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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [00:45]
No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best.
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Seth Mandel
Expect the worst.
- [00:52]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, November 15, 2024. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, again reminding you that we are now available on YouTube. This podcast available on YouTube. You can look at our faces. You can see what we have behind us. You can take stock and measure of our lives as revealed by our bookcases and enjoy the visual feast that is the Commentary podcast staff. We're not a full house today, but with me as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:32]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:34]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:36]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:37]
John Podhoretz
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [01:41]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John. And I just want to start by saying how excited I am to talk about an appointment by President Elect Trump that will affect all of our lives and will touch on American government and public policy in so many ways. And let me be the first to congratulate Governor Doug Burgum for his selection as the next Secretary of the Interior. He's a big fan of the podcast. We're a fan of his. The eyebrows are coming to Washington and things will not be the same. So I assume that's what you want to talk about too.
- [02:14]
John Podhoretz
I do, because I also want to, I want to remind you that when he announced for president, I ordered all of the Doug Burgum merch. And one of the reasons I did so is that he did have the best logo, presidential campaign logo I've ever seen. I got shirts, I got hats, I got Burgum coming at the ears. I thought maybe I had screwed up and that I had ended up spending all this money on nothing. And now of course, I'm charging back into the ebay world.
- [02:50]
Seth Mandel
Sounds like you got a. You got a fever.
- [02:52]
John Podhoretz
And if he is more Burglar merch and if he could just get his people to do some Department of the Interior bergam merch. Yeah, I don't know, we could close that federal deficit.
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Matthew Continetti
Well, that same, that same graphic design sensibility, in addition to his expertise in Land management, infrastructure, energy conservation. I am. I. The only thing he can do to make me more excited is if he emulates one of his predecessors as Secretary of the Interior and goes to work on the first day riding a horse. That happens. I mean, I don't know. I mean, he was like the only person picked yesterday, right? I mean, that's really the only headline, Right.
- [03:46]
John Podhoretz
Well, I have some bad news for you. He was, I think, kind of. His announcement came a couple of hours after one that made a little more news. Oh, actually, I would say that Donald Trump stepped on the news of the appointment that we're about to talk about by simply in the middle of a speech that he was giving saying, oh, and you know what? I was going to do this tomorrow, but I'm appointing Doug Burgum Secretary of the Interior. I'm talking, of course, about the presence of Sylvester Stallone at this America First Principles conference, where Sylvester Stallone, star of the very fine Paramount plus series, Tulsa King, as well as some other things you may have heard about, did call Donald Trump the second George Washington, maybe his finest piece of writing since the Academy Award he won for the film Rocky. But yes, so we have that. And then, of course, just the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. To the Department of Health and Human Services. Anybody else have any news you want to discuss or should we just close up shop now? Now, it's really, it's not. Not. Not a big deal. Not a big deal that a person who opposes vaccines is running the Department of Health and Human Services. A person of extraordinarily questionable personal character, which we can get to. Apparently. That's not really an issue anymore. But, I mean, I'm just gonna say this flat out.
- [05:21]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah. Which nominee are you referring to when you say the issues regarding character?
- [05:25]
John Podhoretz
Right now? I'm talking about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Among other things, that it is important to note about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And it will be noted. So I'm going to note it, and I'm noting it because I think it's important, because I know character doesn't matter. But his first wife, who is a person of fragile emotional. In a fragile emotional condition, found a diary of his in which he detailed his 37 sexual encounters in the previous year with other women and killed herself. That happened in 2011. And somehow that has sort of been buried in the mists of time and history. There are many other stories about his personal hijinks and predilections, including a heroin addiction in the 1980s. I guess we're not supposed to bring stuff like that up because he could have cured himself and otherwise. But there are policy reasons to be extraordinarily upset by this nomination, and there are actually reasons involving who should actually be in positions of power in the United States based on their personal peccadilloes. If voters make those decisions and choices when confronted with them and put before them when they are, then that's one thing. Like if voters say in the end, Donald Trump, it doesn't matter to us that much that Donald Trump behaved in egregious fashion in his private life. That is something that they get to decide. This is a much this is a different issue. But it's not the most important thing about him. Obviously, the most important thing about him are his views.
- [07:06]
Matthew Continetti
Right. Well, I just want to preface what I'm about to say by saying he would not be my choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. However, I think it's the way to understand the selection is through two articles that came out on the same day that his appointment was announced. The first article is, I believe, a Wall Street Journal article about the stunning and alarming rise in obesity in the United States, including among children, and how the experts don't really know what's going on here and don't know how to deal with it. The second article that came out yesterday is, I believe, one of the COVID stories in the forthcoming issue of the Atlantic by David Brooks, our friend and New York Times columnist, talking about how the meritocracy is fundamentally broken and all of the people who have gone through the organizational machinery of going to the right schools, getting the right degrees and landing the right jobs have clearly failed to impress the American people and the electorate with the results of this schooling and resume building that they've done. When you put those two things together, I think you can see why RFK Jr has had an electric effect on American politics in the past couple years. One, there is a rising sense in the culture, not talking about the political system, but the culture, that there's something wrong with our public health and with our nutrition. And this is a cultural phenomenon. It starts out with the crunchy liberals that RFK used to be a part of in California, but it is now basically going across America among particularly moms. Right. And the second thing is, as is alluded to in the David Brooks piece, there is such a widespread distrust of expertise in this country, stemming primarily from the pandemic and the public health system's response to the pandemic, that this distrust opens up the door for people whose views are marginal and fringe to become now a legitimate point of view, and especially when you can articulate them in such a way as RFK can, with his familial background and as well as his kind of celebrity status. So while again, not my pick, I can see how he has had such an influence in this election, and I can also see how there are going to be discrete constituencies that will be pushing him for confirmation. Will they build up to enough to get through the Senate? I don't know about that. But when you consider the people who are skeptical of the COVID vaccines, when you consider the people who are skeptical of the overall vaccination mentality in the United States, when you think about people who are concerned about obesity and nutrition and Big Ag or whatever the big food processors are, when you think about the people who are angry at Fauci and the cdc, you start building up a sense that there's a coalition there that could actually get RFK Jr into this position with unknown consequences.
- [10:51]
John Podhoretz
I think that's a very solid analysis of the position that he is in as a kind of popular culture figure. And we can take it to heart that again, while I said he doesn't get a pass because he wasn't elected, Trump told us he was going to do this or something very much like this for two months. I mean, once RFK endorsed him and was on the trail with him, he kept saying, he's going to have a big job. I'm giving him a big job. He's going to be right there with me. Make America healthy again. So American voters went to the polls fully aware or should have been fully aware in a way that maybe we and the elites warrant that they were voting on this in some tiny, small measure. I mean, I don't think it's the anywhere near the top 15 issues, based on everything that we've seen, that activated people to vote for President Elect Trump. But we also don't know how RFK would have done in the voting in November had he gone all the way to the election. So Trump was clearly grateful.
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Seth Mandel
He rode the same wave that Trump rode, essentially, because about the mistrust of experts about people saying, you know, I'm tired of hearing, you know, words about the noble lie, right there was Fauci's noble lie was, you know, about telling people that what they wanted to hear and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with what they were doing in Wuhan and the research they were doing and there was no possible side effects of a vaccine or this or that, you know, this idea that there's no trade off was always told like, this is the right thing, the science is settled, etc. It's almost 10 years since Trump rode that wave in and it's just the same kind of popular discontent that has led people to say, well, maybe if it's true in politics and it's true in, I don't know, foreign policy, maybe it's true in health matters too. You know, they don't, they don't see them. It's, there's an important point that's fair. People say, like, would you want your plumber to fly the plane? Right. That's their argument against populism. Like, you have the expert do it people. What the misconception there is that the voters who are voting in this so called populist manner are not themselves claiming to be the experts instead of the pilot or somebody else. They're simply saying the experts have lost my trust over this period of time and therefore I'm willing to give a chance to other experts or something like that, or other credential folks. And that seems like it's all part of the same thing.
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Matthew Continetti
And importantly, if the plumber doesn't do the job right, you can hire another plumber.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Matthew Continetti
Whereas with government, especially in the last 25 years, as David Brooks points out in the Atlantic essay, there's very little accountability again. And I'm not defending this pick of RFK Jr what I'm saying is you have to think about it in the context of, say, the national security record of the Biden administration. When Biden was elected in 2020, there was an article in Politico and elsewhere saying the professionals are back, the experts are back, they're going to be in charge again. We're not going to have this chaos under Trump. What happened? Record inflation, record illegal migration, and a world that is far more dangerous than it was in 2020. So I think voters are making the calculation that you're saying, Seth, but the only way you can express their discontent in the political system is by turning to people who are completely outside it. You don't think so?
- [14:59]
John Podhoretz
No. Abe, go ahead.
- [15:00]
Abe Greenwald
I just want to add though, that while Seth said that people are simply saying we no longer trust the experts, it's not that we know more. I think that's half true. We also have to recognize here the huge rise in crank theories and general paranoia in the country. This is real. And there are a great many people walking around who support rfk, who have supported rfk, who do think they know more and they have wacky theories and they have competing wacky theories and they are, I wouldn't even call them marginalized at this point. I mean, that was the word that Matt used and it's up until very few years ago. I think that's accurate. I think we sort of don't even know their number at this point because they're not sealed off in a separate cultural precinct as they once were. It's all sort of seeped into the popular culture, into podcasts and Joe Rogan has all these Gazan and entertains all, including Garfk, entertains all these competing challenges to conventional wisdom and to scientific, to the scientific record and the rest of it. For something like the scientific method and logic based reason based policy making and thinking to gain the upper hand, it's going to have to defend itself in the coming years against this stuff. It's no longer sufficient to say, oh, you can't just listen to that. That guy's a crank. The challenges are too great and the failings of the experts are too great as well.
- [16:55]
John Podhoretz
Right? Well, the reason I say that I don't really agree that you can only go to the margins or sort of go outside the system to find a champion is that is belied by what happened in response to Covid when voters got a chance to make their views known about all kinds of issues relating to Covid, particularly relating to schooling and what people discovered as a result of the closure of the schools and the zooming of their kids. And therefore they were sort of overhearing what was going on and the increasing skepticism of the proper increasing of the American people from the narrative that we were being told about the origins, the causes, what was going on with it, how it worked. And therefore, what's interesting is that despite all of that, the American people have generally taken, I would say, an extraordinarily measured enlarged bore, an extraordinarily measured reaction to the failure of our public health institutions, which is to say that the vaccine was created, vaccine was deployed, right? It was the two shots, or I mean, if you took the one, vaccine was one. But like the two of the two of the three providers of the shots, you took those two shots three weeks apart, and almost 80% of the American people got vaccinated. Then they were like, you got to take another one and now you got to take another one. And that's when people start saying, I don't know, you know, like, I thought the whole point about vaccination was that you were vaccinated against the disease and then you didn't get the disease. If you tell me I'm going to be having to get another shot every single year. The way they've now managed to make you take a flu shot, even though it's a kind of a weird form of vaccination, since you're being vaccinated against something that happened the prior year and that the flu has already mutated. But people then start going, no, I don't know. I mean, I know people are still getting Covid. I know people, I may get it, I may not get it. I don't know, maybe my doctor will. But I did the thing. I did the responsible thing. And now they're telling me that what they gave me wasn't exactly what I understand to be a vaccination. And I'm not doing it again if it's ineffectual and I don't really know what the long term consequences are. I think that's a measured reaction and a reaction, moreover, to the mistrust, deserved mistrust that the public health institutions engendered in the American people. But there was a lot of throwing the bums out. Stuff that went on all over the country in relation, when they could, when local officials, local public health officials, whom we all discovered weren't even doctors. A lot of them, like the notorious Barbara. God, I can't remember her name. The Los Angeles. The public health director of Los Angeles, who had a communications degree from Brandeis University and who was shutting restaurants down and shutting, you know, neighborhoods down and shutting churches down like that. It was like we saw doctors get. Barbara Ferrer was her name.
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Seth Mandel
We saw doctors get arrested for giving people the shot that weren't on, like, the list that they had.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Seth Mandel
There was a famous case in Houston where the shots were. Would expire because once you open the vial, you had to give all 10 shots or lose after a certain period of time. That's right. Whatever it was.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Seth Mandel
He ran out of essentially customers, you know, at the sort of makeshift clinic, I believe it was in Houston that they were giving. And so he had leftover shots to give nobody no arms to stick them in. And he went driving around kind of looking for someone. Eventually, I believe in this case, he gave it to his wife. But it was not that he didn't drive home straight from the clinic and say, yo, my wife needs this. You know, which was how it was portrayed at first. He really went looking for, you know, and so there, there was an element of this, like the rules don't even make sense. There were stories about, you know, Whether there should be, like, you know, I think the Free Beacon did stuff on, you know, a sort of racial hierarchy of the vaccines at first and treatment and stuff like that. There were all sorts of bizarre, wacky rules in place that were clearly only going to make the situation worse.
- [21:42]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so the problem with RFK being the instrument of our retribution for Covid is that of course, he didn't come at this raw. He wasn't like, I trusted the system and then it betrayed me. He has been peddling quackery and nonsense and evil ideas about vaccination for 25 years and has opportunistically jumped on the new public skepticism to advance views about vaccines that are, frankly, profoundly dangerous. I mean, there is this story that there was a measles outbreak, I think, in American Samoa. He convinced public health officials not to vaccinate kids in American Samoa against measles. And 83 people died as a result of a measles epidemic. Like, he has blood on his hands. This idea that he peddled that vaccines causes autism, which of course was the claim of a discredited article in the Lancet in 1998, whose author was convicted of fraud, has been something that he has deployed for decades. And let's also not lose sight of the fact that we are now. Everything is being scrambled here. Right. You mentioned crunchy liberals in California. Right. Who didn't like vaccination. It's not just crunchy. It's not. He doesn't just serve this kind of population of, you know, that's on the one hand, cranks of the left and cranks of the right. He is a tool of the tort lobby. He has been a tool of the tort bar for 30 years. He claims that when people want to sue about claiming that there was. There's leaching wastewater, there's stuff leaching into the wastewater, or. Or someone has some lawsuit about an environmental, you know, cancer cluster or something like that, and you have these tort lawyers looking to make gigantic class action claims. He is one of the people, his organization, River Keepers and others provided nonsense data and totally discredited, well, whatever you call them, latitudinal longitudinal studies about things and enriched a lot of rich lawyers in this game and particularly in New York State in relation to environmental matters. He makes claims about nuclear power that are false. He was a key reason why New York State ended up closing its nuclear power plant on Long island, which was a disastrous thing to do. Populist, because people are afraid of nuclear power. But there was absolutely no reason for it to be closed and it cost a lot of money. And it would, you know, now all those plants are going to have to be basically brought back online to pay for the generative energy needs of AI and that sort of thing. So he's a malign actor. He has been a malign actor and not. And on all sorts of matters that were classic conservative concerns about making sure that the private sector was able to do things without the heavy hand of government getting between them and the consumer, when it came to medicines, when it came to energy, when it came to all kinds of things. So that's when I say, like, could you have found could you have made J. Bhattacharya head of hhs? Yes. Could you have made Richard Urbright head of hhs? Yes. Could you have made all kinds of people who were good on this?
- [25:33]
Matthew Continetti
Well, can I say that first of the controversial picks, the four so far, Hegseth, Gabbard, Gates and Kennedy. Kennedy is probably the least surprising because, as you say, this was being telegraphed since August when Kennedy endorsed Trump on election night in Trump's victory speech, he said, have fun, Bobby, because I'm going to let you loosen.
- [25:59]
John Podhoretz
You're going to do some things. He's going to do some things.
- [26:02]
Matthew Continetti
This is not as much as a shock, even though you're right, there are plenty of other people who could satisfy the demand for accountability at the CDC and NIH over Covid. Potential silver lining. The New York Post has at the well, just can I just finish this at potential silver lining. At the America First Principles Gala at Mar a Lago yesterday, RFK Jr was accompanied by his spouse, Sheryl Hines. And so it occurred to me that maybe this will bring Larry David out of retirement and he can do a whole season about his ex wife Cheryl marrying a guy who starts out as an environmental lawyer, but all of a sudden gets swept up in maga. So I'm just, I'm just trying to make you happier, John. I'm just putting that out there. Third point, what we have this week is a reminder in the importance of the United States Senate. My institute, the American Enterprise Institute, honored outgoing Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell this week. And in his speech, Senator McConnell talked about how the Senate exists to temper temporary majorities. That's the whole reason for the Senate. That's why you have the filibuster. That's why senators are elected to terms of six years, not two years or four years. And why you also have the Senate's constitutional role to provide advice and consent to the president in the matter of appointments. So we're going to reach an inflection point here in the coming weeks where the Senate is The Senate Republicans 53, maybe 52, if Bob Casey, the incumbent in Pennsylvania, and his Democratic super lawyer, Mark Elias, somehow thwart Dave McCormick, the winner of that election. But this Republican Senate majority needs to exercise its responsibility, fulfill its responsibility the best it can. And then one final comment. One thing that's striking to me, and I wrote about this in the Free Beacon, is how fast these appointments are coming compared with 2016, Trump's last transition, which was this kind of drawn out process and this kind of audition that all the different applicants would engage in, contrasted with that we have every day multiple appointments. One thing that's missing though, is there's, there's no like communications team. So we get this news via a release from Trump. And that that release is then posted on social media and amplified by Elon Musk, who owns the social media and has a huge reach. And it's often amplified by J.D. vance, who has more limited reach. But that's it. There's no spokesman coming out and saying, this is why we're doing this and here's how we respond to the different attacks. So while I do stress kind of the differences between the two transitions in my column this morning, it has occurred to me that one thing that is still not there is a sense of kind of, okay, here's our person. This is why President Trump nominated him or her, and this is how we're going to combat the attacks against them. And you can see this in some of the reporting by Mark Caputo at the Bulwark, who's doing a really great job recently, talking about how the Gates appointment came together very quickly just the other day. And Now Gates and J.D. vance are calling senators, trying to present a different face of Matt Gates. But eventually, that type of response, that type of communications effort is going to have to, I think, happen on the outside as well. And so far, the transition is not doing it.
- [30:28]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US Based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.
- [30:58]
Seth Mandel
So let me just say, I just want to add one more thing, by the way, to The RFK stuff, which is that I think the New York Post editorial this morning put its finger on right on the trigger, which is the belief among people, people try to convince themselves that if so and so is only limited to three things. He made sense when he was talking about during the campaign, it might be okay. And the Post did, I think, a very good job pouring cold water all over that this morning, basically warned that that's not how you should look at this thing. You should not expect, you know, that people will be, don't believe that, oh, we'll just leave him. He's just going to do fluoride. That's the whole reason he's here. Whatever. And they note in the piece that when they spoke to him, he was saying things like pesticides, ultrasounds could be driving an upswing in Tourette syndrome and peanut allergies and things like that. And this was during the campaign. And the point they were making, I think, is, which they didn't spell out, but they should have. It doesn't matter. Even if he doesn't change rules and directions and regulations on those specific things, the director of Health and Human Services is going to be saying things like, well, maybe you shouldn't get that ultrasound or your baby's going to have peanut allergies and that, you know, he's not going to outlaw ultrasounds, but the effect it will have of, you know, a kind of like an almost he's not a surgeon general, but, you know, people see him as the health figure that will do a lot of damage. And the other thing is, I would say also, by the way, Matt, the transition, one thing that Trump is not sort of distracted by is the fight over whether various states counting and stuff were unfair or, you know, all sorts of other stuff. Nor is he being run down by the level of Russia stuff from the other side that he was at this time, too. There's a sort of there things will get crazy, but there feels like a weird sort of settling in a way where we're not already gearing up for his impeachment the way we were.
- [33:09]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, I would just say. Yeah. I mean, I think the Russia. There was a lot of argument right after the election in 16 about Russia's involvement. But Russia, Russia, Russia, as we say, really didn't get going until January when you had the meeting with Comey and then, of course, the news about the FISA war.
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John Podhoretz
But there was already.
- [33:30]
Matthew Continetti
Yes, there was already. And we wrote about it in Commentary. Right.
- [33:33]
John Podhoretz
And all that. Right. Okay. But I, I will say what Seth says what you're talking about here is very important. So there has been traditionally a way that you dealt with a nomination. You did some kind of a screening, you had a background check of some sort. You had a team interview people. You tried to come with a list of pros and cons. You figured out what the negatives might be. You announced the nomination. You had some kind of a briefing book or a fact book that could be given to people about why the nominee was so good. You could schedule, had a couple of interviews scheduled. You get them in front of the Senate. There would be a, literally a campaign for every nominee run by somebody who scheduled the appointments with the senators, who figured out how to background figure out how to do background with the reporters who covered the various agencies to give them a sense of what was going to happen and all that. Somebody was given each that job. Like so there are, I don't know, 14 or 15 cabinet departments, right. So somebody would be the manager of the cabinet campaign for the secretary. And that does not seem to be the case. And as a result, you have a kind of sink or swim thing going on here that people aren't quite aware of, by which I mean Pete Hegseth is named, right? So Pete Hegseth is named. We have a fun time talking about him and all of that. Well, there's a story in the San Francisco Cisco Chronicle came out yesterday about some kind of a claim or you know, relating to sexual peccadillo. I couldn't open it because I clicked on it and there was a paywall and I wasn't going to spend five minutes, you know, paying to get the one article because I had.
- [35:22]
Matthew Continetti
There was also a story in Vanity Fair as well.
- [35:25]
John Podhoretz
Oh, is there? Okay, so my point is he wanted Hegseth and he'll want Hex. That's fine. Somebody could have gone to him and said, okay, look, you want Hegseth, you got Hegseth. It's fine. Just know there are these three or four things that are on that are in the, they're in the hopper that he's going to have to deal with. So just as good practices as best practices, Mr. President, here's what you need to know about your choice so you know how to defend them or whatever. Or maybe you don't want to go that way. And he didn't do any of that. So as go ahead.
- [36:02]
Abe Greenwald
Well, I'm just not clear if it's that Trump doesn't know or knows and doesn't care.
- [36:09]
John Podhoretz
I'm pretty sure he doesn't Know, I'm.
- [36:10]
Abe Greenwald
Well, in case of someone like Matt Gaetz. How can he not know? I mean, well, did he know that the report. I know, I know, but.
- [36:18]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah, but did Trump know that the House ethics report was scheduled to be released today when he nominated Matt Gaetz? I mean, did Gates tell him that? I mean, he must have found out when Gates resigned from Congress.
- [36:29]
John Podhoretz
No, he talked to Gates. He talked to Gates on Wednesday morning and appointed him Wednesday afternoon. Right, that's that, that's what, that's what we're, that's what we're talking about here. The one time back long ago, 20 quarter century ago, we knew one thing that George W. Bush was going to do when he became president, when he won the presidency, and that was after 36 days. Right. The first thing he announced was that Colin Powell was going to be Secretary of State. And that was something that he had promised on the campaign trail. So that was actually something that was known. And then there was a kind of flurry right after that because he had. Because there was that 36 day delay in which he couldn't do anything because they were doing the Florida recounts and everything like that. But I bring that up only to say that there's no reason to be disordered. I'm saying Hegseth may go down for reasons that Trump was never exposed to. Now that's his choice. He's an undisciplined purser. He doesn't care. He wants what he wants. Or it's like, all right, I'm going to put him up sink or swim. I mean, you know what? I'll get credit from the people who like him for having nominated him. And if he doesn't, if he goes down, I'll say, who was that guy? I didn't really know him, frankly, I didn't know him very well at all. It's literally what he said about Bolton. That's what I didn't know him.
- [38:00]
Matthew Continetti
I want to praise you, John Pod Horiz, because yesterday you said that some of these nominations may not even make it to a vote. And I was being my contrarian stubborn self and pushed back a little bit. And I was doing some further research and you were absolutely right. I had forgotten, because it had been 20 years that after his victory, it's about the same margin of the popular vote. In 2004, George W. Bush nominated Bernie Carrick, the former New York City Police Commissioner, to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. I don't know why this escape me. And that nomination lasted about a month before so many Stories came out that Kerik withdrew and I had.
- [38:47]
John Podhoretz
And ended up in prison, by the way, eventually.
- [38:49]
Matthew Continetti
And now as a Trump supporter. So.
- [38:52]
John Podhoretz
But I'm saying in the Carrick case, like that was one of those don't fly too close to the sun because you're going to explode in the sun because he surfaced that way.
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Matthew Continetti
Mm. Right.
- [39:03]
John Podhoretz
Stuff. There were consequences getting him. Yeah. Real, very severe.
- [39:06]
Matthew Continetti
Then there's. In 2008, after Barack Obama's major victory, Obama nominated Tom Daschle to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Now, this is the former Senate leader, right, Tom Daschle, and a longtime minority leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He didn't make it to a vote because of stories that came out about his lobbying practices. And on another department, too, Commerce. Obama nominated former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Again, that nomination came, and this is for Commerce. Okay. Not one of the four big ones, but Commerce stories about Richardson came out that forced him to withdraw. Then I totally forgot of this. Then Obama offered the job and nominated the former Republican senator from New Hampshire, Judd Gregg, to the position. But Greg also never came to a vote because Gregg apparently had subsequent conversations with Obama where he was like, oh, I don't agree with you on anything. So he took himself out of the rutting and eventually we got former Washington Governor Gary Locke as secretary. So I think you're right. This is the time of trial, November and December. These nominations are coming fast. I think there is an effort to flood the zone. Right. Move very quickly, have all these controversial picks out there so that it's hard to select targets, hard to drop oppo, hard to focus energies of opposition on any one candidate. But if any of them are forced to withdraw, it will be in this period before the inauguration and not after.
- [40:57]
John Podhoretz
I think people are used to the idea that if you nominate a Supreme Court justice, that's going to be a fight. And that is a fight you have to win, or you have to try to win, because that's a job with all the marbles. It's a lifetime appointment. And that is really the ideological fault line between the two. There is no greater ideological fault line between the two parties than a Supreme Court nominee. And from a Robert Bork onward, there have been battles royale, mostly against Republicans, really, but nonetheless, battles royale. But that's just not the case with Cabinet. I mean, Trump can, if he wants to, go scorched earth with the Senate, about Bobby Kennedy or about Gates or about something like that. I'm not sure when you calculate it, that either his history or any understanding of his personal interest go to having those fights. Because if they can get through on their own steam, great. He gets what he wants. They'll smash. They're smashing the china. They're peeing on the White House carpet. They're doing whatever that populists are supposed to do to show their disrespect for the institutions that have been so unresponsive to the American people. But if they don't make any, just appoint somebody else, it's no skin off his nose. It really isn't. John Tower went down for George H.W. bush and Bill Clinton took three choices to get an attorney general and stuff like that. It's just not something that you need to make a federal case out of. If somebody really displeases the Senate.
- [42:53]
Seth Mandel
Now, I can understand the difference is that also that the people who you guys are talking about who went down before inauguration were traditional picks, right? Tom Daschle was not like, what? Oh, my God, what are you doing picking Tom Daschle and Bernie Kerik, who. I think people understood that he probably had skeletons in his closet by that time, but he was the police commissioner. He was the 911 police commissioner, and Bush was the post 911 president.
- [43:28]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's a joke also. That's actually an interesting political joke story because, of course, Bush did it because Rudy Giuliani said he's fantastic. And now we can see what kind of irony guidance Rudy Giuliani has provided to people over the years. That was.
- [43:44]
Matthew Continetti
And it did happen as well to Trump in his first term with Dr. Ronnie, you know, Dr. Ronnie Jackson had. He wanted him at Veterans affairs, didn't work out. So he came to the White House.
- [43:55]
John Podhoretz
And eventually Veterans affairs, and that didn't work out either. So I'm just saying, like, there is a. But there is a. There. This is not. We are overestimating just because he said, I want recess appointments, which he didn't understand. I'm sure that was. That's an idea that was sort of created by Stephen Miller or by somebody that he wrote that memo and said, you know, the Senate should do recess appointments or whatever the hell it was, he didn't know what it meant. And it's not worth, again, what's worth the fighting if you're Trump, what's worth the fighting?
- [44:24]
Abe Greenwald
Oh, but see, I think.
- [44:26]
John Podhoretz
Okay, go ahead.
- [44:26]
Abe Greenwald
But I think Trump, I think Trump is much more different from other presidents who have picked people. And in his case, I think there is two factors here that would make, in his mind, candidates worth fighting for. When for other people they wouldn't be. And that one is that I think he, just because of who he is, will take every rejection as a personal slight. These picks are extensions of himself. And if one goes down, that's a hit on him. And I think he thinks in those terms. The other is he's said that his first time around the establishment, the Blob, whatever, hamstrung him, right? And they got their way too much. And this was in part because he wasn't a Washington person. You know, he said, like, I hadn't slept, stayed overnight, you know, there until I got. Until I got to the White House or something. So. And this time he wants to correct that. He doesn't want to be hemmed in by the establishment. He doesn't want to be pushed around by the Blob. And I think these are, to him and certainly to some of the people around him, these are big deals.
- [45:59]
John Podhoretz
I don't. I mean, we're psychoanalyzing somebody or we're trying to come up with theories about somebody we don't know, so. Or we only know from the outside. But he's an extraordinarily transactional person and incredibly unsentimental. And he is not loyal to people. He really isn't. Like, the. What he did with RFK is a totally traditional thing to do, right. Guy endorsed him. The endorsement seemed to have some minor positive effect and he gave him a big job, like, that's that. The problem is he gave him a big job and now there's going to be a lot of trouble from him giving him a big job. And he's already served his purpose. So the rap on it would be if he somehow withdrew his affect from rfk, somebody would say, well, you're not being loyal. And he's like, well, whatever. I don't know. I mean, I tried to give him the job and the Senate doesn't like him. Go take it up with them. He defends himself like no human being has ever defended himself. I don't know that there is a single instance you can point to in the course of his entire career, both as a businessman or as a. As president, where he has demonstrated loyalty to people who got into trouble on his watch.
- [47:20]
Seth Mandel
And we just. With Kavanaugh the other day. Right, we.
- [47:23]
John Podhoretz
Kavanaugh. Right, Kavanaugh.
- [47:24]
Seth Mandel
But we were talking about how Trump wasn't the one who jumped into the fray to defend Kavanaugh.
- [47:30]
John Podhoretz
Right. It was like Lindsey Graham, he wanted.
- [47:32]
Seth Mandel
The pick, so he didn't pull him.
- [47:34]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [47:34]
Seth Mandel
He didn't want to lose that fight. But you. Right. You didn't see Trump running into the mix and just swinging around. He was.
- [47:41]
John Podhoretz
No, but he didn't pull him. Right. And the idea didn't pull him. Yeah. If Kavanaugh had called himself. Yeah. No, if Kavanaugh had called him and said, Mr. President, I don't know whether I should resign or not, would he said, no, you stay in and fight because that's what we need in our, in the Supreme Court or what? He said, well, thanks very much for your service. You know, it's really, it's really crappy what they did to you, you know, that he would have done the latter. It's just that's not who he is. And most wisely, I would say most presidents don't have that loyalty downward all that much. They can't, you know, they have too much at stake in other things to spend their capital on a third party. It's not worth it. It really isn't. For in any of these cases, even if someone is getting horribly mistreated, and that's happened many times, that people have gotten horribly unjust, things have been said about them in hearings and all that, and maybe that's the case with some of these circumstances. But if he picks Gates on Wednesday afternoon because he liked the conversation Wednesday morning, and it's two months of agony with Gates, at some point he's gonna go, what do I, you know, I didn't know him. I don't know him. What do I know? You know, I thought he was good, but you know what? I don't really know him anyway. We've, we've made our, we've made our cases on either side. I, you know, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing that he is putting us through. And I will say that the one thing about it is when you're talking about smashing the China, it is true that the sort of customs and manners of Washington, D.C. as you might say, David Brooks exposes in his remarkable Atlantic article about the meritocracy over the last 60, 70 years. There are customs and manners and all of that. So what? They're only good if they make the system function well. And under Trump, those manners and mores did not make the system function well. He really did have enemies who were working directly for him, looking to destroy him, like the director of the FBI and the, as I said the other day, and the person who was left in charge of the Justice Department when he became president and he is right to be skeptical. He was right. Like, though those were, I mean, Comey was plotting against him in a very disgraceful manner in the guise, moreover, which is even creepier, of having gone to him and gone to him at the beginning of January and saying, Mr. President, we, you know, there are things are being said about you or, you know, things are going on with Russia in relation to you. And I felt it necessary to come up and tell you about it, like just to make Trump crazy and paranoid and not make it clear that he was the source himself of the plot against, against Trump. So if you, if that's the kind of lesson you want to take, then, yeah, you want your loyalists there. But you also can't be sentimental about the people you pick.
- [50:59]
Matthew Continetti
Well, look, the upside is with all this controversy and with all of this kind of overload of the circuits of the, of the system, Mike Huckabee will sail through as ambassador to Israel. So will have a good pro Israel voice there. Yeah. And probably, you know, Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio as well at UN And State. I mean, done, you know, voice, voice vote on them.
- [51:25]
John Podhoretz
Voice vote.
- [51:25]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [51:26]
John Podhoretz
Remember, I mean, that is, that is also that the interesting question is who's going to violate and break tradition by simply voting against every single Trump nominee. That would actually be. If the Democrats in the Senate do that. That is a violation of tradition. That is. Okay, look, a, we don't, you know.
- [51:41]
Seth Mandel
Didn'T Warren do that last time? Didn't she vote, didn't she just vote a straight no. And there was somebody. I wish I had it pulled.
- [51:49]
John Podhoretz
I'm sure she did. I'm sure she did.
- [51:51]
Seth Mandel
There was somebody that. It didn't even make sense. It was just like.
- [51:55]
John Podhoretz
I'm sure she did. And you know, I think Rand Paul has probably voted against everybody. Rand Paul might vote against everybody anyway.
- [52:01]
Matthew Continetti
There was that classic moment from Schumer the other day when one of his opening speeches, he's like, you know, I call on the new majority and the new administration to uphold the sacred traditions of this institution and of the three co. = branches of government. And you're sitting there listening to him saying, okay, you're going to break the filibuster. You always wanted to break the filibuster on legislation and you support this plan to completely remake the Supreme Court so that a would be President Harris could stock it with liberal justices. And now you're lecturing the new Republican majority on obeying the norms. That's why I think a lot of these arguments just don't have the purchase they once did after eight years of.
- [52:47]
John Podhoretz
The Trump era and four years of the Biden era.
- [52:51]
Matthew Continetti
Well, I'm including Biden in the Trump era. Right. Yes.
- [52:54]
John Podhoretz
So what. Yeah. What is important, Right. Is this idea that Trump opened the door. I mean, this is one of my bugbears, Right. Which is Trump opened the door to this destruction of our institutions and the dismantling of our common understanding of how to run things. And my line on that is bull. Trump was the creation of two things that happened two decades apart or 15 years apart. One was Bill Clinton's behavior during Lewinsky Gate and going and giving that testimony before the independent counsel and saying it depends on what the meaning of is, is, which transformed the American presidency in ways that are absolutely breathtaking. Though it wasn't entirely clear at the time that somehow you could have a president figure out how not to perjure himself with a sentence that was clearly perjurious anyway and all sorts of other behavior. And then 15 years later, when Barack Obama said, I can't wait. The Senate is controlled by the Republican. I can't wait. I have a pen and a phone, and I'm going to write legislation from the White House and impose it on the American people on matters ranging from immigration to student debt, and there's nothing you can do about it. And when Trump came in and said, I'm smashing the China, that happened after numerous courts had ruled against Barack Obama on the grounds that he was behaving in patently unconstitutional ways as president. And Trump came in as. And this is always the warning, like, if you open Pandora's box, that's why you don't open Pandora's box. And Clinton opened Pandora's box and then Obama thrust it wide open. And that is the story of where this, where this led to Trump.
- [54:50]
Abe Greenwald
And by the way. And Biden did, too. I mean, you know, with, with his, with his student loan schemes, you know, and others.
- [55:03]
Matthew Continetti
The employer mandate for vaccines.
- [55:05]
Abe Greenwald
Absolutely. Inserting himself in the middle of, you know, in between personal contracts having nothing to do with the government.
- [55:14]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [55:14]
Abe Greenwald
You know, by the way.
- [55:18]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [55:19]
Seth Mandel
The Elizabeth Warren voted no. 19 out of 22. Gill Brand voted no. 20 out of 22. There was one Trump nominee who got all 100 votes. That was David Shulkin.
- [55:33]
John Podhoretz
Okay. So, by the way, what's important about this is that there was even then a potential argument based on the idea that Trump was an illegitimate president because he hadn't won the popular vote. Right. I mean, to be Republican, Democrats did think there was an idea that Trump was not due the respect of a normal president because he did not win the popular vote and they could do whatever they wanted. And there is no such argument now to be made. He has a popular mandate. He will have won the popular vote, whether it's over 50% or it's at 49.9%. What all is done is not clear. But he won the Electoral College. He won the popular vote. And if you just vote against people to vote against people, then you look churlish. But that will be a vi. That will be a breaking of a completely, you know, standard practice, which is as long as somebody is not controversial, you're the advise and consent proceed or isn't or is an offense to you in some fashion or other because of some policy view that they take or hold, then you're supposed to let the President have his nominees. Although I guess in the 19th century there were. Was it like 25% of all nominees were rejected by the Senate because, because of slavery and, you know, because of the issues of the day. So there is a history in the United States of total Senate, like just being completely rejectionist. So maybe argument, maybe I'm now making.
- [57:06]
Seth Mandel
Don't want to go back to the 19th century. Right. That's, that's the, that's a good argument. We're already there look like the 19th century.
- [57:12]
Matthew Continetti
Among among rejected nominees was Roger Taney, who was then appointed by. Oh, that's President Jackson to, to the Supreme Court.
- [57:21]
John Podhoretz
Supreme Court to write the, to write.
- [57:23]
Matthew Continetti
The worst decision in the history of this republic, Dred Scott v. Sanford. And I would say, though, that there's a collective action problem facing Republican senators, because how do you think about this? Trump the popular vote victory applies to the Republicans as well. Right. Are you going to oppose all of the controversial nominees? Are you going to concentrate your efforts on one of them? Are you going to try to start off with Trump on a good side, especially if you're one of these new senators? I think that if there's opposition, it's going to come from senators who are on either kind of insulated and have from conservative movement, MAGA movement pressures like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, or senators who are kind of on their way, kind of on the Runway to exiting the institution, such as Senator McConnell, Senator Young, Senator Cassidy. You have to look at how they're going to move and how they decide to position themselves vis a vis all of these different nominees. And if they came out all at once, maybe then it would be much more of an obstacle than if they came out separate and isolated. And of course, all of them hoping that some of the nominations, like Gates, like rfk, like Gabbard, could just go away before they even have to worry about it.
- [59:12]
John Podhoretz
Just because you mentioned one. There is an X factor in the RFK nomination. There are two doctors among the Republican senators, John Barrasso and John Cassidy. And you could see them saying, with all due respect, Mr. President, we would love somebody who, you know, reflects all of your views, but we have vaccinated children our entire careers and we can, we cannot in good conscience have a person with these views. We cannot vote for a person of these views. And that. That's an X factor. There's not nothing else like that. Exactly. I mean, there's also Rand Paul, by the way, though. I. Yeah, and, you know, I thought.
- [60:00]
Matthew Continetti
I thought you were going to go in the other direction. There may be a Democratic senator who actually agrees with RFK on some of this stuff. I mean, remember what happened.
- [60:07]
Seth Mandel
Governor Jared Polis complimented the pick yesterday and then eventually halfway walked it back because of.
- [60:16]
John Podhoretz
That was a very weird. That was a very weird thing.
- [60:19]
Seth Mandel
He's a libertarian leaning Democrat and that's.
- [60:23]
Matthew Continetti
Governor of Colorado, you would think would.
- [60:26]
Seth Mandel
Be open to rfk. The rfk.
- [60:28]
John Podhoretz
Oh. Another important point to make is that, you know who first floated the idea of RFK playing a major role in an administration was Barack Obama. Just to show how everything has been scrambled, he was talking about giving him a major job in 2008 in the wake of his victory, which is kind of interesting. Okay, well, we have come to the end of the week. We have come to the end of the show. Please like and subscribe on YouTube. If you go to YouTube and are watching this and helping us get our numbers up there to make commentary visible through the algorithm to people who love political conversation and would profit the way you seem to feel you like you profit from listening to us. So thank you in advance if you will do that. And for Matt, Seth and Abe, I'm John Putthorn. Keep the cattle burning.