transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:22] Welcome to The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Thursday, April 23rd, 2026. I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

Speaker 2:
[00:37] Hi, John.

Speaker 1:
[00:38] Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

Speaker 2:
[00:40] Hi, John.

Speaker 1:
[00:41] And now in his regular Thursday slot, our old friend, our continuing contributor, Free Expression Wall Street Journal columnist, and AEI Big Cheese Matthew Contenetti. Hi, Matt.

Speaker 3:
[00:55] Hi, John.

Speaker 1:
[00:56] I said Big Cheese because I can't remember what your title is.

Speaker 3:
[00:59] I'll take that. I'm going to have that printed on my business card.

Speaker 1:
[01:02] Okay. There we go. So Donald Trump this morning tweeted basically what we know but is a rare thing for a president to say, not that it's unusual for Trump to say things that presidents have never said before in public, that we really have no idea who's in charge in Iran, and that there are moderates whom he says, he uses the word, he puts quotes around moderates and says they're not really moderate, and then there are the hardliners who are hardliners. These line up relatively precisely to the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the hardliners and the two politicians, the Speaker of the Parliament and the Prime Minister, who are the moderates and nobody is in charge. According to this really remarkable story in The New York Times this morning, by the pretty remarkable reporter, Farnos Fassihi, basically the Ayatollah is surrounded by doctors who are holding guns at his head and access to the Ayatollah, who is of course the Supreme Leader. Very limited, very limited access. Surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes. If this sounds to you like the plot of the movie Dave without the double, it seems to be kind of like that. He's gravely wounded. He's been gravely wounded for six or seven weeks or something like that. And so he's in charge, but no one is in charge. Mr. Hamane, the Ayatollah, has not recorded a video or audio message, the official said, because he does not want to appear vulnerable or sound weak in his first public address. Messages to him are handwritten, sealed in envelopes, relayed via a human chain from one trusted courier to the next, who travel on highways and back roads, in cars and on motorcycles until they reach his hideout. His guidance on issues snakes back the same way. So welcome to Sparta in 300 BC.

Speaker 3:
[03:15] You're missing the best line, the best line in this amazing piece. Here comes one paragraph before what you were reading, where the reporter writes, though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, which is like Joe Biden, meaning that the New York Times has now revealed that the conspiracy that we have, we have the Ayatollah auto pen in Iran right now.

Speaker 1:
[03:42] Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

Speaker 2:
[03:44] There will be no 25th Amendment on the Ayatollah. He's fine.

Speaker 1:
[03:49] Yeah. He's sitting in the backyard with his son saying, and they will call a meeting, and at that meeting, you will be assassinated. So he's being held hostage in some cave somewhere with doctors surrounding him with messages being delivered by a courier pigeon while a major war is going on. So he is the only legitimate leader of the country in the sense of the country's defining legitimacy. And this, of course, does raise questions about whatever validity there is to any kind of negotiation that is likely or possible to go on.

Speaker 2:
[04:31] But, um, Morshtal and Kamenei blink, blink twice if it's a yes on the ceasefire.

Speaker 1:
[04:37] Oh, look, he blinked twice, says somebody who wants to ceasefire. No, he only blinked once, says the other person around the body who says he only wants, he doesn't want to ceasefire. So.

Speaker 4:
[04:49] But it also raises questions, John, about the future of the stability of the regime. I mean, it can't function obviously for any extended period of time like this. It's a situation that has to change. To what extent is this going to become actively warring factions fighting it out for leadership?

Speaker 1:
[05:09] I think it's pretty clear though, Abe, that if there is a fight, that it's probably the fight has already largely been won, which is to say that the IRGC has taken over. Fred Kagan, of course, said like the guys with guns win in a situation where there are guys with guns, and there are other guys who don't have the guns, and as he and others have said, it's not as though the political leaders are not themselves veterans of the IRGC. They are. They were fighters in the IRGC in the 80s and 90s. They just moved off the direct involvement in the IRGC command in order to take political positions in the government. It's not that they're coming, they're entirely outside of the system. It's just that the fight seems to be, do we try to trick the Americans at the negotiating table? Or are we basically, do we need to show such incredible strength and resolve and iron will and determination that we just wait out the Americans until the Americans negotiate themselves into a position of withdrawal?

Speaker 3:
[06:21] Well, the missing element is the blockade, which is having real effects on Iran's economy, and the people with guns might be in charge, but what happens when the people with guns at the top of the food chain can't pay the people with guns at the bottom of the food chain? We seem to be a few weeks away from that happening. There were about two weeks away from Iran filling its storage capacity of energy, which means then that they're going to have to begin to cap the wells, which is economically devastating for the Iranian economy. I learned today that 51 percent of the oil exports go to paying the salaries of the army and the IRGC. So if we're cutting off the oil exports, that means it's a matter of time before we're cutting off the main source of funding for the guys with guns. And that, of course, the blockade is just one part of the overall operation economic fury that the administration is involved in. So when you can add that to the way in which the economic sanctions can affect just the everyday Iranian, Iran imports gas, so that's not coming in. So gasoline powers the economy, but you're not going to have much of it. You already had the currency in as close to hyperinflation as you can get. I mean, it's essentially worthless. Before the war, we had water shortages and electrical outages in Tehran. There was Peshkesi and the president was saying, oh, well, maybe the Tehran residents will have to leave the city. That was one of the reasons for the public protests that triggered, in many ways, this latest round of fighting. So I think the president can't fall for any diplomatic rabbit's ear that the Iranians wave in his direction. Because right now, if he sticks with this blockade, even if he doesn't resume combat operations, which I would like him to do, he still has his foot on the back of the Iranian regime.

Speaker 1:
[08:43] I think it is important to note that the economic condition that you're talking about, Matt, this is a very important thing. In January, the currency was worthless. It is now almost the end of April. So it's not just the guys with guns. Everybody in the country is playing with monopoly money that has no value in a situation in which all trade has essentially been stopped except for whatever can come over the border, you know, in the north and to the east, through, you know, on, like, you know, trucks or whatever. Domestic production of domestic economic growth has probably largely stopped because A, bombings, and B, no one there is getting paid either. So you have the Iranian people already in a position of penury three months ago. And the only, as is always the case, the elite is always the last to feel the sting. And Operation Economic Fury is designed to bring the punishment that every individual Iranian is feeling to the elite, to the leadership, to the guys with guns, to the people for whom all this money has been reserved. And I think despite the incredibly bad polling numbers and despite the continuing game that is being played where people who don't like this war say, oh, we're going to end up with the same deal as the Iran deal in 2015, only we will have done all this warring and for no purpose. The shift, the plan for us to blockade as opposed to their blockading appears to have been, I mean, I would call it a masterstroke, except that it was so obvious a thing to do and that the Iranians, by saying, will blockade the Strait of Hormuz, were, I think I've used this analogy before, were a little like Bart in Blazing Saddles putting the gun to his own head and saying one move and Iran gets it. Iran needs the Strait of Hormuz open. It's conceivable the rest of the world needs the Strait of Hormuz open. We don't really need it open, but fine. We need worldwide shipping and a good working order of shipping and all of that. But somehow it never occurs, didn't occur to people who were saying, wow, what a great move Iran's made militarily to say we're going to control the strait because they're choking themselves to death. Literally, they by saying we're ending free transit in Hormuz and then we say, okay, we'll take up on it. We're also going to end transit in Hormuz. They're the ones who are suffering the worst from it.

Speaker 4:
[11:49] I just want to make a note about this when you mentioned the good working order of international shipping. I think one issue that will come out of this in the long run is this is all really shown a spotlight on the shadow fleets, which is not just an Iranian problem. It's something that's gotten out of hand in terms of Russians and the Chinese. And it's the fact that these bad actors who do form this axis have been able to evade the kind of sanctions that we're always talking about putting on them and crippling their economies. That's a larger issue that needs to be dealt with after this. Because we now see the exposure of all the games going on, of the different flags and the false signals, and the shipping and exchanging loads at sea and the rest of it. It's a larger issue if the US is supposed to be the guarantor of these open shipping.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 3:
[16:01] Can I make a point about the imposition of the blockade and how Trump unveiled it? It is another example of his if you're rubber, I'm glue strategy to all things. I mean, Trump is a very simple reaction mechanism. If you insult him, he will come back at you. It's that simple. If you praise him, he praises you. If you attack him personally, directly, he will attack you. In this case, he just applied that to geopolitics. The Iranians said, no, no, now we close the Strait of Hormuz, and he said, well, I'll close the Gulf of Oman. No one will be able to come in, and I'm going to close your ports, and it seems to be, I think, working. Second thing is, the fact that the Internet has been shut off in Iran for two months now, really hinders our ability to find out what's happening on the ground. Even this New York Times Report we're talking about, it comes from regime sources. It's based according to the story. This account of Iran's new power structure is based on interviews with six senior Iranian officials, two former officials, two members of the Revolutionary Guard, a senior cleric familiar with the inner workings of the system, and three individuals who know Mr. Khamenei well, buddies. They hang out on the soccer fields together. Nine other individuals with ties to the guards and the government also described the command structure. They all spoke on the condition they could not be identified because they were discussing sensitive matters of state. And, you know, they're probably under US sanction and they're on the Israeli target list as well. So if you have your name in the New York Times, maybe you're going to move up on the list. These are the people from whom we're getting the information. So they're going to have the most ideological, most Iran-forward account of what's happening. All the images we get are from photographers that are allowed by the regime to operate in Tehran under the guard of the IRGC. So we have to kind of approach this news, you know, Iranian strength and the silly propaganda videos that they're putting out online with a great deal of skepticism. For ordinary Iranians, I think the situation was bad and it's growing worse and it will be only a matter of time before they vent that frustration against their leaders as they've done so often in the past.

Speaker 2:
[18:40] Yeah, I mean, we do have a Gaza Health Ministry problem, right? With this, you know, sort of, you know, reporting who we're trusting and stuff like that. But I also think that, you know, I think that the part that Abe mentioned answers one of John's questions about why the Iranians thought they could prolong this and actually come out ahead in a tit-for-tat on closing Straits and whatever, which is that they had the Shadow Fleet, and they didn't think that we would pursue the Shadow Fleet outside of the blockade area. They seem to believe that the blockade was just going to be a dual blockade of ports, which essentially, you know, the Iranians were sending people a slightly different direction, so they had to go right by, you know, Iranian ports and whatever. And so Trump said, well, fine, we're going to close those ports. And Iran said, fine, because we have 140 million barrels on the open seas that are waiting, and as soon as there's, as soon as they are needed, or as soon as they get to their destination, they will drop off oil most likely for China. And so they saw this as an insurance policy, but I think it's even more than that. They see the system as an insurance policy. What you're seeing now is why it's been allowed to grow to this point, the shadow fleet, because you see what it takes to stop it. We are pursuing ships in the Indian Ocean and redirecting them. We're pursuing ships in the Arabian Sea and redirecting them this way. That requires US naval assets to escort ships to... It requires military assets to always be on the ready. And there are, according to the Wall Street Journal, 50 plus of these ships hanging out in the water somewhere. So you understand the resources that it would require. It would require a war-like posture to crack down on the shadow fleet sanctions evaders, you know, that they're using now. And so this is an actual... Weirdly, this is an opportunity to do that. We would... If we weren't at war with Iran, we would not be pursuing those ships. We would not be investing the resources in chasing one or two or three ships in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea when there are more than 50 out on the water. And we know that we could only cut down on a certain amount of the oil that's sitting there waiting to be delivered. So now that we're in a war posture and we have, you know, aircraft carriers in the region and we have resources moved to the region and we have bases established with allies in the... You know, all that stuff, that makes it possible to crack down on the shadow fleet. And so this, I think, was Iran's gambit. We'll take the blockade for blockade because most of what we have contracted out is outside of the blockade area and they didn't expect that the US was going to scour, you know, the far corners of the seas to reverse those ships.

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Speaker 1:
[23:12] So, if the enemy gets a vote, that's the famous line in all warfare, right? The enemy gets a vote. And so, the vote that Iran took, since it had no capacity outside of these efforts to sort of hurl missiles at the Gulf States and at Israel, it had no capacity to engage directly against the United States and Israel in their overwhelming air superiority, really. They took their shot, you know, on the strait. And then there was this kind of conventional opinion that this was a masterstroke. And part of that is because it takes time when the enemy gets a vote for the other party to adjust. And Trump started this war with an idea in his head, which I think came to him through his economic advisers and everything like that, that you do this really fast, knock the regime over. And while you were doing that, don't have to suspend, don't have to interfere with the free transit of oil. Let Iran sell its oil in order to keep prices low. Let shipping go on the way it's going on so that the collateral damage is minimal and the American people won't suffer any real consequences from this military engagement. And in fact, they haven't that much. I mean, oil is up 25% per gallon at the pump. That's terrible, but it's not when it went up five-fold in the 1973 oil embargo. It went up 500% during that oil embargo. But it turned out that that was not a good strategy in the end because we were not inflicting the kind of harm on the guys with guns aside from blowing up their stuff, and we killed a lot of them, but we weren't inflicting the right kind of harm. Trump had to get to the point in his own head where he was willing to say, okay, we are going to have a major disruption in the flow of oil on the planet Earth in order to win this war if Iran is going to play this game. But it took him six or seven weeks to get there. Like he was trying to do this, you might say, on the cheap.

Speaker 3:
[25:35] Well, I have a slightly different theory of how we got here. I think that Trump kept leaning into the idea that the way to get Iranians to the negotiating table was to threaten to destroy their power plants, the bridges, and the refineries. And remember, there was that instance in the war when, I believe, the IDF targeted an Iranian refinery, and Iran responded by launching missiles at energy assets in the Gulf. I think this severely alarmed our Gulf allies, who were already bearing a lot of the brunt of Iranian retaliation, the UAE in particular. And they, in my view, they came to the present and said, look, if you destroy these power plants, they're going to launch the missiles that are power plants. If you hit their desalinization plants, they're going to destroy our desalinization plants. And essentially, the Gulf will be ruined. And if you think that the high gasoline prices are hurting you now, just imagine if all of this refinery capacity, all this energy goes offline. And so that, in my view, is what kind of forced him to take the diplomatic route and say, okay, fine, we'll have the two-week ceasefire. We're going to meet in Islamabad. You know, we'll see what happens here. And when that didn't really work, he came up with the blockade strategy, which was always there in front of him. One puzzle I've always had about Epic Fury is, you know, unlike Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, the blockade came after the military operation, whereas in Venezuela, we had the blockade of the Venezuelan ports, and we were going after the Venezuelan Shadow Fleet for months before we went in and took Maduro. So, how we got here is an interesting question. I think a lot of it has to do with Alliance management in truth. I don't, I still think, as Mark Thiessen points out in the post today, you know, the target list that Admiral Cooper had and CENTCOM had two more weeks on it, you know, and that was the original six-week war, I think, was six weeks of target.

Speaker 1:
[27:53] Fred Kagan said that exact thing on the show on Monday. He said, don't believe when people say we're running out of targets, we weren't running out of targets, something else happened to enter.

Speaker 3:
[28:04] I think it was Trump kind of stepped on himself by this threat about the power plants and the bridges. And so ideally, we would maintain this blockade, but Trump recognizing what the Iranians are doing for what it is, which is merely buying the regime time. That's the only reason they negotiate. The only thing they care about is regime survival. So negotiations are just a means to keep the regime in power. Trump needs to recognize that. And I think he should say to Admiral Cooper, all right, spin the wheels again two more weeks, and then we'll see where we are.

Speaker 1:
[28:35] And from what we can tell, he is establishing the predicate for that. Right now, the George HW. Bush aircraft carrier is moving into place. They're moving other seaborne assets into place. They are moving refueling planes into place.

Speaker 3:
[28:57] We have twice the capacity, according to General Jack Keane, in the Gulf now than we did at the start of Epic Fury, including this third carrier group, which is just an incredible amount of power.

Speaker 1:
[29:09] Right. So I think you and I don't disagree. I think we were using different facts to come to the same conclusion. And the fact is that, as you say, in an ordinary military campaign, throughout history, as I've been saying for like six weeks now on the podcast, the blockade would have come first. The blockade is the first thing you do, in part because you want to squeeze off the assets to the country you're attacking before you attack so that they're already wounded. Now, Iran was already wounded because its economy was in such a powerless condition, but of course it had the stocks and reserves of equipment that it had in terms of missiles and launchers and everything like that, all of which were the targets of our destructive capacity in the Israelis' destructive capacity in the first six weeks of the war. But that a blockade was probably inevitable and that, as you say, the I'm rubber, you're a glue strategy turned out to be twice as potent as it might have been had it been the first thing that we did, because if it was the first thing that we did, it would have been, what are you doing? You're creating a worldwide oil crisis here. Obviously, people are blaming us for everything that went on in the war, but it's a little hard to say that we started the blockading. We didn't start the blockading, they started the blockading, and then we opportunistically, as you might say this war itself is all opportunistic in the sense that the position of the Iranians in January and early February was, we had harmed them grievously in the 12-day war, their economy was collapsing, they were coming out into the streets in 90 cities, there was domestic crisis was fomented, they then cracked down on the domestic crisis, their government was wobbly, their circumstances were terrible, and then the Israelis went to them and said, you know, we can decapitate much of this regime on Saturday if we just go, and Trump said, all right, all of these stars aligning, let's go, and let's do this once and for all. And it wasn't like this was a three-year plan to get the Iranians out or that we've been wargaming it forever. That's part of the joke here, as people say, well, you know, every time we did a war game, the Iranians closed the Straits of Hormuz, we should have known that they were going to do it. Yeah, but no war game before it presumed that we were going to decapitate the regime, kill the sitting Ayatollah, kill 50 of the leading, and wipe out in one day, wipe out a third of their offensive military capability in one afternoon, pretty much. That wasn't in the war games. So once we actually made the move, everything changed, and we also had to adapt to the changing circumstances when, it might have been great if the Iranians had attempted to engage us somehow, because then we could have mowed them down, but they didn't. The only time that really happened was in the fight to get the, was in the effort to save the downed airmen, when as we were waiting, as they were charging up the hill to try to get to the airmen, we took that opportunity to eliminate hundreds of elite Iranian fighters as they were attempting to take our guy hostage. But mostly in military terms, this has all been incredibly unconventional. We're now back in this relatively unconventional situation in which Seth says, we're not just blockading Iran, we are hunting down the illegal shipping and making sure that their export capacity is reduced to zero.

Speaker 3:
[33:30] You know, one reason why the blockade may have come out of order, so to speak, was, of course, we are operating under resource constraints. We don't have as many ships as we used to. And we don't have the allies with us who are ready to help us in the, not only the blockade, but also the clearing, minesweeping operations and then the escort operations. And so this kind of is a natural segue to some news that broke last night, which is that our Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was fired by Secretary of Hegseth. And, you know, the media are reporting this story along the very familiar paradigm of, well, here's Hegseth messing with leadership at the Pentagon, it's chaos, it's all about loyalty to him. But I think there's a more interesting story here. Phelan is a campaign donor to Trump, who was put as the Secretary of the Navy. And there was a policy dispute, it seems to me, between Phelan, who had been talking about the Golden Fleet, really expanding our shipbuilding operations, which is a major part of the Trump administration's agenda. But focusing for him mainly on the surface fleet, and even talking about a new Trump class of battleship. Whereas the Hegseth team would prefer that we move our defense spending in the naval arena to the assets that seem to be more and more important these days. Subs, stealth, underwater submersible vehicles, so underwater drones, electronic and cyber. The shipbuilding program, it doesn't seem to have been up to snuff. I would ascribe this firing to a policy dispute, but I also have to say, no one should feel really too bad for Phelan. He's a billionaire. He's married to a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, and they have one of the most impressive art collections in the country, in their homes, in Palm Beach, Aspen, and Manhattan.

Speaker 1:
[36:04] This is a very important point to be made about the, what happens when, you know, S gets real, or when, you know, things important really start to happen. So Trump takes Phelan, who literally has no military experience, from what I can tell. His career was largely confined to being the personal investor for Michael Dell, the, you know, the sort of the PC billionaire. That he ran Michael Dell's money and made a huge amount of money himself doing that and being his own kind of investor. You know, he didn't go to the Naval Academy, wasn't in uniform, nothing like that. And so they were throwing around jobs. They gave him this job. And now the Navy is the most important thing on Earth. And it's 2026. And assume, looking at his resume and everything, if he's not equal to the task, he's not equal to the, makes perfect sense that this is not the guy you need when you're involved in a major naval war, you know, thousands of miles away in the most important effort of the Trump presidency. You probably want somebody else. If what he's saying is, no, no, no, I really want to continue with my figuring out how to use AI to help us build a new Navy 10 years from now, you're like, I may need somebody else to come in here. And like, you're just in the way. And it's not even that much of a gloss or a hit at feeling to say, you know, you're given a relatively ceremonial position. You have skills. They're not really, they don't really line up with the skills you need to be the secretary of the Navy during a war. And so you, it makes perfect sense that it's probably time for you to go and, you know, leave Admiral Cooper alone.

Speaker 3:
[38:10] I've always thought that the more important than secretary of the Navy is assistant secretary of the Navy, which was the job held by Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. So that's the place you want to be. I think Jim Webb was also an assistant secretary of the Navy.

Speaker 1:
[38:28] John Lehman? Well, he was secretary of the Navy.

Speaker 3:
[38:30] He was secretary of the Navy.

Speaker 1:
[38:31] He was assistant secretary of the Navy.

Speaker 3:
[38:32] Now, the assistant who's now the acting secretary of the Navy is one of my favorite American politicians, Hung Cao, who is a Vietnamese American Marine who ran sadly unsuccessfully for Congress a few cycles back. And he is a hard-hitting hawk. He's a culture warrior, much more in, I think, the Hegseth mold. And so that's what we're going to have, at least for the time being. And, you know, the larger Congress...

Speaker 1:
[39:05] Are you saying President Cao?

Speaker 3:
[39:09] I'm just pointing out there.

Speaker 1:
[39:10] I'm just asking. 2048, sitting there.

Speaker 3:
[39:14] I've been a big fan of his for a long time. He's very important, of course, in the Vietnamese American community, which came out strong for Trump in 2024. If you remember when Trump visited the Eden Center in the 2024 campaign, that's a kind of an Asian American grocery and restaurant district in Northern Virginia, and Trump went to the Vietnamese restaurant, and as he was leaving, he turned to the patrons and said, I love you, Vietnam, and Hung Kau was part of that visit. Yeah, so there's a lot going on. But first, they have to pass, more importantly, the Trump defense budget. Remember, this Trump defense budget request is for $1.5 trillion, the largest defense budget proposal ever. And I think what may have been happening under the surface, between Hegseth and Phelan, in addition to some of the cultural stuff, was a fight about priorities. What type of Navy are we going to need in the future? And there is something to be said for just sheer quantity, because like we're talking about, if you want to have these kind of interdiction operations around the world, you're going to need the surface vessels in order to get the Marines so that they can repel down onto the decks of the ships. But you're also going to need, I think, in our competition with China, a lot of submarines and a lot of USVs, a lot of submersible drones.

Speaker 1:
[40:42] I think that this politically poses an interesting problem, both for Democrats and Republicans, and mostly for Democrats, which is, I think it's fine and politically fine for Democrats to feel like they have a free hand to criticize this war and to say it's unnecessary and stupid, and Trump is an idiot and all that. The polling is bearing that out, that there's no cost, it turns out, to opposing this war even if you're saying, well, you really should support the war while we are fighting it, like you're a patriotic American. We're beyond that. That's not what this country is like anymore. Our partisan divide is too bad. But I don't think they want to look like, I genuinely don't think they're going to want to look like they're pacifists. This bill, which I assume most Democrats are going to oppose, could be a long-lasting poison in their system when they actually have to face voters, not individual senators really, but when 2028 rolls around. What world are they going to occupy in which they can move off far left-wing positions into something resembling a center, when they keep moving every shift that is being made, that we can see as a move toward the future, is a move further to the left. And one of the places in which politicians have done this, Obama did it, Clinton did it, both Clintons did it, is I'm for all kinds of crazy liberal social policy. But where I'm going to try to appeal to the center is to say, I'm not going to let this country be weak. I, you, you did stupid thing. I'm, you know, I'm tough. Here's where I'm tough. And the main way they did it for a long time was to say, I will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. Well, that's not going to be a talking point for them.

Speaker 2:
[42:51] But well, they also worked hard to recruit former military and, and military members of Congress. And what has happened? What's the been the result of that? Graham Platner, which is that he's using it to oppose any sort of intervention against Iran. So you're, you know, this, this thing about, well, I'm for American strength. The people they're recruiting who are supposed to stand for American strength are making the exact same arguments that the Elizabeth Warrens and everybody else were already making.

Speaker 1:
[43:23] That is a very good point. And I think, look, I'm optimistic. I remain extremely optimistic that we are going to win this war and that it will be, it will be unavoidable. And you can, you'll be able to say it was an unnecessary war if you want, but that America and Israel are going to win this war. And in 2028, that may not be a voting issue that will cause people to vote Republican. But if you're, if the, if the Democratic Party is axiomatically pacifist, after we win a war and, and opposed to spending on defense policies because Trump was a hawk and all of that, they are going to have trouble convincing people, in my view, who are on the fence, that they can be trusted with national security, which is not the issue that it ever was before. It's much less of an issue, obviously. But it's not, not an issue, you know? And, and with China rising and with fears of AI and China's seeming to be relatively, possibly relatively more advanced than AI than we are, and stuff going on in Taiwan and all of that, they're going to have to at least make a show of being concerned with worldwide global security for the United States. And they're walking themselves into an alley with no exit, if they keep going on this way. And the Trump defense budget is the first real moment at which the Republicans are going to get a talking point to say, they voted against replenishing the stocks that we needed to replenish and to build the 21st military, particularly the Navy that we need. And they can't be trusted to be president. Again, it's not going to be the knockout blow that it was in the 70s and 80s. But it's not going to be nothing. It's going to be something.

Speaker 4:
[45:26] I wonder because I feel as if the broad sense that the only wars in the United States future are wars of choice and the choice is always a mistake to go into. I think there's so much of that out there. The Democrats are certainly relying on that as being the fallback attitude of Americans and American voters. They might be right. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[46:04] My line only works. What I just said only works if it is perceived that the United States won this war. Without that, I don't think I'm right.

Speaker 3:
[46:14] But I don't think that, yeah, I mean, a lot depends on the outcome for sure. But the larger issue of appropriateness for the office, do voters take a presidential candidate as a serious defender of the United States? It's the presidential oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Matter is a great deal. I think it hurt Kamala Harris. I don't think people took her seriously as a commander in chief, nor should they. I think it will hurt Democrats in 2028 if they're associated with the wing of the party that Tim Walz and Chris Murphy belong to. Tim Walz and Chris Murphy traveling to Spain, was actively denying American assistance in this war. Recognizing a Palestinian state, virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist in its policies. That's where Tim Walz, the former vice presidential candidate, current governor of Minnesota, and Chris Murphy, who is the leader of one of the leaders, it's a crowded field of the progressives in the Senate. They go and they address an international socialist conference. I mean, it didn't go by that name, but that's essentially what it was. Both of their speeches are lacerating criticisms of the commander-in-chief at a time of war. That is not the right strategy to have as a party at any time, because it will expose them to the charge that the Democratic Party, whoever the nominee might be in 2028, is weak on national security. That has always been a problem for Democrats, and they're not doing anything to improve it.

Speaker 1:
[48:03] It's important to note that Kamala Harris' candidacy in 2024 being an accident, that in 2016 and in 2020, Hillary Clinton ran as the most, I mean, not that she had a rival, I mean, she had Bernie Sanders as a rival, but they cleared the field for Hillary Clinton, and she ran as a hawk. In 2019, Biden comes into the race and stays 10 points ahead all along the way because he looked like he wasn't a crazy leftist. I mean, it turned out he was by default a crazy leftist just because of the way he governed. But he ran as the, they're all little, boy, this little nuts over there the way they're talking about taxes and single payer health care. You better stick with me because I'm an old guy and I remember when America was America. Who's going to fill that? Not that I'm saying that Democrats need a hawk in 2028. Yeah, it's not being a hawk. No, but who's going to fill that role like, I take this job seriously.

Speaker 2:
[49:17] I mean, Josh Shapiro was angling for that lane at the moment, but he's got his other compli-

Speaker 1:
[49:24] Right.

Speaker 2:
[49:25] He's got these other complications holding him back from like emerging in that lane. I don't see anybody else right now.

Speaker 3:
[49:32] He's going to have to take on Hassan Piker before he can take on, you know, the blind mullah or whoever is in that hospital surrounded by the IRGC.

Speaker 2:
[49:41] That's the problem.

Speaker 3:
[49:42] But I would just say, John, just to, it's less being a hawk because I do think the person who promises peace is the one that's going to win. And I think that Harris was kind of not only associated with the ongoing war in Ukraine, but also the sense that there was so much chaos abroad, whether it's Afghanistan or Israel and Iran. So that kind of helped Trump. And he was saying, look, I'm not going to end these wars, right? But you have to be taken credibly that you would use force if necessary. And no one doubts that about Donald Trump. And he did. He has used force quite a bit. Who in 2028 on the Democrats, you're going to have to just, we'll just have to see, emerges as someone that people say, oh yeah, I can see that person, you know, that two-spirit, whatever, the BIPOC indigenous nominee, can we take them seriously on the issue of credible threat of force?

Speaker 2:
[50:39] Right. And on the piece thing, that like Trump attracted Arab voters, for example, by, you know, when you ask them why they voted for Trump, when he's, you know, obviously has all these pre-existing conditions, we can call them against Arab, you know, voters and interests, they said, well, we think that he'll do what it takes to end the war, right? They knew that Trump-

Speaker 1:
[51:03] And they were right.

Speaker 2:
[51:04] And they were right. But they knew that Trump is pro-Israel, right? And the subtext of the question was, why would you vote for the more pro-Israel guy if you're mad about Gaza? And the answer was, because I think the more pro-Israel guy is still the better candidate to end the war. So Democrats face a credibility crisis on that front too, which is Kamala was viewed as ineffectual. I looked at the maps, I don't know, there's no way for them to go in Rafa. You know, she went to the Munich Security Conference once or whatever, she gave a speech and the Ukrainians never got along with her particularly well because they didn't take her seriously. There were all sorts of things with her and Zelensky behind the scenes where she just didn't appear to be studied up on the war and what was happening. She wasn't taken seriously as a credible person who knows, who might know what there is to do. I think that the Democrats can find a way to get somebody, their version of Trump who is like, I think this guy will end the war. In some of the hostage memoirs, the Israeli hostage memoirs, there were these incredible conversations where they'd relay that they had with their Hamas captors, where the Hamas captors were rooting, in some cases, for Trump to win the election. Because these Hamas captors were lower level people, not Hamas commanders, and they were like, we'd much rather this war end. We'll kill whoever we have to kill, we're not going to revolt against Hamas, we're going to do everything we are ordered to do. But sure would be nice if Trump won and then the war ended and I could go back to running a shop or something like that. That's the sort of thing that Democrats are really missing. Somebody who thinks people are even listening to them.

Speaker 1:
[52:45] Okay, so the most important little shadow thing, because we're talking about Graham Platner, we're talking about what Alyssa Slotkin, the senator from Michigan, who ran as a hawk, right? She was a CIA officer and blah, blah, blah, and all that. And Abigail Spanberger, who was a fighter pilot, and Mickey Sherrill was a fighter, no, no, Mickey Sherrill was a fighter pilot.

Speaker 3:
[53:06] Abigail Spanberger worked in the CIA.

Speaker 1:
[53:08] I'm sorry, Abigail Spanberger was in the CIA, this one was a fighter pilot, and that one was a, you know, whatever. Okay. But there was a debate this week, debate the largest state in the country, gubernatorial debate, and what, as just a picture of what the Democratic Party's candidates want to convey as they are going through this debate, Javier Becerra, the former secretary of Health and Human Services, HHS, said that, I basically said I would push back on the Trump administration on a reckless policy. What's that reckless policy? That drivers of trucks who do not speak English and may not be able to read road signs in English should be taken off the road. That that would be discriminatory to take a truck driver off the road who can't read a road sign in English.

Speaker 3:
[54:15] There have been several high-profile crashes and deaths of American citizens by these illegal immigrant truck drivers who are functionally illiterate.

Speaker 1:
[54:25] Right. Now, why am I bringing this up? Because obviously, it has nothing to do with national or anything like that. It is the incentive of serious Democratic candidates to go completely meshuga trying to appeal to the Democratic base voter. One thing you might learn, given the success of Trump's immigration policies, not the ICE stuff, which is more controversial, but in general is, you might want to find a third lane to talk about some of this stuff. If you're really going to try to appeal to the broad mass of Americans, now Becerra's not trying to do that. He's trying to win a Democratic primary in California. I don't know that Latinos in California, who are voters and not undocumented aliens themselves, are all that thrilled with the idea that a truck driver in charge of a gigantic 18-wheel vehicle that can wreak havoc and destruction can't read a road sign. I don't know why ethnic solidarity would outweigh the common sense that that person should not have a driver's license and likely doesn't, by the way, have a driver's license. But he thinks so. He thinks that's good for him. And that's always the question when you talk about how people run for office. Did Christian Gillibrand, did these people who went totally insane on trans issues and stuff like that in 2019, they thought they were doing that because they thought it was a good idea. They thought it was the best idea to appeal to Democratic voters. I don't know. It's like it was the deepest and closest, the nearest thing to their hearts. They were trying to break out and have breakout moments.

Speaker 3:
[56:27] The irony in California is since the California reform that was meant to block out Republicans mandates that the top two vote getters in the first round automatically advance to the general election.

Speaker 1:
[56:40] No matter their party. Yeah, so party free, jungle, everyone runs at once. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[56:48] We still have the possibility that the two top vote getters, thanks to the fractured Democratic field, will be Republicans. Steve Hilton, the former Cameron advisor and former media personality who's actually been the top vote getter consistently in all of these polls.

Speaker 1:
[57:08] That we should say 21 percent, that's the top vote, but it's 21 percent.

Speaker 3:
[57:12] Yeah. Then I think he's, Chad Barrett. LaBianco, is that his name?

Speaker 1:
[57:18] Yeah. Bianco. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[57:19] Bianco. Yeah. He's a little bit harder edged than Steve, but he too is competitive. Becerra got some attention. I don't think it will really help him because with Swalwell dropping out, some of the vote has moved to him and to Matt Mahan, who is the mayor of San Diego, I believe, who is pretty, I'm sorry, Matt Mahan is the mayor of San Jose, who as far as California Democrats go, is fairly sensible.

Speaker 1:
[57:56] Right. But anyway, it's an interesting, the reason I only bring this up is to say that it's an interesting temperature gauge. These races this year are an interesting temperature gauge about whether or not the Democrats are going to be more like the Democrats in 92, which is to say they really have an opportunity here. They should be able to win the presidency in 2020. A Trump will only have had two terms, but effectively he will have been the dominating politician in the United States for 12 years and it will be time for there to be, there will be, it will be time for them to-

Speaker 2:
[58:35] It will be time for Donald Trump Jr. to have his moment, yes.

Speaker 1:
[58:39] Well, anyway, but I mean, in a sort of rational set of circumstances, you would say that fortune favors the change and the change would be from the Republicans and Trump, even though Biden came in in the middle there. But they have to not be crazy. And I mean, look, Trump is crazy, but particularly on a couple of issues, largely, I would say, immigration and some of the social issues, the, you know, therefore they, them and I'm for you, that stuff. Trump seemed less crazy. So being less crazy is like a winning way in this psychotic political moment that we're in. And I just think that, and Matt, you wrote this column yesterday for free expression in The Wall Street Journal, which echoed a lot of stuff we talked about yesterday, but also about anti-Semitism, that the anti-Semitism and the Democratic Party's moves in this direction against Israel and all of that. That may be a reflection of a gigantic change in the position of Jews in the Democratic Party and Israel's perception of Israel in general. But they're crazy, like Graham Platner is crazy. He's not, look, all things are being considered. You know, aid to Israel needs to be re-examined in light of some things and they don't really need it, and we need to condition it and all of that. That's not what we're talking about here. And that is not the threat to the Democrats.

Speaker 3:
[60:19] Look, and it's why the Democratic brand is still less popular than the GOP and Trump. You know, I mean, part of it is Democrats who would like their party to be even crazier than it is. But another part of that low approval are people who are like, this is not the direction that we want the country to go in, even if we're willing in many cases to vote for Democrats in order to stop the Trump agenda.

Speaker 1:
[60:47] I'm also very struck by the fact that when you look at the people, everyone thinks it's a lead pipe cinch that the Democrats are going to win the house. And I would align myself with that idea. But the people who are like going district by district by district, the margin that they are now suggesting that Democrats will take the house by, is way smaller than the margin of the victories that Republicans scored in the middle of incredibly controversial Democratic administrations.

Speaker 3:
[61:22] Or even Democratic performance in 2018.

Speaker 1:
[61:25] Right, exactly. We're talking about 13 right now. We're talking about somewhere like 15 seats, a gain of 15 seats because right now I think Republicans have a majority of two or something with deaths and various, and maybe now it's three. I don't know. But the gain seems to be the Democrats will end up around 228, which would be a net gain of 13. That's not 63, which was the Republican number in 2010. It's not 52, which was the Republican number in 1994, and it's not 40, which was the Democratic number in 2018.

Speaker 3:
[62:05] That's much more like the 2022 midterm.

Speaker 1:
[62:08] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[62:09] That red wave didn't happen. The forecast, including me, turned into the red trickle.

Speaker 1:
[62:15] Yeah. I just think that's really interesting that Democrats, with Trump in the 30s, if he is in the 30s, let's take the RCP average and say he's at 40, with the war being unpopular, with all kinds of dissatisfactions and the numbers of dissatisfactions. Democrats and Republicans at this point in those polling cycles, Republicans would poll over 10, 12 points generically. They were like, I think 2010, they were up 15 points at some point. If you said, are you going to vote Democrat or Republican in the upcoming election? They were net plus 15. I don't even know if they're net plus anything, the Democrats right now.

Speaker 3:
[63:01] They're about five.

Speaker 1:
[63:02] Five? It's about five.

Speaker 3:
[63:03] Five points. Very stable.

Speaker 1:
[63:05] Yeah. That's interesting to me. It suggests that Democrats, the Democratic image problem that we think is a substantive problem, but is at least whether or not people are engaging with the substantive problem, that is leeching over into the image problem and maybe harming them just as the Republicans seeming crazy in 2022 with their senatorial candidates and various other things, really did not close the sale with the American people about how you need us to stop Biden. That just didn't happen because Republicans look too nuts. Matt, you have a recommendation.

Speaker 3:
[63:55] I do, John. Thank you. Today, I'd like to recommend something a little bit unusual. It's not really a cultural product, but today is the NFL Draft. I want to recommend that our audience just watch five minutes of it. You can see it on cable, on network, on the streaming services for two reasons. The first reason is if you want to have any sense of how powerful the National Football League is in America. The way to do it is to watch just a few minutes of the draft. The draft is being held in different cities each year. This year, it's in Pittsburgh. It's going to attract a huge crowd. It's going to be this tremendous civic event, and seeing the crowd, seeing all the people in their uniforms, young, old, every ethnicity, every race, male, female, cheering on their teams, booing Roger Goodell, the commissioner, which is always fun, you get the sense of just the enormous cultural weight of this institution. So that's reason number one. You don't have to watch it all, just watch five minutes of it. The second reason to watch it is for the likely number one draft pick, and that is one of my favorite Americans, former Indiana University quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, Heisman Trophy winner, led IU to an undefeated season culminating in that fantastic national championship. But more importantly, someone designed Fernando in a lab to appeal to Matt Continetti, because he is always happy. He is always thanking God. He's extremely devout Catholic. He is serious about his studies and the business, and he's a huge family man. In fact, he'll be not at the draft, but he'll be at home in Miami with his family. His mother suffers from MS, and that story is very affecting as well. So I just recommend people tune in for a few minutes, see Fernando, get that number one pick, and get a glimpse of what real America is all about.

Speaker 2:
[66:11] Well, we'll see how much he's thanking God if he ends up on the Jets.

Speaker 3:
[66:14] Well, he's gonna be on the Raiders.

Speaker 1:
[66:18] So, you know, it's interesting because the NFL is basically now the only institution in the United States that anybody seems to think is working. It's gaining popularity, it's gaining in cultural importance, the value of the teams is gaining, the amount of money spent in advertising and rights and all of that is larger than it has ever been. I would not have predicted this 10 years ago. I thought 10 years ago that the NFL was culturally on the way out because of all of the CTE stuff and that the idea that this was a sport that was killing the people, eventually killing the people who were playing it.

Speaker 3:
[66:59] Danger to kids, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[67:01] Yeah, it meant that parents would not allow their kids to play high school football in another generation and all of that. That's what seemed to be happening culturally. And then I think just because everything else in America seems like garbage and that this is a sport that kind of can't really be fixed. There are too many variables. You know, it's not like there's all, you know, as everything seems to be ruined, the NFL is always exciting and your team is always kind of in contention maybe or could rally or something like that. And there is something real going on there. Like you're watching something real. Everything else seems to be fake or twisted or something like that. And there's just no way to make an NFL game not seem real, like a real thing that is happening in front of you with people, you know, like playing their hearts out.

Speaker 3:
[68:00] You know, books have been written trying to explain the NFL's appeal. But it's kind of like what Freud writing a book about jokes, right? You know, I mean, it just doesn't make... You kill the subject when you try... There's just something about it. I think it has to do with the athleticism, I mean, just the sheer prowess of these athletes is just incredible. It has to do with the violence, frankly. I mean, when you have 300-plus-pound men colliding at high speed, it just makes it interesting. But then there's the whole strategic aspect and why people like, you know, people follow different coaches and see all the different techniques. Now, I know some people on this panel don't agree with me about sports in general or the NFL in particular, but nonetheless, I'm recommending it just to have a sense of maybe what is going on when the rest of us are talking about naval blockades in the protocol.

Speaker 1:
[68:56] Okay, but that's a mistake because here's what you have to remember about the NFL that is important for all of us on this panel. These are war games. A football game is a war game. When they draw plays, their flanks, there are fake move, lateral moves up the side, going to the moving. The design of a football play is a battle plan. This is a war game that is taking place in front of the American people every week. I don't know how many, 130 million people are watching a war go on, a stage war, a game war. But if you want to know why we remain a country that is very concerned about having a powerful military and stuff like that, do not discount the psychological importance that it's not baseball that dominates the American consciousness, which is not a war game or golf, which is not these are individual people going one on one against each other. These are two armies at war.

Speaker 4:
[70:14] Don DeLillo wrote a comic novel about football as war called End Zone, his second book.

Speaker 3:
[70:21] Is that right?

Speaker 4:
[70:21] Yeah. Very funny. Brief. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[70:24] But the anonymity is a key part of it. You don't see their faces. Football is like the army in the sense that you're rooting for the uniform.

Speaker 3:
[70:35] But you see the generals.

Speaker 2:
[70:36] You see the generals.

Speaker 3:
[70:38] That's why Fernando is so great.

Speaker 2:
[70:40] You see the quarterback is known and the coaches. For the most part, when you're watching it, you can't see their faces.

Speaker 3:
[70:48] If Fernando Mendoza is drafted by the Raiders, his backup will be Matt Continetti's second favorite American, Kirk Cousins, who has been a mainstay in the NFL for many years. I'm saying it now. We were talking about Hung Cal running for president. Let me tell you, one of these two guys, Fernando Mendoza or Kirk Cousins, is going to be the Republican nominee in 2036 or 2040. I'm saying it now. You heard it here first.

Speaker 1:
[71:15] Protect those skulls. They need very good defensive line. To protect them, because six or seven sacks a game over 10 years is not going to lead to a good political result. As Hercule Walker's career, I think, quite plainly demonstrate.

Speaker 3:
[71:34] I'll be happy to advise them on policy, John.

Speaker 1:
[71:36] Okay, there we go. And so you will. We will be back tomorrow for Abe, Seth and Matt. I'm John Podhoretz. Keep the candle burning.

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