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- [00:06]
A
Welcome back everybody to what really matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. Roughly one year after Donald Trump's landslide victory in the presidential election, Democrats struck back with a mini landslide of their own, dominating off year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, sweeping Democratic Socialist Zoran Mamdani into Gracie Mansion and winning statewide non federal offices in Georgia for the first time in 20 years. Then on Thursday, the Democratic incumbent mayor of Seattle was defeated by Katie Wilson, also a self described socialist, who like Mamdani, focused her campaign on housing affordability, the economic prospects of Gen Z and millennials and homelessness. Walter, is this trend lit news or fo news?
- [00:59]
B
You know, I'm, I'm afraid to say it's probably not news, although a lot of people would like it to be. But you know, what does it tell us when, when you're asking yourself, is something really news or not, you have to ask yourself, what is it telling me that I didn't already know? Okay. And is Donald, has Donald Trump been overplaying his hand a bit? Well, yes, he has. Did I know that before these votes? Yes. Is there a significant chance that the Democrats will make big gains in the midterms? Well, yes, yes, there is and there was before Tuesday. So this is, you know, are the Democrats split between a faction that would like them to go farther left than a faction that thinks they need to travel toward the center to win national elections? Well, yes, yes there is, you know. And what were the polls saying about Mamdani, you know, a month ago, two months ago, three months ago? He's gonna win. All right. So, you know, I don't know how many people were surprised by anything that happened on Tuesday. You know, is Virginia basically a blue state? Yes. Is New Jersey basically a blue state? Yes. Is Seattle one of the most left leaning cities in the United States? Yes. Is New York a very left leaning city with a lot of, you know, sort of young, angry people that want to vote for somebody far left? Yes. So Faux News. Faux News. But the things that we, we already knew were, were not unimportant. And you know, is Trump in trouble? Actually he is a little bit. He is a little bit.
- [02:41]
A
Just one follow up. You know, you've been writing and thinking for a while, going back to the American interest days, but also you had a piece in Tablet a year or two ago, you know, about the housing and affordability crises and thinking about, you know, the, the future economic prospects of Gen Z and of millennials and kind of predicting that, you know, the first party or kind of candidates to figure out if you can convince people, you know, vote for me and vote yourself a house. That's going to be a really winning message. And now we're seeing the first people kind of alighting on that being, you know, Gen Z and millennial left wing Democrats. What do you make of that?
- [03:18]
B
Yeah, well, I think they're going to be a lot better about, at saying vote for me and I'll give you a house than they are going to actually be about giving you a house. You know, I hope I'm not going to shock any of the tender susceptibilities of our readers, but rent control does not actually increase the supply of apartments, not even the supply of cheap apartments. It has also this amazing impact that no one wants to build apartments when they're rent controlled. Not only that, landlords don't even want to maintain existing apartments when they are rent controlled. This is not, it's not going to work. And if you have free, you know, you, you, you're giving away so much stuff that the city tax base doesn't support the costs and the bond markets are scared of you. Taxes have to go up and that has impact. So, you know, I think what we've, we've identified the discontent and it is absolutely 100% true that figuring out this housing thing is critical to the future. And whether it's left, right or center, whoever in American politics manages to get this right is going to enjoy a big boost again. I think the problem in some ways is you can't. If your idea of solving the housing problem is I want to work at an NGO in New York and I want to live in New York and I want to have enough spending money so I can run around and have a good time. That's probably not to be very easy to organize. And especially on a mass scale. There's this sort of geographical reality about New York and especially Manhattan. There's only so much of it and the real issues are not actually in the city, although, you know, for certain group of young Americans they are. But for most young Americans, it's the suburbs and it's solving the suburban housing problem, not actually solving the urban housing problem. That's where the key to future elections actually lies, I think.
- [05:30]
A
All right, our second story. Democrats came to the table late Sunday night to end the 41 day government shutdown. On Monday, seven Democratic senators and one independent broke ranks to end the party's filibuster and voted to advance a bipartisan funding bill, which passed 60 to 40. According to Politico, the party's progressives had wanted to keep the shutdown going either out of principled concern for preserving ACA tax credits, or, more cynically, as part of a broader strategy to portray the Trump administration stance on health care as proof of GOP extremism. The party's moderates, meanwhile, sought to balance their left flank's electoral calculus with a genuine fear that prolonging the standoff would deepen economic pain, worsen public health risks, and fuel safety concerns, ultimately risking a political backlash that could undo any gains. In the end, ending the shutdown without securing ACA tax credits was seen as a major defeat for Democrats. Walter, is this news or Faux news?
- [06:30]
B
It's really, really rare for a party that is out of power to win a big victory by shutting down the government. You know, this is, this is just kind of the way it is. And it's a little harder for Democrats to do that because to some degree, they're the party of government. And for Republicans, a government shutdown is a little bit like during the miners, coal miners issues in England, when in protest against Margaret Thatcher wanting to close their coal mine, a bunch of coal miners went on strike. It's like, I'm sorry, I can take the pain. So, you know, there is a kind of a structural disadvantage that the Democrats faced. And, and to me, the question is sort of less why, after 43 days or whatever, you had eight people defect. Why didn't the Democrats sort of come up with a more winnable strategy in the beginning? I think that's, that's really what you have to ask yourself here again, just in terms of resiliency of Trump. Two days after the news everywhere, Trump has lost the elections. Georgia too, like, you know, dog catchers or whatever have been elected statewide. They're doomed. At last, it's over in the Epstein, you know, oh, he's dead, he's dead. It's finally happening. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Right? You know, then not only do you have like, shutdown collapses, but BBC admitted it grotesquely altered, deliberately alter tapes to lie about January 6th, and it has to apologize under a Labor government to Donald Trump. You know, it's just again, not since Clinton, and maybe not even including Clinton have we had a, a politician who just keeps going after all this bad news. I don't know how long it's going to last. There could be a knockout punch out there, but someday somebody's going to count up all the times that, that people have assumed that Trump was down and, and he keeps popping back up.
- [08:47]
A
All right, final story of the week. Venezuela is deploying weapons, including decades old Russian made equipment, and is planning to mount a guerrilla style resistance or so chaos in the event of a US air ground attack. According to Reuters, the guerrilla style defense, which the government has termed prolonged resistance and mentioned in broadcasts on state television, would involve small military units at more than 280 locations carrying out acts of sabotage and other guerrilla tactics. The second strategy, called anarchization, would use the intelligence services and armed ruling party supporters to create disorder on the streets of Caracas and make Venezuela ungovernable for foreign forces forces. Walter, is this news or phone news?
- [09:33]
B
Well, I'm not sure how governable Venezuela is right now. When you talk about a country being governed, you usually talk about people being able to eat. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. It's got more oil than Saudi Arabia. And millions of Venezuelans have been fleeing the country because there's nothing to eat. I mean, that's governable. I don't actually imagine that Trump is sort of plotting the invasion of Venezuela. That seems he hates war and he hates long wars and he has every kind of sense that these things that you think are going to be like a sharp, sudden, swift, satisfying wind turn into these long, sluggy things. And he knows Americans hate guerrilla, long guerrilla wars. So I, I think in one sense the Venezuelans are trying to deter the kind of attack that isn't coming right.
- [10:38]
A
By making it seem like an insurgency in Iraq is going to follow or something.
- [10:42]
B
Right, right. And I think, you know, but on the other hand, you know, what Trump I think is actually trying to do is to trigger some faction of the armed forces or the security services, find some general that says, look, let's just make a deal with America and move now. Is it that? And this is where it gets really hard from the outside for any of us to have any idea. Is this announcement some way that Maduro is making it harder for people internally to prepare exactly. This kind of quiet insider couple, you know, what's going on and is he assigning like taking the five people he totally doesn't trust and sending them up into the far, far hills? You go organize the resistance up there where there isn't any cell phone service? Right. So, so we don't even know what's going on, I guess is what I'm saying now maybe there's somebody in the National Security Agency who's, you know, listening in on all these phone calls and so on, who knows? It ain't me, and it's not you, and it's not whoever wrote that newspaper article.
- [11:54]
A
All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, you wrote earlier this week about how President Trump has managed to do the impossible again, this time by horrifying the neo isolationist restrainers and the old foreign policy establishment establishment in equal measure by starting to promote humanitarian intervention in Africa, possibly considering using force to intervene in what the administration is describing as a genocide against Christians. So tell us more about what's actually going on, I guess first on the ground in Africa in both a contemporary and historical context, and then also what you think exactly Trump is doing here.
- [12:44]
B
Okay, well, as you know, and as I mentioned in this piece, the media, you know, the sort of foreign policy establishment and the established foreign policy press sort of are always peddling three different storylines about Africa, sort of number one, the big issue is democratization in Africa's transition toward democracy. And that's, you know, great, great, blah, blah, blah. Another of these stories is African Miracle. You know, some country has unlocked the secret to growth. And I'm old enough to, you know, like half a dozen or a dozen countries in Africa have been pointed out since the 1960s. There they've got it. You know, this is really going to make it work. And, oh, this brand fancy new leader, this one is honest, this one is competent, this one is really going to organize the state. And, and then it all just kind of like, you know, putt goes along for a couple of years and then, but that doesn't stop people from trying to whomp it up again for the next miracle feel. Good story. On top of that, you have like green transition, you know, green energy sweeping through Africa. None of these things are actually happening. All right? It's just a bunch of piffle. I mean, not that there isn't solar energy in places in Africa, not that countries aren't having some economic development and not that every now and then a little bit of democracy does sort of put its shy little face on the screen, but, but in the sense of that being the sort of overwhelming, heroic, you know, march of history, it just isn't. The biggest thing that has been happening in Africa is the rise of Christianity in sub Saharan Africa from a tiny percentage of the population, 1900, 1910, I think 65%, 2/3. Most of this has happened after colonialism. It's not colonial missionaries. As long as European colonial powers or the Africans weren't that interested in what they had to say, they leave and suddenly Christianity begins to blossom. Now, Islam has also grown from something like 20 to 30%. You don't have the numbers in front of me, but a, A lot of that is through demography. So a lot of the Christian, you know, the population increase, the Christian population has grown enormously through conversions. And Africa is now the center of, you know, demographically more and more the most important country in, in Christianity. And you see this affecting people like Pope Leo and his pronouncements. But in the US you've seen both the Methodist and the Episcopalian, the Anglican churches split with the weight of the more conservative African groups, really enabling the formation of these more conservative forms of American Christianity. So it's a very big deal. And it's also true that in a number of places in Africa, you're not getting a genocide of Christians. You know, that's really just overdone. But you're seeing a lot of conflict where very often one group involved in the conflict is Christian and one is Muslim. And that's partly because, you know, that's almost everybody there is in sub Saharan Africa these days. You're one of the other almost always now, which was certainly not true even 50 years ago. But also that with population growth, resource depletion in places like the Sahel, where you have desertification, these nomadic tribes that move their flocks from place to place, they tend to be Muslim. Their population is growing. The number of goats and sheep that you need is growing, but you can't feed them unless you sort of move into the more settled agricultural lands, where also the settled farmers, who tend to be in a lot of Nigeria, particularly Christian, their population is growing and they need to expand into new lands. This is much more sort of cowboys and Indian type of two populations competing over land than necessarily like the fourth Crusade or something like that. But it does get involved into it, you know, these other identities, because you have the overlying religious thing. It's very easy for the participants as well as for people reading newspapers thousands of miles away to start framing it in religious conflict. Recently it becomes so. But also radical Islam and jihadi ideology in a lot of these sort of unsettled areas of Africa is not just a sort of. We shouldn't see it as just an anti Christian phenomenon, though it is. But it is also a rebellion, often against established traditional Islamic elites, traditional tribal rulers, what in the state, you know, which has its own sort of way of doing things. And these, you know, these insurgent groups with a more radical ideology are, are attacking both enemies, the establishment generally and the Christians. And what you're seeing in a place, and finally what you see in so much of Africa today is that you can't exactly say that state capacity is, is, is declining as much as what you have to say is, as you get a more complex economic and social environment and more pressures from population growth and so on, government has to become more competent simply in order to do basic jobs. So if you have a city of 12 million in your country, you need a government that has a lot more competence than you did when your biggest city was 400,000 or whatever. And almost everywhere in Africa, the capabilities of governments are not really able to keep up with the growing demands that you have for everything from sanitation or traffic control to electricity generation, food supply, but also provision of law and order. And in that kind of a situation, the whole sort of, you know, the framework in which these religious, tribal, land, demographic conflicts is against the background of a failing state. And in that situation, everybody forts up and everybody is concerned with defending your own life because you no longer count on a neutral state to maintain, to limit violence and so on and so forth. So it's a, it's a tough situation. And there, I think, in Africa, it'll again, you know, situation in different parts of Africa is very different. Let's not just generalize here, but in places where, where this is a problem, it's likely going to be getting worse. So where, where is Trump in all of this? And it seems to me there, there are a couple of things going on with Trump. One of them is he, because of this rare earths thing and some of the other kind of disputes with China, Trump himself has become much more vested in the notion that there are things outside of the United States, outside of our borders, and even outside of our hemisphere that we need to control or deal with. And the mineral wealth of Africa, the cobalt and the DRC or what have you, is one of these, you know, when you start thinking about these resources and competition with China and so on, you start to care about this stuff more than maybe you did before. So. And yet you're elected to be the MAGA president, to be America first. And so you've got to be thinking about how to now the, you know, talk about minerals is one way to get people who aren't normally liberal isolationists a little bit more interested. Well, do you like your cell phone? Tell me that Would you like it to be able to continue to work? Would you like to be able to upgrade your cell phone? You start saying that and then people say, oh, so wait a minute. This foreign policy thing is not as boring as I thought it was. I like my cell phone. You have that, but you also have the Christian thing. A lot of his coalition would kind of like to, you know, is unhappy with the idea that, that Christians are being slaughtered in other parts of the world. And on balance, isn't that averse to maybe America trying to do something about it? As long as it isn't an endless war or something like that. Who has that going for him? Beyond that, I think there's more, which is this huge fight going on in the Trump base between, let's call it the griper wing of the MAGA movement and kind of regular maga. And the griper wing wants to fight. Wants actually, ultimately, its goal is to displace Trump as the center of gravity of maga. It's tired of Trump being able to say to Tucker Carlson, I define maga. Tucker Carlson wants to be able to say to Trump, I define maga. And there's a whole constellation cluster of people there. Well, Trump's support for Israel and the fact also that Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren is something that the groipers, God bless their little hearts, think, you know, they think they would like to be able to turn this as part of their fight for the succession. The future control of MAGA is begin to, you know, ooh, Trump. Trump hangs around with that Jewish pedophile Epstein. Trump is helping Bibi. Trump is, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, okay, but helping Christians in Africa, how exactly is that like a groiper thing? I mean, you know, what's. How do you fit that into Candace Owen worldview? Trump believes, and he is, I think, right, that the majority in MAGA is not in radical groiper maga, but is an ordinary Trump maga. And it has a certain amount of common sense. It doesn't actually like Nick Fuentes. It may not hate him as much as people who were liberal internationalists or something do, but it doesn't like Nazis. You know, this is a way for Trump to kind of be reminding people that he is kind of the guy for Christian evangelical America in a way that sort of groper isolationists aren't. Now, you don't know how it all works. Again, you don't know. Does Trump think this out in his head? I don't think he's got like a whiteboard somewhere, you know, in that beautifully gilded oval office where he's writing down the pros and cons and so on. Probably not, but his again, his instinct for power and his intuitive sense of where his base is and how it's thinking and feeling are both alerting him to the fact that the anti Semitic Nazi curious griper wings his potential, wants to threaten his power. And then that starts to alert him to, you know, how do I cut him off at the knees without so dividing my coalition that I end up weakening myself? He. He doesn't want to drive the groiper incels out of the MAGA movement because he needs them for numbers. But he really doesn't like rebellion.
- [25:11]
A
All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Another listener request this week, Walter, this time from Joanna in Nashville. Who wants to know your favorite speech of all time? I'd guess this means like your favorite political speech or famous speech given by.
- [25:34]
B
A public figure, right? Yeah. You know, I always liked that speech at the start of Twelfth Night of, you know, the Duke's speech there, basically because I had to memorize it, you know, in our eighth grade school play, you know, that was like, if music be the food of love, play on. Right. One of the reasons I liked that was because it was an all boys school. So some of the parts, some of the, some of the boys had to play girls parts and I didn't have to. I guess maybe that's the moment when my parents probably should have realized I wasn't trans. But it was, you know, it was like, okay, fine, I've got like, not only a guy's role, but I've got like a nobleman's role. And also it's like one speech and then I'm kind of done for a while. So I've always had a soft spot for that speech also. It's a good speech, but. And very revealing of his character. But that is not, I think, what our reader is asking about. I like the speeches of. I mean, and then I could give like a very mawkish answer and say, oh, this Sermon on the Mount, that's really okay. And from a certain standpoint, yes, but let's not go there. I would say I like those speeches of antiquity where every historian will frankly just say, look, I wasn't there. I'm writing about something that happened a long time ago. And so what I'm doing here is telling you what a person like this general, as I understand him, to Be, was. Would have said at that moment in time in those circumstances, because those actually turn out often to be the most sort of reveal. That's where the historian is really kind of showing you what their interpretation is. And there are a lot of great ones like that. But the one that probably I think for me stands out really is Pericles, you know, funeral oration when, you know, things have not gone well, as well as he would have liked. And the war weariness is beginning to come in and he, he tells people what he thinks about the conduct of the war that they're in and the conduct of the war. I wish we were having speech, more speeches like that from our presidents of the last 25 years. I wish we had had sort of better accounts of where the country, why this was important or this was not important, what we were doing about it, how we got or didn't get into trouble following this line of policy, what we were going to do now, why there was a reasonable confidence that we could continue to victory or whatever. We've lost for some reason our speeches. And maybe it's because now we live in an age of professional speech writers, as opposed to an age of politicians sitting down to really try to tell their voters what they think. I mean, Lincoln didn't really use speechwriters. Teddy Roosevelt didn't really use speechwriters. Fdr, I would say he abused speech writers. The final result was very much what he, he had in mind. So now we have people just writing these lofty cliches intended to sort of spin. I would like us to get back to speeches where a leader talks honestly to the people about where we are, how we got here, why this thing that I'm about to do really matters, why I think it will work, and then, you know, and then encourages them to follow. We need that. Without rational leaders giving rational guidance, reasonable guidance, it's very, very hard for the kind of sober public opinion to form that can be durable in the face of adversity. And adversity sooner or later comes to everybody.
- [30:02]
A
All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producer, Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Vuitton of A.T. hudson, and my co host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.