
Abe Greenwald
And, and he has found like 25% of world GDP.
- [44:25]
John Podhoretz
We are 25% of world GDP. Okay, yeah. So we are, we are, we are. We're not in it. I mean, we dominate this planet. And so, you know, you can say, you know what, I dominate this planet, but I'm just going to go water skiing because I prefer to go water skiing. You can't. Like, it doesn't work. So that's the sort of Trump lesson. And the weird part about the isolationist, right. And the people who thought they understood the maga, Right, or they thought they were speaking in Trump's voice is that he's a belligerent person who wants to get his own way and has a military at his disposal. We already know he believes he has a Justice Department at his disposal and will use it. And he will use the military at his disposal, particularly if it's a free shot, which is what's happening with Venezuela. And they don't, they haven't gotten it into their heads who he actually is. The belligerence they love when he talks about liberals and policy and trans and whatever is very much consistent with the belligerency that he shows on the world stage.
- [45:42]
Abe Greenwald
Well, it's not just him. It's not just him. It's who his voters are.
- [45:46]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [45:47]
Abe Greenwald
I was just looking at some data about working class voters, white working class voters, and their views match Trump's exactly. They are, they are generally internationalist. They generally believe America should be involved in the world. They're not as enthusiastic about internationalism as college educated voters, but they still lean. They understand that America is a global power and we need to be involved in the world and engaged. But on certain issues, whether it is tariffs to protect American jobs, whether it is border hawkery and deportation, whether it is, this is crucial support for Israel, right? They're with Trump. And so I think it's a political mistake for anyone. Trump hasn't made this political mistake. But some of the people who want to be Trump in 2028 seem tempted by it to think that the views of writers for Chronicles and the American Conservative and Unheard are the views of the Trump base. They are not. And in particular, think about the contrast. Seth was talking about Vice President Vance's appearance yesterday at Ole Miss, okay? You get these questions at these colleges from young anti Semites or young adjacent anti Semites who are picking up their cues from the worst online voices. They're at a college. They're college voters. They are not middle America. They are not non college voters who are the critical part of any winning coalition in this country. And so you cannot, you cannot base the 2028 campaign on appeasement of the young punks who come up to the microphone at a college and say, what are you going to do about the Jews controlling the United States? That is not how America works. And I just, you see this category error again and again and again, but Trump doesn't make it.
- [48:12]
Matthew Continetti
Well, the danger, the danger for whoever wants to replace Trump on the right is the issue of the, that these tariffs actually haven't so far helped the American worker. They've cost the American consumer. The fact that, you know, the economy right now is in a weird place. And a lot of the voters in the most recent election in that new Trump coalition are fickle in the sense that I think if they, if they see that these policies have not actually made it easier for them to find work and keep it and pay the bills, they will defect to some, perhaps, if they have a better choice. But that's actually the, the economic stuff, to me, is where I think Vance could really find a very strong lane. And so far, he hasn't done it. But I imagine we will see that after the midterm elections because people are really worried domestically about jobs, about the economy, about the cost of things. Senators have finally roused themselves to start, you know, pushing back against some of the tariff stuff. I mean, it's Rand Paul saying, let's end the coffee tariff. But there are signs, I think, that we should follow through watching in the next six months about whether or not the American people and that fickle part of the coalition that Trump won over last Time is still with him with regard to his economic policies.
- [49:27]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I'm gonna make a quick dual recommendation. I'm gonna call this a plane, an airplane recommendation. Because I watched two things on the airplane. I took a long flight last night, had that screen in front of me, and I watched two things that I haven't seen. And I watched them and they only had a few episodes. These are sort of limited series. They only had a few episodes of each. So I now I'm gonna have to go home and watch the rest. But I really enjoyed both of them a lot. And I'm sorry I didn't watch them when they came out. I don't know why I didn't watch them when they came out. One is called the Agency with Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere, which is a adaptation of this much heralded French series, Le Bureau. And it's about a. It's about a deep cover CIA agent who returns after six years in deep cover in the field, ends up in London and can't shake himself of the. Of the love affair that he had been having in Ethiopia where he was in deep cover. Meanwhile, things are going disastrously wrong in another op in Ukraine. It's beautifully filmed. Fassbender is a fantastically charismatic actor, as is Jeffrey Wright, who plays one of his handlers, as is Richard Gere. And you're reminded of like what an incandescent kind of star Richard Gere was and the bravery of his own personal life, which is that he really sacrificed his stardom in the early 2000s by being an activist on behalf of Tibetan.
- [51:18]
Abe Greenwald
This is a film, John.
- [51:20]
John Podhoretz
No, this is a tv. This is a streaming series.
- [51:23]
Abe Greenwald
On which platform?
- [51:24]
John Podhoretz
I believe it's on Netflix. But I could be wrong. Called the Agency. But Richard Gere, you know, basically was One of the four or five biggest Hollywood stars in the 1990s. Got very involved with the Dalai Lama and Tibet and the human rights abuses in Tibet and China. The nation of China made it very clear that they would boycott any filmed project that Richard Gere was involved in as they were growing as a international financial force in international cinema. And his stardom ended. He makes. Has made some quite brilliant little independent movies. This, as far as I can tell, is the first time that he's done a TV show. And he plays the station chief in. In London and you know, he just got 10 billion wattage charm. That's show number one. Show number two is called Mobland, which I believe is on Paramount Plus. And Mobland is a. London is about war between two mobsters and two mob families in London that breaks out when the sons when son of each of them ends up in a nightclub together and then one of the sons goes missing. But the reason to watch this show which I watched two episodes of and don't know where it goes three, four amazing star performances. Tom Hardy in his quiet mode as a kind of fixer as the family fixer of the mob family run by Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren who are both sensational as this aging couple. They trust only each other and they're one's more savage and remorseless than the other. And Patty Considine who plays the son another great actor who hasn't quite had the career you might have thought who plays Pierce Brosnan's son who is the father of one of these boys who is making all the trouble that's going to cause this giant mob war. So that's Mobland and the age of see look them up. Really enjoyed did not expect great TV I think probably great in your living room. So till tomorrow for Abe, Matt, Seth and Christine of John Pot horrors keep the candle bur.