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- [00:01]
Jonah Goldberg
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up, required compatibility and availability. Various 18.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?
- [00:45]
Jonah Goldberg
Can you dig it? Greetings and listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch media. So we don't do a lot of Israel content and foreign policy content on here, but we do our share. And this has been a very special time and many people have wanted to make sure that people took away John Podoritz's belt and shoelaces during the last, say, week to 10 days. But he's been fine. He's been holding up very well. I would actually say among the supporters, the forthright supporters of this war and all that, I think John and his colleagues stand out for actual intellectual integrity. Which is to say that when Trump reversed himself on everything, they didn't reverse themselves. They said, no, this sucks. And it's not all Vance's fault. It's like Trump is making a huge mistake. And it shouldn't sound like that's something to praise someone for, but how rare it is makes a requirement of it. For those who don't know, John is my partner in crime on the Glop podcast. He also edits Commentary, which I written for foremost Jewish intellectual publication in the English speaking world. World. I don't know. Is there a competitor?
- [02:03]
John Podhoretz
Not to my mind, but.
- [02:04]
Jonah Goldberg
And John is also one of the people I text with the most in the world, so with that. John Beordoordz, welcome back to the Remnant.
- [02:12]
John Podhoretz
I don't know how to talk to you without, you know, being in all lowercase.
- [02:16]
Jonah Goldberg
I know exactly. And sending follow up things with an asterisk. The correct spelling.
- [02:21]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [02:22]
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. So we're recording this on Thursday, late morning. This is probably not gonna drop until Monday, so we're not gonna do anything too closely tied to the news. But I also don't think the news vis a vis the MOU thing. Every time I hear people say mou, I wanna say S E. Yeah, like the Mickey Mouse Club thing.
- [02:41]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:44]
Jonah Goldberg
How you feeling about it?
- [02:45]
John Podhoretz
I think it's a disaster. I mean, and I'm interested in the ways that it's a Disaster, and the way that Trump himself, in defending it, makes clear what a disaster it is. So let me just ask you this, okay? As somebody who believes that Iran needed to be stopped, it's an existential threat, not only to Israel, but the world. It's an irredentist, millenarian nation with nuclear ambitions and very little check on its behavior. I believe that, however, the week before they're going to war, and he's in a room, war council talking about the war. Did no one say, okay, so we're going to do this, and if the regime doesn't collapse in the first 48 hours, they're obviously not going to be able to hit us with much, but they'll have countermeasures. What are their countermeasures? Well, they have this, they have that, and they could close the Strait of Hormuz. How do we know that? Because they did it in 1987 in an effort to put pressure during the Iran Iraq war on the world to force Iraq to the negotiating table. Presumably, people at the Pentagon and war gamers and people like that know that this is an arrow in the Iranian quiver. And if you think it's an arrow in the Iranian quiver, then you go, okay, well, if they use it, what do you do? X? Yeah. Y or Z? You know, that quote that my father used at the beginning of his book why We Were in Vietnam comes from Bismarck, which was woe betide the statesman who is unable to say, sort of like, explain how a war ends as opposed to how a war begins or some version of that. And he had no idea how this war was going to end. If you go to war as a country, you're going to have to say, okay, there are going to be consequences and lives may be lost. Economy is gonna be interrupted. You know, all of that. And yet it's still worth it, still worth the hell that you're gonna go through, because the world needs this to be done. And you will make the world a safer place, and then everything will be better after you're done. Somewhere in the middle of this, he was like, oops. Not only oops, but you know what's fun? I just noticed it's really fun. If I say that we're making a deal, the stock market goes up. I can make the stock market go up anytime I want to, just by saying that hostilities are going to end. And look, now we have this moment of understanding, and now oil's going to go way down and the market's going up. So I win because I'm Getting my way with, with the market. But he went to war on 28 February with 4 measurable goals. To end the nuclear program. And then as he added to it, to actually take the nuclear material that was buried in Iran and remove it extricated physically and then destroy it. To end their ballistic missile program and launchers and to end that as a threat period. To destroy their navy and destroy all offensive capabilities that they have and to take care of the proxies, meaning the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And as far as I can tell, they destroyed the navy. They got rid of a lot of missiles. They set back the nuclear program. I guess if it hadn't already been set back enough by the bombing in last summer by a midnight hammer. But this deal, not only doesn't it deal with the proxies, it essentially tries to compel Israel to stop fighting with Hezbollah, thus strengthening one of the two proxies, says nothing about missiles and says that they agree that they'll never get a nuclear weapon. But you know what, if they have some materials, why can't they have materials everybody else? And why can't they have ballistic missiles? Saudi Arabia has ballistic missiles. Well, the reason you go to war with them is the regime itself is an existential danger to its region and therefore to the world. And no, they can't have ballistic missiles because they're not defensive weapons, they're offensive weapons.
- [07:12]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, also, look, I mean, you can take the position that they should have allowed to have some ballistic missiles, but the United States of America with its military backing it up, said they can't have ballistic missiles like 20 minutes ago. Yeah, so like that's why, I mean, like if Trump wants people to believe what he says, then he can't say what's the big deal about the fact that I said they can't do this and they can't do that and now I'm saying they can do it. It just means that no one's gonna take United States or Donald Trump very seriously anymore. I mean, that's the, the reason that should appeal to Trump, but doesn't.
- [07:49]
John Podhoretz
Well, no, cuz I think he wants to establish deterrence in his own person. Him personally. Don't f with him. Cuz he's gonna get mad at you. And you don't want him mad at you. If you're John Cassidy, senator from Louisiana, you don't want him mad at you. If you're the Iranians, you don't want him mad at you. If you're Bibi Netanyahu you don't want him mad at you, right? So he deters people or gets them to work as well. He thinks through this personal bullying and personal pressure, he is therefore removing from his tool kit the thing that is the single best thing about being an American president, which is establishing policies that this gigantic behemoth of a country, the richest, the most powerful ever, can simply declare and then expect the world to understand clearly where our red lines are, right? That's what foreign policy is for. We like this. We don't like that. If you do this, we are going to impose that economic sanction on you. If you do this, we're going to withhold something or other. We're going to make life more difficult for you, however you want to slice it. And therefore, it's a machine that goes of itself. Foreign policy, establish the parameters. Everybody knows what the rules are. It's like the rule of law, and then you go ahead. But he, Trump, can change policy every week under Trump rules. He basically this week called himself stupid. He said it's stupid people who wanna use bombs to subdue the Iranian regime. But that was his plan, right?
- [09:28]
Jonah Goldberg
So the question I have to ask is, I was skeptical going into this. Not because I disagreed with the stated aims per se, right? I mean, like, I very much would like to see regime change. I very much would like to see the nuclear program stopped. But I'm of the view that, in the immortal words of Joe Pesci In Lethal Weapon 2, Donald Trump will F you at the drive through, right? I mean, like, at the end of the day, every single person, from wives to business partners to vice presidents, everyone who makes a big bet that they can rely on Trump to stick with something and get their back, gets screwed eventually. And Trump will do all sorts of good things if they're easy and doable, but he will give up if he loses face, if they end up being hard, if they end up costing him. And I was not willing to make the bet that Bibi Netanyahu made, let's put it that way, right, that Trump is gonna see this thing through and it's all gonna work out. What made you think this was gonna work?
- [10:36]
John Podhoretz
My presumption is that if you're the President of the United States and you decide to go to war and you literally, you're dropping, like, hundreds of tons, if not thousands of tons of munitions on this other country, that you've raised the stakes of your presidency and that you have made a larger bet than any bet that you have ever made, including opening A casino that doesn't do well, because this is world historical, this is your reputation forever and all of that. Therefore, if you're gonna start the war, you wanna win it. And if he learned anything based on everything he had been saying from the time that he went into politics in 2015, everybody was stupid because they didn't finish the war. So I figured that he would go to war and he would finish the war. That didn't mean that I thought that he would necessarily get his hands on the nuclear material. I also understood that he didn't want to say that it was a war for regime change, because he said America shouldn't conduct wars for regime change. But effectively the logic of this war was regime change.
- [11:56]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, help is on the way. Take over your country. That was the pretext. Yeah, yeah.
- [12:00]
John Podhoretz
But also, if you want Iran to never have a nuclear weapon, a different regime has to be in charge of Iran, because this regime has spent a generation obsessively attempting to achieve nuclear breakout. They're never gonna stop. So you need regime change. But he didn't wanna say regime change. So I think he thought the decapitation strike that began the war on February 28th would likely be a moment of regime change and that that was all really that you needed to do. And we did. We killed the ayatollah, we killed 50 major leaders on all of that. But it is a regime that's been in place for 47 years. It has the country wired, it shut the Internet down, it has this elite force inside it, 125,000 people called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That is a government within a government that was able to somehow get the reins and at some point come up with this, finally, when the dust settled a teeny little bit, say, well, all we have to do is just close the strait. We're just going to say we're firing on any ship that comes into the Strait of Hormuz from our shores. That's the play we have left. I don't think anybody thought when they said they were closing the Strait of Hormuz that that was gonna break Trump. He just put American credibility, his own credibility, his own word, his own points, all that on the line. So I assumed that simply from a matter of sheer self preservation, not wanting to look like a fool, not wanting to look like one of the all time self owning clowns, that he would be resolute and thorough and like, not care and finish the job. But I underestimated his ability to rewrite in his own head what it would mean to be able to claim a success. Cuz he's claiming a success. He and JD Vance are claiming a success. Nobody on earth thinks that he won this. You know why? Cuz he didn't. Right now, I don't know. In a weird way, we may not have lost it. That is to say, we did immense damage to Iran. We did set it back many years and all of that. He lost it. He looks like the inconstant person who couldn't deliver on his promises. Particularly since this was a unilateral war of choice. Bibi said, you know what? We have this opportunity. We can decapitate the regime. We can sort of do Operation Midnight Hammer times 10. We can do it all at once. And Trump's like, this is great, let's go. It's not like Iran was like, if you don't do this, we'll shoot your dog. I was happy that he chose to do it, cuz I would like to see the Iranian regime removed.
- [15:12]
Jonah Goldberg
Sure.
- [15:14]
John Podhoretz
So of course I'm gonna support the policy that he articulated and put out there, though I said from the outset that without regime change at the end, this would likely be a matter that led to no particular resolution. Did I think it would be over like this now? No, I really, really didn't.
- [15:39]
Jonah Goldberg
Yep. My favorite thing, you know, both of us spend a lot of time watching all these clips come out of Evian France, where the G7 was. Evian, of course, being naive backwards. And one of my favorite quotes that came out of it was Trump saying, I signed this, I agreed to this agreement because it achieved my three major goals. And the three major goals were one, to end the conflict. He launched the war. To end the war. Right. That's interesting. Then two was to open the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war. Right. And so then the last one, which he has to say is deny them a nuclear weapon.
- [16:23]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [16:24]
Jonah Goldberg
Now, purely on the four corners of the nuclear weapon issue, I don't understand how this is any different than the jcpoa. Ted Cruz was saying yesterday, the JCPOA is very different because that was intended to give Iran a bomb. Now, I understand the argument. I've made a version of that argument in the past. The bet that the Obama people were making was that we kicked the can on this issue for a decade. And in that time, we will work to welcome Iran into the community of nations. We'll reward the moderates, and so by the time they can do a bomb, we'll effectively have regime change because we'll incentivize them to have a better regime. That is exactly the argument that J.D. vance is going around making, which is that, look, the actual agreement doesn't really matter. It's the friends we made along the way. These are good people now, Trump says they're very nice to deal with. They're not radical. We essentially had regime change. Cause these are good people now.
- [17:22]
John Podhoretz
They love their country.
- [17:23]
Jonah Goldberg
And now they promise not to have a nuclear weapon. Well, that promise existed on February 27th. That promise existed under the JCPOA. So I don't understand. I mean, on their terms. I don't understand the argument about how this is any different about the nuclear weapon thing. Like, what did Trump get out of this about the nuke question that he didn't have on February 27th?
- [17:45]
John Podhoretz
Well, he has a weaker Iran. Sure.
- [17:48]
Jonah Goldberg
No, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:49]
John Podhoretz
But I mean, you could have said this in 2025 as a result of Midnight Hammer.
- [17:53]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, Midnight Hammer was good. I've always said Midnight Hammer was good.
- [17:56]
John Podhoretz
Right. So this was probably unnecessary in the sense of Midnight Hammer really did bury the nuclear program under, you know, 2,000ft of rubble. And it's not so easy to get to and all of that. But I don't. I can't really make a counter argument to what you just said. And the Vance stuff is fascinating. We know he didn't want this war. We know that he's against it. So he now is the salesman for ending it. And he is trying to fashion an argument that will appeal to his restrainer isolationist base, or whoever he thinks his base is, while advancing Trump's aggression. So that is to say, this is really great. Trump did this, and now the Iranians are nicer. And so all we really wanted was to make the Iranians nicer. We didn't want to change their regime, and we didn't want to put boots on the ground. And we didn't want. That's only mean people who want to have boots on the ground and, you know, have wars and kill all the Iranians. That was a great one that Vance said. So they just are saying, this is great, Van saying, because, you know, now after 47 years, we're finally talking to the Iranians. Well, first of all, John Kerry talked to the Iranians. John Kerry negotiated with Zarif. Rob Malley was talking to the Iran. We had teams of people talking to the Iranians for two years.
- [19:36]
Jonah Goldberg
Ahmedjog spoke at Columbia. I mean, like, we've had dialogue.
- [19:40]
John Podhoretz
I mean, okay, we negotiated with the Iranians. We had a deal with the Iranians. Trump said it was the dumbest deal that ever has been done. And now, yes, we're sort of back. And the funny part is you mentioned the kicking the can, the Obama kicking the can. And the positive element of Obama kicking the can was this totally ludicrous theory that Iran was going to be brought into the community of nations in the course of the 12 years that the deal was going to be in place. But of course, the opposite side for Obama was the implicit, and if that doesn't work, somebody after me is going to have to deal with them. So Trump, in a weird way, was fulfilling the JCPOA's negative mandate. And then he just choked, right? He chickened out. He is a chicken. He's a wimp. He's a loser. He just made himself a loser unilaterally. Four hours after he said, I'm gonna blow up your civilization, he says, ceasefire.
- [20:44]
Jonah Goldberg
All right, we're take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Remnant podcast. So many of you know or may recall or maybe just finding out at this very moment that we've moved out of our house. Our new house is not ready yet. So my wife and I were staying in a one bedroom apartment. We brought with us our bed from Brooklyn Bedding. It's really perfect for what I'm looking for. Can't recommend Brooklyn Bedding enough. They have options for every sleep style, cooling, technology, 120 night comfort, trial and awards from CNET and Wirecutter. Brooklyn Betting makes better sleep simple. So go to BrooklynBetting.com and use promo code remnant at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. That's brooklynbetting.com promo code remnant for 30% off site wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout brooklynbetting.com, promo code remnant.
- [21:54]
John Podhoretz
So the only thing that's left here in terms of the controversy, here we are, we're never going back to war with Iran. That's clear. He says, I'll bomb them if they don't agree.
- [22:06]
Jonah Goldberg
No, we're not.
- [22:06]
John Podhoretz
You know that's not true. I know that's not true. He's moving on. He's rebranding the 250th anniversary of the United States as Trump Day and all that. And then he's going to go pick fights with somebody about something or other and see if he can move the subject forward. But Israel is sitting there and Israel is engaged in a defensive action against an enemy on its border in Lebanon that is firing missiles at civilians constantly. And that is an Iranian proxy that acts on Iranian orders. And Iran said, put Lebanon in there. Israel has to stop fighting with Lebanon. And Trump starts saying the Israelis are being too hard on Lebanon. Somebody walks into an apartment building. Bibi bombs it. That's terrible. He's a great guy, but he's a little too passionate. He should stop. Let's poor Lebanon. It's been treated so poorly, all of that. So the hostilities between the United States and Iran are over. In bad ways, but they're over. The hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel are not over. Israel cannot not respond to Hezbollah. Every time Hezbollah fires, Israel has to fire back. Last week, they fired at three school buses. Was Israel not supposed to fire back? Marco Rubio last week said, no country with an enemy on its border firing across its border, that country would be stupid not to respond. And Trump himself even says, well, Israel has to respond, but only a little bit, or something like that. Now, my view is, and we're taping this on a Thursday, and then there's a Monday. It could already happen by the time you're listening to this, but if not, it will happen in the week subsequent. Trump is going to turn on Netanyahu for sure, and he is going to say that Israel is going to screw up our deal. And Israel, you know, I am the boss, and Israel can't screw up this deal. And Bibi cannot not do what Trump wants. He cannot. 95% of people in Israel believe that Israel has to hit Hezbollah. Unless you're an actual pacifist, particularly after October 7th. There is no person in it, no person on the political spectrum, while Israel is going into an election season. The election is in October. Everybody is for this. And if Bibi blinks, then he gives his opponents literally the scimitar to cut his head off with. So we're about to see America having been at war with Iran, with Israel as its junior partner, and it was so great, and they're so fantastic, and all of this, we're gonna see Donald Trump at war with Israel rhetorically. Rhetorically, Obviously. Rhetorically. And so what that means in terms of Israeli domestic politics should not be of all that much concern to anybody listening to this. Israel's a Democrat country. It'll reelect Bibi or it'll elect somebody else. Policy will be the policy. This is why there are elections, all of that. But Israel pursued the aim that America and it had together, and now Israel has a thing that it has to do that does not have to involve the United States. But Iran insisted on bringing America in to enforce its effort to save its proxy and let it live to fight another day or live to fight this day. And Trump is therefore gonna be essentially taking on the Iranian position if we're not careful. And we're not careful. Cuz he's not careful.
- [26:10]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, look, I've been saying for a month now, I don't understand why Iran telegraphed again and again and again and again that they want Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah. They kept making it a primary thing. They kept saying the ceasefire is off because Israel attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon. Well, that's a sign that actually Trump had leverage over Iran because he could do the Israel is my Luca Brazzi. I can't call it off. They're going to go after Hezbollah. Right. You know, like, you got to give me something to get me to call off Israel off of Hezbollah. And instead Iran managed to make it leverage over Trump and said, if you don't you want this deal so bad, you got to do something for us to help out Hezbollah rather than the other way, you know, like. And Iran was brilliant about this. I mean, I have to say. I mean, because the whole point of making this include Lebanon, which is insane from an Israeli point of view, because that means Israel is now being subject to a treaty they are not a signatory to or an agreement or whatever, which is a poison pill for any leader of Israel. Right.
- [27:25]
John Podhoretz
And with nothing they get in return.
- [27:27]
Jonah Goldberg
Right. And they get nothing. And it means that Iran can now just get Hezbollah to keep poking Israel and put more daylight between the United States and Israel. Israel's already lost the Democratic Party.
- [27:42]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [27:42]
Jonah Goldberg
Now they're in a position where it could lose the Republican Party too, because it's gonna piss off Trump and he have all these like, spittles who do whatever Trump wants. It's a brilliant geostrategic move on Iran's part if you buy into its priors and its commitments and all that. And Trump just fell for it.
- [27:58]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Now you and I are in agreement that this desperate effort of friendly critics who supported the war, who are now disappointed in the memorandum of understanding blaming Vance. Right. Trump is being ill served by Vance. First of all, Vance came in later. He had his two best friends and his son in law negotiating through Qatar and Pakistan. And he had his friend in Turkey and they were all calling him and filling his ear and they all went native, I'm sure, partially, I think, for financial reasons, and were essentially trying to make the arguments of their Interlocutors rather than the arguments of the United States. So they were calling Trump back and saying they think that if you do X, Y and Z, it'll be great because then they'll stop firing on Qatar or they'll stop firing on the uae, or they'll stop firing on Saudi Arabia and then everything can go back to normal. Oil prices will fall. It'll look really good in September at the pump because oil prices will have fallen and we can get a lot of money to help reconstruct things that were blown up. You know, a lot of stuff was ruined in the UAE and other places, military bases and some other stuff that was hit. Maybe we can get the contracts, be great for America. He believes that he's won because now there'll be business opportunities. But we're talking about American prestige, American credibility, the meaning of America's word. How future presidents are going to be able to use American power to preempt bad actors. We want this power hard and soft so we don't have to go to war, so we don't have to do these things. So in order to be part of an international order in which people live within the 40 yard lines and don't try to destroy the system as it, as it stands. And he has just done immense damage to that, either from his successor on the Republican side or from whoever might come in on the Democratic side. This is the fourth or fifth conflict in this century. Well, the third big one that we will have fought to no good conclusion. That's terrible.
- [30:41]
Jonah Goldberg
Yes, that's very bad.
- [30:42]
John Podhoretz
That's terrible. And somebody else is going to be dealing with the consequences of it for decades to come.
- [30:51]
Jonah Goldberg
So let's use this as an opportunity to segue into at least some rank punditry. I'm a little annoyed that their conventional wisdom is getting closer to my long standing maverick view. It's not there yet that J.D. vance is the most wildly overrated political player in the Republican Party. He's presumptive frontrunner for the nomination. Right, because he's the Vice President. He's running the financial stuff for the gop. He's the only one that we know of who's actually definitely going to run. At least that's what we think. I don't think he's a particularly impressive political talent. I think his theory of what his base is is wrong, if not crazy. He had to be carried across the finish line by Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump in Ohio to get elected Senator in the first place. And he still underperformed a very Boring governor by like 26 points. He's not very good at lying. People think, oh, he's like this master guy because he gets through the moment. No, people remember the lies. Right? I mean, like two days ago, he was saying that anybody who is parroting these talking points about the Memorandum of Understanding is just basically an Iranian propagandist and is deliberately peddling misinformation unpatriotically. And then it turns out he was lying about what the memorandum said. Right. You know, and that it was actually accurate. And he knew that. And people aren't gonna forget that. But more importantly, and I had this debate with Ross Douthat, I think all the talk about a Trump mantle is horse. Like, there is no Trump mantle that he can pass on. There are a bunch of people going to run to be Trump's replacement. Nixon won a major landslide in 1972. I mean, like one of the top landslides in all of American history. And Reagan didn't run for the Nixon mantle. He completely changed the position of the Republican Party on almost every single issue from what Nixon's was. And just lastly, it is just an axiom of American politics that you can't run a sitting vice president for four more years when the sitting president has an approval rating in the 30s. All of these. There are. I have a dozen other reasons why. I just think there is this weird power worship. He's good at working Internet and the Twitters and all of that, but I think he's just the most overrated guy out there. I think Rubio would clean his clock in the primaries pretty easily, at least on the debates. Tell me why I'm wrong.
- [33:25]
John Podhoretz
There's literally not a thing you said there that I disagree with, so I can't tell you why you're wrong. I would only add little bits of detail just to take Rubio as an example or anybody else who might run, except for somebody who really does a Trump and really comes in without ever having run for anything before. The only election that Marco Rubio ever lost was the race for president. I believe he has won seven elections. JD Vance has run once and, as you say, was dragged across the finish line. He underperformed as a senatorial candidate in his only race. And, you know, that's forgivable. I mean, he's first time, then he's elevated way beyond anything that anybody could have expected. Trump makes him his vice president. When has he been tested at anything politically? Beginning November 9th or whatever it is. I don't remember what Election Day is this year. The Democratic Party is going to go into Hyperdrive running for 20, 28. There are gonna be 20 people in that race. There are gonna be debates starting in March or April. And the political gravity of the future is gonna shift away from Trump to this argument in the Democratic Party, which means that that's gonna open market fields of opportunity for Republicans to respond to the Democrats as they start talking about the future. And Vance will be in a uniquely bad position for this, in my view, because if it's structurally great to be the vice president, then it's also offset by the fact that he will be the vice president, as you say, of an unpopular president in a very febrile atmosphere in which the other party is overheating with passion. I mean, who knows what kinds of things they'll talk about? And he's not the guy to have that fight. And also, if what Republicans want is, like, the Trump alpha male, Vance doesn't come across like that at all. His soft little beard, blue eyes, he's 42 years old, he's very unaggressive, and he's not quick. You mentioned Rubio, right? So he is lightning fast, and he knows where he's going, he knows what to say. And Vance, he's a very smart guy, very smart, able. But you can see the wheels turning as he figures out where to position himself on any question at any given moment. And that's a liability in this kind of atmosphere.
- [36:23]
Jonah Goldberg
The problem is, like Ronald Reagan, you could try to run as being the next Reagan by saying, I believe in all the things Ronald Reagan believed in. The problem is Trump. He's taken positions on almost every single thing because his view is not ideological. Trumpism is a psychological phenomenon. And so there is a strain of MAGA that is actually more cosmopolitan, more kind of like business oriented, more Marco Rubio, more Miami MAGA than Kentucky maga, Right. Or rural Ohio maga. And, you know, one of the most enduring, important things we learned about the Kristi Noem fiasco, other than the fact that we now understand why she wasn't having a happy marriage with her husband, is that she and Corey Lewandowski were laying the groundwork for her to run for president as a MAGA candidate. Right? Now, I think that's bat guano crazy, but it tells you that she thinks she represents a strain of maga, too. Right? And so they're gonna be all these people contending for different aspects of the disco ball of Trump's personality. And all of them will have a claim that, oh, I'm the real facet and the idea that Vance is gonna own every tributary of MAGA is just nonsense to me. And so I think it's gonna be a much more open field. I think there's a more of a chance for a regression to something closer to the old pre Trump mean, because no one can repeat the Trump hold that Trump had on the party to begin with. And when you watch the 2024 GOP primaries, with the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, everybody else on that stage spoke some sub dialect of Reaganism because it's the only language actual normal Republicans know how to speak. And the people who try to fake it with some new weird thing, they come across creepy in the way that Trump, for whatever reason, doesn't to a lot of people.
- [38:23]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [38:24]
Jonah Goldberg
And I just don't think Vance talking about heritage Americans is gonna work.
- [38:28]
John Podhoretz
So the only issue that is the Republican owned issue, that will remain the Republican owned issue is immigration, right?
- [38:33]
Jonah Goldberg
Sure.
- [38:33]
John Podhoretz
I mean, the Democrats are going nowhere, will make no move to moderate themselves on immigration, and every Republican will have to check that box after that. I don't have a clue what box you have to check. Just as you say, like MAGA doesn't know what MAGA is except for support for Trump. So pull Trump out of MAGA. As Trump himself says, I am MAGA and there is no MAGA. So MAGA's 10,000 different things. And therefore you can't really stand on it as a foundation. You can't reject it and say, I'm against this. But you don't have to, because nobody knows what it is because of Trump's inconstancy, except on immigration. But next year is going to be incredibly interesting politically. And Vance is not that interesting politically. That's my other feeling.
- [39:32]
Jonah Goldberg
Well, outside, as long as he's a vice president, he is constrained in what he can say and how he can say it. Right.
- [39:38]
John Podhoretz
But even if he weren't, does he juice anybody?
- [39:41]
Jonah Goldberg
I think he juices the. I think he juices a handful of influencer types that he text messages.
- [39:46]
John Podhoretz
Right. No. Of course, any politician can gather a court following. And if he has a court following among people who have 50 million followers on, you know, on Twitter, that's probably good for him and useful and will help him. But he himself is not a spark plug. Ramaswamy, whom I really loathed when he was running in 20, 23, 24, nonetheless, he was bothering you if you didn't like him. It was like he was like a gnat. You couldn't get away from it. It's like, get away from my head. That would be better than being the kind of warm milk version of Trump.
- [40:25]
Jonah Goldberg
And it's worth pointing out Ramaswamy, when he ran for governor of Ohio, gave up almost all of his adrenal jackassery and tried to run as, like a normie Republican guy because he read the tea leaves. And it turns out when you're walking around Ohio, being a Silicon Valley Trump imitator is a very niche product, and it's better to be, like, bourgeois dad guy. Roger Ailes used to have this thing where he would go into a new TV market as a consultant, and he would turn on the news and he would watch it with the sound off and just look at the people who had just presence. Vance doesn't have that presence. Right. That's the thing. He doesn't have that oomph and super accomplished guy for a guy his age. But he. He got where he is working the inside game in almost every regard, and not as a retail politician. And I just think it shows. All right, hold on one minute. We got to pay the light bill. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. So the only place I'd push back a little bit on what you were saying earlier is I agree with you that everyone's going to have to have what we would used to call a hawkish position on immigration. No one's going to take an open border kind of position, which is fine. I'm okay with that. I do think there'll be room for a Glenn Youngkin type who says, look, we all agree we gotta do X, Y and Z. We gotta have secure borders, but we can be humane about it. We can pick our targets. We can do this in a way that builds support with the Hispanic community, which we made so many gains in, rather than alienate. I think there's gonna be a lot of people who will never let go of their bizarre affinity for Trump, but at the same time want what they think are the Trump policies. But they don't like the crudeness, they don't like the drama, they don't like the UFC thing and all that kind of stuff. And I think there are lanes within lanes there, even though we're not supposed to talk about lanes anymore, for people to break from Trump on all that.
- [42:36]
John Podhoretz
And if you think about it, the Trumpiest people in Congress are blowing up or gone. It's weird. Matt Gaetz left now. He was supposed to be Attorney General. That didn't happen. He's gone. Marjorie Taylor Greene quit. I don't know how much more energy there is left in Lauren Boebert. Nancy Mace is gone. And then some of these other politicians who are Trump light, like Kristi Noem, gone. The world of the Trump like politician does not seem to have flowered the way that one thought it did, particularly since the 22 senatorial candidates flamed out so badly. The ones who were supposed to be that, you know, who were the ones that he picked and tried to push forward.
- [43:23]
Jonah Goldberg
Also in 2018, when in Trump's first term Bannon ran all these like anti McConnell slate guys. And they all imploded because Trump got grandfathered in from being an icon of the 80s and 90s. So people forgive him because they think he's a known quality and his celebrity carries its own weight. It's almost definitionally true that if you try to imitate Trump, you come across as a jackass. And if you have no previous commitment to the guy's personality, all you see is the jackassery and you don't like it.
- [43:53]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, you could say that. The thing about Trump is that what he promised was that he could get things done that Romney couldn't get done. And that was true in this sense. Romney didn't get elected. He did. And then he pushed through a tax cut and he did a lot of deregulation. That's not Trumpy. Tax cuts and deregulation. Right. You know, that's 80 years of Republican politics. Maybe tax cuts are sort of a little later, but more like 45 years of Republican politics. But what did he do that led him to claim that he had built the most successful economy ever? Which of course he hadn't. He was just somebody whose team managed to execute on things that weren't executed on before. So if he departs the scene having made a hash of Doge. Right. Nobody even remembers Doge. His name is being taken off the Kennedy Center. That arch is never going to be built. I don't know if the ballroom is going to be built, though. I don't know what the hell they're going to do with that giant gaping hole in the back of the building. But all of his efforts to create the kind of Caesar Godhead personage, I think are basically going to come to know. Good resolution for him. So what does he have left? Just himself. The other thing I was going to say is we don't know what issues are going to be talked about, but there are whole avenues of policy innovation or change or creation or something like that that people are going to Start yelling about because they got to talk about something and they're also not going to. The Democrats have the same problem, which is they're not going to be able to talk about Trump anymore. So watch this space. It's going to be really, really interesting.
- [45:52]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. All right, exit question. The Memorandum of Understanding. All right, It's a two parter one. Is this deal the only deal we ever get and we never see a final negotiated document? And is the Iran war in its totality like Biden's pull out of Afghanistan, Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina or something else?
- [46:21]
John Podhoretz
I think the answer to the Iran question is that it's like the action in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Do you remember what that was about? I don't. I can show you special issues of commentary that were dedicated to the question of what to do about the action in the Dominican Republic. So I don't think that it's Afghanistan. I think it will have long term deleterious consequences because it's this question of whether America has any follow through and how we fight wars to no resolution. And the Chinese are gonna take a lot of wisdom from that. I don't know who else is gonna take wisdom from it. It's not even Katrina, because in part, Trump's right in the sense that, you know, the economy, I mean, things are gonna loosen up over the summer. It'll be easier for Americans than it was in the spring. And so it's not gonna be like Katrina. And the answer is there will be no further document. And we have an example of that in Gaza. We're supposed to be in phase two in Gaza. There is no phase two in Gaza. Trump doesn't care about Gaza anymore. Israel, the phase one is Israel occupies about 60% of Gaza in order to prevent Hamas from receding. And then it's also gonna go through and blow up whatever is left of the tunnels and stuff like that. And then if Gaza does this and that, then Israel will pull back to this line and then there'll be development dollars, and then in phase three, they can start building Maragaza and it'll all be wonderful. There is no phase two. There is no phase three. Trump has no follow through. We will not be seeing another deal in that case, by the way, Trump will benefit because the $300 billion reconstruction fund won't happen. And that's the thing that will make him, make him look like the most foolish, because then it will be like, well, at least Obama only gave them $115 billion. He's giving them like three times that. So he'll be spared that particular cell phone. What do you think?
- [48:35]
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, I feel guilty calling it Katrina because I think Bush got a bad rap for Katrina.
- [48:40]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [48:41]
Jonah Goldberg
And I don't think it's necessarily like Afghanistan, but I think there's potential there. I think his potential would be sort of a combination of both. He's never going to put his coalition back together the same way. And I think the damage Iran did to alliances and our trustworthiness on the international stage is probably worse than Afghanistan. I mean, like, I think a lot of countries you can fault Biden for how badly he screwed the pullout, but we were there for like 20 years. So, like, it was not necessarily an unreasonable position to want to pull back out of Afghanistan. I disagreed with it, but, like, you can see why. But this sort of compounds all the lessons from Greenland, right. Where he goes in unilaterally, doesn't consult any allies except for Israel, and then beats up on all of them for refusing to be there for him like he is. He has sent the message. Like you were talking earlier, we were talking earlier about the ballistic missile thing. When he says to the Saudis, when he says about the Iranians, look, it's a little unfair. I mean, like, they gotta have some missiles. I mean, what I'm supposed to tell the Saudis, they can't have missiles. And it's like, you don't think the Saudis heard that? It's like, tell us what, now he has this thing like he's in charge of the Middle East. At the Saudi investment conference thing he did in Florida, he talked about how MBS kisses his ass and all this kind of stuff. Like he's accumulating a lot of hard feelings among allies.
- [50:23]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. An important point about Greenland is this. There was a moment when the Strait of Hormuz strategy that Iran pursued could have been choked at the outset. And that would have been if all of the nations of Europe came out and said, you are not doing this to the Strait of Hormuz. We are sailing our ships right into there and let's see what you do. And I think they would have done it if he hadn't done Greenland for sure. When we were talking about what the hell is he doing with this Greenland strategy, we didn't know what the consequence was going to be. He thought the Europeans had no whip hand over him and couldn't do anything to him. I think we knew somewhere in us that there was going to be payback. And this was the payback we could have won this war three months ago. If the Europeans had sided with us and had said there's a unified Western effort to make sure the Strait of Hormuz is open, then Iran's last weapon would have been taken out of its hands and it would have had to sue for peace. So it turned out that all that crap that he pulled had hurt him later. And at least it hurt him later and not just America. But I still think you can't compare it to Afghanistan, because Afghanistan, I'm pretty sure, led directly to Putin invading Ukraine. And that's still the.
- [51:57]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, no, that's right.
- [51:58]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
- [51:58]
Jonah Goldberg
I just. I meant in terms of domestic politics for the most part. And we got sidelined by international.
- [52:02]
John Podhoretz
Right. But the other reason about Katrina is that this is the question. If it is Katrina, then it really is bad for Vegas and for Republicans because Katrina was the moment when Bush started losing the Republicans. That's why Katrina was important. He didn't have any Democratic support left. And then Katrina followed by immigration because he made a push for an immigration reform package. The Republican Party just said, what the hell? Who are you? We loved you and now we don't like you anymore. So if that happens, and maybe it will, like, we're only in the first week of this thing with. With Iran and the. And the basic. The self defeat in Iran, then, yeah, I mean, that'll be a very. That'll be a very big political deal. Will have effects on the November election and will have effects on. On the Republican Party.
- [53:00]
Jonah Goldberg
All right, J Pod has left the studio. I. I just realized like 15, 20 minutes into or 10 minutes into it, that Pod needed to get some things off of his chest. And normally I give him a lot of grief for monologizing, but I actually thought it was sort of just interesting to listen to him talk it through and vent a bit. And I had hoped to talk about some pop culture things and sort of do a mini glop was not to be. My apologies for those who were expecting it. I will just say one point that I just didn't want to start another round of talking because I had to get out of there. When he was talking about the Europeans getting payback for Greenland. I think obviously there was some of that in there. And as a shorthand, I think his point was perfectly fine. But I think there's just another way to think about it that's important. I remember writing a column about this a few months ago. Even if you don't want to anthropomorphize these nations and say they were getting payback. The simple fact is that because of Greenland, Trump is radioactive with the European public. And coming to Trump's aid about Iran, even if all of these leaders thought it was in their strategic self interest, which I'm sure some did, I'm sure the Brits actually, in a way, were thinking, oh, this probably would make sense for us to get back into Trump's good graces and help with minesweeping or whatever. European governments, which are facing all sorts of populist upheavals, are elected and they're mindful of their own electorates. And Trump is despised by a vast coalition that transcends ideology of European voters in almost every country. I mean, the most obvious place is Denmark. It's been a while since I wrote that column, but when I looked at the time, his approval rating in Denmark was like, I think, 4%, maybe 6%, something like that. So imagine being a politician saying, oh, yeah, let's go bail Trump out. That's just not gonna happen. Keir Starmer is struggling. And the thing that Greenland did is it made the left in Europe hate Trump more, and it made the nationalist right hate Trump for the first time. It created this bipartisan thing. And so Trump likes to anthropomorphize nation states and see them as sort of like servants, lackeys, lieutenants of the American empire doing his bidding. And he doesn't recognize the fact that democracies answer to their voters as much as in Europe, as much as they do in America, or to at least a certain extent. And so it's not just about payback. It's just that Trump has made it literally impossible for a lot of governments to sacrifice on his behalf, even when I think it would be in their interest. Obviously, we'll have a lot more to say about the Iran deal. I just finished the Dispatch podcast where we got deep in the weeds on it, and I'm sure in the solo I'll have gotten more into it, but there are other things to talk about, and we'll get to those next week. And until then, thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. It.