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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Podhoretz
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:22]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, March 4, 2025. I'm John Pot Hortz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and with me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:40]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:44]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:45]
John Podhoretz
So tonight at 9:00pm Donald Trump will be delivering effectively a State of the Union address, although in constitutional terms, he has not been president long enough to deliver the annual message he is supposed to be delivering to Congress on the State of the nation. So it's just his first address to Congress, but one will presume that it will last about an hour, like State of the Unions do, or longer, because I think he delivered didn't he deliver a State of Union that was like 92 minutes long at one point during his presidency? Biden, of course, delivered relatively short ones because that was as long as he could stand. And so here's the advance on the speech from our friends at Jewish Insider. It will be divided into four sections. First, what the administration has accomplished thus far in its second term, which of course has been all of 42 days what the administration has done to improve the economy, Trump's desire for Congress to pass an additional border security funding package and the president's plan to restore peace around the world, unquote. On the foreign policy front, Trump is expected to discuss his administration's push to secure the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas and other groups in Gaza. He will also address his intention to end US Support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and to bring the fighting to a halt. In the audience will be several released hostages and hostage family members, many of whom were invited by members of congressional leadership and rank and file lawmakers. Now let's talk about what's actually happened in the last 24 hours. That will be that is alluded to here in this summary from Jewish Insider. Trump announced a pause in American support for Ukraine, which apparently involves turning back planes and ships that were starting to deliver military materiel. Like the the pause is instantaneous and immediate, thoroughgoing, and means that there is a cutoff at this moment, there is a cutoff of all US Aid to Ukraine. And one will presume that while that cutoff is a pause, it is likely permanent. So we have now gone in 72 to 96 hours from the fight in the Oval Office to a complete cutoff of all assistance to Ukraine. Which raises the question, people really going to argue that this was all Zelensky's fault. I think it's probably pretty clear that Trump wanted to figure out some way to suspend aid to Ukraine before tonight because he wants to make a big point out of having suspended the aid tonight as a peacemaker and a peace giver and a peacebringer. And so whether it was a setup or not a setup, clearly the idea was that there was going to be some kind of confrontation with Ukraine at some point on Friday. That would be the predicate to what happened on Monday. And if you don't believe that, then I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Also, tariffs. As of midnight today, we have a 20% tariff effectively on China and 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. So Trump is going into the speech tonight having made extraordinarily consequential and disruptive moves which he is going to celebrate himself for. But I ask you to consider, tariffs have genuinely not been very popular. And a lot of the workforce in the United States that depends on foreign goods or foreign materiel or anything like that have been primed and prepped for the last four months about what might be happening in their workplaces and with their work product and all of that should the tariffs go into effect. And I don't know how popular this is going to be with currently existing workers and currently existing workforces, particularly since the general line is that they are going to lead to relatively immediate price increases, particularly at the grocery store, which is one of Christine Rosen's main bugbears. Also last minute, the price of eggs stupid.
- [05:39]
Seth Mandel
That should be my mantra.
- [05:40]
John Podhoretz
Price of eggs stupid. And the Dow Jones average collapsed, went down 730 points yesterday when it became clear that there wasn't going to be a last minute deal to close the tariffs. And we'll see what happens today. And by the way, this is not, I haven't even mentioned the strategic Bitcoin reserve plan that was announced over the weekend, which means now effectively that the United States is sponsoring and promoting an alternative currency to the dollar, which Trump.
- [06:13]
Seth Mandel
Himself can will profit from as he is very invested in in crypto Trump.
- [06:18]
John Podhoretz
And Peter Thiel and David Sachs and all of his crypto bros who are big supporters of his. But I mean, effectively, just so people understand, the dollar is the reserve currency of the is our currency, right? It's our currency and it is the reserve is effectively the reserve currency of the planet. And so we are now creating a means to back. To use the American government to bolster and ballast the existence of cryptocurrency as an alternative to the dollar. I'm not going to say that's crazy, but that's crazy.
- [06:59]
Seth Mandel
It's not America first, that's for sure.
- [07:02]
John Podhoretz
I don't know if it is America First. America first would be that the. Right. I mean, America first would be that the dollar should be the almighty dollar and that we should be, you know, lording it over everybody with the power of the dollar.
- [07:14]
Christine Rosen
Okay, well, there are ways to peg it to a sort of American bank, an American imaginary bank in its own way. But I think. But my concern more is the. Is that I worry that people in the public will rush to buy cryptocurrency, not understanding what it is exactly and what the ramifications are. And it's unclear how much the government is going to backstop any of this. And I think that there's an actual risk of, like, people really losing lots of money and stories coming out of people going, well, I bought, you know, crypto because the President said to buy crypto. It's another thing that seems to me to add an element of chaos that Trump can't control because it's not like he. It's not like he's the crypto master. So it's, it's. I think it's, it's, it's pretty.
- [08:15]
John Podhoretz
You know, most people can't buy crypto, by which I mean that the individual markets or the individual coins or whatever has been mined or whatever. The, whatever. This either visionary 22nd century form of financial exchange that has been brought into our time and that we're going to have to deal with and master and control because it's the way of the future. Either that or basically this weird world in which you play a game in which a certain number of these valueless things that are backed by a ledger are placed in hidden places in computers and you're supposed to go and find them, which is straight out of, literally an idea that seems to have emerged from a very interesting pot boiler of a novel called Reamd by Neal Stevenson. The Bitcoin, the meme, coin, whatever that we are. People don't buy crypto. Like, these coins now cost $80,000 a coin or $100,000 a coin. You can buy into a fund that owns coins. So you're not even going to have the coin. It's like a mutual fund. But in fact, when you're in a mutual fund, you own stock, right? You actually own stock. That is in your portfolio. Here you are buying fractions of a non existent, unbacked fake currency that is a purely speculative device. And yeah, millions of people are already playing around with it. But buying into something where you take $1,000 and you get 100th of the value of a single coin whose value can drop 60% in a day if something goes wrong, this.
- [10:25]
Seth Mandel
Sorry to interrupt, but this is actually a point where it's going to be a real test of Trump and the MAGA idea because volatility in foreign policy and diplomacy, he's disrupting our allies. He's doing all this disruption and a lot of people who support Trump support that notion. They think the old way of doing things was bad for the US but volatility in the economy tends to have a different reaction even from voters who love Trump. So if you're, if you're investing in, in a very encouraging people to invest in an extremely volatile asset like, like you know, bitcoin, at the same time that the stock market's going south and your 401k and retirement savings are also plunging and then the cost of everything, inflation is still not under control and the cost of everything in your day to day life and your monthly budget remains above what you're earning, there comes a breaking point for people despite, you know, this is where creative destruction, the people start to focus more on the destructive part to their daily lives versus the creativity of trying to rethink all our institutions. And I won how much he's going to speak tonight about the economy. This is again, this is what people voted on. It's front of mind still for most Americans. So they will tolerate a certain amount of destructive behavior in other realms because it doesn't impact their day to day lives. And this message he's been selling that oh, the money we don't send to Ukraine we can spend on you at home is just that, that's just a slogan. It doesn't have any real world value to people if they're still feeling high prices and declining savings.
- [11:51]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I'm surprised that he's pulled the trigger on the tariffs to be honest, because of this reason. Because I don't know anyone who's in favor of it. I mean, I know there are people who are ideologically or sort of tribally in favor of it, but I don't know anyone from a market standpoint, from an economic standpoint who's in favor of it. Because it's either going to affect their industries, you say John, or it's going to affect Prices and as we know the stock market is, is very shaky about it. I had thought that the threat was another gambit, another, let's see what Mexico does in response about fentanyl or whatever, or Canada about lumber or one of Trump's things. I think that we've leapt into a new territory now and we're going to see the effects real soon.
- [12:51]
John Podhoretz
So there is, there are three different tariffs, right? There's Mexico, there's Canada and there's China. And apparently there might be stuff on Europe to come. There's an argument, and I heard it from people who were very anti Trump in 2017, who liked where he was going with China, people in business who do business in China, do business in the Far east, bankers, investment bankers, people like that, who were quietly very supportive of Trump's very hard line on China and the imposition of certain tariffs, saying that China had been taking advantage of us, that she was tightening, that the intellectual property theft was astounding and that we had simply allowed this all to fester under Obama in particular. But in the years prior and that somebody needed to stand and make it clear to China that there was a new cop in town and that we weren't going to take their stealing our stuff and, and making things, you know, you know, having a government policy to make products at a loss to flood our markets with to, so that, you know, Temu and other clothing, all that weird, you know, fast fashion clothing that people were buying, that this was not, you know, this was undermining our market and that that was a real thing that happened. We're now in a, even if that's still the case with China and the tariffs on China are sort of secondary or different issue from the tariffs on Mexico and Canada. First of all, the, the tariff on Canada is based on a disingenuous and false premise that it's a national security. He is, he is, he is asserting the right to impose tariffs on Canada as part of a foreign policy emergency involving the flooding of our country with fentanyl, which he says is partially a problem with Canada. That is evidently not true. Mexico is a source of fentanyl and China is a source of fentanyl. Canada is not a particular source of fentanyl. In fact, from what I hear kind of goes the other way. We're people here in the United States are getting fentanyl into Canada. So he's using the fentanyl crisis and the powers of the National Security act to impose tariffs on Canada, which is weird. It's not clear why we want to impose tariffs on Canada. I understand using. I understand the idea that we need to discipline Mexico because it doesn't control its borders and it doesn't control its cartels. And fentanyl is coming across the border, though I don't think tariffs are a right way to do it. But that's arguable. What's going on with Canada is very mysterious. And then it gets to, particularly with lumber. Trump says we have plenty of lumber in the United States. That's not how open markets work. We have plenty of lumber in the United States. Then you limit the amount of lumber that can come into the United States and you raise the price of lumber inside the United States. Why is that a problem? Because the largest industry in the United States is home building, and homes are made with wood. And if you raise the price of wood, you're raising the price of housing. And you are therefore creating a circumstance in which an industry on which tens of millions of people rely, the transactional costs are going to increase. That's going to have an inflationary effect, that's going to have an employment effect, and it's going to have an effect on slowing the economy down. It is bizarre. It is a bizarre tariff to impose, to impose tariffs on, on. On Canadian lumber. But, and I, there's gotta be a reason for it. And I really. I haven't read a single thing that explains to me the logic and what it is that Trump has against Canada.
- [17:10]
Unknown
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- [18:28]
John Podhoretz
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- [20:10]
Seth Mandel
There's. Can we add one other bizarre thing, which is that if, if Trump was serious about the terrorists tariff response to Canada being about some national security risk, he sent Kristi Noem to a library recently, according to the Boston Globe, near the border with Canada. And she behaved like a toddler, you know, standing on the American side of the library.
- [20:32]
John Podhoretz
Secretary of the Homeland Security.
- [20:35]
Seth Mandel
She's Homeland Security Secretary. So she was in Vermont. This is how the Boston Globe reported. And she kept saying USA number one, Canada, kept calling Canada the 51st state. Just, just behaving in a way that is unbecoming of a public official sent by the government to go do anything. And, and so that, so if, if, if this was a national security issue, if this was indeed something that the Secretary of Homeland Security would be addressing seriously, she wouldn't be acting this way. So there's an own, the own, the Canadian. To much of what the Trump administration is doing with regard to Canada that you don't see at all, certainly when he's talking about China or Russia or even to some extent Mexico. So there's a sort of bullying the weak person who we think would never actually retaliate sort of tone to much of this. That's just, it's just sort of not adult. Sorry.
- [21:24]
Christine Rosen
Yeah.
- [21:25]
Abe Greenwald
Not just the weak. The sort of, the more closely you are aligned with America and its ideals, the more you come in for bullying. If you're Xi or if you're Putin, you don't.
- [21:39]
John Podhoretz
So it's mean girlism. Like Ukraine, Regina George, like, who does Regina George bully in mean girls? She bullies the girls in her inner circle. She doesn't, you know, she's not taking on, you know, the tough people at school. She is. And so, yeah, we have Canada and Mexico. So Canada.
- [21:59]
Christine Rosen
This is, this is going to raise energy prices. He could, he could have exempted energy imports from the Canada tariffs. This was something that was told to him, suggested to him. And therefore you can stop gas and home heating prices from going up immediately with the tariffs. Because those are the sorts of things that the public sees immediately they open their energy bills or they fill up their car. You know, I, I have a very large, we have one very large car because the number of children that we have in like booster seats and stuff, and it is shocking every time we fill up at the pump, no matter what. But these are, these are the sorts of things that you see. I mean, you look at the receipt, you look at the prices, whatever you see the things that it costs to heat your home, et cetera. And that was one of the things that his advisors, you know, some of his advisors were saying, just be sensible about it and don't do the things that will, you know, that will immediately trigger consequences for the workers, the working class and all the people you said you were getting elected to help and also all the people you claim claim to be helping by pushing back on China and bringing jobs home in the US Right. You may offset the benefits to the specific people that you think you're bringing about with this. And the offsetting will come way before the benefits.
- [23:22]
John Podhoretz
Also, and I think this is important. There is a long term argument. Again, I don't think it's right. I think we have 200 years of history to tell us that it's wrong. But there is this long term argument that raising trade barriers and raising the cost of immigration. Right, or ending illegal immigration and making it harder for people to emigrate legally, whatever that what you're doing is over a 10 or 20 year period, you are rebalancing the world's economy or in our own domestic economy in favor of the American worker or the American, where the American industrial plant and all of that I think that this has been proved to be a, not a sound plan, but it, there's logic to the idea that after the adjustments and the pain and the ratcheting and all of this, you have a different economic setup. Right.
- [24:26]
Seth Mandel
That, that if that's indeed what their philosophy is, they still have to sell that message to the American people. And I have seen no example in the Trump administration of them saying, you know, we're all in this together, we're going to sacrifice, there will be this period of pain, but here's the, here's the promised land we're headed to afterwards. Instead, you've got his agricultural secretary going on TV and saying, raise your own chickens if you're worried about the price of eggs. Which sounds to my ears very much like the elite top down messaging of a Democratic administration. That said, I don't know what you're complaining about, inflation's not that bad. It's just, it is not. You have to persuade, if you are the executive of this country, you go to the people and you say, this is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it. And I understand you'll feel pain, but this is, this is the plan. He doesn't explain himself, he just says we're great, trust me. And that's not enough.
- [25:15]
Christine Rosen
And there are Republicans who are trying, who are, to their somewhat credit, I guess you could say, trying to make that argument. Right. So, so Mark Wayne Mullen, the senator, you know, he's not in trouble, he's a red stater. But you know, CNN reports that he's, you know, he says, are the American people ready to get the country back on track and do what it takes to make that happen? Absolutely. It's going to affect a lot of companies. We're going to have to adjust some prices for it. But the president is tired of people taking advantage of our country. So the question is whether Trump is going to get up there and you know, as you say, Christine, say that, you know, look, there's a, the point is to feel a bit of a pinch now because we have this long term goal. But Republicans are already making that argument because what else can you say? They can't argue it's not going to raise prices. They have to try to put it as well. We're all on board, we're all in the same boat. We're all in this together. And I'm not sure how long that lasts with voters who are like, I don't know how much I want to sacrifice to make sure the Trump Agenda thrives.
- [26:26]
Seth Mandel
And he ran on restoring, getting inflation under control, the border under control, getting back to normalcy in some level. And this is not normal. This is a different path.
- [26:38]
John Podhoretz
For 20 years, people who have been arguing to restrict immigration and that is both legal and illegal immigration, to take measures against, all of them have made this long term argument that one of the reasons that we have this, we have inequality, of economic inequality and we have this lowest quintile of the American economy in desperate straits and you know, young men not working and all of that is that the work that they might have, they don't want to take because the salaries have been artificially low, because we import cheap labor that is paid illegally and, and they do the stuff that in a more lucrative frame. People in the United States who can otherwise cobble together welfare benefits and other things simply don't want to do and that feel that they're undignified, you know, agricultural handwork and whatever, construction stuff like that and that. So what you want to do is increase, is create a world in which you have to pay people more to do that kind of work by limiting the pool of workers and making it, make, creating scarcity among the workforce at this sort of, at the most basic level of work in the United States. And then you create scarcity. And then of course employers have to pay up, have to pony up to do this. And therefore you will again, over the course of a generation rebalance the American economy. You will restore the dignity of work to the, to people for whom these are the first jobs. Or, you know, you will restore that. You will make it possible for people to earn a living wage doing basic things. Maybe, maybe the family. You don't have to have two parent families where both parents have to work simply in order to, you know, maintain a life with children and all that. It's got this kind of paradisical feeling, right? We change the way we do things, we raise the salaries of people at the bottom, we make them their lives more dignified, we stabilize their families, we give them reasons not to take fentanyl and to play video games in their basement and everything will be better, but the cost to everybody outside of that realm or everybody from that quintile upward. And that means there are five quintiles, right? According to the theory of the quintile, there are five quintiles. That's one fifth of everybody. So the people in the second and the third lowest quintiles will find everything costing more. And where's the benefit to them? What are they going to get how are they going to live when their houses cost more, when they're again, when their average daily food costs more, when the toys they want to buy their children cost more because China makes them so cheaply? And now it's going to cost you twice as much to buy some kind of cheap video game or something like that. No one ever talks about them. Right. People, people who are, who are, who are out of poverty but are not well to do there.
- [30:21]
Seth Mandel
Again, here's an opportunity, and I hope the Trump administration sees it. There was a great piece, I think, in the Wall Street Journal the other day about the revival of shop class at high schools and that school districts are realizing that the trades actually are a steady, lucrative form of employment for lots of people who don't have any interest in, and probably shouldn't go to, but who now are being forced down the college path because there's this conceit that everyone should go to college and that they won't be able to sustain a family on an income unless they have a college degree. That's actually an example of people responding to an employment situation where if you try to find a really good electrician, a plumber, an H vac service person, these are extremely technically highly skilled professions. Now, given how the systems that run our homes and our office buildings and whatnot, what they require. So you see this response, and they're even having trouble finding talented shop class teachers for high schools because they can make so much money practicing their trade. So here's an example where it's exactly on message for what the Trump administration said it wants to do for Americans. I mean, he should be talking and putting money behind that if he really wants to revive a middle class and a working class. And that's the kind of thing where it's so much of this other stuff is such a, such a distraction from what he ran on, what people voted for. So I'm not saying maybe he will do that, and I hope he does. But there are so many ways in which the MAGA messaging could be funneled towards a more productive end for Americans that isn't picking fights with Canada.
- [31:52]
John Podhoretz
This is all very true. So why don't we move on to the foreign policy question. So we talked yesterday about Ukraine. Now we have the cutoff. And I think the burgeoning line of the administration is we've moved on from Zelenskyy being rude to Zelenskyy's, they have to come to us and be nice so that we'll give him his mineral deal. Except it's their mineral deal. They're the ones who wanted the mineral deal. This wasn't on the Zelensky or the Ukrainian agenda. So, like, figuring out how to get this deal back on track, it's very odd. It's like saying, you know, you. You know, somebody is, like, forced to go into a. One of those condo sales rooms and then gets into a fight with the condo salesperson, says, you come back when you're ready to make a deal. And it's like, well, I didn't want to buy the condo in first place. Why am I. So that's one very odd thing. It's almost like they're. They're trying to, you know, they're creating this line with the American people that the. That Trump is being tough because he torpedoed the deal that he sent Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, to Ukraine to impose on the Ukrainians. It's a very odd set of circumstances. So that's number one. They're good.
- [33:26]
Abe Greenwald
Can I say something? That goes for the ceasefire, too, in a sense, because whatever kind of peace Trump is now talking about, Zelenskyy is also not interested in. Right. The Trump administration is not doing anything to entice Zelensky here in terms of that. Of a peace deal. I mean, yeah, he's pressuring, obviously, Ukraine by cutting aid. We'll see how Europe steps up. They could replace what America is doing for at least a little bit. But Trump isn't sweetening the deal in terms of getting anything from Putin or guaranteeing any security after a piece to Zelensky. So it's. Trump is acting as if he has something that Zelenskyy wants outside of just this, the military aid. And it's. I don't think, obviously, Zelenskyy doesn't see it that way.
- [34:35]
Christine Rosen
He's offering Zelenskyy essentially a temporary stay of execution. That's all he's offering him.
- [34:42]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [34:42]
Christine Rosen
I mean, he's saying, we'll end the war now, and you will be, you know, your country will be. You know, it's like the Princess Bride. Mostly dead. Not instead of all dead, but eventually Putin's gonna swallow up the rest of it because we're not gonna make him give any of this back. And we obviously are not prepared to stop him. And we've made it very clear that, you know, we're not gonna intervene again. So it's basically like you have, you know, you've. We've given you a few more years, Ukraine, to spend with your. With your grandchildren and enjoy your time, you know, As a state, it's a stay of execution. That feels especially cruel because nobody really thinks everybody understands that that's what's going to happen. Because even people who don't want us to get too involved in Ukraine, they understand what Putin is doing, right? They say things like, we can't win this for Ukraine long term because Russia cares about Ukraine more than we care about keeping Ukraine out of Russia's orbit. And that is an admission that Russia is going to forever try to swallow up Ukraine. So I mean, what he's saying to hear is like, we'll take a pause and maybe something will happen to change your fortunes, which is a very unusual way.
- [36:03]
John Podhoretz
He doesn't care about Ukraine's fortunes. His now line is too many people are dying and the Ukrainians are irresponsibly allowing themselves to be killed. And I'm going to come in and stop the killing and they'll stop dying and the Russians will stop dying and it'll all be wonderful. And once again, we're in this weird position where, yeah, could they could stop dying tomorrow if Russia would end the war, they could both stop. Ukraine is not fighting an offensive war against Russia. So all Russia has to do is stop fighting and the war is over. Ukraine would, I am sure, under those conditions, would it continue to fight to win back the territory that it lost if Russia was sort of effectively withdrew? Probably not. I mean, I, you know, the reality is reality, but they're not the ones who are, who are making the war persist. And even more important, I think is I did this post on the website yesterday, very long, very boring post, I'm sorry to say, about the weird parallels between the present moment and the moments the post World War II arrangement in Europe. And it worked like this. Churchill and FDR go to Yalta in February of 1945 to discuss the makeup of Europe after the end of the war. And FDR and Churchill come home having met with Stalin for a week, saying, it's weirdly enough, kind of, we brought peace for our time. Both of them. Churchill to his private secretary, John Colville, and Roosevelt to Congress in a speech to Congress about what had happened at Yalta and what had happened in Yalta is that the Soviets agreed to join the United nations and that they would permit or oversee free elections in Poland, which had already been liberated and where there was kind of a jury rigged government. And within days after Yalta, Russia began moving to make Poland vassal state. It arrested and murdered politicians who were not aligned with them. Later on, it actually literally arrested most of the political leaders in Poland who were not aligned with them, took them to Moscow, staged a show trial and sent them to the Gulag. Remember, they were not. These were. These were people who are citizens of a different country. And within weeks, Churchill and FDR said, wow, we can't trust Stalin. I guess we can't trust Stalin. You know, fdr, just before he died, said to his confidant, Anna Rosenberg, Averil Harriman, our ambassador to Moscow, is right. Stalin is a communist and he's like, trying to consolidate international communism. Churchill, a year later, is giving the Iron Curtain speech, saying, an Iron Curtain is descending across my continent and America did not want to be involved in Europe. America hoped that it could not be involved in Europe. And Stalin just kept moving, moved on Greece, moved on Turkey, moved on Iran, blockaded Berlin. This is. Over the course of the next three years, blockaded Berlin and then basically took over Czechoslovakia. Murdered again. Murdered itself leading political figure Jan Massary and imposed a Communist government in Prague. At which point it was like, this is. This can't stand. And by 1949, NATO was created as a kind of defensive measure, because unless there was some kind of unified wall against Stalin's absolutely determined efforts to create new facts on the ground that were hospitable to international communism, he wasn't going to be stopped. Similarly, we have Trump saying, I'm bringing peace for our time. And there is Putin, who is going to get what he wants out of Ukraine, or they're going to announce a ceasefire, they're going to impose a ceasefire or something like that. Trump will. Will celebrate it. He'll go away. And then two weeks later, Putin will try to take Kyiv or he'll move or he'll. I mean, what. He is a student of Stalin's. He is a student of this idea. He has copied Stalin's idea that it's very important to create these zones of influence and spheres of influence in your near abroad to protect against the depredations of the West. The west doesn't want anything to do, doesn't want to involve itself with Russia. It wants Russia to leave it alone and to be left alone by Russia. It's Stalin. It's Stalin and Putin who want, wanted and want to move on other countries and swallow up other countries. So if Trump, if this deal goes through, it's Afghanistan all over again in this sense, which is, how are you going to take this? If you're Putin, you're going to think that Trump's going to go back and say, oh, no, no, no, no, don't you be going back into Ukraine. I told you I wanted to stop all the killing.
- [41:42]
Christine Rosen
Well, he'll wait. I mean, he only has to wait a bit. Trump is term limited and he can make a big deal out of this. He doesn't have to wait. I know, but I'm saying he, you know, he can get everything, he can get even more by just appearing to play along. Because, you know, he waited eight years in between Ukraine invasions last time. You know, he could wait three years, you know, to do it again. Even have to, you know, there won't even be a Trump to respond to is what I'm saying. It'll just be the inevitable.
- [42:11]
John Podhoretz
Right, but I'm saying he won't even have to wait. If he doesn't want to wait. That's the, the history tells us otherwise. Trump will want to take a victory lap. He'll take a victory lap. He'll say, I could look, I brought peace. And then Russia will invent some pretext. You know, it'll blow up a theater in Moscow and say, Ukrainian, Ukrainian monsters did it. And then they'll invade. Then they'll, then they'll, then they'll literally like, try to bomb Keev. Like, they will, they will send 500 fighters to bomb Keev, saying that, you know, he, he stages fake casus belli. He did this right, with Chechnya, we now know, with the, the theater attack and stuff like that. Like this is.
- [42:52]
Seth Mandel
But this is actually where I think the question of Europe is somewhat different because. And we will see. I'm not confident that Europe's going to step up, but one of the more interesting bits of polling that has come out in the last 48 hours is European people from European countries saying, we all need to support Ukraine more. We should all be behind Ukraine. And then when the follow up question was asked, should people from your country pay more and, you know, send troops and do all the stuff to support Ukraine? They're like, well, not us. I mean, everybody else in Europe should be doing this. Strongly support Ukraine. And Putin knows that, too. Now Trump looks at that and says, we're getting screwed because we're the ones who've been backing, you know, the protection of Europe for all this time. And so he steps back. Putin looks at that data and goes, okay, so Trump's not going to do anything. Europe's clearly a mess. So who, as you say, who's going to stop it? No one.
- [43:40]
Unknown
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- [45:09]
John Podhoretz
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- [45:37]
Abe Greenwald
The difference, John, I'd say between Yalta and the moment.
- [45:41]
John Podhoretz
There's plenty. There's plenty of difference.
- [45:42]
Abe Greenwald
I know. But one worse though, this is a.
- [45:45]
John Podhoretz
Very vulgar analogy that I want to make.
- [45:48]
Abe Greenwald
No, no, no, it's a good analogy. But I think there's one difference that makes this even worse than that, which is that no one would be surprised by Putin not making good on peace here. We have Putin's own track record of decades of advance and invasion and false flag operations and breaking pieces and so on. It's already been done. And that was the sort of history that Zelenskyy was trying to adduce when he was up against the wall in the Oval Office.
- [46:33]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so the other, by the way.
- [46:35]
Christine Rosen
One last thing on this is that it's frustrating because we make the arguments against this deal exactly the same way we argue about Hamas and Israel. And so if you're, if you're in the president's corner and you're trying to argue for his foreign policy writ large in all stations, you're arguing opposite things. You're arguing common sense in the Middle east. Like Hamas doesn't, Hamas is not going to stop trying to destroy Israel. They don't, they even say they love October 7th, they're going to try it again, like, who are we kidding? And we say, yes, there's finally a dose of reality, like, do what needs to be done because this isn't ending anytime, whatever. And then you go to Russia and it's like, well, you know, Putin, you know, he's willing to talk about this and that. And so I think if you're within the administration, you're, you're, you're balance, you're, you're arguing against your own logic in the foreign policy sphere pretty often.
- [47:33]
Seth Mandel
But they have a lot of contradictory foreign policy people sprinkled throughout the administration, right? They have guys in State who are like, the Middle east, doesn't matter. They have Elbridge Colby, who's, who's going to be going through confirmation today saying, oh, you know, Iran let's, you know, who basically is an Obama when it comes to Iran. So I'm, I'm not sure if it's actually the, that. I mean, I'm not sure which side of all of those different arguments is going to win within the administration because he has, he has sown doubt among people like us who want to seek some clear policies and some, as you say, Seth consistency. But his administration's hires don't necessarily reflect that right now.
- [48:10]
John Podhoretz
One weird quality that Trump possesses is a complete lack of interest. Jonah Goldberg wrote well about this. He has a complete lack of interest in what one would call honor. Right. Throughout most of history, leaders are often consumed with honor, with affronts to their honor, with acting with honor. The charge basically against Zelensky in the Oval Office was that he failed to provide proper obeisance to the honor due to the president and the Vice president as he was sitting there, and that he was behaving right, disrespectfully, which is a form of dishonor. Trump is not interested in honor, right? So there are forms of peace, right? There's peace with honor and there's peace without honor. He is attempting to impose a peace without honor on Ukraine. That is enough. Too much fighting. It doesn't matter that you have national pride or you want to have your borders or anything like that. It's over. You Know what? You stink anyway. Look how rude you are. And you look at your clothing and, you know, you. And Trump said this amazing thing yesterday, and he said, I don't think he's going to be around much longer. Which is a very strange thing to say, because it would seem to suggest that he's giving Putin a green light to assassinate Zelensky. I don't know what it means. Who's ousting Zelensky from. I don't think he's going to be around much longer. And I just wanted to extend this dishonorable thing, because once you start down this path and you are who you're being, and J.D. vance is now the person that he has. He has now grow fully grown into. J.D. vance said something astonishingly dishonorable yesterday that not only deserves to be called that, but we need to think about what it means that he felt. Felt free to say what he was saying. So Vance said, I'm trying to see where exactly. Oh, he told Fox, okay, if you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That's, of course, the mineral deal. That is a better way. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. He is referring there to Great Britain. Great Britain has fought three wars in the last 40 years. Actually four if you count the Falklands, which is 43 years old. Those are our wars. Fought in the Gulf War in 1991. Fought in the Iraq War in 2003 and onward, and fought in Afghanistan. And you know who fought in Afghanistan? Among other people, Prince William and Prince Harry fought in Afghanistan. The members of the Royal Family fought in Afghanistan. Britain has committed blood and treasure.
- [51:31]
Abe Greenwald
So did Ukraine, by the way.
- [51:32]
John Podhoretz
Huh?
- [51:33]
Abe Greenwald
So did Ukraine, by the way.
- [51:35]
John Podhoretz
Right. But what I'm saying here is this is not some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. It has fought at our side. It has committed troops to fight in wars that we started as allies of ours. And the Vice President of the United States is calling them some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. That is disgusting, it is immoral, and it is profoundly dishonorable. It is profound. And, you know, he's a very intelligent person. He is creating a new political path for himself at the age of 40. He is, you know, he is. He is creating an entire wing of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement that will be as dedicated to him as it is to Trump, in my opinion. And what he is showing is dishonor. His behavior toward Zelenskyy, in my view, was dishonorable. But we could have an argument about that. But for this there is no defense. There can be no defense. How dare he say this about Great Britain? He could say it about all kinds of other countries. I'm really. Although a lot of countries participated certainly in the Gulf War and by the way, paid for it.
- [52:56]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I mean we could throw. We could throw Canada into the discussion. Kristi Noem dancing across the U.S. canada borderline. People are saying similar things about what has Canada ever done for us.
- [53:08]
John Podhoretz
Canada fights with us in these wars. Like. Like, are they the main combatant? No. Were they the main people attacked on 9 11? No. So they're coming in to be part of the larger struggle for the west and for humanity and for NATO and all of that. And doing their part at our request and at our behest. And for this twerp to come in and. And piss all over them, I'm sorry, is just. He is a dishonorable person. He will say anything and do anything. He will change his views on a dime. He will go from being a hawk to a dove. He will go from being a neocon to being an anti neocon. He will say whatever it is he has to say to get where he wants to go. And that is a recipe for catastrophe in the future. I have been trying to be forbearing about Vance in many ways over the course of the. But yesterday was the breaking point for me because as I say, maybe there's an argument to be made that Zelensky brought what happened in the Oval Office upon himself. Keir Starmer saying we need to be, you know, we need to save Ukraine, and then saying, ah, what are you? Some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years. Our wars are their wars. So he can go hang. I'm sorry, that is just wrong beyond belief wrong.
- [54:40]
Seth Mandel
What's the quote about? Ambition, which I think applies very well to Vance is the thing that can. It creeps as well as soars. Right. He's definitely got a form of ambition that is shown that's at a lower level perhaps morally right now.
- [54:55]
Christine Rosen
Full court press on the honor thing too, by the way, because, you know, Abe's favorite person, Elon Musk, has been online. You know, he tweeted yesterday that we should offer safe passage for Zelensky like, he's, like he's a Zimbabwean dictator or he's Bashar al Assad who needs, you know, to be taken in by Russia and given a place, you know, suggesting that he should be given safe passage like a dictator to another country, saying, you know, he said something like, as distasteful as it is, is, you know, we should be, you know, allowing him to retire in, you know, alive, basically.
- [55:43]
Abe Greenwald
There's an interesting question here, too, and this, this gets to the weird Trump Musk relationship and the possible conflicts here. So what is Musk going to do about Starlink in Ukraine? Now? That's. That. That's a. That's. That's not a U.S. initiative. That's. That's private.
- [56:09]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [56:09]
Abe Greenwald
And he's been providing it to help them.
- [56:13]
John Podhoretz
Well, I think you can presume that he's going to cut them off. I mean, we are. We are moving in a policy where the United States is cutting off Ukraine.
- [56:20]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [56:20]
John Podhoretz
We're calling it a pause. It will be a cutoff. And this cover, which is, boy, you know, the way to make sure that America's on your side is to make this mineral deal. Ukraine doesn't have anything to do but fight this war like it doesn't have other stuff going on. You know what? There's other stuff. Maybe, you know, we can make this mineral deal, and then that'll be really great. It'll really help the Ukrainians show that America's on their side as cut off. Their effort to not be swallowed up by their neighbor like that, that's madness. And it's so mad that, you know, it's disingenuous. That's why this whole thing is a disingenuous cover for something. And as we've also said, or as there's nothing in the mineral deal, America's not getting anything, and they're not selling anything. There are no minerals to be mined. Most of the minerals. Well, most of the rare minerals are in. Are in the territory controlled by Russia right now, number one. Number two, Russia can mine them if they can. Number three, this is a project that takes years if you're actually going to sort of dig down to get rare earth minerals. That's not like you snap a finger and you start getting rare earth minerals out of the ground. This is a fiendishly complicated engineering and technological challenge, and no one's going to do it while a war is going on, by the way. Okay? So, all right, now we got to move on because Seth said there's this horribly jaggedly discontinuous fact about American foreign policy and Trump's general policy, which is relating to Israel and Gaza alone among practically everybody on the planet. Trump has said Israel should do what it thinks it is necessary to do to get to conclude the war to beat Hamas and to get the hostages home. And Israel has made a shift in the last four days. The ceasefire, the first phase one of the deal with Hamas concluded over the weekend. So we are now in a kind of like, you know, month by. The lease is now month by month or day by day, if it's to be continued, if it's to be called a ceasefire. And Israel is now signaling that either it's going to get a huge trance of hostages back, there's this Witkoff framework which says no ceasefire goes on until the end of Passover because it's Ramadan and then it's Passover. I love how caring we are about the Islamic holiday, the Islamic month of Ramadan, and how Israel should respect that in some fashion, when the Arab states have attacked Israel, first on yom Kippur in 1973 and then on Sukkot, the holiday of Sukkot on October 7. So they love, they love to keep peace on holiday and are doing every.
- [59:35]
Christine Rosen
Hostage transfer on Saturdays.
- [59:38]
John Podhoretz
Right. Which is the weekly Jewish holiday of rest. Right. Okay. So the disrespect, getting back to dishonor and disrespect. Okay. But so the Wyckoff framework is this is how it's going to work. Most hostages out in one fell swoop. We go through Passover and then everybody else has to come out and then we'll see where we are. Right. That's basically the wyckoff framework. And B.B. netanyahu said he accepted the Wyckoff framework and Hamas has not accepted the Wyckoff framework. And now Israel is starting for the first time to get incredibly tough, at least in rhetoric. They are now following Trump's lead in the defense minister. And B.B. anna is saying, we're getting a lot of hostages out right now or you are going to feel pain like you have never felt before. And they have cut off all a. Finally, they're saying no more. There will be no more aid. That's it. And there's also talk about cutting the electrical grid entirely to Gaza. So they have gone from the carrot of the deal and having the hostages humiliated in these parades and having the, you know, murdered babies paraded in coffins and the wrong mother, the wrong woman being put in Shiri Bebas coffin and doing all of that disgusting stuff. And Israel is now saying, we are going to starve you out. We're going to cut off your electricity. It's all on you. All this ends. You let the hostages out, we're not going to let you survive, but all of this ends. The only reason this is happening is because of the hostages. So it'll be interesting to hear what rhetoric Trump uses tonight in relation to this, because it is basically following his policy, right? It's get the hostages out or we're going to unleash hell. And Bibi did what Zelensky didn't do, which is he was obsequious and flattering and all of that talking about how wonderful Trump is and how great the framework is, and he is now going to use that as his lever to go forward. And last night, they killed the leader of Hamas in the west bank in a targeted assassination, which means that they are not leaving. There may be some kind of weird ceasefire on in Gaza, but there is no ceasefire against Hamas forces in the west bank, which, of course, is under, you know, Israeli, nominal Israeli pseudo control. All right, so that's my monologue there, Seth. Where, where do you think this, where, where do you think this goes?
- [62:24]
Christine Rosen
Well, I, I think, you know, I woke up this morning to a headline that at Trump's initiation, initiating, possibly Putin has agreed to mediate negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran. So that's another thing to introducing into this. You can't separate, it's one thing to try to separate Russia and Ukraine from Israel and Hamas, but you, you literally can't separate Iran from Hamas because you can't separate Iran from Iran. So this is, you know, another situation where they're, they're talking tough, right? And they understand that Hamas is evil, it is at fault. But there's a, there's a chance they were looking at Hamas in a vacuum, as if it's an independent sort of thing. And I know a lot of, a lot of, of Israelis and a lot of foreign policy people have suspected with, with a lot, with plenty of reason to suspect that the meetings between Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump have been about putting together a plan to once and for all, end the threat of Iran's nuclear program, Right. That it may or may not be possible to completely eradicate Hamas, but that the larger problem is that if you just cut off their patrons, you get rid of, you know, this nuclear proliferation problem in the Middle east and you get rid of support for, you know, the, the creation of Hezbollah land in South Lebanon and Hamastan in, you know, in, in Gaza and all these places. And now it's like, well, you know, they're getting along with Putin. Well, so what does, you know, what does this sort of thing mean? And what does that mean for the hostages and the negotiations too? Because if you introduce a reason to go easier on Iran, even if it's just during an early phase talks, you're not, it's going to restrict what you do in Gaza also. So that's another thing that we have to sort of watch now whether the administration is really going to stick to this, do whatever you have to do, and for how long they will stay to it.
- [64:48]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I'm going to make a recommends.
- [64:51]
Seth Mandel
Oh man, I had one. I'll save it.
- [64:53]
John Podhoretz
Okay, you save it.
- [64:54]
Seth Mandel
Okay, I'll save it.
- [64:56]
John Podhoretz
So last night I watched on Tubi a film called Citizen Wiener, which is not about Anthony Weiner. So Citizen Weiner is a film about a guy named, named Zach Wiener who ran for city council in New York in 2021. But his race, which was real, was a put on and was an occasion for a mock documentary that he and his friend decided to make about running for city council in New York in 2021. And, and they're basically a bunch of improvisers and comedians. And he did file and he did run in this race. And it is a. It is imagine Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show or one of those Christopher Guest movies. But the setting is not fictional. The setting is real. So in that sense it's Boratish and it's this incredibly nerdy Upper west side Jewish kid who is, has nothing much to say about anything and his friends, and they're just trying to run a city council race. And it's basically a parody of documentaries about politics. So it is actually in part a parody of this really wonderful documentary about Anthony Weiner, whom he has no relation, Zach Wiener, great documentary about him that was released after his horrible mayoral run in 2013. It is hilarious, it is subtle. It is really quite brilliantly made. And you can watch it for free on Tubi, though it's annoying because then there are ads. But, you know, we now gotten used to watching movies without ads. I spent my entire life watching movies with ads until, you know, cable came in for 20 years and now I can't bear it. But okay, so. But it is really, really, really funny and it is really clever and, and it has a hilarious twist in the sort of at the end where, where he is, where he is, a sex tape is suddenly, mysteriously released onto the the. Which Actually became a headline. People wrote about this. And he was in the news in 2021 that this sex tape had been released of him with a dominatrix. And his person, whom he calls. Who calls himself his finance minister, who appears, you know, in the frame of the documentary, says very sadly, because Zach Wiener lives with his mother in this very grand apartment on the upper Upper west side. Because his father, from whom his mother is divorced, created Dora the Explorer. I'm not joking. Now, his father was the creator of Dora the Explorer and therefore very, very rich. And so they're obviously very rich. He, the finance minister says, you can live at home with your mom or you can have a sex tape, but you can't do both. Which I think is one of the great lines of history. Anyway, that's Citizen Wiener on Toobie. That's my commentary recommends. And I will say that my dear friend Chris Starwalt, the host of the Hill Sunday and of course, one of America's foremost political interpreters and thinkers and a colleague of Christine's at the American Enterprise Institute, I said to him, oh, my God, you gotta watch this thing. And he said, I did watch it and it's brilliant. So you got me. You got Chris Stahwalt, Citizen Weiner on Tubi.
- [68:59]
Christine Rosen
The original, by the way, the original Wiener documentary, just called Wiener, was remarkable in that way. So if you can spoof that. Well, that's really a compliment because the original documentary was itself almost hard to believe. It wasn't a spoof with the access, but it was just. It was just an example of, you know, Weider's sort of obsession with himself and, you know, this sort of weird transparency and whatever, that he just wanted cameras everywhere at the, you know, what would normally be the most humiliating point in his life.
- [69:40]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I do want to also want to call out for particular praise the performance or the appearances of Zach Wieners mother, Sheree Vogelstein, who is. Does a Jewish mother bit that is throughout the movie that is sublimely funny. So, yes, and the Wiener documentary is amazing. And it's a parody, but it's a parody of the genre of political documentary that sort of came into being with the War Room back in. Back in 1993 or whenever the War Room came out. The sort of behind the scenes at the campaign thing that. That now is sort of like the. The nest of cliches in the guise of, you know, showing you what's really going on behind the curtain is what really is the subject of this very unique and original piece of work. So Citizen Weiner on tubi. We'll be back tomorrow to talk about Trump's speech. For Christine, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pothorid's Keep the Candle Burning.